Home

A Rip Through Time Bibliography

As much as I love reading historical fiction, I’ve avoided writing it because setting something in another time is such a daunting prospect. It’s not just knowing whether an item was invented by that time (or out of fashion by that time). It’s the language, the customs, the concepts, the ideas…

Below you’ll find a selected and a full bibliography of the books and articles I read in preparation for this series. Did I overdo it? Possibly. Have I still made mistakes, some of them probably so obvious that I’ll cringe when they’re pointed out? Definitely. At some point, I have to say “this is a work of fiction” and if readers are put off by the oversights, then I haven’t provided a story that engages them personally enough for them to forgive the mistakes.

This list will be added to as the series continues–it already contains material for book 2 in the poison references.

Selected Works

For those who are interested in delving deeper into the period in an entertaining way. This contains mostly twenty-first century work, plus a few primary sources. Many of the books here were read to provide insight into the time or some aspect of the time (such as medicine) rather than providing direct research material.

Blum, Deborah. The Poisoner’s Handbook. Penguin, 2011.

Dawson, Kate Winkler. American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI. Penguin, 2021.

Fitzharris, Lindsey. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. Macmillan, 2013.

Goodman, Ruth. How to Be a Victorian. Penguin UK, 2013.

Harman, Claire. Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dicken’s London. Vintage, 2020.

McGovan, James. The McGovan Casebook: Experiences of a Detective in Victorian Edinburgh. 1878. (fiction)

Oneill, Therese. Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners. 2016.

Rubenhold, Hallie. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Houghton Mifflin, 2019.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. 1878, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/382.

Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: The Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2008.

Sung, Tz’u, and Ci Song. The Washing Away of Wrongs. Translated by Brian McKnight, University of Michigan Press, 1981. First printed in 1247

Complete Bibliography

Adam, Alison. Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850. Springer Nature, 2019.

Barrie, David. Police in the Age of Improvement. Routledge, 2008.

Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. 1861, https://www.victorianlondon.org/publications7/beeton-00.htm.

Bell, George. Day and Night in the Wynds of Edinburgh. 1849.

Bennett, Margaret. Scottish Customs From the Cradle to the Grave. Birlinn, 2019.

Bertomeu-Sánchez, José Ramón. “Popularizing Controversial Science: A Popular Treatise on Poisons by Mateu Orfila (1818).” Medical History, no. 3, Cambridge University Press (CUP), July 2009, pp. 351–78. Crossref, doi:10.1017/s0025727300003975.

Black, Adam and Charles. Black’s Guide to Edinburgh and Environs. 1866.

Blum, Deborah. The Poisoner’s Handbook. Penguin, 2011.

Burns, Archibald, and Thomas Henderson. Picturesque “Bits” from Old Edinburgh. 1868.

Carson, W.G. “Policing the Periphery: The Development of Scottish Policing 1795–1900.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, no. 1, SAGE Publications, Mar. 1985, pp. 3–16. Crossref, doi:10.1177/000486588501800102.

Carson, W.G. “Policing the Periphery: The Development of Scottish Policing 1795–1900.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, no. 4, SAGE Publications, Dec. 1984, pp. 207–32. Crossref, doi:10.1177/000486588401700403.

Comrie, John Dixon. History of Scottish Medicine to 1860. 1927.Chapter XVII: Medical Legislative Changes in 1860

Cooke, Anthony. History of Drinking: The Scottish Pub Since 1700. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

Crawford, James, et al. Victorian Scotland. Royal Commission on the Ancient &, 2010.

Dawson, Kate Winkler. American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI. Penguin, 2021.

Donnelly, Daniel, and Kenneth Scott. Policing Scotland. Routledge, 2012.

Fitzharris, Lindsey. The Butchering Art. Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home. W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. Macmillan, 2013.

Fleet, Christopher, and Daniel MacCannell. Edinburgh: Mapping the City. Birlinn, 2014.

Fry, Michael. Edinburgh. Pan Macmillan, 2009.

Goodman, Ruth. How to Be a Victorian. Penguin UK, 2013.

Harman, Claire. Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dicken’s London. Vintage, 2020.

Hempel, Sandra. “James Marsh and the Poison Panic.” The Lancet, no. 9885, Elsevier BV, June 2013, pp. 2247–48. Crossref, doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(13)61472-5.

Horn, Pamela. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant. Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995.

Howarth, Glennys. “Professionalising the Funeral Industry in England 1700–1960.” The Changing Face of Death, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1997, pp. 120–34, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25300-5_9.

Jupp, Peter C., and Hilary J. Grainger. Death in Scotland. Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers, 2019.

Marsh, James. “Method of Separating Small Quantities of Arsenic from Substances with Which It May Have Been Mixed.” Journal of the Franklin Institute, no. 5, Elsevier BV, Nov. 1836, pp. 338–43. Crossref, doi:10.1016/s0016-0032(36)90946-8.

Mcfarland, Elaine. “Researching Death, Mourning and Commemoration in Modern Scotland.” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, no. 1, Edinburgh University Press, May 2004, pp. 20–44. Crossref, doi:10.3366/jshs.2004.24.1.20.

McGovan, James. The McGovan Casebook: Experiences of a Detective in Victorian Edinburgh. 1878. Fiction

Oneill, Therese. Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners. 2016.

Orfila, Matthieu Joseph Bonaventure. A General System of Toxicology, Or, A Treatise on Poisons. 1815.

Ramsay, Alexander (manager of the Edinburgh, and Royal Scottish Society Arts.) On the Water Supply of Edinburgh. 1863.

Rubenhold, Hallie. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Houghton Mifflin, 2019.

Russell, William. The Recollections of a Policeman. 1852, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46462/46462-h/46462-h.htm. Fiction

Smith, Michael. “The Church of Scotland and the Funeral Industry in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh.” The Scottish Historical Review, no. 1, Edinburgh University Press, Apr. 2009, pp. 108–33. Crossref, doi:10.3366/e0036924109000596.

Smith, Michael. “The Church of Scotland and the Funeral Industry in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh.” The Scottish Historical Review, no. 1, Edinburgh University Press, Apr. 2009, pp. 108–33. Crossref, doi:10.3366/e0036924109000596.

Smout, T. Christopher. Century of the Scottish People 1830-1950. 2010.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. 1878, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/382.

Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: The Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2008.

Sung, Tz’u, and Ci Song. The Washing Away of Wrongs. Translated by Brian McKnight, University of Michigan Press, 1981. First printed in 1247

Watson, Katherine D. “Poisoning Crimes and Forensic Toxicology Since the 18th Century.” Academic Forensic Pathology, no. 1, SAGE Publications, Mar. 2020, pp. 35–46. Crossref, doi:10.1177/1925362120937923.

Skip to content