Death Ride From Fenchurch Street And Other Victorian Railway Murders

A Victorian invention, the railways of Britain were the scene of some of the most gruesome murders of the 19th Century. In their gory detail, here are some of the worst.

This volume examines the train trope in a variety of cultural, literary and linguistic contexts, from contemporary crime fiction and dystopian graphic narratives to postcolonial railway travelogues, by employing a range of methods and frameworks. Situated within the “Discourse, Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics” collection, the book critically engages with significant areas such as discourse and narrative structure. Interpreting the railway as a powerful cultural and imaginary site in the English-speaking world that traverses a range of creative domains, this study explores the ways in which the train and its structures, symbols and metaphors are textually rendered and the type of stylistic effects they generate in readers. It introduces, frames and discusses the idea of railway discourse and focuses on specific case studies (The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, the graphic novel Snowpiercer and Monisha Rajesh’s Around India in 80 Trains). In particular, it considers how a compartment window can constrain, and shape, the point of view of a narrator, the way in which science fiction trains are conceptually imagined, and the intercultural implications of rail travel writing in India today. To analyse the role and meaning of the railway in these texts, and compare them with others, this work adopts and adapts analytical tools and critical concepts from the integration of different fields, such as stylistics and linguistics, postcolonial criticism and literary studies.

Is it possible to overestimate the impact of the railway in history? Jeremy Black analyses that impact from the beginning to today. And of course it's not all a triumph. The network of the Congo today operates on three gauges run by separate companies; and a lot of it doesn't work.

George Clarke joined the Metropolitan Police in 1841. Though a "slow starter," his career took off when he was transferred to the small team of detectives at Scotland Yard in 1862, where he became known as " The Chieftain". This book paints the most detailed picture yet published of detective work in mid-Victorian Britain, covering "murders most foul," "slums and Society", the emergence of terrorism related to Ireland, and Victorian frauds. One particular fraudster, Harry Benson, was to contribute to the end of Clarke's career and lead to the first major Metropolitan Police corruption trial in 1877. This fascinating book uses widespread sources of information, including many of Clarke's own case reports.

This story of a real-life Victorian mystery is a “meticulously researched true-crime account . . . its final revelation is a showstopper” (The New York Times). In July 1864, Thomas Briggs was traveling home after visiting his niece and her husband for dinner. He boarded a first-class carriage on the 9:45 pm Hackney service of the North London railway. A short time later, two bank clerks entered the compartment and noticed blood pooled in the seat cushions and smeared all over the floor and windows. But there was no sign of Thomas Briggs. All that remained was his ivory-knobbed walking stick, his empty leather bag, and a bloodstained hat that, strangely, did not belong to Mr. Briggs. The race to identify the killer and catch him as he fled on a boat to America was eagerly followed by the public on both sides of the Atlantic. The investigation and subsequent trial became a fixture in New York newspapers—and a frequent distraction from the Civil War that ravaged the nation. In Murder in the First-Class Carriage, Gold Dagger Award nominee Kate Colquhoun tells the gripping tale of a crime that shocked an era. “A suspenseful, well-paced account of a baffling mystery.” —The Washington Post “Deploying her skill as a historian, Colquhoun turns a single curious murder case into a fascinatingly quirky portrait of the underside of mid-Victorian London. I found it unputdownable.” —Daily Telegraph

The new definitive guide to Victorian crime.