When De Quincey wrote "Murder as Considered as One of the Fine Arts, he sent it to Blackwood's Magazine. In the number of Blackwood containing this article it will be seen that De Quincey treats of murder elegantly as an art. That is to say, instead of dwelling on the atrocity of the act, or painting the feelings of the victim, or estimating the amount of gore, he treats of it from the attractive side, from the exultation of the artificer, and from his point of view as a connoisseur in the art of killing, or a murder fancier. Seen thus, "men may meet and criticise a murder as they would a picture, a statue, or other work of art." In time, he continues, people begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed— a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are indispensable to attempts of this nature. In short, the literary and artistic side of murder will be found to have been perfectly treated of by De Quincey. The Inspector Abatement Society of West Tooting desired to show that there was an ethical side to murder as well as an artistic one. They hoped to convince people that certain individuals might exist whom it was at once our right and our bounden duty to remove from this dull, vexing existence. Such individuals may be increasing at a geometric ratio. They also hoped to point out that all Government Inspectors belonged to this species, and that they therefore deserved to be "outed " for the common good.
