Women Murderers in Victorian Britain
Women as perpetrators of crime, rather than its victims, were figures of especial fascination and loathing in the Victorian popular press. Judith Knelman delves deeper.
The domestication of women early in the reign of Queen Victoria – inspired largely by her example – made it especially difficult for the English to believe that women would harbour, let alone indulge, murderous impulses. By this time the popular press had, through its sensational treatment of such figures, defined the murderess as a cold-blooded monster who operated by stealth and was particularly attracted to poison as a weapon. Such women, having betrayed the trust of their nearest and dearest, could not be understood as women, and so they were loudly derided as traitors to their sex. The crude woodcuts of nineteenth-century broadsides often showed a freshly hanged female figure being gawked at by an assembly of her moral superiors. Newspapers were more reliable but not much less subtle in their depiction of murderesses.
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