Our Evening Talks explore the stories surrounding the history of policing on Bow Street.
The Secret Life: Loves and Lusts of Oscar Wilde
Thursday 25th April 2024, 18:30 (doors open 18:15)
Following his sold-out talk in February, the museum is delighted to welcome back author Neil McKenna.
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde is Neil’s acclaimed and controversial first biography. The book charts fully for the first time Oscar Wilde’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld.
This bestselling book makes a compelling and convincing argument that Oscar Wilde was driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with young men and that his work can only be fully understood in terms of his sexuality.
Drawing on a vast array of previously unknown and unpublished material, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid psychological portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.
Neil McKenna is an award-winning journalist and author. After a distinguished and ground-breaking career in Britain’s gay press and in national newspapers, Neil researched and wrote On the Margins: Men Who Have Sex With Men in the Developing World, the findings of which were formally adopted by the UN. Neil then turned his attention to gay history and wrote the acclaimed biographies: The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde and Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England. He lives in a very sleepy corner of North Norfolk.
Timings: doors open at 18:15. The talk begins at 18:30 and lasts approximately 75 minutes, including a Q&A with the audience and a book signing
Conditions of entry: this event is recommended for anyone over the age of 16 years.
Tickets: there are two ways to attend this event, in person at Bow Street Police Museum, or online via a live stream (using Zoom).
Prices to attend at the Museum: £12/ £9.60 Friends.
Prices to attend via Livestream: £6/ £4.80 Friends.
The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law, A Hidden History
Thursday 18th July, 18:30 (doors open 18:15)
The museum is delighted to welcome back author Kate Morgan, following her sell-out talk last year.
‘A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.’
So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?
In this vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.
We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’.
Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.
Kate Morgan is a writer and former solicitor. She worked as a senior in-house lawyer in the water industry for most of her legal career. Long fascinated with the darker side of the law, her writing focuses on British legal history and the stories behind the important cases that have shaped the law over the centuries. Kate’s first book Murder: The Biography (2021, HarperCollins) explored the legal history of the crime of murder in the UK and The Walnut Tree is her second book.
Timings: doors open at 18:15. The talk begins at 18:30 and lasts approximately 75 minutes, including a Q&A with the audience and a book signing
Conditions of entry: this event is recommended for anyone over the age of 16 years.
Tickets: there are two ways to attend this event, in person at Bow Street Police Museum, or online via a live stream (using Zoom).
Prices to attend at the Museum: £12/ £9.60 Friends.
Prices to attend via Livestream: £6/ £4.80 Friends.
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