The Littlehampton Libels
The Littlehampton Libels

Author: Christopher Hilliard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0198799659

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The Littlehampton Libels tells the story of a poison-pen mystery that led to a miscarriage of justice in the years following the First World War. There would be four criminal trials before the real culprit was finally punished, with the case challenging the police and the prosecuting lawyers as much any capital crime. When a leading Metropolitan Police detective was tasked with solving the case, he questioned the residents of the seaside town of Littlehampton about their neighbours' vocabularies, how often they wrote letters, what their handwriting was like, whether they swore-and how they swore, for the letters at the heart of the case were often bizarre in their abuse. The archive that the investigation produced shows in extraordinary detail how ordinary people could use the English language in inventive and surprising ways at a time when universal literacy was still a novelty. Their personal lives, too, had surprises. The detective's inquiries and the courtroom dramas laid bare their secrets and the intimate details of neighbourhood and family life. Drawing on these records, The Littlehampton Libels traces the tangles of devotion and resentment, desire and manipulation, in a working-class community. We are used to emotional complexity in books about the privileged, but history is seldom able to recover the inner lives of ordinary people in this way.

Penning Poison
Penning Poison

Author: Emily Cockayne

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-09-14

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 019879505X

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Accusatory, libellous, or just bizarre, Penning Poison unveils the history of anonymous letter-writing. 'er at number 14 is dirty Receiving an unexpected and unsigned note is a disconcerting experience. In Penning Poison, Emily Cockayne traces the stories of such letters to all corners of English society over the period 1760-1939. She uncovers scandal, deception, class enmity, personal tragedy, and great loneliness. Some messages were accusatory, some libellous, others bizarre. Technology, new postal networks, forensic techniques, and the emergence of professional police all influence the phenomenon of poison letter campaigns. This book puts the letters back into their local and psychology context, extending the work of detectives, to discover who may have written them and why. Emily Cockayne explores the reasons and motivations for the creation and delivery of these missives and the effect on recipients - with some blasé, others driven to madness. Small communities hit by letter campaigns became places of suspicion and paranoia. By examining the ways in which these letters spread anxiety in the past Penning Poison grapples with the question of how nasty messages can turn into an epidemic. The book recovers many lost stories about how we used to write to one another, finding that perhaps the anxieties of our internet age are not as new as we think.

Dark Days at the Beach Hotel
Dark Days at the Beach Hotel

Author: Francesca Capaldi

Publisher: Hera books Ltd

Published: 2024-02-15

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1804361364

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Can she save the hotel... and her reputation? Helen Bygrove is managing the hotel, now that her husband has been conscripted. Against all expectations, Helen and her team are doing marvellously, despite the shortages brought by war. Even the exacting Lady Blackmore agrees. But then the calm is shattered when poison pen letters are sent to prominent townsfolk and Helen finds herself the target of a police investigation. Is someone trying to ruin Helen, and the Beach Hotel? And can she rely on the handsome but taciturn Inspector Toshack to help her? When her husband, Douglas, is invalided out of the war he is determined to take back control of the hotel and things go from bad to worse. How can she ever escape his bullying? Is she a fool to hope that she may have a second chance at love? A captivating, emotional and uplifting saga set in World War One - fans of Elaine Everest and Ginny Bell will love this! Readers are loving Dark Days at the Beach Hotel: ‘Oh wow this story was...amazing and heartfelt...I hope there will be more in this series’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘Had me turning the pages well into the night... A five-star, well-written beach caper. A page turner from beginning to end.’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘I have enjoyed all three books in this series but this one was the best! I think that is because it is Helen's story and Helen is the very heart of the hotel...I really enjoyed it.’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘The strong thread that runs through this series is friendship, that’s exactly what Helen Bygrove needs when things get difficult! I know it was third in series but I’m sure there’s room for a follow up! I live in hope.’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘Another brilliant book by this brilliant author’ Reader Review Praise for the Beach Hotel series: ‘Brilliant storyline, brilliant book. Couldn’t put it down. Family saga at its best’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘I loved this enchanting read...could not put it down...’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘Well, what a start to a new series! There are many secrets to be uncovered...I loved this book.’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘Charming...this book felt like an escape...The story was heartwarming’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review ‘I thoroughly enjoyed this book...I’m glad there is more to come from the Beach Hotel.’⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reader Review

A Matter of Obscenity
A Matter of Obscenity

Author: Christopher Hilliard

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0691226105

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A comprehensive history of censorship in modern Britain For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. He reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. He describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research, this incisive and multifaceted book reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture
The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture

Author: Brenda Ayres

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1000782638

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The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture exposes, explores, and examines what Victorians once considered flagrant breaches of decorum. Infringements that were fantasized through artforms or were actually committed exceeded entertaining parlor gossip; once in print they were condemned as socially contaminative but were also consumed as delightfully sensational. Written by scholars in diverse disciplines, this volume: Demonstrates that spreading scandals seemed to have been one of the most entertaining sources of activities but were also normative efforts made by the Victorians to ensure conformity of decorum. Provides a broad spectrum of infractions that were considered scandalous to the Victorians. Identifies Victorian transgressions that made the news and that may still shock modern readers. Covers a gamut of moral infractions and transgressions either practiced, rumored, or fantasized in art forms. This handbook is an invaluable resource about Victorian literature, art, and culture which challenges its readers to ponder perplexing questions about how and why some scandals were perpetrated and propagated in the nineteenth century while others were not, and what the controversies reveal about the human condition that persists beyond Victoria’s reign of propriety.

From Courtesy to Civility
From Courtesy to Civility

Author: Anna Bryson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9780198217657

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What counted as good and bad manners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Anna Bryson explores what is often entertaining evidence for Tudor and Stuart ideas of bodily decency and decorum, table manners and polite conversation, and also shows the crucial importance of the values of "courtesy" and "civility" in an aristocratic society.

English as a Vocation
English as a Vocation

Author: Christopher Hilliard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-05-31

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0199695172

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This book explores how a small circle of Cambridge literary critics turned into a movement that revolutionized the way English was taught and brought popular culture into classrooms. The leader, F. R. Leavis, was a well-known and controversial writer. The focus of this book is not on Leavis but on the people who put his ideas into practice.

Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland
Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland

Author: Oren Falk

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-03-25

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0192635573

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Historians spend a lot of time thinking about violence: bloodshed and feats of heroism punctuate practically every narration of the past. Yet historians have been slow to subject 'violence' itself to conceptual analysis. What aspects of the past do we designate violent? To what methodological assumptions do we commit ourselves when we employ this term? How may we approach the category 'violence' in a specifically historical way, and what is it that we explain when we write its history? Astonishingly, such questions are seldom even voiced, much less debated, in the historical literature. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle lays out a cultural history model for understanding violence. Using interdisciplinary tools, it argues that violence is a positively constructed asset, deployed along three principal axes - power, signification, and risk. Analysing violence in instrumental terms, as an attempt to coerce others, focuses on power. Analysing it in symbolic terms, as an attempt to communicate meanings, focuses on signification. Finally, analysing it in cognitive terms, as an attempt to exercise agency despite imperfect control over circumstances, focuses on risk. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland explores a place and time notorious for its rampant violence. Iceland's famous sagas hold treasure troves of circumstantial data, ideally suited for past-tense ethnography, yet demand that the reader come up with subtle and innovative methodologies for recovering histories from their stories. The sagas throw into sharp relief the kinds of analytic insights we obtain through cultural interpretation, offering lessons that apply to other epochs too.

Bad Queen Bess?
Bad Queen Bess?

Author: Peter Lake

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 0198753993

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Explores the role of plot talk, conspiracy theory, and libellous secret history during the Elizabethan regime, analyzing the back and forth between Catholic critics and William Cecil and his circle, and the effect this had on the political, cultural, intellectual, and religious history of the time, both in England, and in a wider European context.

The Moving Finger
The Moving Finger

Author: Agatha Christie

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 9780006172697

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Lymstock was a town with more that its share of shameful secrets – a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate-mail caused only a minor stir. But all of that changed when one of the recipients, Mrs Symmington, committed suicide. Her final note said 'I can't go on'. Only Miss Marple questioned the coroner's verdict of suicide. Was this the work of a poison-pen? Or of a poisoner? Agatha Christie was born in Torquay in 1890 and became, quite simply, the best-selling novelist in history. She wrote 79 crime mysteries and collections, and saw her work translated into more languages than Shakespeare. Her enduring success, enhanced by many film and TV adaptations, is a tribute to the timeless appeal of her characters and the unequalled ingenuity of her plots. "Beyond all doubt the puzzle in 'The Moving Finger' is fit for experts."THE TIMES