Inspired by the gory and sensational publications of the Victorian era, these tales collected by Charles Dickens and his staff between 1850 and 1855 features a beautifully engraved heading for every month In among the pages of Dickens' monthly supplement to Household Words lurks a very strange history. Under the headings of Narrative of Law and Crime and Narrative of Accident and Disaster may be found an astonishing catalog of terrible, grisly, and most dreadful Victorian events. Fires and railway disasters abound; shipwrecks, floods, and "horrible affairs" leap from every page. Some of the crimes would surprise even the most ardent fan of crime fiction—it is doubtful that so many cases of such shocking violence and awful ingenuity have been collected together in one volume since.
