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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Adopting a microhistory approach, Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 1800-1940 provides an in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern justice system. Drawing upon criminal cases and trials from England, Scotland, and Ireland, the book examines the errors, procedural systems, and the ways in which adverse influences of social and cultural forces impacted upon individual instances of justice. The book investigates several case studies of both justice and injustice which prompted the development of forensic toxicology, the implementation of state propaganda and an increased interest in press sensationalism. One such case study considers the trial of William Sheen, who was prosecuted and later acquitted of the murder of his infant child at the Old Baily in 1827, an extraordinary miscarriage of justice that prompted outrage amongst the general public. Other case studies include trials for treason, theft, obscenity and blasphemy. Nash and Kilday root each of these cases within their relevant historical, cultural, and political contexts, highlighting changing attitudes to popular culture, public criticism, protest and activism as significant factors in the transformation of the criminal trial and the British judicial system as a whole. Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources, including legal records, newspaper articles and photographs, this book provides a unique insight into the evolution of modern criminal justice in Britain.

This book analyses the ways in which twenty-first century detective fiction provides an understanding of the increasingly complex and often baffling contemporary world — and what sociology, as a discipline, can learn from it. Conventional sociological accounts of fiction generally comprehend its value in terms of the ways in which it can illustrate, enlarge or help to articulate a particular social theory. Evans, Moore, and Johnstone suggest a different approach, and demonstrate that by taking a group of detective novels, we can unveil so far unidentified, but crucial, theoretical ideas about what it means to be an individual in the twenty-first century. More specifically, the authors argue that detective fiction of the last forty years illuminates the effects of urban isolation and separation, the invisibility of institutional power, financial insecurity, and the failure of public authorities to protect people. In doing so, this body of fiction traces out the fault-lines in our social arrangements, rehearses our collective fears, and captures a mood of restless disquiet. By engaging with detective stories in this way, the book revisits ideas about the promise and purpose of sociology.​

'In terms of a non-fiction account of how historical and contemporary language has been shaped by women, I really recommend lexicographer Jonathon Green's Sounds and Furies' ELEY WILIAMS, author of The Liar's Dictionary 'When it comes to distaff dirtiness, mainstream males such as Dickens and Dekker make easy pickings, but Green finds the greatest treasures when he mudlarks on the margins. In Sounds & Furies, he has dredged up some gems.' EMMA BYRNE, Spectator 'From fishwives to flappers and from music hall performers to Mumsnetters, women have indeed made contributions to the slang vocabulary of English; by bringing together so much fascinating material about their words and their worlds, this book makes its own contribution to the history of both women and language.' PROFESSOR DEBORAH CAMERON, Professor of Language and Communication, Worcester College, University of Oxford 'Green comprehensively disproves that slang is inherently masculine. Mumsnetters and bulldaggers, flappers and slappers, shicksters and hash-slingers all put in their claims as slang-users in their own right in this entertaining and thought-provoking book. Any writer venturing into the contentious area of women as users, creators or objects of slang from now on will look to Green for guidance or for arguments.' JULIE COLEMAN, author of The Life of Slang Slang. The ultimate in man-made languages. The male gaze made verbal. A world where words for intercourse mean 'man hits woman', the penis is a gun, a knife or club and the vagina a terrifying tunnel. Possibly with teeth. Two thousand words for woman and every one a put-down. Even 'mother' is simply short for the grossest of obscenities. Thus the story, now and for several hundred years. But stories are just that and perhaps there's an alternative. In this book Jonathon Green, the leading collector of English-language slang and drawing on forty years of research in the field, asks whether women have another role to play. As slang's active, positive, rebellious subject, rather than its endlessly derided, submissive object. Sounds & Furies represents a quest to overturn a long-established, but far from invulnerable belief system. To show that throughout a recorded history that starts with Chaucer's bawdy, mouthy and magnificently self-willed Wife of Bath and carries on through a cast of working girls and villainesses, playwrights and bestselling authors, shop-girls and fish-wives and through to the modern, on-line worlds of Mumsnet and Tinder, women have always made slang their own. If slang has always been the language of the margins, then women, for all their numbers, have also been consigned to the margins. Those days, it is ever more clear, are over. If slang has a role then it is to represent us at our most human. That may not mean 'admirable' but it surely means 'true'. And humanity is on offer to everyone, whatever gender they may claim. That goes for language, whatever its variety, too. From the foreword by sex historian Kate Lister: 'Patriarchal cultures have understood women, controlled women, and marginalised women. But, this book also reveals that it is the rebellious women who used slang: the fishwives, the scolds, the whores, and the harridans. Long may they continue to do so.'

The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas establishes a new and comprehensive way of working in the history and sociology of ideas, in order to obviate several longstanding gaps that have prevented a fruitful interdisciplinary and international dialogues. Pushing global intellectual history forward, it uses methodological innovations in the history of concepts, gender history, imperial history, and history of normativity, many of which have emerged out of intellectual history in recent years, and it especially foregrounds the role of field theory for delimiting objects of study but also in studying transnational history and migration of persons and ideas. The chapters also explore how intellectual history crosses the study of particular domains: law, politics, economy, science, life sciences, social and human sciences, book history, literature, and emotions.