What's on
Judith Flanders: The Invention of Murder
Time: 6.00pm
Venue: Portland Building, 1.53
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.
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.
Free tickets for this event can be booked at: http://inventionofmurder.eventbrite.com/.