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Think your job is bad? These 17 occupations from the past were much, much worse
From digging up corpses to collecting faeces, Jonny Wilkes delves into some of the dirtiest – and most dangerous – ways that our ancestors earned a living
1. Gong farmer Medieval era Before flushing toilets and proper sewers, there were cesspits: big holes in the ground where all the human waste ended up. When these filled up, it fell to the gong farmers to empty them and take away the excrement for disposal, or to sell as fertiliser on the fields. They earned a decent wage, but the job was considered so revolting – paddling in poo using only shovels and buckets, and breathing in the foulest of stenches – that they were forced to do it at night under the cover of darkness. Gong farmers risked disease and, in the case of poor Richard the Raker, even death by scatological accident. In 1326, he fell through the rotten boards of a privy (possibly while using the convenience himself) and drowned in the stinky pool below. 2. Matchgirl Victorian era There are a lot of contenders for the title of ‘grisliest job in Victorian Britain’, but matchgirl has a strong claim. Done by young girls, it involved working 12 to 14 hours a day with minimal breaks, meagre pay and the likelihood of fines for any perceived wrongdoing (including altering a machine to prevent getting their hands cut). Most seriously, matchgirls worked with white phosphorus, a highly toxic chemical that caused terrible physical ailments, the worst of which was ‘phossy jaw’. In short, this caused the jawbone to rot entirely, causing teeth to fall out, large abscesses to form on the head and possibly brain damage. Sufferers were left disfigured and in acute pain. The working conditions got so bad that, in 1888, the matchgirls of Bryant & May in London went on strike, which eventually brought about the end of white phosphorus in the industry. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/22SBJPTX-4e0af31-e1771425220743.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration of a woman. She has her head slightly bowed, and her hair is in a bun. Her mouth is wide, with the skin around the lips has disintegrated and shows some rotten teeth" title="A medical drawing from the 1840s shows a matchstick worker suffering from the effects of ‘phossy jaw’, caused by constant exposure to white phosphorus (Image by Alamy)" /> 3. Hurriers and trappers Medieval to modern eras Working down a coal mine has always been brutally tough, with long hours underground, exhausting physical labour, breathing in coal dust, and the risk of cave-ins. Spare a thought, then, for hurriers. These were women or children sent into the mines to pull the carts laden with coal. With a leather strap around their waist or shoulders, hauling the cargo was back-breaking work and the tunnels got so hot that many chose to work naked. Meanwhile, other children – some as young as five – worked as trappers, waiting in the complete darkness for hours just to open the trap doors as hurriers passed. Read more | The ancient Mesopotamian civilisation’s weirdest job? Meet the veterinary exorcist 4. Groom of the Stool Tudor to Victorian eras The Groom of the Stool proves that not all bad jobs in history were done by the poorest and lowliest in society. Deemed a prestigious role performed by noblemen looking to make their name at court, it involved helping the monarch with their daily evacuations. It’s still unclear as to whether this meant actually cleaning up afterwards, but it certainly included carrying a portable commode around and keeping an eye on the royal diet (at both ends of the digestive cycle). It was an honour to be at the side of the monarch, no matter which throne they sat on, and the position came with perks. With all that one-on-one time with the king or queen, they could wield a lot of influence and pick up titles. One of George III’s grooms, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, became prime minister. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/4CommodeStoolcirca1650-c313df9-e1771425329227.jpg" width="1000" height="1700" alt="A photograph of a cube stool decorated with red velvet lining and a hole cut out of the top. It has a lid standing up at the back" title="King William III’s ‘close stool’ at Hampton Court Palace. Believe it or not, but carrying one of these commodes would have been seen as a huge privilege" /> 5. Lime burner Since antiquity For millennia, lime has been a useful material in construction as it can make plaster, mortar and whitewash, and is an important ingredient in glassmaking. Making lime, however, could be extremely hazardous. Lime burners heated limestone in a kiln at around 900°C (1652°F) for several days, which released high levels of carbon dioxide, to make quicklime. Given that this highly caustic substance sparked and even exploded when in contact with moisture, it was somewhat unfortunate that the next stage of the lime burners’ job was to mix it with water. Quicklime caused horrific burns if it got on the skin, and any in the eyes would result in blindness. 6. Wool fuller Since antiquity Making wool was less dangerous than making lime – but it involved more urine. To get it ready for the textile business, sheared wool first had to be cleaned of grease and softened, which was done by fullers stomping on it in a vat for hours. To really make it shiny white, though, the vat had to be filled with ammonia – particularly the type found in stale wee. The odour must have been oppressive. That said, maybe ancient fullers wouldn’t have minded, since urine was also used to clean teeth. It clearly worked, too: wool fullers were around from the Romans to the Industrial Revolution. Read more | Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z 7. Petardier Renaissance era A petard was a short-lived weapon designed to bust into a besieged castle. Just a metal container filled with gunpowder, it could be fixed to a wall or gate and blow inwards to form a handy hole for the attackers to get through. Easier said than done, of course: the petardiers had to carry the heavy bomb into position (while defenders were doing their best to stop them), and run away before the big explosion. To make matters more dangerous, petards were highly unreliable. The name comes from the French word ‘to fart’, and there was no telling when one could let off. Now you know why it was short lived. 8. Leech collector Regency era Although blood-sucking worms do not sound like the ideal workplace colleagues, leech collectors did their utmost to form a close bond with them. Leeches had long been used in medicine – and still are today, in some cases – but the medical fascination hit a peak in the 19th century. With demand at an all-time high, collectors – mostly women – would wade into leech-heavy ponds, bogs and marshes and allow their legs to get covered in the things. Ironically enough, this put them at risk of infectious diseases. It was not only the collectors at risk here, either: so many leeches were caught that the species used in medicine almost went extinct in some places. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/8GettyImages-537586865-f6d8e08-e1771425725791.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A coloured engraving of three women working by a shallow stream in a rural landscape. One woman stands in the water washing clothes, another stands on the bank holding a stick and looking into the distance, and a third walks through the water carrying a bucket. Trees, a fence, and a distant church steeple sit in the background." title="A coloured engraving depicts a trio of leech finders somewhere in rural Yorkshire. Those involved in the trade could suffer blood loss as they sought out specimens (Image by Getty Images)" /> 9. Tosher Victorian era Surely, there are fewer jobs that better illustrate how hard it could be for the poor of Victorian London than that of the tosher. These people spent their days deep underground, inside sewers, and scavenged for anything valuable or worth selling. A haul could include coins that had washed into the drains and the occasional bit of silverware or jewellery, but mostly it was scraps of metal and material. Even when it was made illegal to enter the sewers without permission, gangs of toshers continued at night to sieve out what treasures they could from the excreta. All the while, there was the chance of catching a disease, getting lost, or being swept away by the (truly disgusting) water. Read more | What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion 10. Powder monkey Age of Sail Picture this: you’ve been abducted from a port town and pressganged to serve on a Royal Navy ship, spending years at sea and facing death every time an enemy vessel comes over the horizon. Now picture that happening when you’re a child. Warships needed ‘powder monkeys’, or young boys no older than 14 who transported gunpowder from the magazine to the cannon crews in the heat of battle. They had to be small enough to squeeze between the adults, artillery and, hopefully, avoid enemy fire. In truth, there was no safe place on a ship, and powder monkeys were essentially on the frontlines of a war zone. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/102Y7JPAM-07b9754-e1771425896496.jpg" width="1500" height="1121" alt="An illustration of five men in black and red uniforms standing around a large black cannon, which is angled out of a window. On the far left is a younger boy, also in uniform, looking stressed with his hands up as the cannon goes off" title="Powder monkeys didn’t have time to monkey around: keeping a ship’s cannons firing was tiring – and extremely dangerous – work (Image by Alamy)" /> 11. Spit boy Tudor era Preparing a Tudor banquet required hundreds of people bustling for long hours in vast kitchens, with cooks at the top of hierarchy and spit boys at the bottom. The job of the latter was simple enough: to keep the spits turning over the fire and make sure the meat was cooked evenly. The difficult bit, however, was being next to a roaring blaze all day, often perched within the hearth itself. If the fire was hot enough to cook meat, imagine what it would have done to a spit boy’s skin? Eventually, the job was taken out of human hands as it became common to get dogs, running in a wheel, to turn the spits instead. 12. Chimney sweep Victorian era While the so-called master sweeps were dancing on rooftops (if Mary Poppins is to be believed), their apprentices, known as climbing boys, were in the chimneys having a lousy time. With chimneys too narrow for adults, young children were sent up to clean the flues. Six was apparently a good age to start. Their diminutive size did not prevent them from getting stuck, however, and it was far from guaranteed that help would come for them. Those who did not suffocate to death would at least get burned, since the fires below were not necessarily put out first, and they likely suffered from serious health problems in later life thanks to all the noxious fumes they breathed in. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/12GettyImages-2667291-ff6157f-e1771426036359.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man dressed in dirty clothing, carrying a large broom with a round bristled head. To the right, there is a very small boy leaning against the wall" title="An 1877 photograph shows a London chimney sweep and his ‘climbing boy’. Children risked suffocation as they scrambled up filthy flues (Image by Getty Images)" /> 13. Plague bearer Restoration era When the Great Plague ravaged London from 1665–66, around a fifth of the city’s population perished. Traditional burial practices had to be abandoned, and in their place, plague bearers spent the nights walking the streets, announcing their arrival with the call of “Bring out your dead!” and taking the bodies to mass graves. They were powerless to stop catching the disease, despite some of the ‘cures’ being touted at the time, including drinking crushed emeralds or rubbing the bottoms of live chickens on their skin. Even if they stayed healthy, no one wanted to be near them. As such, they often ended up living in the graveyards alongside the dead. 14. Resurrectionist Regency era Medical understanding made huge strides in the 19th century, and a big part of that was increasing knowledge of human anatomy gained through dissection. Since only executed criminals could be scientifically cut up, however, there was a supply shortage at medical schools. That was until a lucrative bodysnatching trade sprouted up among those unscrupulous enough to desecrate recently dug graves. These people were known as resurrectionists. It became such a problem that families began laying their loved ones to rest with added protections, such as coffins encased in metal cages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/14GettyImages-517453470-6c250a5-e1771426240587.jpg" width="1500" height="1003" alt="A black and white illustration showing a four men in a cemetery. On the left, two men are pulling on a rope which is tied around the neck of a female corpse, which they are pulling out of a grave. On the back right, a man in a long black coat and har is looking back over his shoulder, into the distance. On the front right, a man is turned away from the viewer, holding a lantern and also looking into the distance" title="Body snatchers – or resurrectionists – haul a corpse from a grave. Growing demand from medical schools led to an illicit trade in human remains (Image by Getty Images)" /> 15. Sin eater Early modern era How does a Christian in early modern Europe give themselves the best chance of getting to Heaven after death? Well, there’s the life of good deeds and worship, of course, but there was something their families could do, too: hire a sin eater. Usually a destitute outcast who would do anything for a couple of pennies or a meal, a sin eater would eat some bread placed on the deceased’s chest and so take on all their sins. In that way, the job itself was not that bad – but the consequences could be eternal. Read more | “Literally whipped”: the boys who took the beatings meant for royal bottoms 16. Whipping boy Medieval era A challenge facing the tutors of a prince, or even a young king, was how to deal with them when they had been naughty. Corporal punishment was off limits – or, at least, it could not be used directly. Instead, it has been claimed (although evidence is admittedly sketchy) that they came up with the idea of the whipping boy. This was another boy who went through schooling with the royal student and received any necessary reprimand. In return, they could form a friendship with their regal classmate in the hopes that they would be rewarded in later life with titles and honours. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/16D888E0-cc93184-e1771426372807.jpg" width="1500" height="1080" alt="A black and white image showing two young boys with their elderly guardian. One boy is standing in front of the old woman, with her hand on his shoulder. They are both looking towards the other young boy as the woman hits him with a broom-like object" title="A 19th-century image depicts King Edward VI and his ‘whipping boy’. Whether or not the role truly existed is a matter of debate (Image by Alamy)" /> 17. Pure finder Victorian era There is no denying that a common theme throughout this list is poo, and here’s one more. Don’t be misled by their name: pure finders got their hands dirty. They collected as much dog muck from the streets as they could, often foregoing gloves, to sell it to the tanning industry. Faeces were a vital component in the softening of hides to turn them into leather – ‘pure’ referred to its purifying qualities – so there was money to be made as a finder. Yet the tanners themselves deserve a mention on this list too. As well as dog poo, they had to handle animal hides and dangerous chemicals all day.
He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was
By 1889, Jack the Ripper’s grisly murders had sparked terror across London. So when a woman’s headless, mutilated body was found near the Thames, a coded alert was dispatched to police: “Another Whitechapel.” But her killer wasn’t Jack. Lucy Worsley investigates the horrifying crimes of the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’
In the final years of the 1880s, it truly wasn’t safe for women to venture out alone onto the streets of London. Extraordinary though it seems, there was not one but two serial killers on the loose in the same corner of the capital. We’ve all heard of Jack the Ripper, the notoriously brutal criminal who cut the throats of at least five women in and around Whitechapel – and, in doing so, triggered a firestorm of speculation over his identity that continues to rage to this day. But another murderer was plying his grisly trade along the banks of the Thames. He is the scariest Victorian serial killer you’ve probably never heard of – a man who became known as the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’. Because the Ripper slayings attract so much attention, that contemporary killer has been almost completely forgotten. There may be several reasons for this. The Ripper victims were all identified, the killings took place in a shorter time within a close community, and there were various ‘clues’ and ‘sightings’. In addition, the Ripper was clearly motivated by a hot rage against women. The Torso killer, much colder and better at planning, seems less knowable. Yet though he had a very different character and method, his crimes against women were every bit as shocking. In both cases, studying the evidence for their crimes and the lives of their victims reveals a wealth of information about life on the fringes of society in 1880s London, the most populous city in the world at the time. And now, nearly 140 years since the first of the Thames Torso Murders was committed, the culprit in this very cold case has – to my satisfaction, at least – at last been identified. The evidence I’ll lay out here, which I share in my new BBC Two series, would not stand up in a court of law. But researchers using modern techniques and, in particular, analysing large sets of data, have come up with a compelling theory. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1362213-2webready-0141b36-e1771417616576.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black-and-white Victorian newspaper illustration about the Whitechapel murders. At the center is a circular portrait of a curly-haired woman labeled “The Berner St. Victim.” Surrounding panels show scenes from the investigation: on the left, two men stand over a covered body on a table; below, a man discovers a woman’s body lying on a dark street. In the middle foreground, a uniformed police constable raises his arm to signal for assistance while two men crouch beside another woman’s body on the ground. On the right, small panels depict a police inspector in profile, a meeting of officials seated around a table, and a nighttime street scene marked as the “fatal spot” in Mitre Square, Aldgate. A bold headline across the center reads, “Two More Whitechapel Horrors. When Will the Murderer Be Captured?”" title="Jack the Ripper’s killing spree makes the front page of The Illustrated Police News, September 1888 (Image by Topfoto)" /> Gruesome discovery On 10 September 1889, a woman’s body was found by a police constable in Whitechapel, beneath railway arches bordering Pinchin Street, placed there in the early hours of the morning. Those arches are still there; in fact, you can still walk along many of the streets, riverbanks and water-stairs that form the backdrop for this story, which unfolded mainly in central London, along the Thames between Tower Bridge and Battersea Bridge. Distressingly, only the torso was discovered beneath the arches; the legs and head had been removed. Read more | Nell Darby's historical cold cases: murder in the year of the Ripper She was the fourth such mutilated victim to turn up. Three more, also women, had already been found in and around the Thames. Each had been dismembered, their severed limbs and other body parts being discovered piecemeal by horrified members of the public. There was a torso in the river at Rainham, Essex in 1887, followed by more remains left in the city. Then, in 1888, parts were dumped at spots around Whitehall. The torso of that victim was carefully placed for discovery in the unfinished new headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, which looks very much like jeering at authority: ‘catch me if you can.’ And in June 1889, various remains from another victim were found, mostly in and around Battersea. None of the women’s heads were located. Why did police conclude at the time that all were victims of one killer? As well as the strange disposal of body parts along the Thames, there was a common method to the way the bodies were cut up. The Irish pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy, one of our experts in the series, points out that such dismemberment was slow, skilled work that must have been done in a place of privacy, perhaps a house or workshop. But a new factor in the fourth case was the placing of the torso away from the river and – perhaps not coincidentally – on territory by then deemed to ‘belong’ to the Ripper. Perhaps the Thames Torso Murderer was jealous of the media attention that ‘Jack’ had attracted. Perhaps he even wanted to taunt the Ripper by working on ‘his’ patch. A recent Dockers’ Strike, which saw 75,000 workers walk off the job, had prompted the deployment of 2,000 extra policemen into the East End. So the torso in Pinchin Street must have been placed in the railway arches very quickly and precisely between half-hourly police patrols. Carrying a torso through the streets was risky: the killer must have had nerves of steel. But this was his pattern: he’d managed to place the torso of his second victim in the middle of a busy building site without being detected. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1645164483webready-c056b98-e1771418656980.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large brown brick wall curving from the right to the left, with several arch imprints on it. There is a white road sign that reads PINCHIN STREET on the right hand side. Behind this large wall, there is a tall grey and brown tower block" title="The mutilated body of a woman was found near Pinchin Street. To do this, the killer must have carried the torso through busy streets patrolled by police (Image by Getty Images)" /> The fourth murder was a little different, though, maybe because the third hadn’t gone to plan. Clearly contrary to the killer’s intentions, that victim was identified. One of the body parts had been wrapped in fabric from a distinctively checked coat. The friends of a woman who’d gone missing came forward to say they’d recognised descriptions of the garment as one belonging to Elizabeth Jackson. Elizabeth’s life story demonstrates something that was probably true of the other victims, too: that women living precariously on the fringes of society were very vulnerable. Poor Elizabeth was pregnant without being married. She had left her job in domestic service and became estranged from her Catholic family, turning to the workhouse rather than asking them for support. In the last days of her life she had been sleeping rough by the river. She had a friend called ‘Ginger Nell,’ who was described at the time as “an unfortunate”, which means she probably sold sex. Ginger Nell warned Elizabeth to look out for bad men down by the river. It was wise advice that proved sadly prescient. Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators? The identity of the person who’d killed Elizabeth and her unborn child, along with the three other unnamed victims, remained a mystery. The case stumped those investigating at the time. Modern analysis of the police surgeons’ reports shows that they didn’t do a bad job of seeking clues from the human remains, but they lacked two advantages we have today: the science of psychological profiling, and the ability to search large sets of data. A history of violence The person who I believe has identified the Thames Torso Murderer is researcher and author Sarah Bax Horton. She decided that the killer must have had a close connection to the Thames, where so many body parts were found. She also thought that he likely had a history of violent crimes against women. Her real act of genius, though, was to search the online database of British newspapers within the timeframe of the four murders, looking for crime stories containing mentions of the river Thames and violence against women. Among the names emerging from her search, one stood out: James Crick (1862–1907). Crick, Bax Horton’s research reveals, was a waterman, ferrying passengers across the Thames in his skiff. His boat could have provided the private place that the murderer required in which to kill and dismember his victims. Crick operated from Horselydown Old Stairs leading to the water near Butler’s Wharf. These water-stairs are now a hotspot for tourists and Instagrammers because they offer a wonderful view of Tower Bridge. At the time of the murders in the 1880s, the bridge was still under construction. Enabling rapid river crossings, it would eventually steal watermen’s livelihoods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL2801843webready-8207f7d-e1771417994352.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration depicting a man in a long black coat and a tall black hat, rowing a boat in a river. To the left are two other men in sitting in the boat. Behind them all are some sketches of tall buildings with lots of rectangular windows" title="An 1857 illustration of a London waterman ferrying passengers on the Thames. Might the killer have been such a man, using his boat to carry off, kill and dismember women? (Image by Bridgman Images)" /> Crick was first mentioned in the papers for an alleged assault against his wife, Rosina. He’d kicked her, causing her to scream loudly enough to bring the police to their house. Rosina said that her husband was often mysteriously missing at night. But he was not convicted of any crime. Basically, Rosina wasn’t believed. Next came a report that Crick had been accused of raping 31-year-old Jessie Miller. She had a low-skilled job folding paper for the book trade, she was separated from her husband, and she was short of money. On 1 July 1889, the Shah of Persia arrived in London aboard his yacht to visit Britain’s royal family, his progress up the Thames being observed by huge crowds. On this festive day, Crick tempted Jessie into his boat with the offer of a free ride. He then “did ravish and carnally know” Jessie in his boat, but she jumped into the water and escaped. Again she was not believed in court – and, again, Crick got off. Three of the Thames torsos had been discovered before Jessie’s ordeal. The fourth was discovered that September in Pinchin Street, across the river from Horselydown Old Stairs. That October, a 39-year-old named Sarah Warburton, whose poorly paid job was to sew fur trimmings onto clothes, had the misfortune to accept a lift in Crick’s boat. An illiterate mother of three, Sarah was, like Jessie before her, separated. On this occasion, though, Crick’s luck failed. To assault Sarah, he took his skiff to an out-of-the-way spot alongside a steamer moored underneath the half-finished Tower Bridge. But she hit him on the head with an iron bolt and fled, screaming, onto the ship’s deck. There she was heard by a passing police boat, and Crick was apprehended by Inspector Charles Ford as he tried to row away. At last, James Crick was convicted. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/dreamstimexxl150941857webready-75f4182-e1771418129790.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of Tower Bridge in London, lit up at night. Taken from below, there is a set of stone steps and a railing in the foreground, with the two towers of the bridge standing in the middle of the images. The bridge is lit up with yellow lights and the sky is a dark blue behind it." title="The remains of Horselydown Old Stairs leading to the river at Tower Bridge, which was being built at the time of the murders. It was from here that waterman James Crick worked – and perhaps picked up women to kill (Image by Dreamstime)" /> I suspect that was only because Sarah’s witness statement was backed up by that of a Metropolitan Police inspector. With his support, her testimony, so bravely given and so cleverly recovered by Sarah Bax Horton, was enough to put Crick behind bars. And once he was in prison, the bodies stopped appearing along the Thames. Chillingly, Sarah also reported something Crick had said to her during the attack: “I intend to settle you, as I have done other women that have been found in the Thames.” Was that a confession? I believe so. Read more | Hallie Rubenhold: “To most people, the women killed by the Ripper are just corpses. I want to tell a different story” Unmarked graves What became of the victims? Elizabeth Jackson was given a pauper’s burial in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, the largest graveyard in the world at the time. The torso found in Whitehall was also buried at Brookwood; neither grave is marked. The woman found in Pinchin Street was buried in the East London Cemetery, where she didn’t even get a funeral. Records do roughly indicate where their bodies lie, and these burial grounds are moving places to visit. In death, we can give these women the remembrance and respect they deserve. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-90748470webready-76d630c-e1771418795616.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration showing an arched entrance to a train station, with ornate gates across the arch. Over the arch, the words CEMETERY STATION are written. At the top of the building, the word NECROPOLIS is written. To the left of the station entrance, there is a three storey building with four windows visible" title="The London terminus for the Necropolis Railway serving Brookwood Cemetery, where third victim Elizabeth Jackson was given a pauper’s burial (Image by Getty Images)" /> I believe that the Thames Torso Murderer claimed more victims than the four we know. If he truly was James Crick, then his abused wife, Rosina, and his rape targets Jessie and Sarah were also his victims. Rosina and Sarah managed to get on with their lives. The unfortunate Jessie did not. After a spell in the workhouse, she died at the age of 43 as “a drunkard and an unfortunate under the wheels of an omnibus”. She was a casualty not only of a terrible man but also of a society offering no safety net for women who fell on hard times. Three in the frame Which of these men might have committed the Thames Torso Murders? Jack Fairclough was a one-time partner of Elizabeth Jackson, and possibly the father of her child. They lived an itinerant life together, building up debts, and witnesses report that Jack had “unnaturally used” her. The police were obviously interested in this itinerant stonemason and army deserter, but Jack could prove that, at the time of Elizabeth’s death, he’d been away from London looking for work. James Hardiman was a cats’ meat man, a door-to-door pet-food salesman who worked with a barrow that would have been ideal for transporting a torso through London’s streets. The body of Ripper victim Annie Chapman was found in his mother’s backyard in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel, leading some to speculate that Hardiman was both Jack and the Thames Torso Murderer. However, their methods of killing seem too different. James Crick was a waterman who rowed passengers on the Thames in his boat Ally Sloper. Crick had the physical strength to commit the crimes. He also had the perfect means of distributing the body parts by water, and his boat could have provided a place where he could have dismembered the bodies out of sight. He had a history of violence against women, too. After Sarah Warburton, the target of his final identifiable rape attempt, gave testimony at trial, he was convicted and imprisoned – and the killings on the river ceased. (He was released in 1902, and died in 1907.) Crick, then, must be considered the prime suspect. This article was first published in the February 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
Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools
Many Victorian gaols provided schooling for their inmates, decades before it was mandated in wider society. So what, asks Rosalind Crone, drove this great educational crusade?
On 26 February 1848, 19-year-old Thomas Sumpter appeared in the dock at Berkshire Assizes, accused – and quickly convicted – of stealing a sheep. Nothing unusual in that, given the times: livestock theft was hardly uncommon in the first half of the 19th century. What was more curious was the apparent motive behind Sumpter’s offence. Having been recently released from Reading Gaol, he committed the crime with the express intent of ensuring his prompt return to the prison where he had been memorising sections of the Bible. He’d been receiving lessons in reading, and he didn’t want to stop. Sumpter was one of three convicts who had been given early release from Reading Gaol in autumn 1845, following an unprecedented decision by the local authorities. Having been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment, each had served six to eight months – and in that time had become poster boys for the success of a new regime at the prison. To aid rehabilitation, education was prioritised over labour: prisoners spent large amounts of time learning to read and write, as well as memorising passages from the Bible. Having each committed to memory the whole of the New Testament up to Ephesians, at the time of their release the three men were lauded as star pupils whose characters had been transformed. That ‘transformation’, though, proved short-lived. All three soon re-offended, including Sumpter. Word spread about both the system and the unfortunate relapses, and the prison became known as the Read-Read-Reading Gaol. This account is somewhat at odds with our idea of the Victorian prison as a place of ‘hard labour, hard board and hard fare’. Yet in the 1840s, when there was no universal elementary education and many working-class children were denied the opportunity to attend school, many prisons in England and Wales had schools in which inmates learned reading, writing and sometimes more besides. And despite the scandals sparked by those three ‘transformed’ inmates, prison schools were here to stay. Smelly vessels The first recognisable prison schools appeared in the unlikeliest of places: on board prison hulks. These decommissioned naval ships were used to hold men (and sometimes boys) who had been convicted of serious offences but whose transportation to the penal colonies had been delayed or prevented. Moored in rivers and harbours, these damp and often smelly vessels were routinely described as “schools of vice”. Drinking, gambling and fighting were rife. It is extraordinary, then, that on 1 January 1812, Thomas Price, chaplain for the Zealand hulk at Sheerness, reported that a school had been established in the ship and, as a result, that “some of the ignorant are beginning to read”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-90775486web-e23d815.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An etching of a prison hulk, resting on a mud or sand bank during low tide." title="The 19th-century penal system had various categories, including harshly regimented first-stage prisons such as Pentonville (visitors’ order book, shown right), slightly more relaxed second-stage prisons and, for serious offenders, the dreaded prison hulks. (Etching by Edward William Cooke via Getty Images)" /> Soon after, schools began to appear in land-based prisons, too. In 1814–15, the keeper of Warwick County Gaol set up a monitorial school for juvenile prisoners. From 1816, convicts at Millbank Penitentiary would gather in groups of 16 in the corridors between their cells, where they were taught reading, writing and arithmetic by the most educated among their number. By 1821, there were schools teaching basic literacy in at least 24 prisons and hulks in England and Wales, with more in Scotland and Ireland. Their appearance was a consequence of perceived rising crime rates and the increasing use of prisons as places of punishment, not just secure custody, where convicted criminals would serve sentences of incarceration. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/BAL386205web-97217e5.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving, showing a churchman lecturing to a group of inmates inside a ship." title="A churchman lectures inmates on a prison hulk at Woolwich in a 19th-century engraving. During the day, desks and blackboards were brought into the chapel to turn it into a school. (Image from The Stapleton Collection via Bridgeman Images)" /> This was accompanied by a greater emphasis on reformation, or what we would now call rehabilitation: the idea that prisoners should be returned to society as law-abiding, productive subjects. Instruction in reading and writing, reformers hoped, would civilise and discipline a prisoner, support his or her evangelisation and, in some cases, help to secure employment. Listen | British prisons: everything you wanted to know A religious core These developments reflected those of the wider movement for mass education. In early 19th-century England and Wales, there was no national system of elementary schooling, and attempts to legislate for one routinely failed. Though MPs agreed that any state-funded education should have a moral (ie religious) core, they could not agree on who – effectively, which church – should provide it. That failure, combined with the strength of penal reformers’ commitment to rehabilitation and the growing number of prison schools, led to a remarkable event. In summer 1823, MPs passed new legislation: a Gaols Act, which aimed to improve conditions and impose some uniformity on regimes in local prisons for inmates on remand and serving short sentences. Among other directives, it decreed that “provision shall be made in all prisons for the instruction of prisoners of both sexes in reading and writing”. The legislation heralded the birth of state-funded education in England and Wales, pre-dating the establishment of universal elementary education for children by almost 50 years. From 1823, the number of prison schools continued to increase. By the late 1840s, every convict prison and hulk, as well as the majority of local prisons, had some sort of education scheme for prisoners. In the late 1860s, the proportion of local prisons with schools reached 90 per cent. Most early prison schools were ad hoc initiatives. Prisoners were supplied with books, and sometimes pens and paper, then told to get on with it themselves. The authorities often relied on prisoners, philanthropic visitors or family members to teach for free or a small fee. In 1836, the chaplain at Devon County Gaol explained that he selected schoolmasters from among those convicted of smuggling because they “conduct themselves better than other classes of prisoners”. At Ely Gaol, the governor’s 11-year-old daughter taught the female prisoners. Efforts were made to fill learning spaces with suitable fixtures. On the Defence prison hulk, slanting black desks with inkstand holes were arranged in the body of the chapel each morning. Blackboards were common, and lessons were often supported by textbooks published by school societies. At London’s Holloway Prison, journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew watched a class of female prisoners cluster “around a map of England... [they] appeared to take great interest in their geography lesson”. Read more | Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain Soon, however, new systems of prison discipline ushered in more formal approaches. Prisoners’ lives were increasingly managed via timetables dictating hours for sleep, meals, labour and lessons. After the 1839 Prison Act, the adoption of the so-called ‘silent’ and ‘separate’ systems – which prohibited contact between prisoners – put an end to peer learning. Many classrooms became silent, and in some separate prisons, such as Pentonville and Lewes County Gaol, partitions were placed between pupils. These were soon covered in graffiti as the increasingly literate prisoners found new ways to communicate with each other. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/WandsworthwebHoCadultschoolchapelcmyk-9dd5651.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing before a theatre-style seating, filled with men with partitions between them." title="In the ‘separate’ system, prisoners were isolated from each other, even during lessons – as shown here at the Surrey House of Correction (known today as Wandsworth Prison) in the late 1850s. (Engraving from Heritage Image Partnership Ltd via Alamy)" /> When visiting the school at Coldbath Fields, London, Henry Mayhew found that “all was silent as in a dumb asylum, the only sound being the rustling of copy books”. One pupil, “a lad with ruddy skin... [and] a defect in his speech”, was instructed to read aloud from his book. “‘Whatsoever is wight that shall ye weceive’, [he said]. “‘Do try to pronounce your ‘r’s’ better,’ said the master, kindly; and thereupon there was a shuffling of feet from the other pupils, as if the only method of laughing under the silent system was with the shoes.” At the same time, volunteers were replaced with paid teachers under the direct control of the prison chaplain and governor. In convict prisons and large local prisons, qualified schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were recruited, but in smaller institutions the roles of teacher and warder were combined to save money, often retrospectively. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/AE5J55web-94e28c7.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving showing three rows of girls with dresses and white caps, sitting and working at desks, looked over by some women." title="The school for girls imprisoned at Tothill Fields in the late 1850s. A dedicated schoolmistress was employed to teach that institution’s large female population; in other prisons, the matron took lessons. (Engraving from Chronicle, via Alamy)" /> In 1858, Samuel Parker, former schoolmaster at Newgate Gaol, won an action against his employers for unreasonable dismissal after he complained about the new duties imposed on him. “A schoolmaster would be degraded in the eyes of his pupils,” the judge explained, “if, in addition... he officiated as turnkey and was compelled to clean out [water] closets.” Embracing opportunities Qualified teachers and, from 1835, prison inspections encouraged the expansion of the curriculum, with rote learning exposed as a futile exercise. “I have learned all the Galatians through by heart, and am now upon the Ephesians,” Prisoner 4429, a seven-time veteran of Reading Gaol, told the inspector, “[but] I cannot say I understand it.” While instruction in writing and arithmetic became increasingly common, in some prisons lessons in history and geography were offered to vary and deepen learning. “The school is our strength,” declared the chaplain at Shepton Mallet Gaol. “When prisoners begin to read, they begin to think.” Many prisoners embraced the opportunity to learn. Attending school excused them from labour, while mastering the skill of reading provided relief from boredom, and writing offered the chance to communicate with others outside (and sometimes inside) the prison. But progress was dependent on time, and the majority of prisoners spent no more than three months behind bars. Often the learning acquired in prisons was lost amid the hard reality of the outside world. During the 1850s and 1860s the penal aspects of incarceration intensified, fuelled by growing disillusionment with efforts to rehabilitate prisoners, the replacement of transportation by imprisonment, and the perception that prisons were too comfortable. Prison schools persisted, but provision was reshaped by a new emphasis on punishment and deterrence, and curricula were streamlined to focus only on basic competence in reading, writing and arithmetic. “High teaching is wholly eschewed,” explained the chaplain at Millbank, “not only because there would not be time for it, but as inconsistent with the proprieties of a prison, and not at all necessary with reference to the well-doing of the prisoners [on release].” Stages of learning From 1853, convicts at Pentonville and Millbank serving long sentences spent their first nine months in separate confinement. Keen to increase the pain of isolation, in 1863–64 prison administrators introduced a system of cellular instruction. In each ward, one hour each week was set aside for education, during which prisoners would study alone in their cells. Those who were eligible would receive 10 to 15 minutes’ instruction from the schoolmaster or mistress. At second-stage convict prisons, where some association was permitted, classes continued but lessons were limited to just one evening each week. “The mere attempt to read cannot interest a man fatigued by labour and bowed down with shame,” complained the chaplain at Portsmouth. According to a former prisoner at Dartmoor, “by the time a dozen words of one syllable have been spelt, and often before a single line in the copybook has been filled, the bell rings... and the prisoners return to their cells about as wise as they left them”. The nationalisation of local prisons in 1877 provided an opportunity to review education for short-sentence prisoners. Although the work of the commissioners ensured that a school existed in every prison, provision was reduced to the bare minimum: 15 minutes of individual tuition in cells twice a week for prisoners aged under 40 with sentences exceeding four months. “It is an inherent difficulty,” wrote a senior civil servant. “A place of short-term imprisonment cannot be made a place of education.” Read more | Charles Dickens: prison reformer, scourge of capitalists, champion of the poor The advent of universal (1870) and compulsory (1880) elementary education for children in England and Wales gave prison administrators hope that prison schools could be abolished within a generation. But the reasons for illiteracy and innumeracy within the prison population were, and still are, varied and complex. At the same time, the idea of education as a panacea – a cure-all for society’s problems and an antidote to criminality – remains seductive. Educational and penal policy combined in the 19th century to embed education deep within the penal regime and, as a result, prison schools continued through the 20th century and into the 21st. However, the difficulties of accommodating education within an environment in which punishment and deterrence routinely take priority persist. As a result, 200 years after they first appeared, there are still serious limits on what prison schools can achieve. This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Sex, sadism and sugared death: 8 scandals that rocked Victorian Britain
A killer-sweet scare, a criminal trial that threatened to bring down a prominent politician, cruelty in the workhouses, and a horrific murder spree: life in Victorian Britain was not without its scandals. Rosalind Crone investigates eight headline-grabbing events that caused the Victorians to rise up in outrage
The mother of sex scandals: Caroline Norton, a future prime minister and a change in custody laws In 1827, 19-year-old Caroline Sheridan, granddaughter of the famous playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan – himself the subject of a scandal – married George Norton, heir to his family’s fortune. It was a disastrous match. George turned down work while waiting for his inheritance, so the family became dependent on Caroline’s earnings as a poet and novelist. George drank and was often violent towards his wife. All the while, Caroline’s flamboyance and literary flair was attracting some powerful admirers, including a future prime minister, Lord Melbourne. In April 1836, after yet another heated argument, George barred Caroline from the family home and prevented her from seeing their three sons, all aged less than seven. In the early 19th century, the law decreed that a wife’s property – and any children – belonged to her husband, so there was little Caroline could do about it. Naturally, she was distraught, especially as she knew the pain George was inflicting on her children by “cursing me thro them”, as she wrote to Lord Melbourne. If that wasn’t bad enough, in June 1836 George sued Lord Melbourne for adultery with his wife. A successful prosecution was the necessary first step in divorce proceedings. For George, it was also a money-making venture as he demanded that Lord Melbourne pay him £10,000 in damages. The trial was a sensation. The court was “crowded to excess”, and newspaper readers awaited eagerly the potentially salacious testimony. One maid claimed she “saw Lord Melbourne kiss Mrs Norton”, and another that, after a visit from Lord Melbourne, Caroline’s “collar and hair were generally tumbled… She would also wash her hands [and] put fresh rouge on her face.” A coachman’s testimony that he saw Caroline lying on the hearthrug with her clothes “up”, showing “the thick part of her thigh”, promised to prove decisive – until he admitted being sacked for drinking on the job. The jury was unimpressed by these explosive allegations and promptly dismissed the case. Vindicated, Lord Melbourne went on to become Queen Victoria’s first prime minister and beloved ‘Lord M’. Caroline, still married to George but separated from her sons, picked up her pen and successfully campaigned for legal change. In 1839, legislation granted women custody of children aged under seven, provided they were not guilty of adultery. Revelations in the dark: shining a light on the brutality of women's work in the coal mines – sometimes done topless! Coal was the lifeblood of Victorian Britain. But it was extracted at a terrible cost. In 1842, a scandal erupted over the “horrible and degrading labours” that miners were forced to endure – and those miners were often women and children. Read more | From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution The scandal was triggered by the release of a report into mining practices authored by the Children’s Employment Commission. Although established to investigate the use of child labour, its remit was expanded when it was discovered that women were also working underground. Mining placed extraordinary physical demands on women and children alike. But what particularly obsessed the commissioners was its perceived immoral and corrupting effects. The commission’s report described how women and older children, who moved coal from the coalface to the shaft head, were forced to go “down on all-fours” and were “harnessed” to carts “like animals”. At the Hopwood pit in Barnsley, a commissioner found girls, some of pubescent age, “stark naked down to the waist, their hair bound up with a tight cap, and [wearing] trousers”. In some pits, the male ‘hewers’, who cut the coal from the seam, removed all their clothes, exposing themselves to the women they worked with. These accounts were accompanied by woodcut illustrations that were suggestive of further improprieties. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/GettyImages-188002823-638be7f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A drawing of a woman working in a Halifax pit. An 1842 report found evidence of women working “stark naked down to the waist” (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" title="A drawing of a woman working in a Halifax pit. An 1842 report found evidence of women working “stark naked down to the waist” (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" /> Reformers argued that girls were brutalised by their work in the mines. They lost their innocence and grew up to become bad wives and mothers. As for the working women, it was suggested (sometimes contrary to the evidence) that they neglected their domestic duties and were therefore responsible for the poor living conditions endured by their families. The report whipped up a tidal wave of public opposition that helped push the 1842 Mines Act through parliament, prohibiting boys under the age of 10, and women of any age, from working underground in coalmines. Yet not everyone welcomed the legislation. Many women struggled to find alternative employment, creating hardship for families. Meanwhile, men and teenage boys continued to perform backbreaking work over long hours in often perilous conditions. Read more | The ‘Pit Brow Lasses’ of 19th-century coal mines Crushing hunger: the horrific conditions and near starvation in Britain’s workhouses On 1 August 1845, Thomas Wakley stood up in parliament and told his fellow MPs a terrible story of the abuse of the paupers employed to crush bones at Andover workhouse. The inmates were so hungry, Wakley revealed, that they “were in the habit of extracting the marrow and gnawing the meat” that they found on the bones. The home secretary, James Graham, immediately launched an enquiry and a Poor Law assistant commissioner was dispatched to the Hampshire town to investigate. His interviews with staff and inmates confirmed the allegations and revealed yet further abuses. The workhouse master and matron, previously praised by Poor Law administrators for their parsimony and disciplinary regime, had been siphoning food off the prescribed diet. In doing so, they had driven desperate inmates to scavenge for scraps left on putrid bones, while also subjecting them to physical and psychological abuse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/GettyImages-645161372-f0b890d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration shows men fighting over food in a workhouse. One journalist claimed that hunger had propelled the denizens of Andover workhouse into unwitting cannibalism (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" title="An illustration shows men fighting over food in a workhouse. One journalist claimed that hunger had propelled the denizens of Andover workhouse into unwitting cannibalism (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" /> The newspapers seized upon the story, adding yet more fuel to the fire. One journalist claimed that bones sent to the workhouse for crushing were “collected from various sources, including… occasionally some from churchyards”, a veiled suggestion that the inmates had become unwitting cannibals. Read more | How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse? The home secretary ordered the abolition of bone crushing in workhouses. But it was too late – the scandal had shone a spotlight on the failings and incompetence of the Poor Law Commission, the body responsible for the implementation of the 1834 New Poor Law. In 1847, it was replaced with a new, more accountable authority: the Poor Law Board. However, as the ideology of poverty that underpinned the workhouse system went unchallenged, the workhouse continued to be an object of dread and often a place of unnecessary cruelty. The Bradford sweets poisoning: how ‘sugared death’ sparked a change in attitudes to the adulterated food trade On 25 October 1858, Bradford sweet-maker John Neal sent an employee on an errand to a chemist. Neal ordered the employee to buy 12 pounds of plaster of Paris – nicknamed ‘daft’ – which he planned to use in his confectionery in place of expensive sugar. In the early 19th century, rogue and sometimes nefarious substances were often added to food and drink in order to extend shelf life, for visual appeal, or to keep prices low. Most of the time, no one noticed, as the public had become so used to it. Yet in this instance, the consequences were catastrophic. The chemist was ill and bedridden, and so he instructed his apprentice to fetch the ‘daft’ from the storeroom to sell to Neal’s employee. Unfortunately, there were two unlabelled casks of white powder “placed near each other”, and so the apprentice accidentally supplied Neal with 12 pounds of arsenic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/2H47M4X-790f9d4.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Death is depicted as a confectioner in an engraving produced following the 1858 arsenic scandal. Knowingly selling adulterated food was proscribed two years late (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy)" title="Death is depicted as a confectioner in an engraving produced following the 1858 arsenic scandal. Knowingly selling adulterated food was proscribed two years late (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy)" /> The arsenic was used to make peppermint drops, or, as The Times described them, “little pills of sugared death”. Neal observed that the sweets “were unusually long in drying, and… darker in colour than usual”. However, he wasn’t unduly worried, and sold them at a discount to market trader William Hardaker. Read more | Living in fear: the dangers of Victorian London On Saturday 30 October, around a thousand of the sweets were sold to customers at Hardaker’s stall. The next day – Halloween – hundreds of people, including Hardaker himself, became “dangerously ill”, suffering from symptoms of arsenic poisoning. The source was quickly located and unconsumed sweets were seized. Billmen and night police were instructed “to give warnings in all public-houses and… thickly populated streets”. Their intervention came too late to prevent at least 21 people from dying, including several children. “Three of four persons” were found “lying dead in one house”. Events in Bradford prompted a sea change in attitudes towards food adulteration. In 1860, long-awaited legislation was passed which made it an offence to knowingly sell adulterated food. However, it was another 10 years before the legislation could be properly enforced. Cruelty in the home: the plight of domestic servants, who lacked protection from their tyrannical masters The case of Sarah and Robert Bird shone light into a dark corner of domestic life. In March 1850, the couple, north Devon farmers, were put on trial for the murder of their servant, Mary Ann Parsons, a 15-year-old girl they had acquired from the workhouse. The Birds claimed Mary Ann had stumbled and hit her head on the fireplace, but her body was covered in injuries from regular beatings, and neighbours testified that they had seen signs of abuse. “I heard Sarah Bird scolding the girl… after which I heard blows and the girl crying,” said stonemason William Topas. “Soon after she came out… her face was bloody.” The workhouse master admitted that he had advised Sarah Bird to “chastise her!” when Sarah complained that Mary Ann was an idle thief. Local anger turned to national outrage when the Birds were acquitted. “This is not justice,” declared the highly influential commentators John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor in The Morning Chronicle. “Those to whom power over others is given, and who brutally misuse that power, should be thus far held responsible for the safety of those over whom they tyrannise.” Public pressure forced the authorities to re-arrest the Birds for assault. They were convicted in August 1850, and later sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment. The case also led to a change in the law. The domestic service industry had expanded dramatically in the first half of the 19th century as the employment of a ‘maid-of-all work’ became common in middle-class households. It was a backbreaking job, and some employers, like the Birds, could be cruel tyrants. New legislation required parish relieving officers to visit workhouse children who had been sent into service to check they were not being mistreated. Most servants, however, remained vulnerable and it was another 60 years before domestic workers began to unionise and assert their rights. Stella and Fanny: the media storm around the trial of two cross-dressers for “corrupting public morals” The arrest of a group of rowdy patrons at the Strand Theatre in London in April 1870 produced a scandal that challenged Victorian assumptions about gender, sexuality and respectability. At the centre of the storm were Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, both from respectable middle-class families. By the late 1860s the friends were better known as their alter egos, Stella and Fanny. As female impersonators on stage, they barely raised an eyebrow. Increasingly, however, Ernest and Frederick took their characters off stage, parading through the streets and frequenting West End theatres and clubs in flamboyant dresses and elaborate make up. Soon, their unconventional behaviour was drawing significant attention. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/P7GJBN-6f55024.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park pictured in c1869. In 1871, the pair were acquitted following a trial that gripped the nation (Photo by History and Art Collection / Alamy)" title="Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park pictured in c1869. In 1871, the pair were acquitted following a trial that gripped the nation (Photo by History and Art Collection / Alamy)" /> Given their celebrity, the arrest of Ernest and Frederick came as a surprise to many. However, it was later revealed that the pair had been under police surveillance for a year. They were “greeted with shouts of laughter and hisses” as they were conveyed the next morning from the cells to the Bow Street Police Court. When placed in the dock, still in evening dresses from the night before, “great surprise was manifested at the admirable manner” in which Ernest and Frederick “had ‘made up”. The friends were charged with committing sodomy, conspiring to induce others to commit sodomy, and, by wearing women’s clothes, “openly and scandalously outrag[ing] public decency and corrupt[ing] public morals”. By the time of their trial, in May 1871, two of the three charges had been dropped. Ernest and Frederick both appeared in suits, but each “with a bouquet of flowers in a buttonhole of his coat”. They were acquitted, after the prosecution failed to prove that the defendants had done anything other than dress as women for fun. Despite the pair’s exoneration, the trial served to link cross-dressing with homosexuality in the public mind. And the verdict prompted the addition of a clause in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which enabled gay men to be charged with gross indecency where sodomy could not be proven. Among those subsequently prosecuted were playwright Oscar Wilde and codebreaker Alan Turing. Sex trafficking of young girls: a newspaper exposé revealed an unspeakable trade – and landed its editor in prison In July 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette ran a series of articles on a scandal that was so explosive that they were preceded with a content warning. “Squeamish” and “prudish” readers who preferred to live in “selfish” ignorance were advised not to read the paper. Those who dared were promised “an authentic record of unimpeachable facts, abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived”. The articles, collectively entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, was the product of a ‘Special and Secret Commission’ led by the magazine’s editor, William T Stead, on the trafficking of young girls into prostitution in London. Stead took readers on a tour of the capital’s brothels typically frequented by wealthy men in search of ‘maidenheads’ to deflower. Through interviews with procurers and brothel-keepers, Stead reported how girls aged 11–15 were groomed, or purchased from parents, sent to collusive doctors or midwives to have their virginity certified, drugged with chloroform, and then raped in locked rooms. “In my house,” boasted one brothel-keeper, “you can enjoy the screams of the girl with the certainty that no one hears them but yourself.” Stead even went so far as to purchase a child for himself. Thirteen-year-old Lily (later revealed to be Eliza Armstrong) was allegedly sold by her alcoholic mother for £5. Stead described the girl’s panic when she woke to find herself locked in a room with Stead, emitting “a wild and piteous cry… a helpless startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/2DT328F-afa262a.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A cartoon shows a man propositioning a woman in the 19th century. An 1885 grooming scandal resulted in the raising of the age of consent for girls (Photo by Walker Art Library/Alamy)" title="A cartoon shows a man propositioning a woman in the 19th century. An 1885 grooming scandal resulted in the raising of the age of consent for girls (Photo by Walker Art Library/Alamy)" /> The public response to the articles was overwhelming. As the newsagent WH Smith refused to sell it, large crowds gathered at the magazine’s office to obtain copies. The reports were reprinted in European and American newspapers. On 14 August, parliament passed a Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16 and gave the police greater powers to prosecute streetwalkers and brothel-keepers. Days later, 250,000 people gathered for a demonstration in Hyde Park to demand its enforcement. Stead had succeeded in his aim: to use human-interest stories, sensation and scandal to galvanise support for social change. He had also overstepped the mark. For his role in the procurement of ‘Lily’, the editor was convicted of child abduction and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour. The serial killer ‘baby-farmer’: the discovery of an infant’s body alerted police to a murderous money-making scheme On 30 March 1896, a bargeman discovered the body of a baby girl, wrapped in brown paper, floating in the Thames near Caversham Weir just outside Reading. The bargeman called the police, who took the parcel back to the station for examination. The police surgeon, on finding “a piece of string… tied tightly around its neck”, concluded that the baby had been strangled. That might have been the end of the story, had the police not noticed a faded address written on the brown paper. This information led the authorities to the home of 58-year-old Amelia Dyer, who was arrested on suspicion of murder. A search of the premises produced “incriminating letters, telegrams, pawn tickets [for baby clothes] and receipts for advertisements in London and other papers”. Dyer, one reporter noted, “evidently carried on to a considerable extent” an “awful traffic in human life”. Read more | Victorian murder scandals: what six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century Dyer was a ‘baby-farmer’, a woman who was given money to look after children on a residential basis who were not her own. This was an industry that had emerged in the Victorian period to deal with children – born in and out of wedlock – whose mothers could not afford to support them. The baby farmer was given a lump sum to ‘adopt’ the child. Some, like Dyer, would then kill the child and pocket the money. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/KCP5P9-c22faf9.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Amelia Dyer ruthlessly exploited the fact that many parents could not afford to support their children (Photo by Historic Collection/Alamy)" title="Amelia Dyer ruthlessly exploited the fact that many parents could not afford to support their children (Photo by Historic Collection/Alamy)" /> Dyer was not the first murderous baby-farmer to come before the courts, but the scale of her enterprise transformed this case into one of the most prominent scandals of the age. During the month of April, while Dyer was held on remand in Reading Gaol, the bodies of another six babies linked to her were discovered near Caversham Weir. Evidence suggests that in the two months before her arrest, she had acquired around 20 children, none of whom were still living with her. Over the course of Dyer’s 30-year career, it is estimated that she killed more than 300 children. Dyer was convicted of murder, and hanged on 10 June. While the public were outraged by her crimes, some commentators were more ambivalent. One journalist pointed to the “cruel and callous heartedness of parents, who fling away their offspring, to endure any fate that may await them at a mercenary stranger’s hands”. Long-awaited infant protection legislation tightened and added to existing regulations around childcare, but lawmakers failed to provide any new solutions for women who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant with a child they could not support. Rosalind Crone is professor of history at the Open University, and author of Violent Victorians (Manchester University Press, 2012) and Illiterate Inmates (Oxford University Press, 2022) This article first appeared in the May 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Anna McKay delves into the development, use and abolition of floating prisons – and the horrible experiences of those incarcerated on board
Decried by reformers as “wicked Noah’s arks” and “rotten leaky tubs”, prison hulks were a looming presence off the shores of 18th- and 19th-century Britain and its empire. Large former navy ships were docked on the Thames and elsewhere, housing convicts awaiting transportation, often in hideous conditions. Dr Anna McKay explains to David Musgrove why these floating prisons existed, what life was like on board, and why the system eventually fell out of use. Read more about the brutal history of prison hulks
Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain
What are the key dates to know about in the development of prisons in Britain? Rosalind Crone shares 14 milestones in the evolution of imprisonment, from the Norman conquest to the Victorians…
In an episode of our ‘Everything you wanted to know’ podcast series, Rosalind Crone answered key questions on the history of prisons in Britain, from what life was like in Victorian prisons to the real state of the food. Listen to the full episode here and find out more about key milestones below… 1078 | The construction of the central keep of the Tower of London, built by William I following the Norman conquest of England. The Tower was first used as a prison for enemies of the king in about 1100. 1166 | The Assizes of Clarendon, a series of ordinances through which Henry II ordered sheriffs of every county to build gaols to keep in safe custody those accused of felonies (serious crimes) until they could be tried by the newly created itinerant royal judges (justices of the assize). From about the 12th century, the obligation to establish and maintain a gaol in order to keep the peace was included in royal charters granted to towns. These gaols were the responsibility of the towns’ corporations (or governing bodies). 1352 | Imprisonment for debt, previously confined to those who owed money to the crown, was extended to those who owed money to private individuals. Read more: What was it like to be a Prisoner of War during the Hundred Years’ War? 1556 | Bridewell Hospital in London became a ‘house of correction’ for idle apprentices, rogues and vagabonds, disorderly women and petty offenders. The idea of the bridewell or house of correction to manage social problems associated with poverty spread across England and Wales, so that be the early 1600s there were approximately 170 such institutions. Not only did the bridewell foster the use of sentences of imprisonment for petty offenders, but it also introduced the notion of ‘reform’, that imprisonment could be used not just to punish but to transform criminals or the socially deviant into more productive members of society. 1777 | The publication of John Howard’s State of the Prisons in England and Wales, which exposed the appalling conditions in many gaols and houses of correction in Britain, and spearheaded a movement for the reform of prisons. Howard’s efforts were mirrored by those of Jeremiah Fitzpatrick in Ireland. 1779 | The passing of the first Penitentiary Act, which contained a blueprint for prison construction and a new regime of imprisonment. The national penitentiaries proposed by the legislation were not built, but the Act triggered a wave of local prison building and renovation: during the 1780s and 1790s, approximately 60 prisons were either built or substantially rebuilt. The Act also enabled judges to sentence felons to terms of imprisonment as an alternative to transportation. 1816 | Millbank, the first state penitentiary in Britain, opens. Convicted male and female felons are sent to Millbank to serve long sentences of imprisonment as an alternative to transportation. In the same year, Elizabeth Fry began to visit Newgate Gaol on a regular basis, and to embark on a programme to reform female imprisonment at that institution, and the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline in Britain was established. A second wave of national prison reform had begun. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-3376123-3d6c1ea.jpg" width="2708" height="3502" alt="Elizabeth Fry, English prison reformer and Quaker, circa 1820. She fought for what are now regarded as basic prison principles" title="Elizabeth Fry, English prison reformer and Quaker, circa 1820. She fought for what are now regarded as basic prison principles (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> 1823 | A Gaols Act is passed which attempts to regulate imprisonment in local prisons, and to impose some degree of uniformity. Unfortunately, the legislation lacks a mechanism for enforcement. 1835 | An independent prison inspectorate for England, Wales and Scotland is established in an attempt to enforce greater uniformity in local prisons. In the same year, two rival systems of prison discipline – separation and silence – come to characterise the debate over penal reform in Britain. Following a parliamentary inquiry, the government expresses a preference for separation. 1842 | Pentonville Prison, designed for the implementation of the separate system of prison discipline, opens. It was intended for young men (aged 18 to 35) sentenced to transportation who the authorities thought might be capable of reform. The men were subjected to 18 months separate confinement (later reduced to 9 months) at the prison, and those who showed signs of amendment were released on licence or given conditional pardons on arrival in Australia. Pentonville was promoted as a ‘model prison’ and local authorities were encouraged to replicate its design. Read more: 5 crimes that changed law enforcement in Britain 1857 | Sentences of transportation were abolished. Instead, convicted felons were sentenced to penal servitude – or long-term imprisonment – in Britain, for periods between 3 years and life (depending on the crime). Some convicts sentenced to penal servitude continued to be sent to the penal colony in Western Australia until 1868. 1865 | A new Prison Act abolished the distinction between gaols and houses of correction, and all local prisons became known as prisons. The Act also promoted a new penal regime based on ‘hard labour, hard board and hard fare’ in local prisons. At the same time, the punitive aspects of imprisonment in the convict prison system were intensified. 1869 | The Debtors Act substantially curtailed the use of imprisonment for debt. Only debtors who defaulted in paying fines or other sums ordered by the court could be imprisoned. The last debtors’ prison in England was closed. 1878 | Local prisons in England and Wales were nationalised, thus coming under the control of a new sub-department of the Home Office: the Prison Commission. The nationalisation of prisons in Scotland and Ireland soon followed, with national prison boards under the authority of the Home Office established in those countries. Sir Edmund Du Cane, chair of the Prison Commission, insisted on uniformity in prison discipline, including the strict implementation of the 1865 Prison Act. 1895 | The Gladstone Committee – an inquiry into prisons administered by the Home Office – ushered in a new era of imprisonment in Britain. In its wake, more specialist prisons for different types of offenders, as well as a range of non-custodial options for those convicted of crime, were established. There was a new interest in rehabilitation among policymakers, but this had a limited effect on the many prisoners confined in ordinary local prisons. Rosalind Crone is a senior lecturer in history at the Open University, specialising in the society and culture of 19th-century Britain. She is currently writing a book, Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in 19th-Century England
Living in fear: the dangers of Victorian London
From the terror of being strangled by violent thieves to tales that the sewers were infested with a squealing band of pigs, 19th-century Londoners spent much of their time living in fear. Emma Butcher and Tim Blythe reveal what seven such scare stories can tell us about the psyche of the imperial capital
The garrotting panic of 1862 Victorian London was a sprawling metropolis, an imperial capital, the nerve-centre of the mightiest nation on Earth. Yet it was also a city wracked by fear. Confronted by rapid industrialisation, crowded slums and graphic media reports of a thriving criminal underbelly, many Londoners may have come to the conclusion that danger lurked in every shadow. And a single mugging in 1862 apparently confirmed their fears. On 17 July, Hugh Pilkington, the Liberal MP for Blackburn, was walking home from a late sitting in the Commons when he was choked and robbed (he survived the attack). The press latched on to this incident and ramped up its coverage on street violence, despite no indication that criminal activity had increased. The public panicked, believing that criminals stalked the streets, searching for victims to strangle or ‘garrotte’. Victorian London’s East End: what can a foul murder tell us about life in the city? The media’s sensationalism linked the mythical rise in violence to ‘ticket-of-leave’ men – convicted criminals who were granted conditional parole – and the recent reduction of criminals transported to Australia. To combat this threat, Punch produced a number of cartoons demonstrating how individuals could deal with the risk of garrotting, such as by walking back-to-back in pairs or by wearing protective clothing in the form of a collar studded with huge spikes (the first Metropolitan Police officers were given these collars as standard issue). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/08/00-PCL108220_cmyk-f6c2f52.jpg" width="1392" height="1808" alt="A satirical cartoon shows a man wearing an array of anti-garrotting spikes. A single mugging in 1862 convinced many that London was at the mercy of violent thieves. (Photo by Topfoto)" title="A satirical cartoon shows a man wearing an array of anti-garrotting spikes. A single mugging in 1862 convinced many that London was at the mercy of violent thieves. (Photo by Topfoto)" /> Press coverage also criticised the ‘ineffective’ police force and called for the redrafting of sympathetic prison reform proposals. The campaign was so pronounced that parliament rapidly drew-up and passed the Garrotters Act in 1863, which brought back floggings as a punishment for violent robbery. So, although the panic itself was short-lived, the change to prison reform, favouring deterrence over rehabilitation, ensured that harsh attitudes towards criminality endured. For, as The Times noted: “It is of far more moment to a Londoner that he should be able at all hours of the day or night to walk safely in the streets of London.” The London beer flood During the 19th century, alcohol was increasingly viewed as a perilous substance with the capacity to cause society to crumble. Events on 17 October 1814 did little to assuage these anxieties. Horse Shoe Brewery, located just off Tottenham Court Road, specialised in the making of porter. On the day in question, George Crick, a brewery employee, noticed a breakage in the enormous brewing vats, although he thought there was no imminent danger. Unbeknown to him, pressure was building within the damaged vat until it exploded with such power that it caused another nearby vat to burst too. The result was a tidal wave of beer, supposedly 15 feet high and approaching 1 million litres in volume. This tsunami of porter crashed out of the brewery and into the surround- ing slums of St Giles Rookery with such force that it de- stroyed walls and completely flooded basements, dashing people “to pieces”. A passing American tourist wrote: In total, eight people, all working-class women and children, lost their lives. Soon after, labourers were assigned the “distressing task” of clearing the fallout, working in the midst of “offensive and over- powering” beer fumes. Rumours were soon doing the rounds that a number died from alcohol poison- ing after gleefully drinking from the sea of beer that covered the streets. However, newspaper articles actually report the opposite, referencing the “caution and humanity” of locals in rescuing victims and paying their respect to those who died. Regardless, the incident served as a reminder to London’s self-appointed moral guardians that alcohol posed a threat to the poor. The Morning Post even compared breweries to “magazines for gun-powder”. The message was clear: it was not only dangerous to drink beer, but also to produce it in the first place. The pig-faced woman of Manchester Square In summer 1815, the night-skies of London were lit up to celebrate Britain’s victory at the battle of Waterloo. But not all eyes were on the bright lights. A magnificently dressed woman was seen sitting in a carriage driving about the sights, but on closer inspection, observers were shocked to see that she had the face of a pig. Previously, a rumour had swept London that a pig-faced noblewoman lived in Marylebone, who ate from a silver trough, and when spoken to, replied only in grunts. Although the woman was reported to be “most delicately formed, and of the greatest symmetry”, atop her neck sat a “hideous face”. Her blend of beauty and beast inspired various artists, such as the famed caricaturist George Cruikshank, who drew her playing piano in an alluring white dress, with a transparent veil covering her snout. A deadly obsession in Victorian London The media suggested that the pig-faced woman had come to London in order to find a husband, and some suitors went as far to write into the papers to appeal to her: “A SINGLE GENTLEMAN…,” wrote one, “is desirous of explaining his Mind to the Friends of a Person who has a Misfortune in her Face. His intentions are sincere.” Other suitors called on her in person, only to find she was far from wife material. One baronet was reported to have called upon the “great lady”, only to recoil from her with shouts of horror as she attacked his neck, causing an injury that required treatment by a surgeon. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/08/R56XY5-c977975.jpg" width="4314" height="5322" alt="A contemporary portrait of the pig-faced woman, who embodied fears that women could be “enigmatic, other-worldly and ultimately dangerous”. (Photo by Alamy)" title="A contemporary portrait of the pig-faced woman, who embodied fears that women could be “enigmatic, other-worldly and ultimately dangerous”. (Photo by Alamy)" /> Theories on the origins of such stories vary. It’s been suggested that they were inspired by a real-life woman with a facial disfigurement, or, alternatively, that they were based on a mythological history of pig-faced women dating back to the 1600s. Either way – presented as violent, repulsive and sexual in equal parts – the pig-faced woman posed a threat to traditional gender roles. She showed that women did not necessarily fit into Victorian ideals of beauty, and could instead be enigmatic, other-worldly and ultimately dangerous. The train for the dead In the winter of 1854, a new railway line was opened in London. The Illustrated London News was full of praise, writing joyfully of people leaving the dense city to “reach the open country with the speed of the winds”. There was just one difference about these country-bound travellers: many of them were dead. London’s Necropolis Railways was built in response to the crisis of overcrowding in the capital. Graveyards were stretched to their limits; sewers and chapels were broken into to dump bodies; and the ongoing cholera epidemic of the 1840s and 50s led to thou- Enter Richard Broun and Richard Sprye, entrepreneurs who proposed a solution: to transport bodies and mourners to Brookwood Cemetery near Woking in Surrey, which wasthe largest cemetery in the world and affection- ately named ‘the city of the dead’. Despite his good intentions, Broun made an unfortunate blip in advertising. In stating his belief that all deceased should lie “in one vast heap... mingled together”, he triggered a very English panic – one that reveals a great deal about Victorian anxieties over class. Respectable, middle and upper-class Londoners believed fervently that they should be separated from the ‘great unwashed’ even in death. The bishop of London, Charles Blomfield, violently opposed “persons of opposite character carried in the same conveyance”. The idea of a respected church member being carried alongside a profligate would “shock the feelings of his friends”. Soon, the carriages had been divided according to social rank, as was ‘Cemetery Station’ in London, with the third-class waiting room on the bottom floor, and then second and first-class receptions, accessed by a grand staircase. Despite these problems, the railway was so successful that it ran until the Second World War, carrying more than 200,000 Londoners to their final resting place through a portal between the living and the dead. Haunted to death at Berkeley Square “The cobwebs in the windows lie, And dirt and dust are there; What is the unknown history, Of 50, Berkeley square?” These words, written by the Victorian poet Frederick Doveton, reflect the unease and mystery surrounding a run-down townhouse in the affluent London district of Mayfair. In the late 19th century, it gained a reputation as being the most haunted house in London, with people driven mad at the sight of a horrible apparition in an attic room. Soon, 50 Berkeley Square’s evil aura was the talk of dinner parties, and manna from heaven for the press. In 1879, The Mayfair Magazine reported that a Lord Lyttelton had shot at something through the darkness, which left no trace but the bullet holes in the floorboards. The periodical Notes and Queries published a letter that wrote of a maid, who was found, “lying at the foot of the bed in strong convulsions”. She was hospitalised with insanity and died the following morning. 7 famous Victorians: from Brontë to Brunel The most common rumour was that 50 Berkeley Square was occupied by a Mr Myers, who had been jilted at the altar and now wandered the house in a state of lunacy. Another was that the house belonged to a Mr Du Pré, who “shut up his lunatic brother there in a cage in one of the attics… the poor captive was so violent that he could only be fed through a hole”. Regardless of the truth, the house’s dilapidated and enigmatic state allowed it to embody contemporary anxieties that ranged from the rising interest in spiritualism and the occult, to the mannerisms and treatment of mentally ill people. It was not merely the subject of a fireside story, but an embodiment of the dark side of Victorian high-class society. The sewer swine of Hampstead Most people have heard the myth that alligators roam the sewers of New York. But did you know that London’s underground waterways were rumoured to be infested with a squealing band of sewer pigs? In the mid-19th century, increasing urbanisation meant that London’s sewer system was breaching its limits, the streets overrunning with human filth. Nobody knew the extent of these unsanitary conditions better than the ‘toshers’, who sifted through sewer matter for treasure. In his book London Labour and the London Poor, the journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed these sewage sifters along with other characters of the Victorian underworld, revealing the city’s dark and disturbing secrets: “There is a strange tale in existence among the shore-workers, of a race of wild hogs inhabit- ing the sewers in the neighbourhood ofHampstead. The story runs, that a sow... littered and reared her offspring in the drain... this breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous.” The image of an army of stinking swine haunting the underground tunnels captured the imagination of the media and the public, highlighting the uncontrollable vastness of an ever-growing London, and the types of beasts that feed on urban waste. In 1859, The Daily Telegraph reported: “London is an amalgam of worlds within worlds... and the ignorance of its penetralia [hidden spaces] common to us who dwell therein. It has been said that Hampstead sewers shelter a monstrous breed of black swine... whose ferocious snouts will one day up-root High- gate archway.” At the end of the 1850s, London sewers were overhauled and the story of the black sewer swine became nothing but an urban legend. But the fact that it had such an impact on popular culture demonstrates the anxieties all classes felt over London’s infrastructure and the enduring fears of what monsters lurk beneath cities’ subterranean spaces. Spring-Heeled Jack’s reign of terror Victorian London is known for blurring the line between man and myth. The same streets that bore legendary and real-life monsters, such as Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, were also home to one who straddled both fact and fiction: Spring-Heeled Jack. He may be little remembered now, but Jack haunted Londoners’ dreams for almost a century. Descriptions of Jack are inconsistent, but his appearance is frequently portrayed as devil-like, and he was apparently able to leap over walls, fences and, in some cases, small buildings. Characteristically, he was known for ambushing pedestrians, ranging from lone wanderers to mail coachmen. Although Jack did attack men, the assaults that attracted most attention were those on women, which often involved him clawing at their bodies, scaring them into fits. In some cases, he attacked them while vomiting blue and white flames. In the 1830s, Jack’s escapades were brought to the attention of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, by an anonymous letter, which blamed some individuals of “higher-rank” who had taken part in a reckless wager. Although sceptical at first, The Times’ follow-on report led to south Londoners coming forward with similar stories, and, eventually, new crimes were attributed to him in all four corners of the United Kingdom. On the one hand, Jack was a terrifying symbol of criminal and sexual degeneracy; on the other he was a prankster and ‘bogeyman’, used to frighten children into behaving. He became a recurrent character in several penny dreadfuls (one-penny fiction) and even replaced the devil in Punch and Judy shows. By the 1900s, Jack had lost the spring in his step, described by The Idler as “gaunt and weird, with a tangled beard”. Yet his persistent presence throughout the Victorian era shows how the anxieties of the age rippled through layers of reality and imprinted themselves on the macabre and the bizarre. Emma Butcher specialises in Romantic and Victorian literature and culture at the University of Leicester. Her books include The Brontës and War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Timothy Blythe is a freelance historian based in the south Shropshire hills This article was first published in the August 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
The real history behind Victorian thriller ‘The Limehouse Golem’
Starring Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke and Douglas Booth, The Limehouse Golem is a Victorian murder mystery thriller based on a novel by Peter Ackroyd. The story follows a seasoned detective (Bill Nighy) as he hunts a ruthless serial killer through the streets of Victorian London. Here, producer Stephen Woolley talks to History Extra about the real history behind the film, currently showing on Netflix...
From the murky underworld of Victorian music halls to life in 19th-century Limehouse – we speak to The Limehouse Golem producer Stephen Woolley about the real history behind the film... Q: What inspired you to take this film on board? A: The film is based on a book — Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd – which I was given in the mid-90s. What attracted me to the story was the subversion that takes place. You may think it’s just another Victorian murder mystery, but it’s actually so much more than that: it turns what you expect on its head. One aspect that really interested me in the book was the setting, Limehouse [a district in east London]. Ackroyd is a great writer and an obsessive London enthusiast – he’s written terrific biographies on Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens and Nicholas Hawksmoor [a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late 17th and early 18th centuries]. So as a Londoner myself, and as someone who has made films that are set in and around the city, I immediately thought that this would make a really fun movie. Q: What sort of Victorian London do we see in this film? A: Limehouse was one of the poorest districts in London, but it was also very cosmopolitan and attracted people from a broad variety of backgrounds. There were people in Limehouse who had political ideas, such as Karl Marx [played by Henry Goodman in the film], and there were people who had ideas about the future, including [novelist and teacher] George Gissing [played by Morgan Watkins]. And, of course, there were crazy people – psychopaths and people who treated human life like it was nothing – such as the ‘Golem’ in the film. Q: Three out of four of the Golem suspects are real people from history (Karl Marx, George Gissing and comedian and entertainer Dan Leno). What was the reason for this and what did it add to the story? A: This was Peter Ackroyd’s choice, as he wrote the book. I believe he wanted to show how much Limehouse was part of a bigger universe and how ‘big minds’ played there. I also think it’s a lot of fun for the audience to imagine Karl Marx murdering someone. The weird and wonderful world of Victorian entertainment It was also very important for us to have a sort of ‘reality’ to the story. Although it’s a fantasy in terms of what Gissing and Marx do in the film – we see that when Inspector Kildare [played by Bill Nighy] imagines them killing the Golem victims – it’s a reality that they were in Limehouse and a part of Victorian London. When a nun tells Kildare: “you’re not fit to wipe the boots of Karl Marx”, that gives us an insight into how he was known. In the case of George Gissing, he was genuinely living in Limehouse and visiting opium dens – those aspects of the film are true. His wife Nell [played by Edythe Woolley] features very briefly in the film, and some of what we see of the couple is based on real events. Nell was a prostitute, and George was trying to find out as much about the world as possible. Q. One of the main settings in the film is a music hall. What can you tell us about the history of music halls and how did you go about creating the one we see in the film? The history of music halls is an astonishing thing and I loved the work we did researching this. It’s hard to compare to now; when you think of a music hall today you think of a place where you can sit down and have a programme and so on. It was never like that in the Victorian times. The music halls originated as public ventures. People would come to public houses and perform an act – be it singing a song, playing an instrument or performing a trick. Eventually the landlord might offer the performer money to return. There were no dressing rooms at this point; performers would just run on stage from the crowd. After a while, the landlord would expand his pub and buy the house next door. The emphasis would then be about making the acts more varied and special, different from the competitor’s music hall down the road. The whole enterprise was about alcohol and how much landlords could sell, so the music halls were a sort of cross between a supper club and a variety circus. The best historical TV shows and films to stream right now It was a fantastic period of time. The music halls were all closed down eventually because there was so much crime going on and people were outraged. I think at one point there was something like 10,000 music halls in London. There’s still a few going today – one in Leeds and one in Glasgow. They’re very posh though; they have seats, which the Victorian music halls never had. We built our music hall based on Ackroyd’s descriptions in the book. It’s a very dirty and down-to-earth place; closer, I think, to the real thing. Q. What sort of acts would you see in the music halls and what sort of people visited them? A. The bawdiness of it all was very important. Many acts would be a satirical take on the world. Dan Leno [played by Douglas Booth in the film] was a great example of this type of performance and he was amazingly popular; people would come from miles around to see him. At the height of his career, he was one of the most highly paid performers in the world. Although originally designed for commoners, the music halls attracted very well-to-do people who wanted to come and witness the entertainment of the time. The wealthy would traditionally be found in the galleries, while the ordinary people were down on the ground, in a sort of mosh pit. It was more expensive to go into the galleries because you could walk around. Women weren’t allowed in the galleries (apart from the prostitutes), and you couldn’t sit down. There were, however, dark areas where the men could go with the prostitutes. It was very seedy. The women of Hamilton: Angelica, Eliza and… Maria Reynolds Q. What can The Limehouse Golem tell us about what life was like for women in this time? A. It was a really horrific time for women. Domestic violence was rife: it happened every day. There was a lot of alcohol, despair and horror behind closed doors. You see some of this in the way that the character Lizzie [played by Olivia Cooke] is treated. She is in a really bad place in the film – any woman of that time would be. When she gets married, that’s the end of her life. Her inability to have sex means that she will never be a mother, making it impossible for her to fulfil society’s expectations of her. She was a ‘freak’. Q. Dan Leno, the popular Victorian performer, is a major character in The Limehouse Golem. He is also one of the only male characters who is kind to the film’s second protagonist Lizzie, an aspiring actress. What was the real Dan Leno like and what was his relationship like with women? A. Strangely, Dan Leno represented a voice for women. At that time, it was easier for a man dressed as a woman to voice women’s troubles than women themselves. A woman saying the same thing would have been booed off the stage: it would have been considered ‘unfemale’ or ‘unfeminine’. But Dan Leno was able to talk about women’s issues (such as domestic violence) on a public platform and that was accepted. In the film, Dan Leno understands Lizzie. He was an incredibly bright man: he knew that you were never going to go far as a woman and he knew that Lizzie would never be treated as a proper actress. That was her glass ceiling. The message from society was: “This is where you are now, Lizzie, and this is where you will stay – don’t imagine you’ll get higher than this.” And, of course, she couldn’t. Q. Why do you think modern audiences are so interested in stories that reflect the social history of Victorian London? A. It’s hard to know, but I think it’s probably something to do with the industrial revolution and the cosmopolitan nature of London. At this point in time, London was a melting pot of ideas, home to many different nationalities, religions and thoughts. It was a time when the world as we know it today was just beginning: a world of steam and trains and harnessing power from people. In the film, we try to show this cosmopolitan aspect of London. You see the Chinese opium dens; you see the Jewish influence in Limehouse; you see the Irish influence and people speaking Irish on the streets. Limehouse was a real smorgasbord of different ideas and cultures, and this makes it a fascinating place. Victorian London’s East End: what can a foul murder tell us about life in the city? I think people are also fascinated by the idea of secrecy. Keeping things secret, particularly in terms of sexualities and desires, was something that the Victorian era encouraged. So, in the film, when you discover the character Uncle’s [played by Eddie Marsan] secret, you get an idea of the kind of thing that was going on behind closed doors. People had secrets; it was a world driven on the idea of secrecy. The whole idea of everything Victorian being ‘prim and proper’ is nonsense – it really wasn’t. People were crazy; certainly in Limehouse. Read more about Victorian life This interview was first published on HistoryExtra in 2017. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week