Liverpool Sound and Vision Ration * * * *
As Dr. Lucy Worsley makes her way through the Victorian age of the most nefarious crime of all, the taking of another’s life, the second part of her new series, A Very British Murder, lifts the lid on the rise of the detective, whether in fiction or on the streets and houses of Britain and the detective’s arch nemesis, that of the arm chair detective.
With the 19th Century gathering pace, a new type of policeman emerges, clever, methodical and up to date with the latest ways of crime detection. From out of this comes a whole raft of works of fiction that the public ends up entranced by. Not just the works of Arthur Conan Doyle but those that seem to have been largely forgotten by many, the sociologically interesting Penny Dreadfuls and the ahead of their time The Female Detective books that made their way into circulation in the 1860s.
Aside from the most perplexing set of murders during Victorian times, namely the brutal slayings of prostitutes in Whitechapel at the hands of Jack the Ripper, Dr. Worsley showed how the art of detection became more involved with the book by Wilkie Collins, the iconic The Moon Stone. Smoking cigars, it seems, can really be bad for your health.
With the dependable actor and biographer Simon Callow adding his vast wealth of knowledge of Charles Dickens to the programme, the hour zoomed along as if being chased by a sinister shadowy fiend intent on drawing a silken veil over the proceedings. Dr. Lucy Worsley holds the audience’s attention very well as she goes through the gruesome facts of some of the cases that held the British newspaper and new emerging crime reading public’s interest.
History is certainly a living, breathing animal, full of wonder and intrigue and in the hands of Dr. Worsley, that intrigue is given a sense of the familiar, a sense of the tangible and easily accessed. Murder may be most foul but history gives the menacing macabre nature of the evil crime a reality that should be viewed making sense of the waste of life.
Ian D. Hall