Theatre of the macabre

Sam Leith marvels at Victorian Britain’s appetite for crime, where a public hanging was considered a family day out and murder became a lurid industry in itself

On my satellite TV box, murder is being committed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I could probably live out the rest of my life watching the three CSIs, Bones, Criminal Minds and Waking the Dead without ever once breaking for a cup of tea or having to set the video to record.

Is this a new thing? Sky Plus may be, but the obsession with murder? Not a bit. It all kicked off with the Victorians, as Judith Flanders’s winningly cheerful new book (aimed squarely at The Suspicions of Mr Whicher market) sets out to demonstrate. From the early 19th century onwards, the British public thrilled to tales of murder, detection, confession and execution — garlanded then as now with bogus pieties and tenuously drawn social morals.