"George Orwell in his whimsical 1946 essay Decline of the English Murders considers high profile cases like Dr. Palmer of Rugeley, Neill Cream, and several more but leaves out whose notable spree saying it was ""in a class by itself""?"
Decline of the English Murder point of view, the "perfect" murder: middle class criminals, sex or respectability as a motif, mostly poisoning, deaths slow to be seen as due to crime, a dramatic coincidence or unbelievable occurrence, the aim of getting hold of a certain known sum of money - usually small, and domestic victims against an essentially domestic background. Orwell excluded Jack the Ripper's murder spree as being "in a class by itself" and considered the cases of Dr. Palmer of Rugeley, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Frederick Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, Bywaters and Thompson, and an unnamed case from 1919, wherein the
Decline of the English Murder Decline of the English Murder "Decline of the English Murder" is an essay by English writer George Orwell, wherein he analysed the kinds of murders depicted in popular media and why people like to read them. "Tribune" published it on 15 February 1946, and Secker and Warburg republished it after his death in "Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays" in 1952. Orwell identified several common features which 'have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public' during 'our great period in murder, between roughly 1850 and 1925' and may be considered from a "News of the World" reader's