Crime writers setting their stories in the Victorian era are privileged to have a vast range of sources to consult about the social history, politics and crimes of the time. In Britain, where my Arrowood novels are set, newspapers carried lengthy court reports (often with verbatim transcripts), true crime papers such as the Illustrated Police News were popular, and real crimes frequently made their way into the growing body of realist literature.
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As Judith Flanders describes in her book The Invention of Murder, Industries grew up to serve the public's appetite for the thickest murders of the day. Balladeers sold songs about famous killings, pamphlets full of speculation and gory details were hawked on street corners, guides ran tours of the murder sites, and theaters put on plays based on real police investigations. At the same time, journalists and researchers such as Jack London, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew journeyed into the underworld to report on what they found.
These sources reveal a brutal world in which the struggle for survival, the harsh consequences of breaking moral taboos, and the lack of a social net led many to adopt creative and sometimes cruel ways to get by. Here are just a few of the unusual crimes of the Victorian underworld.
Nowadays, a thief would be more likely to go for a cellphone or a laptop, but in the 1800s clothes might have been the most valuable things many people possessed. There were street markets given over to selling used garments, often still filthy from their last owners, and the courts were full of people being prosecuted for stealing an overcoat, a pair of boots, or a pair of stockings.
Thieves would steal clothes by harvesting them from washing lines ('snowing'), breaking into a person's home, or through highway robbery. Gangs would pounce on washers taking clothes to drying grounds and steal their laundry baskets. The most interesting were the 'skinners', kindly women who lured well-dressed children into an alley, then proceeded to strip them of their clothes and boots before sending them off in just their underwear.
Nowadays we know of criminal organizations that sell human organs for transplant, but in the Victorian era there was a more substantial equivalent. Most of us know the famous Victorian story of Sweeney Todd, the London barber with a penchant for killing his customers. Once dispatched, her friend Mrs Lovett made meat pies out of them to sell in her pudding shop. Although some claim this is a true story, there isn't a lot of evidence Todd ever existed.
However, there is a similarly thick story from London which is true. In 1879, Kate Webster was fired from her post as servant to a Mrs Thomas. In revenge, she killed her mistress with an ax to her skull, sliced her body to pieces, and boiled it up in a large pot. She then burned the bones and meat, but kept the body fat which she sold as 'best dripping.' Beef dripping was a popular food in Victorian time, used to fry foods or just spread straight onto a nice piece of bread.
In the days when it was considered a disgrace to have a child out of wedlock, young unmarried mothers, or widowed fathers, would often pay an older woman to raise the child. In many cases, the mother or father would have no more contact, and it was this that allowed some terrible crimes to be committed by evil 'baby farmers'. In the 1860s, the 'Brixton baby-farmers' Margaret Waters and Sarah Ellis killed at least 19 infants in their care through starvation.
To make the hungry babies more manageable, they were given laudanum, a freely-available opium tincture. Perhaps the most notorious baby-farmer was Ameila Dyer, executed in 1896. She killed her charges either through starvation or strangulation with fabric tape, the bodies being dumped in a canal. We do not know exactly how many babies she killed, but historians estimate that over the twenty years of her career it could have been as many as fifty. When asked how to identify her victims, she said 'You'll know mine by the tape around their necks'.