The TRUE tale of Victorian crime, betrayal and murder...Celestina Sommer's problem took her to the very edge of hell.
Pregnant at seventeen, with no support and little more compassion, she relinquishes her infant to the baby-farmers. Eleven years on, now married, she endures not only vilification but domestic abuse - the man she trusted turning on her with misogynistic cruelty endorsed by a society turning its blind, masculine eye.
The young woman formulates a tragic response, leading her daughter into the cellar and violently cutting her throat. Her descent into hell has begun...
This work of narrative non-fiction, in the genre of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, exploits the passion for murder-mystery and disadvantaged Victorian women driven to kill.
Containing death, abuse, sex, murder and political cover-up, set within Victorian London, it exposes for the first time the awful truth about her short, tragic life and reveals exactly why she avoided the hangman's noose. Her heart-rending story follows the world's reaction to her crime: parliamentary debates, press outrage, allegations of royal collusion, garishly explicit reports of her trials at the Old Bailey and, finally, her collapse into madness as she struggles through a harsh Victorian penal system and, at the very end, Britain's foremost criminal lunatic asylum of the age.
Using official records, newspapers, journals and broadsides, the events are pursued chronologically and with minimum imagined dialogue that keeps the narrative moving, addressing the social issues of the day that lead to the outcome of her case.
Over two years in the making, one thing is for certain...the true story of Celestina Sommer will never leave you.
Pregnant at seventeen, with no support and little more compassion, she relinquishes her infant to the baby-farmers. Eleven years on, now married, she endures not only vilification but domestic abuse - the man she trusted turning on her with misogynistic cruelty endorsed by a society turning its blind, masculine eye.
The young woman formulates a tragic response, leading her daughter into the cellar and violently cutting her throat. Her descent into hell has begun...
This work of narrative non-fiction, in the genre of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, exploits the passion for murder-mystery and disadvantaged Victorian women driven to kill.
Containing death, abuse, sex, murder and political cover-up, set within Victorian London, it exposes for the first time the awful truth about her short, tragic life and reveals exactly why she avoided the hangman's noose. Her heart-rending story follows the world's reaction to her crime: parliamentary debates, press outrage, allegations of royal collusion, garishly explicit reports of her trials at the Old Bailey and, finally, her collapse into madness as she struggles through a harsh Victorian penal system and, at the very end, Britain's foremost criminal lunatic asylum of the age.
Using official records, newspapers, journals and broadsides, the events are pursued chronologically and with minimum imagined dialogue that keeps the narrative moving, addressing the social issues of the day that lead to the outcome of her case.
Over two years in the making, one thing is for certain...the true story of Celestina Sommer will never leave you.
