Getting Serious!

Okay! So I have been keeping a vague sort of thing on the go for ages now and thought it best to composite it all in one place and make it all a bit more focused - after all I have started my Phd which is all about Victorian law and it's affect on the literature of the age.  So I get to spend the next few years up to my eyes in the worst travesties of the Victorian legal system and lots of books - great right!?


The literature in question is a lot of the stuff you might expect really -Sherlock Holmes, Wilkie Collins, even a bit of Dickens for the civil law stuff.  I would have tried to cram in a bit of Poe but it might have been a touch too ambitious since the general focus is the operation of the UK legal system rather than the US one- although I am still in two minds over the inclusion of some traditionally 'Irish' Victorian writers since it was pre-1921 and as such they would have been subject to English law and as such fall under the auspices of the researches wider umbrella.

To say that it's not motivated by an overwhelming desire to hide from the job market while getting to read Sherlock Holmes over and over again and the rest of the canon of early detective fiction.  I might also be something of a creep for looking forward to trawling through the rather florid articles in The Illustrated Police News and the like - they shouldn't be amusing because they are depictions of actual events and incidents involving real people but the little drawings are so overly dramatic that I can't help but smirk at them.

Basically the purpose of this blog will be largely the same as the old postings but with a bit more focus, Ill be throwing things up that relate to Victorian law, Victorian literature or any sort of related bits and pieces that take my fancy - so it won't be changing that much just with a little more focus than before.  Granted I still might go off on tangents and post random things that seems totally unrelated, the truth is that they might well be but they have taken my fancy or have been sparked by some crazy thought process relating to my research.  So here we go!