Murder In Victorian Liverpool

The thirty-three cases in this excellent book give a unique and fascinating insight into life in the Victorian period, in Liverpool and beyond.

An astonishing local book which tells the story of the murderous activities of an infamous killing syndicate of women operating in the heart of Victorian Liverpool. from a poor area of Liverpool who conspired to insure and then poison their victims for their insurance pay out. Two sisters, Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins, sat at the centre of the web, preying like Black Widow spiders on their victims, including their own husbands. more probable victims and accomplices, to produce a gripping account of crime and punishment, and a real insight into working-class life in nineteenth-century Liverpool.

A vivid and graphic survey of the casualties of childhood during the Victorian Era through detailed and never-before-seen firsthand accounts. Take a fascinating journey into the real lives of Victorian children—how they lived, worked, played, and far too often, died before reaching adulthood. These true accounts, many of which had been hidden for more than a century, reveal the hardship and cruel conditions endured by young people living through the tumult of the Industrial Revolution. Here are the lives of a traveling fair child, an apprentice at sea, and a young trapper, as well as the children of prostitutes, servant girls, debutantes, and married women, all unified in the tragedy of early death. Drawing on actual cases of infanticide and baby farming, historian Sarah Seaton uncovers the dismal realities of the Victorian Era’s unwed mothers, whose shame at being pregnant drove them to carry out horrendous crimes. With the introduction of the New Poor Law in 1834, the future for some poor children changed—but not for the better. Yet it was the tragic loss of these many young lives that lead to essential reforms, and eventually to today’s more enlightened views on childhood.

In this compelling study of true crime, Liverpool's most popular author Tom Slemen recounts some of the most intriguing and baffling murders of Merseyside such as: The baffling case of the Victorian canned corpse The magistrate's beautiful granddaughter who was killed by a crazed admirer The condemned man who was hanged twice Frederick Deeming - the Rainhill psychopath who wiped out his own family and danced on their grave with his next victim The bizarre link between a South Seas cult and the housewife who was stabbed fourteen times in her Knotty Ash home by a killer who struck under the cover of a fog The unsolved case of the superintendent and his son who died of gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances - in a police station The enigmatic murder of Julia Wallace - and a very credible solution The only assassination of a British prime minister - by a Liverpool businessman Plus many more fascinating murder cases. This fascinating book is a must for all readers of true crime in general and Liverpudlians and Merseysiders in particular.

A look at the dark side of life in Liverpool in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kate Colquhoun, author of Murder in the First-Class Carriage, follows up with the sensational murder trial that captivated Victorian Society.

Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners investigates the Essex poisoning trials of 1846 to 1851 where three women were charged with using arsenic to kill children, their husbands and brothers. Using newspapers, archival sources (including petitions and witness depositions), and records from parliamentary debates, the focus is not on whether the women were guilty or innocent, but rather on what English society during this period made of their trials and what stereotypes and stock-stories were used to describe women who used arsenic to kill. All three women were initially presented as 'bad' women but as the book illustrates there was no clear consensus on what exactly constituted bad womanhood.