scholarly journals Crime, Sensation, and Empire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomas Boyd

<p><b>The 1857 criminal trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of Pierre Emile L’Angelier became a cause célèbre throughout the British world. Enmeshed with scandal and speculation, it involved a secret affair between a young upper middle-class Glasgow woman and her older foreign lover of lower social standing; accusations of arsenic poisoning that led to his demise; erotic love letters that were read out in court; and an inconclusive—and uniquely Scottish—verdict of ‘not proven’. In 1866, a butcher under the name of Thomas Castro from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed to be the heir to an ancient English baronetcy: the Tichborne estates. Similarly described as its own cause célèbre, the Tichborne baronetcy case spanned two long-running civil and criminal trials and led to a political movement in Britain that continued to take aim at political, legal, and religious institutions long after the trials had ended, in 1874.</b></p> <p>Although the crimes at the centre of the two cases were incongruous, both Madeleine Smith and the Tichborne Claimant ignited significant public debate over criminal procedures, class, gender, and identity. Smith’s case played a key role in the development of ‘sensation’ journalism and literature centred on the violent propensities that lurked beneath the seemingly respectable and repressive Victorian social code, while the Tichborne Claimant’s case confronted Britons with anxieties around the definition of ‘respectability’ and the homecoming of expatriates from the colonies.</p> <p>While coverage of the cases has been well-documented within Britain, less scholarly attention has been paid to their pervasive coverage in the colony of Australia. Both cases were major news items in the colonial press, as updates on the trials were sourced from British media outlets and published in local newspapers almost daily. So pervasive was the coverage that gossip and misinformation surrounding the two cases spread throughout Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand, as speculation surrounded Smith’s later whereabouts over the late nineteenth century and questions about the Tichborne Claimant’s identity lingered.</p> <p>By examining the widespread coverage of the cases in Australia, this work explores how the cases harnessed the communicative powers of the press and stirred sensation in and outside of Britain. Both cases played a role in forging British-Australian transnational identities in the colonies, as Australian newspapers lent their unique voices to associated British metropolitan discussions and weighed in on the respective trial verdicts. With Smith embodying the perceived exodus of undesirable migrants to Australia and the Tichborne Claimant representing colonial life being brought back to the British metropole, Australian newspapers also used the cases to confront the way British metropolitan newspapers wrote about the colony. Fixation on the appearances, manners, and movements of Smith and the Tichborne Claimant, and the crimes with which they were implicated, meant that the Australian newspaper press became an arena for long-standing and far-reaching debate about class, social respectability, gender, sexuality, criminality, and colonial justice.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomas Boyd

<p><b>The 1857 criminal trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of Pierre Emile L’Angelier became a cause célèbre throughout the British world. Enmeshed with scandal and speculation, it involved a secret affair between a young upper middle-class Glasgow woman and her older foreign lover of lower social standing; accusations of arsenic poisoning that led to his demise; erotic love letters that were read out in court; and an inconclusive—and uniquely Scottish—verdict of ‘not proven’. In 1866, a butcher under the name of Thomas Castro from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed to be the heir to an ancient English baronetcy: the Tichborne estates. Similarly described as its own cause célèbre, the Tichborne baronetcy case spanned two long-running civil and criminal trials and led to a political movement in Britain that continued to take aim at political, legal, and religious institutions long after the trials had ended, in 1874.</b></p> <p>Although the crimes at the centre of the two cases were incongruous, both Madeleine Smith and the Tichborne Claimant ignited significant public debate over criminal procedures, class, gender, and identity. Smith’s case played a key role in the development of ‘sensation’ journalism and literature centred on the violent propensities that lurked beneath the seemingly respectable and repressive Victorian social code, while the Tichborne Claimant’s case confronted Britons with anxieties around the definition of ‘respectability’ and the homecoming of expatriates from the colonies.</p> <p>While coverage of the cases has been well-documented within Britain, less scholarly attention has been paid to their pervasive coverage in the colony of Australia. Both cases were major news items in the colonial press, as updates on the trials were sourced from British media outlets and published in local newspapers almost daily. So pervasive was the coverage that gossip and misinformation surrounding the two cases spread throughout Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand, as speculation surrounded Smith’s later whereabouts over the late nineteenth century and questions about the Tichborne Claimant’s identity lingered.</p> <p>By examining the widespread coverage of the cases in Australia, this work explores how the cases harnessed the communicative powers of the press and stirred sensation in and outside of Britain. Both cases played a role in forging British-Australian transnational identities in the colonies, as Australian newspapers lent their unique voices to associated British metropolitan discussions and weighed in on the respective trial verdicts. With Smith embodying the perceived exodus of undesirable migrants to Australia and the Tichborne Claimant representing colonial life being brought back to the British metropole, Australian newspapers also used the cases to confront the way British metropolitan newspapers wrote about the colony. Fixation on the appearances, manners, and movements of Smith and the Tichborne Claimant, and the crimes with which they were implicated, meant that the Australian newspaper press became an arena for long-standing and far-reaching debate about class, social respectability, gender, sexuality, criminality, and colonial justice.</p>


2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.


Author(s):  
Steven Conn

This introductory chapter provides an overview of American business schools. While at one level business schools stand as of a piece of the way American universities have grown and evolved since the end of the Civil War, they stand apart from the rest of higher education in three, interconnected ways. First, they have consistently disappointed even their most enthusiastic boosters—failing to develop a definition of professional business education, failing to develop a coherent, intellectually vibrant body of knowledge, unable to agree on what the raison d'être of business schools ought to be—to an extent simply not true of any other academic pursuit. Despite this, of course, business schools have flourished on U.S. campuses and continue to do so. Second, the late nineteenth-century revolutions in higher education fostered a change in how universities were funded and governed. For the businessmen who now presided over higher education, a business school on their campus might hold a special place in their hearts. Finally, business schools serve as the handmaids to corporate capitalism in the United States in a way that no other campus enterprise does.


Author(s):  
Robert B. Gordon ◽  
Patrick M. Malone

Industry uses technical and organizational skills, engineering knowledge, and energy to transform natural resources into useful products. (Our definition of industry excludes such late-twentieth-century coinages as “banking industry,” “leisure industry,” and “culture industry.”) When we carry on industry, we alter the landscape by using natural resources, by releasing wastes, and by building workplaces, industrial communities, and transportation systems. The components of industry include the skills and technical knowledge of the participants as well as the landscape and natural resources devoted to industrial activity. We cover the industrial landscape in Part II; in this chapter, we introduce the human and natural resources used by industry. The work skills of artisans, the organizational skills of managers and entrepreneurs, and the engineering skills of designers and innovators have always been as essential as natural resources to industrial success. Although scientific skills had relatively little place in most industrial enterprises until the late nineteenth century, they are now essential to the success of many industries. The skills in consideration here are the mental and physical capacities of individuals to do difficult tasks. These “genuine” skills are not necessarily the same as the “socially constructed” skills that are defined by job descriptions or established as barriers to control entry into a trade or profession. Among work skills, those of artisans are the most poorly re corded and are, consequently, the most difficult for historians to interpret; additionally, artisan’s skills are sometimes ignored, or even denigrated, by authors seeking to describe industrial work in terms of exploitation of workers or to inflate the accomplishments of inventors or entrepreneurs. Some skills that were essential in industrialization, sueh as those used in mining and burning coal, are hardly described in the historical record because they developed gradually and were difficult for observers to perceive. Firing a furnace with coal seems to be a simple, physically demanding task, but it requires judgment and experience to do well in a locomotive, a crucible steelworks, a glasshouse, or other heat-using industries. The stoker’s skill often went unrecognized until attempts were made to transfer technology dependent on burning coal elsewhere.


2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine D Watson

This article contributes to the literature on the history of medico-legal practice by using a survey of 535 poisoning cases to examine the emergence of forensic toxicological expertise in nineteenth-century English criminal trials. In emphasizing chemical expertise, it seeks both to expand upon a limited literature on the history of the subject, and to offer a contrast to studies of criminal poisoning that have tended to focus primarily on medical expertise. Poisoning itself is a topic of abiding interest to historians of forensic medicine and science because (together with insanity) it long tended to attract the greatest attention (and often confrontation) in criminal proceedings. In looking at a wide number of cases, however, it becomes apparent that few aroused true medico-legal controversy. Rather, the evidence from several hundred cases tried as felonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicates that prior to the 1830s few presented any opportunity for “a battle of experts”. While Ian Burney and Tal Golan have shown that this was certainly not the case during the mid and late nineteenth century, this paper goes further by dividing the period under study into three distinct phases in order to show how expert testimony (and experts themselves) changed during the course of the century, and why this process opened a door to the potential for formalized controversy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (01) ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Rawsthorne ◽  
Grace Kinsela ◽  
Karen Paxton ◽  
Georgina Luscombe

AbstractYoung people’s well-being has attracted significant policy and research attention in Australia and internationally for at least three decades. Despite this, there is no consensus about what it means, how it can be measured or, most importantly, what supports young people’s well-being. This paper adopts a definition of well-being as a multidimensional process, comprising subjective, material and relational factors. Drawing on self-report data collected at two time points from young people (aged 9–14 years) living in rural and regional New South Wales (N= 342 at baseline andN= 217 Wave 2), this paper seeks to identify the salience of these factors to well-being, measured through Perceived Self-Efficacy. Our analysis suggests that a sense of belonging, safety and the presence of supportive adults all appear to support enhanced well-being. The paper concludes with recommendations for policy makers and communities wishing to better support the development of young people’s well-being.


2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Tomsen

Anti-homosexual harassment and violence are often described as ‘hate’ crimes perpetrated by homophobic people who act on an extreme and irrational contempt for the sexual identity of victims, and killings are regarded as the most typical form of these incidents. But there is little detailed international research evidence about the victims, perpetrators and the social aspects of such fatal violent incidents. The author's ongoing study in New South Wales, Australia, has filled some of these gaps. It has drawn evidence from 74 homicides with male victims that occurred in New South Wales between 1980–2000. Information sources were press records, police interviews with suspects, Coroner's court files and documents from the criminal trials of accused perpetrators. Analysis of the social characteristics of victims and perpetrators and the fatal scenarios reflect the significance of situational factors (such as alcohol, illicit drugs and anonymous sexual cruising) as well as the ‘hate’ motive in this fatal violence. Some perpetrators have serious drug use or psychological problems, whereas most killers are young men and boys from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. The major scenarios of killing indicate that these crimes are linked to commonplace issues of male honour and masculine identity that are sharpened in the perpetrators’ situations by their marginal social status.


2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 35-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selim Deringil

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.


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