'The damned place was haunted': The gothic, middlebrow culture and inter-war 'notable trials'

Literature and History

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 37-58

  D'Cruze, Shani ^a  

^a KEELE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950093411     PISSN: 03061973     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.7227/lh.15.1.3     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. Edgar Wallace (ed. and introd.), The Trial of Patrick Herbert Mahon (London, 1928), p. 20.
2. There certainly was a thunderstorm, but it happened not at the assize trial but at the appeal hearing, weeks later. Times, July 19 1924, p. 7
3. and Evening Standard, July 18, 1924 for the cross examination;
4. Once told this story proved too good to waste by later writers, for example; "[Mahon] described, as one of the people who heard him later related to me, how he built a large fire and put the head on it. As the fair hair began to blaze the eyes in the head opened and at that very instant a storm burst right over the bungalow. He rushed into the open." Lesley Knowles, Court of Drama (London, 1966), p. 47.
5. V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994).
6. M. Weiner, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004).
7. D. J. A. Cairns, Advocacy and the Making of the Adversarial Criminal Trial 1800-1865 (Oxford, 1998).
8. Edward Marjoribanks, The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall (London, 1929);
9. Nina Warner Hooke and Gil Thomas, Marshall Hall: a Biography (London, 1966).
10. The flamboyant barrister and journalist Filson Young editing the 'Notable Trial' Volume on the Crippen trial did much to shape the twentieth-century form of the genre. Filson Yong (ed.), The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen, Notable British Trials Series (Edinburgh, 1920)
11. Lindsay Farmer, 'Notable Trials and the Criminal Law in Scotland and England, 1750-1950', in P. Chassaigne and J-P Genet (eds), Droit et Societé en France et en Grande-Bretagne (XIIe-Xxe siècles). Fonctions, usages et représentations (Paris, 2003) pp. 149-170.
12. Martin Conboy, The Press and Popular Culture (London, 2002);
13. L. Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985).
14. Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson, 'Gendering Representations: Criminals and Victims in the Twentieth Century' in Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson (eds.), Behaving Badly: Social Visible Crime (Aldershot, 2003);
15. John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London, 1997).
16. G. Robb & N. Ehrber (eds), Disorder in the Court: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century (Basingstoke, 1999), esp. pp. 2, 6-7;
17. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing sexual boundaries, 1870-1930, (Chicago, 1997).
18. Ginger Frost, 'She is But a Woman': Kitty Byron and the English Edwardian Criminal Justice System', in S. D'Cruze and A. Rao (eds), Violence Vulnerability and Embodiment, a special issue of Gender & History 16:3, 2004.
19. Michelle A. Massé, 'Psychoanalysis and the gothic', in D. Punter (ed.) A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford, 2000), pp. 229-241;
20. David Punter, The Gothic Tradition, 2nd edition, vol 1, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present (London, 1996).
21. F. T. Jesse (ed.), The Trial of Samuel Dougal (Edinburgh, 1928), p. 17.
22. D. Armstrong, The Political anatomy of the Body (Cambridge, 1983) p. 26.
23. As F. Tennyson Jesse argued in her popular criminological volume, Murder and Its Motives, (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 18; 'the criminal and the community are not two separate factors but one and the same thing. Over the gate of every prison there might with truth be carved this paraphrase of some immortal words: 'There for the grace of God go I.'
24. Filson Young, The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen (Edinburgh, 1920), pp. 111-2.
25. Julie English Early, 'Keeping ourselves to ourselves: violence in the Edwardian suburb', in S. D'Cruze (ed.), Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 170-184
26. and '"A new man for a new century": Dr Crippen and the Principles of Masculinity', in G. Robb and N. Erber (eds), Disorder in the Court, pp. 209-30.
27. Alison Millbank, Daughters of the House (Basingstoke, 1992);
28. Karen Halttunen, 'Early American Murder Narratives: the Birth of Horror', in Richard W. Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (eds.), The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, (Chicago, 1993) pp. 67-101;
29. and her 'Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: the Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe', in Eric Sandquist (ed.), New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York, 1986).
30. Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie, p. 110.
31. Catherine Ross Nickerson, The Web of Iniquity, pp 7-8.
32. W. Teignmouth Shore, The Trials of Charles Peace (Edinburgh, 1926), p. 8.
33. Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind (Toronto, 1998).
34. H. B. Irving, The Trial of Mrs Florence Maybrick (Edinburgh, 1922), p. 122.
35. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque, pp. 9, 8
36. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmare (Oxford, 1999), p. xviii;
37. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London 1983);
38. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York, 1994), p. 8.
39. J. C. Muddiman (ed.), The Trial of Charles I (Edinburgh, 1928), p. 45.
40. Wm Roughead (ed.), The Trial of Burke and Hare (Edinburgh, 1921), pp. 14, 13,
41. quoting from West Port Murders (1829), pp. 122-123
42. and Blackwoods Magazine, March 1829.
43. W. Roughead, The Trial of Oscar Slater (Edinburgh and London, 1929).
44. Alison Light, Forever England, Feminism, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991);
45. S. D'Cruze, 'Dainty little fairies? Women, performance and the boundaries of social identity in the amateur performance of the Savoy Operas since c.1890', Women's History Review, 9, 2, (2000) p. 354.
46. Of the growing literature on gender and the interwar middle classes, see also Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900-50 (London, 1995);
47. and her The Parlour and the Suburb (2004),
48. A. James Hammerton, 'Pooterism or partnership? Marriage and masculine identity in the lower middle class, 1870-1920', Journal of British Studies, 38:3, 1999, pp 291-321;
49. Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions. Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991);
50. Jill Greenfield, Sean O'Connell and Chris Reid, 'Gender, consumer culture and the middle-class male, 1918-39' in Alan Kidd and David Nichols (eds), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism. Middle class identity in Britain, 1800-1940 (Manchester, 1999);
51. Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (Basingstoke, 2000);
52. Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: the reconstruction of gender inter-war Britain (Princeton, 1993).
53. A. Sinfield, 'War Stories', in his Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, 2nd edn (London, 1997), pp. 6-23.
54. J. Baxendale and C. Pawling, Narrating the Thirties: a Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (London, 1996);
55. Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 (London, 1993).
56. If the English middle-classes anxiously and competitively carved out their cultural position, middlebrow reading practices seem less subordinated to the highbrow than in Bourdieu's formulation of 'allodoxia' (the misrecognition of cultural 'distinction'). P. Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, 2003), pp. 142, 155, 164.
57. Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford, 2001), p 3.
58. Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950, (Oxford, 1992), p 97.
59. David Glover, 'The stuff that dreams are made of: masculinity, femininity and the thriller', in D. Longhurst (ed.), Gender, Genre and Narrative (London, 1989). p. 75;
60. Catherine Ross Nickerson, The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Durham and London, 1998), pp. 6-11, 45-6, 68;
61. Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (Basingstoke, 2001), ch. 6.
62. Of the sizeable critical literature on British interwar crime fiction, I have also found helpful: J. G. Cawelti, Adventure Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, 1976);
63. R. Coward Rosalind and L. Semple, 'Tracking down the past: Women and detective fiction' in Helen Carr (ed), From My Guy to Scifi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World (London), pp 39-58;
64. P. Haining, Mystery: an Illustrated History of Crime and Detective Fiction (London, 1977);
65. S. Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London, 1980);
66. C. Watson, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and their Audience (London, 1971);
67. W. Chernaik, M. Swales and R. Vilain (eds.), The Art of Detective Fiction (London, 2000).
68. Anyhouse. A play in three acts (London, 1925);
69. Beggars on Horseback (London, 1915);
70. Comments on Cain. (An examination of the murder trials of Harold Wolcott, Reginald Ivor Hinks and Eugen Weidmann.) (London, 1948)
71. Of recent critical literature see, for example, Tim Dolin, Mistress of the House: Women and Property in the Victorian Novel (Aldershot, 1997);
72. Andrew Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature (Aldershot, 2001), especially pp. 36-7, 53-4, 63-4, 104;
73. Alison Millbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke, 1992);
74. Carolyn Denver, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the anxiety of Origins (Cambridge, 1998);
75. Valerie Sanders, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf (Basingstoke, 2002).
76. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, 1984), pp. 244-5.
77. Lindsay Farmer, 'Notable Trials and the Criminal Law'.
78. Alison Light, Forever England, pp. 17, 18.
79. F. T. Jesse, The Trial of Madeleine Smith (Edinburgh, 1928), pp. 12, 16.
80. and an earlier version of the Notable Trial, A. D. Smith (ed.), The Trial of Madeleine Smith (Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1905).
81. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994) argues that the construction of the Victorian era as sexually repressive was a product of the immediate post-Victorian era.
82. F. T. Jesse, The Trial of Madeleine Smith pp. 15, 16.
83. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), pp. 199-201;
84. David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford, 1990). This article is part of a wider project in part concerned to map historically Garland's theoretical linkage of penal systems to wider cultures.
85. Winifred Duke, The Trial of Harold Greenwood (Edinburgh, 1930);
86. Filson Young (ed.), The Trial of Herbert Rowse Armstrong (Edinburgh 1927);
87. On Armstrong see also R. Wild and D. Curtis-Bennett Curtis (London, 1939), pp 125-141;
88. W. Roughead, (ed.) Trial of Dr. Pritchard, Notable Scottish Trials, (Edinburgh, 1906, reissued 1925).
89. Winifred Duke, The Trial of Harold Greenwood, pp. 70, 59.
90. Susan Rowlands, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell, pp. 39-42.
91. Eugenia Delamotte, Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of the Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford, 1990);
92. Andrew Smith, Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (London, 2000);
93. R H Blundell and G H Wilson (eds.), The Trial of Buck Ruxton (Edinburgh, 1937).
94. Compare Lucy Bland's work on the Madame Fahmy trial of 1921 and her more recent work on racial and gender anxieties in inter-war Britain. Lucy Bland, 'The Trial of Madame Fahmy: Orientalism, Violence, Sexual Perversity and the Fear of Miscegenation', in Shani D'Cruze (ed.), Everyday Violence (London, 2000), pp. 185-197;
95. John Glaister and James Couper Brash, Medico Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case (Edinburgh, 1937).
96. T. F. Potter, The Deadly Dr Ruxton: How they Caught a Lancashire Double Killer (Preston, 1984), pp. 36-8.
97. F. Tennyson Jesse (ed.), The Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury and George Percy Stoner (London and Edinburgh, 1935), pp. 188, 195
98. Lucy Bland, 'The Condemnation of Edith Thompson: Victorian Morality or Aftermath of the War?', paper to Criminal Conversations Conference, Nottingham Trent University, February, 2002.
99. F. Tennyson Jesse (ed.), The Trial of Alma Victoria Rattenbury, p. 35.
100. Daily Mail, 6 June, 1935, p 14.
101. Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (London, 1992).
102. Joanna Bourke, 'Effeminacy ethnicity and the end of trauma: shellshock', Journal of Contemporary History 35:1, (2000), pp. 57-69
103. and her Dismembering the Male (London, 1999).
104. J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London 1985), pp. 273-5.
105. John Bull, 28 August, 1920, p. 16, 'An Appeal to Happy Holiday Makers'
106. Lesley Hall Sex, Gender and social change in Britain;
107. Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace.
108. Helena Normanton (ed.) The Trial of Alfred Arthur Rouse (Edinburgh and London, 1931), pp. 142-3.
109. On 'leisure' and unemployment see Stephen G. Jones, Workers at Play: a social and economic history of leisure, 1918-1939 (London, 1986), ch. 5.
110. On young women's interwar clerical work see, for example, Jane Lewis, 'Women between the Wars', in F. Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change: A new view of the 1930s (Sussex, 1980), pp. 211-3;
111. Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: women between the wars, 1918-1939 (London 1989), pp. 72-5;
112. Penny Tinkler, Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing Up in England 1920-1950 (London, 1995), pp. 95, 135
113. For fuller discussion of the Munro case see Shani D'Cruze, 'A warning to frolics': Notable Trials and Constructions of Criminality in Britain, c.1920-c.1950.' Paper to North American Conference on British Studies Annual Meeting, October 2002;
114. 'The Eastbourne Foxes and the Shorthand Typist: Gender, Murder and Suicide in an Inter-War Seaside Town.' Paper to Social History Society Conference, January 2003.
115. Paul Fussell, Abroad British Literary Traveling Between The Wars (Oxford, 1980);
116. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, (London 1977);
117. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), p. 54
118. Eastbourne Gazette, September 1, pp. 1-2, has two pages of an apparent transcript of the interview with the medium in trance. The story that 'Irene' told was the one about being abducted by a richer, older, married man in a car with a chauffeur.
119. see, K. Canning and S. O. Rose (eds.), Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities (Oxford, 2002).
120. For the problematic outcomes of the elision of issues of sexuality, gender and citizenship in the Second World War, see, for example, Rose Sonya O, 'Girls and GIs: Race Sex and Diplomacy in Second World War Britain', International History Review, xix: 1, (1997), pp.146-160.
121. Winifred Duke, Field and Gray, p. 95.