HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-12-26T16:01:04.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
items: Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
items: Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld
items: Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools
items: Sex, sadism and sugared death: 8 scandals that rocked Victorian Britain

These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
type: item
date: 2025-12-26T16:00:35.000Z
creator: Rosalind Crone
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Death
subject: Historical people
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
subject: Murder
subject: Victorian crime and punishment
description: Women accused of violent murders have often faced assumptions about their motives and disbelief that the ‘gentle sex’ could commit such bloody crimes. Rosalind Crone investigates four cases from the 19th century
encoded: 1. A female bodysnatcher? At a time when selling human bodies to anatomy schools reaped hefty payouts, some desperate criminals killed to get their hands on fresh corpses. Was Elizabeth Ross one such grasping murderer? In the early 19th century, ‘resurrection men’ dug up recently buried corpses to meet the huge demand for cadavers to use in teaching and surgical practice. Others were too impatient to wait for someone to die before snatching a body – and took matters into their own hands. Between 1828 and 1831, William Burke (operating with accomplice William Hare) in Edinburgh, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams in London, were convicted and hanged for murdering numerous people in order to sell their bodies to anatomy schools. Indeed, all of the infamous bodysnatchers of 19th-century Britain were male. It’s certainly conceivable that women were involved in the trade as helpmates – but could they ever have been the instigators, or even killers? Meet Elizabeth Ross (alias Cook), a 38-year-old Irish immigrant in London with a reputation for drunkenness, violence and petty crime. She had once been accused of skinning alive six of her neighbours’ cats, and it was rumoured that she had murdered a 14-year-old girl who went missing while in her care. Elizabeth’s common-law husband, Edward Cook, who worked as a nightwatchman for the parish of Aldgate, associated with resurrection men. Little wonder, then, that fellow parishioner Ann Buton was very concerned when her grandmother, Caroline Walsh – at that time an 84-year-old pedlar – accepted Elizabeth’s offer of cheap lodgings. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/Credit-Wellcome-CollectionEliza-Rosswebready-6e9dca8-e1766488850584.jpg" width="613" height="420" alt="A black and white sketch of an elderly woman wearing a frilly bonnet and a high necked coat" title="An illustration of “the atrocious Eliza Ross” from an 1832 book about London ‘Burkers’ – bodysnatchers – including an accoun…

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Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
type: item
date: 2025-06-12T08:00:53.000Z
creator: Rosalind Crone
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
subject: Victorian crime and punishment
description: Drugging, fraud, even murder – women couldn’t really commit such heinous crimes, could they? Rosalind Crone explores five audacious female-led felonies from the 18th and 19th centuries
encoded: 1. The Victorian spiking crisis Female thieves took to drugging men’s drinks with opiates before cleaning out their victims’ pockets On 2 January 1865, Elizabeth Bagwell (alias Elizabeth Manning) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of “larceny from the person”, and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. It was a harsh punishment, reflecting the fact that she already had three previous convictions – but also that she was no ordinary pickpocket. Bagwell had spiked the drink of James Rintoul, a London cab driver, at her lodgings off Edgware Road, according to press reports of her committal hearing at the Marylebone Police Court. The drugged glass of gin she gave James was, he claimed, “so hot that it burnt my mouth”. He fell unconscious, and later woke to find himself “alone in the room, and in darkness. My gold watch and chain were gone… my ring also [and] 25 shillings from my pocket.” He had fallen victim to a crime commonly called ‘hocussing’, derived from ‘hocus pocus’ – the term used since the 17th century for conjuring, trickery or sleight of hand. By the late 19th century, ‘hocus’ had become shorthand for drugged liquor. Hocussing had become more prevalent by that time, likely because of the ready availability of cheap drugs including opium (in the form of laudanum), morphine and chloroform. Particularly in convivial social settings such as Victorian public houses, it was easy for thieves to slip drugs into drinks undetected. With their victims bewildered or unconscious, hocussers had time to search pockets thoroughly, remove any valuable jewellery and escape the scene of the crime, making pursuit and prosecution difficult. Poisoners in prison Hocussing was deployed by women and men against victims of both sexes. As a weapon of the weak, poison enabled female thieves to overcome stronger male victims. Men who had been lured by the promise of sex with women hocussers may have been reluctant to prosecute, for fear of reputational damage. Certainly, by 1865…

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Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld
type: item
date: 2024-11-21T14:58:54.000Z
creator: Rosalind Crone
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Hoaxes
subject: Peaky Blinders
description: The BBC series, Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley, tells the stories of female criminals from the 18th to 20th centuries. Their chicanery often earned them great riches, yet, as series consultant Rosalind Crone reveals through six case studies, their schemes didn’t always go to plan
encoded: Alice Diamond: the “queen of the forty thieves” who amassed a fortune While the Peaky Blinders, Brigton Billy Boys and Charles Sabini’s mob terrorised the streets of Britain’s major cities, there was another, equally notorious all-female gang whose shoplifting sprees brought havoc to London’s West End. Read more | The real Peaky Blinders The Forty Elephants, named after the thieves in the legend of Ali Baba and their geographical home (Elephant and Castle), were active from about the 1880s. By the mid-1910s, the gang had a new leader, Alice Diamond (alias Diana Black), described in newspapers of the time as “Queen of the Forty Thieves”. Alice was born in 1896 in the Lambeth workhouse infirmary, and grew up alongside seven siblings in the grim tenements of Southwark, south London. According to the 1911 census, Alice had begun working as a servant when she was just 14 years old. While this was an age of growing opportunities for some working-class women to move into better-paid employment in factories and offices, others – domestic servants, dressmakers and laundresses – found themselves stuck in low-paid work, unable to participate (legally) in new forms of leisure and consumerism. Read more | What was life like for women in Edwardian Britain? The new West End department stores, with their accessible displays of ready-to-wear clothes, proved an irresistible temptation to many. Some shoplifters worked alone, others formed groups, and for Alice and her gang shoplifting became a career. New members were inducted and trained. All had to abide by a ‘hoisters’ code’, which bound them to support each other, share proceeds equally and abstain from “drinking before a raid”. A Metropolitan Police detective explained that the women would dress up and “descend upon a West End store like a plague of locusts… practically clean[ing] the place out inside an hour”. Stolen clothes, fabrics and furs were rolled up and stuffed inside their grafter’s bloomers (pants with giant pockets). …

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Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools
type: item
date: 2024-11-18T09:00:18.000Z
creator: Rosalind Crone
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Education
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
subject: Victorian crime and punishment
description: Many Victorian gaols provided schooling for their inmates, decades before it was mandated in wider society. So what, asks Rosalind Crone, drove this great educational crusade?
encoded: On 26 February 1848, 19-year-old Thomas Sumpter appeared in the dock at Berkshire Assizes, accused – and quickly convicted – of stealing a sheep. Nothing unusual in that, given the times: livestock theft was hardly uncommon in the first half of the 19th century. What was more curious was the apparent motive behind Sumpter’s offence. Having been recently released from Reading Gaol, he committed the crime with the express intent of ensuring his prompt return to the prison where he had been memorising sections of the Bible. He’d been receiving lessons in reading, and he didn’t want to stop. Sumpter was one of three convicts who had been given early release from Reading Gaol in autumn 1845, following an unprecedented decision by the local authorities. Having been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment, each had served six to eight months – and in that time had become poster boys for the success of a new regime at the prison. To aid rehabilitation, education was prioritised over labour: prisoners spent large amounts of time learning to read and write, as well as memorising passages from the Bible. Having each committed to memory the whole of the New Testament up to Ephesians, at the time of their release the three men were lauded as star pupils whose characters had been transformed. That ‘transformation’, though, proved short-lived. All three soon re-offended, including Sumpter. Word spread about both the system and the unfortunate relapses, and the prison became known as the Read-Read-Reading Gaol. This account is somewhat at odds with our idea of the Victorian prison as a place of ‘hard labour, hard board and hard fare’. Yet in the 1840s, when there was no universal elementary education and many working-class children were denied the opportunity to attend school, many prisons in England and Wales had schools in which inmates learned reading, writing and sometimes more besides. And despite the scandals sparked by those three ‘transformed’ inmates, prison schools were here…

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Sex, sadism and sugared death: 8 scandals that rocked Victorian Britain
type: item
date: 2024-05-02T05:44:12.000Z
creator: Rosalind Crone
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
subject: Victorian crime and punishment
description: A killer-sweet scare, a criminal trial that threatened to bring down a prominent politician, cruelty in the workhouses, and a horrific murder spree: life in Victorian Britain was not without its scandals. Rosalind Crone investigates eight headline-grabbing events that caused the Victorians to rise up in outrage
encoded: The mother of sex scandals: Caroline Norton, a future prime minister and a change in custody laws In 1827, 19-year-old Caroline Sheridan, granddaughter of the famous playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan – himself the subject of a scandal – married George Norton, heir to his family’s fortune. It was a disastrous match. George turned down work while waiting for his inheritance, so the family became dependent on Caroline’s earnings as a poet and novelist. George drank and was often violent towards his wife. All the while, Caroline’s flamboyance and literary flair was attracting some powerful admirers, including a future prime minister, Lord Melbourne. In April 1836, after yet another heated argument, George barred Caroline from the family home and prevented her from seeing their three sons, all aged less than seven. In the early 19th century, the law decreed that a wife’s property – and any children – belonged to her husband, so there was little Caroline could do about it. Naturally, she was distraught, especially as she knew the pain George was inflicting on her children by “cursing me thro them”, as she wrote to Lord Melbourne. If that wasn’t bad enough, in June 1836 George sued Lord Melbourne for adultery with his wife. A successful prosecution was the necessary first step in divorce proceedings. For George, it was also a money-making venture as he demanded that Lord Melbourne pay him £10,000 in damages. The trial was a sensation. The court was “crowded to excess”, and newspaper readers awaited eagerly the potentially salacious testimony. One maid claimed she “saw Lord Melbourne kiss Mrs Norton”, and another that, after a visit from Lord Melbourne, Caroline’s “collar and hair were generally tumbled… She would also wash her hands [and] put fresh rouge on her face.” A coachman’s testimony that he saw Caroline lying on the hearthrug with her clothes “up”, showing “the thick part of her thigh”, promised to prove decisive – until he admitted being sacked for drinking on …

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