Intimate Partner Homicide in British street literature in the nineteenth century

Alshammari, Aiman Mutlaq O (2025) Intimate Partner Homicide in British street literature in the nineteenth century. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis explores the representation of Intimate Partner Homicide (IPH) in nineteenth-century British street literature, focusing on how visual and verbal elements converge to construct depictions of domestic murder in broadsides, chapbooks, and other ephemeral cultural productions. It examines how the hybrid form of street literature—combining sensational illustration, visual layout and typography with ballads, trial reports, confessions, and execution account —evokes real-life cases of IPH in a direct, raw, and immediate manner while negotiating the formal dissonance and fluidity of the genre in its portrayal of this culturally complex issue. By restoring these neglected texts to scholarly visibility, this thesis highlights the value of street literature as a vital archive of popular responses and public discourse surrounding domestic violence, gender norms, and legal reform in the nineteenth century. The project challenges literary hierarchies that privilege canonical texts by locating broadsides and chapbooks as a dissident, generative and underexplored site of cultural meaning-making around intimate violence.

The thesis is structured around three chapters, each centred on either male- or female-perpetrated IPH and exploring a different mode of killing and its attendant cultural anxieties. The first considers the 1831 case of John Holloway, focusing on dismemberment and the construction of male violence and victim-blaming through the interplay of verbal and visual codes. The second examines Margaret Shuttleworth (1821), a so-called ‘fallen woman’ who killed her husband while drunk, addressing how street literature frames female physical aggression. The third investigates several poisoning cases across the century, arguing that poison is a ‘feminine’ method of murder, entangled with misgivings about medical jurisprudence, female propriety, intimacy, and deceit. Overall, this thesis argues that street literature’s hybrid form allows it to stage intense and contested portrayals of IPH, making visible the tensions surrounding gender, domestic authority and justice in nineteenth-century Britain.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Additional Information: Supported by funding from the Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau (SACB).
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PE English
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies
• Funder's Name: Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau (SACB)
• Supervisor's Name: Radford, Dr. Andrew and Coyer, Dr. Megan
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85642
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 10 Dec 2025 16:31
• Last Modified: 10 Dec 2025 16:35
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85642
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85642