Ms. Summerscale has found a nifty literary specialty: resurrecting and reanimating, in detail as much forensic as it is novelistic, notorious true-life tales of the Victorian era ... Enjoyable as an atmospheric tale of crime and punishment from a distant era written in lucid, limber prose, The Wicked Boy also implicitly raises questions that remain with us today ... Ms. Summerscale’s easy mastery of what turns out to be a complicated, at times surprising narrative drives the book forward.
[Summerscale] expertly probes the deep anxieties of a modernizing era. Even better, she brings rare biographical tenacity and sympathy to bear. She follows Robert, spared the gallows, out of the spotlight and into a lunatic asylum, and then into the horrors of the First World War and beyond.
The real skill of the book is its blend of well-researched historical context and telescopic personal and domestic detail ... The facts and dialogue are reported with restraint, sensitivity and a real intuition for the questions that she knows will be asked. Ultimately, the narrative is an exploration of Victorian attitudes to juvenile crime, and this pacy slice of social history acts as both hawk-eyed prosecution and gentle defence.
Summerscale is a scrupulous chronicler of recorded fact, never using rhetorical flourishes or speculation to fill the odd jumps and elisions in the Old Bailey transcript and its newspaper paraphrases. As a result, the case takes on a dreamlike quality ... Summerscale is far too subtle and confident a writer to feel the need to bang home the wider implications of her story.
Over the course of her irresistible book, [Summerscale] takes on popular attitudes toward children and their place in society ... Summerscale proves a wonderful champion of these exciting adventure tales, which allowed young boys to dream of better things than a life of poverty.
Within a few pages her murderer has been identified. The challenge, to which Ms Summerscale rises wonderfully well, is to sustain the reader’s interest in him for the remaining 50-odd years of his life ... She writes throughout with measured restraint; but in her last paragraph she allows her feelings to show. The murderer Robert Coombes has won her admiration and affection—even love.
Summerscale has performed a remarkable job of historical reconstruction in this book. She holds her story strictly to the evidence and is particularly crisp in her portrayals of the many subsidiary characters who figure in her book ... The Wicked Boy is a compelling mixture of the gruesome and the perfectly ordinary, a brew uniquely British. But unexpectedly her story goes on, beyond the trial and the verdict, and in a feat of genuine detective work.
