I’ve just finished Linda Stratman’s 2019 compilation of excerpts from the Illustrated police News.

The Illustrated Police News, the ‘police’ in the name refers to crime, the Victorians referred to news of criminal activities as ‘police news’ in much the same way as the French refer to a crime novel as a ‘roman policier’.

The Illustrated Police News was the pre-eminent tabloid of its day, and its woodblock illustrations are beloved by documentary makers where no photographs exist, as for example in the Mordaunt case where the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, was accused of having sex with Lady Harriet Mordaunt. The accusation came to light in a very messy divorce case where basically her husband tried to divorce her on the grounds of promiscuity.

(While the men got off with little or no reputational damage, ‘boys will be boys’, poor Harriet Mordaunt spent the rest of her life in a lunatic asylum, which seems a trifle harsh.)

There were of course no photographs of the Prince of Wales appearing as a witness at the trial or indeed of him canoodling with Lady Mordaunt, but the Illustrated Police News provided woodcuts of the supposed events, which have ever after been used in TV documentaries about royal shenanigans.

Like today’s tabloids, the IPN could never resist a good story, whether it be about murder, especially somewhere shocking, as in a railway compartment, violent housebreaking, or the sexual peccadillos of the upper classes.

As can be imagined, it went to town with such violet events as the Jack the Ripper murders in London. However it wasn’t all blood and gore, it also reported on the social conditions of the times, and events such as pregnant housemaids being turned out to starve, after having had sex, willingly or unwillingly, with the householder, or indeed his teenage sons.

Its prime was in the high Victorian era, later on after various changes of ownership it became increasingly xenophobic and jingoistic, perhaps reflecting the prejudices of its readership. At the same time increasing production costs led to a decrease in the quality of the illustrations.

However, the IPN, as the prime nineteenth century tabloid, and the first to be widely circulated among the newly literate poor has an important role in the history of England in the latter half of the nineteenth century