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The Victorians were facing a population crisis, until this ‘obscene’ invention turned out to be the solution
In the first half of the 19th century, England’s population doubled. With many families struggling to survive, the picture had to change – and the solution came in an innovative treatment of one material: rubber. But as the question of ‘respectable’ reproduction emerged, Ruth Goodman explains how the invention also widened an already broad class divide
The air in Victorian London was thick with smog. In the narrow streets of the rapidly industrialising city, where the city’s poorest families lived cheek by jowl, every child born stretched meagre resources thinner still. For those in the working class, wages were uncertain and the cost of living presented constant challenges. Yet, despite the hardship, children kept coming – one after another, year after year. With most families lacking access to contraception, there was no realistic alternative. Big families: the Victorian ideal? “One of the things that we all think we know about Victorian families was that they all had huge numbers of children”, explains historian Ruth Goodman in her HistoryExtra Academy series on Victorian Life. This is true: between 1800 and 1850, England’s population had doubled, and by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, families across the social spectrum were getting bigger. Victoria herself had nine children with her husband, Prince Albert, providing an example for others to follow. But outside of the royal family, this birth rate boom placed huge pressure on the resources of families who were scraping by on meagre livings amid the industrial revolution. But as the century progressed the image of the archetypal Victorian family – respectable, hardworking and moral – began to change. Now, smaller, controlled families were becoming the ideal. This had a noticeable effect on the population. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-464466975-aca8503-e1775055434278.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful Victorian pop‑up illustration opens to reveal Queen Victoria seated with a child while Prince Albert plays on the floor with two others in an ornate domestic interior." title="A c1845 depiction of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at home, playing with their children. The royal couple and their nine offspring were seen as the perfect example of a Victorian family (Image by Getty Images)" /> “From the 1880s, you can actually see the effects of contraception turning up in family size,” Goodman says. “In the census and the records, you can see that middle class families are getting smaller.” Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you Early Victorian contraception This was largely down to new discussions about family limitations. Shrouded in euphemism, the understanding of sex and how to prevent pregnancy was starting to be framed as a health concern. Goodman explains how it was often covered by the phrase: “Being kind to your wife”. Framing contraception in this way placed the onus on parents to prevent excessive numbers of children for their own good. The idea was that a respectable family wouldn’t have more children than they could feed, and a decent father would ensure his children had a mother to look after them. “Quiet discussions are had within certain groups of society about [not letting] your wife have too many children,” says Goodman. One argument was that “it’s not healthy for her, she should be around in good health to bring up the children you already have.” What contraception was available? In today’s world, there’s an array of accessible contraception. In the Victorian era, the options were more limited. However, there was one development that changed the game: the vulcanisation of rubber. Vulcanisation – the process of improving the durability and pliability – of rubber was patented by British inventor Thomas Hancock in November 1843 and became more widespread in the mid-to-late 19th century. The progress and innovation that characterised the Industrial Revolution helped accelerate its commercial success – and one of its most practical uses was for condoms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90732016-2629d99-e1775055647469.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A circular relief sculpture shows a man in formal 19th‑century clothing, with detailed facial features and visible surface cracks." title="A medallion portrait of Thomas Hancock, who obtained the first British patent for vulcanised rubber in 1843 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Condoms in some form had been available for centuries. They had variably been made from sheep guts, linen or other materials – intact condoms made from animal membrane dating to the 1640s were discovered at Dudley Castle – and were almost exclusively used for preventing the spread of venereal disease. The vulcanisation process made rubber “flexible and soft” says Goodman, “so then condoms became made of a softer, more cleanable material.” Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys The introduction of cleanable, reusable rubber condoms in 1855 was revolutionary – and people started to see the possibilities for using condoms in family planning too. Vulcanised rubber also led to the creation of the female cap – a forerunner to diaphragms and cervical caps – which, as Goodman states, “made it possible for a woman to begin to take control of her own fertility”. Due to the hierarchical ‘male breadwinner’ structure of Victorian families, the reality was that decisions regarding reproduction, or lack thereof, were still primarily made by men. However, this development in female contraception did allow women a little more autonomy over their bodies and futures. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-90763429-9b45b35-e1775056110601.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small, rounded brown object resembling a bowler hat sits on a dark surface, with worn texture and the words “Racial Trade Mark” printed in white on the top." title="A cervical cap, c1920s. The introduction of this contraception gave women a degree of power over their own fertility (Image by Getty Images)" /> A mirror of the class divide Despite the incredible innovations, access to these new methods of contraception was far from equal. “Doctors found their way to manage their own families”, explains Goodman, “but they were not keen on passing that information on to the working classes.” While there was a widespread belief in the need to reduce family sizes, many of those in power tried to stop it. Attempts to make contraceptive advice more accessible through pamphlets were often unsuccessful as it was “decided that these were obscene publications”. Ideas of propriety and morality – as well as objections from the Catholic Church to any ‘unnatural’ birth control – prevented access to communication about sex in any straightforward terms, and in turn, limited people’s understanding of it. In 1877, The Fruits of Philosophy (an 1832 book that advocated for birth control) was the subject of a sensational obscenity trial in London. Activist Annie Besant stood in her own defence, dubbed a “filthy woman” for selling it. As Michael Meyer explained on a previous episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “[the jury decided it was a] dirty, filthy book, [but] absolved the defendants of any malicious intent in publishing it”. Regardless of intent, Besant and her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh were found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act 1857. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: Historian Fern Riddell explains all Later, their convictions were overturned, and both continued to campaign, with Besant publishing her own birth control pamphlet, The Law of Population. The problem with The Fruits of Philosophy wasn’t its contents – the information inside was nothing that Victorian medical professionals didn’t already know – but that it was being sold at a low enough price for the average person to buy it. The middle classes believed that the pressure of rising population numbers forced the working classes (who they presumed were naturally lethargic) to work harder. This prejudiced – and incorrect – assumption about the nature of working-class people led to deliberate limitations on their access to contraceptive information. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3089859-b6a0f97-e1775056364693.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photo shows two women, a man, and three children standing outside a small shop with jars and baskets visible inside." title="Impoverished people gather in front of a rag shop, c1877. The working classes faced many hardships – some of which were exacerbated by their lack of access to contraception (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even with these rather aggressive attempts to prevent contraceptive advice from being disseminated, the knowledge did spread. Throughout the later years of the 19th century and into the 20th, medical pamphlets, marital guides and private consultations offered methods to regulate conception. For those who could afford discretion and access to physicians, family planning became a means of greater control over their future. For those who couldn’t afford it, though, nothing much changed. In Victorian England, birth control was a mirror of the class divide. It revealed who had enough money to dictate the size of their family, and who had no such luxury.
Ringing the changes: how the telephone transformed Victorian Britain
To celebrate 150 years since the first telephone call was made, Michael Kay and Coreen McGuire describe how the device reshaped social interactions in Britain – and the somewhat surprising ways it was first used
In autumn 1883, an unusual news story captured the imagination of the British public. It was a tale of deception, fraud – and telephones. On Friday 21 September, a young barrister’s clerk in Birmingham, Robert Danks, set in motion a plan to commit fraud. First he forged a message from a solicitor asking his boss, Jesse Herbert, to travel out of town. Next, he telephoned the office of Herbert’s friend, Alfred Young. Speaking to the clerk, Danks – impersonating Herbert – said he had been called away but had left his cheque book at home. Would Mr Young please lend him £5 (equivalent to more than £500 today – five times Danks’ weekly wage)? Deceived, the clerk agreed, and was told to expect Danks to collect the money – which he did, absconding with it the next day. The story was reported at length across the country – not least because of the novel and ingenious (for the time) method of Danks’ deceit. This was, one commentator noted, the first time the telephone had been used for such fraud – a landmark of sorts in the technology’s short history. Sound idea The first practical functioning telephone was developed by Scottish-born engineer and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who lived and worked in Canada and the US during the second half of the 19th century. He worked extensively on hearing and speech, experimenting with hearing-aid devices and then acoustic telegraphy – efforts that led to the development of the telephone. Bell was issued the US patent for his telephone on 7 March 1876 – 150 years ago this month. The Bell Telephone Company was established the following year, and within a decade tens of thousands of telephone sets were in use across the US. The first successful demonstration in Britain took place in 1877, and the first telephone exchanges opened in London two years later. By the time of Danks’ fraudulent call, small exchanges up and down the UK were being operated by different companies, invariably serving local business communities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-464474699webready-add59a2-e1774011650108.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph two women sitting at a low table in front of a large wall with several thick wires across it. Each woman is dressed in a long Victorian dress, with their hair up" title="Wired for sound Telephonists at work for the General Post Office c1905. The GPO gradually replaced local exchanges across Britain at the turn of the 20th century. (Image by GettyImages)" /> But were people talking about telephones more than they were talking through them? When it was first introduced, everyone agreed that the telephone was a marvellous invention – though its purpose was far from clear. Was it a device for relaying the sounds of concerts and church sermons? Perhaps it was more useful in the mining industry, utilising the telephone microphone’s sensitivity to vibrations in order to monitor the quality and density of air, and so guard against the build-up of explosive gases? People did use the telephone to speak to each other, but a subscription to a telephone exchange was expensive – often £15 or £20 a year – so for the first several decades in Britain it remained very much a business tool. As well as barristers such as Herbert and Young, early exchange telephone subscribers included companies involved in large local industries – for example, wool in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, jute in Dundee and steel in Sheffield. Also prominent in early telephone directories are professional firms such as solicitors, doctors and banks, as well as local councils and chambers of commerce. In those first decades, contemporaries observed how few telephone subscribers and devices the UK had compared with other countries. That’s in part because the communications context at that time was rich and diverse. Thanks to the success of the telegraph system, the effective penny post service and cheap messenger boys, the telephone had less immediate impact on communication in Britain than elsewhere. Read more | The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency In addition, the usefulness of exchange telephony depended entirely on who else was also using it. This did not necessarily mean that being in a bigger network was better: many subscribers preferred smaller, more exclusive networks. Subscribers were also concerned about privacy: they didn’t want to be available to just anyone who could wander into a public call office and make demands on their time – nor to leave themselves open to fraudsters like Danks. In short, it suited many subscribers to keep the telephone network limited. And certainly, no one could imagine why the ‘working man’ might need a telephone. Regardless of subscribers’ preferences, exchange companies realised the importance of encouraging groups of subscribers to join at the same time. This often meant targeting professional communities such as lawyers or doctors, whose offices tended to cluster together in the same geographical area within a town. Many companies sold telephony by advertising that they connected their exchanges up to local police and fire stations, and sometimes also to doctors. In sickness and in health In August 1879, shortly before the first British telephone exchanges were established, Eva Lückes wrote a letter to the Telephone Company, which had been established to promote Bell’s patents in Britain. Lückes – the lady superintendent at the Hospital for Sick Children in Pendlebury, Manchester – wanted to thank the company for her telephones. These were used throughout the hospital, but had proved most valuable in the fever ward, where telephony enabled communication without the risk of infection. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-463911827webready-5706511-e1774011631346.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful illustration shows four men at dinner: three are sitting at the table while another stands up alongside them. To the right, another man in a suit, carrying a tray is talking into a large tube, sending a message to the room below" title="Upstairs, downstairs A waiter talks to kitchen staff in a restaurant. Before telephony, the speaking tube was a relatively common way to communicate. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Over the next few years, other medical professionals extolled the virtues of the telephone. “All of us must have felt the heartaching anxiety of longing to hear the voice of a dear friend when either ourselves lying on, or the friend being confined to, a bed of sickness,” noted the medical journal The Lancet. Unlike the speaking tubes that had been common for some time, but through which infection could be transmitted, telephones allowed contagious patients speak directly to family and friends while remaining safely isolated. Following an outbreak of scarlet fever in London in 1887, The Lancet was moved to recognise that this kind of remote contact had a curative power. The strength of this belief increased as the system proliferated, and special telephones for hospital patients were increasingly commonplace in the interwar years. In addition, the telephone achieved lasting clinical utility as an audiometer – a device to quantify individual levels of hearing loss in numerical terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/HHG5ADwebready-cb80a99-e1774011609462.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" title="Testing time An illustration shows a young man’s hearing being assessed using a Hughes audiometer, invented by David Edward Hughes c1879. (Image by Alamy)" /> Despite these benefits, many people feared that the telephone might pose risks, particularly to users’ mental health. In May 1879, The Times lamented that businessmen’s lives had become increasingly busy, unpredictable and reactive following the advent of telegraphy – a situation that would only get worse with the proliferation of telephones. Concerns about how telephony had increased the pace of modern life, and the associated stress that came with this, were commonplace in this period. In October 1882, the popular science writer Phoebe Lankester encountered a telephone in a private house, and wrote in her newspaper column that: “Extraordinary as this novel invention is, I am not sure that I quite like the idea of its intrusion into our domestic scenes at any moment of the day… [W]hen it comes to being at the beck and call of any intrusive person who may possess a telephonic wire… no man’s house can thenceforth be called his castle, unless he be brave enough to resist such innovations, and leave himself far behind the rest of the impetuous world – in peace.” Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain This combination of excitement and anxiety typified the Victorian response to the telephone in the business and domestic spheres. In public spaces, too, overhead telephone wires raised concerns, being viewed as unsightly at best, and even dangerous. Accidents involving falling telephone wires were rare but reported widely. In 1885, the council in Bath was reluctant to establish an exchange at all, citing concerns that overhead wires would disfigure the city, a picturesque and popular tourist destination. The GPO intervenes In most towns and cities, exchanges were established by large companies that were offshoots of the US Bell Telephone Company, operating using Bell’s patents. The largest of these was the National Telephone Company (NTC), which eventually absorbed the other companies operating in different regions around the UK. However, in late 1879, as the first British telephone companies began to establish exchanges, the General Post Office (GPO) successfully argued that the telephone came under its monopoly on telegraphic communications. This was based on its ownership of the telegraph network, which had been nationalised in 1870. As a result of this legal decision, telephone companies required GPO licences to operate. In addition, the GPO began to open its own exchanges around the country. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3315417webready-054117c-e1774011586519.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historical photograph of a spacious telephone exchange filled with rows of operators working at manual switchboards. The high, vaulted ceiling and hanging lights frame dozens of workers plugging cables to connect calls" title="from low volume levels to overhearing private conversations between other people. (Image by GettyImages)" /> In towns such as Sheffield, Dundee, Swansea and Preston, local people also established their own exchanges. Despite patent disputes and fierce competition from the larger companies, these were able to operate for many years. Cleverly branding themselves as being run by and for local people, these companies charged lower subscriptions, enabling a broader range of businesses to sign up. They often inspired greater loyalty among their subscribers than the larger companies. Together, these factors meant that, by the late 1880s, towns such as Dundee and Sheffield had some of the most developed exchange telephone infrastructure anywhere in the country. For 30 years, therefore, provision was quite messy, with different companies and the GPO providing services in different areas. This situation ended only in 1912 when the NTC, the last remaining private telephone company, was nationalised. Wartime lifeline Although telephony seemed to be gaining ground in Britain, many in the military still viewed it with scepticism. Telephones proved suitable for point-to-point communication with surveillance balloons from the ground below, and were used as Morse receivers, but they seemed unlikely to replace messenger communications. How could you trust that a barely audible message relayed via this method was sufficiently secure during battle? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3243926webready-bca04cb-e1774011559272.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a soldier kneeling outdoors, holding a field‑telephone receiver to the ear while speaking into it. The device is wired to a wooden pole fitted with multiple cables and a small switchboard‑like unit. The barren, muddy landscape suggests a wartime setting" title="in October 1918. The needs of the military drove innovations in telephony during the First World War. (Image by GettyImages)" /> The dark, isolated and stagnant conditions of mechanised conflict in the First World War changed everything. Suddenly, telephones became a lifeline – a crucial means of communicating between trenches and relaying news from the battlefront to headquarters. By 1920, the GPO had, at great cost, supplied 40,000 specially protected telephones to the army, meaning they were unable to invest in the development of telephone technology on the home front. Yet this expense was hidden from the public, who complained extensively about the failings of domestic telephony. Reliance on this technology in the context of war drove innovations in audibility and portability. Crucially, clearer transmission of speech was vital, and equipment needed to be light enough for repeated dismantling and movement. These aims were in tension, because improvements to audibility added weight. Improved audibility was also important for the generation of men who had fought in the war. Many of these servicemen suffered deafness or hearing loss from the bombardment of artillery and shells. In 1928, the National Benevolent Society recorded that “33,768 men were discharged from the army and navy on account of deafness”. Symptoms of deafness or deaf mutism also presented with shell shock. So hearing loss was regarded as a national problem in the interwar years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3301550webready-8b9948e-e1774266801629.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a woman standing in country road, looking up some fallen telegraph lines. In the background, a small bus is driving towards the camera" title="A woman gazes in bemusement at storm-damaged telephone wires in south Wales, 1939. Overhead lines were initially viewed as unsightly or even dangerous. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Though valve technology had improved the telephone, individual voices remained hard to comprehend. Early telephone lines were noisy, open and messy, with background noise described in a Birmingham newspaper in 1888 as “a buzzing obbligato which gives a faint suggestion of bees, but has no precise resemblance to anything in nature”. In addition, problems of induction between overhead wires, with signals from one call leaking into another, often led to subscribers being able to overhear supposedly private conversations. This had obvious privacy implications for those engaged in business conversations, as did fears of exchange operators listening in on calls. In 1897, a Glasgow corn merchant, Anton Kufeke, described overhearing a conversation between his competitor and a customer, thereby learning that the competitor was selling more cheaply than he was. This was sensitive business information. In 1893, another Glasgow subscriber recounted a conversation he had overheard between a man and a woman: after a brief exchange, the man announced that he was going for a clean shave – and another listener on the line commented “Is that a clean shirt you’re going for? You need one badly”. The conversation finished with various listeners joining in a rendition of a popular song. Read More | How did Bletchley Park shape the success of D-Day? Agitations from exchange subscribers in Leeds and Glasgow in local newspapers in the late 1880s and early 1890s illustrate the great difficulties many faced in trying to use their telephones. One correspondent in Leeds wrote that: “I occupy more time in communicating through it than I should do if I went to the offices or places of business of nine out of ten of the persons with whom I wish to communicate.” A Glasgow subscriber said that one thing he had learned from using the telephone and overhearing his colleagues and neighbours was just how much they swore when frustrated. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-515579042webready-0db1e60-e1774267416605.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a telephone operator seated at a manual switchboard. She wears a cloth mask over her nose and mouth and speaks into a candlestick‑style telephone. Papers and notes lie on the desk beside the switchboard equipment" title="Wearing a gauze mask, a telephone operator works during the devastating flu pandemic that spread across the world from 1918 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Restricted information A broad range of people struggled with such issues, including some who had trouble following telephone conversations yet didn’t consider themselves to have hearing loss in other contexts. It was strange to have access to speech without visual information. Moreover, the frequency band of the telephone was restricted, so people making or receiving calls were receiving far less sonic information than when talking in person. These difficulties are clear from a 1923 advice sheet issued by the GPO. This gave instructions on what to say when picking up the receiver, and how to speak with maximum audibility and effectiveness. Users were counselled to speak “clearly”, and to roll the rhotic R when saying the number three, because the telephone would blur consonants and elide vowel sounds. “The telephone is no louder or clearer now than it was 40 years ago,” HA Garratt complained to The Times in 1934. Although he admitted that he was “just the least bit deaf”, he still could hear the wireless perfectly well, which led him to conclude that the telephone model he possessed was faulty. Faced with such criticisms, it became clear how the GPO could both recoup financial losses sustained in the war and move beyond issuing edicts to encourage clear speech: by repurposing technology used in the trenches to create amplified telephony. When the telephone was first introduced, the deaf community was excited about the possibility that the new device could be used as a hearing aid. Bell’s wife and mother were both deaf, and the telephone had in fact been initially designed as a type of hearing aid. Instead, it initially excluded the hard of hearing. Moreover, its development encouraged the measurement of levels of deafness in increasingly narrow and strict terms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/10720997webready-b2202ae-e1774266977716.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A small brown pouch with a long strap, alongside two small vials, one yellow, one black. The vials are attached to a small black box which has a pale wire with an earpiece attached to it" title="Hear this A body-worn Medresco portable hearing aid. Such analogue devices were supplied by the NHS from the late 1940s until the early 1980s" /> The first amplified telephone designed for people with limited hearing was advertised by the GPO in 1924 “for the use of ‘Deaf Subscribers’ who experience difficulty in the use of the standard telephone”. It featured a controlling key to adjust the volume; this was stored in a separate wooden box, along with the valve amplifier. Following numerous complaints from customers about the stigmatising box, an improved amplifier telephone was released in 1934. The new device was cheaper, with a freehand microtelephone – the volume control being embedded in the telephone itself rather than in a box – and more powerful valves to boost the signal and increase the volume. Previous models comprised a separate receiver, held to the ear, and a transmitter into which one spoke. Newly integrated receivers combined the two, creating the telephone familiar to us today. When using early devices, people with hearing loss had been able to press the receiver to their mastoid bone, behind the ear, receiving the sounds via bone conduction. As the GPO explained, such users “had been accustomed to holding the bell receiver to the bone at the back of the ear to obtain best reception for his [sic] particular deafness”. This was not possible with the integrated receiver, and the GPO received a flood of complaints. In the UK, categories of deafness were defined according to audiological tests that were themselves biased, being driven by the GPO’s development of Artificial Ear technology. This machine designated standards of normal hearing in narrow mechanical parameters. The standardisation of ‘normal’ hearing and the categorisation of the deaf was therefore created in line with the priorities of the Post Office’s telephone system. Those who did not fit within the GPO’s standards were categorised as customers in need of a “telephone service for the deaf”. So ‘deafness’ was constructed both socially and technologically at the behest of the GPO. Despite these obvious limitations and biases, the GPO was a repository of expertise in electroacoustics in Britain during the interwar years, and it engineered the first NHS hearing aid – the Medresco. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1498115609webready-e515da9-e1774267518636.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photograph of a person in a fuzzy striped sweater standing beside a wooden bookshelf, holding a cream‑coloured rotary telephone receiver to their ear. Books, a potted plant, and framed botanical prints appear in the background" title="By 1960, when this studio portrait of a model was taken, telephones were installed in many British homes (Image by Getty Images)" /> Change and change again Today, an irony often highlighted is that technologies designed to bring us together are actually having the effect of isolating us. Yet, as we have seen, communication and isolation have been in tension since telephony began. The telephone was always perceived as a threat to societal mental health, and there were always isolated portions of society unable to make and receive calls easily. In recent years, mobile phones have changed our behaviour. Domestic landlines are becoming rarer, for example, largely replaced by smartphones. For a time, landlines were important for the roll-out of the internet, with dial-up connections being the norm before broadband usurped that technology. Today, many young people dislike speaking on the phone, instead preferring to communicate through text. But as we embrace a more individualistic model of telephony, do we appreciate what has been lost with the decline of the home phone, with access to it shared by members of a family or friend group? Whatever your take on such a question, aspects of mobile-phone culture might well seem familiar to our forebears. In 1885, a London-based commentator wryly described a group “telephone party”: “There sat about 15 well-dressed persons, gazing straight in front, apparently deep in thought, and with a black tube held up to one ear. They heeded not the entry of anyone, and silence and inactivity reigned supreme.” The ever-evolving telephone has radically reshaped our lives – but concerns about its impact on mental health and wellbeing are nothing new. Michael Kay is a senior learning designer at King’s College, London. Coreen McGuire is a historian of interwar Britain, and assistant professor of history at Durham University This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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
Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
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
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 Bagwell had already hocussed at least two other men – a medical student and a midshipman – both of whom declined to press charges. Following her release from prison on parole in 1869, she was convicted of theft from the person two more times. Her story suggests that there were probably many more victims of this technique – and many more female hocussers at work. 2. The counterfeit coin con Instead of stealing money from the pockets of others, some women had a go at literally making it themselves – and gambled with their lives On 3 September 1788, Elizabeth Alford went to a neighbour’s room in the lodging house she inhabited in Aldgate, London, to buy some thread. The neighbour, Christian Bowman (alias Catherine Murphy), was a single mother of three who worked as a servant in a public house and lived with a man named Hugh Murphy. On entering the room, Alford noticed “some bad money on the table”, and that Bowman and Murphy looked a bit shifty. “They wanted to shut me in,” Alford later told the court. Yet when she informed the couple that she had left her own door open, they let her go – and she went straight to her landlord, asking him to fetch an officer of the parish. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Credit-Element-Pictrures-BBC-430378-CMYK-37d46f5.jpg" width="4285" height="2855" alt="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire (Image by Element Pictures – BBC)" title="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire" /> Fatal consequences Later that day, officers caught Bowman and Murphy in the act of colouring pieces of base metal in the hope of passing them off as silver shillings. Bowman begged the officer for mercy, explaining that she had got involved in making counterfeit coins only after her husband had left her, and “never [passed] any bad money in the neighbourhood”. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. The pair were both convicted of coining at the Old Bailey court, and sentenced to death. Murphy was hanged, while Bowman was strangled and her body burned at the stake outside Newgate Gaol. Read more | Tudor angels of death: the 16th-century obsession with female killers Christian Bowman was one of 13 women burned for coining offences in England during the 18th century. It was a terrible punishment and used sparingly, but lawmakers believed it reflected the gravity of the crime, as coining was considered a form of treason. Between 1700 and 1789, 166 women were tried at the Old Bailey for coining offences. These included making, colouring or rubbing counterfeit coins; clipping or filing precious metal from legitimate coins; possessing tools to make counterfeit coins; and ‘uttering’ (trying to use) counterfeit coins. Only 65 of these women were found guilty, and about half of those were sentenced to death. Women represented around one third of those tried for coining offences in England in the 18th century, a surprisingly high proportion. Though some women, such as Bowman, made counterfeit coins with male accomplices, others worked in single-sex groups. Coining was an activity that could be done at home, and with the help of family members. Making fake coins required skill. Advances in the manufacture of legitimate coins, such as milled edges and gilding, made it harder for counterfeiters to produce convincing copies. Some women used the skills gained from other types of delicate finishing work to make coins; most almost certainly resorted to coining to supplement meagre wages. The levels of evidence required for prosecution were demanding. In addition, most ordinary people did not regard coining as a heinous offence. So there were likely many female coiners who never came to court – and simply got away with their crimes. 3. Maladies, magic and murder Fraudulent ‘wise women’ and ‘cunning folk’ scammed desperate people hoping for cures – and some resorted to poisoning their victims In March 1809, Mary Bateman was hanged at York for the murder of her client, Rebecca Perigo. Over the previous decade, Bateman, the wife of a wheelwright and the mother of four children, had been supplementing the family income by selling fortunes, charms and alternative medicines, and claimed to act as an intermediary for other ‘wise women’, including a Miss Blythe in Scarborough. Bateman’s name was often recommended to those in need of help, including Perigo, who was suffering from a “fluttering in her breast”, believed to be an “evil wish” that required the “arts of sorcery” to resolve. In May 1806 Bateman suggested that, with the help of Miss Blythe, Perigo could be cured – in time, and at some expense. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-463913393-CMYK-b6be386.jpg" width="4299" height="2864" alt="Three women sit around a burning cauldron. One is a fortune teller, who is older and bent over, with a blue headscarf. The two women visiting her are dressed in fancier clothes, with furs and hats" title="A scene such as this, showing two young women having their cards read by a fortune-teller, was a familiar one in the early 19th century" /> Over the following 12 months, Miss Blythe sent letters via Bateman to Rebecca and her husband, William, requesting money and various items – shoes, hat boxes, a tea caddy, eggs and bacon – in exchange for charms and spells to relieve Rebecca’s symptoms. Then in April 1807, Miss Blythe warned Rebecca and William that they would soon succumb to a terrible illness. To escape death, she told them, they must “eat pudding for six days and… put into it one of my powders everyday”. The powders contained poison, and Rebecca died. William continued to correspond with the ‘wise woman’ in Scarborough until October 1808, when he discovered that the charms were fake, that ‘Miss Blythe’ did not exist – and that Bateman had killed his wife. Repeat offender The unfortunate couple were the latest in a long list of ordinary and often desperate people duped by Bateman. Some lost only money and possessions; others also lost their lives. Bateman had earlier been publicly exposed as a fraud when she was caught pushing eggs, which contained the message “Christ is coming”, back up the oviduct of her supposedly prophetic hen. Yet her perfidious activities continued. The 1735 Witchcraft Act had made it a crime to pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, to tell fortunes, or to use “crafty science” to locate lost or stolen goods. Offenders were to be sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. This legislation did not stop Bateman nor, in all likelihood, others like her. Read more | Victorian murder scandals: what six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century We must not assume that all ‘cunning folk’ at the turn of the 19th century were knowingly fraudulent; some sincerely believed in their magic powers. The case of Bateman, though, exposes an unscrupulous side to this business – frauds who took advantage of ordinary people living in uncertain times, who sought explanations and remedies for misfortune and illness, and who continued to believe in the supernatural and the utility of magic. This type of criminal activity might have been far more prevalent than previously imagined. 4. Light-fingered lodgers People who rented rooms in furnished lodgings pilfered items to pawn or sell – and many probably got away with their crimes Criminal justice historians suspect that women perpetrated far more theft from private spaces than was ever prosecuted. Many domestic servants casually or even systematically appropriated or stole things from their employers. Larceny by a servant was even a specific category of offence. When the items were of relatively low (or sometimes even high) value, many masters and mistresses did not think taking such thieves to court was worthwhile. Instead, a pilfering servant was typically dismissed without a reference – a tough punishment. The case of Amelie Decuypere and her husband, Paul, sheds light on a different type of theft from the domestic space: taking goods from furnished lodgings. In July 1859, the Decuyperes were arrested in London, following a complaint made by their former landlord, David Berri. Just six days after moving into a furnished room in Berri’s house, the couple disappeared – along with a coffee pot, a clock and several paintings. To divert attention from their absence, or to indicate their intention to return, the couple left in the room a large chest that, on inspection, “turned out to be filled with straw”. The police found in the couple’s possession a pile of receipts issued by pawnbrokers for items exchanged for cash – property that “no doubt had been stolen from other lodgings”. Three landlords pressed charges, but the magistrate believed that there could have been “at least a dozen” victims in total. Amelie and Paul Decuypere got caught largely because of the impressive scale of their theft, and were sentenced to six and eight years’ penal servitude, respectively. Although Amelie remained silent during her trial, the judge and jury decided that she and her husband were equal partners in the crime. As historians have shown, women made good thieves in private spaces because they often best understood the value of domestic items. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang 5. Criminal credit crunch As retail opportunities opened up to wider society, female fraudsters abused ease of credit to take goods with no intention of paying for them For centuries, wealthy people in England purchased goods and services on credit, promising to pay at a later date. In the 19th century, as real wages were rising and the ‘retail revolution’ was under way, personal credit was extended to more people across society, including the upper working classes and women. This system relied on reputation and trust – and was increasingly open to abuse in densely populated urban environments. To gain credit, a woman needed simply to look respectable and to provide a plausible address. It was often difficult for those demanding payment to prove that unpaid debts were not bad debts but were criminal frauds. The difference hinged on whether there was ever an intention to pay: bad debt was dealt with by civil courts, while fraud ended up in the criminal courts. The popular depiction of the faux-aristocratic male swindler likely enabled many fraudulent women to escape detection simply because they didn’t fit that stereotype. One woman who did get caught was serial swindler Annie Gordon Baillie – not her real name, but one of some 40 aliases she used across her lifetime. The illegitimate daughter of a farm servant from Peterhead, Scotland, Annie harboured ambitions of wealth and fame. Her career included collecting money for fake charities and the ruthless exploitation of an aged baronet, but began and ended with the fraudulent acquisition of goods and services on credit. Annie ran up debts in cities across Britain and much farther afield: in Dundee, London and Broadstairs, but also in Rome, New York and Melbourne, Australia. In 1884, the London Association for the Protection of Trade warned about a woman using several aliases who had run up bills with piano manufacturers, chemists and other businesses. By 1888, the police in London and Edinburgh were on the case, and published a full expose in the Edinburgh Evening News. Despite this publicity, it wasn’t until four months later, on 23 June 1888, that the culprit was finally arrested. At Annie’s committal hearing, Detective Inspector Marshall said that the police had uncovered “hundreds, and probably to the extent of thousands” of frauds. “The prisoner is an extraordinary woman,” Marshall declared, “one of the greatest swindlers in the country.” Greed, and a love of attention, had led to Annie’s downfall. Had she been less flamboyant, by living more modestly and eschewing interviews about her outlandish charitable schemes, she might well have got away with it. This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
The industrial revolution caused huge growth in the urban population – and with it, a rising tide of human waste. Find out how the leaders of Victorian cities tried to cope with the excrement explosion that came hand-in-hand with the 19th century’s boom in industry
In the 1890s, Manchester’s civic leaders faced a mounting crisis. The city’s population had exploded, its industries were booming, and with them came an ever-growing tide of human waste. By the later decades of the 19th century, Victorian Britain’s sanitation revolution was well underway, but as historian Richard Jones explains in an April 2025 article from the Environment and History journal, ‘Excremental Flows: Manchester Corporation’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ and the Rampton Manor Estate, Nottinghamshire, 1892’ (available to purchase or access via a subscriber login), the transition from solid waste systems to water-borne sewage was anything but smooth. By the late Victorian era, Manchester’s “existing waste removal infrastructure – designed to deal with the much smaller volumes and narrower range of waste materials of the pre-industrial age – had begun to struggle with the prodigious quantities of polluting waste its people and factories now generated,” says Jones. The sanitary reformer Dr Southwood Smith vividly described a scene he was greeted with upon a visit to a Manchester privy in 1860: “The floor… is completely covered, several inches deep, with ashes and night-soil, so that it is impossible to get to the seat itself without being over shoes in abominable filth. The seat itself is, in every part, besmeared, and in some parts covered several inches deep, with the same filth.” By the mid-19th century, Manchester was already producing more than 100,000 tons of ‘night-soil’ (a euphemism for human excrement) annually. This waste was collected from thousands of ash-pits – an open pit into which all domestic waste and excrement was disposed, partially dried and deodorised by adding ashes from hearths and ovens – and privies. Then, it was often transported by rail to distant farming regions in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. But this system was expensive and increasingly unpopular. In one step to cope with the growing burden, Manchester introduced pail-closets, which replaced open cesspits and ash-pits with sealed containers that could be regularly emptied. By the late 1870s, the city had phased out most of its older waste systems, replacing them with 28,000 pail-closets and 10,000 water-closets. But the problem was far from solved. A deluge of waste “The total replacement, by the early 1880s, of cess-pits, ash-pits and middens by the pail-closet system represented an impressive achievement,” says Jones. “Yet still, in 1884, around 200,000 tons of waste were annually arriving at the Corporation’s depot.” Though unpleasant to deal with, this was valuable stuff – it was sold as night-soil or processed into a dry powder and marketed as concentrated manure that could be delivered to farmers up to 100 miles away in less than 24 hours. With the context of current attempts to quickly transform domestic heating systems from oil and gas boilers to air source heat pumps and solar, it’s notable that the municipal authorities of Victorian Manchester were able to drive domestic infrastructure change so rapidly. According to Dr Jones, “The Manchester authorities began with a rolling programme of improving existing infrastructure rather than replacing this with new technology. Retrofitting existing properties with water closets was more problematic but was solved by requiring landlords to do this work. Building in water closets and connecting to the sewers was much easier when planned from the outset in new builds.” However, the problems kept mounting as the population kept growing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Victorian-Poo-Alamy-DYEJHH-c2ff0ee.jpg" width="861" height="574" alt="A sketch from The Practical Magazine (1874) shows a vacuum pump used for removing night soil from cesspools (Image by Alamy)" title="A sketch from The Practical Magazine shows a vacuum pump used for removing night soil from cesspools (1874) (Image by Alamy)" /> Jones memorably describes the city authorities’ struggles to “keep their noses above the rising tide of excremental waste”. The challenge was made harder because Manchester was “water poor”, which made it difficult to implement a water-based sewer system. Plus, the 1876 Rivers Pollution Prevention Act had made it illegal to dump untreated sewage into rivers, cutting off one traditional route of disposal. Faced with these challenges, Manchester looked for new ways to rid itself of its waste. One solution was Carrington Moss, an area with 600 acres of boggy land and c500 acres of agricultural land on the city’s outskirts, purchased by the Manchester Corporation in 1886. Read more | Urban animals: the growth of city farms in 20th-century Britain Roads, drains, and a light railway were built to carry the waste there. But by the early 1890s, Carrington Moss was nearing capacity. In the five years after the purchase of the site in 1886, the population of Manchester had increased by over 150,000 people to a total of over half a million. All those people had to live somewhere – and the human waste that they produced had to go somewhere too. Water-closets were being introduced in the city, but that was a slow process, and in the meantime, Manchester was producing an extra 20,000 tons of excremental waste a year. Residents kick up a stink In 1892, Manchester’s Cleansing Committee hatched a bold plan: to purchase Rampton Manor, a large agricultural estate in Nottinghamshire, and transport 20,000 tons of waste there annually, by rail. The scheme promised to relieve pressure on the city’s depots and provide valuable manure to farmers – and handily, the estate was up for sale by its owner Colonel Henry Eyre, the MP for Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. But the proposal sparked a furious backlash. Rampton is many miles from Manchester and there were concerns about transportation of waste. Local residents, tenant farmers, and neighbouring towns like Gainsborough and Retford were horrified. As Jones explains: “When the residents of Rampton, surrounding villages and the nearby towns of Retford and Gainsborough got wind of Manchester’s intentions they were quick to kick up a stink.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Victorian-Poo-Topfoto-PAST11257-6d28efb.jpg" width="861" height="574" alt="A black and white photograph shows people in Victorian dress standing on the pavement outside their houses" title="People gather in a street in Collyhurst, Manchester, c1900. The rising urban population in urban Manchester caused a problem with sewage" /> At a public inquiry held by the Local Government Board, the Manchester Corporation tried to reassure the public. It was a robust affair: “Among the testimony heard were the views of local farmers, delivered in characteristically robust language and with a general disregard for the pseudo-legal niceties of the inquiry,” says Jones. “The chairman struggled to keep order.” The inquiry revealed a clash of worldviews. Manchester saw the scheme as a practical solution to an urban problem, while rural communities viewed it as an environmental threat and an unwanted intrusion. The efforts of the Manchester authorities to demonstrate that the “problem waste removed from one place would miraculously metamorphose into beneficial manure in another” proved a very hard sell indeed. Local concerns centred around the ability of the ground to cope with the volume of manure, the risk of water supply contamination, and the threat of disease. But also, there was the question of reciprocity and standing up for one’s own area. As the vice-chair of Nottingham County Council’s Health Committee, Mr Earp, put it, “Every town should stand on its own bottom”. Read more | Victorian daily life: what was it like for 'ordinary' Victorians? “At root, what was at stake was the right or otherwise of an urban centre to colonise distant places with its waste,” says Jones. The Local Government Board ultimately sided with the objectors. In December 1892, it refused Manchester’s request for a £60,000 loan to purchase Rampton Manor. The city was forced to abandon the scheme. But the waste problem remained. In the aftermath, Manchester turned back to an earlier idea: purchasing Chat Moss, another area of bogland closer to the city. Acquired in 1895, it became a major dumping ground, capable of absorbing 50,000 tons of waste annually. The ‘sewage question’ was a topic of national conversation through the second half of the 19th century. Manchester’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ in Rampton was just one of the solutions. Elsewhere, Joseph Bazalgette’s famous London’s embankment sewage system took the capital’s waste out to the tidal Thames, but the idea of water-borne sewage networks was not the only option. Rev. Henry Moule, for instance, patented his dry earth-closet scheme (not dissimilar to modern composting toilets) and that attracted a lot of interest. Some resolution came in the form of the main drainage system in Manchester, which was designed in the late 1880s, but its operation had to wait until the construction of the Thirlmere reservoir and aqueduct, completed in 1894. This brought much needed water from the Lake District over a distance of nearly 96 miles. Read more | Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z A wasteful legacy With the threats facing today’s water supply, and growing numbers of people advocating the use of dry systems like Moule’s, the Victorian experience has long echoes into the 21st century. “In many respects, the current sewage crisis has its origins in the decisions made by Victorian civil engineers,” notes Dr Jones. “In particular, the decision to opt for combined sewerage systems that captured and combined both industrial and domestic liquid waste and rainwater and ground water (the model designed by Joseph Bazalgette for London), generated much larger volumes of albeit highly diluted but nevertheless tainted sewage water requiring treatment.” “Had separate sewerage systems been adopted, which kept these different liquid streams apart, then the volume of sewage proper would have been much reduced, and stormwaters more easily and safely sent back into our rivers and streams.”
Test your knowledge on what daily life was like in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman on what family life was like in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our 20 question quiz! View Riddle on the source website
Victorian family life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the 19th century, men took more control at home than at any other time in history. In the final episode of our course on Victorian life, Ruth Goodman discusses the ‘male breadwinner pattern’, the employment of boys and its impact on family life, as well as how Victorians controlled the size of their families
View Green Video on the source website Ruth Goodman is a historian of the social and domestic life of Britain. She has advised the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Globe Theatre and presented a number of BBC television series, including Victorian Farm
Living in sin: unmarried relationships in Victorian Britain
Is the idea that Victorian working-class couples often skipped marriage accurate? Rebecca Probert examines the evidence...
There is a surprisingly widespread assumption, shared by popular and academic historians alike, that cohabitation (living together in a relationship without being married) was common among the Victorian poor. The journalist Matthew Sweet suggests in his book Inventing the Victorians that working-class men and women took an “equivocal and pragmatic approach” to marriage, with many choosing to cohabit out of economic convenience. Others refer darkly to ‘unknown’ numbers of people living in ‘irregular unions’ – the implication being that those numbers, though unknown, must nevertheless have been large. Moving from the belief that the poor did not marry to the observation that the working classes made up the largest section of the population, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that marriage was a minority practice in Victorian England. Of course, individual examples of cohabiting couples can be found in all classes of Victorian society. George Eliot is a regularly cited example, and her fellow authors Mary Elizabeth Bradden and Wilkie Collins, along with the political activist Eleanor Marx, often feature alongside her on lists of Victorian cohabitants. And yes, alternatives to marriage were seriously discussed by radical thinkers such as the socialist Robert Owen in the 1830s and the early feminists of the late 19th century. But one should never confuse big names with big numbers. Newly available historical data, using recently digitised sources, clearly establishes that all but a tiny fraction of Victorian couples sharing a home had gone through a ceremony of marriage. Read more | A brief history of proposing marriage Earlier generations of researchers who have looked at the extent of cohabitation were hampered by the need to wade through thousands of pages of registers when searching for evidence that a marriage had taken place. Understandably, they often failed to trace weddings that had been held more than a few miles from a couple’s home parish, and from this failure deduced high rates of cohabitation. But as any family historian is well aware, finding a marriage depends on searching in the right place. To take an example of how digitisation has revolutionised this task, marriages could only be traced for some two-thirds of couples listed in the 1851 census for the Northamptonshire village of Kilsby when using the laborious old method of looking through the parish registers of the most likely locations. With the assistance of modern databases, though, the proportion traced rose to 100 per cent. In short, Victorian couples were both more mobile and more likely to marry than previously thought. Crime hotspot And this social conformity was not confined to rural areas: similar results were achieved for Neithrop, a poor suburb of Banbury, studied because it was notorious locally for crime and immorality. Even here, marriages have been traced for 95 per cent of the people who described themselves as married in the 1851 census, and the missing five per cent can largely be accounted for by recording errors, multiple matches and marriages overseas. Nor was there generally any reason to suspect an illicit cohabiting relationship between men and their ‘housekeepers’, or between female householders and their ‘lodgers’: one couple who looked like possible cohabitants turned out to be a brother and his married sister. Even in this impoverished ward, the picture seems to have been overwhelmingly one of marital conformity. These findings of very low levels of cohabitation are supported by the conclusions of the more measured Victorian commentators (as opposed to the hysterical polemicists who were responsible for a genre of ‘slum’ literature that makes today’s tabloids seem restrained). Charles Booth, who carried out his survey of working-class life in London between 1886 and 1903, noted that legal marriage was the general rule even among the “roughest class”. Read more | Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: was their union a marriage of misery? Tracing a ceremony of marriage, of course, is no guarantee that a couple were legally married: bigamists abounded, and there are plenty of examples of a man entering into a prohibited marriage with his deceased wife’s sister. But the relatively high incidence of bigamy only serves to underline the significance Victorians attached to marriage. If cohabitation had been acceptable, there would have been no need to risk criminal penalties to secure respectability. So did couples live together before they married, as is the norm today? Some historians have noted Booth’s comment on the frequency with which bridal couples gave the same address, and the marriage registers support his observation. But when addresses in the marriage register are checked against census returns, it turns out that the great majority who claimed to be living together were actually residing at different addresses. Here, the census is likely to be the more reliable. There was, after all, no advantage to be gained from concealing a cohabiting relationship from census-takers. And there was a very practical reason why couples might wish to appear to be living at the same address even if they were not: vicars – and even civil registrars – faced with a couple apparently living together unwed, would often waive the marriage fee. Even though Victorians married late – when compared to the mid-20th century – it was still rare for couples to set up home in advance of the wedding. Indeed, unmarried Victorians had little scope to establish a household of their own. The Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted had a particularly high level of unmarried adults in 1851, with 45 per cent of women aged between 25 and 34 still single and most of these living at home. A further third were working as servants. Only around five per cent headed their own household, and only one woman (out of over 100) appears to have been cohabiting with a man, whom she later married. Read more | How to celebrate a Victorian wedding Very occasionally, a sexual relationship between a woman and a man sharing an address can be inferred from the presence of a child and a subsequent marriage. But this was rare, and childbearing outside marriage was not generally the result of a cohabiting relationship. While some areas of Victorian England had high levels of extramarital births – over 30 per cent in the then Lancashire parish of Culcheth, for example – it is clear that most of the mothers of illegitimate babies were not living with the father. Linking digitised baptism and census records from a range of parishes confirms that such women were more likely to be living in the workhouse, or with family, than with any man who might be the father. For the Victorians, relationships outside marriage tended to be surreptitious rather than openly acknowledged. The poor, dependent upon landlords, employers, and occasionally charity, needed to maintain a good reputation just as much as the wealthy, if not more so. The diarist and clergyman Francis Kilvert wrote of one couple being evicted from their home simply because they were unmarried, and the receipt of social support could depend on showing one’s ‘marriage lines’. This was a society that drew a sharp distinction between the married and the unmarried. One writer noted that there was a public interest in knowing who was and was not married, since others’ behaviour toward them had to be regulated accordingly. For most, marriage was not a ‘choice’, any more than putting on clothes before one left the house was a ‘choice’. It was simply what one did so as not to cause trouble for oneself or offence for others. Fear of the slums So why has such a different perception of the Victorian poor proved so popular? Middle-class Victorian moralists were willing to believe the worst of the denizens of outcast London. Fear and suspicion of the poor, who were effectively seen as a race apart, meant that any claims about immorality and sexual licence met with a receptive audience. Read more | How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse? The journalist Henry Mayhew was pandering to this taste when he claimed in London Labour and the London Poor that, at most, only one in 10 of London’s costermongers (who sold food from a street barrow or stall) were married. So incensed were the costermongers at this slander that they held a public meeting to condemn Mayhew’s methods. They drew attention to the fact that Mayhew was writing “to suit the tastes and views of the upper and middle classes”, and that he had paid disreputable informants for inaccurate information. But they were only too well aware that it was Mayhew’s account that would eventually survive, given his public platform, and so it has proved. Today, Mayhew’s costermongers tend to be celebrated rather than condemned for their supposed rejection of marriage. Social commentators’ desire to find precedents for modern trends has led to the unfounded fears of Victorian moralists about the numbers ‘living in sin’ being transformed into evidence of cohabitation. Claims of high rates of cohabitation outside marriage in past centuries seem to be a comforting – but quite incorrect – riposte to modern worries about the collapse of family life. But rather than acclaiming the costermongers as the pioneers of alternative family forms, we should do them the justice of remembering them as they wanted to be remembered – as they pleaded in the name of their “poor but honest wives”. Cohabitation and the myth of the 'common-law marriage' Today, 2.8 million British couples live together outside marriage, almost 90 per cent of marrying couples have cohabited beforehand, and 47 per cent of children are born outside marriage, the majority to cohabiting couples. All this, however, is historically unprecedented. Given the rudimentary nature and general unpopularity of birth control until recent decades, most stable sexual relationships would in time produce children. As a result, the illegitimacy ratio gives us a good idea of the maximum possible frequency of cohabiting relationships in the population. But in earlier centuries births outside marriage were relatively rare, and cohabitation proportionally even rarer. Fluctuations in the illegitimacy ratio occurred within a small scale: rising from less than two per cent in 1700 to five per cent by 1800, a little under seven per cent by 1850, then falling again to four per cent by 1900. A close examination of baptism registers suggests that throughout this period cohabiting couples accounted for only a tiny proportion of illegitimate births, and thus a vanishingly small proportion of births overall. So, what changed? The causes are complex, but one factor – 'the emergence of the myth that cohabitants had a 'common-law marriage' – stands out. Contrary to popular belief, English law has never recognised cohabiting couples as having a 'common-law marriage'. It was not until the 1960s that the term even crept into popular usage, and it was not until the late 1970s that the myth emerged that cohabiting couples enjoyed the same rights as married couples, a misunderstanding generated by misleading media reporting of the limited legal reforms of the period. After the myth took hold, there was a sharp rise in births outside marriage, from 16 to 30 per cent over the course of the 1980s, with cohabiting couples accounting for the bulk of the increase. Rebecca Probert is a professor at the University of Warwick Law School. She has written widely on the history of marriage and cohabitation and appeared on programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? This article first appeared in the October 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
Week five quiz: work and labour rights in Victorian Britain
Test your knowledge on work and labour rights in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman about labour and workers' rights in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our quiz! View Riddle on the source website
Victorian working life | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In week five of our course on life in Victorian Britain, Ruth Goodman explores how the 19th century saw work change for most of the population, with shift working made possible by gas light, a new adherence to fixed hours of work and a fierce concentration upon a smaller number of tasks whilst at work. She also looks at the slow movement towards protection for workers, including children
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