Hilarious Homicides: Satirizing Sensational Murders in Late Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract

Abstract Whereas many studies consider the nineteenth-century fascination with murder as synonymous with the contemporary cultural tendency towards sensation and melodrama, this article offers a fresh perspective on the subject. Here, I deal with a corpus of humorous murder representations, which have rarely been addressed before. I examine how murder was comically represented and look at the contemporary discourse on murder, through the investigation of sources including music hall songs, cartoons, and theatrical travesties, with an emphasis on visual representations. In the context of the democratization of culture, the article examines the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of plebian taste. It demonstrates how late nineteenth-century notions of modernity, which were crystallized through the discussion of murder, were classed and gendered. Thus, a hidden discourse is exposed, in which murder serves as a central tool in a mechanism similar to Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, where cultural and artistic ‘taste’ has a social dimension.