"Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK); page [5].

A panoramic portrait of a remarkable woman and the tumultuous Victorian era on which she made her mark, The First Lady of Fleet Street chronicles the meteoric rise and tragic fall of Rachel Beer—indomitable heiress, social crusader, and newspaper pioneer. Rich with period detail and drawing on a wealth of original material, this sweeping work of never-before-told history recounts the ascent of two of London’s most prominent Jewish immigrant families—the Sassoons and the Beers. Born into one, Rachel married into the other, wedding newspaper proprietor Frederick Beer, the sole heir to his father’s enormous fortune. Though she and Frederick became leading London socialites, Rachel was ambitious and unwilling to settle for a comfortable, idle life. She used her husband’s platform to assume the editorship of not one but two venerable Sunday newspapers—the Sunday Times and The Observer—a stunning accomplishment at a time when women were denied the vote and allowed little access to education. Ninety years would pass before another woman would take the helm of a major newspaper on either side of the Atlantic. It was an exhilarating period in London’s history—fortunes were being amassed (and squandered), masterpieces were being created, and new technologies were revolutionizing daily life. But with scant access to politicians and press circles, most female journalists were restricted to issuing fashion reports and dispatches from the social whirl. Rachel refused to limit herself or her beliefs. In the pages of her newspapers, she opined on Whitehall politics and British imperial adventures abroad, campaigned for women’s causes, and doggedly pursued the evidence that would exonerate an unjustly accused French military officer in the so-called Dreyfus Affair. But even as she successfully blazed a trail in her professional life, Rachel’s personal travails were the stuff of tragedy. Her marriage to Frederick drove an insurmountable wedge between herself and her conservative family. Ultimately, she was forced to retreat from public life entirely, living out the rest of her days in stately isolation. While the men of her era may have grabbed more headlines, Rachel Beer remains a pivotal figure in the annals of journalism—and the long march toward equality between the sexes. With The First Lady of Fleet Street, she finally gets the front page treatment she deserves.

This edited collection offers multi-disciplinary reflections and analysis on a variety of themes centred on nineteenth century executions in the UK, many specifically related to the fundamental change in capital punishment culture as the execution moved from the public arena to behind the prison wall. By examining a period of dramatic change in punishment practice, this collection of essays provides a fresh historical perspective on nineteenth century execution culture, with a focus on Scotland, Wales and the regions of England. From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual has two parts. Part 1 addresses the criminal body and the witnessing of executions in the nineteenth century, including studies of the execution crowd and executioners’ memoirs, as well as reflections on the experience of narratives around capital punishment in museums in the present day. Part 2 explores the treatment of the execution experience in the print media, from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The collection draws together contributions from the fields of Heritage and Museum Studies, History, Law, Legal History and Literary Studies, to shed new light on execution culture in nineteenth century Britain. This volume will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of criminology, heritage and museum studies, history, law, legal history, medical humanities and socio-legal studies.

James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre’s creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884). It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called ‘penny bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’ for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer wrote for and edited family magazines early in that genre’s history, deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends, and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s–1860s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political change. During the fin-de-siècle, Rymer’s penny fiction was demonised as hyper-masculine ‘bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’, a reputation it retains today. Reading Victorian penny fiction’s most indicative author’s works as a corpus and with attention to their original textual, cultural, and political contexts reveals it as the family-oriented phenomenon it in fact was.