Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan

Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners

Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill

  • Book
  • © 2015

Overview

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

eBook USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

About this book

Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners investigates the Essex poisoning trials of 1846 to 1851 where three women were charged with using arsenic to kill children, their husbands and brothers. Using newspapers, archival sources (including petitions and witness depositions), and records from parliamentary debates, the focus is not on whether the women were guilty or innocent, but rather on what English society during this period made of their trials and what stereotypes and stock-stories were used to describe women who used arsenic to kill. All three women were initially presented as 'bad' women but as the book illustrates there was no clear consensus on what exactly constituted bad womanhood.

Similar content being viewed by others

Keywords

Table of contents (8 chapters)

About the author

Victoria M. Nagy received her PhD from the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University, Australia. Prior to this she was lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us