General News

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 […]

Long before the Jack the Ripper crimes brought terror and panic to the inhabitants of Victorian Britain, the newspapers were pondering why murders should have such an impact on society as a whole. The St James’s Gazette, in […]

I have recently been perusing copies of The Pall Mall Budget – the weekly digest of articles that had appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette – searching for information on the Whitechapel murders, as well as on Whitechapel […]

Throughout the first thirty to forty years of the 20th century many of those who had been involved in the case of the Whitechapel murders, one way or another, began dying off, and the newspapers were quick to […]

Reading through the newspaper accounts of disputes that occurred on the streets of Victorian London, you come across some that really make you wish that you could have been present in the court to watch the combatants go […]

Contrary to popular assumption, murder was, in fact, quite common in Victorian London, and the murder of women particularly so. It’s also quite surprising, when you follow the accounts of the murders in the newspapers, how many of […]

One of the major causes that was pursued throughout the 1880s was the problem of unemployment in the East End of London. Pauperism was certainly rife in the district, and philanthropists were wrestling with the problem of how […]