A Most Unique Ruffian: The Trial of F.B. Deeming, Melbourne, 1892 by J.S. O’Sullivan (Secondhand Book)

SECONDHAND BOOK

This book is a fascinating reconstruction of the criminal career, trial and public reaction to Frederick Bayley Deeming – the murderer in England of his first wife and four children, murderer in Australia of his second wife, a bigamist and fraud, a thief and liar in the Manchausen tradition, aptly called by a contemporary report the “most unique ruffian in modern times”.

Though defended by Alfred Deakin, later three times Prime Minister of Australia and an orator without peer, Deeming’s trial, in Melbourne in May 1892, although unobjectionable in form was little more than a formality. “For by early April,” the author writes, “Deeming had not only become the most written about person in Australian history, but the object of an unprecedented campaign of newspaper vilification.”

Accused variously of being Jack the Ripper, a South African mass murderer, and a vampire, the villainies of this “erratically erotic egotist” as he was called, were presented on the Melbourne stage before he came to trial. Judged and condemned in one of the worst cases of trial by newspaper on record, one paper went so far as to say, after Deeming’s execution, that his painless death “seems hardly in accordance with the demands of poetical justice in his case!”

A Most Unique Ruffian is not an attempt at belated psychoanalysis nor does it seek to whitewash a murderer at the expense of those who convicted and executed him. Rather it is intended as a description of a crime, an arrest and a trial that created an unprecedented furore in colonial Australia. It is also a reminder that Australian criminal law is not necessarily beyond the reach of mass hysteria and prejudice.

Specifications:

Condition: Good – general wear, yellowing to pages.

Publisher: F.W. Cheshire Publishing

Year: 1968

Format: Hardback, with dustjacket

Pages: 203pp

ISBN: N/A

$28.00

1 in stock