ABSTRACT
Every historical era has experienced some form of crime-generated social anxiety, and it would be both foolish and unwise for contemporary commentators to view present-day crimes of violence as either novel, unique or representative of ‘the decline of society’. For every child-on-child murder, paedophile outrage or serial killer that shocks present-day society, historians can point to incidents and figures from the past. Some are notorious, like Jack the Ripper; others are almost forgotten, like ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, the details of whose brutal murder lie forgotten in the columns of Victorian newspapers but whose name has lived on and even been abbreviated into the euphemistic phrase ‘sweet FA’.2
