In 1838 Charles Dickens’s character Mr Pickwick embarked on further adventures into France, and these were published in The Monthly Magazine by a man calling himself “Parisianus.” In this story Pickwick stops to talk to a French gendarme and learns the fate of a parricide.
The text of a little-known Robin Hood poem I found in the Victorian magazine “Bentley’s Miscellany” in 1846.
This is the text of a public talk given at Abbey House Museum, Kirkstall, Leeds on 1 March 2015 to complement their Crime and Punishment Exhibition.
The 19th-century criminal was an altogether different species of villain compared to the romantic highwayman a century previously.
The Mysteries of London was a long-running penny dreadful serial which ran between 1844 and 1846 and was the biggest selling novel of the Victorian era. Read the ebook here. A version […]