The Most Infamous Murders Of The Victorian Era Shutterstock
By Debra Kelly/Jan. 28, 2021 2:46 pm EDT
Murder is a strange thing. It s an act that to many is absolutely unthinkable, but at the same time fascinating. The idea that a human being sometimes, a perfectly ordinary-seeming person could take the life of another is so strange and yet so common.
And this is nothing new people have, of course, been killing other people since they figured out how to swing a club. Fast forward to the Victorian era, and killers were still killing they d just gotten much more creative.
While Jack the Ripper might be the most infamous of the Victorian era s murderers, he definitely wasn t the only one. The era was downright full of dastardly men and women, and some of them committed crimes so heinous they sound like something right out of a crime novel, or Netflix special. But they re not they re absolutely true, and even though they ve been overshadowed by the infamo
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From the pages of novels such as
Oliver Twist, Dickens savaged the injustices meted out to the impoverished – and at the top of his hit-list was the infamous New Poor Law
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“Please, Sir, I want some more.” Charles Dickens’ portrayal of Oliver Twist approaching the master and asking him, timorously, for a second helping of gruel is surely one of the most famous scenes in all of 19th-century literature.
When Dickens wrote these words in the 1830s, huge celebrity and vast fortune still lay in the future. Instead the author was thinking of the here and now – in particular, the plight of the most impoverished Britons. Dickens was determined to savage the terrible injustices he saw unfolding around him, and did that so effectively that he soon secured a reputation as a spokesman for the poor.