So reports The Evening Mail in their daily coverage of the Marrs murders. Ashburton’s traumatic recollection demonstrates the power that the murders had on the individual; not only through inspiring “powerful sensations of horror and guilt” (Critchley and James 36), but specifically in their ability to resurrect past experiences of otherwise unfathomable violence.
The murders have a similarly evocative effect on Thomas De Quincey. His works are steeped in violence and a preoccupation with sudden, unexplainable death, and this obsession is never more explicit than in his essays which study the impact and artistry of violence: ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Art’ (1827), ‘A Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1839) and its ‘Postscript’ (1854); ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ (1823); and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849). By allying the murderer with the artist, and discussing the brutality of the contemporary Ratcliffe Highway murders alongside fictionalised portrayals of murder, De Quincey traces the pervasive influence of violence on his own personal and literary identities. As Schneider observes, De Quincey writes extensively on a variety of figures but “accords to none the degree and kind of admiration he grants to Williams” (Performance 35). This warped elevation further demonstrates that the Ratcliffe Highway …show more content…
Schneider describes the problematic nature of the essays in this regard as confusing “real and representational violence” (Sacrificial 15) – whereas writers such as Plato safely regulate discussions of violence through the framework of fiction, De Quincey offers no such distinction and, in his first discussion of the Williams murders in ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, comes dangerously close to removing the boundaries between art and life
The murders have a similarly evocative effect on Thomas De Quincey. His works are steeped in violence and a preoccupation with sudden, unexplainable death, and this obsession is never more explicit than in his essays which study the impact and artistry of violence: ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Art’ (1827), ‘A Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1839) and its ‘Postscript’ (1854); ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ (1823); and ‘The English Mail-Coach’ (1849). By allying the murderer with the artist, and discussing the brutality of the contemporary Ratcliffe Highway murders alongside fictionalised portrayals of murder, De Quincey traces the pervasive influence of violence on his own personal and literary identities. As Schneider observes, De Quincey writes extensively on a variety of figures but “accords to none the degree and kind of admiration he grants to Williams” (Performance 35). This warped elevation further demonstrates that the Ratcliffe Highway …show more content…
Schneider describes the problematic nature of the essays in this regard as confusing “real and representational violence” (Sacrificial 15) – whereas writers such as Plato safely regulate discussions of violence through the framework of fiction, De Quincey offers no such distinction and, in his first discussion of the Williams murders in ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, comes dangerously close to removing the boundaries between art and life