The Battered Body Beneath the Flagstones, and Other Victorian Scandals

By: Michelle Morgan

Narrated by: Anne Dover

'Ghoulishly entertaining' Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement

'This is a great book for dipping into . . . the cases themselves are written engagingly and with appealing dramatisation of key events.'
Kim Fleet, Crime Review

A grisly book dedicated to the crimes, perversions and outrages of Victorian England, covering high-profile offences - such as the murder of actor William Terriss, whose stabbing at the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre in 1897 filled the front pages for many weeks - as well as lesser-known transgressions that scandalised the Victorian era.

The tales include murders and violent crimes, but also feature scandals that merely amused the Victorians. These include the story of a teenage man who married an actress, only to be shipped off to Australia by his disgusted parents; and the Italian ice-cream man who only meant to buy his sweetheart a hat but ended up proposing marriage instead. When he broke it off, his fiancée's father sued him and the story was dubbed the 'Amusing Aberdeen Breach of Promise Case'. Also present is the gruesome story of the murder of Patrick O Connor who was shot in the head and buried under the kitchen flagstones by his lover Maria Manning and her husband, Frederick. The couple's subsequent trial caused a sensation and even author Charles Dickens attended the grisly public hanging.

Drawing on a range of sources from university records and Old Bailey transcripts to national and regional newspaper archives, Michelle Morgan's research sheds new light on well-known stories as well as unearthing previously unknown incidents.©2018 Michelle Morgan

Critic reviews

Ghoulishly entertaining. (Jacqueline Banerjee)

This is a great book for dipping into . . . the cases themselves are written engagingly and with appealing dramatisation of key events. (Kim Fleet)

It's all been going on for YEARS!

(As posted in GoodReads.)
Victorian lives were apparently as lascivious and corrupt as those in the Bible! This is a fun collection of real Victorian stories of murder, suicide, murder-suicide, bigamy, and more. Anyone who thinks that we have the origin of any of this in modern day, is absolutely wrong!
I guess this gives a flavor to "true crime".

Intriguing

I found this interesting. Plan to listen to again and again. Going to look for more like it.

Mostly murdered women

What I was hoping for was something that covered a variety of scandals and some of the infamous and sensational characters from the Victorian era: Jack the Ripper (he is mentioned in a short chapter about a supposed close call almost victim), Oscar Wilde, Anne Lister, HH Holmes, or even the trial of Fanny and Stella and their contemporaries but it was not meant to be. The bulk of the stories are about men murdering the women who reject them. The frequency of that trope quickly became grating. I would have enjoyed the book far more if the “scandals” weren’t just about murders and included some social or sex scandals since there were plenty of those in the Victorian Era too.

Interesting

As an all history buff I found it very interesting. These storied accounts are sometimes humorous sometimes disturbing, but always interesting.

Hidden Crimes and Mostly Murder

For true crime fans, this is a great read! Dive into murder, and cases that you may not be familiar with!
I could not put this one down. I was hooked from the beginning!