ABSTRACT
From the mid-nineteenth century, the British popular press was engulfed by a public craving for sensation news, guaranteeing maximum exposure for cases of seduction, domestic abuse and murder. Taking their lead from the more lurid publications, the daily and weekly newspapers fed a voracious appetite for crime news, revelling in patterns of vice and villainy, both locally and nationally, as tales of abuse and violation became a lucrative business. Victims and defendants were paraded before eager audiences who, well versed in the nineteenth-century literary genres of sensation and melodrama, came to look upon crime news as a good read with the added spice of being grounded in reality. From a comfortable distance, readers were able to spy on the negotiated relationship between victim and defendant, be it familial, marital, one of courtship or between strangers. As commercial undertakings, the newspapers’ sensational narratives enticed, entertained and informed readers, but they were not simply sources of vicarious pleasure for ‘respectable’ audiences who, unaccustomed to the daily grind of working-class districts, were enthralled by its colourful presentation. In choosing to report acts of everyday violence as news, in spite of their apparent statistical decline, the newspapers’ narratives invoked wider concerns of perceived disorder within working-class neighbourhoods and, in doing so, spelt out the case for regulation and reform.
