The Littlehampton Libels tells the story of a poison-pen mystery
that led to a miscarriage of justice in the years following the
First World War. There would be four criminal trials before the
real culprit was finally punished, with the case challenging the
police and the prosecuting lawyers as much any capital crime. When
a leading Metropolitan Police detective was tasked with solving the
case, he questioned the residents of the seaside town of
Littlehampton about their neighbours' vocabularies, how often they
wrote letters, what their handwriting was like, whether they swore
— and how they swore, for the letters at the heart of the case
were often bizarre in their abuse. The archive that the
investigation produced shows in extraordinary detail how ordinary
people could use the English language in inventive and surprising
ways at a time when universal literacy was still a novelty. Their
personal lives, too, had surprises. The detective's inquiries and
the courtroom dramas laid bare their secrets and the intimate
details of neighbourhood and family life. Drawing on these records,
The Littlehampton Libels traces the tangles of devotion and
resentment, desire and manipulation, in a working-class community.
We are used to emotional complexity in books about the privileged,
but history is seldom able to recover the inner lives of ordinary
people in this way.
General
| Imprint: |
Oxford UniversityPress
|
| Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
| Release date: |
August 2023 |
| Authors: |
Christopher Hilliard
(Challis Professor of History)
|
| Dimensions: |
216 x 138mm (L x W) |
| Pages: |
256 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-0-19-890006-1 |
| Categories: |
Books
|
| LSN: |
0-19-890006-6 |
| Barcode: |
9780198900061 |
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