This is an account of a nineteenth-century murder and moral panic. The murder is a case of upstairs-downstairs violence, the moral panic a fright about the pernicious influence of crime fiction, focused on William Harrison Atherton's "Jack Sheppard," a fictionalized biography of a notorious criminal. Harman argues that the murder and the controversy affected the direction of Victorian literature, including the careers of Dickens and Thackeray. To me, the connection between the crime and the book felt thinner than advertised, but the lit-history bits were especially interesting.
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Mostly sf & fantasy, but really any shiny thing that catches my attention-deficient eye: mystery, science, horror, history, thriller, library science, social justice, ...
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Icho68 rated James Clavell's Noble house: 2 stars
Icho68 rated Benny Rose, the Cannibal King: 4 stars
Benny Rose, the Cannibal King by Hailey Piper (Rewind-or-Die, Book 3)
Blackwood, Vermont has one legend to its name—Benny Rose, the Cannibal King. Every local kid knows him and tells his …
Icho68 rated The Heart Forger: 3 stars
The Heart Forger by Rin Chupeco (The Bone Witch Trilogy, #2)
In The Bone Witch, Tea mastered resurrection—now she's after revenge...
No one knows death like Tea. A bone witch …
Icho68 reviewed Murder by the Book by Claire Harman
Murder by the book
4 stars
This is an account of a nineteenth-century murder and moral panic. The murder is a case of upstairs-downstairs violence, the moral panic a fright about the pernicious influence of crime fiction, focused on William Harrison Atherton's "Jack Sheppard," a fictionalized biography of a notorious criminal. Harman argues that the murder and the controversy affected the direction of Victorian literature, including the careers of Dickens and Thackeray. To me, the connection between the crime and the book felt thinner than advertised, but the lit-history bits were especially interesting.