"Decline of the English Murder" is an

essay An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...

by English writer George Orwell, wherein he analysed the kinds of murders depicted in popular media and why people like to read them. ''

Tribune Tribune () was the title of various elected officials in ancient Rome. The two most important were the tribunes of the plebs and the military tribunes. For most of Roman history, a college of ten tribunes of the plebs acted as a check on th ...

'' published it on 15 February 1946, and

Secker and Warburg Harvill Secker is a British publishing company formed in 2005 from the merger of Secker & Warburg and the Harvill Press. History Secker & Warburg Secker & Warburg was formed in 1935 from a takeover of Martin Secker, which was in receivership, ...

republished it after his death in '' Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays'' in 1952.

Overview

Orwell identified several common features which 'have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public' during 'our great period in murder, between roughly 1850 and 1925' and may be considered from a ''News of the World'' reader's point of view, the "perfect" murder:

middle class The middle class refers to a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy, often defined by occupation, income, education, or social status. The term has historically been associated with modernity, capitalism and political debate. Com ...

criminals, sex or respectability as a motif, mostly poisoning, deaths slow to be seen as due to crime, a dramatic coincidence or unbelievable occurrence, the aim of getting hold of a certain known sum of money - usually small, and domestic victims against an essentially domestic background. Orwell excluded

Jack the Ripper Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in the autumn of 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer w ...

's murder spree as being "in a class by itself" and considered the cases of Dr. Palmer of Rugeley, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick,

Dr. Crippen Hawley Harvey Crippen (September 11, 1862 – November 23, 1910), usually known as Dr. Crippen, was an American Homeopathy, homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser. He was hanged in HM Prison Pentonville, Pentonville Prison in L ...

, Frederick Seddon,

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, Bywaters and Thompson, and an unnamed case from 1919, wherein the accused was acquitted. Orwell then contrasted these with the

Cleft Chin Murder The cleft chin murder was a killing which occurred as part of a string of crimes during 1944, and was mentioned in George Orwell's essay " Decline of the English Murder". It became known as the "cleft chin murder" because the murder victim, George ...

, a recent murder during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, distinguished by its brutal casualness rather than by emotion or class. He suggested that this story became a distraction amid the doodle-bugs and created excitement because the man was sentenced to death and the girl to imprisonment. According to Orwell, a call for the girl also to be hanged flowed from the brutalizing effects of the war, and he thought that the story would not be as remembered as the older cases. The essay was later collected in a compilation entitled ''Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays'', published by London's Penguin Group in 1965. The essay's opening sentence pictures a typical working Englishman settling down with the '' News of the World'' after his Sunday lunch. The final issue of this newspaper in July 2011 quoted this sentence, claiming that Orwell had well-described the sentiments of the nation. However, media pundit Max Atkinson argued that Orwell was in fact satirizing the sensationalist tabloids. His essay "

Raffles and Miss Blandish "Raffles and Miss Blandish" is an essay by the English writer George Orwell first published in ''Horizon'' in October 1944 as "The Ethics of the Detective Story from Raffles to Miss Blandish". Dwight Macdonald published the essay in ''politics'' ...

" also casts a light on how he thought an English murder was in a different class from any other murder and compares a 'partly Americanised' sensibility to former times.

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Text of the essay
*" Decline of the English Murder" {{DEFAULTSORT:Decline Of The English Murder Essays by George Orwell 1946 essays Works originally published in Tribune (magazine) Essays in literary criticism 1965 non-fiction books

Overview

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External links