Shani D'Cruze

Being an examination of assaults by, between, and, especially, upon Englishwomen of the working class in Victorian Britain, sourced mainly from court records and newspapers. The most interesting part of the book by far is the case studies. Too much of the book, especially early on, is written in jargonese and covers topics such as "liminal space", "narratization", and "the courtroom grotesque" which are uninteresting even if one might fathom what she's getting at with such arcana. If anything, her tangents on barely related topics such as the wage structure of the period's textile workers and the revenue streams of rural newspapers in the nineteenth century are even more difficult to get excited about..… (more)