Decline of the English Murder
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"Decline of the English Murder" is an essay by George Orwell in which he analysed the kind of murders depicted in popular media. Tribune published the essay in 1946-02-15, and Secker and Warburg republished it posthumously in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1950.
In the essay Orwell identified common features: middle class criminals; sex or respectability as motive; mostly poisoning; deaths slow to be seen as due to crime; a dramatic coincidence or unbelievable occurrence; domestic victims.
Orwell excluded Jack the Ripper as being "in a class by itself"[1] and considered the cases of Dr. Palmer of Rugeley, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, Bywaters and Thompson and an unnamed case from 1919 where the accused was acquitted.
Orwell then contrasted this with the Cleft Chin Murder, a then modern World War II-era murder only distinguished by brutality, not emotion or class, and he suggested it would not be as remembered as the older cases.
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- ^ Orwell
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