Celebrity Murderers
This week we will discuss how some murderers become so notorious that they remain in the cultural zeitgeist. What made Mary Cotton and Jack the Ripper so captivating for generations following their crimes? Is celebrity status a reward for committing such atrocities, or is it a self-defence mechanism for the fearful public?
Additional intro material:
PODCAST: 'Mary Ann Cotton', Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley (2023)
Essential seminar reading:
Primary:
- Mary Ann Cotton (website with some original source material)
- G. Savage, ‘Homicidal mania’, Fortnightly Review, 50 (1888), 448–63
Secondary:
- Clive Emsley, Crime and Society, chapter 2 'The Statistical Map'.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Entries on Mary Ann Cotton and Jack the Ripper
- Lindsay Steenberg, 'Crime and Celebrity', Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Criminality and Criminal Justice (2017)
Seminar prep questions:
- How does a criminal become a celebrity criminal?
- Compare and contrast the perceptions of the female and male mass murderers.
- What was the impact of the murders on views of the police?
Further Reading:
Primary:
- S. A. Barnett, ‘East London and crime’, National Review, 12 (1888–9), 433–43
- ‘The Whitechapel mystery’, The Spectator (15 Sept 1888), 1253–4
- ‘The Whitechapel horrors’, The Spectator (6 Oct 1888), 1352–3
Secondary:
- Jan Bonderson, ‘Monsters and moral panic in London’, History Today, 2001
- Lucy Bland, Modern women on trial : sexual transgression in the age of the flapper
- Barbara Butcher, 'The baby farmer of Reading', History Today, 2014
- Rosalind Crone, ‘From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd: Murder machines in the mid-nineteenth century metropolis’, Cultural & Social History, 7 (2010), pp. 59-85.
- Lisa Downing, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality and the Modern Killer
- Peter Fisher, An Illustrated Guide to Jack the Ripper
- Drew Gray, London's Shadows
- Caroline McCracken-Flesher, The doctor dissected: a cultural autopsy of the Burke and Hare murders
- Douglas McGowan, Trial of Madeleine Smith
- Jane Monckton Smith, Relating Rape and Murder: Narratives of Sex, Death and Gender
- Sara Murphy, 'Inadmissible evidence : the trial of Madeleine Smith and Collins's The Law and the Lady', Victorian Literature and Culture, 2016
- Neil Pemberton, ''Bloodhounds as Detectives' : Dogs, Slum Stench and Late-Victorian Murder Investigation', Cultural and Social History, 2013
- Nicholas Rance, ‘Jonathan’s great knife: Dracula meets Jack the Ripper’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 2002
- Lisa Rosner, The anatomy murders: being the true and spectacular history of Edinburgh's notorious Burke and Hare, and of the man of science who abetted them in the commission of their most heinous crimes
- D Rubinstein, ‘The hunt for Jack the Ripper’, History Today, 2000
- Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper
- Lisa Tickner, Walter Sickert, the Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime
- Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis, Jack the Ripper: media, culture, history
- Judy Walkowitz, ‘Jack the Ripper and the myth of male violence’, Feminist Studies, 1982
- Judy Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight
- Alexandra Warwick, 'The Scene of the Crime: Inventing the Serial Killer', Social and Legal Studies, 2006
- Elizabeth Yardley and David Wilson, Female serial killers in social context: criminological institutionalism and the case of Mary Ann Cotton