Book of the Week - The Invention of Murder - Episode 3

By Judith Flanders. Over the course of the nineteenth century, murder - in reality a rarity - became ubiquitous: transformed into novels, into broadsides and ballads, into theatre and melodrama. "The Invention of Murder" explores the Victorian fascination with deadly violence by relating some of the century's most gripping and gruesome cases and the ways in which they were commercially exploited. The decreasing age of the British population - in the 1820s half the country was under 25 - meant there was a lucrative market for lively entertainment. Children flocked to penny gaffs: unlicensed theatres which offered cheap entertainment, often dramatisations of notorious murders. One of the most infamous, the Red Barn Murder of 1828, was being performed as a melodrama even before the prime suspect was put on trial. Read by Robert Glenister. Abridged by David Jackson Young. Produced by Kirsteen Cameron.