General News

Wandsworth Prison looms large in the annals of London’s criminal history, as well as featuring in the story. It was, for example, at Wandsworth Prison that Jack the Ripper suspect George Chapman was executed. The Portsmouth Evening News,  […]

Time and time again in the Victorian newspapers one comes across cases whereby a cohabitee murdered the woman (and sometimes the man) with whom they were cohabiting. In many of the cases jealousy was clearly the motive for […]

As you will have noticed in previous articles, murder wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in Whitechapel, and accounts of some pretty terrible atrocities abound in the pages of the 19th century newspapers. Some of the most disturbing homicides were […]

Robbery is, without doubt, one of the most common motives for murder, and the pages of the 19th century newspapers are full of accounts of people who were murdered for their money or their possessions. Violent murders were […]

Victorian Whitechapel was a dangerous place indeed, and strangers entered certain pockets of the district at their peril. Aside from the threat posed by a chance encounter with the likes of Jack the Ripper, or the fact that […]

By the time of the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes – both of which took place in the early hours of Sunday the 30th of September, 1888 – the Whitechapel murders had well and truly grabbed […]

It wasn’t just the streets of the East End of London that were dangerous places to be in the latter half of the 19th century. Indeed, some of the institutions where you might expect some semblance of safety […]

Following the murder of Annie Chapman , which took place in the backyard of number 29 Hanbury Street on the 8th of September, 1888, newspapers began to take a greater interest in, not just the murders, but in […]

Murders took place throughout Victorian Britain, and all manner of motives lay behind them. The Leytonstone Express and Independent, in its edition of Saturday the 14th of December, 1878, published details of a murder that had occurred in […]

Throughout the 19th century, and well on into the 20th, there was constant debate as to whether or not the death penally had any place in a supposedly civilised society. The Norwood News, in its edition of Friday […]