For their second-year Working with the Past project, UoP history students Daniel Rickler and Sebastian Burgess chose to research the history of crime and punishment in Hampshire. In contemporary Britain, we have moved beyond the need to deter crime through humiliation, physical punishment and execution. But as we look to Hampshire from the 1600s onwards, we see a brutal and bloody history including, in Portsmouth in 1782, the last person to be hung, drawn and quartered for treason. Daniel and Sebastian examined both the wider policies of government and individual cases alongside the ritualistic nature of these punishments, to show how unnecessary they were and how far we’ve evolved. Both […]
Tag Archives | crime
Stop Thief! Investigating the influence of criminal representations on London’s imagination
Frankie Raine’s dissertation looked at how perceptions of crime in the nineteenth-century were influenced by sensationalist literary and media representations, contrasting the depiction of men involved in the mid-Victorian garrotting panic, with those of female prostitutes accused of theft. She found that the impact of literary and journalistic depictions on public understanding was mixed, intersecting in a more complex way with on pre-existing gender and class expectations. Below, she describes her research process, and gives some tips for future dissertation students. Frankie’s supervisor was Professor Brad Beaven. The abundance of media sources detailing crimes and the criminals convicted of carrying them out has long been a cause of amusement and […]
Uncovering seventeenth-century Portsmouth: the assassination of the King’s favourite
Portsmouth was strategically important in the seventeenth century, but relatively little has been written on it. For their second-year Working with the Past project a group of UoP history students tried to discover more about three key Portsmouth figures from this time. In this second post in a series, Olivia Newby writes about the infamous murder of the Duke of Buckingham on Portsmouth High Street and how it became a catalyst for political change in the 17th century. When we think of famous people relative to Portsmouth’s history, we often think of Charles Dickens and his famed nineteenth century novels.[1] What we don’t often draw attention to, is the importance […]
Alice Diamond, ‘Queen of the Terrors’ in the interwar London underworld
Emily Burgess, who studied for PhD in history at the University of Portsmouth, has had a paper published in Women’s History Review which is free to read here. The paper looks at press depiction of Alice Diamond, leader of the interwar Forty Thieves gang. By mythmaking, framing Diamond as an ‘Underworld Amazon’, ‘Giant’, and ‘Queen of the Terrors’, the press was able to project female gangsterism as a form of ‘internal terror’ to fuel fears over gender, post-war brutalisation and the changing interwar landscape.See a previous post about Emily’s work on London’s female gangsters here. Emily is a graduate of the University, having studied for a BA (Hons) History degree […]
The Devil’s Highway
Our own Professor Brad Beaven has published a new book about Ratcliffe Highway, the heart of London’s sailortown, which had a notorious reputation for knife crime and immorality in the nineteenth century. You can listen to a recording of Brad talking about the book here. No doubt some of the material from the book will work its way into Brad’s second-year history option, Underworlds: Crime, Deviance and Punishment in Britain 1500-1900.
Homosexual relationships in the time of King James I
A blog on homosexual relationships in the time of King James I was published today by our own Dr Fiona McCall in the Conversation. https://theconversation.com/mary-and-george-homosexual-relationships-in-the-time-of-king-james-i-were-forbidden-but-not-uncommon-223522 Fiona teaches the second year UoP option Underworlds: Crime, Deviance and Punishment in Britain, 1500-1900 which looks at sexual offences and attitudes in the early modern period. Her research looks at the relationship between sex and religion during the interregnum (amongst other things).