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From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
Muckraking journalists and money-hungry editors have been publishing sensational stories since newspapers first began. Hilary Mitchell flicks through the archives and reveals some of the weirdest press cuttings of all time
1. "German ghouls: corpses converted to soap and explosives” Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, April 1917 If you think that ‘fake news’ is a new phenomenon, think again. One of the most notorious pieces of misinformation actually dates to the First World War. During the conflict, a gruesome rumour spread that German leaders were using “Kadaververwertungsanstalten” – ‘corpse factories’ – to turn the dead bodies of their own soldiers into products such as soap, candles, and even bombs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/German-Ghouls-0741ad1-e1769765897344.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline GERMAN GHOULS across the top" title="German leaders were creating soap and explosives out of corpses, claimed this 1917 newspaper article. In reality, they were victims of a deliberately shocking propaganda campaign (Image by the Newspaper Archive)" /> The lurid story unsurprisingly sparked widespread outrage, but it wasn’t true. It was a purposefully shocking piece of war propaganda, and the German government protested in the strongest terms against the “loathsome and ridiculous” claims. However, that didn’t stop the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star gleefully reporting on the hoax in April 1917, in an article that claimed the Germans were making “dividends from death” by distilling glycerine from dead bodies “and so obtaining some portion of their explosives.” 2. "O Dammit wants his name changed" The Richmond Climax, 6 June 1913 Orlando Dammit was featured in the 6 June issue of the equally curiously named Richmond Climax newspaper. The short article explained that the man wanted to change his name from “O. Dammit” because he “can’t tell whether people are calling him or merely venting injured feelings when they say ‘O, dammit.’” It’s not clear what he wanted to change his name to, or if he was successful in his attempts to change it, but presumably he would have been happy with anything that didn’t begin with the letter ‘O’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Vampires-in-Rhode-Island-Public-Domain-3e1421d-e1769766218331.jpeg" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES across the top" title="Rhode Islanders were convinced the undead were sucking the blood of their own relatives and causing consumption – sparking ‘vampire hysteria’ throughout the state" /> 3. "Vampires in Rhode Island" Boston Evening Transcript, 18 January 1896 On 18 January 1896, a particularly strange story ran in the Boston Evening Transcript. The headline was ‘Vampires in Rhode Island’, and the story went on to explain: “Respectable people [are] digging up the bodies of defunct relatives… The belief is that persons dead of consumption leave their graves and suck the blood of members of their own families.” This outbreak of ‘vampire panic’ was sparked by a wave of tuberculosis (then known as consumption) in New England. Some rural communities decided that the often-fatal illness was the work of the undead and began exhuming bodies, looking for what they believed were signs of vampirism, such as fresh blood in the heart. The most famous case occurred in 1892 in Exeter, Rhode Island, when the body of a young woman called Mercy Brown was exhumed. Her heart was reduced to ashes and given to her sick brother as a remedy for his own illness. He died anyway – after all, burned organs aren’t a cure for TB – but the story became a lasting symbol of the panic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Ouija-boardPublic-Domain-7d2ac73-e1769766295767.png" width="904" height="1000" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CONSTANT USE OF OUIJA BOARD DRIVES SEVEN PEOPLE INSANE across the top" title="Rooted in the Victorian obsession with spiritualism, encounters with ouija boards were common. The story of Adeline Bottini, featuring an alleged séance in the nude, was particularly dramatic" /> 4. "Constant use of ouija board drives seven people insane" The Long Beach Telegram and The Long Beach Daily News, 4 March 1920 In 1920, Long Beach newspapers reported that a 15-year-old girl in California had introduced “the [ouija board] and convinced other six [people] of its spiritual power”. The story went on to claim that all seven of the people involved were now under observation in the “insane ward”. The girl at the heart of the scandal was one Adeline Bottini, who police alleged was performing séances in a state of undress, “the better to communicate with the spirits”. Ouija boards were first commercialised in 1890 by a businessman from Baltimore, towards the tail end of the Victorian obsession with spiritualism: the belief that the living could communicate with the spirits of the dead. The craze began in 1848 with the Fox sisters in New York state, whose séances drew wide attention, and it didn’t take long before copycat socialites started to host similar gatherings. At these, participants were – unlike poor Adeline Bottini – always fully clothed. Read more | Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Boy-Eats-BibleGettyImages-164563808-960838d-e1769766508270.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cartoon of a boy wearing a pink T shirt, green trousers, a blue backwards cap on his head, and blue shoes, eating a blue Bible" title="In one of the more trivial stories from rural 1920s Hilton, Mellzo McCoy munched on the family Bible, resulting in an appearance in the newspaper – and a stomach ache" /> 5. "Boy eats Bible" The Hilton Record, 17 June 1926 “Unknown to his parents, Mellzo McCoy ate the family Bible with the exception of the covers and a few pages. The loss was only discovered when Mellzo complained of a stomach ache.” This 1926 snippet in The Hilton Record – the weekly community newspaper for the village of Hilton in Monroe County, New York – definitely won’t win any awards for the most detailed news article of all time. This is probably why it was buried on page eight of the publication, alongside another article (‘Bee Causes Wreck’) about a man losing control of his vehicle after a bee got into it. When it comes to stories like this, it’s important to understand how local papers worked at the time. Rural weeklies like the Record often had unpaid neighbourhood correspondents who contacted them with (fairly trivial) stories about what had happened in their neck of the woods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Terrified-by-Donkey-f14e9ba-e1769766740393.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="A black and white illustration shows a woman falling to the floor in front of a donkey" title="Scared to death by the sound of a donkey’s footsteps behind her, a young woman’s sad demise ended up in the Illustrated Police News, known for its lurid coverage (Image by The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive)" /> 6. "Trampled to death by a donkey" Illustrated Police News, 21 July 1883 The Illustrated Police News was a sensationalist Victorian weekly newspaper published in Britain, infamous for its lurid crime coverage and emotive illustrations. It launched in 1864 and this rather sad story ran in their 21 July 1883 edition. It recounts the final hours in the life of a young woman who had set off to visit her grandparents and heard footsteps behind her. She ran for her life. Her grandfather found her body the next day, noticed his donkey standing close by and concluded that she’d been frightened by the sound of the animal following her home. Although the stories featured in the Illustrated Police News were reported in a very melodramatic way, they were, unlike the German ‘corpse factory’ article above, completely true. The publication’s content, though bombastic, was based on police reports, coroners’ inquests and court reporting. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Children-Not-Fish-Public-Domain-889d371.jpg" width="299" height="258" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CHILDREN NOT "FISH" SO CAN'T BE MAILED across the top" title="After at least two separate attempts to send children via mail, the postal department had to step in. Children, they said in 1920, were not “harmless animals” so couldn’t be mailed" /> 7. "Children not 'fish' so can't be mailed" Des Moines Tribune, 16 June 1920 “Children do not come within the classification of ‘harmless animals’, and therefore are not mailable,” the Des Moines Tribune reported the postal department as saying in 1920, apparently prompted by two applications to ship children around the country inside packages. Parcel post was still a relatively new phenomenon in 1920, having been introduced in 1913. Some inventive parents realised that the cost of sending a package was often cheaper than a train ticket and news reports of the time carried stories about attempts to mail children: for example, in St Louis in 1913, a mother allegedly tried to mail her eight-year-old to relatives a few hundred miles away and in 1914, a 10-year-old-boy was purportedly mailed as a parcel to his grandmother. 8. "Battle with a bald eagle" San Francisco Call, 9 October 1891 The San Francisco Call was known for its flamboyant coverage, and this thrilling tale of a balloonist’s high-altitude encounter with an eagle, published in 1891, is a great example. The article describes the ascent of a 24-year-old named Arthur Cleveland in a hot air balloon. Once he had climbed to 3,000 feet, “he saw a huge bird flying swiftly toward him” and became aware it was a bald eagle. The article goes on to describe Cleveland’s daring – and victorious – battle with the rogue bird. He later retrieved the dead eagle, only to discover the local constable wasn’t too impressed; he suggested Cleveland be fined $550 for killing a protected species. Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Real-Puppy-Love-Public-Domain.jpg-f48d0e7-e1769767410147.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline REAL PUPPY LOVE HERE AS DOGS GO ELOPING across the top" title="Canines under the spell of Cupid were the news of the day in 1910s Minneapolis – showing the sensationalism of early 20th-century press" /> 9. "Real puppy love here as dogs go eloping" The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 2 March 1911 It must have been a slow news day in Minneapolis on 2 March 1911, as one of the headlines in the Tribune appears to have been about dogs having sex. The rest of the headline reads: ‘Canines Fall Under Shafts of Cupid and Kennel Society is Stirred, Four Hundred of Dogdom Buzzes over Scandals Among Young Set, Irate Husband of French Poodle on Warpath after His Rival.’ Although the full details of the story are lost in the mists of time, it’s another good example of early 20th-century press sensationalism, one which also documents the rise of pet culture we still have today. The early 1900s saw a rise in the popularity of organised dog breeding, which in turn led to the formation of kennel clubs; these sometimes became embroiled in controversies and rivalries, which were equally good tabloid-fodder. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Bat-Men-GettyImages-1397982878-a7ec22c-e1769767491349.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration of large winged creatures flying around a mountainous area with a river running through it" title="A lithograph depicts the lunar civilisation that New York newspaper The Sun claimed had been found on the moon (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. ”Bat-men on the moon” The Sun, New York, 1835 In August 1835, New York newspaper The Sun published a series of six articles claiming that life had been discovered on the moon. Not only life, in fact, but an entire lunar civilisation. The stories, credited to the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel and supposedly sourced from a (non-existent) Edinburgh paper, detailed lunar landscapes populated by bison, goats, unicorns, tail-less beavers, and bat-like humanoids called ‘Vespertilio-homo’ who built temples. The articles claimed that discoveries had been made using a revolutionary new telescope. It turned out that the hoax was the work of one of The Sun’s reporters who later admitted to inventing the stories to boost sales. However, The Sun never issued a formal retraction, making the ‘Great Moon Hoax’ one of the most famous examples of 19th-century ‘fake news’. 11. "Man doesn't trust horses" Amador Ledger, 3 October 1902 Letters to the editor aren’t a new phenomenon, as this extract from the Amador Ledger, itself lifted from Harper’s Weekly, shows. In this example, a man from Kentucky wrote into Harper’s to share his opinion that, in his long experience, “every horse at some time in his life develops into a homicidal maniac… I have driven one commonplace horse every other day for six years over the same road and then had him go crazy and try to kill himself and me because a leaf fluttered down in front of him.” The entry had the subheading: ‘Part maniac and part idiot, is what one man calls them’, which many present-day horse owners will no doubt relate to. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/TypistGettyImages-97226313-cb961e1-e1769767620435.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white cartoon of a woman sitting at a typewriter" title="In an eerie ‘true ghost’ story, a woman reportedly saw a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London – the same building from which a woman had previously fallen to her death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. "Girl typist saw a ghost fall in city street" Sunday Mirror, 29 July 1934 In July 1934, the Sunday Mirror reported the case of a typist who claimed to have seen a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London. She fainted and was carried into a nearby chemist’s shop. When she regained consciousness, she told reporters she’d seen a girl fall from a high window and land at her feet. Interestingly, 18 months earlier, a young woman had actually fallen from an upper storey at that very location and was killed. The typist claimed she had no prior knowledge of the tragedy – whether you believe her is entirely up to you. As noted above, the mid-19th century saw a rise in spiritualism and séances. As a result, papers often reported ‘true ghost’ stories or mysterious happenings. However, by the 1920s and 30s these stories had begun to decline in mainstream tabloids, so this 1934 Mirror story is a bit of a (spooky) outlier. Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Devil-WorshipGettyImages-1387752195-62248fc-e1769767805608.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Seven people are standing in a line with their heads bowed slightly forward. Each is wearing a black hooded gown and a red devil mask on their faces" title="The global ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s led to many stories of witches and ritualistic practices. In Utah, a 12-part series in the Provo Daily Herald was dedicated to devil worship (Image by Getty Images)" /> 13. "Satan worship in Zion" Provo Daily Herald, July–August 1985 No, this isn’t a particularly far-fetched plot from hit Netflix series Stranger Things: the US newspaper Provo Daily Herald really did publish a series of 12 articles in 1985 alleging widespread devil worship in Utah Valley. The articles were written by two reporters, Patrick Christian and Vicki Barker, who claimed to have interviewed “dozens” of psychologists, therapists and law-enforcement officers so they could “educate readers about the prevalence of Satanic worship in this area”. Subjects of the articles included a teenager who, it was claimed, drank animal blood after meeting a Satanist in seventh grade. Also, two Utah County Sheriff's deputies reported on “covens of witches” operating in abandoned buildings. Proof of these claims was lacking, to say the least, and the Provo Daily Herald faced criticism for adding fuel to the global ‘satanic panic’ that gripped the media in the 1980s. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Tiger-WoodsGettyImages-1097899790-f941754-e1769767906185.jpg" width="620" height="747" alt="A man wearing a black Nike sports jacket and black Nike cap stands holding multiple white golf balls in his hand" title="Tiger Woods holding his custom-made golf balls, which caused a stir following his endorsement of Nike Tour Accuracy ones (Image by Getty Images)" /> 14. "Tiger Woods plays with own balls" Associated Press wire story, 2000 The editor of this news story by journalist David Kravets was either very naive or purposefully channelling their inner Carry On scriptwriter when they crafted this saucy headline in the year 2000. The story is about the fact that pro golfer Tiger Woods had endorsed Nike Tour Accuracy golf balls in adverts, when (shock horror!) he actually played with custom-made balls unavailable to amateur players. Nike was eventually forced to confess that the balls Woods played with had a slightly harder inner and outer core than the balls sold to the public. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting story of all time, which is possibly why it was given such a cheeky, Barbara Windsor-esque headline.
Medieval vampire slayers: why did our ancestors dig up and dismember the dead?
At the turn of the 12th century, two men from a Staffordshire village died suddenly. A few days after they were solemnly laid to rest, they were spotted walking around the village, with their coffins on their backs. John Blair investigates the medieval terror of the living dead
In the last decades of the 12th century, the townsfolk of Annan in the Scottish borders were terrified by a sinister nocturnal revenant that stalked the dark byways. “Each night his corpse, driven by Satan, left his grave and wandered through the streets” accompanied by howling dogs and spreading sickness and death, according to the contemporary chronicler William of Newburgh. Desperate to put an end to the unholy scourge, two brothers whose father had been carried off by the plague opened the grave and “exposed the corpse, which was distended to a huge corpulence, with a swollen, livid face. It was observed that the shroud, which had been wound around it, was completely shredded up. Too angry to be frightened, the young men struck a blow at the lifeless corpse, whereupon such a flow of blood gushed out that they understood it to be a sucker of many people’s blood. Dragging it out of the town, they quickly built a pyre.” Recalling the accepted wisdom that such a being would burn only after they’d cut out its heart, the brothers took their shovels and hacked out the organ – after which the cadaver was immolated. The curse was finally over. Walking corpses To modern ears, this story stretches credulity far beyond breaking point. Not so to William of Newburgh: he recorded another three such tales, and hinted at many more. There are “numerous modern cases and abundant reports”, he wrote, but “it would be just too laborious and burdensome to write down all episodes of this kind that I have heard to have happened in our own times”. Yet though walking corpses were boringly commonplace in the 1190s, they had almost vanished from the English scene only a few decades later. Apparently they retreated northwards, leaving only occasional traces south of the border with Scotland. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/W45702webready-05b1689-e1769699879666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration shows two people standing over a cut up body, with the person on the left handing the decapitated head of the body to the person on the right" title="A corpse is dismembered in a medieval illustration. During the Middle Ages, mutilation was inflicted on cadavers believed to be restless (Image by Alamy)" /> This spotlight on high medieval Britain illustrates a basic fact about ‘vampire’ beliefs in many periods and places across the globe: they tend to come and go. Though some societies retained low-level fears about dangerous corpses over many centuries, there have also been many short, sharp episodes of corpse-killing that reached an intensity justifying the label ‘epidemic’. Some are described in medieval texts such as William of Newburgh’s, covering a period from about 1050 to 1200. Others leave no written evidence, and must be inferred from distinctive patterns of mutilation found in excavated burials: corpses turned upside-down, hearts pierced or removed, limbs broken or bound, heads removed, craniums and jaws separated. Read more | Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world's oldest vampires Why do communities suddenly erupt into frenzies of corpse-killing? Fundamentally, the act reflects fear of social disruption, fear of political or religious change, or fear of disease. In fact, it can be defined as a form of persecution mania – that tragic, paranoid reaction that makes people turn against minority groups in their midst. But there is a crucial difference: unlike witches or heretics, corpses cannot suffer because they are dead already. Killing the dead is better than killing the living. Archaeological evidence from late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England suggests several persuasive cases of posthumously ‘killed’ corpses. There are too few of them to suggest clear patterns – until we reach a group of distinctive female burials in Yorkshire and County Durham from c550–80 AD. These women were buried face-down – often accompanied by charms and other ritual items – in strange, contorted attitudes, often with one leg or arm raised so that it almost touched the surface of the grave. It looks as though these were traditional healers or ‘wise women’ – powerful in life and potentially troublesome after death, so measures to restrain them were necessary. In that society, as in many others, the dangerous dead were mainly female. Unholy nuns From around 650, that perception carried over to the new world of royal nunneries that dominated early Christian England. Traditionally powerful women could reinvent themselves as holy nuns and abbesses, exercising something like their erstwhile supernatural powers within the new belief system. One narrative from Wimborne nunnery in the 720s hints at corpse fears. It recounts the story of a sadistic prioress who died unreconciled with the young nuns whom she had tormented. They gleefully danced on her grave – but then, to the abbess’s horror, the grave-earth sunk, a phenomenon explained in later eastern European folklore as a sign that the corpse has climbed out. In England around 650–700, a series of non-monastic burials – almost entirely of young women – were mutilated in a consistent way: the corpse was pulled over onto its front, the heart was possibly removed or pierced, the head was removed, and the cranium and lower jaw were thrown back in different parts of the grave. Read more | Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think The seventh century was a period of rapid religious change and social transformation, so it is unsurprising that people felt disorientated, and that their fears focussed on certain ‘special’ women who were perceived to be reservoirs of supernatural power. Corpse anxieties seem to have died down across the eighth century, but did not disappear entirely. Young women were still sometimes targeted, their trussed and mutilated corpses laid face-down in boundary ditches. The gender balance then shifted. In a ninth to 10th-century cemetery at Godalming in Surrey, it was mostly male corpses that had nails and iron spikes driven into their shoulders, necks and knees. The age of castles, military power and ‘feudal’ dominance was approaching in northern Europe, and there was no lack of disruption and psychological trauma to breed paranoid fears. In this increasingly man’s world, as traditional wise women declined in power and status, violent corpses were increasingly envisaged as male. That brings us back to the lurid prose of William of Newburgh and his contemporaries. The high medieval British epidemic coincided with a period of greater theological sophistication in north-western Europe (including, for instance, the elaboration of the idea of purgatory), more complex scholastic thought, and higher levels of literacy. Accordingly, there was more questioning of received doctrine, and more concern by the clerical establishment to define, stigmatise and punish ‘heresy’. It is very interesting that, whereas the French persecuted heretics and not corpses, England saw virtually no heresy trials but widespread corpse-killing – an excellent illustration of how attacks on the dead can help to spare the living. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL1278768webready-497e003-e1769698475877.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A red, blue and black stained glass window showing four people sitting alongside one another, praying" title="Souls in purgatory, shown in a 14th-century French stained-glass window. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory may have shaped medieval concepts about the dead who had not moved on (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Noxious corpses Ten stories survive from 12th-century England, all concerning noxious male corpses: excommunicates, oath-breakers, corrupt judges, dissolute priests. One Buckinghamshire man paid unwelcome night-time visits to his widow, “took to dancing around wildly among the animals”, and finally “started wandering around by day, frightening everyone though visible only to some”. For sheer excitement, a story recorded by a monk of Burton-upon-Trent, and set in a nearby village around 1100, is in a class of its own. Two perjured villagers died suddenly and were buried. They then appeared walking around the village, sometimes carrying their coffins on their backs and sometimes in the shape of animals. They behaved threateningly and spread disease, causing many deaths. When their graves were opened, the corpses proved to have resisted natural decay, and the cloths over their faces were “very horribly bloody”. Their heads were cut off and placed between their thighs, and their hearts were cut out and burned on a hilltop, where they crackled with a loud noise; a black crow flew up from the flames. Read more | “Ghoul-like beyond nightmare dream, they were the living dead”: belief in Vampires through history After 1200, most of the British evidence comes from Scotland. A story set in the Clyde Valley west of Glasgow in 1295 describes how an evil-living monk returned from his grave to visit a knight’s house. “Having assumed a body – it is uncertain whether natural or aerial, but it was dank, gross and tangible” – he appeared in broad daylight in his monastic habit, and took to climbing around on the roofs. People tried to shoot and stab him, but anything penetrating “that damned substance” immediately burned up. No later Scottish stories are quite so lurid, but a resilient substratum of belief can be seen in the many post-medieval oral ballads that describe dead relatives and lovers coming home in bodily form. A strand survived the Reformation and was assimilated into Calvinist theology in the idea that the devil could occupy the corpse of even a virtuous person. In his Daemonologie of 1597, King James VI (later I of England) observed reassuringly “that the Devil may use as well the ministry of the bodies of the faithful in these cases as of the unfaithful, there is no inconvenient: for his haunting with their bodies after they are dead can no-ways defile them, in respect of the soul’s absence”. Beliefs about the dangerous dead didn’t disappear from England entirely. There seems to have been an undercurrent of low-level but persistent anxiety that surfaced at different times and in different places. A 14th-century story from Byland Abbey in Yorkshire recounts that a local rector who died and was buried near the abbey’s chapter house developed “the habit of going out by night, and one night he put out the eye of his concubine”. His body was dug up and dumped in a local lake – though the oxen pulling the cart carrying the corpse “almost sank through fear”. Stone dead Some suggestively mutilated bodies from later periods have also been discovered. Perhaps the latest and strangest was a victim of the 1665–66 plague who was buried in a London church. He was later found to have a large stone in his mouth – a mode of corpse-killing that was standard in Lutheran Germany at the time but unknown in England. Was he a member of the immigrant mercantile community? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL5864439webready-7cd79c8-e1769698055247.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing facing a skeleton, representing Death." title="Death meets a German mercenary in an engraving. Beliefs in the dangerous dead led to stones being placed in the mouths of corpses to quell them (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> It’s not entirely clear why such beliefs were so rare in late medieval and early modern England at times when they assumed epidemic proportions in some parts of central Europe. For instance, the Black Death plague pandemic of 1347–51 seems to have whipped up corpse fears in Greece and Serbia – so why did it have no such effect in England? It may be because the people of England now widely believed in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which offered a different framework for conceptualising the dead who had not quite moved on. Another factor could be the English enthusiasm for persecuting witches at points in the 16th and 17th centuries. Except in a few locations – Scotland and Moravia, for example – witch-killing and corpse-killing tended to occupy different spaces in early modern Europe, and seem to have provided alternative outlets for the same anxieties. European beliefs in the dangerous dead were never the same again after a series of lurid corpse-killings in Serbia in 1725–32 were widely reported for the first time in the western press. These reports brought with them a new word – vampire – that quickly drove out all synonyms. From that moment, folklore and fiction became inextricably entwined. Sensational novelists embroidered what they read, and their own readers in turn assimilated their work into popular beliefs. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871–72 novella Carmilla sensitively reworked the idea of a loving but predatory dead female derived ultimately from ancient Chinese tradition. But it was of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that imposed an indelible – if highly misleading – image of the ‘European vampire’, overlaying and ultimately obliterating the last traces of genuine English popular belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/RJGAYDwebready-0963212-e1769700002267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving of a woman creeping towards a person laying in a bed, with her arm reached out towards them" title="An illustration from the 1871–72 Gothic novella Carmilla shows the eponymous bloodsucker approaching her victim. Sheridan Le Fanu’s tale drew on ancient stories of predatory dead women (Image by Alamy)" /> Remarkably, the idea of turning a potentially dangerous corpse upside-down survived a decade or two longer. In rural Devonshire sometime around the turn of the 20th century, a farmer was recorded telling the tale of a wicked local woman who had recently died “cussin’ and dam’in”, and whose coffin had been turned over. “Her ’ont be troublesome then, ’cause if her do begin to diggy her can on’y diggy downwards,” he claimed. The grim finale to this particular English superstition was acted out during the First World War, after a slim English youth had killed a “huge, scowling” German soldier. “Later,” an officer observed, “I found our men burying him most carefully – face downwards. You know why. If he began digging his way out, he would only go deeper.” Epidemics of the undead Five periods when fears of living corpses terrified societies around the world Ancient Mesopotamia: eternal non-sleeping Fears of the dead plagued inhabitants of the neo-Assyrian empire in the near east between c911 and c605 BC. An inscription (left) in the tomb of eighth-century BC queen Yabâ of Nineveh curses any robber by imposing “eternal non-sleeping on his corpse and ghost”. And an omen text of the mid-seventh century BC describes what will happen if one sees “a dead person restrained with cloths, uprising, complaining”. The silence of earlier and later sources suggests that this may have been an epidemic generated by the violence and trauma of imperial expansion in the provinces. Early 18th-century Serbia: dawn of Dracula In the western Balkans after 1700, the central European tradition of dangerous-dead beliefs converged with a Caucasian one. This highly coloured mixture of fantasies reached an epidemic scale on the violent, unstable military frontier between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Cases in 1725–26 and again in the 1730s came to the attention of the Habsburg authorities, whose reports created a Europe-wide sensation. The details were actually rather atypical – for example, in their emphasis on bloodsucking – but inspired a series of fictional works culminating in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. 16th-century Saxony: rise of the chomping dead Devastated by plague and destabilised by the Lutheran Reformation, after 1540 the German electorate of Saxony suffered the strange visitation of the ‘chomping dead’. It was widely believed that some corpses lay in their graves noisily eating their own shrouds, and that they spread plague among the living. This idea had older roots, but it reached epidemic levels in this traumatised society. The remedy was to open the grave to check for shroud-eating and, if evidence mandated action, to behead the corpse with a spade. Martin Luther himself spoke out against the belief, but it endured for several decades before dying away naturally around 1600. 19th-century New England: a war on organs As tuberculosis swept the US between the 1780s and 1890s, the strange idea developed that internal organs of buried victims were spreading the disease. Between 1784 and 1892, at least 70 exhumations are known to have been undertaken in New England, mostly involving turning the corpse face-down, extracting the heart, liver and lungs, and occasionally burning the body. At Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1949, the exhumation of a soldier to burn his uniform represents the last known ‘corpse-killing’ in any non-Balkan and non-Aegean western society. Independent Haiti: zombie slaves In the 19th and 20th centuries, many Haitians believed that some apparently ‘dead’ people had actually been poisoned by sorcerers to induce a death-like trance. The ‘corpses’ were then reputedly stolen from their graves, revived and made to work on sugar plantations. Famously, Clairvius Narcisse (1922–94), who claimed to have escaped from such a plantation, was photographed sitting on his own tomb (above). This strangest of variants – walking ‘corpses’ that had never died – had roots in African beliefs, but developed a unique twist in this fragile republic with its tragic origins, where the unquiet dead were enslaved. Professor John Blair is emeritus fellow in medieval history at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton University Press, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe, reveals Thomas Williams
The poor citizens of Al-Jazira al-Khadra never knew what hit them. In 859, an unfamiliar fleet sailed into the bay separating this Muslim settlement – which later evolved into the city of Algeciras, now in southern Spain – from Gibraltar. Making landfall nearby, the alien ships disgorged their fearsome crews: Vikings. In a sequence of events terrifyingly familiar to victims in more northerly parts of Europe, these formidable marauders wreaked havoc. They occupied the city, burned the mosque, ravaged the countryside – and then moved on to the next target, and the next. The campaign later known as the ‘Great Raid’ was well and truly underway – part of a chapter in Norse history that’s less known today, but no less bloody. Stone cold killers The Vikings of our imagination are emphatically creatures of the north – avatars of cold climes and bleak weather, manifestations of ice and snow made flesh and steel. Dragon-prowed ships slice through the frigid waters of steep-sided fjords swathed in midnight-green pine forests. Fur-clad adventurers hunt walrus amid the crashing icebergs of the northernmost seas. Giants haunt the ice-capped mountains in an unreal world of midnight sun and northern lights. We are used to reading tales of Viking rampages through lands both near and far from home: around the Baltic coastline, in Britain and Ireland, in what’s now northern France, Russia, even Canada. But none of these places seem so different from Scandinavia, in climate at least; indeed, some boast similar extremes of latitude. Even in the most temperate of these places, a sharp north-easterly or a rare winter snowstorm may come and go without raising an eyebrow. Likewise Vikings in times past. But, like the ice, it can feel jarring to find Vikings in places where we feel instinctively they don’t quite belong. Like Mallorca, southern France, even Egypt. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CreditCopyright--Museo-San-Isidoro-de-Leon-Derechos-reservadosFRT2114webready-75aa086-e1768832592182.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cylindrical wooden box with ornate patterns carved into it" title="An elaborately carved box made from reindeer horn around the turn of the 11th century and discovered in Spain, hinting at Viking contact there (Image by Museo San Isidoro de León-Derechos reservados)" /> Of course, summer does come to the north. Vikings didn’t spend the whole year swaddled in bearskins. Still, like many of us, the inhabitants of those northerly climes might well have dreamed wistfully of a sun-soaked break in the Med – not least those hardy souls beyond the Arctic Circle who endured weeks of crushing midwinter darkness. We don’t know exactly what sparked the Great Raid of 859–60, but we have a fair idea of at least some of what transpired. The expedition was supposedly led by Björn Ironside, son of the larger-than-life Ragnar Loðbrok (‘Hairy pants’), and Hastein, who was later involved in campaigns in Brittany, the Loire Valley and King Alfred’s Britain. Having entered the Mediterranean and started as they meant to go in Al-Jazira al-Khadra, the Viking fleet next hit the kingdom of Nakur (or Nekor) on the north African coastline. There, in the words of one Asturian chronicler, they killed “a vast number of Muslims” and captured many others for ransom or for sale as slaves. The raiders headed back north via the Balearics, molesting Murcia, Mallorca, Menorca and, perhaps, Ibiza and Formentera. Touching down on what’s now the Côte d’Azur, they pillaged their way through Perpignan, Narbonne, Nîmes, Arles and Valence. After a winter spent in the Camargue, the Vikings moved on to Italy, where they sacked Pisa. Thereafter, things get a little muddled. One far-fetched narrative has them aiming for Rome but getting confused, instead plundering the small port of Luni (a surprising mistake, given that Rome was far inland and to the south, and still possibly the largest and most architecturally impressive city in western Europe). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Greekfire-public-domain-CMYK-64ac2bc-e1768832114133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing two black boats filled with men facing each other, with the group on the left shooting fire towards the ones on the right" title="A 12th-century manuscript illustration shows the use of ‘Greek fire’, an incendiary weapon wielded by Andalusian forces against Viking attackers to devastating effect" /> Whatever the truth of that tale, from Italy the fleet seems to have moved on to the eastern Mediterranean, and regions under the sway of the Byzantine empire. One chronicler even places Viking ships at Alexandria, near the mouth of the Nile. We do know that the campaign nearly ended in disaster – for the Vikings. En route home through the Straits of Gibraltar (or, as it was known in Old Norse, Nǫrvasund, ‘Narrow Sound’), longships were intercepted by the formidable galley fleet of Muslim al-Andalus under the command of Qarqashish ibn Shakruh and the admiral Khashkhash. Andalusian forces decimated Viking crews with arrows and incinerated ships with bursts of ‘Greek fire’ – the nautical napalm of the early medieval world – belched across the water. The Andalusians sailed close enough to engage the Vikings hand-to-hand across the ships’ bows: Khashkhash himself “fought them from the prow of his ship until he met a martyr’s death, may God have mercy on him”. Only a handful of Viking ships escaped the maelstrom – but those men who survived had gathered tales enough to fill many a long Nordic night. Read more | Forget the longships: this is the overlooked story of how the Vikings dominated eastern Europe Capital ideas The Great Raid was one of the largest, most dramatic and best remembered of the Viking adventures in the south, but it was far from the only such excursion. The sources rarely explain what inspired individual expeditions but, broadly speaking, adventures to such distant lands were animated by the same impulses that drove the Vikings to sail waters closer to home. The main driver of raiding – and, indeed, military employment overseas – was the acquisition of capital. This was both economic, in the shape of plunder and extorted wealth, and social, in the form of fame and prestige. Both could be leveraged to gain political power back home. Stories of awe-inspiring deeds, and possession of the wherewithal to reward and retain a warband, provided the basis for power in early medieval Scandinavia. Viking exploits around the storied and wealthy Mediterranean rim had the potential to provide generous helpings of both. Sometimes they could provide a springboard to the pinnacle of power and fame. When Harald Hardrada (more on whom later) returned to Scandinavia via what’s now Russia after a brutal mid-career sojourn in the employment of the Byzantine emperor, the poet Valgard of Voll said that: Harald, you launched your vessel Laden with a cargo of riches Freighted with hard-won honour And gleaming gold […] Through storm and gale, great king, You sailed your plunging vessel; And as the sea-spray was thinning You sighted at least Sigtuna. Inside a year, Harald was king of Norway. First fleet It was some 15 years before the Great Raid, and half a century after the pioneering attack on Lindisfarne, that Vikings first sailed into the Atlantic and steered determinedly south. The first known sortie to the Iberian peninsula was made in 844. The 54 ships that undertook that journey blazed a trail that others – the Great Raid included – would follow and greatly extend over centuries to come. Setting out from Brittany, the Viking fleet harried the Atlantic coast of Iberia, landing at A Coruña and launching raids inland, but ultimately came to grief at the hands of Asturian stone-throwers and the stalwart resistance of the Christian king Ramiro I. Thwarted there, the remaining Vikings cut their losses and headed south towards the Muslim emirate of al-Andalus. Their first stop was Lisbon, where they tarried for a couple of weeks to resupply their ships and terrorise the locals. Sailing on, the fleet sailed up the Guadalquivir river to menace the great city of Seville. Many of the inhabitants fled at the approach of the Norsemen, the reputation of these exotic marauders having preceded them. What followed was an extravaganza of brutality that was grimly familiar in Britain, Ireland and France, but which was terrifyingly novel in southern Iberia. Viking raiders disembarked from their ships to pillage and despoil the Andalusian countryside, slaughtering men, kidnapping women and children, and burning settlements. Seville itself was largely ransacked, only the walls of the inner citadel halting the attackers. Terrified citizens huddling for refuge within the great mosque of Ibn Abbas were massacred. Eventually, the emir, Abd al-Rahman II, got his act together. He mustered an army that confronted the Viking warband at an unidentified place recorded as Talyata where, according to the sources, 1,000 Viking warriors (or Majūs, ‘fire-worshippers’, as they are referred to in Arabic writing) were slain. Some 400 Norsemen were captured and executed in spectacular ways – decapitated or strung up on palm trees. According to the later source Ibn Idhari, Abd al-Rahman sent “the heads of the general, and of 200 of the noblest Viking warriors” to the tribes under Andalusian dominion in Africa. It was a warning and a reminder that his power, however much it had been tested by this novel threat, remained intact. Though they didn’t make it into the Mediterranean on that occasion, the Vikings had delivered a nasty shock to the Andalusians. As a result, city and coastal defences were strengthened and naval patrols were enhanced – as the returning ships of the Great Raid discovered to their cost on their way home 16 years later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WIKICredit-Didier-DescouensArsenaleVenice-FirstAncientGreeklionwebready-5971df2-e1768832842209.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large stone lion, with a brick crenellated wall and black railings behind it" title="Runic inscriptions on the shoulders of this ancient Greek lion, now in Venice but originally in Piraeus, are believed to be 11th-century graffiti inscribed by Norse mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army" /> Suburban terrorists At around the same time that the Vikings of the Great Raid were pillaging their way around the western Med, another group were unleashing violence to the east. This was a sudden irruption of Rus – the adventurers of Scandinavian origin who settled between the eastern Baltic and Black Seas. Later establishing their epicentre in Kyiv, they sparked a long political and economic transformation of predominantly Slavic eastern Europe. In 860, these marauders launched an attack on the suburbs of Constantinople. The earliest account describes the Northmen burning and plundering their way to the walls of the mighty capital of the Byzantine empire, terrifying the inhabitants. Later sources describe the raiders spreading out around the Sea of Marmara south of the city, and pillaging and burning monasteries on the archipelago now known as Princes’ Islands. Capturing 22 of the exiled Patriarch Ignatius’ servants, the Rus took them “aboard their ships and cruelly dismembered them with axes, demonstrating their barbarity”. These attackers were the people whom Patriarch Photios of Constantinople – who lived contemporaneously with the events of 860, though didn’t record them directly – described as “a fierce and barbarous people, worshipping no gods and living in constant strife. Their coming brings destruction and sorrow to those lands they visit.” Sadly for the locals, it wouldn’t be the last time the Rus made their presence felt in the Bosphorus. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/PrinceOlegtheProphetridesonshipsputonwheelstoConstantinople2webready-ad9a5ea-e1768832311475.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration showing several groups of men in boats with wheels on the bottom. They are all dressed in red robes with blue hoods" title="Warships of the Kyivan Rus, the eastern European realm settled by Scandinavians, are fitted with wheels to attack Constantinople in 907, as imagined in a 16th-century Russian chronicle" /> In 907, for reasons unstated, the Rus again assaulted Constantinople. The events were recorded in detail by the compilers of the Russian Primary Chronicle; though open to sceptical assessment, their words certainly paint a vivid picture. The attack was led by the Rus warlord Oleg, whose name was recorded as a Slavic form of the Old Norse Helgi, and comprised “Varangians [ie Scandinavians], Slavs, Chuds, Krivichs, Meryans, Polianians, Severians, Derevlians, Radimichs, Croats, Dulebs and Tivercians” – various East Slavic tribes. According to this account, the Rus fleet comprised 2,000 ships, though Greek sources give the rather more credible figure of 350. Having landed outside the city, Oleg disembarked and led his army on another rampage through the suburbs, killing inhabitants, burning houses and razing churches. Prisoners were, so the chronicler recounts, “beheaded, tortured, shot or thrown into the sea”. Read more | "A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people", plus four other facts about the Vikings you might not know... The most remarkable episode in this otherwise fairly typical account of Viking atrocities was the order that Oleg allegedly gave “to fit the ships with wheels. When a favourable wind rose up, they set sail and bore down upon the city by land.” The residents were, quite understandably, “frightened to see this”. It is difficult to understand how this would have worked in practice, attempted at short notice by a raiding army speaking disparate languages and who, we must assume, had never done such a thing before. The smouldering ruins of the suburbs would also have presented challenging terrain for Oleg’s marauding land-fleet. Whatever the true details of the assault, it’s recorded that the terrified city-dwellers “agreed to pay tribute, provide provisions and grant the Rus the right to trade in Constantinople tax-free”. A Rus-Byzantine treaty was indeed duly signed – and the Old Norse names of the Rus signatories leave no doubt as to their Viking origins. This treaty included provisions granting the Rus access to Constantinopolitan markets, provided they adhered to certain restrictions. They were to use only one designated gate; their numbers in the city were limited to 50 at any one time; they were to be accompanied by Byzantine guardsmen; and their weapons were to be left outside the walls. In return, they received food and an allowance for six months. If the attack had been a coordinated strategy to wring economic concessions for Rus traders in Europe’s greatest marketplace, then Oleg’s campaign – land-ships or no – had been a resounding success. Unruly contractors For all that the Vikings represented a menace, it was clearly preferable to have them working in the service of the Byzantine empire rather than camped belligerently outside the walls of its cities. So, for at least 200 years, Scandinavians were employed as mercenaries, hired to prosecute the empire’s wars in all quarters of the eastern Mediterranean. Northmen who served in this way, known as Varangoi by the Byzantines, were prized for their skills as sailors and fighters, and the empire’s far-flung interests took them all across the greater Byzantine world. From 902, when the first direct reference to Varangians appears in Greek sources, they could be found fighting the empire’s wars in Sicily, Italy, Crete, Croatia, Lebanon, Anatolia and Syria – not to mention Armenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Georgia. And they left their mark in Constantinople: runic inscriptions in the stonework of the Hagia Sophia – the city’s great basilica, now a mosque – seem to be Varangian graffiti. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/dreamstimexl29748298webready-ab8436b-e1768832432639.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a red stone building with several floors, a domed roof and a narrow, pointed tower at each corner" title="Istanbul’s sixth-century Hagia Sophia. Around the time of the Rus attack on the Byzantine capital, Scandinavians were hired as ‘Varangian’ soldiers, leaving runic graffiti in this basilica, now a mosque" /> The Varangian phenomenon was turbo-charged in 988 when Vladimir the Great of Kyiv despatched 6,000 men to Emperor Basil II Porphyrogenitus (the ‘Bulgar Slayer’). The Rus leader issued the revealing advice to “not keep them in the city, for then they will only give you trouble, as they have given me”, finishing with the weary plea to “not let one man come back here again”. Undesirable citizens they may have been, but these eastern Vikings quickly proved their military worth in Basil’s wars. Under pressure from within the imperial military hierarchy and from fractious neighbours in Bulgaria, Syria and Mesopotamia, the emperor was grateful for Vladimir’s assistance. He put his new recruits to immediate and effective employ, and Rus warriors were instrumental in crushing a revolt by the Byzantine general Bardas Phokas in 989. Thereafter, Varangians became increasingly commonplace in the Byzantine military, serving in the imperial bodyguard – though the significance of their contribution may have been exaggerated in some sources. This policy was an extension of a long tradition in the imperial army of employing foreign fighters of diverse origins, from within and without the boundaries of the empire. Read more | Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age A legend in his lifetime No Varangian was more celebrated – particularly by himself – than the future Norwegian king Harald Hardrada (‘Hard Ruler’). British readers will remember Harald best for his part in the events of 1066, when he led a Viking force to defeat – and his own death – at Stamford Bridge at the hands of the English king Harold Godwinson. The demands of that clash exhausted and diverted English forces, easing the path to Norman victory at Hastings a few weeks later, and the subsequent conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy. A legend in his own lifetime, Harald travelled to the Byzantine imperial court via Kyivan Rus, and distinguished himself in campaigns fought on a number of fronts – most notably in Sicily, but also in the Greek islands and Bulgaria, and possibly north Africa, Syria and Anatolia. The most eye-catching of Harald’s postings was to the Middle East. In verses ascribed to Stuf Thordarson, who supposedly heard it from the lion’s mouth: With courage sharp as a sword-edge The all-triumphant warrior Left Greece to conquer Palestine – An easy task for Harald Tempting though it is to imagine Harald seizing control of the Holy Land with ease 60 years before the knights of the First Crusade achieved the same feat, in truth this is characteristic hyperbole. The future king seems rather to have been engaged in some sort of joint security operation designed to police the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem under the terms of a deal between the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt and Emperor Michael IV. Nevertheless, while he was there Harald took opportunities hitherto open to very few Scandinavians: he bathed his weary bones in the river Jordan and paid his respects to Christ at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre. The Viking Age was coming to a close; the Age of the Crusades was near. But, as Harald’s tale shows, the boundary between these two epochs was not as clear-cut or impermeable as modern historiographical terminology implies. When the Norwegian king Sigurd Jórsalfari (‘Jerusalem-farer’) set sail in 1107 in search of adventure in the Holy Land, he followed in the slip-stream of his Viking forebears. He sailed down the coast of Iberia, through the straits of Gibraltar and on via the Balearics, pillaging as he went. The longships that arrived in 1110, and which blockaded the Fatimid controlled Levantine city of Sidon (now in Lebanon) as an ally of the Frankish king Baldwin of Jerusalem, bore all the hallmarks of the Viking fleets that had terrorised the Mediterranean in centuries past. On his return journey, during a pitstop at the old Varangian staging post of Constantinople, the Norwegian king made a gift to Emperor Alexios I Komnenos: “A very ornate dragon-head from the prow of his ship.” Thomas Williams is a historian of the early Middle Ages. His new book God’s Hammer: A History of the Viking Crusade is due out in October 2026 This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Uncontacted peoples: why do nearly 200 groups choose to live outside 'civilisation'?
"These are the last humans who have stayed outside 'civilisation'", writes Michael Wood
A new report by Survival International, Uncontacted Peoples: At the Edge of Survival, is the latest accounting of the human story – and it is a historical document of unparalleled power. It reveals that at least 196 groups in the world are still uncontacted, most of them gravely threatened by logging, mining and drilling for oil. These are the last human beings who have stayed outside ‘civilisation’ since the violence of the West reached across the globe after 1492. The report cast my mind back 25 years to when we made a series of four films telling the story of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Cortés, Pizarro, Orellana, Cabeza de Vaca: these were men who experienced some of the most incredible adventures in human history. We tracked them on the ground, following in their footsteps over the Andes, up Inca trails to lost cities, and rafting down the Amazon. The third film was especially powerful in its implications for the here and now, as well as the events of the 16th century. It told the story of the expedition led out of Quito in 1541 by Gonzalo Pizarro (younger half-brother of Francisco, who spearheaded the conquest of the Inca empire). Its goal was to find the fabled El Dorado – ‘the Golden Man’ – a mythical city of gold believed to exist somewhere in the jungles beyond the Andes. The city was, in fact, unfindable – because it never existed. In trackless terrain, the expedition ran into disaster: soaked by incessant rains, running out of food, the men were reduced to eating their horses and cooking their boot leather. Francisco Orellana pushed onward in a home-made boat to scout what lay ahead, but such was the speed of the river that he couldn’t make his way back to the rest of the men. Read more | “Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society” After untold sufferings, the survivors of the main army made it back to Quito nearly a year and a half later. Meanwhile, after many adventures, Orellana sailed eastward, navigating the entire length of the Amazon. He was the first European to see the interior of Amazonia at a time when the middle reaches of the river supported huge settlements. Then, from the mouth of the great river, he sailed back north to Trinidad, completing one of the most astounding stories of human endurance. On our journey, a parallel narrative unfolded. Down the main course of the Amazon, everyone told us that the water levels were fast receding. Climate researchers had just announced that, at the rate of climate change then observed, the Amazon forest would start to transform into savannah in 2042 – coincidentally, the 500th anniversary of the Orellana expedition. If that happened, the climate cycle would be broken, the weight of history literally tipping the balance. Along the route, we heard stories of indigenous peoples in the depths of the forest. In the river town of Coca in Ecuador, a man told us how, as a youngster, he had lived with the Waorani tribe before he moved to the town and learned Spanish. He told of the struggles of those who chose to stay out of the modern world. One group steadfastly refused all contact; another had killed US missionaries who had not respected their wishes to be left alone. For them, he said, the price of receiving the white man’s god was degradation, alcoholism, and the loss of their own language, culture and identity. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think The Survival International report features the story of one such people, the Mashco Piro in the Madre de Dios region of Peru – perhaps the single largest remaining uncontacted group. Not long after our journeys for the Conquistadors films, haunted by the beauty and tragedy of Peru, I went back with my family. We stayed in the Manu region with local people who lived off the forests and drew sustenance from the river. Beyond them was a checkpoint and a protected region extending 100 miles to the Madre de Dios river where outsiders may not go – and where the Survival report shows the Mashco Piro still live. So I read the report, with its haunting photos, feeling a sense of profound sadness. The holocaust of indigenous peoples is almost complete. The pattern is the same across the world over the past 500 years: the taking of the land, the extermination of native people and the plundering of the environment, fuelled by white supremacy, evangelical religion, western diseases and sheer greed. And now, five centuries on from the conquest of the Americas, across the entire planet only a few thousand of our ancient brothers and sisters hang on – people who simply do not wish to be contacted. What does that say about us? This column was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From Churchill to Vietnam: protests that changed the world
With the police about to be given broader powers to tackle disruptive events, the right to protest is in the spotlight. Timothy Garton Ash and Katrina Navickas join Danny Bird to discuss the history of popular demonstrations
Danny Bird: What is a protest? What distinguishes it from a riot or a revolution? Katrina Navickas: A protest is often defined by law, making it a fluid and changeable term. In England and Wales, its meaning has evolved over time. The earliest legal definition dates to the 1714 Riot Act, which distinguished a riot from other forms of protest. The modern idea of a demonstration emerged in the 19th century alongside the rise of democratic movements. Protest came to mean people gathering publicly to make collective claims – a reflection of the growing concept of ‘the people’ and their role in politics. However, what counts as a protest still depends on context: the country, the circumstances and the legal boundaries of what is permitted in public spaces. Timothy Garton Ash: Historically, revolution was associated with violence, but modern protest is defined by nonviolent action. Think of Gandhi in India, the Civil Rights movement in the US, or People Power in the Philippines [in 1986, resulting in the overthrow of the Marcos regime]. The revolutionary events of 1989 in eastern Europe were particularly notable because they brought together nonviolence and revolution for the first time. In essence, protest is about people power – collective, peaceful demonstration as a means of change. What makes a protest ultimately successful? Is it timing, tactics, leadership or something peculiar to a moment in history? TGA: In the book I co-edited with Adam Roberts, Civil Resistance and Power Politics (OUP, 2009), we examined 18 cases over a century, from Gandhi to the more recent ‘colour revolutions’ in former Soviet and Yugoslav republics. One point is clear: protest alone is never enough. It requires favourable internal and external conditions to succeed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WHA0173278webready-6200492-e1767782763339.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of people, standing together in white robes" title="Mahātmā Gandhi – shown on a peace march in 1947 during the partition of India – used nonviolent resistance to campaign for Indian independence and the end of British rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> For example, the 1989 revolutions succeeded where many Arab Spring protests did not because their surrounding circumstances were vastly different. Successful movements also have a clear strategy and they’re not merely expressions of anger or moral outrage. Effective protest involves understanding how to influence and divide those in power. Read more | The violent history of student protest KN: I often refer to the idea of critical mass, which is the point a movement gains enough public support to create real momentum. That usually depends on an ideological or belief shift, as well as favourable conditions. Successful protests often arise when the state is weakened – for instance, after wars or during major economic crises – creating opportunities to mobilise support. At such times, the forces of law and order may also be less capable of suppressing dissent. Even the strongest movement needs both structural openings and a sense among people that success is possible. Why does protest continue to make societies uneasy even in countries that pride themselves on free expression? KN: In Britain’s case, particularly in England and Wales, there was no statutory right to assembly or free speech until the Human Rights Act of 1998. Until then, the right to protest was effectively permissive rather than guaranteed. Throughout the 20th century, much of the legislation was designed to manage the far right and other regressive forces, which created tensions around freedom of speech and assembly. A key example came in 1936, with debates over whether Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists should be allowed to march. Questions arose over who could prevent such meetings, particularly those held in private venues, and whether police had the authority to intervene based on what was said. These tensions persist today: the balance between protecting free expression and preventing disorder remains delicate. TGA: Even in the freest societies, freedom is never unlimited. The freedoms of speech and assembly are constrained; if they were not, we would encounter philosopher Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, where unlimited tolerance can ultimately destroy tolerance itself by empowering the enemies of democracy. In authoritarian regimes, the issue is simpler: governments fear protest because it allows people to speak and find their voice. The pivotal moment is breaking that barrier of fear. For instance, in autumn 1989 in Leipzig, two friends attended a demonstration against the East German regime. As they walked, more people joined at each street corner… 10, 12, 200, then 1,000. This ‘cascade effect’ demonstrates how critical mass can overcome fear, a prospect that terrifies authoritarian rulers: consider Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu’s facial expression when he realised that the crowd was openly booing him on 21 December 1989. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2220408825webready-194c494-e1767783458422.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a group of people leaning over a large number of lit candles on the floor" title="A candlelit mass protest in Leipzig in November 1989. The Monday Demonstrations, as these nonviolent gatherings were known, played a crucial role in ending the rule of communism in East Germany (Image by Getty Images)" /> How fair is it to say Britain’s history is one of evolution rather than revolution? KN: I often blame the Victorians for the myth of steady, moderate progress. The story of peaceful reform in Britain ignored harsh realities faced elsewhere. For a long time, for instance, Ireland was treated as a testing ground for extreme policing, public order measures and restrictions on constitutional rights. Even within Britain itself, progress was rarely smooth. TGA: Protest always involves risk – putting your body in situations where you might be attacked or, in extreme cases, killed. Sometimes, violence from the state backfires, galvanising wider support. The Tolpuddle Martyrs and, in Ireland, the Bloody Sunday massacres both illustrate this. How has protest been legislated and policed throughout history? KN: In Britain, general public order legislation arrived relatively late. Historically, most laws targeted specific political or social movements rather than applying broadly. In the 19th century, measures focused on the Chartists, trade unions or suffragettes. Even in the 20th century, legislation was often aimed at particular crises: the 1936 laws addressed fascist and communist unrest in the East End of London, while measures in 1986 targeted striking miners or football hooligans. Recent legislation, including that of 2022–23, is broader in scope, but it still arises in reaction to specific groups dominating public attention – for example environmental and black rights movements. This reactive approach represents a continuity throughout British history. TGA: Authoritarian governments can invent almost any justification to suppress protest. In democracies, the situation depends on whether constitutional protections exist. In the US, the First Amendment protects free speech; in Germany, experience with two dictatorships has led to clear constitutional guarantees of assembly. The UK has no written constitution. Over the past 30 years, piecemeal legislation, often poorly drafted and confusing, has slowly restricted protest. How do the spaces in which protest occurs help to shape it? KN: All protest is, at its core, a claim to public space. Demonstrations are associated with squares, streets and civic areas – town halls, county halls and other symbolic sites. Protesters assert their presence as ‘the public’ within these spaces, often choosing locations of national significance such as Trafalgar Square, built between the 1820s and 1840s and long regarded as Britain’s foremost public space. Throughout history, protesters have deliberately occupied symbolic sites to challenge authority or reshape public narratives. In London, battles over access to Hyde Park were especially significant. Although political gatherings were banned there because it was a royal park, the Reform League’s demonstrations of the 1860s, in which supporters tore down fences to enter, forced change. Speaker’s Corner emerged from this as a legal compromise established by the 1872 Parks Regulation Act, designating a specific area where people could speak freely without permission. Even modern tactics, such as ‘locking on’, have historical roots: suffragettes chained themselves to the gates of Downing Street to demand visibility and access. From the 18th century to the present day, controlling the geography of protest has remained central to how the state manages dissent. Read more | Female activism: 10 remarkable protests from around the world TGA: Protests are also a form of political theatre, and public squares are their grand stages. Consider Tiananmen Square, the focal point of the Chinese protests in 1989. Or Wenceslas Square in Prague during the Velvet Revolution that same year, where 300,000 people gathered under the direction of Václav Havel – an actual dramatist turned leader – shaking their keys in unison to create an unforgettable sound. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2186457134webready-3fb663a-e1767783864589.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing very large crowds, holding up orange flags outside a large stone building with many windows and arches" title="Supporters of the opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko rally at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv in November 2004, after the election run-off was thought to be rigged against him (Image by Getty Images)" /> Similarly, Ukraine’s great protests have centred on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square, during the Orange Revolution of 2004–05 and again in the Revolution of Dignity in 2014–15, when it became known as the Euromaidan. In each case, the physical setting of the central square of the capital has been vital to the drama and symbolism of protest. The suffragettes, who used violent tactics, are often lauded for having been on the ‘right side’ of history. What does this say about the way historical protests are perceived by posterity? KN: Groups such as the East London Federation of Suffragettes carried out more spectacular actions when moderate, peaceful wings were failing to make progress. This tactical shift in the early 1900s was also highly media-savvy. The suffragettes understood early mass media, staging stunts designed to capture newspaper front pages. Other actions targeted politicians or property: Winston Churchill, post boxes, shops. Because the suffragettes ultimately succeeded, their militancy is incorporated into the national narrative as justified. Movements using similar tactics that fail rarely achieve such recognition; the losers are often excluded from stories of national progress. History can move backwards as well as forwards, but there is a tendency to view the British story as progressive, where ‘winners’ are celebrated and ‘losers’ forgotten. This explains why suffragette militancy is accepted, while comparable violence – for example, during Irish campaigns for independence – is not seen as necessary. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> TGA: So-called ‘freedom fighters’ who take up arms for independence are often celebrated as heroes if they succeed. History tends to memorialise those who eventually win, often decades after the events. An example is Oxford’s Martyrs’ Memorial, commemorating Protestant bishops who paid the ultimate price during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary and were celebrated only once their cause prevailed. In Czechoslovakia, the brave student Jan Palach set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion. Today, Jan Palach Square commemorates his sacrifice – a recognition that would not have been possible if the country had remained under Soviet control. There is a particular category of hero here: the martyr, someone who literally gives their life for a cause. Such figures occupy a special place in these narratives, because their extraordinary courage and ultimate sacrifice have universal resonance. How important has social class been in the history of protest? KN: When asked about the most successful protests or campaigns, examples often include the abolition of slavery and the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 19th century. These movements were largely led by well-connected, relatively wealthy men and women who could exert influence in parliament. Their campaigns were single-issue, respectable, and financially supported, which allowed them to achieve legislative change. By contrast, working-class movements faced a far longer struggle to have their voices heard. Strict class hierarchies and limited resources made it harder to fund campaigns, influence policymakers, or sustain pressure. Yet, despite these constraints, working-class activists often achieved remarkable results with far fewer means than their wealthier counterparts, making their accomplishments all the more significant. TGA: Some protest movements are class-based, with the labour movement being the clearest example. However, protests tend to succeed most when they cross class boundaries and unite different parts of society, because rulers often employ a divide-and-rule strategy. A striking example is the Solidarity movement in Poland during the 1980s. This decade-long mass popular movement succeeded precisely because it united intelligentsia, workers and peasants. KN: This also marks a key difference in 20th century protests. In Britain and Ireland prior to the 1960s, movements were largely class-based, with the labour movement being the strongest. But protests then increasingly took the form of amorphous social movements, not tied to traditional party or trade union structures. These movements sought to connect local struggles with global causes such as environmental campaigns, the anti-Vietnam War movement, peace initiatives and anti-nuclear activism. They were typically more cross-class, framed as part of a wider global struggle rather than a narrow class-based conflict. TGA: One additional factor we haven’t discussed is age. There are striking examples of generational protest movements such as the one that swept across Europe in 1968, including Britain. Climate change activism has emerged as another. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> What can today’s protesters learn from their predecessors? KN: That raises a central question: how do you organise against repressive regimes? One key factor is achieving a critical mass – breaking out of silos of class or generation and creating a large, united group capable of overcoming fear. This remains a core goal of any successful protest movement. TGA: It is vital to learn from history. For example, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was violently suppressed, and the Czechoslovak attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact in 1968 was met with Soviet invasion. By 1980–81, activists in Poland were far more cautious, learning from these experiences. There are several key lessons. First, maintain nonviolence. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik warned: “Those who start by storming the Bastille may end up building their own Bastilles.” Nonviolence achieves more enduring results. Read more | Boston Tea Party: your guide to the protest that ignited a revolution Second, achieve a critical mass. Cascade effects and political theatre are essential, especially in the age of social media. A flash mob may appear impactful but, without sustained engagement, it disappears as quickly as it appeared. Third, develop a strategy. Clearly identify what you aim to change and how protest can effect that change. Non-violent movements succeed by targeting potential defectors within existing power structures – those who may be persuaded to switch allegiance. Protest has a promising future, but its lessons are best understood by studying the past. Timothy Garton Ash is Isaiah Berlin professorial fellow and professor of European studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Bodley Head, 2023) Katrina Navickas is professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire. Her books include Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
As the conflict with Nazi Germany raged on, British tram drivers tuned in to Tchaikovsky and waitresses revelled in Wagner. But why? Alexandra Wilson explores the surprising Second World War obsession with opera
Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War. This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last. Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2X2FXR2webready-9f2accf-e1767623285427.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph shows a man in a cap with round glasses and a cigarette in his mouth sitting on one of many stools outside a theatre. In front of him to the right, a billboard advertises the Sadler's Wells Opera" title="Stools for hire by people queueing for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company performances at the New Theatre, 1943. Tickets started at just 1/6 (about £4 today) (Image by Alamy)" /> Workers’ playtime Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In London, the enterprising impresario Lilian Baylis had set up companies at the Old Vic in the 1920s and Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s that were explicitly aimed at fostering a love of opera among local working-class communities. And over in the East End, people could regularly watch operas at the People’s Palace, a large entertainment complex on the Mile End Road. Touring opera companies regularly visited towns and cities around the country, and were eagerly anticipated by people of all social classes. Operatic music could also be widely heard in restaurants, hotel foyers and cinemas, and broadcasting and gramophone records had done a great deal to popularise and democratise the art form. But the opera boom of the early 1940s was in a different league. It would have been logical if opera had ground to a halt during the war, given the large resources conventionally needed to stage performances. To be sure, the most prominent venues did close: the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden was turned into one of the most popular wartime dance halls, and Glyndebourne in East Sussex became a home for evacuees from London. Read more | The War of the Operas: new money vs old in The Gilded Age Sadler’s Wells soldiered on during the early months of the war, staging matinees to get around the problem of blackouts, but soon enough the Blitz put paid to this, and the theatre became a refuge for the newly homeless. However, the company moved its operations to Burnley and toured extensively from there, putting on works including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto and La bohème with a scaled-down cast, piano accompaniment, a simple painted backcloth and a sofa. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/La-Traviata-9c942fb-e1767623963300.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing two women sharing an afternoon tea on a tray, in a theatre auditorium" title="Audience members sip tea during the interval in a 1943 matinee performance of La Traviata at the New Theatre in London’s West End. The soaring appetite for opera among all classes fuelled a wartime renaissance in Britain (Image by Imperial War Museum)" /> The Times praised Sadler’s Wells for “Making converts to the art of music-drama” in places such as Oldham, Accrington and Stockport. Performances were so popular that theatres were desperate to book the company. The manager of the Hull New Theatre reported that his postbag was constantly full of letters from audience members “representing a cross-section of the community” who wanted to see the troupe. Periodically, when it was safe to do so – and even when it wasn’t – the company returned to London to perform in the West End. The soprano Elisabeth Parry recalled a performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944 when the show went on even while alarms rang and ‘Doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) could be heard buzzing overhead. Audience members remained in their seats, and the singers and orchestra carried on as if nothing was happening. The success of the Sadler’s Wells tours showed that the British would happily embrace opera if only they were given the opportunity. Journalists expressed frustration that there had never been a move to set up a similar opera company in every major city around the country, because there was clearly plenty of demand. “No doubt there are as many busmen as there are butchers, bakers, baronets and bankers who enjoy a good opera when they can get it,” argued The Times. And the Times Literary Supplement proposed that, with a dozen more companies along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, “we should have a genuine art of opera in England as we already have a genuine public for it”. Sadler’s Wells worked in partnership with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which also arranged concerts in which professional musicians, including opera singers, performed in factories, air-raid shelters and hospitals. CEMA’s broad aim was to “carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times”. Operatic performances also featured in the Holidays at Home initiative organised by the Ministry of Labour, which turned open areas in cities into makeshift seaside resorts, and put on a wide range of entertainments. One such scheme in Liverpool, which included performances of opera, ran for 11 weeks in 1942 and attracted an audience of three quarters of a million. Arias on the airwaves Of course, there was also plenty of opera on the radio. In 1941, regular monthly broadcasts of studio operas resumed for the first time since the outbreak of war. The emphasis was primarily on well-known classics such as La Traviata and The Barber of Seville because, as the conductor Sir Adrian Boult said, “The evidence is general that the musical public turns to these sources for mental and spiritual recreation more eagerly than ever today.” BBC listener research from 1943 revealed that the numbers listening to variety shows were down by 20 per cent, whereas audiences for classical music and serious drama were on the rise. Read more | The biggest misconceptions about WW2 evacuees? This historian has the answers Victor Hely-Hutchinson, the BBC’s director of music from 1944, wrote that one of the few benefits of the war was the rise of an immense public enthusiasm for good music. “Go to an orchestral concert, or a fine operatic performance,” he said, “and you will find a corporate appreciation and desire for music of a kind, and on a scale, that has never been seen in Britain before.” Radio broadcasts allowed audiences to enjoy the highest standards of singing, which were not always evident in rough-and-ready touring productions. “Stayed at home tonight to listen to Faust – complete – on the wireless,” wrote one unnamed office worker in a diary submission for Mass Observation in 1942. “Feel very grateful to the BBC for giving us first-class opera; it is not often we get first-rate opera in Manchester, and there is nothing worse than good music badly executed.” Many people, men in particular, first encountered opera in the forces. Some took part in amateur operatic productions of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at military bases in Britain. Others stationed in the Middle East with Paiforce (the Persia and Iraq force) had the opportunity to hear operatic arias in concerts organised by the Entertainments National Service Association. Some of the most respected British opera singers of the day, such as Walter Widdop, Dennis Noble and Miriam Licette, toured that region. But by far the most significant boom in enthusiasm for opera among soldiers was seen in Italy. In 1944, the Daily Express reported that “one of the biggest surprises of our ‘invasion’ of Italy has been the way the men have become opera fans”. Some enterprising army captains reformed the mothballed opera company at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Word soon spread that watching opera was a good way to spend an evening, and British troops took to queueing around the block to get tickets. The 1,600-seat theatre was always full to capacity, and two performances a day had to be scheduled to meet demand. A similar enterprise was also set up at the bomb-damaged and abandoned Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and, as the Allies moved north, more companies were founded in major cities across the country. Naomi Jacob, who in 1948 wrote a book about opera aimed specifically at the soldiers who had come to love it in Italy, recalled that when the idea had first been mooted, there had been a lot of scepticism about whether British and American troops would be willing to listen to opera. But houses sold out in advance, and audience members often came back several times. Jacob reported that “no better audience ever existed… they were punctual, they gave rapt attention, and their appreciation was unstinted”. From September 1943 to the end of the war, countless British servicemen watched performances of opera in Italy. The composer and broadcaster Spike Hughes reported that “in every town the same thing happened: the British soldier took to grand opera as if it were in his blood”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1754686839webready-9635b10-e1767623396598.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a stage show. A large ensemble crowd stands at the back of the stage, while one man stands at the front, crouched down with his arm held backwards" title="A 1940s opera performance in Rome. Many British servicemen first experienced – and came to love – opera while stationed in Italy during the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Exposure to Italian opera in Italy helped soldiers to become more discerning listeners. In Britain before the war, opera was performed in English translation everywhere except Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, two ‘luxurious’ venues that sat apart from the national norm. But here, suddenly, was an audience that had shown itself perfectly capable of appreciating opera in the original language. The Rome correspondent for the Sunday Express reported that “an ‘opera-conscious’ audience is being created for Britain after the war, but if any theatre magnate wants to cater for them he must offer something better than a third-rate touring company”. Optimism for opera Hopes were high, then, for what Britain’s operatic landscape might look like in the postwar period. Even the most sceptical commentators were coming round to opera: the Daily Express reported that “the most ridiculous art-form ever invented” was “proving more popular than anybody ever imagined”. Of course, many people who had encountered opera in pared-back productions during the war had no idea what it really could be. The public was, as The Liverpool Daily Post put it, “as ignorant of the real taste of opera as a wartime infant is of the taste of bananas”. But appetites had been whetted, and Britons emerged from the war wanting to see not only more opera but better opera. To a large extent, these expectations were met. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie argued after the war that London was becoming the musical centre of the world, with opera at its heart. In the autumn of 1947, audiences in the capital had the opportunity to watch no fewer than 23 different operas performed by five companies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1360190650webready-ae6a690-e1767623509642.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing five women dancing on a stage, in front of a large crowd of men in military uniform, who are all sitting on the floor" title="Servicemen watch a wartime rehearsal by the Entertainments National Service Association, which toured combat zones (Image by Getty Images)" /> A new company based at the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials performed Italian opera in Italian to groups of former servicemen and West End shopworkers. For a while, even glamorous Covent Garden presented a form of “opera for the people”, running regional auditions and recruiting talented opera-singing coalminers, secretaries and milkmen as soloists for a new company. Read more | "Hooray! The war is ended": 5 people's recollections of VE Day Some of these initiatives were only short-lived. Even so, there was very much a buzz in the air around opera after the war, with the Musicians’ Union declaring in 1947 that classical music had become “a necessary part of the life of the people”. The wider acceptance of opera as bona fide popular entertainment seemed to be summed up by the fact that when the San Carlo Opera Company from Naples visited just after the war, it performed not only at Covent Garden but also at Butlin’s holiday camps in Filey and Skegness. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/San-Carlo-Opera-Companywebready-ce0beda-e1767624438971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a crowd of women, dressed in dresses and frilly white pinafores. One sits at a piano, surrounded by the others" title="Members of the San Carlo Opera Company of Naples perform at a Butlin’s holiday camp in the mid-1940s. Classical music was now, so the Musicians’ Union declared, “a necessary part of the life of the people” (Image by The Butlin’s Heritage Collection, History of Advertising Trust Archive (HAT))" /> Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, made a triumphant return to its Islington home, where on 7 June 1945 it staged the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – a rapturously received work that seemed to signal a hopeful new beginning for British operatic composition. New troupes formed to take touring opera around the country in the late 1940s. The 1940s also saw the foundation of Welsh National Opera – a group of talented amateurs at the outset but later a major player on the British operatic scene. Perhaps most importantly, thanks to the huge explosion of interest in the high arts that had taken place during the war, the nation was far more open-minded towards the possibility of funding it afterwards. Up to this point, public subsidy had only ever been a pipe dream. Now CEMA provided a model for the new Arts Council of Great Britain, which leaned heavily towards favouring opera. Thanks to subsidies, opera could be staged at Covent Garden year-round rather than just for a three-month summer season, and prices could be kept low. The Arts Council also undertook local measures to foster music-making and music appreciation, setting up clubs in workplaces and lending gramophone records. Meanwhile, opera featured prominently on the BBC’s new Third Programme. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WNO-Chorus-in-Ebenezer-Chapel-1946-Idloes-Owen-front-6th-from-the-leftwebready-12658e1-e1767624255173.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of men and women, sitting in rows" title="Singers with the Welsh National Opera in the 1940s. The company made its debut with a double-bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci in 1946 (Image by Welsh National Opera)" /> “Fifteen years ago I should have felt obliged to defend opera as a form of art,” said the critic and academic Edward J Dent in a lecture delivered at Liverpool University in 1945, “but that is no longer necessary.” Opera continued to be enjoyed by large, socially mixed audiences through the 1950s, sixties and seventies, and was drawing record audiences in the eighties and nineties. But by those later decades, the media had begun to circulate a simplistic idea that opera was elitist, and by the turn of the millennium the idea was so entrenched that it was deterring newcomers to the genre. Opera was also becoming more expensive, declining on television and disappearing from the school curriculum. Today, opera still has something for everyone, but it has receded from the mainstream cultural conversation. Regrettably, it has become necessary, once again, to defend it as a form of art. Alexandra Wilson is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book is Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press), published in September 2025 This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From krakens to serpents: 5 fearsome sea monsters from history
Sea monsters have haunted human imaginations for millennia. From the kraken to killer serpents, Prema Arasu explores what five mythical creatures reveal about our deepest fears
1. Armed and dangerous The writhing tentacles of the kraken inspired horror and disgust Sea monsters have fired our imaginations – and chilled our blood – for as long as humanity has sailed the seas. The Babylonian epic Enūma Eliš, which dates back to at least 1200 BC, describes the creation of the world from two fearsome primordial beings: Apsû, the embodiment of subterranean fresh water, and Tiamat, the sea. Like the many mythical aquatic creatures that have occupied our dreams and our nightmares, Apsû and Tiamat reveal much about how the Babylonians saw the world, acting as projections through which their anxieties about nature could be expressed, examined and, perhaps, mastered. Fast forward more than a thousand years and, in Naturalis Historia (c77 AD), the earliest extant work of natural history, the Roman author Pliny the Elder argued that the largest animals found in the sea “exceed in size any of the terrestrial animals” because of the “superabundance of moisture with which they are supplied”. One such giant creature is the kraken, its origins lying in Nordic mythology and folklore. In his 1752–53 proto-scientific work The Natural History of Norway, Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan described the “Kraken, Kraxen, or, as some world name it, Krabben” as an island-sized creature, “round, flat, and full of arms, or branches”. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was so energised by reports of this monster of the deep that, in 1830, he wrote a poem in its honour, describing an ancient, giant-armed creature slumbering “Below the thunders of the upper deep; Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea.” British naturalist Henry Lee offered a more rational perspective. In Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), he stated that kraken sightings by sailors were most likely exaggerated reports of giant squid (Architeuthis dux), described a quarter of a century earlier by the Danish biologist Japetus Steenstrup. Even after that, though, kraken and other squid-like monsters proliferated in literature. Herman Melville dedicated a chapter of Moby-Dick (1851) to the giant squid. Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s narrator, references The Natural History of Norway in his description of the creature, offering up the possibility that the kraken might not be a mythological beast but a taxonomically recognised species. Myth and reality continued to amalgamate in the science-fiction genre. Jules Verne’s battle with a giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) was based on reports of an encounter between a French corvette, Alecton, and a squid in 1861. As Verne puts it: “Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvellous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long… Its eight arms… were twice as long as its body, and were twisted like the furies’ hair.” The uncanny undulations of kraken continue to fascinate. Roger Luckhurst, a scholar of the field of horror, links this to our innate “response to things that overwhelm our senses, stick too close, ooze across borders, or refuse to keep a stable shape”. Read more | Water gods and sea goddesses: 17 water deities from world history 2. A feminine fantasy Aquatic half-humans enchanted men and attracted women seeking new freedoms Sirens, tritons, nereids, merfolk, nymphs… part-fish, part-human creatures have gone by many names over the millennia. These alluring beings have glided gracefully into cultural traditions across the world for thousands of years – particularly those with strong histories of seafaring. And, unlike many of the aquatic beings on these pages, they haven’t always done so with malign intentions. In Naturalis Historia, Pliny described “tritons and nereids” as creatures in which “the portion of the body that resembles the human figure is still rough all over with scales”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/AKG342658webready-934ba2a-e1767351773509.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A stone relief showing a ship full of men sailing towards three women lined up on the left" title="A fourth-century BC urn shows Odysseus sailing towards the sirens, who, he reported, “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers” (Image by AKG)" /> Sirens had appeared in Homer’s poem the Odyssey nine centuries earlier. But in the case of this ancient Greek epic, they were never physically described. Rather, we’re told that they “sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers”. Interestingly, they tempt sailors with knowledge, rather than – as other, later, depictions would have it – luring them to their doom. “When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate,” the fictional Odysseus recalls, “the sirens saw that we were getting in shore and began with their singing: ‘No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song – and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser’.” In medieval art, Homer’s sirens are interpreted as both aquatic and non-aquatic creatures. In contrast, the nereids of Greek myth were explicitly spirits or embodiments of the sea, albeit often visually depicted as human women. In the Romantic and Victorian imagination, they became synonymous with mermaids, frequently depicted with tails. Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe conjured a fish-tailed ingénue in her 1794 poem The Sea-Nymph, as did Hans Christian Andersen in The Little Mermaid four decades later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/gr0031911Hwebready-444c4de-e1767352384901.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A drawing showing a mermaid with a black, orange and yellow tail and long blonde hair, laying on her front on a rock, with a sea plant in the background" title="A 1930s depiction of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, which did so much to popularise the fish-tailed ingénue (Image by TopFoto)" /> Radcliffe’s poem marked a turn to the mermaid as a feminine fantasy: an aspirational symbol for young women who might otherwise feel confined by the gendered expectations of public life. This manifests today in the enduring visibility of the mermaid in popular culture and in the burgeoning pastime of mermaiding – cosplaying by swimming with a decorative monofin. 3. Terror in the deep For millennia, giant, ravenous sea serpents have played on humanity’s primal terrors It didn’t pay to get on the wrong side of the gods in ancient mythology. Just ask Laocoön, a Trojan priest who offended the deity Minerva – and didn’t live to tell the tale. As the Roman poet Virgil relates it in the Aeneid – his epic first-century BC poem telling the story of the foundation of Rome – Laocoön committed the cardinal sin of throwing a spear into the Greeks’ wooden horse to show that it was hollow. It was an act that so enraged Minerva that she unleashed two giant sea serpents to eat him. “Taking swift course; their necks were lifted high,” Virgil writes of the ravenous creatures. “Their gory dragon-crests o’ertopped the waves; all else, half seen, trailed low along the sea; while with loud cleavage of the foaming brine, their monstrous backs wound forward fold on fold.” Poor Laocoön didn’t stand a chance. As the priest’s grisly fate proves, the sea serpent had established itself as a terror of the deep by the time the Greeks and Romans dominated the Mediterranean. But they weren’t the first to live in fear of this creature. In fact, the ancient Greeks’ diverse bestiary of monsters likely derived from earlier prototypes. Sea serpents recur in the folklore traditions of a range of coastal and lake cultures, from the black, hairy Nile-dwelling monster Aman Doger of ancient Nubia to the rainbow snake of Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime myth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1288491221webready-92f8e54-e1767351878133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a naked man with curly hair and a beard, with a large snake wrapped around his body, holding him down, alongside his two sons" title="Laocoön and his two sons are attacked by serpents, as shown in a 16th‑century engraving. Could megalophobia – the fear of large objects – be a factor in humanity’s obsession with sea monsters? (Image by Getty Images)" /> For the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee, tales of colossal sea serpents were a case of mistaken identity, likely originating in sightings of other marine phenomena – perhaps large pods of porpoises or whales. “I believe that… the supposed coils or protuberances of the serpent’s body, were only so many porpoises swimming in line in accordance with their habit before mentioned,” he wrote. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates The anthropologist David D Gilmore has offered an alternative interpretation of our sea serpent obsession. He has suggested that the recurrence of such creatures in literature down the ages points to three primal human fears: of the sea; of what might lurk in the unknown; and of large objects, otherwise known as megalophobia. 4. The theory of de-evolution Early Christians feared that the Leviathan would propel the human race back to its watery past To some, it has been a benign presence. To others, a terror-inducing harbinger of doom. Ever since the Leviathan emerged from the depths of the oceans and floated into the human consciousness, it has meant different things to different people. Jews and early Christians were certainly fearful. In the Hebrew Bible – where it appears in the Old Testament books of Psalms, Job and Isaiah – the Leviathan is a female sea serpent who will bring about the apocalypse together with her male counterpart, the desert monster Behemoth. Such ancient beasts played on the enduring fear of regression, reminding us of our uncomfortable origins in the oceans. David D Gilmore suggests that the water that so often drips from primal monsters as they emerge from the deep “symbolises not only the amniotic fluids of the womb, but also the primal element from which all life emerged”. These creatures threaten us with the possibilities of de-evolution – a stripping of what modern science has decided makes us human. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-534969411webready-723169d-e1767352029623.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A drawing depicting a large black whale being held under a boat, while several people and other sea creatures surround it in the water" title="An illustration from a 14th-century manuscript shows Alexander the Great being lowered into the sea to explore the ocean bed – a place populated by aquatic humans, dogs and a huge whale (Image by Getty Images)" /> For Renaissance cartographers, the Leviathan meant something different. Medieval maps of the world abound with monstrous-looking whales, depicted in ornate detail. According to historian Chet van Duzer, these illustrations served two purposes: to warn sailors of dangers that awaited them at sea, and as decorative elements designed to show off the artist’s talents. By the time the American writer Celia Thaxter penned her poem Leviathan in 1876, the creature had shape-shifted again. For Thaxter, it was a largely peaceful presence, who triumphed against the rage of nature: “For her worst fury he nor stayed nor turned. ‘Twas joy to think in such tremendous play, Through the sea’s cruelty, all unconcerned. Leviathan pursued his placid way!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CPA0030665webready-7c5c3eb-e1767352254831.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing a large grey and orange fish with a man laying next to it, covered in flowers" title="A 14th-century depiction of Jonah with the giant fish that spat him out. Huge sea creatures make numerous appearances in biblical texts (Image by TopFoto)" /> 5. Visions of Atlantis Tales of an aquatic city populated by hyper-intelligent Atlanteans enchanted authors from Plato to HG Wells “A strange vertebrated animal.” That’s how Elstead, the narrator of HG Wells’s 1897 short story In the Abyss, describes the lifeform he encounters on a journey into a deep ocean trench. “Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils,” reported the intrepid submariner. “The vertical pitch of its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.” In introducing Elstead to this strange creature, HG Wells was joining a long list of writers to conjure the inhabitants of a mysterious underwater civilisation into fictional life. In fact, the possibility of an intelligent, almost godlike race of aquatic beings living on the ocean bed has captured the imagination for centuries. Mentions of the submerged island Atlantis date back to Plato’s fourth-century BC dialogues Timaeus and Critias, in which the Greek philosopher described a land sunken by a devastating earthquake. Renaissance scholars such as Francis Bacon linked Atlantis to the Americas, a notion he further explored in his utopian novel The New Atlantis (1624). In 1931, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists Henry Bryant and Columbus Iselin embarked upon a research cruise in search of the lost continent around the Azores. It was unsuccessful. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/the-shape-of-water9lp0tuwebready-2ed216e-e1767352125833.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photo of a woman with her hands pressed up against a glass tank, looking into the eyes of a large green sea creature behind the glass" title="2017 dark fantasy film The Shape of Water, which traces the relationship between a mute woman and a captured humanoid amphibian (Image by MovieStills)" /> Tales of Atlantis made a resurgence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1929 novel The Maracot Deep features a team of scientists who descend into the ocean, become trapped in a deep-sea trench and are saved from disaster by descendants of Atlantis. Other underseas peoples in popular fiction aren’t quite so benign. American horror writer HP Lovecraft described an undersea race of creatures called Deep Ones who worship the deities Dagon and Cthulhu. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth Lovecraft projects his own prejudices about racial purity and miscegenation (sexual relationships between people of different ethnic groups) onto a fictional coastal town. Here the residents interbreed with marine beings and become corrupted in form and character. Read more | Tails from the deep: separating the real folklore of mermaids from Disney stories The denizens of cities under the sea continue to capture our imaginations today. Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning 2017 film The Shape of Water tells how a mute cleaner working in a high-security government laboratory falls in a love with a green-skinned humanoid amphibian. This enduring interest in aquatic beings speaks to a wider fascination with how great civilisations might fall. This is an intriguing and alarming prospect. After all, if a creature is to knock us off our self-appointed perch at the top of the evolutionary ladder, then surely that creature could come from the same primordial soup as we once did? Prema Arasu is an adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Australia, and author of The Book of Sea Monsters: Leviathans of Literature (Adlard Coles, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Father Christmas v Santa Claus: the centuries-long battle for Britain's chimneys
The true identity of the white-bearded, red-robed figure who fills children’s stockings at Christmas has long been debated. Thomas Ruys Smith sizes up the merry contenders
Tis the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature is stirring… but someone is. While the household sleeps, a jolly visitor carefully places presents in stockings hung by the fireplace. After taking a sip of whatever tipple has been thoughtfully left out for him, he pockets a carrot and disappears up the chimney. With a tinkle of sleigh bells he disappears into the night with his faithful reindeer, a merry laugh echoing across the rooftops. It’s a familiar ritual – with one fundamental point of contention. Who do you think it was that brought you these presents? Are you a Father Christmas fundamentalist or are you a Santa Claus supporter? Each figure has his passionate partisans, and each is wrapped up with issues of national and regional identity. A recent YouGov poll of around 4,000 British residents suggested that the UK is split right down the middle on the topic – though Santa enjoyed a narrow lead by a couple of percentage points. What you may find surprising is that this isn’t a modern conundrum. In fact, the ongoing battle for seasonal supremacy has created a schism in British culture since the Victorian era. Despite what some Father Christmas traditionalists might think, Santa Claus is not some recent American arriviste. The forgotten history of the friendly rivalry between this pair of festive icons goes much further back, taking us on a transatlantic journey through popular culture to a time even before our modern celebration of Christmas was taking shape. Nick of time Let’s start at the beginning – or as close as we can get to it. The figure of Father Christmas is undoubtedly more venerable than Santa Claus – in English culture, at least. References to characters who served to personify the period of yuletide feasting and merrymaking can be traced back to at least the 15th century. But Father Christmas really emerged as a champion of the season when Christmas came under threat in Britain. He joined the fray in the midst of religious and cultural arguments during the Civil War, when Puritans tried to suppress traditional Christmas celebrations. One anti-Puritan pamphlet written in 1652 lamented that Father Christmas, who could once “knock down Hercules”, was lately suffering from “a deep consumption”, his might sadly diminished. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-526608136webready-8247d2a-e1765964190971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a family gathered around a large Christmas tree. On the wall behind them is a banner that reads Merry Christmas" title="A c1895 photograph of a family at Christmas. The Victorians revived historic festive traditions as well as creating new ones (Image by Getty Images)" /> Christmas celebrations and Father Christmas both returned with the Restoration. But it wasn’t until the Victorian revival of historic traditions, and its creation of new ones, that Father Christmas was truly reinvigorated as the presiding spirit of the season. Certainly, Charles Dickens’ portrait of the jovial Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol (1843) owes a lot to the established idea of Father Christmas as the personification of yuletide celebrations – crowned with winter greenery, and accompanied by bountiful piles of food and a brimming wassail bowl. This iteration had no truck with reindeer, though, and he certainly never stuffed a stocking – at least, not until his American rival started to descend British chimneys. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know Enter Santa Claus. Tracing his origins takes us across the Atlantic to 18th-century New England. Puritan colonists, in common with their English counterparts, had been positively averse to Christmas celebrations, but plenty of European immigrants imported their Christmas celebrations to America, where they took root and found new forms. A wealth of winter gift-bringers set up shop in their respective immigrant communities, from the Dutch Saint Nicholas (and his secularised counterpart Sinterklaas) to wilder figures such as Knecht-Ruprecht and Belsnickel from Germany. Undoubtedly, Father Christmas made the trip across the Atlantic, too; despite the Puritans’ best efforts, he found a warmer reception in the Southern colonies. The figure of Santa Claus emerged from this characteristically diverse American melting pot. Tantalising references to a distinctive new seasonal gift-bringer started to emerge in the late 18th century. As his name suggests, Santa Claus took inspiration from Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop of Myra (in what’s now Turkey), about whom tales were told of secret gift-giving. But elements of other European traditions are evident, too. In appearance, Santa was more rough and ready than might be imagined. And, rather than appearing on 5 or 6 December (the feast day of Saint Nicholas), when he came to homes in many parts of central Europe, Santa Claus visited American families on Christmas Eve. The age of Santa Though the exact origins of Santa Claus remain murky, 1821 certainly marked a key moment in his emergence onto the seasonal stage. That Christmas, an ephemeral publication for young readers called The Children’s Friend was published in New York. From its richly illustrated pages leapt the now-recognisable figure of ‘Old Santeclaus’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/J4X8XGwebready-62d3a57-e1765963962733.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“Old Santeclaus” depicted in an illustration from The Children’s Friend (1821), which marked his emergence onto the seasonal stage in the US (Image by Alamy)" title="“Old Santeclaus” depicted in an illustration from The Children’s Friend (1821), which marked his emergence onto the seasonal stage in the US (Image by Alamy)" /> This character visited children on Christmas Eve, left presents in their hanging stockings, and travelled in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Whether this reflected folk traditions that were already in evidence or newly invented them for its young readers – it was probably a bit of both – the age of Santa had arrived. Almost immediately, his public profile was boosted by the 1823 publication – initially anonymous – of a poem that is still very familiar to us today: Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St Nicholas. Though that title called him by his older name, the newspaper in which it appeared introduced the verses as a “description of that unwearied patron of children… Sante Claus”. Moore’s timing was perfect: soon the poem became an emblem of a new kind of domestic Christmas centred on the family, the home and the excitement of children waiting for their stockings to be filled by a magical visitor. In the US, it did much to spread the legend of Santa Claus to eager young ears. “Just think of it!” exclaimed an American commentator in 1875. “Until we had heard or read this, we didn’t know much about him.” Read more | The child-eating Christmas Yule Cat: what are the origins of this Icelandic folklore? Over the decades that followed, American writers and artists continued to develop Santa’s backstory, locating his base in the north pole, revealing his workshop of elves, and even giving him a wife. By the middle of the 19th century, Santa Claus’s reach had expanded from his regional base in and around New York to become a ubiquitous figure in American Christmases. “Nobody ever saw him,” as one American described in 1853, “though everybody has heard of him.” Emboldened by such success, Santa looked to expand his empire further still. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1283479122webready-e55e347-e1765964523934.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A picture showing a young bearded man dressed in red and green robes and a red hat, holding a book and plate of fruit in one hand with his other hand held up in the air" title="A c1890 lithograph of Nicholas of Bari, also known as Saint Nicholas of Myra. The US version of Santa Claus can trace his roots to this fourth-century bishop (Image by Getty Images)" /> American influence Then as now, the potent slices of American popular culture that crossed the Atlantic had a profound effect on the seasonal behaviour of the young – not to mention their demands on parents – in Britain. Slowly but surely, Santa Claus gained a foothold in the Old World, his legend disseminated in popular literature. Reprints of Moore’s poem were certainly circulating in Britain by the 1850s, and probably earlier. Published in the Illustrated London News in 1855, it was accompanied by some useful advice for British children looking to emulate their American counterparts: “Before going to bed, the children hang their newest stockings near the chimney, or pin them to the curtains of the bed. Midnight finds a world of hosiery waiting for favours; and the only wonder is that a single Santa Klaus can get around among them all.” One American book, now largely forgotten, seems to have had a particular impact on the profile of Santa Claus in Britain. Sisters Susan and Anna Warner shot to fame in 1850 when the former published The Wide, Wide World, one of the bestselling books of the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of British readers read of its heroine, Ellen Montgomery, hanging up her stocking for Santa at Christmas-time – and perhaps emulated her hopeful act. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/PC600Mwebready-f75c38f-e1765965239337.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration showing three small children in white gowns, hanging a stocking from a fireplace" title="A c1870 illustration for Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, which disseminated the idea of hanging up stockings in the US. The poem had made its way to Britain by the 1850s (Image by Alamy)" /> Even more significant was the sisters’ 1853 story Carl Krinken; or, a Christmas Stocking. The tale of a poor young American boy visited by Santa Claus one Christmas Eve, it seems to have captivated a generation of young Victorians. Looking back to her mid-century childhood, British writer Sarah Tooley recalled that the Warners’ book did more than anything “to popularise the visits of Santa Claus in our own country”; when British children read the story of Carl’s adventures, it “caught their imagination, and ‘St Nick’ is now almost as popular in London as in New York”. New British editions of the book were still being produced in the closing years of the 19th century. As early as 1856, reviewing the transformations of Christmas celebrations over the previous decade or so, one Birmingham newspaper marvelled that Christmas stockings were already an established part of the season, “for Santa-Claus has had the temerity to scale the wooden walls of old England, of late years”. Having scaled those walls, Santa became a familiar presence in British Christmases for the remaining years of the 19th century. As the London Evening Standard judged in 1861, “the children of England may be pleased with the advent of Santa Claus”. Even as late as 1896, a writer for the Manchester Courier declared: “I do think that Santa Claus is the most beautiful myth which ever comes into our lives.” So, when Victorian children hung up their stockings, it was Santa Claus that they expected to fill them. Not that Father Christmas retreated entirely in the face of Santa’s celebrity. He increasingly appeared on cards and in magazine illustrations as an embodiment of the festive season. In the late 19th century, at least, there was clearly room for both figures in the landscape of British Christmas celebrations. In 1876, for example, the Darlington & Richmond Herald found space in its account of the coming “Christmastide” for a tribute to both “Old Father Christmas” as the incarnation of the “merry season” and the American newcomer who had become a central part of domestic celebrations: “We envy not the home where the Christmas stocking… is not an established institution and Santa Claus one of the patron saints of the children’s calendar.” Read more | How to host a medieval Christmas Blurred figures It wasn’t long, though, before the outlines of these defined figures, with their distinctive roles, began to blur and merge. Even in the 1880s, Father Christmas was sometimes named as the figure who filled festive stockings. The shadow of war and a growing jingoism seems to have sped up that process, and national tensions found their way into Christmas debates. In 1912, one rather confused memoirist, looking back to his childhood in the mid-19th century, declared: “I am glad to say that in those days people knew nothing (at any rate, they knew nothing in our part of England) about such German things as ‘Christmas Trees’, or such German saints as ‘Santa Claus’. Our Christmas presents were found in stockings, and put there by Father Christmas.” He was taken to task for this assertion by a correspondent to Notes & Queries magazine, who attempted to set the record straight. “I am as John Bullish as may be but I do not remember finding any gifts in my youthful socks or stockings,” they wrote, “and have an impression that my first introduction to the contemplation of such cornucopias was in the pages of an American story-book.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-90018255webready-9d925e7-e1765964970850.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An American Christmas card printed at the turn of the 20th century depicts Santa Claus as we still know him today – sporting a red outfit with fluffy white trimming, driving a sleigh loaded with presents and drawn by flying reindeer (Image by Getty Images)" title="An American Christmas card printed at the turn of the 20th century depicts Santa Claus as we still know him today – sporting a red outfit with fluffy white trimming, driving a sleigh loaded with presents and drawn by flying reindeer (Image by Getty Images)" /> Such memories soon faded, though, and by 1933 one newspaper laid out a deceptively simple answer to the question of who exactly stuffed British stockings: “Here we call him Father Christmas, in America he is Santa Claus.” The patriotic preference for a home-grown gift-bringer was, at least temporarily, in the ascendancy. Since then, the pair have been locked in a struggle for Britain’s stockings. If Father Christmas’s status rose in the 20th century, Santa Claus has clearly made inroads into the psyche of Britain’s children in recent decades; apparently, he has even gained a narrow lead this century. However, even the most ardent Father Christmas fanatic shouldn’t panic about this apparent Americanisation of British culture. Arriving from across the Atlantic at the precise moment that our modern Christmas was taking shape in the Victorian era, Santa Claus should be considered as much a part of our traditional celebrations as Christmas trees, Christmas crackers, Christmas cards – and good old Father Christmas himself. In the spirit of the season, let’s call a truce between these jovial icons. This yuletide, if you really want to honour festive tradition, raise a glass to Father Christmas in thanks for your family’s feast and the blessings of the season – but make sure to hang out your stocking for Santa Claus. Thomas Ruys Smith is professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia. His new book is Searching for Santa Claus (Boiler House Press, November 2025)
Sex, slavery and royal scandal: how Jane Austen's novels exposed a darker side of Georgian Britain
The author's books depict an evocative slice of early 19th-century life, but many aspects of the Regency era are only hinted at in her novels, as Lizzie Rogers reveals
Ever felt like you could be Elizabeth Bennet? You’re not alone. Entering Jane Austen’s world can feel like an immersive experience. Reading her books (or watching television or film adaptations, or the many spin-offs and lookalikes), it’s easy to believe that somehow we’ve really got to know her England – and, by extension, the people who lived in it. That feeling is encapsulated in the 2008 ITV series Lost in Austen, which follows the adventures of 21st-century heroine Amanda Price. Stepping through a portal into the world of Pride and Prejudice, Price (played by Jemima Rooper) finds herself in the bosom of the Bennet family, messing up episodes in the novel, trying – with varying degrees of success – to fix them and, inevitably, falling in love with Mr Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Her opening voiceover declares that “I’ve read [Pride and Prejudice] so many times now the words just say themselves in my head and it’s like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there – it’s become a place I know so intimately… I can see that world, I can touch it.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/shutterstockeditorial912719bewebready-5e6f127-e1765974181648.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a modern-day adaptation of a Regency ball. A couple dance in the middle, with the man spinning the woman around. Around them, several other couples dance" title="A scene from ITV’s Lost in Austen, where 21st-century heroine Amanda Price steps into Pride and Prejudice, which she describes as “a place I know so intimately” (Image by Shutterstock)" /> This is far from a new sentiment. In March 1826, after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal that Austen “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with… the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment... What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.” Her undeniable talent for character study is one of the key reasons why Austen’s work resonates so loudly across the world. Creative retellings of her novels show how the themes, characters and plotlines easily transcend their bounds of Regency England and fit well in other countries, other cultures and other times, with new representations amending the ages, social class and genders of characters. In the 250 years since Austen’s birth, her work has morphed into a behemoth that we simultaneously modernise and have made emblematic of life in late 18th and early 19th-century England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-113633139webready-0bd035d.jpg" width="2083" height="1388" alt="An image showing an old man with a straight face, wearing a suit and coat" title="A 19th-century engraving of author Sir Walter Scott, who wrote glowingly of Austen’s writing after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time (Image by Getty Images)" /> Obscuring obsession Thanks to her gift for evoking that era, its environment and inhabitants, it’s easy to envision ourselves inside her world. We feel able to enter it through the plots of her novels and their adaptations for stage and screen, as well as the extension of her unfinished novel Sanditon, fleshed out vividly in the ITV series running from 2019. But there is a danger that we conflate her writing too fully with the history of the time, obscuring swathes of this period through our obsession. The picture we receive is one that’s been enhanced by layers of interpretation, adaptation and the historical distance between us and the source material. The effect of them all together is “to make us read novels that aren’t actually there”, argued Helena Kelly in her 2016 book Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, echoing the views of other Austen scholars. Because Austen’s work feels so modern and accessible, we miss wider perspectives that are alluded to through her clever study of the world around her – but also, importantly, many that she simply could not give us and did not have to. One person cannot capture every aspect of life in their era, nor act as the singular voice of a generation. No matter how brilliant or important the writer in question is, they cannot speak to the experience of everybody. Yes, Jane Austen was a genius, through whose pen the novel was changed forever. She defied her circumstances in life – being a woman with very little money – to become one of the world’s best-loved authors, thanks solely to her immense talent. And she does open a window into this period of history from which we can learn so much – but her work, and the questions it raises, invites us to widen our gaze. Our knowledge of both her and the time in which she lived is only enriched by expanding our understanding by exploring the work of other writers and figures that populated her world, opening our eyes to that diverse, fast-changing and momentous era. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-173344128webready-9d2cff4-e1765974152772.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white pictures showing large groups of people in states of undress, fighting and drinking in the street" title="William Hogarth’s Gin Lane provides a stark portrayal of a teeming urban environment in which drunkenness and debauchery were rife (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fascinated by the intelligent satire of Austen’s novels, we might look at the art of William Hogarth. Though he died in 1764, more than a decade before the author’s birth, many of his images of 18th-century London highlight the blight of corruption and the terrible conditions endured by Britain’s urban poor well into the 19th century. His famous prints Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751) could be seen as demonising the drinking habits of the working class. But his work does at least feature ordinary folk as more than just background elements. A portrait of his own servants from the early 1750s, for instance, presents distinct faces and personalities. Hogarth’s father spent time in debtors’ prison, a place more often associated with the Victorian work of Charles Dickens, and many other figures from the Georgian period also found themselves inmates. The actress and writer Mary Robinson (c1757–1800), who later became famous for her portrayal of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale (and for her brief affair with the Prince of Wales), lived with her profligate husband in debtors’ prison for several months from 1775; while there, she became the family breadwinner by publishing her poetry. Read more | Beyond the podcast: Jane Austen Robinson’s memoirs, prepared from 1798 and published the year after her death, charted a life beset with immense ups and downs. They give us an insight into her youth and first marriage (“I considered chastity as the brightest ornament that could embellish the female mind,” she writes) and trace the struggles that continued to beset her into her later years. In fact, much of the preparations for those memoirs was done on envelopes because she couldn’t afford to buy fresh paper. Crime and poverty To continue our trip into the murkier corners of London during this period, consider the business dealings, crime and poverty prevalent in lower-class areas of the city. One publication that illustrates this side of urban life was Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious bestseller published annually from 1757 to 1794 that detailed names and talents of dozens of sex workers. It was interrogated by Hallie Rubenhold in her 2005 book The Covent Garden Ladies, which itself inspired the television series Harlots (2017–19). These aspects of London are hinted at in Pride and Prejudice, in the form of the poverty and depravity that Mrs Bennet fears will be the fate of her daughter Lydia after she runs away to the capital with George Wickham. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2E4A0NWwebready-e008451.jpg" width="1639" height="1093" alt="A drawing of a black man with one leg, dressed in a blue jacket, checked shirt and a feathered hat, playing the violin" title="An early 19th-century illustration of sailor-turned-street performer Billy Waters, whose life “highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period” (Image by Alamy)" /> Strength in diversity Sanditon introduces Austen’s only black character: Miss Lambe, an heiress from the West Indies. During the 18th century, it is estimated there were more than 20,000 black Britons – a significant number, in a British population that had exceeded 10 million by 1801. To explore the lives of some of these people, read Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (2022) and Mary L Shannon’s biography Billy Waters Is Dancing (2024). The latter gives a voice to a black sailor in Regency Britain whose presence as a street performer was so famed across London that his name became legendary, his life shaped by those who aimed to profit from his talent. Living from around the 1770s until 1823, Waters’ life maps closely onto Austen’s, and highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England Mansfield Park, Austen’s third and perhaps most divisive novel, makes clear the links between slavery, the country house and aristocratic wealth. The titular house is built on a fortune sustained by plantations worked by enslaved people in Antigua, and its name may come from Lord Mansfield, whose judicial decisions enabled the advancement towards the abolition of slavery. Austen’s favourite poet was William Cowper, whose work fervently supported antislavery campaigns. But there were also first-person accounts of the experiences of black people in Britain in that period. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/2H492WTwebready-9bef977-e1765974356801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An open book with a portrait of a black man in a suit on the left page, and a title page on the right" title="First-person accounts written by the formerly enslaved – such as the letters of Ignatius Sancho (above) – helped rally Britons to the cause of abolition (Image by Alamy)" /> The letters of Ignatius Sancho, born into slavery on an Atlantic ship in 1729 and brought to England at two years old, were published in 1782, after his death. One of them – written to John Wingrave, a London bookseller, in 1778 – contains a stinging rebuke of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. “I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom, and for the many blessings I enjoy in it, shall ever have my warmest wishes – prayers – and blessings;) I say, it is with reluctance that I must observe your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea.” Olaudah Equiano was another high profile supporter of the British abolitionist movement whose writings shone a light on the iniquities of the slave trade. His Interesting Narrative autobiography – telling the story of his enslavement in Africa, arrival in Britain as a young man and life after purchasing his freedom in 1766 – was hugely popular when it was published in 1789. The enslaved female poet Phillis Wheatley revealed in verse her desire for intellectual fulfilment. Travelling to London from Boston with her enslavers, she was able to publish Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 – believed to be the first set of poems published by an African American. Such writings enable us to understand experiences of black people during the era, reminding us of the often-forgotten diversity of England at this time. In this vein, the second season of Bridgerton (2022) highlighted – albeit through a fictionalised lens – the experiences of south Asian people in Britain. During Jane Austen’s lifetime, the British empire was in rapid ascendency, fuelled by commerce, trade and the ruthless actions of the East India Company. The author’s own cousin, Eliza Hancock – who later married Jane’s brother Henry – grew up in India as the daughter of a British surgeon to the East India Company. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-90779123webready-cbf67a0-e1765974523630.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of three workers working in a factory, turning large wheels with cloth hanging over them into buckets" title="An 18th-century illustration of workers dyeing cloth. Jane Austen lived through a boom in industry, but others would document the struggles of the labouring poor (Image by Getty Images)" /> Long-lost sister William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, which was set during the Regency period though published in 1848, highlights through the character of Jos Sedley the wealth that could be accumulated by young people capitalising on travelling to India. Historian Durba Ghosh has noted that Thackeray had a long-lost (and possibly mixed-heritage) sister, Amelia – also known as Sarah Redfield – in India, and explored the stories of many south Asian women, demonstrating the strong connections between Britain and India at the time. Read more | Strange and surprising pastimes of the Regency Ton Thackeray’s dramatic novel is more specifically set during the Napoleonic Wars, hinted at in Austen’s work through the regular presence of a militia or naval characters, though this inclusion is often overlooked as a reflection of the lived experience of constant war and unrest. Two of Austen’s brothers were in the navy and one was in a militia regiment, while her cousin Eliza lost her first husband, the Comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine. The absence of peace and a sense of perpetual uncertainty were harrowing facts of life. This tumult extended to Britain’s shores as violence broke out over questions of religion and parliamentary representation. Through the late 18th and early 19th century, villages, towns and cities grew rapidly while at the same time the voices of ordinary people were not heard. Burgeoning industry created a new class of wealthy people, while also fostering extremely testing working conditions for the labouring poor. We tend to think of these subjects as uniquely endemic to the Victorian period, taking centre stage in the writing of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, but the boom in industry was firmly rooted in Austen’s lifetime. For instance, Lancashire’s cotton industry was in full swing by the late 18th century, with some 20,000 apprentices working in cotton mills in 1800. Textile magnate Robert Peel (1750–1830), long-term MP for Tamworth and father of the future prime minister of the same name, began campaigning and introducing legislation on child labour in the early years of the 19th century. Spending time in London, Bath and Southampton, Jane Austen would have been offered significant insights into the growth of industry and urban overcrowding. We celebrate Austen’s novels for the questions she raises about the position of women in society, a subject that preoccupied many of her contemporaries. Early feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft argued fervently for the recognition of women as rational creatures who deserved rights accordingly in a world that granted them few, if any. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects she wrote: “One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.” Wollstonecraft’s words caused a sensation – and when, after her premature death in 1797, her husband, William Godwin published her biography, so did the story of her life. She lived frequently outside the bounds of accepted social propriety – a point that enables us to delve deeper into the world of reputation, of making spaces to safely subvert societal expectations and legal doctrine, and of understanding how relationships, freedom and restriction truly worked in practice. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1441698253webready-9c87b29-e1765974624755.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" title="A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)" /> The third season of Sanditon (2023) presented a slow-burn romance between two gay men, Arthur Parker and Lord Harry Montrose – the storyline breathing a small piece of fictional life into the rich LGBTQ+ history of this period. A visible real-life example can be found in the cottage named Plas Newydd in Llangollen, Wales where from 1780 the couple Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler created a sanctuary for queer happiness. They became famous within their own lifetimes, visited by Sir Walter Scott and given a royal pension by George III upon the intercession of Queen Charlotte. We cannot – and should not expect to – learn everything about the history of the Regency period from the pages of Jane Austen’s novels. But as fans, readers and historians, we are indebted to her for providing a gateway into this tumultuous period, into which new research is being undertaken all the time, shining light on previously unheard voices and hidden faces. It is all these lived experiences that weave a rich tapestry, helping us to better know the period in which Jane Austen lived – one that indelibly shaped her and the masterpieces she left behind.
The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine