Chapter 1: What does George Orwell's essay 'Decline of the English Murder' reveal about murder narratives?
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the news of the world. Roast beef in Yorkshire, or roast pork and applesauce, followed by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany brown tea.
have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally about a murder. This isn't the opening of a detective novel from 1932, although you could be forgiven for thinking so.
This is George Orwell writing in 1946, conjuring a cosy atmosphere ideal for the reading of horrible murder stories.
Chapter 2: Which notable murder cases does Orwell highlight in his essay?
His pipe-smoking householder is buried in a tabloid newspaper, not a murder mystery novel. But nonetheless, Orwell's critique of post-war media consumption about crime has plenty to tell us about detective fiction in the first half of the 20th century too. Let us consider, then, the decline of the English murder. Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.
Orwell's essay, Decline of the English Murder, was published in Tribune on 5 February 1946. The Second World War had not been over a year, and the author was enjoying one of the most successful moments in his career to date. Animal Farm had been published in the UK the previous summer and was forthcoming in the US.
The novel's huge success had led to a renewed interest in Orwell's writing, and 1946 was an especially prolific year for him. As his title would suggest, Orwell's subject in this essay is murder, specifically what he calls our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, defined as being roughly between 1850 and 1925.
Chapter 3: How did the social context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries influence murder stories?
He cites nine cases from this time span that have stood the test of time, some of which have been the subject of their own She Done It episodes, so great was their influence on Golden Age detective fiction.
Orwell's Chamber of Horrors is inhabited by William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner, Jack the Ripper, Neil Cream, Florence Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Frederick Seddon, George Joseph Smith, the Brides in the Bath murderer, the so-called Hay Poisoner, Herbert Armstrong, and the tragic duo of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson.
For the ninth case, Orwell didn't name his protagonist, as the 1919 trial had ended in an acquittal, and putting such a person in this lineup of criminals would have almost certainly meant a libel action. Historians now believe this to have been the murder of Mabel Greenwood by arsenic poisoning, for which her husband Harold, a solicitor, stood trial and was acquitted.
These are the most memorable cases from a period of English history that was marked by its rapid social and economic change, as well as a surge in the popularity of crime narratives, both real and fictional. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a book that has a fair claim to be the first true detective novel, was published in 1868 but set in 1850 at the beginning of Orwell's period.
In the decades that followed, newspapers and pamphlets vied with novels to claim the attention of a reading public hungry for salacious, sordid, satisfying stories of terrible crimes. With the exception of Jack the Ripper, and he is always the exception, all the murders that Orwell selected from this period committed their crimes in private settings.
Poisoners, especially domestic poisoners, dominate his list. And yet, at the same time, this was a period in which murder had never been so public. One could not just attend a trial or an execution, but also keep up with every twist and turn of allegation and investigation.
Although Orwell himself never published any crime fiction, he did spend a fair amount of his time thinking about the questions that its popularity raised – His interest began early. Among the juvenilia that survives from his school days is a detective story titled The Vernon Murder, which is almost certainly the product of a joke with his school contemporary Cyril Connolly.
Vernon was Connolly's middle name, and the story contains a character called Cyril too. An avid reader from his early years, as might be expected given that he was a teenager in the 1910s, Orwell's favourite fictional detectives are those who slightly predate the post-war golden age of detective fiction. G.K.
Chesterton's Father Brown, Ernest Brammer's Max Carrados, R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke, and of course, Sherlock Holmes. When Orwell died in 1950, one of the 523 books that were listed as being in his personal library was a very well-thumbed 1925 edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
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Chapter 4: What role do class and respectability play in the depiction of murder in fiction?
Orwell had a varied career between travel, journalism, politics, and fiction. Books were always a constant, though, both his own and those written by others. He was a prolific book reviewer, and it is in his criticism that we see some of his closest engagement with ideas of crime. In another essay for Tribune, published in November 1945, he tackles what G.K.
Chesterton termed good-bad books, defined as the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. The pre-eminent examples of this form, he declares, are the Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung, Sherlock Holmes, and the early Thorndike adventures.
His criteria is about what remains readable, what is moving, amusing, entertaining, way after literary fashions have passed and changed. And because of the presence of this indefinable literary vitamin that sustains successive generations of readers, these are the books that outlast their authors' intentions or their fame.
Not all of the works he singles out are crime-related, of course, but a good deal of them are, a testament both to Orwell's own belief in the power of these narratives to hold attention and an insight into the appetites of readers more generally.
To return to Orwell's thesis of the decline of the English murder, then, there are commonalities in the nine cases he highlights in the 1946 essay that all readers of crime fiction from the first couple of decades in the 20th century will recognise. These were domestic, intimate murders. The killers struck those closest to them, often at home.
The victims were spouses, children, close friends, the occasional lodger. Their habits and personalities were well known and ruthlessly exploited by their murderers. The motives existed close to home too. These were killings done for relatively small sums of money, or to gain a slight elevation in social position, or both.
Maintaining appearances was a major concern for most, if not all, of these perpetrators, and the way that their deeds were uncovered is a factor in the appeal of these cases too. Entry to Orwell's elite roster of cases is only granted to instances where a deadly plan was carefully followed. Only for coincidence, nosy neighbours or sheer bad luck to unravel matters ultimately.
From this analysis, Orwell built up the following picture of the perfect crime from this great period in murder.
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Chapter 5: How does Orwell compare the moral atmosphere of different crime narratives?
He wrote, He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch or or a leading non-conformist and strong temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary, or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience.
Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis, he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful and less damaging to his career than being detected in adultery.
With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. As you can see from that, Respectability is a very important theme here.
For the consumer of a crime story, there is pleasure to be had in the contrast between the image of the upright citizen presented to the world and the murdering sinner who comes out only in private. These stories, and the best crime fiction Orwell says, operate on a moral framework where everybody knows what right and wrong is, even if they don't adhere to it.
but there are other rules at play too, social rules. And this is where the peculiarly English nature of his argument comes in, because it was, he says, the conditions produced by England's social norms that shaped these crimes. Observing and critiquing these invisible yet powerful conventions is something that had interested Orwell for a long time.
In a book review from 1936, he had written that "...in England life is subdued and cautious. Everything is governed by family ties, social status and the difficulty of earning a living, and these things are so important that no novelist can forget them." The crimes that he singles out for special attention demonstrate the incredible power that social status and expectation had.
Rather than countenance a divorce, for instance, with all of the stigma and potential loss of position and professional kudos that might bring, someone would rather commit a murder. Of course, class and snobbishness is a big part of this.
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Chapter 6: What shifts in public interest towards crime stories does Orwell identify?
These are not killers simply for financial advantage. If they were, they would be attacking much bigger targets and greater sums of money. These are killers who want to achieve a certain status, to have others look at them a certain way, and to look down on those who have not risen to such heights themselves.
There's an inherent frisson, Orwell argues, between higher social status and the committing of a crime. In 1944, he published an essay titled The Ethics of the Detective Story from Raffles to Miss Blandish, in which he contrasts the restrained, upper-class morality of E. W. Horning's Raffles stories with the 1939 novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase.
Both are crime narratives that focus on the criminal rather than the victim or detective, but they are vastly different in what he calls moral atmosphere. Raffles, like the murderers in Orwell's personal rogues gallery, targets relatively low amounts of money in his burglary ventures.
prioritising the maintenance of his social position that allows him to continue living at the Albany and playing cricket. That someone of his class should have a criminal career at all is what makes him interesting. As Orwell points out, a West End clubman who is really a burglar, that's almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar?
Would there be anything inherently dramatic in that? No. This is the snobbery of Orwell's great period of murder. It simply isn't as surprising or interesting if someone lower down the social ladder commits a crime. No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by contrast, is an American gangster novel from 1938, full of explicit descriptions of sex and violence.
At the start of World War II, this book was wildly popular, something that Orwell sees as a turn away from the previous era and a new development in collective taste and psychology. Orwell's great period of murder is also defined via comparison.
He contrasts the likes of Florence Maybrick and George Joseph Smith with a case from 1944, the so-called cleft chin murder, so-called, perhaps absurdly, because the murder victim had a cleft chin. In an echo of Orwell's thesis from his Good Bad Books essay, this case is much less well-known today than some of the earlier Golden Age ones.
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Chapter 7: How do the motivations of murderers reflect societal changes according to Orwell?
Even outside of detective fiction fans, far more people will recognise the name Crippen than those of Carl Houlton and Elizabeth Jones, the Cleft Chin Perpetrators. Houlton was a US Army deserter and Jones an 18-year-old Welsh waitress, who met by chance in a tea shop and together went on a six-day bout of robbing and killing that resulted in two women being assaulted and a man being killed.
Orwell declared their exploits to be pitiful and sordid, and in every way indicating that the era of great or satisfying murders was now over. There was no respectability to what Houlton and Jones did, at all. They met randomly, they killed random people for no clear reason other than petty cash, and then they were caught because they made no serious attempts not to be.
Jones actually spontaneously confessed to the police, and Houlton kept the car they'd stolen from their victim. Everything they did was about short-term gratification, spending the £8 they stole from the murdered taxi driver with the cleft chin at the dog racing track the very next day, with little concern for who might see them doing it.
For Orwell, this was all emblematic of the way that the world had changed, probably for the worse. The whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance halls, movie palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period, he wrote. He criticises the Americanness of the Cleft Chin murder, a quality he locates in its anonymity and its individualism.
It's not a product of a rules-based system, but an artefact of chaos. It makes me wonder whether this was ever really about murders. Is this anxiety about the lack of perfect murders simply a proxy form of nostalgia for the now vanished stable society of yesteryear? Change, even a change in the pattern of killing, is uncomfortable.
It's worth noting that Orwell was very far from the first person to make this kind of observation. Maybe this is as generational as saying the kids these days. In 1869, Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, had complained that the murders were becoming simply gross, stupid and brutal.
He went on to bemoan that where once a killer had been something like a skilled duelist who observed conventions and proprieties in order to get their murder done, they were now something more like a stupid prizefighter, indiscriminately battering away at their victim. No finesse, no decorum.
Just as Orwell preferred Raffles, who sat down to a formal dinner with a Martianess and then shinned down the drainpipe to steal her jewels, Stephen wanted his murders to have a touch of class and a sense of purpose about them.
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Chapter 8: What conclusions does Orwell draw about the evolution of crime narratives?
Not everybody agreed, though. In The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler praised the work of Dashiell Hammett precisely because it took the act away from the hidebound conventions of the previous age. He felt that the hard-boiled style Hammett practiced showed crime as it was, not as people might hope it would be.
He wrote, Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse, and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols. He put these people down on paper as they were.
I'm not here to litigate the relative attractions of noir crime fiction versus puzzle mysteries, far from it. But I do think there's something fascinating about how different critics, from different places and times, keep coming back to this same question. Why do we prefer to read about certain types of murders, real or otherwise, and not others?
Why is Crippen's dismemberment of his wife entertaining, whereas the cleft chin crime is just sad? On one level, this is a question about storytelling and the lure of cohesive narrative, no matter what its subject matter. Crippen killed his wife to be with another woman, and then tried to flee across the Atlantic with her in disguise.
They were caught via an exciting technological first, shipboard wireless telegraphy, and brought back to face justice. There's a beginning, middle and end to the story, with points of tension and release. Seeing order made out of confusion is always satisfying.
By contrast, the violent and purposeless actions of two nihilistic young people during the worst war the world had ever seen, who may not have even exchanged names before setting out on their murderous adventures, has no plot or puzzle to it. There's nothing standing between us and the sheer horror of what they did.
The background brutality of war has bled any strong emotions from the crime itself. So was Orwell right? Was there something fundamentally better about the genteel English murders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries? No, of course not.
He says that Jack the Ripper's killing of working-class women is, quote, in a class by itself, but removing this case from the analysis does not mean it and other such murders didn't happen. Of course they did. What Orwell's decline of the English murder essay does is crystallise a narrative that was and is enormously influential.
It shows how matters of class, respectability, nostalgia and media consumption came together to produce a way of thinking about crime that crossed over from non-fiction to fiction. As someone highly skilled in both kinds of writing, Orwell was well placed to observe this cross-pollination.
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