Author: Richard Jones

As 1888 got underway, the big story in the newspapers was the prosecution of John Burns and Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham for involvement in the events of what had been dubbed Bloody Sunday, 13th November, 1887. When the two […]

The problems associated with prostitution in London had been constantly in the news over the years preceding the onset of the Jack the Ripper murders. The Miss Cass case, that had generated a huge amount of press coverage […]

Mary Kelly, murdered on the 9th of November, 1888, in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields, is the most enigmatic of Jack the Ripper’s victims. We know virtually nothing about her life before she came to be living […]

Exploring the dwellings of the poor in both the East End and the West End of London was a recurrent theme with many Victorian newspaper reporters. The accounts they have left us of their explorations of the hovels […]

The Sporting Times, on Saturday, 13th October, 1888, published the following letter, which was intended as a tongue-in-cheek response to the letters then appearing in the newspapers from Radicals, who were using the murders as a means by […]

Police work is dangerous work. Of that, there is no doubt whatsoever. Those tasked with the job of ensuring the safety and the well-being of society as a whole never know what is going to happen when they […]

Strange as it might seem to us, the slums of Victorian London were, to many visitors, a tourist attraction in their own right. Many people, visiting the 19th-century Metropolis, would not consider their trip complete unless they had […]

Francis Charles Hughes-Hallett (1838 -1903) was an officer with the Royal Artillery and the Member of Parliament for Rochester. His first wife, Catherine, died in 1875, and, in 1882, Hughes-Hallett married a middle-aged American heiress, Emilie Page von Schaumberg […]

At the height of the panic around the Whitechapel murders, all manner of weird and wonderful stories cropped up in the newspapers concerning the behaviour of individuals who found the allure of involving themselves with the case almost […]

By November, 1890, interest in the Whitechapel murders – and also in the perpetrator of the heinous crimes – showed no signs of abating. It is true to say that the sensationalism, that been so apparent in the […]