- Title
- The case of Frederick Deeming: the true crime archive as publication event
- Creator
- Smith, Rosalind
- Relation
- Southerly Vol. 72, Issue 2, p. 56-73
- Relation
- http://southerlyjournal.com.au/2013/03/04/true-crime
- Publisher
- English Association
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- In 1892, Frederick Bailey Deeming was convicted of the murder of his wife Emily Mather, whose body he disposed of by concreting it beneath a hearthstone of a rented cottage in Windsor, Melbourne. This was not his first murder. The previous year, he had killed his first wife and their four children, and had similarly concealed their bodies beneath a concrete floor in another rented house in the English village of Rain-hill. Although tried in Australia for the second murder only, extensive contemporary press coverage of both events meant that Deeming was popularly viewed as a serial murderer, a monster of depravity operating within the familiar territory of ordinary nineteenth-century suburban life: marriage and the home. His history was characterised by an astonishing mobility, as he travelled between England, South Africa and the Australian colonies, assuming different identities, classes and occupations in his pursuit of financial and personal gain. Six contemporary cheap print accounts of Deeming's life and crimes were published in 1892, three of these accounts in more than one edition, as well as a published lecture, The Criminal's Ascension or From the Gallows to the Golden Streets!, and a play, Wilful Murder, of which only a record of the playbill survives. With contemporary newspaper articles chronicling the detection, trial and punishment that attended the Deeming murders, the 1892 cheap print redactions of the Deeming crime narrative form a "publication event" through which cultural questions ancillary to that narrative are addressed in a textual network of exchange, imitation and contest.
- Subject
- Frederick Deeming; true crime; Frederick Bailey Deeming; serial muderer
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1056465
- Identifier
- uon:16047
- Identifier
- ISSN:0038-3732
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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