UBC: Patrick Wilson, Murderesses

Murderesses: A study of the Women executed in Britain since 1843 by Patric Wilson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am the person who added this book to Goodreads.

For what it is--and it is exactly what it says on the tin--this is not a bad book.

It's very 1971 in this book--Wilson earnestly lists "Lesbianism" as one of the possible physiological causes of murder, along with menopause, post-partum depression, and "unsatisfactory sexual relations"--and his attempts to draw conclusions from his material are either blindingly obvious or only dubiously plausible. (The remains of an ancient pagan cult in the area around Wix, demonstrated by the unusual number of poisoners who operated there, is my favorite.) He's astute enough to observe that most of these sixty-eight women come from the poorest and most poorly educated sections of their society, but all he draws from that is that "poverty breeds violence" and that violent crime can never be separated from its social and economic environs. He does not ask questions about how these women's poverty affected the course of the investigation of their crimes, nor how it affected the lawyers, the judge, the jury . . . the Home Secretary, who was the person who ultimately decided whether a condemned murderer should live or die. And those are questions I think should be asked.

But unlike other amateur criminologists I have read, Wilson does know how to put his facts together, and he does know how to tell the stories of his sixty-eight subjects. And he's making an honest try at objectivity. He does ask questions about whether these women should have been brought to trial, whether they should have been convicted, whether they should have been denied a reprieve and therefore hanged. Sometimes the answer is emphatically yes (the baby farmers and the burial club murderers spring instantly to mind), sometimes the answer is no (mentally disabled or mentally ill women). Sometimes the answer is a baffled maybe.

So, if this kind of thing is your cup of tea (or cup of something else, we won't ask), I recommend it, although it's obviously going to be difficult to come by. If it is not your cup of tea, this is not where I would suggest starting with Victorian true crime.



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