Murder by Candlelight

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Absolutely fascinating.

This book is essentially about English murder prior to 1850. The author examines several murders that qualified as the “Crime of the Century” when that concept was still new. The presentation of the story of the murders gives the reader insight into pre-Victorian society and culture.

The first murder involves a callous murder of a gambler by his fellow gamblers. The chief among the villains was a provincial gaming man who was embezzled his business's money, lost it in gambling, and fell into low company. The plot seemed like a hair-brained affair involving inviting the victim to the country for shooting and then killing him there. The murder was botched and the plot unravelled as quickly as it had been concocted.

What I noted in the first murders introduced was how naive the criminals were and how shallow their plots were. The murders that got the public attention generally involved scams for money. After the victim was killed, the problem of the disposing of the body came up, which usually involved chopping the body up and distributing it around London. Given the amount of moving corpses around, and the number of bodies that simply showed up every morning in London, and the difficulty of identifying bodies, it seems strange that an energetic villain simply didn't hire a horse and carriage and drive out the to country and drop it off somewhere.

Thomas de Quincy and Thomas Carlyle are central figures in this book. De Quincy has been described as the first “True Crime” writer in the English language. Carlyle also paid some attention to the celebrated murders. Both were part of the Romantic genre of writing and brought the sensibility of horror and the macabre to their descriptions of these cases.

De Quincy and Carlyle were no longer writing, when the fore-runners of Jack the Ripper appeared. Jack the Ripper was not the first sexually deviant serial killer in England. The author has a long passage describing the many, many other sexual murders of young women in London, perhaps some of them were part of the Ripper's series, of which only five are “canonical.”

This is an interesting foray into a world that was like and unlike our own.