The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane: The Story of the Carr's Hill Murder

Housham, Jane

ISBN 10: 178648160X / ISBN 13: 9781786481603

Published by Arcadia, 2018

About this Item

Befriedigend/Good: Durchschnittlich erhaltenes Buch bzw. Schutzumschlag mit Gebrauchsspuren, aber vollständigen Seiten. / Describes the average WORN book or dust jacket that has all the pages present.

Seller Inventory # M0178648160X-G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane: The Story of the Carr's Hill Murder
• Publisher: Arcadia
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178648160X
• ISBN 13: 9781786481603
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

A Victorian Murder. A Victorian Madman. A Modern Judgement.

Gateshead, April 1866

The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane takes the forgotten case of a child murder in 1866 as a springboard to delve deeply into the pysche of the Victorians. What Jane Housham finds, in this exploration of guilt, sexual deviance and madness, is a diagnosis that is still ripe for the challenging and a sentence that provokes even our liberal modern judgement.

Set around Gateshead, it is a revelatory social history of the North - an area growing in industry and swelling with immigration, where factory workers are tinged blue and yellow by chemicals, the first tabloids are printed, children are left alone by working parents and haystack fires sweep the county in rebellion against the introduction of the police force. Into this landscape, a five-year-old Irish girl named Sarah Melvin sets out over the fell to look for her father, and a troubled young man makes a frightening leap of logic to save his own skin.

Told here for the first time, this is an extraordinary story of sexual deviance and murder. In lively, empathic prose, Jane Housham explores psychiatry, the justice system and the media in mid-Victorian England to reveal a surprisingly modern state of affairs.

About the Author

Jane Housham grew up in Richmond, Yorkshire and is proud of her North East heritage. She is the publisher at University of Hertfordshire Press and also reviews books for the Guardian.