Certain Other Countries. Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

Certain Other Countries. Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. By Carolyn A. Conley (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. ix plus 255 pp. $49.95).

Most historic studies of 'Britain' are in fact about England, with only token nods to the considerable diversity within the Atlantic archipelago. In contrast, this ambitious study is real British history that devotes equal attention to all the component parts. Conley seeks to explore "responses to homicides and what those responses reveal about the comparative cultures of the four nations of the United Kingdom" (3). By looking at different representations of murder in courts and newspapers she shows not only how unusual Scotland was in a British context (Scots law was quite distinct from English in its underlying premises, workings and nomenclature), but also how the different cultures of Wales and Ireland related to the English law that had been imposed on them since at least the sixteenth century.

There is a prodigious amount of work here: 7,000 homicide reports and 6,000 court cases covering 1867-92. Aware of the importance of English and Scottish legal codes to how historians see murder, gender and national identity, Conley outlines their salient differences, but she does not explore the detailed workings of courts, including counsel's legal arguments, which were often extremely detailed and widely discursive. Specialists in the field will baulk at this and other aspects of the broad-brush approach. At the outset, Conley is disarmingly honest about her lack of engagement with the extensive literature on Victorian crime, society and politics, arguing that she wishes to teach a readership beyond academics (5-6). Indeed the brief bibliography favours general works and is highly eclectic in its choice of specialist articles and book chapters. An egregious omission is the work of Pauline M. Prior on homicide, insanity and gender in Ireland.'

The British-Isles focus is to be commended because it illustrates important points about, for example, the highly centralized nature of English justice compared with societies in which a participatory tradition in policing and trial was either poorly developed or only weakly related to the instructions sent out from central government. Yet the nation may not be the most appropriate geographical framework. One in ten Scots had been born in Ireland by 1901 and Scottish courts manifested the prevalent racism against murderers who were Irish, seeing the crime both as more characteristic of the people and yet also more reprehensible. There is a short section on regions (128-30), but had Conley looked in detail at English towns which also had significant immigrant populations in Victorian times, like Bristol, Liverpool or Manchester, she might have found something similar. She mentions the language problem in Welsh courts, but not in Irish or Scottish ones where (Gaelic) monolingualism was arguably as much of a problem. Indeed, future work might explore regional legal cultures and local responses in more detail (1).

Conley's study has many interesting findings. The execution rate per head of population during the nineteenth century was nearly three times higher in England, Wales, and Ireland than in Scotland. This is explained by the inner logic of law rather than some vague national characteristic. Law is indeed a social fact which shapes how people think and behave, but many other cultural and social elements informed decision making. Scottish juries, we are told several times, were "more likely to stress individual responsibility and the need for atonement" (16), but was that primarily an issue in religion, history, philosophy or law? Were different attitudes to family members in the component parts of the United Kingdom determined by the pronounced variations in the way the poor law operated in Ireland compared with England and Wales (with Scotland different again)? For an emotive matter like neglect of children is a social as well as an individual and familial issue (184-93).

The elementary methodology too may frustrate some readers. Newspapers had different political stances and different biases in coverage: The Times, which focused on the natural, accidental or suicidal deaths of those in public service and society, was very different from most provincial papers. Did the literary tropes they contained also vary? The book provides much quantification: perhaps too much in the text itself and there are only two poorly laid out tables where many more are needed (13, 93); differences in length of custodial sentences are frequently given, but here and elsewhere allegedly important variances are never subject to statistical tests of significance. The space saved by tabulating findings could have been filled by fuller consideration of what the statistics mean. Comparisons of class-related justice may be valid, but there is no systematic description of what occupation or status groups constituted each class (was a tenant farmer the same status everywhere in Britain and who exactly were 'the roughs'?). Indeed for all the statistics offered, the discussion of the connection between newspapers and court records tends towards the qualitative and illustrative. A more rigorous methodology would have helped--like that developed by Esther Snell to show how news was actually made from court records in eighteenth-century England. (2)

The same level of generality affects discussion of the reception of news: How did audiences react to newspaper stories outside the columns themselves? Con-ley makes extensive use of quotations from the original documents, many of them fascinating in themselves as well as valuable in illuminating wider issues. There is, however, a tendency to accept some contemporary interpretations at face value or to offer one answer to a question without fully airing others. For example, the rate of homicide trials in which men were tried for killing women who rejected them was ten times higher in England than in Scotland or Wales and five times higher than in Ireland. That English courts punished such men severely may show that "patriarchy was still largely enforced" (122). And it may be that romance was dead in Scotland, as a newspaper suggested. Another explanation is that stringent standards of proof required in Scotland (one witness was insufficient to secure conviction) may have made prosecutions of such cases rarer. The cost of prosecution (a topic mentioned, but not fully considered in the book) may also have been thought unjustifiable when the waters were muddied by competing emotional expectations. One might even argue that not prosecuting was just another way of enforcing patriarchy. The reader also wonders about the robustness of some explanations and the significance of certain conclusions. What do measures like the type of weapons used in homicides really tell us about national characteristics (60-7)? Were the Irish really tolerant of alcohol-accelerated crime and did they really love brawling? There is a worrying sense in which many 'characteristics' and 'explanations' given are just restatements of Victorian media stereotypes, some of them overtly racist. Finally, there is a lot of potentially valuable material in the book for cultural, legal and social historians and it is a shame that the index is too sketchy to be of much help to inquisitive but busy bookworms. And however much the text is leavened by human detail, that elusive general reader will find the going tough.

ENDNOTES

(1.) For example P. M. Prior, "Mad not bad: crime, mental disorder and gender in nine teenth-century Ireland," History of Psychiatry 8 (1997): 501-16.

(2.) E. Snell, "Perceptions of Violent Crime in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study of Discourses of Homicide, Aggravated Larceny and Sexual Assault in the EighteenthCentury Newspaper" (PhD thesis: University of Kent at Canterbury, 2005).

R. A. Houston

University of St Andrews