Search results for: chamber of horrors
Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors in the 1800s
The forerunner to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors was La Caverne des Grands Voleurs (The Cavern of the Great Thieves), founded by Madame Tussaud’s uncle and mentor, Philippe Mathé Curtius. At his Caverne visitors could linger and scrutinize the morbid and bloody details related to a murder, or they could view all the associated gruesomeness…
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Justice John Byles: Some of His Interesting Court Cases
Justice John Byles studied law in Britain in the 1820s and 30s and became a member of the Inner Temple, a professional body that provides legal training, selection, and regulation of its members. The Inner Temple was also one of the four inns of the court and to be called to practice as a barrister…
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Trial of the Detectives and Harry Benson and William Kurr
The “Trial of the Detectives” was a notorious police corruption scandal that involved officers at Scotland Yard in 1877. The criminals who bribed certain Scotland Yard officers were two swindlers, Harry Benson and William Kurr. In the end, both Benson and Kurr became notorious enough that their wax figures ended up in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber…
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Mary Ann Cotton: Female Serial Killer of the 1800s
Mary Ann Cotton was an English serial killer convicted of poisoning her stepson Charles Edward Cotton in 1872. She supposedly did it using arsenic, a terrible poison that causes intense gastric pain and results in a rapid decline of health. He was not her only victim as it is likely she also murdered a total…
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Wyld’s Great Globe: A 1850s and 1860s London Attraction
Wyld’s Great Globe, also known as Wyld’s Globe or Wyld’s Monster Globe, was a world globe that served as an attraction in London’s Leicester Square between 1851 and 1862. It was constructed based on the ideas of James Wyld, a British geographer and map-seller, who was the oldest son of James Wyld the elder and…
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Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry
There were many female prisoners at Newgate during the 1700 and 1800s. Part of the reason why is that the living standards for rural women in England and Wales appears to have worsened as the Industrial Revolution progressed. This may have been one reason why one study provided by Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley titled…
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Harry T Hayward: Socialite, Arsonist, and Murderer
Harry T Hayward may have been a socialite, but he was also an arsonist and murderer. From a phrenologist’s point of view he was deemed at the time to be a “man of low type, the lower face being especially heavy, while the rear top head presents the gable conformation characteristics of the criminal class.”[1]…
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The London Burkers: Body Snatchers of the 1830s
The London Burkers were a group of body snatchers or resurrection men who operated in London in the 1830s and came to prominence in 1831. They operated as a gang stealing and selling dead bodies to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, St. Thomas’ Hospital, and King’s College School of Anatomy in order to allow anatomists, surgeons, and…
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Elizabeth Ross: Convicted Burkeite and Murderess
Thirty-eight-year-old Elizabeth Ross was the common law wife of fifty-year-old Edward Cook, and therefore, sometimes called Mrs. Cook. The couple lived with their 12-year-old son Edward, known as Ned, in a one room apartment in Goodman’s Yard, where they had recently moved. As the couple knew 84-year-old Caroline Walsh they encouraged her to move nearby.…
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Parliament Fire of 1834: The Night it Burned Down
The same year that Madame Tussaud established her Chamber of Horrors, was the same year that the parliament fire of 16 October 1834 began. Apparently, the Exchequer needed to dispose of an obsolete accounting system that had not been used since 1826. The system relied on elongated tally sticks described as follows: “[A tally is…
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