In Domestic Murder, Bridget Walsh traces an evolution in Victorian approaches to gender and domestic space through public responses to intimate partner homicide. Walsh sees the home, with all its possibility for “secrecy and deviance,” as the prime mover in the Victorian public's fascination with domestic murder (2). Home was a contested space, loaded with personal, legal, and cultural significance. Violations that took place within threw open the doors of private life to patronizing, moralizing, and often prurient eyes. By tracing public reaction to this most intimate of crimes, she argues, we can see how public debates about masculinity, femininity, criminality, and domesticity played out.

Using literature and newspaper trial reports, Walsh identifies distinct differences in the perception of murderers and their victims before and after 1870. In the period before 1870, melodrama, with its strong distinction between good and evil, was the dominant framework within which such murders were explored in newsprint and literature. Reporters in particular glossed over complicated interpersonal relationships to portray killer and victim as easily digestible moral opposites, while censors sometimes blocked the performance of plays based on these events to protect the fabric of early Victorian society. By the 1870s, concurrent developments in psychiatry and changing views of men and women's places in the domestic sphere muddied the moral waters, giving way to more nuanced representations of male and female murderers. The horror of the female killer in the fin de siècle was more likely to be mitigated by sympathy for her domestic plight or acknowledge possible psychological factors at play. Similarly, male counterparts were no longer seen as the physical embodiment of evil. Instead, male murderers in fiction and as represented by the press were in a bitter battle with “the gospel of male self-control so dominant within Victorian society” (95–96). The male murderers in Wilkie Collins's Basil, Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies, and Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood crack under “the unnatural suppression of male sexual desire urged upon Victorian men” and are driven to kill by “unhealthy levels of self-control” (108). It is the accommodation of cultural and environmental factors affecting the murderer, Walsh contends, that distinguishes depictions of mid-to-late Victorian domestic killers from representations prevalent earlier in the century.

In the book's five chapters Walsh examines domestic murder in street literature and the popular press, on the Victorian stage, and as part of the long-running debate about Newgate novels. In the final two chapters she explores conceptualizations of male and female murderers in novels and newsprint. These final chapters are the strongest. Walsh, whose own background is in English literature, is clearly most comfortable when analyzing fiction. Her discussion of male murderers in particular is a helpful addition to our understanding of masculinity in the Victorian period.

Walsh's analysis of real-life murders is weaker, manifesting issues with sources and context. Walsh uses the Annual Register to select cases without acknowledging the editorial process involved. It might have served her purposes better had she relied on a greater variety of newspapers and secondary literature to furnish cases for consideration. Her complete omission of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers is also problematic. Given her focus on London, this digitized database of felonies prosecuted at London's Central Criminal Court would have been an ideal place to locate murders for examination. Walsh is not a criminal justice historian, but her choice “not to examine the ‘law and literature’ school of writing” was a mistake (2). This body of scholarship discusses more than “legal technicalities” and would have offered necessary background in the criminal law and, more importantly, crime reporting. A reliance on newspaper reporting should necessitate a discussion of editorship, and this is missing. Similarly, Walsh's analysis of theater should probably include some mention of playwrights, their motivations, and their backgrounds.

Another concern is the taxonomy upon which Walsh bases her argument. She uses the somewhat misleading term “domestic murder” to describe marital murder as well as the slaying of “lovers, spouses or love rivals” (2). Her definition does not, however, include other seemingly domestic murders, such as infanticide, parricide, fratricide, or murders of masters by servants. The term “domestic murder” is also problematic because many of the murders described took place outside the home. Walsh maintains that because “the concept of the home and its attendant domesticity” characterized published reports of the murders she examines, her classification remains relevant (2). The modern term “intimate partner homicide” or another similar term would add clarity.

Finally, one wishes Walsh could have summarized and paraphrased instead of leaving the reader to wade through a mass of lengthy quotations. The excessive use of block quotations, especially unnecessary for secondary literature, is distracting and makes for difficult reading. Also surprising is the omission of Rosalind Crone's Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (2012), which should feature in any study of popular representations of crime during this period.

Bridget Walsh demonstrates that changing ideas about gender and domestic space are central themes in public discussions about murder in the Victorian period. Domestic Murder is a helpful guide through these debates in contemporary literature, though it is less helpful for addressing real crime.