Megan Ainsworth, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University On a recent field trip to one of Liverpool’s most prominent buildings, St. George’s Hall, our ‘Prison Voices’ module was taken beyond the university. The building, regarded as a monument to the city, opened in 1854 and was to serve a multitude of purposes for the people of Liverpool, being both a concert hall and courtroom. The building is renowned for its judicial history. Initially, the Assizes (the
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Argyle Street Bridewell: Walking the beat with Liverpool’s nineteenth–century police force
Beth McConnell, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University When we visited the welcoming pub, L1 Bridewell, it was difficult to believe we were sitting in what were once the holding cells for Victorian prisoners. Known in the nineteenth century as Argyle Street Bridewell, it was one of ten police stations in the Liverpool district as each station could not be more than 1.5 miles apart. In one of the original cells, we did a close reading
Read moreResearching ‘the terrors of their neighbourhood’: Street robbery in Chisenhale Street
Keiran Southern, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University In our sessions on Victorian street robbery, we examined a case involving a ‘garotter’, 19 year old Martin Corrigan. In 1869 Corrigan was tried at Liverpool Assizes, held in St George’s Hall, for robbing Patrick Spelman, a porter in the city’s St John’s market, on Chisenhale Street bridge. This bridge had a fearsome reputation for violent street crime in the mid-nineteenth century, so I decided to do more
Read moreA Brief History of St George’s Hall
Riain Egan, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University The factual information in this blog has been drawn from Steve Binns’s informative tour of St George’s Hall and his series of podcasts which are available online here Liverpool has always been, and continues to be, synonymous with great feats of architecture from ‘The Three Graces’ that line the Pier Head to the neo-classical St George’s Hall. Opened in 1842, and built on the site of the old
Read moreResearching Nineteenth-Century Prison Graffiti
Sam Bennett, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University During a field trip to Liverpool’s St George’s Hall for our Prison Voices module, I noticed a piece of graffiti on one of the cell walls. It reads, ‘Mary Lecy Hornby Street 7 years 1871’. One of the key areas of the module aims to recover ‘prison voices’, so I was thrilled to find this original graffiti. I was interested in finding out about the apparent author of
Read moreWalking the streets of Victorian crime and punishment
By Zoë Alker, (Liverpool John Moores University) In JVC Online’s ‘Teaching and Learning Showcase’, September 2012, Drew Grey (University of Northampton) discussed his experience of ‘Putting Undergraduates On Trial: Using the Old Bailey Online as a Teaching Tool.’ Drew introduces his second-year history students to eighteenth-century court proceedings by getting them to re-enact cases from the Old Bailey. Even more ambitiously, he is planning in future years to re-stage the trials at the Sessions House in Northampton. This gave Helen
Read more‘CSI: Whitechapel’: Ripper Street and the evidential body
By Jessica Hindes (Royal Holloway) Though I understand the desire to dissect a period drama on the basis of its historical authenticity, I’ve never thought it a particularly profitable approach. Guy Woolnough may be right to criticise Ripper Street for condemning a 14 year old to an implausibly expedited hanging; but cataloguing this kind of historical inaccuracy contributes little to a critical understanding of the show. In this article, therefore, I set such questions aside in order to think more
Read moreThe Lure of the Solution: How do we consume the detective story today?
Alfie Bown (University of Manchester) The place of the fictional detective in contemporary popular culture is as central now as it was when the form first became popular in the nineteenth-century. Detective and crime fiction of innumerable sub-genres line the shelves of Waterstones, Poirot and Miss Marple are seemingly looped continuously on ITV3, film continues its interest in the whodunit, and the form is strangely prevalent in children’s and teenage television and fiction. But is there a continuity between the
Read moreImagining the Ripper
Jenny Pyke (Mount Holyoke College) As the new “Ripper Street” series begins on BBC, the many other versions from books, tv, film, and stage echo like footsteps in a dark alley. “Crime present,” says David Taylor “has a fascination, in part at least, rooted in fear; crime past has a fascination rooted in curiosity.”[i] Figure One: Front cover of the Police Illustrated News found here Teaching Victorian detective fiction, I am reminded regularly that the sensation of Jack the Ripper
Read moreThe elephant in the room: Questioning the absence of paedophilia in children’s histories
Lesley Hulonce (Swansea University) For the past four years I have been researching how pauper children fared under the ‘new’ poor law in Swansea between 1834 and 1910. Although the vast majority of these children stayed at home with their families or were fostered, the Swansea Guardians of the Poor paid for many children to live in a number of institutions. There were children in the workhouse, in cottage homes, privately-run orphanages, Catholic children’s homes and philanthropic institutions for deaf
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