The Worst Newspaper in History · The Black Archive

The Worst Newspaper in History

Imagine, if you will, a newspaper edited by a twelve-year-old boy with a taste for murder, shipwrecks, explosions, scantily clad sleepwalkers and public executions.

Now imagine that it was one of the most popular publications in Britain.

This was the Illustrated Police News.

To call it a newspaper feels faintly misleading. It was closer to a fever dream printed on cheap paper. Every week it arrived packed with murder, mayhem and catastrophe. Husbands bludgeoning wives. Madmen leaping from rooftops. Trains hurtling towards disaster. Suicides. Executions. Drunken brawls. Exotic crimes from distant corners of the Empire. If somebody was stabbed, strangled, poisoned, crushed, drowned or decapitated, the Illustrated Police News wanted it on the front page. Preferably with an enormous illustration.

And what illustrations they were.

Victorian artists filled the pages with scenes of such glorious hysteria that reality scarcely seemed relevant. Blood sprayed theatrically across drawing rooms. Villains twirled moustaches. Respectable young women fainted with astonishing frequency. Even the most mundane crime was transformed into grand opera.

By 1886 it had earned an extraordinary distinction. Readers of the Pall Mall Gazette voted it ‘the worst newspaper in England.’ Most publishers would have been mortified. The proprietor, George Purkiss, appeared almost delighted. When accused of corrupting the nation, he cheerfully admitted the paper was sensational, while insisting that apart from the sensationalism there was really nothing objectionable about it.

There is something wonderfully Victorian about that defence.

The paper occupied the strange territory between journalism and penny dreadful. It fed a public appetite for horror while pretending to warn against it. It condemned vice while luxuriating in every lurid detail. It was simultaneously moral lesson and guilty pleasure.

The respectable classes hated it, naturally.

Which is often the surest sign that everybody else was reading it.

For seventy years, the Illustrated Police News chronicled the nation’s nightmares. Then, in 1938, it vanished. Yet its spirit survives everywhere. Every tabloid splash, every true-crime documentary, every lurid headline promising shock and scandal owes something to those crowded Victorian pages.

The truth is that the Illustrated Police News was never really a newspaper at all.

It was a cabinet of horrors.

And Victorian Britain could not stop peering inside.(Which is weird, when you think about it, because it didn’t even have a nipple count.)

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The Worst Newspaper in History