Crime and punishment: a 19th-century love affair
The violence of everyday life in 19th-century Europe - including murder most foul, handsome bandits, wicked women and huge crowds at executions - is being revealed in all its bloody detail by Cambridge University Library. This is the literature that was sold in the streets; it took people into a world populated by bandits, sordid criminals and terrible women. Alison Sinclair Read all about it! Wrongdoing in Spain and England in the long nineteenth century opens free to the public today (April 30) and reveals a catalogue of criminality from the Library's remarkable collections of books, broadsides, penny dreadfuls and cheap, mass-produced ephemera. They reveal how, just like today, tales of crime and punishment were lapped up by a huge cross-section of society in the two countries; from illiterate Spanish peasants who consumed tales of wickedness and evil deeds via rudimentary picture stories to the English middle classes who devoured verbatim court reports from The Times. The exhibition, opened by Lord Williams of Oystermouth, Master of Magdalene College and former Archbishop of Canterbury, draws on the Library's vast collection of material from both countries, and runs until December 2013. Themes include: 'Don't lock up your daughters', 'The glamour of bandits', and 'Monstrous criminals'. Many of the exhibits feature magnificently gruesome, sometimes comically exaggerated, depictions of criminals and their crimes, such as Francisquillo el Sastre (Frankie the Tailor), whose weapon of choice was a gigantic pair of scissors - which, he boasts, were used to cut up the bodies of his victims.
