Danger, Darkness and Destitution in Nineteenth Century Britain

Victorian England was swamped in numerous of horrific headlines of baby farming and murder. Not all were dark shadowy figures stalking behind cobbled streets, many were trusted faces with inviting adverts in the local gazettes, while at the end of the 19th century, most people were shaken by the crimes of Jack the Ripper, often just as gory murders were happening. Amelia Dyer, the infamous baby killer known as the ‘angel maker’, spent three decades on a secret dark world and murdered 200 infants, possibly more. Many more killers were whose lives had taken a turn for the worst, known as unfortunates, had taken to crime to survive one of the most difficult times in the city’s history. These few stories alone show how dangerous London was in the Victorian era.