#victorian crime

[scribbledbyhand]

The wait is over! Here we have the brand new Ripper Street comic of the week - S9E18 - Enjoy 😉!

[margysmusings]

[djohnhopper]

READING: Wilde Nights and Robber Barons by Laura Lee. Has anyone come across Maurice Schwabe before? First time for me. What a fascinating character, part of a colourful, sticky world of gambling, prostitution, cheating, blackmail, Oscar Wilde and much more. Delicious. Definitely a great read.

[deepcutdave]

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Max Carrados

Going to episode #2. Max Carrados (created by Ernest Bramah in 1914) is a private detective, but here's the twist-he's blind.

Yeah, in many ways a possible source of inspiration for Marvel's Daredevil, Carrados has trained his other senses to be so exact he easily pass himself off as a seeing man. He can even read newspapers by the feel of the ink on his fingers.

Just going by the episode aired, Carrados is witty, urbane, and some cases a real smart-aleck. There is a rather poor portrayal of the Irish, but given the time the stories were written, I suppose that is to be expected.

[weirdlookindog]

"Rose carried of by Count Lerno"

"The hag and her victim"

"The murder in the green-room"

"The murderous attack"

"Found dead"

"The crime"

"Digging the grave"

"Clara and the ruffians"

"The lost one"

"The murder by poison"

"The sweep and his victims"

"Selling a wife"

"The bodysnatchers"

"ROSE MORTIMER; OR, THE BALLET-GIRL'S REVENGE"

by a comedian of the T. R. Drury Lane, London, c. 1865

source

[mori-boo0]

I know I'm a few days late but happy pride everybody!

[marzipanandminutiae]

I see a Craigslist ad titled "apartment in grand Victorian house!"

I click through the interior photos

I see minimalist Landlord White bullshit where period details definitely could have been left while still dividing the house up

now I am no closer to finding a preferable place to rent but I'm filled with rage

[theoutcastrogue]

"The knife is a weapon of the Other"

"The emerging martial art of Bartitsu, appearing in middle-class magazines during the Boer War, was the encapsulation of British civilian gallantry. Yet Bartitsu would have slid into obscurity had it not been for its curious appearance in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The final showdown of the ‘duel’ between Holmes and Moriarty is a wrestling match between two Victorian masterminds. When Holmes returns to London he tells Watson that he and Moriarty went to battle at the Reichenbach Falls unarmed. Holmes managed to ‘slip through’ Moriarty’s grip as he possessed ‘some knowledge’ of ‘baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling’, adding that the art had on occasion been useful to him.

Founded in the 1890s by an Anglo-Scottish engineer, Edward William Barton-Wright (1860–1951), Bartitsu was a synthesis of British boxing, French la savate (kickboxing) and Japanese jujitsu. Barton-Wright tapped into the need for a bourgeois form of self-defence, something which he could promote as being British and yet was also exotic and refined.

The principal aim of Bartitsu’s promoters was ‘to provide a means whereby the higher classes of society may protect themselves from the attacks of hooligans and their like all over the world’. These urban gangs were a new form of folk devil, descendants of the mid-Victorian-era garotter. While they were armed with clubs, knuckles, iron bars and leather belts, it is doubtful that they carried firearms. Nevertheless, the press did represent the hooligan as a threatening presence.

Perhaps the scares promoted the growth of a burgeoning culture of ‘British’ self-defence which avoided the aggressive and increasingly unmanly action of using a firearm against a ruffianly lower-class opponent equipped only with basic weapons.

Barton-Wright follows a literary tradition when he presents his martial art as a British form of self-defence. Pierce Egan’s well-known self-defence manual was supplemented with a word on the ‘Englishness’ of physical heroism, arguing that ‘Englishmen need no other weapons in personal contests than those which nature has so amply supplied them with’. In 1910 the former lightweight boxing champion Andrew J. Newton said in his manual Boxing that ‘the native of Southern Europe flies to his knife’, whereas the ‘Britisher […] is handy with his fists in an emergency’. Elsewhere it was maintained that the ‘Italian, Greek, Portuguese, or South American’ ‘give preference to the knife’ while the Englishman extols boxing. For Barton-Wright, British boxers ‘scorn taking advantages of another man when he is down’, while a foreigner might ‘use a chair, or a beer bottle, or a knife’ or, ‘when a weapon is available’, he might employ ‘underhanded means’. The views of these articles reappear in a later self-defence manual of 1914, where it is argued that Britons ‘live in a country where knife and revolver are not much in evidence’. This statement about the low number of firearms and edged weapons can be read as an attempt to extol British virtues and is not necessarily representative of reality. The knife is a weapon of the Other. Barton-Wright’s view that English practitioners of Bartitsu are principled men is reflected in the Sherlock Holmes canon, where Holmes never uses a knife, although his enemies, whether foreign or British, do so at times."

— Emelyne Godfrey, Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) (very abridged)

[asalesbian]

Clara & a partial inventory i drew during my Victoriocity relisten for the final day of @podcastgirlsweek!

[citrus-soda]

holding that small animal

[moth-party]

Tired of pretending that Sebastian would be a good flirt. That man is a god damn nerd who wears a fucking ruffled cravat like he’s cosplaying Alexander Hamilton this man could not pull a bitch by flirting to save his life. Theater kid looking dumbass who was chronically “Townsman Number 3” i need to skin him alive and smoke him.

[scribbledbyhand]

Exciting new crime story!

S8E03

[margysmusings]

My books are available from Amazon Italy. Four of them have been translated into Italian.

@sherlockholmesbooks

[deepcutdave]

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Dr. Thorndyke

Having recently discovered the 1970's series the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, I must admit I found myself growing impressed with the idea of each episode focusing on different characters published around the same time as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective.

Dr. John E. Thorndyke (created by R. Austin Freeman in 1907) was the subject of the first episode. A forerunner to a modern forensic expert, Dr. Thorndyke worked on any cases that struck his interest.

As an aside, Freeman was so committed to making his stories accurate he actually set up a lab in his house to test his stories out.

Just going off the first episode, I rather liked the character. He's a genius but he doesn't lord it over people (at least according to the show). He's a quick wit but his devotion to science is absolute.

Going off the first episode, he is called into a murder by a former student and quickly deduces how the killer worked and from the evidence at the scene figures out the who.

An interesting character but snark aside he is a bit flat. We don't really have a background on him (in the show at least) but he did save his lab assistant from poverty, so there's that.

[weirdlookindog]

"Look! Look! 'Tis the Captain of the Skeleton Crew!!"

"Wildire Ned visits the red man of the Heath"

"The midnight dance of the Skeleton Crew"

"The fight between Wildfire Ned and the Skeleton Crew"

"The encounter between Wildfire Ned and the Skeleton Crew"

"The bodiless legs walked slowly across the path"

"The mysterious barber"

"Wildfire Ned's attack on Skeleton Crew"

"The meeting in the wood"

"A death-bed curse"

THE SKELETON CREW; OR, WILDFIRE NED

"First serialised between 1866 and 1867 by the Newsagents’ Publishing Company and Edwin J. Brett, The Skeleton Crew; Or, Wildfire Ned was among the finest and most popular of the fierce ‘penny dreadful’ tales which flourished in the mid nineteenth century."

"Occultist A. E. Waite described this bloodthirsty tale as “suggestive of a film produced by the inmates of Bedlam” with a storyline “in a state of nightmare”.

source

[skillzissue]

Pspspsps goobers

Bubble!! Kisses!! Cuz!! They!! Are!! So!! Silly!!