Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud: DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld, for the ghoulish giftee closest to your heart

Tuesday, November 25, 2025

DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld, for the ghoulish giftee closest to your heart

DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld
DR. DREW GRAY
Frances Lincoln Ltd (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

From dark crimes of passion to shocking tales of grave robbing, gruesome murders, dens of iniquity, Victorian séances, and haunted houses—not far beneath London’s everyday bustle and glitter there has long been a fascinatingly rich underworld of criminality, superstition, scandal, and macabre debauchery.

In Dark London, social historian Dr Drew Gray, a specialist in the history of crime and punishment, delves into the city’s grim yet compelling past, uncovering the people and places that shaped its darker identity.

Across more than 100 real-life cases and curiosities, he explores how London became both the heart of a growing empire and a stage for vice, greed, and human fallibility.

Highlights include:

The London Burkers, a notorious gang of resurrectionists whose leader confessed to stealing and selling nearly 1,000 bodies to London’s medical schools in the 1830s.

The Whitechapel Murders of 1888, still the world’s longest running serial murder mystery.

The prisons of Newgate and Pentonville, where shifting attitudes towards justice revealed the tension between punishment, reform, and moral control.

The legend of Spring-heeled Jack, the terrifying, leaping figure who caused panic across London’s streets.

The Great Stink of 1858, when London’s polluted Thames brought the city to a standstill and forced a revolution in sanitation and public health.

Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: London's been a world city, most of the time, since the Romans lost Colchester in 60CE and moved their colonial government there. Lots of scope for serious weirdness of the supernatural stuff sort, and viciousness (or just misguided trying to help) of the human sort. Both leave separate kinds of stains on the memory of society, locally as well as internationally.

Author Drew Gray's biography as provided by Frances Lincoln Ltd:

Dr. Drew Gray is a social historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who specialises in the history of crime and punishment. Drew is Head of Subject for Culture (Humanities, Media, & Performance) at the University of Northampton and teaches modules on both the History and Criminology programmes. His previous works include Murder Maps: Crime Scenes Revisited; Phrenology to Fingerprint 1811-1911 and London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City.

That's one helluva CV. The gent knows how to present the facts and images in tandem, all illustrated books from him to date, so why would this one fail? Spoiler: It doesn't.

The history of crime, the historical context of punishment, the social context of these dark patches of London's history aren't exhaustively explored in this handsome gift book. I felt the illustrations were well-chosen and -presented; but sometimes pulled well above their weight in explication of societal details. I can't give full five stars because I was niggled by this, despite this being the book's literal purpose for being an illustrated overview.

We all have a well-loved ghoul somewhere on our gifting list. Someone who really enjoys the frisson of crime and punishment, who wants that extra thrill of knowing what humans are capable of...and this is the book for them. It's also very much a book for your Londonphile/Anglophile giftee. I think you, faithful reader, might like it for your own coffee table.

Here, look at some of the more than a hundred images: