Littlehampton Libels - A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery About Words in 1920s England

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List of contents

• Introduction


• Prologue: Reopening the Case


• 1: Beach Town


• 2: Easter and After


• 3: A Craze for This Sort of Thing


• 4: Will You Let Me Have That Letter


• 5: A Case of Handwriting


• 6: Circumstances Grave and Unusual


• 7: Keeping Observation


• 8: The Perfect Witness


• 9: Bad Language


• 10: It Is Not My Verdict


• Conclusion

About the author

Christopher Hilliard is a professor at the University of Sydney, where he is currently chair of the Department of History. He grew up in New Zealand and studied at the University of Auckland before completing his PhD at Harvard. He is the author of three previous books, including English as a Vocation: The 'Scrutiny' Movement (OUP, 2012), about F. R. Leavis and his followers, and To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006), which traces a forgotten history of aspiring writers' clubs and how-to-be-an-author magazines.

Summary

The Littlehampton Libels tells the story of a poison-pen mystery that led to a miscarriage of justice in the years following the First World War. There would be four criminal trials before the real culprit was finally punished, with the case challenging the police and the prosecuting lawyers as much any capital crime.

When a leading Metropolitan Police detective was tasked with solving the case, he questioned the residents of the seaside town of Littlehampton about their neighbours' vocabularies, how often they wrote letters, what their handwriting was like, whether they swore -- and how they swore, for the letters at the heart of the case were often bizarre in their abuse. The archive that the investigation produced shows in extraordinary detail how ordinary people could use the English language in inventive and surprising ways at a time when universal literacy was still a novelty. Their personal lives, too, had surprises. The detective's inquiries and the courtroom dramas laid bare their secrets and the intimate details of neighbourhood and family life. Drawing on these records, The Littlehampton Libels traces the tangles of devotion and resentment, desire and manipulation, in a working-class community. We are used to emotional complexity in books about the privileged, but history is seldom able to recover the inner lives of ordinary people in this way.

Additional text

an absorbing book ... fascinating in its detail

Product details

• Authors: Christopher Hilliard, Christopher (Challis Professor of Histor Hilliard, Christopher (Professor of History Hilliard, Hilliard Christopher
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 15.06.2017
• EAN: 9780198799658
• ISBN: 978-0-19-879965-8
• No. of pages: 256
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Social sciences, law, business > Law > Criminal law, criminal procedural law, criminology; Europäische Geschichte, Zwischen den Weltkriegen (1919 bis 1939 n. Chr.), Verbrechen und Kriminologie (Kriminalistik), Sussex, Geschichte allgemein und Weltgeschichte, European History, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Criminology, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century, British & Irish history, Social and cultural history, Crime and criminology, Crime & criminology, c 1919 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), c 1918 to c 1939 (Inter-war period)