Helena Wojtczak Libri

This groundbreaking book shatters many myths about the lives of working women in 19th-century England. We move amongst publicans and pew-openers, pickpockets and poisoners, taking in courtroom dramas and domestic battles, as the social and legal status of women is examined in a wide-ranging overview that is constantly enlivened by fascinating local detail. As the story unfolds we find women at work in 180 occupations. We meet some memorable characters trying to survive in the male-dominated world of Victorian society. Some beat the system; some are destroyed by it; others live outside it. Their stories are told in this absorbing study, richly illustrated with newspaper reports and advertisements, providing a unique historical resource.

‘You’ve got Jack the Ripper at last!’ The words with which Abberline congratulated Godley. The two detectives had hunted the fiend of Whitechapel fourteen years previously, but failed to catch him. George Chapman, a man facing the death penalty for poisoning his girlfriend, had a secret past. Born Seweryn Klosowski in Poland, he’d lived in London’s East End during the Ripper’s killing spree in 1888. Former Chief Inspector Abberline had ‘a score of reasons’ for naming Chapman as the Ripper. And Arthur Neil, former Superintendent of Scotland Yard, agreed with him. Chapman had committed ‘a series of murders which for sheer heartlessness are almost unprecedented in the annals of crime’. He was described as ‘one of the most loathsome murderers in criminal history, and the director of public prosecutions stated that his ‘cruelty, hypocrisy and daring’ had rarely, if ever, been equalled.