Poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination / Ian Burney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burney, Ian A., author.

Contributor:

Manchester University Press., Publisher.

Series:

Encounters (Manchester University Press)

Encounters. Cultural histories

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poisoning--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Poisoning.

Toxicology--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Toxicology.

Criminal investigation--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Criminal investigation.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 193 pages.) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

Paperback edition.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2006.

Summary:

This book explores how contemporary observers located criminal poisoning within a multi-layered network of historical and cultural references. It focuses on the painstaking attempts to construct a 'modern' conceptual and legislative framework for containing the threat posed by criminal poisoning. The book discusses the efforts to delineate the terms of scientific engagement with modern poison and then presents an analysis of how toxicological work was undertaken and represented. In motive and means, William Palmer's was the quintessential 'crime of civilization', and it shows how his case was enmeshed with a core set of concerns about the social and cultural underpinnings of a self-consciously 'modern' Britain. The book examines toxicology in the aftermath of the Palmer trial, showing how the tensions it highlighted within the imaginative landscape of Victorian poisoning led to an implosion of the toxicological project. The epic framing of toxicology's struggles with poison and the poisoner yielded to two (seemingly contradictory) revisions: on the one hand, to a more modest, less individually heroic role for the poison hunter, a vision of expertise as the collective application of consensually developed knowledge; and, on the other, to a literary reworking of the constitutive elements of toxicology's quest for mastery, a transposed re-articulation of the fraught relationship between poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

List of plates

Acknowledgements

Dedication

1 Introduction

2 Poison and the Victorian imagination

3 Disciplining poison

4 Plain matters of fact

5 The crime of the age

6 The travails of poison hunting

Index

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 23 Feb 2026).

ISBN:

9781526158635

1526158639

9781526158628

1526158620

OCLC:

1273307703