All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Murder, She Wrote….Mrs Henry Wood’s Use of Newspaper Reporting, 1858-1887
| The popular sensation novelist Mrs Henry Wood used newspaper reports as the basis for her tales of murder and mysterious death, rather than a personally creative imagination. Drawing on the regular and extensive reports of murder trials in the press, she extracted the narrative cores and incorporated them in her writing, which always located them in backgrounds which were physically and culturally recognisable to her readers, thus locating the murders within the familiar context of Victorian daily living. This paper will examine the ways in which Wood presented and explained murder in her work, including the ways in which she amplified press accounts by depicting the personalities of murderers and victims in terms of motivations for murder and provocations to murder. Her appreciation of the need for popular support for the criminal justice system enabled her to explore the tensions within Victorian society surrounding conceptions of class and gender and how the nineteenth century legal process sought to cope with the demands of respectability and the creditable standing of so many middle class murderers, particularly male murderers. Her work will be examined in the context of Victorian newspaper reportage of murder trials, illuminating the ways in which Wood sought to uncover the deception practised by ‘respectable’ murderers on their community to disguise their dark deeds, as well as their essentially mundane motivations. The importance of Wood’s work for contemporary readers lay in the ways in which it echoed and amplified newspaper murder reportage. This was crucial, not just because of the illusions of reality based on her inclusion of the kind of small, fussy detail which also characterised newspaper accounts, but because this juxtaposition reveals the core of the sensationalism at the heart of these depictions of murder. This was that the murderer in Victorian society was not the stranger but the familiar friend, impelled to kill for very familiar motivations taken to a comprehensible excess, and that therefore the reader was impelled into a sympathy based on understanding for such figures, despite their awful crimes.
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