Book of the Week - The Invention of Murder - Episode 5

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 public imagination was particularly stirred when new technology was used to bring criminals to justice. This episode looks at one such case in which an enterprising railway clerk used the electric telegraph to send a description of a suspected murderer ahead of the train he was travelling on, so that the suspect could be met by police at his journey's end. And, bringing us right up to the final years of the century, how the funeral of an acclaimed actor - and murder victim - was captured on film for posterity. Read by Robert Glenister. Abridged by David Jackson Young. Produced by Kirsteen Cameron.