The Illustrated Police News (1864–1938) sounds as if it should be a sober piece of journalism, carrying factual reports on crime and the activities of law-enforcers. However, it was far from respectable or objective. On the contrary it was the quintessential Victorian rag; never more than a scurrilous tabloid, it pandered to the lowest taste by offering a sensationalized diet of violence and crime, focusing especially on murders (notably the work of Jack the Ripper), street disorder, suicide, attempted lynchings, public executions and sexual assaults. It further supplemented this unsavoury diet with material that carried the suggestion of scandal or strangeness and often reported on the supernatural – haunting and seances were always popular – along with accounts of the antics of animals running amok, stunning rescues or near escapes, and other oddities. The bizarre was especially privileged, and a leavening of xenophobia and misogyny completed the brew.
It was set up in 1864 as a weekly issued on Saturdays in time for a leisurely read on Sunday, and sold for a penny. It was initially owned by Henry Lea and Edwin Bulpin and, several critics have observed, was inspired by the highly respected Illustrated London News, which was established in 1842. The idea of a dual text, reporting both visually and in writing, was the guiding principle, even if the Police News seems more like a pastiche of the model newspaper than a homage. For sure, any similarity was abandoned in 1865 when ownership was passed to George Purkess, a publisher who had already established himself at the scandal-sheet end of the market by issuing books, in the words of Jan Bondeson, ‘on crime and quackery’ (Bondeson). But Purkess was an effective entrepreneur and knew how to exploit the market. Under his direction the newspaper had a large and expanding circulation: in 1872 it sold 150,000 copies, and in 1877 an astonishing 300,000. This was very considerable and indicates that it was read by all social classes.
Indeed, a significant part of the paper’s success lay in Purkess’s clear integration of material that would have wide appeal. The reports, while full of exaggeration and sensationalized details, are not presented in the simplified language that is associated with tabloid papers, and made a clear pitch at a bourgeois audience. However, the illustrations were aimed at the semi-literate proletariat, and many readers probably ignored (or couldn’t read) the letterpress and only looked at the pictures. Coarsely executed by anonymous artists, these bold wood-engravings have the intensity and directness of a cartoon strip; always focusing on extremes, they report their events in melodramatic tableaux, offering suspended moments of horror and shock in which the emphasis is on the dynamic and unsettling and nothing is left to the imagination. As Bondeson remarks, the ‘lurid illustrations’ show ‘Brains [being] blown out, skulls crushed with blunt instruments, and limbs lopped off’ (Bondeson). Sharks in the process of eating people, gunshots, stabbings, dreams, monsters and sundry other aspects of body horror also appear, with the front pages offering a heart-stopping concoction of terrible, frightening, or repulsive events: the worse, the better. In this sense the paper continued the tradition of the Penny Dreadful, which usually figured sensational woodcuts, and drew more generally on the conventions of the scandalous broadsheets of the eighteenth century.
Purkess’s rag was also very much of its time. Its success, when first set up in the mid-1860s. undoubtedly reflected the contemporary taste for the outré and shocking. This was, after all, the golden period of Sensational fiction as developed by Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. These writers defined an imaginative landscape of crime and sexual and social transgression, and there can be no doubt that The Illustrated Police was part of this discourse.
It notably partook of the controversies surrounding the work of Collins and his acolytes. Sensational fiction, such as Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), was met with disapproval by critics such as Margaret Oliphant, who regarded such literature as corrupting, and the same complaint was made about The Illustrated Police News. Commentators believed there was a direct connection between moral decline and the sensational press, with some claiming that the IPN’s effects were brutalizing and led directly to brutal behaviour as it normalized wickedness and converted horror into an entertaining spectacle. Of course, parallel claims have been made in our own age, but then, as now, there was no evidence to suggest that violent imagery impelled its readers to behave in a violent way.
The Illustrated Police News was without doubt an appalling publication and was widely regarded as ‘the worst newspaper in England.’ Yet it is a significant historical document and, as recent commentors such as Alice Smalley and Linda Stratmann have shown, a fascinating mirror of Victorian values in an age of jeopardy, social unrest, and lawlessness. Such material takes us outside the pages of the respectable papers, allowing us to see for a moment the chaos of a turbulent period in British culture.
Bibliography
Bondeson, Jan. Victorian Murders. London: Amberley, 2017 [online editon].
Illustrated London News (1842).
Illustrated Police News (1864 –1938).
Smalley, Alice. Representations of Crime, Justice, and Punishment in the Popular Press: A Study of the Illustrated Police News. Doctoral thesis, The Open University, 2017.
Stratmann, Linda. The Illustrated Police News: The Shocks, Scandals and Sensations of the Week 1864–1938. London: The British Library, 2011.
Created 17 June 2025