Professor Rosalind Crone

Professional biography

Broadly speaking, my research interests lie in a 'long' nineteenth century, c1780-c1914. More specifically, I am interested in the society and culture of nineteenth-century Britain, and particularly themes such as criminal justice, popular culture, education and reading practices.

I welcome PhD proposals on these themes but also on other social and cultural topics in the period of the nineteenth century. Recent and current PhD students have worked on a range of projects including policing in nineteenth-century Leeds, representations of crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century press, unreasonable marital behaviours in Victorian Glasgow, sexual violence by men towards men, and pupil rebellions in public schools between the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries.

At present, I am completing research in three areas:

Prison History

For the last 10+ years, I have been working on the history of prisons in Britain. Work began with an interest in reading in prisons which quickly expanded into research on prisoner literacy, prison schools, the (complicated) 19th century prison system, prison reform, and most recently, labour or work in prisons.

I have completed a number of articles on the literacy rates of prisoners. In April 2012, I was awarded a small grant from the Marc Fitch Fund to use surviving prison records from Suffolk to map the educational experiences of the poor in that county for the seventy years or so prior to the 1870 Education Act. This research was published as an article in Social History in 2018 (and you can read a blog post about the article here).

In March 2014, I was awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship to complete the research for my book on nineteenth-century prison education. Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth-Century England was published by Oxford University Press in May 2022 (for more details, follow this link). In 2023, Illiterate Inmates was awarded the Anne Bloomfield Prize for the best book written in English on the history of education, awarded by the History of Education Society. The book also received an honourable mention for the British Association of Victorian Studies Rosemary Mitchell Prize.

In 2018 I launched a new resource, Prison History, which makes datasets originally arising from my research on the nineteenth-century prison freely available to other scholars and members of the public in order to expand our understanding of the use and experience of imprisonment in the past. Prison History currently hosts 19th Century Prisons, a database of 846 convict and local prisons operational in England between 1800-99, and Local Lock-Ups, a database of more than 900 structures used for the temporary confinement of accused criminals (and riff raff) by local communities between c.1500 and the 20th century. Prison History has featured in the genealogical magazine, Who Do You Think You Are, including as one of the 'Websites to Watch in 2020'.

In August 2019, I was awarded an AHRC Follow on Funding grant to work in partnership with Prisoners' Education Trust and former prisoners to transform the research completed for my monograph, Illiterate Inmates, into a free, Badged Open Course on the history of prison education in the UK. The course will be available to students in secure environments, to prison staff and those working in the criminal justice sector, and to anyone with an interest in the history of prisons in early 2022 on The OU's free learning platform, Open Learn.

Violent Entertainments

In 2012 I  completed a monograph derived from my doctoral research on violent entertainments in nineteenth-century London: Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (Manchester University Press). This book is the first full-length study to address the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements and pastimes, patronised by large numbers of ordinary Londoners, that did not conform to the values of respectability and restraint which we so often claim characterised Victorian culture. While pastimes involving displays of actual violence were brought under control during the early-nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, ‘re-enactments’ of high-level violence flourished in street or travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers. By examining these predominantly new amusements in detail, this book explores the ways in which gruesome, bloodthirsty and violent representations provided an outlet, indeed siphoned off, much of the actual violence that had hitherto been expressed in all manner of social and political dealings, thus providing a crucial accompaniment to schemes for the reformation of manners and the taming of the streets, while providing a mechanism through which the common people could ‘protest’ against the values of the establishment.

More recently, I combined my interests in popular entertainment and policing to produce a collection of documents for the Pickering & Chatto series, The Making of the Modern Police, edited by my colleague in the history department, Paul Lawrence. My volume, Policing Entertainment (volume 4) was published in autumn 2014. The 6 volume collection has since been reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement (13 March 2015).

Click here to find out more about Violent Victorians.
The book has been reviewed in the following journals:
Journal of Victorian Culture, June 5, 2012
IHR Reviews in History, June 2012
BBC History Magazine, August 2012
The London Journal, vol 37, November 2012
Times Literary Supplement, 25 January 2013
Urban History, vol 40, February 2013
New Theatre Quarterly, vol 29, February 2013
The Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol 59 (3), 2013
Victorian Studies, vol 57, Summer 2015

International Histories of Reading

Between March 2010 and February 2011, I was a Co-I on the AHRC project, ‘Developing an International Digital Network in the History of Reading’ with colleagues in the English department – W.R. Owens and Shafquat Towheed. During this period, the Reading Experience Database (RED) was subjected to major redevelopment: the UK RED website was enhanced, by adding new teaching tools and improving its functionality, in preparation for distribution to colleagues in Australia (Griffith University, Brisbane), Canada (Dalhousie University, Halifax), the Netherlands (Universiteit Utrecht) and New Zealand (Victoria University of Wellington) to allow the creation of other national REDs; and work began on a new international portal housed on the Open University web space to allow simultaneous searching of national REDs in particular fields. For more information, see the RED website.

Since joining the department I have contributed to a number of teaching modules. Between 2010 and 2013 I was chair of AA312 Total War and Social Change: Europe, 1914-1955 and also of its associated residential school. I wrote several units for its successor module, A327 Europe 1914-1989: War, Peace, Modernity, and in 2012 and 2013 served as co-chair during its production. From 2009-2019 I was a member of the module team for A825/6 MA History and between 2019 and 2022 I chaired the production of its replacement, A883/4 MA History. I remain a member of the module team for A883/4 MA History. 

Broadcast Media

I have been interviewed or served as a consultant for a number of television and radio programmes related to my research interests, including on local radio stations (BBC Somerset, BBC Bristol, etc), Who Do You Think You Are Australia (Warner Bros/SBS Australia, May 2023), Expert Witness (BBC 1, December 2023) Jay Blades: No Place Like Home (Hungry Bear/Channel 5, May 2022), The Forum (BBC World Service, October 2020) Who Do You Think You Are (Wall to Wall/ BBC One, August 2019), Classified Britain (Radio 4/ Loftus Media, May 2018), Inside... The Old Bailey (Channel 5, 2017), A Very British Murder (BBC4, September 2013), Food: A Scandalous History (Radio 4/ Just Radio, May 2013), Great British Bake-Off (BBC1/ Love Productions, August 2013), Mister Punch (CBC/Battery Radio, May 2012), Sweeney Todd (supplementary materials for the DVD of Tim Burton's film, May 2008).

In June 2021, I was interviewed for a BBC History Extra podcast, 'British Prisons: Everything you wanted to know', available here.

In April 2022, I was interviewed by Dallas Campbell for his History Hit series, Patented: History of Inventions, on the history of the penal treadmill, available here.

In April 2023, I appeared in two episodes of the BBC Sounds series Killing Victoria, talking about the history of prisons (Millbank in episode 3 and Pentonville in episode 4), available here.

Since 2021, I have been historical consultant (and resident historian!) for the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley, which looks killing (and living) by women in 19th century Britain, North America and Australia. All 3 series (30 episodes) are freely available on BBC Sounds (or wherever you get your podcasts). Follow these links for episode guides for series 1 and series 2. The third series was a BBC-Open University co-production. Behind the scenes interviews and bonus interactive content on the process of investigating the past is available on the BBC-OU Connect website.

Print

A full list of my academic publications can be found by clicking on the 'Publications' tab above.

Some additional publications aimed at wider audiences which are related to my research interests above include:

'Victorian Murder Scandals: What six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century', BBC History Magazine, January 2024, pp. 57-63

'Reading, Writing and Retribution’, BBC History Magazine, December 2023, pp. 41-45.

'Boris Becker's prison revelations and the role of celebrities in prison reform', History & Policy, April 2023, Read this online

'Victorian Lady Killers: Five Women Whose Crimes Shocked Society', BBC History Magazine, April 2023, pp. 46-51 Read this online

'Stuck in the Victorian past', Inside Times, 22 September 2022. Read this online.

'Focus on: Prison Records', Who Do You Think You Are Magazine, November 2021, pp. 63-67.

'Dickens: Social Crusader', BBC History Magazine, July 2020, pp. 54-59.

'Record Masterclass: Prison Registers', Who Do You Think You Are Magazine, September 2019, pp. 54-56.

'Silence and Separation', Who Do You Think You Are Magazine, Summer 2019, pp. 70-74.

Guide to the Criminal Prisons of 19th Century England (e-book, 2018). Download here.

'Educating Criminals; or, Where did the 19th-century prisoner go to school?', Social History Blog, April 2018. Read this online.

'Elizabeth Fry: The Great Reformer', BBC History Magazine, May 2017, pp. 44-47. Read this online.

'The People on the Notes: Elizabeth Fry', OpenLearn, February 2017. Read this online.

'Think entertainment is violent today? The Victorians were much, much worse', The Conversation, 13 October 2016 Read this online.

'Great Expectations: The role of education in penal reform', History & Policy, 27 May 2016. Read this online.

'Was Victorian life really so grim?', BBC History Magazine, Christmas 2015, pp. 50-56. Read this online.

'Jack the Ripper, a women's history museum and London's fascination with all things gory', The Conversation, 31 July 2015 Read this online.

'New evidence points to old Jack the Ripper suspect - but here is why I'm not convinced', The Conversation, 10 Sept 2014 Read this online.

‘ “Life after death”: Legacies of executed criminals in the nineteenth century’, Curator’s Choice: Selections from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera (2011) Read this online.

‘Reading (in) the Past, 1450-1945’, English Review (Oct 2009), pp. 24-26.

‘Crime reporting in the nineteenth-century newspaper’, British Library 19th Century Newspapers (British Library, 2009).

‘The Common Reader’, History Today (January 2008), pp. 42-43.