Crimes of passion and the making of modern intimate life in Twentieth-Century Britain

Fredrickson, Jacob (2024). Crimes of passion and the making of modern intimate life in Twentieth-Century Britain. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis is the first history of the crime of passion in twentieth-century Britain. It demonstrates how the crime of passion, even if formally disavowed from English law, was a powerful and capacious way of understanding violence throughout the twentieth century. The crime of passion, it argues, shaped everyday attitudes towards the more difficult edges of modern intimate life. Murders ostensibly triggered by jealousy at infidelity, or rage at love gone wrong, stood at the fault-line between ideals of love which promised personal transformation and fulfilment, and the pain caused when this ideal never fully delivered on its promise.

The crime of passion was central to the operation of the English law and the British state. The thesis shows how public and official sympathy for those seen to have committed a crime of passion served to normalise almost exclusively male violence as an inevitable, if regrettable,
feature of the demanding task of managing disappointment in love. This was particularly important in shaping the decision-making of the British Home Office, even though politicians and civil servants overtly distanced their decisions from the language of the crime of passion.

The thesis is thus also the first sustained study of the Home Office’s responsibility for the royal prerogative of mercy in the twentieth century. It explores how institutions of state and law reaffirmed the inevitability of male violence, particularly when provoked by women’s ‘disreputable’ behaviour. One by-product of this process is a rich and unprecedented record of ordinary people managing the demands of modern love in their own words. Drawing on this material, the thesis offers a social history of intimate life, which recasts established chronologies on the emergence of ‘heterosexual’ and liberal sexual cultures. In so doing, this thesis also emphasises the centrality of male violence to modern ways of understanding desire, sexuality and selfhood.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):