Table of contents from "Narratives."
Narratives of Remarkable Crimes, selected from the German works of Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach and published in 1846 in London, consists of 14 of the trials in Feuerbach’s original 1300 page work chosen and translated by Lady Duff Gordon. She provides a brief overview of the German justice system in her preface, commenting on the role of witnesses, judge, and the system of appeals. She spends only a brief paragraph explaining her reasons for choosing the trials here published, mentioning only the influence of an article from the influential and popular Edinburgh Review and her desire to “[choose] those trials which appear to me to have the greatest general interest…” (10)
The table of contents will have an immediate familiar ring to those who have read any Victorian fiction: “John Paul Forster; or, the Twofold Murder,” for instance, or “George Wachs; or The Sudden Temptation.” They tease the reader with a brief, thematic sense of what the crime could involve: what would a “twofold murder” be? How many people did Forster kill and why? And, even juicier, how?
The stories of the crimes themselves would have been familiar to contemporary British readers of the tabloid press which thrived on similar stories from the United Kingdom and Europe. Even to the modern reader, they have a easily identifiable style, starting with the description of the place and setting of the murder, the crime itself, and the eventual legal examination and discovery of guilt. Regular watchers of shows like the CSI universe or Dexter will find nothing startlingly new here, but the fascination with the commission of serious crime is always an interesting trend to witness.
In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British newspaper readers would have more than enough serious crime of their own, including the infamous Jack, Dr. H.H. Crippen, and George J. Smith, whose case may be better known as “the brides in the bath.” The Narratives still has interest not only for the student of criminal or judicial history, but also for those interested in forensics and popular culture, since the interest in crimes, forensic investigation, and legal procedure is clearly just as strong today as it was when Lady Duff Gordon decided to publish her translations in 1845.
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