ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how Victorian newspapers attempted to comprehend the existence of children who killed, providing readers with a variety of different coping strategies to lessen the ideological threat youthful murderers posed to preconceived notions of childhood and criminality. It argues that the process of understanding can be found in newspaper coverage surrounding murders committed by children in the nineteenth century. Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson and Samantha Pegg have argued that Victorian newspapers employed monstrous imagery in their descriptions of children who killed in order to inflame the public and generate sensation. Representations of youthful murderers as inhuman and beast-like no doubt unsettled audiences in the nineteenth century. Though the image of the innocent child was frequently referenced in Victorian literature and melodrama it was widely recognised that few children adhered to this discourse in reality.
