Victorian culture is often represented in dualistic terms between bourgeois moralism and popular sensationalism. This study shows us a very different picture: of a cross-class revolt against both. Packed with rich source material and textual and visual detail, the book traces, across diverse mediums and genres, the widespread rejection of lurid representations of murder at the fin-de-siècle. Tired of overworn tropes and saturated with violence, the producers and consumers of both elite and popular entertainments turned away from melodramatic and sensational murder narratives on stage and page. From graphic and dramatic satire, to theatrical adaptations of biblical, classical, and Shakespearian tales, to investigative reporting in the penny press and mainstream broadsides, the case studies collectively document how sensationalism ceased to govern highbrow or lowbrow culture in turn-of-the-century London.

Given how central murder was to the development of British melodramatic spectacle over the previous 100 years, this was a major departure, and makes this study a welcome revision to master narratives that assume the consistency of sensationalism throughout the Victorian period, and its persistence beyond its mid-century heyday. Late-Victorian tastes did not turn away from murder itself, but rather rejected its most graphic portrayals, along with the most vilifying representations of murderers. Indeed, narratives of murder and murderers continued to perform robust cultural work in this moment, precisely by being framed through new optics and values. Tragedy, in particular, became an important alternative to melodrama, and the book shows how writers deployed this genre in a variety of creative ways to reinvent murder, often rewriting familiar stories and rehabilitating their protagonists. Classical themes lent themselves well to modern concerns, and murder, then, became a referendum on some of the most pressing issues of the day, including criminality, social and urban reform, and the ethics and didactics of art.

A related contribution of the book concerns its commentary on modernity itself, and on its interlocutors. Modernist cultural expression has long been tied to fin-de- siècle disillusionment with the degeneration of western civilization and the massification of its artistic and literary forms. Michael-Berger adds to a rich body of scholarship that complicates this premise (emblematized by Michael Saler's study of modern re-enchantment in As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality [2012]) in probing the constructive potential of both high art and mass culture, which, in this case, focused ironically on the form and the function of murder. To be sure, the intellectual taste-makers Michael-Berger tracks throughout the book did not always agree with their audiences about whether or how de-sensationalizing murder translated into democratization or cultural access, as shown in numerous cases of discursive struggle within these evolving genres. Still, the need to refashion murder and murderers in accordance with modern principles was something elite and popular organs could agree on among and between themselves, even if they did not agree on what form that should take. Notwithstanding the strong association of sensationalist literature with working-class readership and sensibilities, and the attending snobbery of elites toward those tastes, sensationalist narrative and reporting were standard fare across the social spectrum of consumption for much of the nineteenth century—a reality that makes the diverse social sources of the revolt against it all the more striking.

It is a bit less clear whether this critique replaced the status quo as a norm or stayed in the realm of countercultural pushback. Moreover, the disentanglement of melodrama and sensationalism, not just from extreme violence but from each other, sometimes remained a messy business. The reporting on Kate Marshall's alleged fratricide was arguably no less sensational for being less melodramatic. That said, the evidence shows a formidable challenge if not a total paradigm shift. And these changing values had an undeniable impact on numerous cultural forms themselves, allowing not only “Miserable Kate” (chapter 5) to be redefined as a tragic figure but the tragic figure to be redefined as working-class. Recuperating murderous figures as tragic heroes also channeled and prompted new debates around human accountability and agency, judicial punishment and rehabilitation, nature vs. nurture as a predictor or explanation of criminal behavior, heredity and evolution, race and eugenics, gender and lunacy. Fictional and farcical narratives as well as true-crime investigations were, thus, transformed by the cultural modernization of murder, offering a valuable window onto a society that had begun to reevaluate its relationship with violence.

The ultimate tragedy, as Michael-Berger concludes, was how little time these alternative visions of killing had to germinate before “the great blood-letting” of 1914–18 (the subject of the epilogue) made them seem moot. In this respect, the fin-de-siècle constituted neither an ideological culmination of earlier decades nor a hinge point between nineteenth-century optimism and twentieth-century pessimism. Instead, it presented a temporary but powerful departure from celebrations of violence in literary and lived experience. More than a road not taken, it was a road that might well have been taken, suggesting too that widespread rage against bloodlust preceded as well as resulted from the Great War.

Michael-Berger thus stands on strong ground in claiming murder as a “measure of modernity” (6). Modern Murders is sure to be of interest as much to crime historians as to social and cultural historians, illuminating how, under the right conditions, murder itself needs killing off.