Victorian Criminals

Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer—some have called him a 'Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter'—whose crimes spanned decades, but by 1871 he was captured, chained in a cell—a psychopath holding court while curious 19th-century 'mindhunters' got to work. From alienists (early psychiatrists who tried to analyse the source of his madness) to neurologists (who wanted to dissect his brain) to phrenologists (who analysed the bumps on his head to determine his character), each one thought he held the key to understanding the essential question: is evil born or made?

The essays in this audiobook set out to explore the ways in which Victorians used newspapers to identify the causes of bad behavior and its impacts, and the ways in which they tried to "distance" criminals and those guilty of "bad" behavior from the ordinary members of society, including identification of them as different according to race or sexual orientation. Victorian alarm was about crimes and bad behavior that they saw as new or unique to their period - but that were not new then and that, in slightly different dress, are still causing panic today.