Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
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Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond |
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Editors | Barbara Leonardi |
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Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
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Pages | 41-66 |
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Number of pages | 26 |
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ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-319-96770-7 |
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ISBN (Print) | 978-3-319-96769-1 |
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DOIs | |
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Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 30 Dec 2018 |
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Name | Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture |
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Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
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Abstract
This chapter explores how infanticide cases were interpreted through an explicitly gendered lens in nineteenth-century England and Wales. It focuses in particular on three key aspects: the spectre of the death penalty, the issue of poverty and deprivation, and mental illness. Drawing on a range of sources including archival criminal justice records, newspapers, Parliamentary Papers, and medical and legal texts, Grey demonstrates how a crime which might have been understood as an especially heinous and deviant act became, instead, stereotyped as a killing committed almost exclusively by “normal” and “respectable” women who were then invariably recipients of both official and popular sympathy. It concludes that nineteenth-century attitudes and ideas still resonate strongly in the reportage and judicial treatment of infanticide in the twenty-first century.
Notes
ID: 19212343