Stolen Innocents: A Yorkshire Tragedy
I must admit I am not quite certain what, exactly, Stolen Innocents is: a true crime book? A non-fiction narrative with some fictionalisation? What it isn’t, is a novel, as there is no real protagonist. People wander in and out of the narrative as required by this re-telling of two gruesome murders in the late 19th century, but due to the lack of a protagonist, the reader remains at a distance from the events, no matter how emotive the language.
One cannot doubt the effort invested in researching Stolen Innocents, nor can one doubt how impassioned Mr Lawless is about the subject matter as such. The author paints vivid and grim descriptions of the lives of people like Walter Turner, of the conditions in gaol, of a society where some never manage to crawl out of the underbelly.
Stolen Innocents is an interesting read, delivering insight into crime and punishment in Victorian times, as well as the harsher aspects of life in mill towns like Bradford, Yorkshire. At times, it is gripping—there is an excellent depiction of one of the young victims that had me thinking “no, no, no!”. This reader, however, has a problem with the somewhat overblown prose and the odd punctuation. Commas are evidently missing (one hopes, as a knife blade reasonably cannot be “wholly unworthy of such cruelty”) there is an overuse of semi-colons and far too many incomplete sentences.
As a true crime story, Stolen Innocents has a lot of merit—I particularly like how Mr Lawless juxtaposes William Barrett (accused of one of the murders) with Walter Turner (accused of the other) . As historical fiction, however, it lacks the personal tension that comes with having a central character the reader can invest themselves in.
