Lucy Worsley’s ‘Art of the English Murder’
“Scratch John Bull . . . and you find the ancient Briton who revels in blood, who loves to dip deep into a murder and devours the details of a hanging,” The Pall Mall Gazette wrote in 1887, a year before Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” became a stage play. People packed the theater night after night, some fainting after witnessing Richard Mansfield’s performance, which included an extraordinary onstage transformation from monster to doctor. This appetite for gore as entertainment spawned a major industry in print, theater and artifacts in 19th-century England. Lucy Worsley’s lively book, “The Art of the English Murder,” traces the growth of this industry through some of the era’s most avidly followed killings. Her goal isn’t to provide a history of crime or crime writing, but to show how “the British enjoyed and consumed the idea of murder.” The interplay of urban growth, a rapid rise in literacy, the development ...