BOOK: Gregory J. DURSTON, A "Dereliction of Moral Feeling". Crime in Victorian Norfolk (Bury St Edmonds: Abramis, 2024), 290 p. ISBN 1845498356

 

(image source: Saxo)

Abstract:

This book considers crime in Norfolk during the Victorian era. Although a companion volume to the author's earlier book on the criminal justice system in the same part of East Anglia, it can be read entirely independently of that work. It examines the pattern, nature, and incidence of offending in the county during the years from about 1837 to 1901. However, as well as examining general trends in crime over that period, the book also focuses in specific detail on important individual offences, such as, and inter alia, murder, rape, sodomy, burglary, robbery, theft and poaching. The study of crime in England's more rural counties at this time has often been neglected in favour of the country's rapidly expanding, and so 'eye-catching', urban, mining, and industrial parts, especially London and the North. The book goes some way to redressing this neglect by focusing on an area where social change and population increase had been slightly more modest, but which still made up a significant part of the nation, even at the end of the Victorian period.

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