Download Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Slayings Behind Our Romance With the Macabre AudioBook Free
In the first 19th century, some murders took place in and around London that shocked the whole of Britain. The appalling mother nature of the crimes - a brutal slaying in the gaming netherworld, the slaughter of two entire homeowners, and the first of the present day lust-murders - was magnified not only by the lurid atmosphere of any age where candlelight offered way to gaslight but also by the attempts of some of the keenest heads of the period to discover the most gruesome details of the killings. These slayings all took place against the setting of any London where the splendor of the trendy world was haunted by the squalor of the slums. Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others were fascinated with the blood vessels and deviltry of the crimes. Within their contemplations of the very most notorious murders of their time, they discerned in the action of eradicating itself a depth of hideousness that people have lost eyesight of, now surviving in an age where murder has been reduced to a problem of social technology and skilled detective work. Interweaving these ethnical vignettes alongside criminal history, acclaimed creator Michael Knox Beran paints a vibrant picture of a period when homicide was regarded as the intrusion of the diabolic into standard life.
