Courtroom Ghosts

More than thirty years before the shocking disaster of RMS Titanic, another maritime horror filled the front pages of London's newspaper and it occurred far closer to home. SS Princess Alice was a paddle steamer owned by the London Steamboat Company, 219.4ft long and 20.2ft wide. The Board of Trade had surveyed the ship in 1878 and decided that it could carry a maximum of 936 passengers. On 3rd September that year, SS Princess Alice left Swan Pier, close to London Bridge, and headed to Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. The return journey would call at Blackwall, North Woolwich, and the pleasure gardens at Rosherville. Tickets could be used interchangeably on any steamship owned by the company, so that those who did not wish to go all the way to Sheerness, or indeed could not afford to, had the option to make an outward journey to Rosherville on another vessel and join the Princess Alice for the return journey to Swan Pier; this journey cost as little as 2 shillings. As such...

Amelia Dyer A note at the beginning to say that most of the illustrations I have included in this post come from the  The Illustrated Police News , a tabloid which ran from the 1860s through to the 1930s and is a goldmine of weird and wonderful cases, complete with equally bizarre illustrations. The British Library have some examples  here  and you can find even more on Google Images.  While women who killed their own new-born  infants increasingly generated sympathy among the public and within the judicial system, there was one class of baby-killers who most certainly did not. As I mentioned last week, the introduction of the 1834 Poor Law left women who were pregnant outside of marriage in an even more dire situation than had been the case previously. If a woman wanted to continue working and stay out of the workhouse, she would need to make alternative arrangements for the care of her child. And this is where the baby farmers come in. On 16 th  May 1...