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In mid-September 1839 the newspapers were running two London stories that inflamed the imagination of Charles Dickens: but he was away from London at the time, and the flavour of these tales gave him a pang of homesickness.

On 18 September he wrote to his friend John Forster: “What a strange thing it is that all sorts of fine things happen in London when I’m away! I almost blame myself for the death of that poor girl who leaped off the Monument – she would never have done it if I had been in town; neither would the two men have found the skeleton in the sewers. If it had been a female skeleton, I should have written to the coroner and stated my conviction that it must be Mrs [Jack] Sheppard [notorious villain]. A famous subject for illustration by George [Cruikshank] – Jonathan Wild forcing Mrs Sheppard down the grown-up seat of a gloomy privy, and Blueskin, or any such second robber, cramming a child (anybody’s child) down the little hole, Mr Wood [alderman] looking on in horror, and two other spectators, one with a fiendish smile and the other with a torch, aiding and abetting.”

Below are the two stories in the Morning Chronicle of 14 September 1839, the first on the suicide of 22-year-old Margaret Moyes, a baker’s daughter, who jumped from the Monument on 11 September; the second on a skeleton found sitting upright in a sewer beneath the Strand.

At the bottom, the Era and the Examiner conclude the tales.

Source for the letter to Forster: The Letters of Charles Dickens, The Pilgrim Edition, edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey, Volume 1, 1820-1839 (1965), p582.

 For a map showing Shire Lane/St Clement Danes, see post below 'Jerry Cruncher, Mrs Lovett and the mysterious Shire Lane area'.