Horrid Mutilation! Read all about it! Jack the Ripper and the London Press by Perry Curtis
Richard Davenport-Hines, 4 April 2002
When Tennyson and Jowett sat up late together, it was to talk of murders. The Victorians took a ghoulish pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to...