Author Who Outsold Dickens… Stephen Carver’s “Author Who Outsold Dickens” (2020): Biography of a Crime Novelist 23 Mar 202023 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo When I was doing my MA dissertation on the cultural history of crime, my supervisor, Dr Heather Shore, advised me to read two now largely forgotten novels:…
19th Century… Review: “The 19th-Century Underworld: Crime, Controversy & Corruption” by Stephen Carver 10 May 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Everyone nowadays seems fascinated by the Victorian criminal underworld. From Ripper Street to Peaky Blinders, it seems people cannot get enough of murdered sex workers and brutal…
18th century… Mack the Knife: The “True” Story Behind the Song 28 Oct 2017 The popular song Mack the Knife was based upon the story of an eighteenth-century highwayman named Captain Macheath. This post traces the literary life of this fictional character. Most people,…
18th century… Unruly Apprentices 9 Apr 20179 Apr 2017 During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many criminals recorded in works such as Alexander Smith’s History of the Highwaymen (1714), and Charles Johnson’s History of the Highwaymen (1734), as…
bandits… My Forthcoming Book: “The Lives and Exploits of the Most Noted Highwaymen, Rogues, and Murderers” (2018) 23 Dec 2016 In addition to my PhD thesis entitled ‘The Changing Faces of Robin Hood, c.1700-c.1900’ and my forthcoming book, The Mob Reformer: The Life and Legend of Wat Tyler (2018), I…
19th Century… Judging Robin Hood: Negotiating Outlawry in Nineteenth-Century Texts 25 Jun 2016 Paper Read at Plymouth University Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference 23-24 June 2016. Abstract. Robin Hood needs no introduction. He is the noble outlaw who steals from the rich to give to…
