Another Matt Shaw link, this time to Judith Flanders’s blog. (Judith Flanders blogs! Squee worthy geek out moment on par with discovering that Kate Flint has a photo blog.) Through the British Library, Flanders spent a Saturday editing Wikipedia entries using the BL’s collections and resources. I love the bizarre confluence of writers, the BL, Judith Flanders, the Victorians, the Wikipedia, and bawdy songs about the burning of Parliament in 1830s. I also discovered that Flanders has a new book out called The Invention of Murder. I’m reading it as soon as I can lay hands on a copy. Her Inside the Victorian Home has the most flags in it of any book I used in my dissertation. And as my family and students know, give me a pack of Post-It Note flags, and I’m one happy person. If the new book is anywhere near as fantastic as Inside the Victorian Home, I’m so using it the next time I teach the Victorian Lit. class on crime and sensation fiction.
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To Be An Electric Telegraph 
Wait until you find out that Mary Barton was not only motivated by the death of her son, but based on a real murder case too!
Best from (a not very geeky) Judith Flanders
I didn’t know that Gaskell based the story on a real murder case. I taught Mary Barton as part of the class I did on crime and sensation fiction, even though the novel is considered a social problem novel. You may cover this in your book, but I always read the courtroom section as a kind of melodrama that is at odds with the rest of the novel’s structure. Did the murder case Gaskell drew from include a well documented court trial?
Best, Lindsy Lawrence