The Invention of Murder

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The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders: 5. New Technology

5. New Technology

The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders

BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders, 5. New Technology

How the age's great technological advances were used to capture criminals.

How the crime-obsessed Victorians used technological advances to help capture criminals. Concluded by Robert Glenister.

Over the course of the 19th century, murder - in reality a rarity - became ubiquitous: transformed into novels, into broadsides and ballads, into theatre and melodrama.

Judith Flanders explores this 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. 

The final 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.

Written by Judith Flanders.

Concluded by Robert Glenister.

Abridged by David Jackson Young.

Producer: Kirsteen Cameron

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2011.

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Robert Glenister reads Judith Flanders' book on the Victorian obsession with violent crime

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