MEET THE AUTHOR

Rosemary Collins talks to cultural historian STEPHEN CARVER about his new book The 19th Century Underworld

What inspired you to write the book?

It’s a subject that’s haunted me ever since

I was a kid. My mother and father were getting on a bit when I was born. They both came from huge Edwardian families, so I grew up going to a lot of family gatherings. I have very vivid memories of being a kid in very old-fashioned houses with ancient furniture and dim lights, and elderly relatives talking about true crime. I just found that these scary stories stick with you.

How is writing for a mainstream audience different from writing academically?

I started to blog a few years ago (at stephenj carver.com), and that started out as a way of showcasing academic publications. I needed more content when I ran out of that stuff, so I started to write new material. I learned a nonfiction style rather than an academic style, which is fun to write and you actually get a chance to reach a much wider audience, which is lovely.

That’s really what I decided I’d do with this book. It’s where we come from. It’s our culture. There’s a strange familiarity about the Victorians. We can still relate to them. They’re not that long ago, and they’re not that different from us.

But The 19th Century Underworld depicts a violent and lawless society.

I hope that the book doesn’t come across as ‘murder porn’. There’s a gallows humour in it, which might sometimes be a bit at odds with the social history and the political readings. But there’s also a more serious point about all the violence, which is all of the ways our culture is built on all this horror.

Where I tried to end up with the book was how the Victorians were trying to interpret what was going on. Cities expanded incredibly quickly, and there’s a new rootless urban population. They were containing it and representing it, from writers to social reformers to politicians. Now we’re doing the same in this hyper-real way with television dramas like Ripper Street.