Decline of the English Murder E-Book

George Orwell

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 47

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.' George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell's essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Decline of the English Murder, the tenth in the Orwell's Essays series, Orwell considers the sorts of murders are portrayed in the media, and why exactly people like to read about them. Expounding on his findings in the accompanying essay, titled in full The Ethics of the Detective Story from Raffles to Miss Blandish, Orwell broadens his focus to 'true crime' and realism in fictional murders – a genre that thrives to this day.

Leseprobe

the orwell’s essays series

i. Why I Write

ii. Politics and the English Language

iii. The Prevention of Literature

iv. Politics vs. Literature

v. Shooting an Elephant

vi. England Your England

vii. Orwell on Reading

viii. Inside the Whale

ix. A Hanging

x. Decline of the English Murder

Decline of the English Murder&Raffles and Miss Blandish

george orwell

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Decline of the English Murder first published in 1946

Raffles and Miss Blandish first published in 1944

This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2024

Edited text, Notes and Selection © Renard Press Ltd, 2024

Cover design by Will DadyExtra Material edited by Tom Conaghan

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contents

Decline of the English Murder

Raffles and Miss Blandish

Notes

A Brief Biographical Sketch of George Orwell

decline of the english murder and raffles and miss blandish

decline of the english murder

It is a sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and rehashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson.* In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was another very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitted.*

Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had successful novels based on them, one has been made into a popular melodrama, and the amount of literature surrounding them, in the form of newspaper write-ups, criminological treatises and reminiscences by lawyers and police officers, would make a considerable library. It is difficult to believe that any recent English crime will be remembered so long and so intimately, and not only because the violence of external events has made murder seem unimportant, but because the prevalent type of crime seems to be changing. The principal cause célèbre of the war years was the so-called Cleft Chin Murder,* which has now been written up in a popular booklet;* the verbatim account of the trial was published some time last year by Messrs Jarrolds with an introduction by Mr Bechhofer-Roberts.*

Before returning to this pitiful and sordid case, which is only interesting from a sociological and perhaps a legal point of view, let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that ‘you never seem to get a good murder nowadays’.

In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by excluding the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself. Of the other eight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged to