'The Violence We Have Lost'? - Body Counts, Historians and Interpersonal Violence in England
Year: 1970
Type: article
Abstract: Late Victorian commentators felt able to congratulate themselves on the growing civility of English society.Hard evidence for this decline in lawlessness was to be found in the decline of interpersonal violence, especially homicide and murder in particular, as recorded in the annual parliamentary criminal statistics between the 1850s and 1914.Historians have located this decline as belonging to a much longer term drop in homicides, which can be traced back to the Middle Ages.This essay will argue that historians' approaches to the subject of violence have been restricted both in terms of methodology and content.In the former case they have shown an over-reliance on the veracity of statistical data and have restricted themselves in the main to studies of the most extreme form of interpersonal violence, murder.These two interrelated limitations, the reliance on statistics and the focus on murder, have recently been placed under critical scrutiny by Howard Taylor in his seminal study which places homicide and murder in a whole new perspective 1 .The decline in murder experienced by England and Wales, he concludes, may have been statistical rather than real.This essay proposes to examine the histo-* This paper is based on examples drawn from a project on 'Violence in the North West with Special Reference to Liverpool and Manchester 1850-1914' funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (award number LI33251004) as part of the Violence Research Programme.My thanks are extended to Jo Jones, the project research officer, for the newspaper references and to Andrew Davies for his helpful advice.
Source: Memoria y Civilización
DOI: 10.15581/001.2.33917
Author: John E. Archer
Institution: Edge Hill University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1578465849