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Shooting Victoria Hardcover – July 1, 2012
| Paul Thomas Murphy (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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A New York Times Notable Book for 2012. From a hunchbacked dwarf to a paranoid poet–assassin, a history of Victorian England as seen through the numerous assassination attempts on Queen Victoria.
During Queen Victoria’s 64-year reign, no fewer than eight attempts were made on her life. Murphy follows each would-be assassin and the repercussions of their actions, illuminating daily life in Victorian England, the development of the monarchy under Queen Victoria and the evolution of the attacks in light of evolving social issues and technology.
There was Edward Oxford, a bartender who dreamed of becoming an admiral, who was simply shocked when his attempt to shoot the pregnant Queen and Prince consort made him a madman in the world’s eyes. There was hunchbacked John Bean, who dreamed of historical notoriety in a publicized treason trial, and William Hamilton, forever scarred by the ravages of the Irish Potato Famine. Roderick MacLean enabled Victoria to successfully strike insanity pleas from Britain’s legal process. Most threatening of all were the “dynamitards” who targeted her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee―who signaled the advent of modern terrorism with their publicly focused attack.
From these cloak-and-dagger plots to Victoria’s brilliant wit and steadfast courage, Shooting Victoria is historical narrative at its most thrilling, complete with astute insight into how these attacks actually revitalized the British crown at a time when monarchy was quickly becoming unpopular abroad. While thrones across Europe toppled, the Queen’s would-be assassins contributed greatly to the preservation of the monarchy and to the stability that it enjoys today. After all, as Victoria herself noted, “It is worth being shot at―to see how much one is loved.”
32 pages of black & white and color illustrations- Print length512 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPegasus Books
- Publication dateJuly 1, 2012
- Dimensions6 x 2.2 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101605983543
- ISBN-13978-1605983547
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Product details
- Publisher : Pegasus Books; First Edition, First Printing (July 1, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 512 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1605983543
- ISBN-13 : 978-1605983547
- Item Weight : 1.85 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 2.2 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,698,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,388 in England History
- #9,893 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

As an author, Paul Thomas Murphy is a strange animal: born, raised, and, for the most part, resident in the United States of America—living most of his early life in and around Lexington, Massachusetts, birthplace of the American Revolution, and living most of the rest in the relentlessly windswept foothills of the Rocky Mountains outside of Boulder, Colorado—his writings have nothing to do with his surroundings, instead focusing upon Victorian England—focusing, particularly, upon Victorian London. How, exactly, did Murphy become, as one critic put it, an “American Victoriana enthusiast”? Blame Charles Dickens. At some point in the mid-1970s, when Murphy was on the verge of escaping high school and committing himself to college with an undeclared major, he picked up and quickly consumed his first Dickens novel: Hard Times. Instantly addicted, Murphy went back to the beginning and, in order of publication, tore through Dickens’s collected works from Pickwick to Drood. Similar assaults upon the works of Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and William Makepeace Thackeray followed. For his Masters in English Literature at McGill University in Montreal, Murphy wrote about Dickens’s villains; for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he wrote about literary criticism in nineteenth-century British working-class periodicals. (That dissertation was later published by The Ohio State University Press as Toward a Working-Class Canon.) For twenty years after that Murphy pursued an academic career, teaching a variety of courses in a variety of disciplines at the University of Colorado, presenting a slew of academic papers on Victorian subjects at academic conferences, publishing in learned and sententious journals essays on working-class literary criticism, on the magnificent Henry Mayhew, on the Victorian culinary dynamo Alexis Soyer. And during that time, his enthusiasm largely shifted from Victorian literature to Victorian history—or, more accurately, widened to include Victorian history. In 2002, Murphy left off teaching to pursue yet another degree, this time at Merton College, University of Oxford, this time in Modern History. It was at Oxford that he first became interested in the stories of the seven boys and men who attacked Queen Victoria. Those stories became Shooting Victoria, one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books for 2012. And it was in the final stages of writing that book that Murphy discovered the subject of his next book a heroine who—besides being Victorian, English, and female—could not be further removed from Queen Victoria, the heroine of the first: Jane Maria Clouson, maid-of-all-work and the victim in Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane. Murphy’s enthusiasm is now directed towards the mid-Victorian world of Fine Art: he is currently working on a narrative history of the great battle of art between two of 19th-century London’s biggest egos: John Ruskin and James McNeill Whistler.
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The Victorian Age nowadays has the reputation of being a quiet, fusty period in which nothing that wasn't decorous was allowed to happen. That is far from the truth, for the mid to late nineteenth century was a period of rapid change. Industrialization and imperialism led to massive social upheavals, and Victoria found herself at the center of it all as ruler of the most powerful nation and empire.
The eight assassination attempts on Queen Victoria all tended to fit a certain pattern. An unhappy, troubled man dealing with what today might be labeled schizophrenia, Tourette's, or various other disorders singled out the monarch as the source of his problems and made plans to assassinate her. Murphy does an excellent job detailing the early lives of the assassins and what motivated them to strike against the Queen. Each attempt is vividly described, so that it is easy for the reader to imagine what it must have been like to witness. Even though the subject matter is serious there are moments of humor, as when Victoria recognized a man who had just dealt her a severe blow to the head as a peculiar fellow who was always strutting around and making exagerratedly low bows when she went out. The reader also gains new admiration for Victoria's bravery, as she always refused to lock herself away after being shot at but instead insisted on riding out in public again as soon as possible.
Murphy places each attempt in the context of their time, linking them when possible to contemporary political issues, and notes that each attempt made Victoria even more popular than before. He describes the trials and ultimate dispositions of each of the attempted assassins, and gives us some fascinating information on their eventual fates. Victoria's understandable interest in the trials and her annoyance when the men weren't punished severely enough in her opinion are also interesting.
Victoria's assassination attempts were part of a pattern of political terrorism during the nineteenth century, and Murphy notes similar attacks that took place in other countries, including the assassinations of two US Presidents (in both of which Victoria took a great interest), the King of Italy, and the Empress of Austria. Shooting Victoria provides a new angle by which to view the always fascinating Queen and the society in which she lived, and deserves a place alongside the best of her many biographies.
Seven attempts were made on the life of Queen Victoria during her reign. Beginning with Edward Oxford, he often inspired those that followed: John Francis, John William Bean, William Hamilton, Robert Pate, Arthur O’Connor, and Roderick Maclean. Either the case of criminal insanity or want of imprisonment on behalf of her assailants, Victoria faced a dilemma that challenged preexisting laws concerning treason. Initially, would be assassin Oxford was proved criminally insane on want of being known and thought important, which becomes the archetype for most who attempt regicide. Often nonpolitical, the motives for killing the Queen shared that facet of truth in her assailants: each wanting desperately something that life had not afforded them—fame. And still, some, like William Hamilton, just wanted to get off the streets and enjoy a decent place to spend the winter.
Although Edward Oxford is the precedent used for all subsequent trials, his also proved to be the motivator, inspiring impressionable and quite possibly imbecilic youths such as John William Bean who, after attempting, as he claimed, to only scare the Queen, shared the same cell that Victoria’s previous assailant occupied just days earlier. A comedic episode initiated by joint police efforts resulted in the signaling out of deformed, dwarfed males throughout London. Bean, childlike in both mind and body, would miss out on a new law that sought to remove the prestige of attempted regicide and replaced it with a greater public humiliation, Peel’s Act, which included flogging and hard labor. Oddly, this spared future assassins from the glory of “fine dining in an insane asylum,” as rumors told of Oxford at Betham Hospital, and the thrill of a public hanging.
London’s police department experienced a period of expansion and specialization during the reign of Victoria as a result of the attempted assassinations. Division A expanded and created a specialized detective force that would later culminate in one of the greatest investigative forces in the world, Scotland Yard. The decades of Victoria’s early reigned proved that the police force had little training and at times, even less common sense. Another moment of comedy in Murphy’s tale involves an undercover cop who, as the Queen’s carriage passed, struggled with a choice, having choose poorly, between saluting his Queen and anticipating the draw of a pistol from the assassin several steps away from him. As he saluted his Queen, the probably empty gun went off. This would not be the first time careless mistakes would occur as a result of poor training.
A great deal of the story is given to Victoria’s personal life and marriage with Prince Albert. Victoria, from the beginning, chose to be a strong female monarch, refusing to relinquish any authority to her husband. It would not be until later years that Albert would exercise any politics outside of committees. Often portrayed as a boy toy, Albert is the strong left hand of Victoria’s reign and supported her as a close secretary. His closeness as both husband and helper placed him often between Victoria and her assailants, assuming at times the bullets had been meant for him.
In fact it was the insanity of one assassin, who did not make an attempt on the queen, that changed judicial proceedings on both sides of the pond. In 1843 Daniel M'Naghton (sometimes spelled McNaughton) attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Peel. He mistakenly shot Peel's secretary Edward Drummond, and was taken into custody. His defense resulted in what is called the M'Naghton rule for an insanity defense. It states
"that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and... that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong."
This rule is applied today in the United States, with some exceptions, where a defendant pleads not guilty for reason of insanity.
The other assassination attempts were by equally disturbed individuals, who were taken into custody. The police didn't seem to learn much from each attempt about protecting the monarch, who moved free through the crowds, exposing her person to danger in a way that is not tolerated today.
