FT274


In November 1886, after a newspaper poll had voted the Illustrated Police News “the worst newspaper in England”, a journalist from the Pall Mall Gazette went to interview the proprietor of this notorious publication, Mr George Purkess. The office of the IPN, in the Strand, could be detected from some distance, due to the small crowd gathered outside, in front of the pictorial placard advertising the current issue. Purkess, described as “a stout, comfortable-looking man of middle age,” received the news of the vote with the greatest composure, being thick-skinned with regard to such criticism. He jovially invited his fellow journalist into his private office.

The first truly successful British period­ical to tap into the public appetite for crime and sensation, the IPN had been founded in 1863, and taken over by Purkess two or three years later. It consisted of one pictorial page and three text pages in folio, and sold for one penny. The normal weekly circulation was between 150,000 and 200,000 copies, but spec­ial issues could sell as many as 600,000. The paper had most buyers and subscribers in the Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham areas; its London circulation was just one eighth of the total issue. Circulation abroad was fairly limited, although a friend had recently sent Purkess a copy of the IPN which he had picked up in Hyderabad. Although the IPN was considered a workingman’s newspaper appealing to lowbrow tastes, Purkess claimed that a Dowager Marchioness was a permanent subscriber, and that an Earl had once ordered his biography of Calcraft the Hangman; several clergymen, according to Purkess, had also been known to request copies.

The IPN’s pages were filled with murders at home and abroad, assaults and outrages, accidents and macabre events, all described with gusto and luridly illustrated. For the fortean enthusiast, the IPN has a good deal to offer. Just like Charles Fort himself, the newspaper’s editorial staff sifted an enormous amount of newspaper copy from Britain, Europe and the United States in their search for dastardly crimes and sensational stories. When there were no recent murders, curios­ities of other kinds were pressed into service: ghosts, freaks and hermits, strange deaths and premature burials all featured over the years, and bizarre stories from the animal kingdom were also used on occasion to bolster the paper’s contents: a swan is eaten by a boa constrictor; a monkey scalds a cat with a teapot; a man is attacked by a furious magpie; and a burglar is confronted by a razor-wielding orang-utan. When an old London tramp is attacked by hooligans, he is defended by his large troupe of trained rats. Fish fall from the sky, sea monsters attack, and in two separate incidents, a child and a dog are abducted by large eagles.

The main reason the IPN was such a scandal­ous newspaper was its lewd and graphic illustrations, which outraged many people. Heads were crushed and limbs lopped off; blood spouted from knife wounds; children screamed in agony when bitten by dogs, and wives desperately begged for mercy when beaten by their brutal husbands. Images that would today seem amusing and burlesque – ‘fast’ women fighting or getting drunk, or a lady bicyclist flying through the air after being gored from behind by a bull – also infuriated the rather more prudish Victorians. When interviewed, George Purkess defended his IPN artists, who he thought were as good as those working for any rival journal, including the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. He had half a dozen artists on his staff in London, and occasionally employed 70 or more freelance artists in all parts of the country. Whenever a high-profile crime was comm­itted, Purkess was able to dispatch one of his artists to the scene. Several times, he claimed, criminals depicted in the IPN had written back to offer their compliments on their excellent likenesses in the paper.


1. SAUCY SOMNAMBULISTS
As I have shown in another article on pre­mature burial and supposed corpses coming to life (“The Dead Reawaken!”, FT247:44–49), the Victorians in general, and the readers of the IPN in particular, had a fascination for the conscious but immobile (usually female) body, at risk of being buried alive while in some strange trance-like state, but unable to move or cry out. This fascination also extended to the mobile but unconscious female body: sleepwalkers, or somnambulists as the Victor­ians called them, were among the favourite subjects for the IPN’s bawdy-minded draughtsmen. Male somnambulists may have been news, but they were never Illustrated Police News, even if they performed a tap dance on the roof of the House of Lords; the IPN’s somnambulists were all young, female, and scantily clad. Whether they were saved at the last minute by some gallant male rescuer, or fell to their death screaming with terror, they helped to sell a lot of newspapers.

2. ANDRIAN THE DOG-FACED MAN AND HIS SON
In 1874, the London newspapers announced that two of the greatest human curiosities of the age had arrived at the Metropolitan Music Hall in Edgware Road: Andrian the Russian Dog-faced Man and his son Fedor (see FT209:49–51). A reporter and a draughtsman from the Illustrated Police News were present to provide a feature about these strange beings. The 55-year-old Andrian was a quiet, morose individual, who spoke only Russian. He was of medium height, strongly built, and dressed in not very clean-looking Russian clothes. His eyes were a curious yellow, and his skin an unhealthy grey.

Young Fedor, who was on show with him, was actually Andrian’s illegitimate son, the impresario claimed, and many of the female visitors to the exhibition must have experi­enced a frisson of horror that even a sex-starved Russian peasant woman had once consented to copulate with such a monster. Andrian was like a man half-changed into an animal, his face entirely covered with hair, like that of a Skye terrier. It was a spectacle destined to strike horror into the Victorian imagination.

A doctor was impressed to see Andrian drink a pint of undiluted vodka with relish, as he carved his beefsteak at the exhibition. He showed little affection for his son, and much resented it when some visitors to the exhibition spoke to the lively young Fedor and tipped him handsomely, and then passed by the smelly, unprepossessing father with horror. The showman said that, ever since he had first put Andrian on show before the curious in St Petersburg, Paris and Berlin the year before, the hairy man had vowed to return to his native village as soon as his tour of the European capitals was over, and to spend all the money he had earned entirely on strong drink. According to another, more prepossessing version, Andrian was a devout member of the Russo-Greek Church. Others in that faith had told him that he must surely have been cursed by the Devil, and poor Andrian spent all his money on the purchase of prayers from a devout community of monks near Kostroma, “hoping one day to be able to introduce his frightful counten­ance in the court of heaven”, as the exhibit­ion pamphlet flippantly expressed it.

If many visitors to the exhibition were disgusted or horrified by the debauched and unkempt spectacle of Andrian, all were charmed by his little son Fedor. Although just four years old, Fedor was more intelligent, and much more sprightly and vigorous, than his wretched father. The growth of down on his face was not yet so heavy as to conceal his features, but the medical men who saw him did not doubt that he would one day become just as hairy as his father. Fedor’s hair was white and as thick as that of an Angora cat, and he had long whiskers and a tuft of long hair at the outer angle of either eye. He liked to travel and to meet new people, and was already gett­ing spoilt and petulant. He spoke French, and, in spite of his tender age, gave rational replies to quest­ions from the audience. The dentition of both Andrian and Fedor was very defect­ive. Andrian had only the stump of a tooth in the upper jaw and four rotten teeth in the lower jaw. Fedor had a perfectly toothless upper jaw, with no alveolar processes, and only four incis­ors in the lower jaw.

Andrian and Fedor remained in London until early April 1874, and then spent 10 days in Liverpool. According to the Liverpool Mercury of 14 April, the jolly young Fedor pointed at the bald head of a doctor in the audience and suggested that it would have been an improvement if some of the hair on his own face could have been transferred to the savant’s gleaming pate!

Andrian died later in 1874, probably from cirrhosis of the liver brought on by his excess­ive drinking of spirits. Fedor’s later disting­uished career in the American sideshow, under the name of Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy, has been described in my recent book Freaks. Jo-Jo toured the world with Barnum & Bail­ey’s Greatest Show on Earth until his death from pneumonia in 1912.