Radzinowicz Library
18th February 2013 | 0 Comment(s) | Cambridge University Library
I hear another boy’s voice in letters to his parents, and see his prizewinning copperplate writing in ‘A Christmas meditation’ (the prize was probably a bible).
This time the young writer is the 1940s Acid Bath Murderer John George Haigh.
Stuart Stone of the Radzinowicz Library (part of the Institute of Criminology) shows me the letters from the boy who grew up to be a serial killer. He was in the habit of dissolving his victims’ bodies in acid, thinking that if no body was found he could not be convicted.
He was wrong.
In the library’s collection are illustrated Victorian books that catalogue the weird and wonderful (and some indescribable) criminal tattood body parts, as well as studies of physiognomy and handwriting to indicate criminal tendencies.
They wouldn’t have clocked young John George.
They were great cataloguers and list-makers, the Victorians, as if they hoped that recording aberrations would throw up a pattern and turn their wild guesses into science.
(For example he showed me the Library’s collection of prisoner art, painstaking montages made of thousands of tiny photographs, large sculptures constructed from matchsticks, by people who have all the time in the world).
Above image: a photograph of one of the more distinctive pieces of prisoner art, Morning Smile, made by three young offenders in HMYOI Brinsford (the hippo has been named Asbo by the Institute).
Radzinowicz Library:
Imtiaz Dharker, poet in residence at the University Library.
