Chapter Three

• Author: Richard D. Schneider
• Pages: 31-39

 

Cae ree

   into London each month hoping to nd

work, and with its metropolitan population having ballooned as a result

to well over  million people, the city to which Daniel M’Naughten

rst came in the summer of  was a study in contrasts. London was

at once an ancient city, built by the Romans in  , and a modern

one, with a dozen railway lines running trains in and out of London

daily while hundreds of steamships plied the waters of the ames,

bound for or returning from Britain’s imperial colonies around the

world. People of staggering wealth lived and worked alongside the

poor and poverty-stricken. Royalty and aristocracy, as emblemized by

the monarchy and the House of Lords, continued to rule “Brittania,”

the young Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert were be-

loved by all. At the same time mass working-class labour movements

agitated for social and political reforms with an ever-growing willing-

ness to use violence to achieve their ends.

Indeed, London in  (the time of the murder) was a city like

no other. Frederick Engels, arriving the year before to work with Karl

Marx on the seminal works of dialectical materialism (Communism),

marvelled at the city’s vibrancy and dynamism:

I know of nothing more imposing than the view the ames of-

fers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. e masses

of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich

upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer

together, until, at last, only a narrow passage through which hundreds

of steamers shoot by one another.

We can almost visualize the frenetic harbour and hear the blaring

horns of the “countless ships” docking and departing from the bustling