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Humble Victorian heroes: the ordinary Britons who sacrificed their lives for others
Statues celebrate monarchs, rulers and conquerors – but who remembers the brave folk who gave their lives to save others? Anna Maria Barry recounts stories of self-sacrificing but otherwise ordinary people from the 19th and 20th centuries who are commemorated in one London park
Tucked away in the City of London, a short walk north of St Paul’s Cathedral, lies a curious, oddly-shaped, leafy little sanctuary. Opened in 1880, Postman’s Park is named for the workers at the nearby General Post Office who liked to visit during their breaks. Today, though, it’s best known as the home of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, honouring dozens of heroic Londoners who lost their lives while trying to save others, most in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Unusually, the memorial describes the details of each tragic death, from drownings and carriage accidents to house fires and poisonings. No wonder this moving, if somewhat macabre, celebration of bravery continues to fascinate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1411624515webready-b2b4c26-e1769529632536.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a low, long wooden and brick structure against a building. In front of it there is a garden with a stone font in the middle" title="The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice honours ordinary people (Image by Getty Images)" /> Flames faced with fortitude One such quietly heroic Londoner was Alice Ayres. During the night of 24 April 1885, the 26-year-old lay asleep in her bedroom on Union Street, in the home of her older sister and brother-in-law, who employed her as a nursemaid and household assistant. Sharing this room were her nieces Edith, Ellen and Elizabeth, aged five, four and three, respectively. Shortly after 2am, Alice was jolted awake by the crackling of flames, and quickly realised that something was very wrong. Her brother-in-law’s oil and paint shop on the ground floor was on fire, and his wares were rapidly accelerating the flames. Alice had to think fast. Unable to exit the bedroom, she rushed to the window and threw it open to scream for help. She grabbed two bedsheets to tie together before realising that this makeshift rope wouldn’t enable her to lower her nieces to safety. Instead, she heaved a feather mattress out of the window to create a soft landing. By now, several neighbours had rushed to the property, and they suspended the mattress between them. First, Alice threw Edith out; next up was Ellen, who clung to her aunt in fear. Finally, Alice dropped Elizabeth down to the waiting neighbours before letting herself drop. Tragically, the fire claimed five lives: neither Elizabeth nor Alice survived their injuries, and Alice’s sister, brother-in-law and young nephew also perished. This sad episode was not soon forgotten, though, and created a sensation in the press, with articles focused firmly on the heroic actions of this brave young woman. “Death of the heroine Alice Ayres,” reported one paper, while another led with “A Heroine in Humble Life”. Alice’s courage was potent: many people were moved deeply by this story of a lowly nursemaid – a young, working-class woman who lost her life in the process of saving others. As historian John Price pointed out, many of these reports erased Alice’s familial relationship to the young girls. It seems that the story of a devoted employee giving her life to save her charges was perceived as more poignant than that of a frantic woman trying to save her own family. On the day of Alice’s funeral, as her coffin was carried by firefighters to its final resting place, admiring Londoners came out to line the streets in their hundreds. A memorial fund raised a significant sum, eventually paying for a large memorial that still stands over Alice’s grave in Isleworth Cemetery. And these were not the only tributes: in the months and years after her death, Alice underwent a process that historian Lara Perry has described as a “secular canonisation”. She became something of a folk hero, her act inspiring poets and writers and being cited as an example of everyday heroism among working people. Read more | For ordinary Tudors, death lurked around every corner with these surprising ways to die This impact even spread overseas: six years after Alice’s death, a poem published in a Toronto newspaper ended with the lines: She did not die. Such names as hers will never, never die; They make our British blood run hot, our British hearts beat high. And as we linger near her tomb, by grateful laurels crown’d, We ask, “What braver act than hers could on the earth be found?” On battle-fields, where strong men fight, what hero’s deed compares With the noble true, self-sacrifice of this nursemaid, Alice Ayres? Among the many people inspired by Alice’s story was George Frederic Watts. One of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian age, dubbed ‘England’s Michelangelo’, Watts was a gifted painter and sculptor known for his symbolist works, public sculptures and many portraits of the era’s great and good. His most famous work is the allegorical Hope (1886), which took on a new significance at the peak of the 20th-century civil rights movement in the US, when Martin Luther King Jr discussed the painting in a sermon. Much later, after hearing about it in another sermon given by pastor Jeremiah Wright, a young Barack Obama took inspiration from its message, later writing the 2006 book The Audacity of Hope. In 1887, two years after Alice’s death, Watts wrote a letter to The Times proposing a novel way to mark the forthcoming golden jubilee of Queen Victoria. “[I]t would surely be of national interest,” he suggested, “to collect a complete record of the stories of heroism in every-day life.” This would, he mooted, take the form of a memorial in London and, to illustrate his argument, he reminded readers of Alice Ayres: such “forgotten heroes”, he argued, should be remembered. “The material prosperity of a nation is not an abiding possession,” Watts concluded. “The deeds of its people are.” Inspiring other Britons This idea of celebrating heroism was very much in keeping with Victorian sensibilities. In 1841, Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle had published his influential On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, championing the importance of heroic individuals – typically, the ‘great men’ of history. There was also a widely held belief in improvement through example – the idea that studying great lives helped an individual to better themselves. Watts’ suggestion was very much in this spirit: he hoped that his memorial would articulate a type of selfless conduct that other Britons would be inspired to emulate through their own good deeds. Although Watts’ idea was not picked up immediately, it resurfaced in 1898 when the vicar of St Botolph’s offered him a site to bring his vision to life – a public park that had once been the parish churchyard and burial ground. It was here that the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was finally unveiled by the lord mayor on 30 July 1900. Initially, just four people were commemorated, but batches of names were added steadily over the following years. After Watts’ death in 1904, the project was taken over by his wife, Mary, a talented designer, social reformer and (later) suffragette. Today, the memorial consists of 54 plaques celebrating a total of 62 individuals. Most of them are men, though nine women and eight children are honoured. The vast majority of those named were either Londoners or people who died in the capital. Though many of the subjects were working class – labourers and railway workers – there are also members of the middle class, including managers and medical men. The memorial takes the form of a wall bearing ornate ceramic plaques covered by a red-tiled roof, supported by columns. Each plaque records a name, dates and – most movingly – a short summary of the circumstances under which the subject died. A typical entry reads: Soloman Galaman aged 11 died of injuries Sept 6 1901 after saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street “Mother I saved him but I could not save myself” Another commemorates: Frederick Alfred Croft Inspector aged 31 saved a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal Station but was himself run over by the train Jan 11 1878 <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-144844808webready-2d9e5af-e1769530315297.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="plaque tile dedicated to a man named Frederick Alfred Croft. The tile is beige with an orange outline and has a green and cream floral pattern around it. The words are written in blue" title="A plaque dedicated to Frederick Alfred Croft, who saved a woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal station, before being hit by the train himself (Image by Getty Images)" /> Each plaque tells a vivid story in a few short lines, offering a glimpse into everyday people’s experiences of life in the metropolis. The extraordinary nature of these ordinary Londoners’ deaths means that they generated a deposit in the historic record in the form of newspaper stories and inquest reports. These, along with the information given on the memorial – dates and sometimes even addresses – yields much historical material. Read more | The Bengal Famine was one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies – so why is there no memorial to it? Many of those commemorated suffered accidents at work. One plaque commemorates Walter Peart and Harry Dean, driver and fireman, respectively, on Great Western Railway’s Windsor Express. On 18 July 1898, they were both working on the 4.15pm service from Windsor to London Paddington when a rod in the engine broke, engulfing the boiler in flames. Though they were severely scalded and later died from their injuries, the two men succeeded in bringing the train to a safe stop, preventing further casualties. Both were married, and Walter left five children. One grateful passenger on the train was George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, who wrote a letter to the Great Western Railway expressing his admiration for the men’s bravery and enclosing a donation for their families. Lost at sea Another plaque honours 44-year-old Mary Rogers, a stewardess on the passenger ferry Stella. On 30 March 1899, Mary was working on a voyage from Southampton to Guernsey with 147 passengers on board, many of whom were starting an Easter holiday. In heavy fog, the ship hit rocks, sinking just eight minutes later. Although some escaped in lifeboats, 86 passengers and 19 crew members were lost. One who made it safely off the ship was the famous opera singer Greta Williams, who sang hymns to calm survivors as they waited in lifeboats for rescue. Rogers, though, was not among them: she had given up her life jacket and refused a seat in a lifeboat, choosing instead to save a passenger. This story touched many, including writer Frances Power Cobbe, who penned an inscription for a monument to Mary containing the lines: Urged by the sailors to make sure her escape, she refused, lest she might endanger the heavily-laden boat. Cheering the departing crew with the friendly cry of “Good-bye, good-bye” she was seen, a few moments later, as the Stella went down, lifting her arms upwards with the prayer “Lord have me” then sank in the waters with the sinking ship. A monument to Mary’s bravery still stands in Southampton. It was funded by donations from an admiring public, who also raised a significant sum to support her elderly father and the two young children she left behind. Mary is one of the few heroes commemorated at Postman’s Park who did not die in London. Another plaque commemorates Sarah Smith, a “pantomime artiste” (real name Sarah Gibson) who reportedly performed an act of bravery during a show at the Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street on 23 January 1863. She was on stage when the dress of her friend Anne Hunt began burning, set alight by a pan of fire that was being used in the performance. According to the plaque, Sarah rushed over to extinguish the flames but was so badly burned that she later died of her injuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/dreamstime98653751webready-8fe05fe-e1769530060418.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A plaque tile dedicated to a woman named Sarah Smith. The tile is beige with an orange outline and has a green and cream floral pattern around it. The words are written in blue" title="One plaque commemorates Sarah Smith, who sustained fatal burns when saving her friend from a fire in 1863 (Image by Dreamtime)" /> At the inquest into her death, the jury reprimanded the theatre for its insufficient fire precautions, and the coroner raised his concern about the flammable nature of women’s dress. “He thought it quite impossible by any amount of reasoning or warning to produce any effect on fashion,” reported one newspaper, concluding that “[h]e did not know how many women would be required to be burnt to death before any of their fair sex would give up wearing an article of fashion.” Read more | Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos Courageous children Some of the most moving plaques on the memorial honour children who died trying to save friends or siblings. One of these was 10-year-old John Clinton. On 16 July 1894, he was playing on the foreshore of the Thames, close to London Bridge, with another boy called Campbell Mortimer. When Campbell waded into the water and found himself out of his depth, John succeeded in rescuing him, but fell back into the river and drowned. Newspaper reports noted that John had saved another life not long before his death. His baby brother had accidentally started a fire while playing with matches, and John had had the presence of mind to roll him on the carpet to extinguish the flames while also removing a set of curtains that had been set alight. The son of a “struggling carpenter”, John was praised in the press as a “boy hero” and “a most dutiful and affectionate child”. At his funeral, the coffin was “almost hidden with wreaths”; one, reporters noted, “bore the simple words ‘He saved me.’” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2169595312webready-b75a2d2-e1769529775392.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a green heart with the word GRENFELL written across it in yellow" title="The Grenfell Tower Memorial is one of many "attempts to ensure that the lives of ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices are not forgotten" (Image by Getty Images)" /> Though 120 tiles were originally planned, after GF Watts’ death the addition of new tablets became sporadic, and effectively ceased after 1931. The final plaque fixed to the memorial, in 2009, honours Leigh Pitt. He was 30 when he died in 2007 while saving a drowning boy from a canal in Thamesmead. In 2010, the group that looks after the Watts memorial decided that no more plaques would be added. In recent years, monuments have become focal points for political debate, and the wisdom of commemorating certain figures has been interrogated. Watts’ Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice seems to speak to the moment: it doesn’t celebrate military generals, politicians or monarchs, but instead pays tribute to the bravery and humanity of everyday people who were prepared to risk their lives for others. We might recognise echoes of this sentiment in the National Covid Memorial Wall on the South Bank or the Grenfell Tower Memorial Wall. All are attempts to ensure that the lives of ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices are not forgotten. Anna Maria Berry is a historian and writer This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
In 1848, the US ended a war with its neighbour and took its land. What happened next?
A peace treaty ended the Mexican–American War in February 1848 and officially left California as new American territory. Unbeknownst to any of the negotiators, gold had been discovered in California just nine days before the treaty was signed
In February 1848, after almost two years of conflict, Mexico signed a peace treaty that formally ended a war with the United States which it no longer had any chance of winning. But the peace treaty didn’t only mark an end to the war. It saw the formal loss of a huge swathe of Mexican territory to the victorious US, significantly expanding the American frontier to the west and south and marking a new border. This was only one more chapter in the long history of American expansionism; another instance of Manifest Destiny – the quasi-religious belief that the United States was destined to span the continent. It was an idea that would, in just a few decades, cause US sights to turn towards Alaska and Greenland. The 1848 treaty brought peace, but just nine days before it was signed, gold was discovered in California – this soon-to-be American territory. The discovery came on 24 January 1848 when James W Marshall found flakes of gold while supervising construction of a sawmill on the American River in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This began an economic boom that shaped the next decades of American prosperity. For Mexico, the timing couldn’t have been crueller. According to historian Paul Gillingham, that short period of days between the signing of the treaty and the discovery of gold marks one of the most consequential turning points in North American history: as much as it was actively a disaster for Mexico, it put rocket fuel beneath the rise of the United States. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Gillingham situates this moment within a much longer story of imperial inheritance, fragile statehood and American expansionism. Mexico’s colonial inheritance When Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, it inherited an enormous territorial claim. On paper, the new republic stretched “from Oregon in this giant triangle, to Texas and then down to Guatemala,” as Gillingham puts it. These borders were the legacy of Spanish colonial administration rather than the result of effective Mexican control. After 1848, roughly half of this territory passed to the United States, as stated under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo – which marked the end of the Mexican-American War. Read more | History’s 8 biggest land deals: how the US more than doubled in size – and why it agreed to leave Greenland alone Almost immediately, the loss became central to Mexican politics. Nationalists claimed to have lost half of their entire national territory. But Gillingham urges caution. “This isn’t really true,” he explains, because “no one really owned the territory much above southern California. It was the indigenous peoples’.” Large areas of what would later become the American southwest were sparsely settled by Mexicans and only weakly integrated into the Mexican state. Real power rested with Indigenous nations rather than officials in Mexico City. In practical terms, this wasn’t territory governed by Mexico in a meaningful sense. Read more | What does Cinco de Mayo commemorate? Nevertheless, it was a vast ocean of land that would, within days, change the trajectory of North America. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-3070574-af7e1e6-e1769084597855.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="On 8 May 1846, General Zachary Taylor leads US troops into battle at Palo Alto, one of the opening engagements of the Mexican–American War. The clash helped propel Taylor to national fame, paving the way for his election as president just two years later." title="At Palo Alto" /> Manifest Destiny and American expansionism The Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty was the outcome of the Mexican–American War, a conflict sparked by the annexation of Texas by the USA in 1845. It was driven by a broader US ambition to expand westward, represented in the ideology of Manifest Destiny. By the 1840s, this had become a powerful political idea. Mexico entered the war divided, riven by frequent changes of government and weak institutions. The United States entered wealthier, more unified and increasingly industrialised. It wielded this power effectively, and the Mexicans were soon on the back foot. By the time peace negotiations began, US forces had occupied much of northern and central Mexico, including Mexico City itself. Mexico’s bargaining position was effectively gone. As Gillingham puts it, “their national state was destroyed.” Why, then, did the United States not take more? Read more | Who owns Greenland? Why the island's history is more complicated than you think Mexico’s mountainous interior was difficult to occupy and historically favourable to local resistance. “Like anywhere else around the world, people who live in mountains tend to be good at war and don’t like other people treading on their turf,” says Gillingham. Any further American advancement would come under heavy losses and diminishing returns. “The further-sighted people realised they had got about as much as they would ever get,” Gillingham explains. So, Mexico signed the peace treaty, says Gillingham, because it lacked the capacity to continue fighting. The United States signed because it had secured its strategic aims without overextending itself. But even with Manifest Destiny propelling them forward, Gillingham recounts that some on the American side felt conflicted about taking so much Mexican land. Gillingham explains how one American negotiator, Nicholas Trist, was “wracked by guilt at what he was doing” and attempted to derail the agreement so that Mexico might retain more territory. His attempted self-sabotage failed. California was now American. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-615293902-e1ca0f8-e1769085644657.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This colour lithograph by John Gast visualises the 19th-century ideology of Manifest Destiny as a white-robed female figure floating westward across the continent. Carrying a schoolbook and telegraph wire, she brings education and technology, while Native Americans and bison retreat before her. The image captures how westward expansion was envisioned as divine and destined progress." title="American Progress Color Lithograph by George A. Crofutt and John Gast" /> The nine days Nine days before the treaty was signed, gold was discovered near San Francisco. It triggered a boom in capital that reshaped the United States. The gold rush accelerated westward settlement, financed new railroads, underpinned industrial growth and helped propel the US toward its eventual status as a superpower. Read more | 13 famous cowboys and gunslingers from the history of the American Wild West Had California remained Mexican, what might have happened? Gillingham says, “within two years, the gold production from San Francisco would’ve paid off the entire Mexican national debt.” Additionally, he explains that “Mexico had all these plans for national banks, development banks, for industrialisation, which never happened because the capital wasn't there.” He describes a tentative “alternative reality” in which Mexico, having kept hold of its territory, would have unlocked the capital to make those plans a reality. This is why Gillingham states that the loss to Mexico was more than territorial. “It wasn’t so much what was already there, as what would be there, that Mexico lost,” he says. “You’ve got a loss of national identity, you’ve got a loss of territory, you’ve got a loss of the future.” A pivotal nine days separated the discovery of gold from the signing of the treaty, marking the transition from war to a new phase of American expansion and the beginning of extraordinary growth. For Mexico, those same nine days encapsulated the loss of its land, and the loss of a potential future. Paul Gillingham was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation. Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story. Listen to all episodes now
Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it?
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had to battle to turn Buckingham Palace into the iconic royal residency that it serves as today
For most young married couples, moving into a new house represents an exciting new start. But for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, their newlywed bliss was marred by their cold, smelly, disorganised new home: Buckingham Palace. Today Buckingham Palace is synonymous with the British monarchy, but this was not always the case. “It’s only in the 20th century [that we get] Buckingham Palace as we know it today,” says Kate Williams, speaking on an episode of her HistoryExtra Academy series: Royal Residences: Secrets and Scandals. Victoria and Albert were the first monarchs to use it as their primary residence, and it took substantial work to turn it into a home fit for a queen. Before Victoria, Buckingham Palace wasn’t an official royal residence Buckingham House first passed into the royal family’s ownership in 1761. It was originally intended only to be a retreat for Queen Victoria’s grandmother, Queen Charlotte, who loved the house and raised 14 of her 15 children there, including Victoria’s father. It officially became known as a palace from the 1790s, but St James’ Palace continued to be the main royal residence. The royal family steadily began to spend more and more time at Buckingham Palace, though it would never become the official residence of George IV and William IV – Victoria’s uncles – either. In fact, William IV thought of it as “something of a white elephant” that he was “stuck with”, Williams says. He tried to pass it on by offering it as a new Parliament building when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, but MPs rejected it as too dingy. Nevertheless, work was slowly being done on the palace to expand and renovate it. The main phase of this work was finally finished in May 1837. By this time, St James’s Palace had become increasingly less desirable. The area around the main residence had been built up, so there was less privacy available for royals living there, and its Tudor architecture and fire damage meant it was no longer a comfortable place to live. So, after her coronation in 1837, Queen Victoria moved into the refreshed Buckingham Palace as her primary residence. The Palace wasn’t fit for purpose at first However, Buckingham Palace wasn’t thought of as a “suitable” residence for monarchs even once one was living there, Williams says. The palace was a labyrinth at this time, with lots of dark rooms and corridors with unclear uses. This meant that security was lax, and it proved easy for determined intruders to gain entry to the palace. “It wasn't really surprising that one of Victoria's fans and stalkers known as ‘the boy Jones’ managed to live in the palace for ages, eating a few crumbs of bread and drinking wine, until he was found under the queen's chair by the queen's maternity nurse,” Williams says. In addition to its lacklustre security, it was infamously cold, especially in the winter, because the chimneys smoked so much that the fires couldn’t be properly lit. Read more | Queen Victoria's unhappy childhood: life under the 'Kensington System' The sewer system wasn’t fit for purpose, either, and the palace was badly ventilated and smelly. Commissioners who inspected the palace soon after Victoria moved in found that the rooms weren’t cleaned or dusted often, and that the windows were kept closed, allowing unpleasant smells from decaying food and garden waste to spread. The house was also generally mismanaged, with staff badly organised and a general lack of discipline. For example, in great houses the housework was usually finished by 10am, but the domestic workers in Buckingham Palace didn’t finish their tasks until the early afternoon. “One team washed the outside of the windows, and another team washed the inside of the windows, so the windows were never perfectly clean,” Williams says, in one example of the inadequate standards. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-2193298415-a175ee7-e1766491233251.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This 1920 postcard shows Buckingham Palace with the Victoria Memorial dominating the foreground, a monument to Queen Victoria unveiled in 1911. Set amid early motor cars and pedestrians, the scene reflects how the late queen’s legacy continued to shape the ceremonial heart of London in the decades after her reign." title="Buckingham Palace Postcard" /> Prince Albert's renovations Clearly, there was a lot to be done to make Buckingham Palace fit for a queen, but Prince Albert was willing to take on the job when he arrived in England. “Albert, with his customary German efficiency, set about looking at the workings of the palace and he was very disappointed. It was a total disaster, so he looked into making the palaces much more efficient,” Williams says. Previously, different parts of household tasks were under the jurisdiction of different people, so that, for example, different people were in charge of the laying of a fire and the lighting of it, and six different people had to sign off on simple repairs like fixing a broken window. Prince Albert changed this. He gathered most of the responsibility for the upkeep of the palace into one role: the Master of the Household, who was to permanently live in the Palace. Steadily, with its flaws identified, the state of the building was wrested into better condition. But the royal couple still weren’t satisfied just yet. The royal couple continued to improve the Palace Victoria and Albert also moved Marble Arch from its original position just outside Buckingham Palace to where it sits today, in Hyde Park. There are rumours that they did this because the Arch wasn’t wide enough for Victoria’s state coach to pass through. But that’s proven to be untrue. Instead, it was moved to make room for Buckingham Palace to expand, because by 1847, it was seen as too small to comfortably house her courtiers and ever-expanding family. Read more | Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: what was their relationship like? This expansion was done by Edward Blore, an architect who had previously worked on Westminster Abbey and Lambeth Palace. He built the East Wing, which incorporates the front façade and the famous central balcony still used on important royal occasions. This balcony was Prince Albert’s suggestion, and has played an important role in allowing members of the royal family to be increasingly visible to their subjects ever since. Even once the East Wing was built, the palace wasn’t perfect. Victoria complained of a lack of a space relative to any of her present apartments, so work on a new ballroom began. That was completed in May 1856, nearly a century after Buckingham Palace first came under royal ownership. The history of Buckingham Palace serves as a reminder not to be too jealous of people with bigger houses than you: the bigger the house, the bigger the potential problems that come with it. Kate Williams was speaking on her HistoryExtra Academy series, Royal residences: secrets and scandals. All episodes are available now ad-free on the HistoryExtra app. Start watching today.
A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly went undercover to expose the shocking conditions inside an infamous Victorian-era asylum in New York
In autumn 1887, a 23-year-old woman checked into a temporary boarding house for working women in New York City. She immediately alarmed the other residents: she didn’t sleep for days, and insisted that she didn’t remember who she was. But for all that it looked as if she might be in need of psychiatric support, the woman wasn’t experiencing any mental ill health. She was, in fact, a journalist. And she was trying to get herself admitted to a psychiatric unit for a story. Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was working for the New York World newspaper, reporting on the conditions inside the infamous Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in NYC’s East River. The resulting article and book would shock America, and lead to reform. But it also helped to boost Bly’s reputation usher in a new style of sensationalist investigative reporting that would come to be known as ‘stunt journalism’. She became a “proper bona fide celebrity, in a way that almost no journalists of the 19th century were,” explains Dr Bob Nicholson, a historian of Victorian media and popular culture at Edge Hill University, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast about how the story unfolded. How Nellie Bly tricked psychiatric doctors Soon after starting to alarm her fellow boarding house residents, Bly was examined by the police, a judge and doctors at a hospital. “She had the challenge of trying to convince people that she was mad, but not to also terribly mistreat her. [Eventually] the judge sent her to a hospital in New York to be examined. And from there, they were absolutely convinced she's mad. Every doctor was 100 per cent certain,” Nicholson says. Read more | What was life like for 'ordinary' Victorians? “They then send her to Blackwell's Island, which is a small island in the river between Manhattan and Queens.” Her employer, the New York World, promised to retrieve her in ten days – meaning that “for those ten days, she was entirely at the mercy of the people of the asylum,” Nicholson says. Bly dropped the ‘mad’ act once she arrived at the asylum, but the staff just assumed that her normal behaviours were symptoms of insanity. “She can't tell them, ‘I am a journalist and I'm doing all this for a story,’ because that sounds like the maddest thing you could possibly say,” Nicholson points out. With her performance now behind her, it became clear to Bly that she had come upon a big story. “It’s absolutely ridden with abuse, with terrible treatment of patients,” Nicholson says. “Nurses and attendants that looked after them day-to-day were particularly abusive. They would beat and choke patients, they would refuse them food, they would tease them and goad them. They wouldn't give them enough clothes to keep warm.” Bly also “described in vivid detail the terrible food she would have to eat, the times that she would be plunged into an ice-cold bath and scrubbed by one of the other patients, and then placed into just a wet nightgown to sleep in an ice-cold cell,” he says. Read more | Could you survive in the vicious Gilded Age? Here are the original influencer's secrets to success While rumours had been circulating about the terrible conditions on Blackwell’s Island, no one had corroborated them until Bly was able to actually see – and experience – them for herself. “The little details in there really hammer home the horror of it. It's an incredibly powerful expose that she writes when she gets out,” Nicholson says. Reform to New York City’s mental health treatment The story was published in two parts, with the first ending in a cliffhanger as Bly boards the boat to the asylum, and then later as a book titled Ten Days in a Mad-house. It piqued people’s curiosity, and they were astonished by what she had managed to do. There was also a “journalistic frenzy” around the story, Nicholson says, because lots of papers had unwittingly reported on Bly’s admission to the asylum at the start. The New York Times had called her a “mysterious waif,” and other papers wrote about the unknown attractive girl who had appeared with no knowledge of who she was. “She had fooled the journalists, and they'd written all these reports about her. So, one of the first reactions from the other papers who've been duped is embarrassment,” Nicholson says. “They desperately then try to get in first, before her next instalment comes out a week later.” As well as causing a sensation, the buzz around the story led to real change in the way the facility was run. “The conditions in the asylum that she uncovers are so shocking and horrifying to people, that it is enough to put pressure on the government to invest more money in the asylums to make sure that they are reformed,” Nicholson says. The reforms included a new requirement for female physicians and ‘properly trained attendants’ to be present at patient assessments, new sanitation regulations, and the firing of abusive staff members. Life in Victorian Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | This six-week course covers everything you need to know about Victorian Britain, guided by historian Ruth Goodman and filmed on location at Black Country Living Museum. Explore the course now Nellie Bly was a pioneer of a new style of journalism Bly’s journalism created change in real people’s lives – but Nicholson thinks that it wasn’t just the coverage that allowed this change to happen. It was her unique approach to the story that gave it so much power. “Ultimately what makes that story so compelling is not just what she finds, it's her narrative. We really become fascinated with her and with her journey. And the jeopardy of going undercover becomes just as important as anything else,” he says. Other papers soon followed suit and a new trend in journalism arose. Ten Days in a Mad-house became an early example of investigative journalism with a performative element, designed to attract more attention. Read more | She exposed the horrors of Britain’s secret concentration camps – so why was she demonised? “The vast majority of journalists in the 19th century would have been completely anonymous,” Nicholson says. Bly’s story “broke the mould of what a conventional journalist would do”. But it wasn’t just the experiential element of her reporting. Bly also broke the mould as a female journalist. She wasn’t the first or only woman working as a journalist at the time, but others were mostly confined to covering subject matter like weddings, fashion, and society. Bly showed that women were capable of much more, and inspired other young women to become stunt journalists in the 1880s, Nicholson says. “She threw herself into absolutely everything, whether it was learning to fence or to be a chorus girl, being admitted to a ‘madhouse’, or reporting on a war. In the end, she ticks off almost every aspect of journalism. All the things that people told her a woman couldn't do, she did.” Bob Nicholson was speaking to Kev Lochun on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
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
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 account of her murder of elderly Caroline Walsh (Image by the Wellcome Collection)" /> On 19 August 1831, Caroline moved into the small attic room occupied by the Cook family – Elizabeth, Edward and their 12-year-old son Ned – at 7 Goodman’s Yard. With only one bed and a small table, Caroline was expected to sleep on the floor in the corner of the room. The next morning, when Ann came to check on her grandmother, Caroline was nowhere to be seen. Missing, presumed dead After searching the streets, poorhouses, hospitals and prisons for her grandmother, Ann Buton became worried, and told the police about her suspicions. But it wasn’t until October that an officer launched an investigation and arrested all three members of the Cook family. Elizabeth appeared unfazed. “With all your trouble,” she remarked, “you have not found the old woman’s body.” Elizabeth’s son, Ned, soon explained why. He told the court that on 19 August, soon after Caroline Walsh had gone to bed, his mother had suffocated the old lady. His father had been leaning out of the window at the time. Elizabeth then “lifted [the body] off the bed herself” and carried it downstairs. The next morning, Ned saw a sack in the cellar, with “partly black and partly grey” hair poking out of the top. That evening, between 11pm and midnight, Ned watched his mother carrying the sack down Goodman’s Yard. “She told me,” he continued, “that she took the body to the London Hospital.” Read more | From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain Perhaps unsurprisingly, the surgeons at the hospital denied ever having received a body from Elizabeth Ross, but the rag sellers in the market testified that she had sold them distinctive items of clothing that belonged to Caroline Walsh. Elizabeth was convicted of murder (Edward was acquitted) and was hanged on 9 January 1832. But how reliable was the evidence of a 12-year-old boy? Could Elizabeth have carried a body by herself all the way from Goodman’s Yard in Aldgate to the London Hospital in Whitechapel? In the moral panic about bodysnatching that had erupted in the early 1830s, was Elizabeth – already a woman with a bad reputation – accused and convicted of a crime she did not commit? Or does her case suggest that we need to look more closely at female involvement in body snatching? 2. Matricide – or a terrible mishap? Kitty Newton, who grew up in a troubled family, was accused of murdering her mother – but it may have been a tragic accident At 2am on 5 December 1848, in a grand house on the banks of the river Severn in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, servant Mary Corfield woke to the smell of smoke and the sound of her disabled master, Mr Dyer, crying out. Mary rushed downstairs and out of the house to call for help. Neighbours quickly came to the aid of Mr Dyer, while Mary found evidence of a fire in the kitchen – a half-burned sofa and pillows, wet sheets, and oil on the floor. The previous evening, Ann Newton – mother of the housekeeper, Kitty Newton – had decided to stay the night and sleep in the kitchen. Her burned body was found lying face down in an outbuilding on the property. The police were called, and Kitty was arrested, accused of murdering her mother. An inquest was quickly convened and witnesses called. Mary Corfield claimed that Kitty and Ann had had a turbulent relationship. When Ann visited Kitty, mother and daughter would drink and quarrel, sometimes violently. On one occasion, Mary said, Kitty had beaten Ann with a hand-whip so severely that pieces of flesh were torn from Ann’s arms and a doctor had to be called. Kitty’s uncle, Ann’s brother, suggested that his niece might have killed his sister to get her hands on an inheritance. He reported that on one occasion, when he spoke to Kitty about ill-treating her mother, she replied: “I should like to see the d*** old bitch dead and cut in quarters! She has lived too long, and has kept me out of my money till the hairs of my head are got grey!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-2227135159-e8bcfff-e1766488988940.jpg" width="1500" height="995" alt="A sketch of a woman in a long black dress and top hat leaning against the rail of a box in court, with a large crowd behind her" title="A Victorian illustration of a woman in a courtroom dock. When Kitty Newton was accused of murdering her mother, a botched post-mortem helped secure a not guilty verdict (Image by Getty Images)" /> Shamed and condemned Was Kitty’s uncle telling the truth? As the newspapers revealed, hers was a troubled family. Another uncle had been convicted and hanged for beating his pregnant wife to death. Kitty’s parents had had an unhappy and violent marriage. And as a teenager, Kitty had been sent to work as a housekeeper for a third uncle, and became pregnant with his child. While the child was accepted by the family, Kitty was shamed and condemned – by her own mother, too. However, other witnesses at the inquest testified that Kitty showed great care towards her mother. The local curate suggested that Ann “was in a troubled and unhappy condition, and wished to die”. Two medical men criticised the post-mortem examination, which failed to examine Ann’s larynx or trachea, making it impossible to determine the true cause of death. The inquest jury failed to reach a consensus and, after enduring three criminal trials and spending 15 months in prison, Kitty was found not guilty and set free. She moved into a small cottage in Bridgnorth, left to her by Mr Dyer who had died while she was awaiting trial, and lived off the inheritance from her mother. Was Kitty a greedy, murderous daughter? Or had Ann accidentally (or deliberately) set fire to herself on that fateful night? After all, Victorian kitchens, which combined naked flames with flammable liquids, could be dangerous places. We may never know. 3. Pathological lies or a cry for help? Accused of murder, Jessie McLachlan issued a string of contradictory statements – but proof of her guilt remained elusive On 7 July 1862, John Fleming and his son arrived home at 17 Sandyford Place, Glasgow, after spending the weekend at the family’s summer house on the Firth of Clyde. The two men were greeted at the door by John’s father, James, an old man in his eighties who had decided to forgo the family holiday. But opening the door was the job of the servant, Jessie McPherson. Where was she? James said that he had not seen Jessie since Friday night, and that her door was locked. The three men went to investigate. John found a key and opened the door to Jessie’s bedroom, where they found her dead body. Her head had been smashed in, she was naked from the waist down, and there were defensive wounds on her hands. Clothes and sheets were soaked in blood, and someone had attempted to wash the kitchen floor. A post-mortem concluded that Jessie’s injuries pointed “to a female or a weak man as having inflicted them”. Further investigation revealed that Jessie’s best clothes and some of the Flemings’ silverware were missing. Evidence on a plate The police arrested James Fleming on suspicion of murder, but their attention was soon drawn in a different direction. A pawnbroker claimed that a woman had sold him some plate that matched the description of the silverware taken from the Flemings’ house. That woman was 28-year-old Jessie McLachlan, a former servant of the Flemings and a friend of Jessie McPherson, who had married a seaman and had a child. McLachlan was arrested and brought in for questioning. Over the course of a week or so, she gave three statements in response to the discovery of new evidence linking her to the crime. Each contained lies and contradictions. James Fleming was released, and McLachlan was indicted for murder. At her trial between 17 and 20 September, McLachlan’s legal counsel argued that the prosecution could not prove that McLachlan had been at Sandyford Place on the fateful weekend. But, despite further compelling evidence – including some from friends of McPherson who claimed that James Fleming was sexually harassing his servant – it was a losing battle. The judge encouraged the jury to return a guilty verdict – which they did, after deliberating for just 15 minutes. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang McLachlan responded by delivering yet another statement, which she had written while awaiting trial – though her lawyers had refused to use it in her defence. McLachlan admitted that she had been at Sandyford Place on the night when McPherson was killed – but she claimed that James had murdered McPherson after the latter rejected his sexual advances. James then secured McLachlan’s silence with a thinly veiled threat: “Don’t be feart, only if you tell you know about her death, you will be taken in for it as well as I… My life is in your power, and yours is in my power.” McLachlan’s statement was enough to cast doubt over her conviction, trigger an inquiry and save her from the gallows. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she served 15 years behind bars. James Fleming , meanwhile, lived out his days as a free man. There is a further twist in this tale. McLachlan gave a fifth statement to her lawyer, in which she confessed to the murder. It was quickly retracted, but the question remains: was this an admission of guilt? Or a cry from a woman desperate to be heard, knowing that she would likely never see her young child again, and that her voice would be suppressed throughout a long prison sentence for a crime she did not commit? 4. Could a woman commit brutal murder? After a mother and baby were slaughtered, ample evidence pointed to a love rival, Mary Pearcey, as the culprit – but many couldn’t believe that a woman might be capable of such a vicious crime On the evening of 24 October 1890, the body of a brutally murdered woman was discovered behind a row of newly built houses in Belsize Park, London. Her head was “almost entirely severed from the body” and her skull, pierced in several places, had suffered “terrible blows from some penetrating instrument”. Newspapers declared that the victim must be a prostitute, the killer must be a man, and the murder could be the work of Jack the Ripper, who had not long ago terrorised the streets of the capital. They were wrong on all three counts. The body was identified next morning as Phoebe Hogg, a 31-year-old mother. She had last been seen on the afternoon of the discovery leaving the home she shared with her husband, Frank, with her 18-month-old baby, Tiggy. Her pram, covered with blood, had been found a mile and a half from Phoebe’s body. On 26 October, Tiggy’s body was found in some nettles near Finchley Road. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/BAL11978716webready-cabdf28-e1766489231180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A sketch of a crime scene, with a woman killing another woman and a baby, with an upturned pram" title="The murder of Phoebe Hogg and her baby Tiggy by Mary Pearcey, as imagined in The Illustrated Police News. Tiggy’s pram (right) remains on display in Madame Tussauds wax museum, London (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> A search of the Hoggs’ home revealed in Frank’s coat pocket a key to the lodgings of a family friend, 24-year-old Mary Pearcey. The police decided to visit the property. Opening the door, they discovered a horrific scene: blood was splattered on the walls, ceiling and floor, and two kitchen windowpanes had been smashed. They found lace curtains, clothing, a poker and a big knife all covered in blood, and a button from Phoebe’s jacket. Mary claimed that she had been killing mice. The police arrested her for murder. Read more | Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools Suspicious minds The public could not believe that a woman had committed such a brutal crime, or even possessed the physical strength to dispose of the bodies. Suspicion continued to swirl around Frank, especially when it was discovered that he and Mary were lovers. Did he want to get rid of his wife to be with Mary? Yet Frank had an alibi for the time of the murder, and there was no evidence that he had encouraged or helped Mary to kill his wife. A neighbour claimed that she had seen Mary, alone, pushing a heavily loaded pram along the street an hour before Phoebe’s body was found. Mary admitted that she had invited Phoebe and Tiggy to tea that afternoon, but denied that she had killed them. “I would not do such a dreadful thing,” she declared, adding: “I would not hurt anyone.” On 3 December 1890, Mary was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A plea for clemency on the grounds of insanity failed, and she was hanged at Newgate Prison on 23 December. She begged Frank to visit her before her execution. He had already left London – but not before he had sold Tiggy’s pram to Madame Tussauds wax museum in Marylebone Road. There it remains on display in the infamous Chamber of Horrors – a reminder that perhaps women have the potential to be killers just as brutal as men. This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Meet the reluctant US president who accidentally changed American political norms forever
In an era when candidates were expected to remain silent, detached and above the chase for votes, James Garfield’s improvised presidential campaign in the late 19th century transformed the race for the highest office in the USA
When James A Garfield reluctantly accepted the Republican nomination for president in June 1880, he stepped into a fraught political culture that was governed by strict codes of restraint. Put simply, in the late 19th century, a presidential candidate wasn’t meant to appear eager for the job. Publicly courting votes was distasteful, demeaning, and incompatible with the dignity of the office. As biographer CW Goodyear puts it, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, the prevailing view was that “if you are interested in the job, it’s not for you.” The job of actively campaigning was delegated to party operatives, loyal newspapers and travelling surrogates. The candidate was supposed to stay out of public view while conveying lofty neutrality. On one level, that was a culture that suited Garfield. He was a man who, to all appearances, never intended to become the Republican party’s presidential nominee, let alone the actual president. So how did he – who was both dignified and reluctant – end up being the man who dismantled such norms of dignified reluctance? It feels like an irony, and yet, as Goodyear explains, Garfield’s election campaign of 1880 did indeed mark a turning point that upended the long-standing taboo against candidates speaking directly to voters. It changed campaign culture forever. American presidential ideals in the 19th century “It was seen as being desperate and pathetic for a presidential candidate to go rally voters. That was seen as being beneath the office,” explains Goodyear, setting out the attitudes that prevailed as the 1880 presidential election loomed. But where had that notion come from? Read more | The 5 most notorious presidents in US history The expectation that candidates should remain silent was rooted in early republican ideals inherited from the late 18th century, when the American colonies had won their independence from Britain and forged the United States of America. The Founding Fathers had worried that unrestrained electioneering might debase public life and turn politics into petty spectacle. As the USA expanded, the principle endured: it was parties that mobilised voters, while candidates remained above the fray. It was this culture that Garfield – a former Union general, lawyer, minister and congressman – was suddenly forced into. In a divided Republican party, he was a compromise nominee who ostensibly hadn’t sought, or expected, the nomination. Upon being nominated at the 1880 Republican National Convention, he returned immediately to his “bucolic home life at his farm” in Mentor, Ohio, where he lived with his wife Lucretia Garfield and their children, to observe those rules of sober political propriety. How Garfield’s farm became an unexpected political stage Garfield was looking to “flee” from the public eye by returning home, says Goodyear. Instead, his farm became the focus of national attention. Spurred on by new railway expansion and mass political participation, voters saw a rare opportunity to meet a potential president face-to-face. Goodyear describes how it was an opportunity for marginalised groups in particular, with “legions of black voters, wannabe women voters – who didn’t have the right to vote yet – and industrial groups” soon turning up at Garfield’s door, looking to catch a glimpse of this prospective leader. Read more | Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president? This placed Garfield in an awkward position. Addressing them risked violating the taboo against campaigning directly to voters. But refusing to greet visitors would appear cold and inhospitable. Clearly that wouldn’t do. Backed into a corner, Garfield chose courtesy. He fed his visitors and spoke with them. And, in doing so, inadvertently invented a new kind of political campaign. A revolutionary presidential campaign The “front porch campaign”, as it later became known, evolved almost organically. “Garfield goes out onto his front porch, and he gives all these impromptu speeches to these visitors,” says Goodyear. These were informal and conversational, in sharp contrast to the scripted, lofty communication that previously defined presidential races. For many Americans, this was the first time they had heard a presidential candidate address national issues directly. Newspapers reprinted his remarks, and political operatives recognised that Garfield had found a way to engage voters without appearing to pursue them. “It was seen as being very revolutionary, and it was not uncontroversial,” says Goodyear. Read more | Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next “But Garfield was able to get around this by insisting that, ‘I'm not going out to talk to these people. I'm not asking them to vote for me. They are knocking on my front door. What am I to do? Just shut the door and put guards out and get the people to get away from me?’” The political establishment was divided. Senior Republicans debated how much visibility Garfield could risk without undermining the decorum of the office. Democrat-backing newspapers accused him of encouraging spectacle. Summing up the reaction of Garfield’s own party, Goodyear explains how one senior Republican, Senator James Blaine, who went on to be Garfield's Secretary of State, would later write and say: “Until this point in history, to have a presidential candidate comment on current events and issues, and his own opinions on them, was seen as being demeaning, and beneath the office.” Without intending to, Garfield had just changed that norm. And with that change, the expectations of presidential campaigning had shifted too. Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story. Listen to all episodes now Why Garfield’s approach succeeded Garfield’s personal qualities made the experiment work. A trained orator and former college professor, he could speak fluently and without notes, adjusting his tone to suit his shifting audience of farmers, industrial workers, veterans and reform groups. And crucially, because he never left Mentor, he could credibly claim he was not campaigning in the traditional sense. In the end, it helped Garfield win the presidency, alongside his nominee for vice-president, Chester Arthur. Garfield’s presidency was brief; he served only a few months before being shot by the deluded assassin Charles Guiteau. The president died from infection in September 1881. Read more | 6 shocking presidential scandals that rocked the White House But his unintentional ‘front porch’ campaign format became an accepted political strategy. In 1896, Republican nominee William McKinley would perfect it, orchestrating a highly choreographed version from his own home in Canton, Ohio. Through the early 20th century, the distance between presidential candidates and voters continued to shrink. Train tours, national speaking circuits, radio broadcasts, and television debates all built on the same principle: that presidential hopefuls should directly persuade and speak to the electorate. In doing so, the presidential role has gradually evolved and has since been expected to be a more partisan figure than the Founding Fathers had envisioned. Ultimately, Garfield’s campaign wasn’t just the “first front porch campaign in American history,” says Goodyear. It was “one of the first active presidential campaigns in US history.” CW Goodyear was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Ben Machell discusses the history of ghost hunting
A spooky story during the Christmas season has become traditional – and the modern ghost story was invented by the Victorians, who embraced the supernatural and tried to understand it. Ben Machell has investigated the history of ghost hunting and supernatural investigations since the mid-19th century for his new book, Chasing the Dark, and in this episode David Musgrove talks to Ben about the history of our passion for the paranormal.
Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France
The wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army captain in France in the late 19th century exposed antisemitism and virulent nationalism – but also, as Mike Rapport reveals, sparked a flood of ‘fake news’ that presaged the worst of the modern media landscape
In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bottle of rum, and killed himself. This desperate act was a pivotal moment in one of the best-known causes celebres in modern history: the Dreyfus Affair. The story of Henry’s suicide, following his arrest for forging a document in the controversial case, was co-opted by the nationalist rightwing media as part of a tidal wave of coverage that threatened to destabilise French democracy and public trust in the Republic. The background is well known today. In September 1894, Henry, a counter-espionage officer, had uncovered evidence of a mole within French military intelligence. A cleaner working in the German embassy (and in Henry’s pay) had found a memorandum, since dubbed the ‘bordereau’, written by an officer in the French General Staff revealing military secrets. The handwriting was identified as that of Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain then working in the War Ministry, who was arrested, court-martialled, publicly degraded and hauled off to solitary confinement on the notoriously harsh penal colony of Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. But the army had the wrong man. Contradictions and irregularities in the case soon began to appear. In August 1896, the new head of military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, was examining more papers stolen from the German embassy. The handwriting on one was identical to that in the bordereau used to convict Dreyfus – but the signature was that of Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a dissipated, debt-ridden, disreputable officer who had been selling secrets to the Germans for two years. Dreyfus, Picquart realised, was innocent. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/BAL1756949-CMYKWeb-Ready-2c9d689.jpg" width="3683" height="2456" alt="An engraving shows a man lying dead on the floor, while a police officer kneels over him. Another police officer stands by his head, and two more officers are entering the room in the background" title="An engraving depicts the discovery of the suicide of Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry following his arrest for forging a letter incriminating Dreyfus. Some thought his crime justifiable (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Ignoring the errors Even after this discovery, Dreyfus remained incarcerated for years longer because government officials, the army and large segments of public opinion refused to accept that a terrible error had been made. In part this was a result of the desire to maintain national security by authorities who were keen to avoid demoralising the army just as France secured a military alliance with the Russian empire, and amid heightened tensions with Germany following its annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region from France in 1871. But it was also due to the fact that Dreyfus was from Alsace, and Jewish – at a time when a virulent strain of antisemitism based on ‘scientific’ racism had emerged, and as antisemites of different political persuasions associated Jews with either socialism or capitalism. Read more | Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies These motives also played on a deeper division that had riven French society since 1789. There were those who, like Dreyfus himself, embraced the principles of the Revolution and its legacy as embodied in the Third Republic, founded in 1870. These included secularism, parliamentary democracy, civil equality and a world view exulting in science and human reason. Adherents of this strong current within French political culture generally became ‘Dreyfusards’ who supported the officer’s innocence. Their opponents saw 1789 as a fatal breach with France’s true historical destiny: Catholic, hierarchical and monarchical. More recently, this traditional conservatism had been joined by a new form of rightwing ideology promising social reform but which was also nationalist, authoritarian, antisemitic. Many of those with such views became ‘anti-Dreyfusard’, opposed to revisiting the case. These flames were stoked by a virulently partisan newspaper press that played a pivotal role in the battle for public opinion. Print media had experienced a boom stimulated by more rapid communications, the introduction of photographs into newspapers, an expansion in advertising, and new forms of printing technology that made periodicals quicker and cheaper to produce and more widely available. At that time, France had a particularly vibrant press. Free, compulsory and universal primary education for boys and girls from the early 1880s encouraged literacy, and a press law enacted in 1881 lifted almost all restrictions on what could be published, although this was rolled back in 1893 and 1894 after a spate of anarchist bombings. Journalists and publishers could be sued for slander, but cases were rarely successful. Between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the number of periodical titles mushroomed by 250 per cent. These publications included broadsheets and tabloid newspapers representing the whole range of political opinions from the radical left to the extreme right. Yet within this vibrant ecosystem of print lurked a danger that remains familiar in our age of social media, online news and artificial intelligence. It was all too easy to spread what we now call ‘fake news’ – misinformation (falsehoods spread unintentionally), disinformation (fabrications aimed at manipulating readers politically and socially) and malinformation (deception based on some truth, but twisted in such a way as to deceive). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1404448124cmykWeb-Ready-a0c4306.jpg" width="2374" height="1582" alt="A black and white photograph of a man wearing military uniform, including a hat with "74" written on the front. He has a large, heavy moustache" title="Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the officer who really wrote the treasonous memorandum attributed to Dreyfus. He was acquitted by a tribunal in 1898 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fake news During the Dreyfus Affair, the newspaper press was infused with ‘fake news’. Not for the last time, the episode exposed the friction between free speech on the one hand and, on the other hand, the challenges that arise when people of bad faith abuse that freedom, spreading falsehoods to manipulate public opinion, demonise certain groups of people, or undermine faith in the rule of law and democratic government. The Dreyfus case sparked a truly explosive public controversy after Walsin Esterhazy was finally tried – and acquitted with unseemly haste – by a military court in January 1898. On 13 January, novelist Émile Zola published J’Accuse…!, an open letter to the president of the Republic, in L’Aurore newspaper. He accused the government and army of committing a gross injustice and of conspiring to cover up the truth. He specifically highlighted and decried the antisemitism, militarism and authoritarianism behind the falsehoods: “It is a crime to lead public opinion astray,” Zola wrote, “to manipulate it for a death-dealing purpose and pervert it to the point of delirium. It is a crime to poison the minds of the humble, ordinary people, to whip reactionary and intolerant passions into a frenzy while sheltering behind the odious bastion of antisemitism… It is a crime to play on patriotism to further the aims of hatred.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-90758187cmykWeb-Ready-51ffbc8.jpg" width="2642" height="1761" alt="A yellow newspaper page with the headline "J'accuse!" written across the top" title="Émile Zola’s open letter to the president of the Republic, accusing the army and government of a cover-up in the Dreyfus Affair, exposed deep rifts in French society (Image by Getty Images)" /> Following Zola’s outburst, the Dreyfus Affair erupted into a full-scale public storm. Except on rare occasions, newspapers tended to reinforce the beliefs of their readership rather than challenge them with facts. Giving readers what they wanted to hear was partly driven by economics: the conservative Le Figaro, for example, had stopped publishing Zola’s articles towards the end of 1897 after he openly embraced the Dreyfusard cause, which hurt sales of the newspaper. Yet much of the fake news had an even more insidious purpose. Anti-Dreyfusard papers fuelled nationalist prejudices by targeting Jews; claimed to be defending the ‘honour’ of the army; and railed against the ‘unpatriotic’ manoeuvres of the Dreyfusards – all as a means of galvanising support for the assorted authoritarians, monarchists, nationalists and antisemites who loathed the Republic. It was not that the Dreyfusards were innocent of spreading fake news. Although much of what Zola wrote in J’Accuse…! turned out to be accurate, he did not get everything right, as he himself appeared to admit when he finished by saying that he would willingly submit to prosecution for defamation under the 1881 Press Law. Zola did, in fact, face prosecution in 1898, avoiding imprisonment only by slipping away in June to England and living there in exile for a year. Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history Even some leftwing Dreyfusard newspapers tended to casually use the antisemitic trope of the Jew as capitalist to explain popular hostility against Jews. Anti-Dreyfusard publications saw Jews, socialists and leftwing republicans as a ‘Syndicate of Treason’ (as the vitriolic journalist Henri Rochefort put it). However, the Dreyfusard press was prone to sharing conspiracy theories of its own, seeing its opponents as part of an interwoven plot involving the Catholic church and the nationalists, aiming to destroy the Republic and the inheritance of 1789. Yet the anti-Dreyfusard press had most of the running: of the 55 dailies published at the time, only eight came out as Dreyfusard from February 1898, almost all of them with relatively low circulation numbers. The media was dominated by anti-Dreyfusard titles, which had an almost open field in which to bombard readers with a swirl of half-truths and outright lies, stoking prejudices and stirring up fears. Forgiveable forgery One of the most egregious moments came in the wake of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry’s death. After his colleague, Picquart, had exposed Esterhazy as the real traitor in 1896, Henry had tried to bolster the case against Dreyfus by forging a letter that ‘proved’ his guilt, introducing it into the dossier of evidence. The ruse was successful until, as the pressure mounted over the course of 1898, the government investigated and discovered that forgery, leading to Henry’s arrest and suicide. For anti-Dreyfusard journalists, Henry’s crime was forgiveable: it was ‘patriotic’ because it served a higher cause – the security of the nation. Dreyfus was guilty anyway, they claimed; and even if he were innocent, those who sought to clear his name were traitors working for Germany. The virulently nationalist La Patrie accused Zola of doing untold harm to the army: “And since that day, the damage has surged in like a torrent, roared like a tempest. Who has not recognised in this tactic the workings of Bismarckian [ie German] politics?” The idea that Henry was a martyr to the cause of patriotism gained traction when the explicitly and graphically antisemitic La Libre Parole opened a subscription for the Lieutenant-Colonel’s widow, Berthe, which received no fewer than 25,000 donations. The newspaper published the many antisemitic and anti-republican messages sent along with the money. La Libre Parole means ‘Free Speech’, making it a case study for how prejudice and anti-democratic forces cloak themselves in the very freedoms that they seek to destroy or to deny to others. The Dreyfus case was – rightly or wrongly – seen as connected with both national security and the country’s future, so both sides entrenched themselves deeply within their positions. The more that the problems with Dreyfus’s conviction trickled out, the more the anti-Dreyfusards reinvigorated strategies that rested less on facts than on what is today called ‘gaslighting’ and on deflection, both of which involved stoking prejudices and demeaning opponents. Gaslighting, by which the perpetrator seeks to cast doubt on the truth, was deployed by Édouard Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole, who in June 1898 assured his readers that Dreyfusards were merely “a clutch of cosmopolitans who always talk of pieces of paper and documents but never prove anything” – the term ‘cosmopolitan’ being a dog-whistle term denoting unpatriotic or Jewish people. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/RV185-14cmykWeb-Ready-bfe91fd.jpg" width="2464" height="1643" alt="The top image shows a man in a suit with a moustache sitting at a desk and looking to the right. The bottom image shows a bearded man wearing glasses attached to a string, looking directly into the camera" title="Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès (top) entreated readers to consider national security above the facts of the miscarriage of justice, in contrast with the moral arguments of Dreyfusard Émile Zola (Images by TopFoto and Getty Images)" /> Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès made a more sophisticated use of gaslighting. Nothing in the Dreyfus Affair was demonstrably true, he argued in Le Journal in February 1898, so “how do you intend… to undertake to solve the problem when you do not have all the data?” he demanded of the Dreyfusards. Barrès’ purpose was to cast doubt on the significance of the few facts that were, at that point, already public knowledge. He took this further by suggesting that there are some truths that are “foreign to individual reason”, and that national circumstances and interests were the true barometer of what was just and true. “It is necessary to judge things in the relative,” Barrès argued, opening the way for his readership to be secure in their prejudices – because for them the army’s honour and national security were more important than the facts of any miscarriage of justice. Anti-Dreyfusard newspapers tried in various ways to deflect their readers’ attention away from the question of the convicted man’s innocence and onto other targets. This was a strategy behind the argument that Henry’s forgery was ‘patriotic’: his crime was minor compared to the real danger, which would be the victory of the Dreyfusards, who were no better than traitors. La Patrie proclaimed in September 1898: “Let us leave those cosmopolitans from Frankfurt to howl with joy over the tomb of that modest child of French soil [Henry]… Let us turn away with disgust from the spectacle of the odious triumph of the worst enemies of the army and of the country.” In that one sentence, the newspaper connected the Dreyfusards with treason, with Germany and Jews (‘cosmopolitans’), and with the ignominy of defeat – ‘Frankfurt’ being a reference to the humiliating peace treaty with Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Demeaning caricatures At the same time, the anti-Dreyfusard press demeaned their opponents, caricaturing them as effeminate wimps, sexually sterile and highly strung, and contrasted them with the muscular, virile masculinity of the army officers whom they were accused of attacking. Zola was frequently depicted with simian characteristics: hairy, fat, thick-lipped. Dreyfus and other Jewish figures were ascribed the whole range of antisemitic tropes. La Libre Parole compared the ‘French’ femininity of Henry’s widow, Berthe, with the Jewish Dreyfusard Joseph Reinach, who was “puffy, swarthy, sweaty, stomach bulging”. For some, it did not even matter that Dreyfus was innocent: he was Jewish, so for the nationalists the greater ‘truth’ was that he could never be French. The process of gaslighting and deflection combined to stoke prejudices and popular fears, fogging out the original question of Dreyfus’s innocence. Read more | How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution Yet a denouement was eventually reached. In February 1899, President Félix Faure – who opposed reopening Dreyfus’s case – died of a brain haemorrhage. He was succeeded by a Dreyfusard, Émile Loubet, whose election by parliament prompted an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Ligue des Patriotes and the Ligue antisémitique, who provided the street muscle of the anti-Dreyfusard movement. In June, the appeals court quashed Dreyfus’s conviction and ordered a retrial, which took place in August and September 1899 in Rennes – Paris being deemed too dangerous. Shockingly, the military tribunal again found the captain guilty. President Loubet issued a formal pardon, but Dreyfus was not officially cleared until 1906. He returned to the army, serving with merit in the First World War. The Dreyfus Affair showed how, when the stakes were high and when divisions ran deep, a torrent of half-truths, lies, deflection, the stoking of fear and prejudices, and appeals to ‘patriotism’ made it difficult for citizens to make informed decisions. It also demonstrated that many citizens were content to have their prejudices reaffirmed rather than critically examined. This is why Barrès’ argument that the nation had needs that were above reason and truth was so corrosive to democratic politics. The principle that truth, justice and legality could be judged only according to national interests allowed readers to indulge in a kind of relativism that justified falsehoods and injustice in pursuit of a conception of France that excluded groups who were the bogeymen of the nationalist right: Jews, foreigners, Protestants, Freemasons, socialists and others. It also exposed the spiky question that every democracy faces when freedom of expression becomes a means of undermining confidence and trust in its institutions: how to defend itself without infringing the very liberties that are its essence. Ultimately, the lesson of the Dreyfus Affair is that, in an age of mass media, citizens not only need to be equipped to make the honest effort to assess critically their sources of information and to examine their positions with verifiable evidence: they have to be willing to do so. In December 1898, L’Aurore understood that this was essential to the survival of democracy: “It is for citizens to inform themselves, to think, to use their will; it is for them to reform their morals, to no longer let themselves be taken for fools or as things to be juggled with and to emancipate themselves, not by force, but by ideas.” We need, the newspaper concluded, to “enlighten [our] brains, not slice them open!” Mike Rapport is reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a grieving nation turned towards spiritualism in the hope of seeing the dead once more. Facilitated by new technologies like photography, some unscrupulous fraudsters stepped in to manipulate the vulnerable
In the decades after the American Civil War ended in 1865, the United States was a nation still grappling with its own grief. As many as 750,000 people had died in the conflict as they fought their own countrymen. It was a scale of loss unprecedented since the inception of the United States as an independent nation. Families were torn apart, as many husbands, sons and fathers had died on American battlefields. Of course, with the widespread loss, many people were struggling to come to terms with their grief, which in turn created a vulnerability. And, for some less scrupulous individuals, that uncertainty and collective sadness presented a new opportunity for fame and wealth. Enter William Mumler, a so-called spirit photographer. Born in 1832, Mumler later became a fraudster who claimed to be able to reunite people with their dead loved ones via his photography. Mumler was only a small part of a quasi-religious movement, which, in the wake of the war, became a subject of fascination. “It was in the middle of the 19th century that ghost-hunting became a cultural obsession,” explains Alice Vernon, author and academic at Aberystwyth University, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “It swept across America as this new pseudo-scientific religion called spiritualism.” The rise of spiritualism was inseparable, says Vernon, from this wave of collective mourning. Science and spiritualism in the 19th century The idea of spiritualism offered many people a kind of conceptual comfort, and new technologies, including photography, were giving it a seemingly evidential backbone. “I think the reason why spirit photography became so popular at that moment,” Vernon says, “was because photography was a fairly new innovation, and it was something that people didn’t really understand.” Early photographs were incredibly precious. So when spiritualists claimed that cameras could record the unseen world – as well as the images of the dead – many saw it as a logical extension of what the technology was already offering. Read more | When a Victorian ghost hunter investigated Britain’s most haunted house, this is what he found The result was a wave of ‘spirit photographers’, who offered people a chance to be photographed beside the ghost of a dead loved one. Of course, it was all trickery, relying on the public’s lack of understanding of how photography worked. But some early photographers were able to master the chemistry of exposure, and worked on overlaying negatives, adjusting lighting and controlling depth of field – all to create convincing ‘ghosts’. Some of the resulting “ghost images” look crude today: translucent faces, faint white smears, or “a paper ghost behind them”, as Vernon describes. But in an age before image manipulation was common knowledge, such details were persuasive. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-515449646-1-cd96ac2-e1763739871308.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="President Abraham Lincoln visits General George B. McClellan at his headquarters near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on 3 October 1862—just weeks after the Battle of Antietam. Hoping to urge McClellan to press his advantage against Robert E. Lee, Lincoln found the general unwilling to act, a decision that soon cost McClellan his command. The photograph gathers key Union figures of the moment, capturing a pivotal clash of leadership in the midst of the Civil War." title="Lincoln Visits Civil War Headquarters" /> William Mumler and the business of grief The greatest example of the impact of spirit photography came from the hands of William Mumler. He was a Boston engraver who stumbled upon the technique of double exposure by accident. When he noticed that faint second images appeared on his negatives, he realised their ghostly potential. Soon, bereaved families were queuing at his studio. They posed for portraits and received photographs appearing to show the faint image of a deceased relative standing beside or behind them. Read more | History’s smallest billionaire? Meet the tiny titan who was, briefly, the richest man alive Mumler’s fame reached its height when he photographed Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of the assassinated president, with the spectral figure of Abraham Lincoln at her shoulder. “It’s literally just Mary Todd Lincoln with what looks like a glove on her shoulder,” Vernon says. “And then a double exposure of a photograph of Abraham Lincoln behind her. It looks terrible.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/mary-todd-william-mumler-spirit-photography-27f2fe5.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This William Mumler photograph shows Mary Todd Lincoln with the faint, ghostlike form of her assassinated husband behind her. One of the most famous examples of 19th-century spirit photography, it reflects both the era’s deep grief after the Civil War and the widespread fascination with attempts to capture the dead on camera." title="mary-todd-william-mumler-spirit-photography" /> Yet for many, the image was incredible proof of what they already wanted to believe: that all those who had died during the American Civil War might not really be so far away. William Mumler’s trial and controversy But not everyone was convinced. In 1869, Mumler was arrested and charged with fraud in New York, accused of exploiting the grief of the bereaved. Crowds packed the courtroom as expert witnesses demonstrated how the “spirits” could be produced through trick photography. And yet, Mumler was acquitted. “He was acquitted because so many people involved in the case – and people on the jury – were spiritualists,” Vernon explains. “It was such a widespread religion that people subscribed to. There were so many people biased towards spiritualism involved in prosecuting him.” Read more | Skip the office and give your money away: a Victorian billionaire’s guide to financial triumph His release spoke volumes about the power of spiritualism. The belief had spread far beyond fringe circles, and counted scientists, writers and politicians among its adherents. Spiritualism across the Atlantic After Mumler’s trial, spirit photography crossed the Atlantic, finding eager audiences in Victorian Britain (which was grappling with the changes caused by industrialisation, and increasing religious doubts) where spiritualism was also flourishing. The movement was bolstered by interest from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir William Crookes, who believed the dead could be studied as scientifically as any natural phenomenon. Though Mumler’s name eventually faded, his pioneering techniques persisted. Spirit photography survived well into the 20th century, adapting to new technologies while also latching onto new explosions of grief brought about by the First World War. In all, Vernon concludes that there’s a very simple, and human, explanation for the rise of spiritualism, and the success of figures including Mumler. “Spiritualism came at a point in history where people were grieving on a mass scale and wanted to contact the dead.” Alice Vernon was speaking to Jon Bauckham on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore more Victorian history with exclusive content from our archives Was Victorian life really so grim? 5 reasons why the Victorians were 'happy' An appointment at the house of death: the horror of the early Victorian hospital From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain Cricket, cocaine and cocoa houses: 5 ways Victorians spent their free time Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers
Toilets through time: Victorian lavatories
David Musgrove and Jerry White revisit the avant-garde sewerage systems, shining porcelain cisterns, and unsanitary conditions of the Victorian era
In the fourth episode of Toilets Through Time, we’ve finally reached the age of avant-garde sewerage systems and shining porcelain cisterns: the Victorian era. David Musgrove is joined by historian and author Jerry White, who explains why the period nevertheless saw appalling sanitary conditions that sparked debates about the public health of Britain’s cities – and shares some surprising toilet-based euphemisms.