Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre

Author Michael Beran vividly portrays the ghastly ambiance of an epoch, revealing the horror beneath the seeming civility of the Romantic era. In the early nineteenth century, London was shocked by a series of murder. These slayings occurred against the backdrop of a city where the splendor of the fashionable world coexisted with the squalor of the slums. Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, and Percy Bysshe Shelley were fascinated by the blood and deviltry of these crimes, which the author argues affected the aesthetic of their writing and works.

Now, in an age where murder is reduced to a social science problem and a skillful detective’s task, they interweave these cultural anecdotes with criminal history. Beran paints a vivid picture of a time when homicide was perceived as the intrusion of the diabolic into ordinary life.

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