The Illustrated Police News

The Illustrated Police News is often dismissed as a crude publication which aimed to thrill the undiscerning reader with gruesome pictures. Cruel Deeds and Calamities sets out to correct that belief by demonstrating the diversity of its subject matter, examining its social and political agenda and revealing the power and compassion in its images. The Illustrated Police News was a promoter of social change and a campaigner against the evils of cruelty, poverty, drink and crime. It anticipated by many years the features of today's journalism, in the rapidity with which it provided pictures of current news events, its appeal to the emotions, and the involvement of its readers in the reporting process. This is the first book exclusively about the Illustrated Police News to reproduce the pictures as high quality images, provide a balanced account of its content and cover the full period of its publication. There is substantial new research into how the paper was produced, the men who made it a success, and the stories behind the pictures.

'The Illustrated Police News' was a bestseller in mid and late Victorian times, offering a weekly diet of shocking and shameless stories that feed the public's hunger for sensationalism. This book contains snippets of reports from the publication.

Firs published in 2011 as Cruel deeds and dreadfull calamaties. This edition contains revised and edited material.

Thomas hears voices. They tell him to kill women with auburn hair. Superintendent Cadema Sharma, a SIO in the Met, is on a mission for justice. She investigates all five vicious murders of young women. But each enquiry leads to a dead end. DNA left at each scene, is useless. One victim has blond hair. An intended victim whispers the name Thomas, but later denies having said this. Being pulled in too many directions, she must focus on the only suspects she has; none are called Thomas. So who is Thomas? If he is the perpetrator, what is his motive? Cadema needs answers now, before any more murders are committed.

Thanks to digitisation, newspapers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century have become an indispensable and accessible source for researchers. Through their pages, historians with a passion for a person or a place or a time or a topic can rediscover forgotten details and gain new insights into the society and values of bygone ages.Historical Research Using British Newspapers provides plenty of practical advice for anyone intending to use old newspapers by: * outlining the strengths of newspapers as source material * revealing the drawbacks of newspapers as sources and giving ways to guard against them * tracing the development of the British newspaper industry * showing the type of information that can be found in newspapers and how it can be used * identifying the best newspapers to start with when researching a particular topic * suggesting methods to locate the most relevant articles available * demonstrating techniques for collating, analysing and interpreting information * showing how to place newspaper reports in their wider contextIn addition nine case studies are included, showing how researchers have already made productive use of newspapers to gain insights that were not available from elsewhere.

In the early nineteenth century, a series of murders took place in and around London which shocked the whole of England. The appalling nature of the crimes—a brutal slaying in the gambling netherworld, the slaughter of two entire households, and the first of the modern lust-murders—was magnified not only by the lurid atmosphere of an age in which candlelight gave way to gaslight, but also by the efforts of some of the keenest minds of the period to uncover the gruesomest details of the killings.These slayings took place against the backdrop of a London in which the splendor of the fashionable world was haunted by the squalor of the slums. Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and others were fascinated by the blood and deviltry of the macabre. In their contemplations of the most notorious murders of their time, they discerned in the act of killing itself a depth of hideousness that we have lost sight of, now living in an age in which murder has been reduced to a problem of social science and skillful detective work. Interweaving these cultural vignettes alongside criminal history, acclaimed author Michael Beran paints a vivid picture of a time when homicide was thought of as the intrusion of the diabolic into ordinary life.