The notion that alternative or fuller accounts of the Crippen case were possible first emerged from dissenting voices in the press and public discourse. Abolitionist commentators expressed deep anxieties at the circumstantial basis of Crippen's conviction and the prurient public interest in all stages of the trial and failed appeal.

A focus for these concerns was Arthur Newton's petition to Home Secretary Winston Churchill ‘praying for a remission of the sentence on Dr. Crippen’ in favour of a sentence of life imprisonment. Copies of the petition were distributed nationwide, the London Globe advising that the copy lodged in Newton's offices on the corner of Regent Street could be signed between the hours of 10am and 6pm. The petition would garner over 15,000 signatures by the time it was submitted to Churchill but it was to prove no more effective in saving Crippen than did the elderly man who presented himself at Cambridge Police Court in early November 1910 to offer himself as surrogate: ‘He said he thought doctors do a lot of good in the world, and he himself had received benefits at the hands of medical men, and he felt that Dr. Crippen should not be allowed to suffer the extreme penalty.’

In the week of Crippen's execution, socialist weekly The Clarion carried an article from a clergyman protesting at the prurience and morbidity of spectators at the trial: ‘Lorgnettes and opera-glasses were freely used on the prisoner, and one gentleman was particularly intent on witnessing the effect of the death sentence upon him.’ Pronouncing such experimentalism fit for the laboratory rather than the court of law, the cleric went on to criticise the Tussaud's publicity campaign that had followed Crippen's trial: ‘large posters appeared shortly after sentence was passed informing the public that his wax-work effigy has been added to the chamber of horrors, a show which is regarded by many as a national institution.’

Such impassioned commentary, contesting the dominant, Northcliffe-led rendering of the Crippen case as melodrama and spectacle, continued into the following month. ‘What is the duty of society towards the criminal?’ asked Emily Lutyens, signatory of the Crippen reprieve petition and abolitionist correspondent to The Times in early December 1910.