Strange Victoriana, the first from my massive pile of Christmas swag, is an entertaining collection of the weird, wonderful, spooky, salacious, and sometimes downright macabre stories taken from the Illustrated Police News (IPN) – an immensely popular tabloid of the time (you’ll have seen some of its illustrations before, particularly if you’ve ever had any kind of interest in the Jack the Ripper case which the IPN went to town on). Victorians are often thought of as incredibly repressed and prudish, while a quick peruse […]