19th Century… A Murder-Suicide in Stephen Basdeo’s Victorian Ancestors: The Case of George Leedham (1871) 15 Aug 2020 By Stephen Basdeo I have been doing a lot of work this past year tracing my ancestors and discovering their history. Imagine how delighted (wrong word, perhaps!) I was when…
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… John Terry (d.1803): A Yorkshire Murderer 29 Apr 201729 Apr 2017 All too often histories of crime focus upon what happened in the big cities such as London, Manchester, and New York. Part of the reason for this is that, as…
18th century… Charles Kinnaister: Executed for the Murder of Australian Aborigines (1838) 27 Jan 201727 Jan 2017 Broadly speaking, criminals fall into three types: heroes, buffoons, and brutes.[i] The categories are just as applicable to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they are today – ‘heroes’ would…
17th century… The Newgate Calendar 24 Mar 201624 Mar 2016 People in the eighteenth century believed that they were living in a crime-ridden society. In addition to Capt. Alexander Smith’s and Capt. Charles Johnson’s criminal biographies, the Proceedings of the…
Film… Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 4 Mar 201513 Sep 2017 This post has been adapted from a chapter in my MA Thesis which was completed under the supervision of Dr. Heather Shore. The tale of Sweeney Todd, the ‘demon barber,’…
