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.
As Judith Flanders describes in her book The Invention of Murder, Industries grew up to service the public’s appetite for the more gruesome 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 washerwomen 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 gruesome equivalent. Most of us know the famous Victorian story of Sweeney Todd, the London barber with a penchant for killing his customers. Once despatched, his 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 gruesome 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 axe to the skull, sliced her body to pieces, and boiled it up in a large pot. She then burnt 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.