Author: Richard Jones

On Saturday, 11th of February, 1911, The Illustrated London News issued the following article, written by the author G. K. Chesterton, which was a response to a recent case in which a magistrate had suggested that, mot only […]

Long after the cessation of the Whitechapel murders in the East End of London, people all over the country were being terrified by receiving letters that purported to have been written by the perpetrator of the said crimes. […]

In the early hours of Monday, 25th February, 1889, a young woman by the name of Mary Ann Godstone was found cut and bleeding near Plumstead Railway Station. She said that she had been attacked by a young […]

Spouse murder, whereby husbands murdered their wives, was alarmingly common in Victorian London. It would appear, from reading the numerous accounts of these domestic crimes in the 19th century newspapers, that drink played a major part in the […]

It is extremely interesting, if a little disconcerting, to study the various types of crimes that were reported from the Police Courts of the 19th century. A particular crime that has always fascinated me, is that of pretending […]

There was a huge amount of interest in the Victorian newspapers – and, presumably, therefore, amongst the public who read those newspapers – in the more sordid and squalid aspects of the Victorian East End. In the 19th […]

There were, most certainly, some pretty horrible crimes perpetrated in London in the 19th century. Aside from the Jack the Ripper atrocities, which tend to be the ones that occupy us today, a range of horrible murders were […]

Although the Whitechapel murders occurred over a period lasting from April 1888 to February 1891 – and the Jack the Ripper murders (which were officially classed as part of the Whitechapel murders) lasted from August to November, 1888, […]

By the mid 1880s, the East End of London, and the district of Whitechapel in particular, was coming to be seen as a lawless and savage territory, in which official neglect had resulted in the emergence of a […]

The Illustrated Police News, on Saturday 25th of January, 1879, posed a simple question in the headline to one of its articles that appeared on that day – what is the value of a man’s jaw? The article […]