The London monster has inspired new fashions in women’s clothes to protect themselves from attacks
In the late eighteenth century, a London criminal attacked up upper-class women stabbing them in the buttocks or breasts. Panic led women to wear pots under the dresses.
Long before Jack, the stripper, sowing panic in Victorian London, another dark aggressor known as “London monsterHe terrified the streets of the British capital in the late eighteenth century. Between 1788 and 1790, a series of bizarre and disturbing attacks plunged the city in a climate of fear, generating a hysteria wave that would fall into oblivion.
The aggressor, whose identity remains unknown, aimed at elegant, alone and upper -class women in different areas of London. The attacks followed a disturbing pattern: stabbed the victims in the thighsbuttocks, breasts or face, using hidden sharp objects such as razors or thin swords.
In one of his most bizarre tactics, he hid the gun in a branch of flowers and attacked women’s nose when they leaned to smell. These actions were later classified as “piquerism”, a rare paraffilia where there is sexual excitement by drilling someone’s skin with pointed objects.
The case was deepened by historian Jan Bondeson, who discovered a former poster in the British Library and published the book in 2002 in 2002 The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale. In 1790, accounted for more than 50 attackswith reports of persecution, injuries and verbal abuse. The first documented victim, Maria Smyth, suffered physical and psychological trauma after being stabbed in the chest and thigh.
The public reaction was intense. London broker John Julius Angerstein offered a 100 -pound reward by capturing the “monster” – a considerable amount at the time. The posters caused a wave of panic: patrols of vigilantes, false accusations and even satire in the newspapers appeared. A group of men created “No Monster Club”, displaying emblems in the lapels declaring their innocence.
Afraid, women started wearing ingenious protective clothing: copper askings, cork pillows And even pans under the skirts, curiously, the false rear were already trend at the time and have now gained a new purpose: self -defense.
Eventually, a Welsh named Rhynwick Williams was arrested, tried and sentenced to six years in prison, although doubts persist about his guilt. Bondeson and other historians believe that Williams It was just one scapegoatused to cover up police ineffectiveness. Some experts go further, suggesting that the “monster” may never have existed, being just a classic case of collective hysteria, says.
Whatever the truth, the story of the London monster remains one of the weirdest and most disturbing chapters of the city’s past.
