Item of the Month, December 2010: The London Monster

On this day in 1790, this man, Rhynwick Williams, a young unemployed Welshman was convicted of three counts of assault and sentenced to six years in prison. This - seemingly - brought to an end a sequence of attacks on women in London over the previous two years. Images from the Wellcome Library's collections will help us tell this rather odd story.

There were over 50 reported, seemingly linked, attacks on women in London between 1788 and 1790. Whilst some women received deep wounds, it does not appear the aim of their assailant was to cause life threatening injuries - the attacker at times seemed as concerned with slashing the garments of the women as stabbing them. Often he would attempt to stab the women in the buttocks, sometimes those attacked reported they were offered a nosegay to sniff, out of which a sharp instrument would emerge and at least one report suggested the attacker approached a woman with sharp instruments attached to his knees. The description of the assailant also wildly differed.

Understandably, the attacks received a certain degree of late eighteenth century media hype: THE MONSTER! was how the newspapers of the day dubbed the attacker. There was also a certain degree of sensationalism in how artists and printmakers such as James Gillray responded to the attacks.

In an etching by Gillray, The Monster disappointed of his Afternoon Luncheon, or Porridge Potts preferable to Cork Rumps, the Monster is a true Ogre: about to feast on his victim whose only protection is a copper pan covering her posterior.

The Wellcome Library holds a copy of this related etching by Gillray, The Monster going to take his Afternoons luncheon which was issued in May 1790. Here, the victim has no protection, bare skin is revealed and there's a rather more salacious edge in how the victim is being portrayed.


There's a similar ribaldry in another of Gillray's prints of May 1790, Swearing to the Cutting Monster, or a Scene in Bow Street. Here, a victim shows her injuries - which the officials are making perhaps too close an examination of - to the Bow Street Magistrates. Note too the political connotations of the engraving: instead of our wild-haired ogre, here 'The Monster' in the Dock bears more than a passing resemblance to the politician Charles James Fox...

In June 1790, one victim claimed she recognised her attacker walk past her in the street - this was Rhynwick Williams. Williams was arrested and charged with the attacks. After his first trial collapsed on a technicality, Williams underwent a second trial leading to his conviction on 14th December 1790.

However, the story doesn't quite end there. In Jan Bondeson's The London Monster - the best account of these events - Bondeson talks of similar attacks to these in the centuries that have followed (for example, the 'Brooklyn Monster', depicted left); questions the reliability of Williams's conviction and explores the possibility that the explanation for the attacks may even lie in a massive case of Mass Hysteria (it's certainly the case that some 'victims' lied about the nature of their injuries).

Interestingly, Williams went back to his previous career as an artificial flowermaker after he left jail. His time spent behind bars did have one major transformative effect on him: by the time he left he was father to a child - which was conceived whilst Williams was behind bars (Williams would marry the mother of his child on release). As for the sensationalism of the 'Monster', it's almost tempting now to see this as prefiguring in some ways the newspaper reporting of the Whitechapel murders of 1888.

Image credits:
1/ Renwick Williams, a man convicted of wounding women. Reproduction of a stipple engraving (Wellcome Library no. 1970i)
2/ Renwick Williams, a man who attacked women; represented by a grotesque fiend wielding an exaggerated knife and fork and holding a young woman up by the skirt. Etching by J. Gillray, 1790. (Wellcome Library no. 11193i)
3/ The dismayed Charles Fox in handcuffs, implicated by a woman who is displaying her wounded posterior to three Bow Street Justices; satirizing Fox as being 'The 'monster'. Etching by J. Gillray, 1790. (Wellcome Library no. 12176i)
4/ A man who stabs women in the leg. Wood engraving. (Wellcome Library no. 3411i)

London Faces: new 'Insight'

This Saturday, 2nd October, the library will feature a new Insight talk - London Faces - to coincide with Story of London events. Learn how Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and James Gillray made their own contributions to the fascinating history of physiognomy (the 'science' of face reading). See bitingly satirical pictures, original nineteenth century material and even tea towels as we revisit three key inhabitants of England's capital from a very different perspective.

Held in the Wellcome Library at 2.30pm-3.30pm. Please see details as number are limited: Wellcome Collection

Item of the Month – February 2009

A toast in Abyssinia. Wellcome Library no. 667946i

It could be said without fear of contradiction that wherever you are in the Wellcome Library you are never more then ten feet away from a reference to Aristotle, the Virgin Mary, Queen Victoria or the River Nile. The Nile features in many roles: as the channel whose flooding fed the civilization of the ancient Egyptians; as the waters which supported the infant Moses and thus enabled the exodus of the Jews from Egypt with momentous consequences; as a place for research into schistosomiasis with the aid of a floating laboratory commissioned by Henry S. Wellcome; or more frivolously as the holiday resort of Europeans and North Americans such as Florence Nightingale, the Prince of Wales, William Osler, and the many others who enjoyed the views from the Nile dahabeeyahs.

Many references involve the obsession with finding "the" source of the Nile, exemplified in the Victorian expeditions of Sir Samuel Baker, and John Hanning Speke. There were however earlier explorers of the source of the Nile, one of the most distinctive being James Bruce of Kinnaird (1730–1794), whose many massive volumes Travels to discover the source of the Nile in the years 1768–73 (1790) weigh heavily on the Library's shelves. Their pages record the political and tribal history as well as the fauna, flora, and natural features of the regions which Bruce, disguised as a Syrian savant and physician, passed through in his quest for the fons et origo of the river. They also include a report on the Abyssinian custom of eating raw beef cut from living cattle.

Among the Bruce of Kinnaird documents in the Wellcome Library is an unusually large etching (above). It shows Bruce at his moment of triumph in November 1770, when he and his Greek assistant Strates reach a fountain at Gisha in Abyssinia, regarded by the locals as the sole source of the Nile. Bruce described it as "an island of green turf which was in the form of an altar … I stood in rapture over the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it". To mark the occasion, Bruce and Strates raise a coconut to drink the Nile water to the health of King George III of Great Britain and to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (the champion of the Greeks against the Ottomans).

The print must be exceptionally rare, for it is mentioned neither among the likenesses in Bruce's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry nor in the recent biography of Bruce by Miles Bredin, which does however describe the episode [1]. Another impression in the British Museum bears lettering which records the date 1793 and the names of the authors: the composition was attributed to Richard Morton Paye (1750-1821), and the etching to none other than James Gillray (1756–1815), the well-known caricaturist. In support of that surprising attribution, the fuzzy etched lineation is similar to Gillray's caricatures: a specialist history engraver would have used bolder and thicker lines to differentiate between the principal figures and the background. It is nevertheless strange that this work is not included in Thomas Wright's list of works by Gillray "not belonging to the province of caricature or satire" [2].

This heroic history picture of the Scottish explorer at his moment of glory in Africa must be one of Gillray's least-known works. It deserves to be drawn to the attention of historians of Nile exploration, matters Abyssinian, and Scotland.

[1] Miles Bredin, The pale Abyssinian: a life of James Bruce, African explorer and adventurer, London: HarperCollins, 2000, pp. 160-163

[2] Thomas Wright, The works of James Gillray, the caricaturist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1873, appendix pp. 372-374, 'Works, not belonging to the province of caricature or satire, executed by James Gillray as an engraver'