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Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill, by Victoria Nagy; pp. x + 224. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, £63.00, £60.00 paper, $95.00, $90.00 paper.
In Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill, Victoria Nagy takes a microhistorical approach to the trials of three women accused of poisoning in mid-nineteenth-century rural Essex. Nagy's writing is somewhat repetitive and her analysis is not always as nuanced as it could be, but her fundamental arguments about her cases are convincing and, at times, quite insightful.
Between 1846 and 1851, Sarah Chesham, Mary May, and Hannah Southgate-all working-class women in rural Essex-were tried for murder by arsenic poisoning (May and Chesham were both found guilty and executed). The cases received attention in the national as well as local press. Placing these representations in the larger context of nineteenth-century understandings of acceptable female behavior, Nagy argues that the cases should be treated together as a single cultural panic, one that revolved primarily around gender.
Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners is organized into six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. The first three chapters-which lay the groundwork for the analysis in chapters 4, 5, and 6-move a bit slowly; much of the material in them could have been condensed, put into explanatory footnotes, or woven into the central analysis. Chapter 1 provides a narrative and historiographical look at crime and prosecution during the nineteenth century. (The chapter is not really...