Volume 15, Number 11 · December 17, 1970
Magsmen, Macers, Gonophs, Footpads and Pimps
By Noel Annan
Victorian Studies in Scarlet
by Richard D. Altick
Norton, 336 pp., $7.95
The Anti-Society: An Account of the Victorian Underworld
by Kellow Chesney
Gambit, 398 pp., $8.95
The Edwardians
by J.B. Priestley
Harper & Row, 302 pp., $15.00
There is nothing like a description of a good murder to put one in a happy and receptive state of mind at Christmas, and Professor Altick, who has taken time off from higher things at Ohio State, certainly whisks us through the most famous of the nineteenth-century murders in England from Maria Marten in the Red Barn through Burke and Hare, Courvoisier, William Palmer, Pritchard and Peace to Florence Maybrick and Madelaine Smith. No one can complain at the number of murder cases he is offered. Of course some people will never be satisfied. I remember coming out of one of those prewar custard-pie movies, in which every thirty seconds, so it seemed, a missile whizzed across the screen, and hearing a dissatisfied member of the audience complain, 'It was all right but there wasn't enough of it.' Altick gives us enough murder cases. But mere numbers are not what we want. What we want are the horrifying details.
Review, 3208 words
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