Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: The Illustrated Police News, 1864–1938 by Linda Stratmann (review)

Linda Stratmann’s Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: The Illustrated Police News, 1864–1938 is an important introduction to a newspaper which has been ignored by scholarly studies of the popular press. The book comes at an important juncture in the history of the IPN, which has been recently digitised as part of the British Library’s collection of nineteenth-century newspapers online. Prior to this, the newspaper had been subject to little academic interest, with the exception of two anthologies for the general public, Leonard de Vries’s ‘Orrible Murder (1971) and Steve Jones’s The Illustrated Police News (2002).

As any nineteenth-century print historian will be aware, the success of the penny newspaper was made possible by a number of developments during the century. These included technological advances such as the invention of the rotary press and the expanding rail service; political reforms, notably the abolition of the so-called Taxes on Knowledge; and social changes, including an upsurge in adult literacy and a demand for reading material. The IPN was preceded by a number of illustrated newspapers, including the Illustrated London News, The Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette, the Illustrated News of the World, The Graphic, and The Illustrated Weekly News. There were also newspapers with mass appeal which did not include illustrations until a later date, notably Reynolds Weekly Newspaper and Lloyd’s Weekly News. However, Stratmann notes that the IPN was the only illustrated newspaper of the day to focus exclusively on crime and sensational events.

In addition to providing a context for the rise of the newspaper, Stratmann considers the relationship between the IPN and New Journalism. Stratmann claims that the term “New Journalism” “exactly describes the content of the IPN” (9). She asserts that even before the term was coined, the IPN contained the crucial features of New Journalism, namely sensational stories and striking illustrations. While the attempt to link the IPN to nineteenth-century print culture is important, Stratmann does not provide evidence for her claims, nor does she provide a full explanation of the concept “New Journalism” (which was more than simply sensational stories and illustrations). Furthermore, Stratmann does not consider the ways in which the newspaper continued earlier forms. Although there is some mention of penny bloods, there could be a brief analysis of the relationship between the IPN and old broadside traditions.

The IPN saw many changes across its eighty-four years of publication, which Stratmann chronicles well. She gives a broad sweep of the newspaper’s history, from its early days under the leadership of Mssrs Henry Lea and Edwin Bulpin, to the days of George Purkess Senior and George Purkess Junior, and finally to a company called the Purkess and Co Ltd, set up after the death of Purkess Junior (and of no relation to the Purkesses), and provides detail about its changing style and form. Following this detailed introduction, the rest of the book is organised into chapters drawn from the main themes of the newspaper reporting. The titles of a number of these chapters summarise the contents and coverage of the newspaper well: “Murder,” “Accidents and Disasters,” “Celebrities, Scandals and Public Events,” and “Supernatural and Strange,” for example. Each chapter summarises the main tropes of the reporting and retells the unusual or controversial stories found in the newspaper. Lavishly illustrated and printed on high quality paper, these stories show how exciting and varied the newspaper reporting could be. Stratmann’s selection of news stories demonstrates that the IPN was mainly interested in publishing stories of murder and violent crime, although accidents and disasters could also receive some coverage, especially if there was a spectacular scene or loss of life.

Stratmann does not merely inventory the stories told by the IPN; rather, she interprets the newspaper and analyses its role in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British society. Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities attempts to...