Dark London: A Journey Through the City’s Mysterious and Macabre Underworld

From dark crimes of passion to shocking tales of grave robbing, gruesome murders, dens of iniquity, Victorian séances and haunted houses - not far beneath London’s everyday bustle and glitter there has long been a fascinatingly rich underworld of criminality, superstition, scandal and macabre debauchery.

Explore this rich seam of morbid history, case-by-case, with social historian Dr Drew Gray, a specialist in the history of crime and punishment. Who were the London Burkers, for example, whose ringleader confessed to stealing and selling nearly 1,000 dead bodies to keen 1830s anatomists? What was ’The Whitechapel Tragedy’ of 1875, and who was its unfortunate headless victim? Why was there so much public panic about crime in Victorian London, and how did the city’s notoriously rough prisons, courts, workhouses and houses of correction deal with its perpetrators?

Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

Dr. Drew Gray is a social historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who specialises in the history of crime and punishment. Drew is Head of Subject for Culture (Humanities, Media, & Performance) at the University of Northampton and teaches modules on both the History and Criminology programmes. His previous works include Murder Maps: Crime Scenes Revisited; Phrenology to Fringerprint 1811-1911 and London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City.