Sarah Wise

. 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… Continue reading →

It’s called The Bodysnatcher (would you believe it?), and what is fascinating is that it was drawn in 1913, more than 80 years after the end of bodysnatching. The artist is Morris Meredith Williams, and the very generous David Patterson,… Continue reading →

Really not a great idea, as this horrendous story of 1822 shows. Source: Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 7 November 1822. Tweet

One of my favourite Victorian cuttings: on the imminent demolition of the area north of the Strand near Carey Street (Sweeney Todd territory), for the building of the Royal Courts of Justice. It was reprinted in The Times of 12… Continue reading →

Sad but true, one of my smuggest historico-moments was finding the apparently lost grave of the Marr family in the graveyard of St George’s in the East; they were among the victims of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811. I… Continue reading →

[If you’ve not read The Italian Boy, this post tells you who done what to whom…] On the day before their execution, the killers of Carlo Ferrari at last revealed how they had inveigled him to their home and killed… Continue reading →

Rob Baker tweets the most fantastic London pictures (find him on Twitter at @robnitm). He recently posted the one below (dating from 1966). The Golden Boy stands at what used to be known as Pye Corner, at the junction of… Continue reading →

This illustration of the killing of the Italian Boy appeared in the Annals of Crime for 1831, and it even features the mysterious lavatory that stood at the end of Bishop’s garden. (Seriously unpleasant…) See several of the stories below… Continue reading →

The “fourth man” in the Italian Boy case was Michael Shields, a gravedigger turned carrier for bodysnatchers. Though released without charge, Shields was well known in the bodysnatching community as a strong, reliable and discreet porter: he ferried corpses around… Continue reading →

I wrote this piece below for the Society of Authors’ magazine The Author after having had my work appropriated by yet another television production company. I and a number of other non-fiction writers are hoping to get a set of… Continue reading →