A wide selection of criminal case records from 19th century England and Wales have been made available online:
The records of more than 1.4m criminal trials held in England and Wales in the 19th century, including the most celebrated cases of the Victorian era, have been posted online for family historians to trace their more nefarious ancestors.
Among those whose names are listed are Roderick Maclean, one of several would-be assassins of Queen Victoria, who was declared “not guilty, but insane” after he threatened the monarch with a pistol outside Windsor Castle in 1882, and Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, the fence of stolen property and model for Charles Dickens’s Fagin, who was sentenced to transportation — not execution as in Oliver Twist — in 1830, six years before the novel was written.
Others include notorious murderers such as William Palmer, publicly hanged outside Stafford jail in 1856 after being found guilty of poisoning a horse-racing friend, and Dr Thomas Neill Cream, one of the Jack the Ripper suspects, also hanged as a poisoner in 1892.
