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Arsenic Under the Elms: Murder in Victorian New Haven

Arsenic Under the Elms: Murder in Victorian New Haven
By Virginia A. McConnell

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Product Description

The attorney Virginia A. McConnell provides a riveting view of Connecticut in the late 1800s as revealed through the unrelated but disturbingly similar murders of two young women. The first, Mary Stannard, was an unmarried mother who worked as a domestic and believed herself to be pregnant for a second time. The man accused of her murder, Reverend Herbert Hayden, was a married lay minister whose seduction of Mary was common knowledge. Three years later, Jennie Cramer, another woman of low social status, was found floating facedown in Long Island Sound off West Haven. The characters involved in the commission, investigation, and prosecution of these crimes emerge as vibrant individuals, and their stories shed light on many aspects of the Victorian world: sex and marriage; drugs, from arsenic to aphrodisiacs; forensic medicine; and courtroom procedures.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #792548 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-12-01
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: .85 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 262 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
McConnell (English, literature, and speech, Walla Walla Community Coll.) believes that "murder provides us with a mirror of an era." A specialist in researching historical crimes, she sees the newspaper coverage of the murders of Mary Stannard in 1878 and of Jennie Cramer in 1881 as a "time machine" that allows a reader "to eavesdrop on the people of Victorian New England, to listen to their speech patterns, their opinions, and to see the clothes they wore...the tools they used...the food they ateAnot as examples in a history text or artifacts in a museum, but as vibrant and real." Her painstaking reconstruction, both of the murders of these two young women and of the trials in which their alleged killers were acquitted, reveals fascinating insights about law, justice, and the position of women in post-Civil War Connecticut. Recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries.ARobert C. Jones, formerly of Central Missouri State Univ., Warrensburg
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Attorney/college teacher McConnells debut is an accomplished re-creation of two notorious murders of young women in the rural gentility of 1880s Connecticut, with a remarkable sense for the inequities and dark places of that vanished era. Near New Haven in 1878, a frightened, illiterate working girl named Mary Stannard was fed arsenic and had her throat slit, almost certainly by her lover Herbert Hayden, a failing minister; three years later, Jennie Cramer, The Belle of New Haven, was found dead of arsenic poisoning, following her forced seduction by Jim Malley, a member of the citys most prominent business family. Both cases created what would now be called a media circus; both culminated in grotesque trials which maligned the dead and their survivors, ignored scientific evidence, and freed men who probably killed to conceal obvious violations of then-universal notions of womanly virtue. With a refreshing absence of maudlin declamation, McConnell performs a masterly job of retrieving the lost history of these sensational events. Her crisp prose and comprehensive research make for a lively presentation of many remarkable details as she unfolds a disturbing tale of class-oriented gender discrimination and dramatizes the state criminal justice system in its infancy. (Ordinary citizens and an indiscreet press readily insinuated themselves into the investigation and trial, tainting them both; the grisly Victorian fascination with the misfortunes of others derailed justice still further.) McConnell also examines the repercussions of both murders for the victims hapless families, not sparing readers the tragic nature of otherwise remote events, and captures the resonance of these crimes within their communities. An intimate, compelling portrait of seamy and disturbing (thus forgotten) aspects of the Gilded Age that, in its narrative of yearningly naive young women and socially respectable male predators, offers a sobering augury of our own violent, sexually stratified times. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"[McConnell places the events firmly in cultural context, providing a fascinating glimpse into the arenas of late nineteenth-century law, journalism, morality, and social structure. A superb piece of historical detection that will gratify true-crime buffs."—Booklist
(Booklist )

"With a refreshing absence of maudlin declamation, McConnell performs a masterly job of retrieving the lost history of these sensational events. Her crisp prose and comprehensive research make for a lively presentation of many remarkable details as she unfolds a disturbing tale of class-oriented gender discrimination and dramatizes the state criminal justice system in its infancy."—Kirkus
(Kirkus )

"All in all, this is a well-researched, well-written and engrossing account of crime in an era very different but surprisingly similar to our own."—Megan R. Rooney, Daily Nebraskan
(Megan R. Rooney Daily Nebraskan )