Sex, sadism and sugared death: 8 scandals that rocked Victorian Britain

Naturally, she was distraught, especially as she knew the pain George was inflicting on her children by “cursing me thro them”, as she wrote to Lord Melbourne. If that wasn’t bad enough, in June 1836 George sued Lord Melbourne for adultery with his wife. A successful prosecution was the necessary first step in divorce proceedings. For George, it was also a money-making venture as he demanded that Lord Melbourne pay him £10,000 in damages.

The trial was a sensation. The court was “crowded to excess”, and newspaper readers awaited eagerly the potentially salacious testimony. One maid claimed she “saw Lord Melbourne kiss Mrs Norton”, and another that, after a visit from Lord Melbourne, Caroline’s “collar and hair were generally tumbled… She would also wash her hands [and] put fresh rouge on her face.” A coachman’s testimony that he saw Caroline lying on the hearthrug with her clothes “up”, showing “the thick part of her thigh”, promised to prove decisive – until he admitted being sacked for drinking on the job.

The jury was unimpressed by these explosive allegations and promptly dismissed the case. Vindicated, Lord Melbourne went on to become Queen Victoria’s first prime minister and beloved ‘Lord M’. Caroline, still married to George but separated from her sons, picked up her pen and successfully campaigned for legal change. In 1839, legislation granted women custody of children aged under seven, provided they were not guilty of adultery.

Revelations in the dark: shining a light on the brutality of women's work in the coal mines – sometimes done topless!

Coal was the lifeblood of Victorian Britain. But it was extracted at a terrible cost. In 1842, a scandal erupted over the “horrible and degrading labours” that miners were forced to endure – and those miners were often women and children.

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The scandal was triggered by the release of a report into mining practices authored by the Children’s Employment Commission. Although established to investigate the use of child labour, its remit was expanded when it was discovered that women were also working underground. Mining placed extraordinary physical demands on women and children alike. But what particularly obsessed the commissioners was its perceived immoral and corrupting effects.

The commission’s report described how women and older children, who moved coal from the coalface to the shaft head, were forced to go “down on all-fours” and were “harnessed” to carts “like animals”. At the Hopwood pit in Barnsley, a commissioner found girls, some of pubescent age, “stark naked down to the waist, their hair bound up with a tight cap, and [wearing] trousers”. In some pits, the male ‘hewers’, who cut the coal from the seam, removed all their clothes, exposing themselves to the women they worked with. These accounts were accompanied by woodcut illustrations that were suggestive of further improprieties.

Reformers argued that girls were brutalised by their work in the mines. They lost their innocence and grew up to become bad wives and mothers. As for the working women, it was suggested (sometimes contrary to the evidence) that they neglected their domestic duties and were therefore responsible for the poor living conditions endured by their families.

The report whipped up a tidal wave of public opposition that helped push the 1842 Mines Act through parliament, prohibiting boys under the age of 10, and women of any age, from working underground in coalmines. Yet not everyone welcomed the legislation. Many women struggled to find alternative employment, creating hardship for families. Meanwhile, men and teenage boys continued to perform backbreaking work over long hours in often perilous conditions.

• Read more | The ‘Pit Brow Lasses’ of 19th-century coal mines

Crushing hunger: the horrific conditions and near starvation in Britain’s workhouses

On 1 August 1845, Thomas Wakley stood up in parliament and told his fellow MPs a terrible story of the abuse of the paupers employed to crush bones at Andover workhouse. The inmates were so hungry, Wakley revealed, that they “were in the habit of extracting the marrow and gnawing the meat” that they found on the bones.

The home secretary, James Graham, immediately launched an enquiry and a Poor Law assistant commissioner was dispatched to the Hampshire town to investigate. His interviews with staff and inmates confirmed the allegations and revealed yet further abuses. The workhouse master and matron, previously praised by Poor Law administrators for their parsimony and disciplinary regime, had been siphoning food off the prescribed diet. In doing so, they had driven desperate inmates to scavenge for scraps left on putrid bones, while also subjecting them to physical and psychological abuse.

The newspapers seized upon the story, adding yet more fuel to the fire. One journalist claimed that bones sent to the workhouse for crushing were “collected from various sources, including… occasionally some from churchyards”, a veiled suggestion that the inmates had become unwitting cannibals.

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The home secretary ordered the abolition of bone crushing in workhouses. But it was too late – the scandal had shone a spotlight on the failings and incompetence of the Poor Law Commission, the body responsible for the implementation of the 1834 New Poor Law. In 1847, it was replaced with a new, more accountable authority: the Poor Law Board. However, as the ideology of poverty that underpinned the workhouse system went unchallenged, the workhouse continued to be an object of dread and often a place of unnecessary cruelty.

The Bradford sweets poisoning: how ‘sugared death’ sparked a change in attitudes to the adulterated food trade

On 25 October 1858, Bradford sweet-maker John Neal sent an employee on an errand to a chemist. Neal ordered the employee to buy 12 pounds of plaster of Paris – nicknamed ‘daft’ – which he planned to use in his confectionery in place of expensive sugar. In the early 19th century, rogue and sometimes nefarious substances were often added to food and drink in order to extend shelf life, for visual appeal, or to keep prices low. Most of the time, no one noticed, as the public had become so used to it.

Yet in this instance, the consequences were catastrophic. The chemist was ill and bedridden, and so he instructed his apprentice to fetch the ‘daft’ from the storeroom to sell to Neal’s employee. Unfortunately, there were two unlabelled casks of white powder “placed near each other”, and so the apprentice accidentally supplied Neal with 12 pounds of arsenic.

The arsenic was used to make peppermint drops, or, as The Times described them, “little pills of sugared death”. Neal observed that the sweets “were unusually long in drying, and… darker in colour than usual”. However, he wasn’t unduly worried, and sold them at a discount to market trader William Hardaker.

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On Saturday 30 October, around a thousand of the sweets were sold to customers at Hardaker’s stall. The next day – Halloween – hundreds of people, including Hardaker himself, became “dangerously ill”, suffering from symptoms of arsenic poisoning. The source was quickly located and unconsumed sweets were seized. Billmen and night police were instructed “to give warnings in all public-houses and… thickly populated streets”. Their intervention came too late to prevent at least 21 people from dying, including several children.

“Three of four persons” were found “lying dead in one house”. Events in Bradford prompted a sea change in attitudes towards food adulteration. In 1860, long-awaited legislation was passed which made it an offence to knowingly sell adulterated food. However, it was another 10 years before the legislation could be properly enforced.

Cruelty in the home: the plight of domestic servants, who lacked protection from their tyrannical masters

The case of Sarah and Robert Bird shone light into a dark corner of domestic life. In March 1850, the couple, north Devon farmers, were put on trial for the murder of their servant, Mary Ann Parsons, a 15-year-old girl they had acquired from the workhouse. The Birds claimed Mary Ann had stumbled and hit her head on the fireplace, but her body was covered in injuries from regular beatings, and neighbours testified that they had seen signs of abuse.

“I heard Sarah Bird scolding the girl… after which I heard blows and the girl crying,” said stonemason William Topas. “Soon after she came out… her face was bloody.” The workhouse master admitted that he had advised Sarah Bird to “chastise her!” when Sarah complained that Mary Ann was an idle thief.

Local anger turned to national outrage when the Birds were acquitted. “This is not justice,” declared the highly influential commentators John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor in The Morning Chronicle. “Those to whom power over others is given, and who brutally misuse that power, should be thus far held responsible for the safety of those over whom they tyrannise.” Public pressure forced the authorities to re-arrest the Birds for assault. They were convicted in August 1850, and later sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment.

The case also led to a change in the law. The domestic service industry had expanded dramatically in the first half of the 19th century as the employment of a ‘maid-of-all work’ became common in middle-class households. It was a backbreaking job, and some employers, like the Birds, could be cruel tyrants. New legislation required parish relieving officers to visit workhouse children who had been sent into service to check they were not being mistreated. Most servants, however, remained vulnerable and it was another 60 years before domestic workers began to unionise and assert their rights.

Stella and Fanny: the media storm around the trial of two cross-dressers for “corrupting public morals”

The arrest of a group of rowdy patrons at the Strand Theatre in London in April 1870 produced a scandal that challenged Victorian assumptions about gender, sexuality and respectability. At the centre of the storm were Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, both from respectable middle-class families. By the late 1860s the friends were better known as their alter egos, Stella and Fanny.

As female impersonators on stage, they barely raised an eyebrow. Increasingly, however, Ernest and Frederick took their characters off stage, parading through the streets and frequenting West End theatres and clubs in flamboyant dresses and elaborate make up. Soon, their unconventional behaviour was drawing significant attention.

Given their celebrity, the arrest of Ernest and Frederick came as a surprise to many. However, it was later revealed that the pair had been under police surveillance for a year. They were “greeted with shouts of laughter and hisses” as they were conveyed the next morning from the cells to the Bow Street Police Court. When placed in the dock, still in evening dresses from the night before, “great surprise was manifested at the admirable manner” in which Ernest and Frederick “had ‘made up”.

The friends were charged with committing sodomy, conspiring to induce others to commit sodomy, and, by wearing women’s clothes, “openly and scandalously outrag[ing] public decency and corrupt[ing] public morals”.

As female impersonators on stage, they barely raised an eyebrow. Increasingly, however, Ernest and Frederick took their characters off stage

By the time of their trial, in May 1871, two of the three charges had been dropped. Ernest and Frederick both appeared in suits, but each “with a bouquet of flowers in a buttonhole of his coat”. They were acquitted, after the prosecution failed to prove that the defendants had done anything other than dress as women for fun. Despite the pair’s exoneration, the trial served to link cross-dressing with homosexuality in the public mind.

And the verdict prompted the addition of a clause in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which enabled gay men to be charged with gross indecency where sodomy could not be proven. Among those subsequently prosecuted were playwright Oscar Wilde and codebreaker Alan Turing.

Sex trafficking of young girls: a newspaper exposé revealed an unspeakable trade – and landed its editor in prison

In July 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette ran a series of articles on a scandal that was so explosive that they were preceded with a content warning. “Squeamish” and “prudish” readers who preferred to live in “selfish” ignorance were advised not to read the paper. Those who dared were promised “an authentic record of unimpeachable facts, abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived”.

The articles, collectively entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, was the product of a ‘Special and Secret Commission’ led by the magazine’s editor, William T Stead, on the trafficking of young girls into prostitution in London. Stead took readers on a tour of the capital’s brothels typically frequented by wealthy men in search of ‘maidenheads’ to deflower.

Through interviews with procurers and brothel-keepers, Stead reported how girls aged 11–15 were groomed, or purchased from parents, sent to collusive doctors or midwives to have their virginity certified, drugged with chloroform, and then raped in locked rooms. “In my house,” boasted one brothel-keeper, “you can enjoy the screams of the girl with the certainty that no one hears them but yourself.”

Stead even went so far as to purchase a child for himself. Thirteen-year-old Lily (later revealed to be Eliza Armstrong) was allegedly sold by her alcoholic mother for £5. Stead described the girl’s panic when she woke to find herself locked in a room with Stead, emitting “a wild and piteous cry… a helpless startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb”.

The public response to the articles was overwhelming. As the newsagent WH Smith refused to sell it, large crowds gathered at the magazine’s office to obtain copies. The reports were reprinted in European and American newspapers. On 14 August, parliament passed a Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16 and gave the police greater powers to prosecute streetwalkers and brothel-keepers.

Days later, 250,000 people gathered for a demonstration in Hyde Park to demand its enforcement. Stead had succeeded in his aim: to use human-interest stories, sensation and scandal to galvanise support for social change. He had also overstepped the mark. For his role in the procurement of ‘Lily’, the editor was convicted of child abduction and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

The serial killer ‘baby-farmer’: the discovery of an infant’s body alerted police to a murderous money-making scheme

On 30 March 1896, a bargeman discovered the body of a baby girl, wrapped in brown paper, floating in the Thames near Caversham Weir just outside Reading. The bargeman called the police, who took the parcel back to the station for examination. The police surgeon, on finding “a piece of string… tied tightly around its neck”, concluded that the baby had been strangled.

That might have been the end of the story, had the police not noticed a faded address written on the brown paper. This information led the authorities to the home of 58-year-old Amelia Dyer, who was arrested on suspicion of murder. A search of the premises produced “incriminating letters, telegrams, pawn tickets [for baby clothes] and receipts for advertisements in London and other papers”. Dyer, one reporter noted, “evidently carried on to a considerable extent” an “awful traffic in human life”.

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Dyer was a ‘baby-farmer’, a woman who was given money to look after children on a residential basis who were not her own. This was an industry that had emerged in the Victorian period to deal with children – born in and out of wedlock – whose mothers could not afford to support them. The baby farmer was given a lump sum to ‘adopt’ the child. Some, like Dyer, would then kill the child and pocket the money.

Dyer was not the first murderous baby-farmer to come before the courts, but the scale of her enterprise transformed this case into one of the most prominent scandals of the age. During the month of April, while Dyer was held on remand in Reading Gaol, the bodies of another six babies linked to her were discovered near Caversham Weir. Evidence suggests that in the two months before her arrest, she had acquired around 20 children, none of whom were still living with her. Over the course of Dyer’s 30-year career, it is estimated that she killed more than 300 children.

Dyer was convicted of murder, and hanged on 10 June. While the public were outraged by her crimes, some commentators were more ambivalent. One journalist pointed to the “cruel and callous heartedness of parents, who fling away their offspring, to endure any fate that may await them at a mercenary stranger’s hands”.

Long-awaited infant protection legislation tightened and added to existing regulations around childcare, but lawmakers failed to provide any new solutions for women who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant with a child they could not support.

Rosalind Crone is professor of history at the Open University, and author of Violent Victorians (Manchester University Press, 2012) and Illiterate Inmates (Oxford University Press, 2022)

This article first appeared in the May 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine