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English men did not consider marriage a sacred institution and English women were particular about marrying men conforming to morality during the Victorian period. Those men who believed in marriage wanted to get married only after getting a lucrative job. Most women did not want to get married and be subservient to their husbands.

Women as perpetrators of crime, rather than its victims, were figures of especial fascination and loathing in the Victorian popular press. The domestication of women early in the reign of [...]

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 200l. Pp. Viii, 354. $35.00. ISBN 0-300-08872-8. This solid and highly accessible work summarizes, analyzes, and contextualizes contemporary press reports of the Ripper murders, [...]

Margaret Atwood relied on imagination to retell the story of Grace Marks, a servant who was found guilty of murdering her master and his housekeeper in Canada in 1843, in her novel 'Alias Grace.' Her explanation is much more comprehensive and more palatable than other versions of the sensational case because she can not only use available information but also invent narratives, a license allowed fiction writers. Nevertheless, this does not mean that newspaper accounts of the affair are not reliable. They merely reflect the customs and attitudes of the time.