HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-21T14:12:36.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/feed/atom Elinor Evans <![CDATA[America's anti-Chinese laws: a forgotten history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/americas-anti-chinese-laws-forgotten-history-podcast/ 2026-10-21T14:12:36.000Z 2026-10-21T14:12:36.000Z From the middle of the 19th century, Chinese people in the United States found themselves increasingly policed, as legislation was introduced that contained and controlled their economic and cultural lives.
Historian Beth Lew-Williams tells Elinor Evans about her work uncovering this wide-reaching set of laws for her book John Doe Chinaman, and reveals how Chinese people resisted and avoided discrimination.
Beth’s book is a finalist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize – you can find more details at cundillprize.com.
Find out more about the Chinese Exclusion Act.
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[Would you eat an Egyptian mummy? Here's why the Victorians did exactly that]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/would-you-eat-an-egyptian-mummy-heres-why-the-victorians-did-exactly-that/ 2026-10-20T10:31:03.000Z 2026-10-20T10:30:29.000Z In the Victorian age, the mummified remains taken from ancient Egyptian tombs had multiple purposes beyond historical and scientific study. While some mummies went on public display in museums and exhibitions, others were bought to be the main attraction at special ‘unwrapping parties’ where the bandages would be removed for the entertainment of the guests.
That’s perhaps the most respectful option. Mummies could be used as fuels on the railways, ballast on ships and fertiliser in the fields; they were mulched to make paper and ground up to make a special type of paint, called Mummy Brown. This was a favourite of the pre-Raphaelites, but still available to buy well into the 20th century.
And yes, the Victorians did think that eating mummies was a good idea, believing the ancient remains had medical benefits. That said, they did not come up with the idea themselves; the morbid practice began in the Middle Ages.
Why did Europeans start eating mummies?
At the time of the crusades, Europeans travelled to the Holy Land in large numbers and started hearing about mumiya, a tar-like substance that occurred naturally in parts of modern-day Iran and known throughout Persia for its healing qualities.
Through misunderstandings and poor translations, the belief spread among Europeans that mūmiyā referred instead to the similar substance found on mummified bodies, used in the embalming process. The meaning continued to evolve until it meant the actual bodies themselves. The name ‘mummy’ comes from mūmiyā.
- Read more | Is the mummy's curse real? False tales about ancient Egyptian mummies (plus some true ones)
How did mummia work?
Ground-up mummies, or mummia, therefore became medicine in medieval Europe. It could be added to tinctures or to alcohol and swallowed, or rubbed onto the skin of the patient.
Such was the belief in its curative powers that mummia was said to cure a host of ailments, injuries and diseases, from bruising and nosebleeds to epilepsy and syphilis. It was a painkiller, blood thinner, anti-inflammatory and menstrual aid.
According to this medical cannibalism, the part of the mummified body consumed related to the issue – for instance, the skull would be needed to treat headaches – and by ingesting the powdered mummy a person would imbibe the spirit and strength of the deceased person.
How popular was medical cannibalism?
The demand for mummia led to widespread tomb raiding in Egypt to ensure there were enough mummies being sent to Europe. When this was not enough to meet demand, enterprising graverobbers began digging up fresher bodies and treating them as best they could in order to pass them off as millennia-old mummies.
In 1564, a French royal physician named Guy de la Fontaine examined dozens of mummies being sold by a dealer in Alexandria only to find that they were recently executed criminals or slaves.
In fact, a whole area of medicine flourished promoting the consumption of fresh body parts, arguing that it had more healthy nutrients and stronger vitality than the desiccated bones of ancient Egyptians. It became customary for people to stand underneath the scaffold of an execution and try and catch the blood with the intention of drinking it.
- Read more | The Victorians were facing a population crisis, until this ‘obscene’ invention turned out to be the solution
When did people stop eating mummies?
Medical cannibalism reached its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries, widely prescribed by doctors and used by the likes of Francis I of France and Charles II of England. But while it did fade away as medical understanding grew, as well as a deeper respect for archaeological artefacts, the practice did find a new audience in the Victorians, at a time of Egyptomania sparked by Napoleon’s campaign to Egypt and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
Not everyone approved of how mummies were being used, however. The artist Edward Burne-Jones, on discovering that his tube of Mummy Brown actually contained real mummy, insisted on giving his paint a proper burial. But mummia remained on the price list of a German pharmaceutical company until 1924.
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[Is Madfabulous based on a true story? The real history of ‘Dancing Marquess’ Henry Cyril Paget]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/edwardian/is-madfabulous-based-on-a-true-story-the-real-history-of-dancing-marquess-henry-cyril-paget/ 2026-10-16T10:31:04.000Z 2026-10-16T10:30:30.000Z To call Henry Cyril Paget, fifth Marquess of Anglesey, an eccentric would be an understatement. A flamboyant, scandalous hedonist with a lust for big spending and showmanship might be more accurate.
Although an embarrassment to the Edwardian era, albeit an endlessly compelling one featured heavily in the press, his legacy is now under re-evaluation. His lifestyle, his exuberant personality and his possible homosexuality have seen the so-called ‘Dancing Marquess’ compared to the likes of Freddie Mercury and David Bowie.
Who was Henry Cyril Paget?
Born in 1875, Paget seemed destined for scandal from the beginning as rumours spread that his father may not have been the fourth marquess at all, but a French actor. After his mother died when he was a toddler, he spent his early years being raised by relatives in Paris before, at the age of eight, being summoned to the family estate of Plas Newydd in Anglesey.
There, he could have an appropriate upbringing for a nobleman’s son, including an education at Eton and a stint in the military. His family had a revered military heritage: the first marquess had been with the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, being hit with a cannonball and famously remarking in true British stoicism, “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!”
The ‘appropriateness’ of Paget’s life ended in 1898, however, upon the death of the fourth marquess. At the aged of 23, he inherited the title along with estates in Anglesey, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Dorset, and a fortune sufficient to make him a multi-millionaire today.
What did Paget spend his money on?
In just five years, Paget had blown through his entire fortune and wracked up debts sufficient to make him the opposite of a multi-millionaire today. The ultimate spendthrift, he bought the most expensive clothes and jewellery in bulk – once emptying the whole front window display of a Parisian jewellers in a single spree – hosted lavish parties and coveted any outrageous or sparkly thing he saw.
He had underwear woven with gold thread and a collection of cars that he had converted so that the fumes came out as rose-scented perfume.
It was in his love of theatre, however, that Paget truly indulged every single desire. Having renamed his estate as Anglesey Castle, he replaced the chapel with a 150-seat theatre, dubbed the Gaiety, and hired professional troupes to put on shows for guests and locals, free of charge.
How did he become known as the ‘Dancing Marquess’?
Of course, Paget always put himself in the lead of his plays, in which he wore jewel-encrusted costumes and often women’s dresses. Every performance, he would do his “butterfly dance”, moving his body in sinuous motions while waving silk robes as wings. The newspapers soon called him ‘the Dancing Marquess’.
He even took his productions on tours across Britain and Europe, and never shied away from causing a stir. He staged Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband only a few years after the famed Irish playwright had been convicted of ‘gross indecency’ for his homosexuality.
Was Henry Cyril Paget homosexual?
Over the years there have been many questions about Paget’s sexuality. He had married his cousin, Lillian Chetwynd, the same year that he inherited his title, but the relationship ended after a couple of years with an annulment having never been consummated. Supposedly, Paget was most excited at seeing his wife’s naked form only when covered in jewels.
There is no evidence, though, that he ever had a same-sex relationship or lover. As performance historian Viv Gardner put it, he may have been a “textbook narcissist” instead: “The only person he could love and make love to was himself.”
Regardless, many still believe that Paget should be celebrated as a LGBT+ icon.
What happened when the money ran out?
By 1904, the well had run dry and tens of thousands of Paget’s belongings had to be sold off to pay his colossal debts. The resulting set of auctions, known as the Great Anglesey Sales, lasted 40 days.
Having absconded to France – in possession of a still-generous pension – Paget died in Monte Carlo on 14 March 1905, aged 29, from complications of tuberculosis.
“His example will remain one of the strongest arguments against our hereditary system that the most ardent revolutionist would wish for,” read one newspaper. Another described his as a “wasted life”.
His family attempted to expunge all memory of the fifth marquess. As he had no heir, the title went to his cousin, who set about turning the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel and renaming the estate as Plas Newydd. Paget’s diaries were destroyed, leaving much of his character up to speculation.
In recent years, Paget has inspired a musical, How to Win Against History, and the 2026 film Madfabulous.
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[Victorian London's poop explosion: why even Queen Victoria couldn't escape the stench]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/victorian-londons-poop-explosion-why-even-queen-victoria-couldnt-escape-the-stench/ 2026-10-12T10:31:04.000Z 2026-10-12T10:30:16.000Z The River Thames has long been a major artery of London, used for transportation and trade with ships constantly moving up and down delivering and picking up people and goods. But at the same time that it helped build the British capital into a bustling metropolis, and the very centre of a global empire, it was also used as a dumping ground for waste.
Whether the chemicals from the factories, animal parts from abattoirs, or household sewage, much of the city’s effluent ended up in the river. By the turn of the 19th century, the state of the Thames was dire. What’s more, it was the source of London’s drinking water, allowing diseases to wreak havoc. There were three cholera epidemics between 1832 and 1854.
- Read more | What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
To make matters worse, the population rose rapidly to beyond 2.5 million by 1850. And even the introduction of the more-hygienic water closets exacerbated the problem as flushing toilets meant there was more sewer water flowing into the river. The antiquated system of small sewers and cesspits was overwhelmed.
Newspapers clamoured for change, with illustrated papers like Punch personifying the river into a disgusting old man called Father Thames. Scientists and engineers drew up plans of how to deal with London’s sewage problem, but still nothing was done. A desperate Michael Faraday warned that a single “hot season” would give the people of London “sad proof of the folly of our carelessness”.
The summer of stink
Faraday’s warning came true in 1858. An unusually hot summer, with temperature rising over 30°C, saw the river levels drop, which left the filth to bake in the sun. The odour became unbearable.
“Gentility of speech is at an end – it stinks, and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it,” read the London City Press.
Queen Victoria herself attempted a river cruise, hoping that the bouquet of flowers she held would be enough to mask the stench, only to give up after a few minutes and demand the boat be returned to shore.
Being next to the Thames became nearly impossible. At the time, it was believed that diseases spread through foul air, or miasma, so for Londoners to get a whiff of the Thames during the Great Stink was not only deeply unpleasant but a risk to life.
Cutting through the red tape
One group of people especially affected were politicians, since the newly built Palace of Westminster, home to the British parliament, sat on the riverbank. They ordered tons of lime to be poured into the Thames and for the curtains to be doused with chloride of lime to mask the smell, but to no effect. Committee rooms had to be abandoned and there were serious talks of moving Parliament to another city, such as Oxford.
It turned out that political action could be swift when the politicians were faced with the problem themselves. In just 18 days, MPs passed a bill authorising £3 million to deal with what the Chancellor of the Exchequer Benjamin Disraeli described as “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors”.
Joseph Bazalgette, hero of the capital
The Metropolitan Board of Works was tasked with building a new sewer system for the city, led by chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He had been trying for years to implement his plans for improved sanitation; now, he was the mastermind behind an ambitious vision.
Bazalgette ripped up London to build a network of interconnecting sewers that led to the river, but joined major sewers running parallel with it. The waste would be diverted to pumping stations – some, like Crossness and Abbey Mills, were architectural marvels themselves – and away downstream.
The project changed the very look of the city, most notably with the addition of embankments. These concealed the sewers and narrowed the river, making it less likely that filth in the water could collect. Completed in 1875, it took more than 318 million bricks to realise Bazalgette’s vision.
The smell improved, the water became clearer and cases of disease dropped. There was another cholera epidemic, but only in the part of London not yet connected to Bazalgette’s network. Such was the success of the new sewer system that London still relies on it to this day.
]]> Dr Bob Nicholson <![CDATA["She was mad with the acrid lust of blood": 6 murders that shocked Victorian Britain]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-was-mad-with-the-acrid-lust-of-blood-6-murders-that-shocked-victorian-britain/ 2026-10-11T17:31:04.000Z 2026-10-11T17:30:42.000Z This article contains graphic descriptions of blood, injury and death – reader discretion is advised
“Get me a murder a day!” So demanded the press baron Alfred Harmsworth, who understood exactly what Victorian readers wanted from their newspapers. Parliamentary reports and stock prices were all well and good, but nothing made a title fly off the newsstands like a gruesome killing.
The Victorians had an insatiable appetite for true crime – so insatiable that one of their most popular papers was devoted to nothing else. Every week, the Illustrated Police News served up lurid engravings of the latest shocking offences. Respectable critics damned it as “the worst newspaper in England” and accused it of glorifying crime, but the public bought more than 100,000 copies a week, reaching a circulation of 300,000 by 1888.
Some of the Victorian period’s most infamous murderers – Mary Ann Cotton, Charles Peace, and of course Jack the Ripper – are already familiar to modern true crime fans. But for every household name, there were hundreds of other cases that gripped the nation in their day, only to fade from memory.
Here are six of the strangest, bloodiest, and most sensational...
1. Mysterious circumstances
Reported on 4 January 1868
Victorian readers loved an element of mystery in their murders, so the strange death of Thomas Farrant in Bristol made news across the country. Passers-by were shocked to see the young man fall from the top-floor window of the Colston’s Arms. He plunged, head-first, onto a ledge, then rolled onto the pavement, his neck broken and skull fractured.
A passing constable rushed into the pub to investigate and found clear signs of a violent scuffle upstairs. The only likely culprit was a 53-year-old man named Giles Clift, who had tracked his estranged wife to Farrant’s bedroom. There was just one problem – the suspect was completely blind.
- Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
A few days later, witnesses gathered for the inquest and the coroner tried to make sense of the case. A downstairs neighbour heard two men and a woman shouting, as well as the sound of a struggle near to the window. A woman on the street claimed to have heard the victim crying “Don’t! Don’t!” just before he fell. But no one in court actually saw what caused him to fall.
The only person who knew what happened in that room was Mrs Clift. She insisted that her husband had threatened Farrant – “Damn thee! I’ll break thee damned neck out of the window!” – and then pushed her lover to his death. But she was hardly an impartial witness, and the law forbade a wife from giving evidence against her husband.
A doctor examined Farrant’s body and concluded that his injuries were more consistent with a man who had been trying to escape from the window and had slipped. The jury agreed and Clift was released, but the full truth remains a mystery. The Illustrated Police News naturally preferred the most sensational version of events and printed a dramatic illustration of the enraged blind man throwing his rival from the window.
2. The Kennington Tragedy
Reported on 31 August 1867
On a summer’s afternoon in 1867, 12-year-old Charles Roberts and his seven-year-old brother Frederick were playing outside their south London home when they heard their mother calling. “Fred, I want you!” she cried, and the younger boy trudged inside. Charles followed close behind and saw his brother go upstairs. A few moments later, he heard a strange scraping from the ceiling above, followed by the sound of running water.
When Charles went upstairs to investigate, he was astonished to see his mother burst through a door clutching a bloody knife. Inside, Frederick lay in a pool of blood, his throat cut open. Charles watched in horror as his mother rushed to the bedroom and slashed the neck of his sister Annie, before turning to chase him downstairs.
Charles dodged around the kitchen table and ducked when his mother hurled the knife at his head. He slipped past her and fled into the street shouting, “Murder! Police!” By the time a neighbour reached the house, Anne Roberts had turned the knife on herself and lay bleeding to death on the kitchen floor. “Oh, Mrs Roberts,” the neighbour gasped, “what have you done?”
Few crimes horrified Victorian readers more than a mother killing her own children, and the press spared no detail. Though Roberts had been mentally unwell for some time, journalists showed little sympathy, branding her a “wretched woman” who was “mad with the acrid lust of blood”. The Illustrated Police News dubbed the case ‘The Kennington Tragedy’ and dispatched its artist to sketch the house, alongside a graphic depiction of each death.
The public couldn’t look away. For days afterwards, crowds flocked to South London, eager to inspect the blood-spattered bedroom walls they had read about over breakfast. The murders had become a tourist attraction and, not for the first time, the Victorian press had turned private tragedy into public spectacle.
3. A double execution
Reported on 14 September 1867 and 19 October 1867
Hanging days were major public events in London and, in October 1867, the city’s crowds were treated to a rare double bill.
At 8am, outside Newgate Prison, they watched John Wiggins hang for the murder of his lover, Agnes Oakes. A policeman had found him in a room “covered in all directions with blood”, Agnes already dead and Wiggins bleeding from his neck and hands. He claimed Oakes had attacked him in his sleep following a quarrel and then cut her own throat. Debate raged in the press, and many among the public were convinced by his story, but a jury sentenced him to death. On the gallows, Wiggins struggled violently with his executioner, shouting, “Don’t hang me! I am innocent!” before he was, as the Victorians put it, “launched into eternity.”
WATCH | Ruth Goodman explores the normal routines of life in Victorian Britain
View Green Video on the source website
Two hours later, outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Southwark, a new crowd assembled for the execution of Louis Bordier, a Frenchman found guilty of murdering his partner, Mary Anne Snow, with whom he had three children. In the early hours of the morning, Snow had staggered into her aunt’s bedroom, blood pouring from her neck. Bordier followed shortly after, calmly kissed her head, and said he “hoped she would die.” Asked why he had done it, he replied that he “could not help it” and “could not think of parting with her.” Snow, it turned out, had been planning to leave him for another man.
William Calcraft, the era’s most famous executioner, rushed across the river after dispatching Wiggins and must have been relieved to find that Bordier was resigned to his fate. The Frenchman bowed to the 20,000 spectators who had gathered to watch him die, and within moments it was over, his body left hanging for an hour, as custom dictated.
These were among the last public executions in Britain. The following year, hangings moved behind prison walls, and the press lost their final moment of public spectacle.
4. A shocking revenge
Reported on 9 May 1868
The murder of a respectable gentleman was particularly shocking to Victorian readers. Edward Adolphus Walsh was a 50-year-old man with a lawyer’s education and good connections. He worked as a station master in Dover, and for some time, he had struggled to discipline a badly behaved young carriage-cleaner named Thomas Wells.
The young man had recently been spotted firing a gun at a target near the station. Walsh – who already found issue with Wells’ general attitude to work – informed him that this was most improper behaviour, but generously offered to say nothing more, so long as Wells promised not to do it again. The boy denied the accusation and petulantly refused to make the promise.
The next day, Walsh called in his superintendent as backup. They summoned Wells to an office and made him the same offer. When he refused, they sent him away for ten minutes to reconsider, expecting him to return with an apology. Instead, he went to fetch his gun.
A few minutes later, Wells burst back into the office and fired, point blank, at the station master’s face. The bullet entered under Walsh’s eye and, as one paper bluntly put it, “scattered his brains in every direction.” The young man fled but was soon found hiding in a nearby railway carriage. He was engaged to be married – a future he had now thrown away.
His punishment attracted an unusual amount of public curiosity, for it was the first execution in Britain performed under the new law that moved the gallows behind prison walls. Instead of meeting his end in front of a raucous crowd, Wells’s execution was witnessed by only a handful of officials and journalists. The chaplain sang a hymn as the drop fell and, after “two or three convulsive struggles”, all was still. A black flag flown above the prison was the only public sign that justice had been done.
5. A barbaric massacre
Reported on 26 February 1868
The Victorian press’s appetite for murder was so strong that they often looked abroad to satisfy it. When news arrived from Germany about a series of killings that promised to be “unequalled in barbarity,” translations of the grisly news were gleefully reprinted in papers throughout Britain.
23-year-old Timm Thode belonged to a farming family from Schleswig-Holstein. He was on bad terms with his father and brothers and so, in the summer of 1866, he resolved to kill them all so that he might inherit the farm. For months, he deliberated about how to do the deed and eventually settled on using a five-foot metal handspike.
One by one, he crept up behind each of his four brothers while they worked and bludgeoned them to death. Next, he lured his father outside and struck him down in the farmyard. When the family dogs began to bark, Thode, worried they would give him away, attempted to kill them too.
Then, wielding an axe, Thode brutally murdered his mother and sister, before running to the servant girl’s room. He grasped in the dark to find the bed, then brought his axe crashing down on the sleeping girl’s head. “There”, he said, “I have them all dead!”
His plan was to dispose of all eight bodies in the barn and then set it alight, but neighbours saw the fire before it had time to destroy their remains, and the culprit was soon arrested and sentenced to death. In Germany, the murders were soon set to music, with ballad sheets recounting Thode's crimes sold on street corners. When the news reached Britain, the Illustrated Police News depicted each stage of Thode’s killing spree in typically graphic detail.
6. Criminal on the run
Reported on 20 February 1869
On a Sunday night in February 1869, a woman returned to her family’s house in Poplar in the East End of London and discovered a horrifying scene in the kitchen. Her 86-year-old father lay slumped in a chair, his throat cut from ear-to-ear, just above his black silk cravat. The woman’s daughter lay lifeless on the floor with a gash to her neck so deep that her head had almost been severed. The floor and furniture were soaked with blood.
Suspicion soon rested on the dead woman’s husband, an out-of-work engineer named John William Cooper. It seems that Cooper hated living under the roof of his in-laws. “I advise you not to get married,” he told his brother on the night before the murders. “I am miserable”, he moaned, “but it won’t be for long.”
In the moments after the killing, Cooper washed his hands in a bowl of water, tore his photo out of the family album, and then vanished into the night.
Detectives from Scotland Yard were soon on his trail and circulated a description of the suspect, including the fact that he was missing the thumb on his left hand. He was well known in the neighbourhood and everyone assumed that he would be caught in a matter of hours. But hours soon turned to days, and the fugitive remained at large.
- Read more | History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle'
The press followed the hunt with great excitement. Almost every day brought news of the capture of a man with a missing thumb, but none turned out to be Cooper. Pressure on the police quickly mounted. After a week of fruitless searching, a £100 reward was offered for the killer’s capture, but it seemed to have come much too late. As one armchair detective scathingly put it, Scotland Yard’s investigation was a textbook example of “How Not To Do It.”
After a month of frantic searching, Cooper was finally discovered. He was not found by a police officer, but by a waterman, who fished his decomposing body out of the Thames. The press had little room to dwell on his demise – or indeed apologise to the police – for a new and equally horrifying double murder had since been perpetrated in the East End, and the papers were once again full of fresh blood.
This constant supply of gruesome murder news took its toll. As one Victorian journalist put it, they had begun to “feel that to sleep in a tent in the desert with the hyenas howling round us, is sometimes a safer thing than to rest within the walls of a house in London.”
Bob Nicholson is a professor of public history at Edge Hill University. He co-wrote and presented the podcast series Killing Victoria for BBC Sounds
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[In 1895, a Chicago housewife left her family to cycle around the world. But was it all a hoax?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1895-a-chicago-housewife-left-her-family-to-cycle-around-the-world-but-was-it-all-a-hoax/ 2026-09-28T11:14:44.000Z 2026-09-25T14:30:28.000Z On 12 September 1895, a young woman pedalled into Chicago. Not so remarkable, you might think, but at the time, it was astonishing. Not because the sight of a woman on a bicycle was a novelty – that decade saw a boom in female cyclists – but because this particular rider had completed a circumnavigation of the globe on her steed.
Or had she really? That’s the $10,000-dollar question. That cyclist, already world famous, was Annie Londonderry. Her real name was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, and she was a married Jewish mother of three children, all under the age of six at the time she set out. Her odyssey was, according to the New York World, “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman”.
Born in 1870 or 1871 near Riga in Latvia, Annie Cohen had come to the US with her family in 1875. She married Simon ‘Max’ Kopchovsky in 1888, and within six years had three small children and a job selling advertising space for newspapers. The family lived in Boston’s West End, where immigrants packed into tenement houses, speaking their native languages and cooking traditional foods. It may well have fired the imagination of a young woman curious about the world.
In the 1890s, the bicycle craze was peaking, and round-the-world adventures were capturing the public imagination. Londonderry joined in, not to score a victory for women, though she later cast herself in that light, but because she didn’t want to stay “home with a baby under my apron every year”.
The world for a wager
Londonderry’s improbable journey was reputedly set in motion by a wager between two “wealthy clubmen of Boston”. A $10,000 prize awaited a woman who succeeded in travelling around the world on two wheels; she was to start penniless and earn $5,000 en route, accept no gratuities, make the trip in 15 months, and cover 10,000 miles by bicycle. This was a test not just of a woman’s endurance but also of her ability to fend for herself in unfamiliar lands.
At first glance, Londonderry seemed an unlikely candidate. For a woman of the 1890s to leave her husband and children was scandalous. She was physically unprepossessing – 1.6m tall and weighing around 47kg, although she subsequently claimed there was “nothing better than a wheel to build a woman up” – and had never ridden a bicycle in her life. But riding was a learnable skill. The other traits required – courage, cunning, willpower and chutzpah – could not be taught, but Londonderry, a skilful creator of her own myth, had them in spades.
- Read more | "She saw off bandits with her revolver": the unbelievable adventures of Fanny Bullock Workman
On Monday 25 June 1894, in front of a crowd gathered at the Massachusetts capitol, Londonderry climbed onto a Columbia women’s bicycle produced by the Pope Manufacturing Company – to the delight of that company’s owner, Colonel Albert Pope, who was actively marketing bicycles to women, and for whom Londonderry’s journey would represent a public relations triumph.
After various speeches were delivered, a representative of the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire hung an advertising placard on Londonderry’s bicycle (paying her $100 for the privilege). With a sports marketing savvy rare in the 1890s, she adopted the Londonderry name, which also served to conceal her Jewish heritage.
Turning her bicycle, body and name into a mobile billboard was a moneymaking and publicity strategy Londonderry employed in cities around the world. She solicited advertising, attaching banners, placards and ribbons to her bike or clothing to be seen by the thousands who watched her pedal by. She also courted the press. “A bright, vivacious woman, a good talker… in fact, all fired smart,” declared the El Paso Daily Herald. And a French newspaper proclaimed: “She seems made only of muscles and nerves and in spite of her petite size gives the impression of remarkable energy.”
When she set out on her adventure in June 1894, Londonderry “sailed away like a kite down Beacon Street”, according to the Boston Evening Transcript. Carrying only a change of undergarments and a pearl-handled revolver, her plan was to ride west. But progress was slow: her bike weighed a whopping 19kg, her long skirts and tailored jacket were ill-suited for the exertions of cycling, the weather was hot, and the physical demands were formidable.
- Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
Three months later, having got only as far as Chicago, she decided to abandon the trip, realising that she wouldn’t make it across the continent before winter set in. But her fortunes quickly changed. The Sterling Cycle Works offered her a men’s bicycle half the weight of her Columbia, and she adopted radical new riding attire: bloomers. Enjoying a second wind, Londonderry reversed course and headed to New York. By then, nearly four months had elapsed and she was, in terms of circling the Earth, starting from scratch.
French leave
On 24 November, Londonderry boarded the liner La Touraine for Le Havre. Then she took a train to Paris, where she lingered for several weeks earning money as a human billboard. She left on 30 December, riding through wintry weather over poor roads. It was mid-January by the time she reached Marseilles. Londonderry now had just eight months to compete the circuit – and most of the world still lay ahead. She boarded a French mail boat, the Sydney, and hopped across various seas and oceans, via Alexandria, Yemen and Singapore. Three weeks later, she was in Saigon. From there, she sailed on to Hong Kong and Shanghai, en route to Japan.
On 9 March 1895, Londonderry sailed from Yokohama to San Francisco. By the time she made landfall in the US, she had a series of hyperbolic, apocryphal stories to tell, including being caught up in the Sino-Japanese War. Breathless sensationalism was characteristic of American journalism in the 1890s and Londonderry was on song. Writing in the New York Sunday World in October 1895, she described being imprisoned by the Japanese: “The cell was merely a hut with lattice-work sides. There was no protection from the bitter cold and I suffered keenly. [A] Japanese soldier dragged a Chinese prisoner up to my cell and killed him before my eyes, drinking his blood while the muscles were yet quivering.”
Charge for Chicago
In April, Londonderry left San Francisco accompanied by Mark Johnson, a well-known cyclist from the city. Having reached Los Angeles on 18 May, she headed east alone, following the Southern Pacific Railway nearly 200 miles across the desert. Or did she? The Los Angeles Times reported that “if certain railroad men were asked how she crossed the desert, ‘they would wink their other eye’”.
Such was the anticipation in Tucson that spectators clambered up a bell tower clutching telescopes hoping for a glimpse of Londonderry as she came over the horizon. In El Paso, she was the featured attraction at a bicycle meet, riding a tandem with several cycling enthusiasts. “The way Miss Londonderry pulled Bart Allen around the track… greatly amused the crowd,” said the El Paso Daily Herald.
With little more than two months left on the wager clock, Londonderry was still 1,800 miles from Chicago. She headed north, reaching Cheyenne, Wyoming on 19 August. Then, partly by rail and partly by bike, she arrived in Chicago on 12 September – not quite 15 months after leaving Boston.
“I am a journalist and ‘a new woman’ – if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.” So begins Londonderry’s account of her trip, published in the New York Sunday World. She’d ridden thousands of miles, often alone. But did she truly pedal around the world? The evidence suggests not – but, even so, it was no small feat for an anonymous Jewish mother from the tenements of Boston to turn herself into a global celebrity, inspiring countless women along the way, without the modern tools of social media. And the wager? Most likely another of Londonderry’s fictions – a brilliant device to add drama to her singular adventure.
Soon after her return, Londonderry moved her family to New York City, where she had a brief career writing sensational features for the New York World under the byline ‘The New Woman’. She had a fourth child in 1897, and died on 11 November 1947, a year after her husband.
In her scrapbook is a handwritten note to the Sunday editor of the New York World that speaks volumes: “Mr Brisbane, I am not afraid. I’ll take the risk myself.”
Peter Zheutlin is Annie’s great-grand-nephew, and the author of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride (Citadel Press, 2007)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[Was the British Empire really built on drugs? The unlikely rise of an imperial superpower]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/was-the-british-empire-really-built-on-drugs/ 2026-09-28T09:59:35.000Z 2026-09-25T13:25:05.000Z Lin Zexu was a Chinese official acting on the behalf of the Qing dynasty emperor. In 1839, he set about attempting to suppress an illegal trade, and started to demand that foreign merchants surrender their opium at Canton, now Guangzhou, in southern China. More than 20,000 chests were handed over and destroyed. The British government responded with military escalation, beginning a conflict that would end three years later in 1842 – the First Opium War. The fighting ended with China compelled to open additional ports to British trade and cede Hong Kong Island.
Why go to war over such a specific issue? Because behind the confrontation was a deeply ingrained (and lucrative) system of British-backed pan-Asian commerce that connected Indian cultivators, Asian merchants and British imperial finances.
This system was so interlinked that, argues historian Benjamin Robert Siegel, “you couldn’t have had the British Empire if you didn't have opium. And this is not just a bold assertion. The numbers back it up.”
An Asian commodity
Britain certainly didn’t introduce opium to Asia. “Opium is an Asian story, first” Siegel explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
Derived from the opium poppy, it had long been used across the continent for its medicinal and otherwise intoxicating effects. “It’s an important cash crop, a commodity that gets traded in the Mughal Empire and the Ottoman Empire.”
The Mughal Empire had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent. The Ottoman Empire, centred on modern Turkey, connected territories across western Asia, southeastern Europe and north Africa. Opium circulated through established commercial networks within and between these regions.
- Read more | What caused the First Opium War?
But British imperial expansion changed the level of opium production, and its political significance.
“It becomes very clear that this is a powerful substance, not just for what it does in the body, but for what it means economically, what it means at a global scale.”
This was due to the substance’s overlapping functions.
“Opium is a medicine, it's a vice, it's an important tax base, it's a diplomatic weapon.”
From fields to auctions
The principal institution behind Britain’s expansion in India was initially the East India Company: a commercial corporation that acquired new territory, collected taxes and maintained armies.
As its power spread from Bengal during the later 18th century, it developed a monopoly over opium production and sale in the territories under its control. The purpose of this monopoly was to allow “the expanding British state in India to manage the flow of opium,” Siegel says. British Crown rule, established in 1858, inherited the system.
The crop’s cultivators received advance payments tied to producing the crop and had to deliver it to the government at fixed prices. The opium was processed and sold at auctions in Calcutta, now Kolkata. Private merchants then carried it towards overseas markets.
This was an extensive agricultural operation. Research identifies more than a million farmers under contract annually, involving more people across their households. Siegel describes these cultivators as “often working in very difficult conditions, often against their will,” though he points out that “historians of the 19th century debate this”.
The returns to government were considerable. One research estimate puts opium at roughly 15 per cent of colonial revenues in India at its mid-century peak. This was revenue for the Indian administration, rather than 15 per cent of all British imperial income.
Enter China
China offered a large market for opium, although its government prohibited the trade. Foreign merchants and Chinese intermediaries nevertheless brought opium to consumers through smuggling networks.
For British commerce, the trade also helped address a persistent imbalance. Britain operated at a significant trade deficit with China, importing Chinese tea, silk and porcelain, though Chinese demand for British products remained limited. Opium sales helped finance purchases that would otherwise require substantial exports of silver.
- Read more | Your guide to the Opium Wars
For Chinese officials, consumption and the outflow of silver were pressing concerns. Lin’s intervention in 1839 – his attempt to stem the flow of the banned substance into the country – brought those concerns into direct conflict with foreign commercial interests.
After the conflict was triggered – and resolved – Britain fought again in the Second Opium War, from 1856 to 1860, this time alongside France. The conflict involved wider demands for diplomatic access and commercial privileges, but opium remained central to the relationship. The resulting settlement opened further opportunities for foreign trade, and opium imports became legal under tariff arrangements.
As Siegel puts it, Britain went to war “to keep the Chinese market open”.
Indian opium merchants
However, British officials weren’t in control of every opium route. In Malwa, a region of central India, Indian rulers, bankers and merchants developed an alternative trade, shipping opium through Bombay, now Mumbai.
“There are princes, merchant families, bankers, and they come up with a system that rivals the British trade that the British really can't control,” Siegel explains. “They get called smugglers.”
Their activity challenged the East India Company’s effort to manage supply and prices. Eventually, British authorities accommodated the trade and collected duties from it.
“They brought those Indian merchants into the system,” Siegel says, “and many of the Asian fortunes of the 19th century start from that trade that Britain eventually had to contend with too.”
Opium therefore supported both colonial revenues and private fortunes. Its economy included Indian commercial initiative as well as the restricted choices of cultivators.
Medicine, vice and contraband
By the late Victorian period, opposition to the trade of opium become organised and vocal.
“There are missionaries, women's activists, reformers who all say, ‘This is a drug trade. We can't be involved anymore,’” Siegel says. But the dispute was complicated by opium’s accepted medical uses. Critics could oppose its non-medical consumption while supporting its availability as a medicine. Where to draw that boundary involved commercial interests and moral judgements as well as medical evidence.
- Read more | "Sodomy was a very widespread phenomenon": the secret sex lives of China's most infamous pirates
“Is it a medicine? Is it contraband?” Siegel asks. “This is never a scientific line [established].”
A Royal Commission appointed in 1893 reported in 1895. Siegel summarises its practical outcome as: “It's a bad system, but we're going to keep it anyway.”
The commission’s own position rejected central claims about the harm of Indian consumption and supported retaining the existing arrangements. Opponents challenged its evidence and independence in a contentious parliamentary debate.
It wasn’t opium alone that financed the empire. But its vast contribution and interconnectedness do help explain why ending the trade proved so difficult. It connected the Indian government’s accounts to merchants’ investments and Britain’s position in China. By the time reformers demanded its abolition, those connections had become too embedded in the operation of imperial rule.
Benjamin Robert Siegel was speaking to Isabel King on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Emily Briffett <![CDATA[What is ‘Europe’, anyway?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/europe-podcast-roderick-beaton/ 2026-09-15T07:31:07.000Z 2026-09-15T07:30:17.000Z What defines Europe – is it geography, politics, a shared culture, or perhaps a mix of all three? In this episode, historian Roderick Beaton tells Emily Briffett about the ways in which it has been defined, and redefined, as an idea by its people over the centuries.
]]> Isabel King <![CDATA[Christianity, conflict and catastrophe: the life of CS Lewis]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/cs-lewis-podcast-michael-ward/ 2026-09-14T09:03:19.000Z 2026-09-14T07:30:02.000Z He's well-known for creating children's classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but what else can history teach us about CS Lewis? Michael Ward explores the life of the author with Isabel King – from a tragic childhood to his turbulent relationship with faith.
]]> Danny Bird <![CDATA[Was Napoleon III the world's first populist leader?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-napoleon-iii-the-worlds-first-populist-leader/ 2026-09-11T10:20:24.000Z 2026-09-11T10:20:11.000Z Napoleon III's family was, in the words of historian Edward Shawcross, “the most cutthroat mafioso soap opera in the world”. Exiled to Switzerland as a boy and disowned by his own father, he spent years as a laughing stock of French politics, twice arrested trying to seize power.
Here, in conversation with Danny Bird, Edward traces Louis-Napoleon's strange path from mocked pretender in exile to Emperor of the French, and explores whether Napoleon III can really be regarded as an early populist dictator.
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