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Judith Flanders: The Invention of Murder
Date: Friday 31 May 2013
Time: 6-8pm
Venue: Portland Building, Portland Street, Portsmouth PO1 3AH
Modern culture is fascinated by accounts of crime and criminality, whether these be TV detective dramas, popular crime novels, or the reportage of sensational incidents of crime. But while we like to consider ourselves as a modern society liberated from supposedly 'repressive' Victorian moralities, we often overlook the fact that much of our thinking about crime and its representations owes a great deal to the later nineteenth century. This was the age in which the detective story was created, and in which Dickens presented documentary journalism on the workings of the London police (themselves a nineteenth century creation); in which sensational newspaper accounts of crimes and their victims put our own concerns about the morality and propriety of the press into context, and where technologies of criminal profiling and identification were pioneered. Today, television series such as the BBC's Ripper Street and Sherlock reinvent Victorian stories of criminality as modern entertainment.
In this event, the historian Judith Flanders (author of The Victorian House (2004), Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (2007), and most recently The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (2012)) will discuss the ways in which the Victorians treated and represented crime, as explored in her recent book The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and created Modern Crime (2011). Flanders will be in conversation with Dr Christopher Pittard (author of Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011)), University of Portsmouth, considering the impact of Victorian ideas of criminality on fiction. Taking place in the city where Arthur Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes and where Charles Dickens (the father of modern English crime fiction) was born, this promises to be a fascinating event for all enthusiasts of crime writing and detective fiction.
This event is organised by the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth.
Free tickets are available through Eventbrite: http://inventionofmurder.eventbrite.com/