Search results for ""Author Adrian Gray""

In this comprehensive work, familiar Dickensian themes of grisly murders and ragged street urchins are joined by other dramatic cases, which show patterns of crime and illustrate the causes and effects of changes in criminal law. The author shows how both pure greed and genuine mental illness were responsible for unpleasant cases - such as the murder of an elderly aristocrat in his bed or the poisoning of a series of 'working girls'. Changes in the law are charted, showing how new offences were created from old customs, and how the law was updated to deal with modern problems such as motor cars.In a book that covers the complete range of crime, the reader will meet many colourful characters including Courvoisier, a murderous butler. With many gruesome details and excellent illustrations, this book will appeal to London and Victorian historians as well as the macabre-minded.

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Dark and foggy Victorian streets, the murderous madman, the arsenic-laced evening meal - we all think we know the realities of Victorian crime. Adrian Gray's thrilling book recounts the classic murders, by knife and poison, but it also covers much more, taking the reader into less familiar parts of Victorian life, uncovering the wicked, the vengeful, the foolish and the hopeless amongst the criminal world of the nineteenth century. Here you will encounter the women who sold their children, corrupt bankers, smugglers, highwaymen, the first terrorists, bloodthirsty mutineers and petty thieves; you will meet the 'mesmerists' who fooled a credulous public, and even the Salvation Army band that went to gaol. Gray journeys through the cities, villages, lanes, mills and sailing ships of the period, ranging from Carlisle to Cornwall, showing how our laws today have been shaped by what the Victorians considered acceptable - or made illegal.

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