Author: Richard Jones

Knife crime was a major problem in the Victorian East End. In an age when a huge number of men, and boys, carried knives, it didn’t take much for a drunken brawl to result in murder. On other […]

Just how commonplace murder was in the East End of London in the 19th century is evident from the number of reports in the various newspapers of the day. Many of the homicides that were reported in the […]

It is, of course, a well known fact that the police efforts to capture the person responsible for the Whitechapel murders were ultimately unsuccessful. However, there were, as it transpired, quite a few other cases in the years […]

Throughout late September, 1888, the big story in the newspapers was that of the two inquests into the deaths of Annie Chapman and Mary Nichols that were being heard at the Working Lads Institute by the Coroner Wynne […]

On Saturday the 15th of August, 1846, the Lord Mayor was presiding over a session at the Mansion House Court, when a police inspector arrived to tell him that a woman by the name of Susan Tolleday, had […]

As regular readers of my true crime blogs will known, I am forever combing through the pages of 19th century newspapers in search of stories about murders and other crimes that took place in the Victorian metropolis. I […]

Murder was, and had been, a regular occurrence in London in London in general, and in Whitechapel in particular, in the decades preceding the Jack the Ripper atrocities. One of the most common forms of homicide was wives […]

Although the Jack the Ripper atrocities dominated the newspapers throughout late 1888 and early 1889, they were by no means the only murders that occurred during this period. Thew newspapers carried stories of numerous homicides that occurred over […]

Welcome to another Jack the Ripper Quiz. As per our usual quizzes, the September 2022 challenge consists of 10 questions pertaining to the Jack the Ripper crimes in particular or the Whitechapel murders in general. There are questions […]

As regular readers of my blogs will be aware, I am fascinated by accounts that appear in Victorian newspapers that provided with insights into the everyday lives of the ordinary people of the era. On a recent trawl […]