Come with me as we gaze through the keyhole of history into the lives of people in and around the ancient town of Bishop Auckland, our local capital, so to speak. As you will notice, I have given precedence to certain places over others, without bias, I may add, or partiality.

There are several other places of importance in the neighbourhood which it was the Author's intention to have noticed had space allowed. The book is a compilation of newspaper reports relating to the local area.

Spanning the entire Victorian era, the reports are accompanied with hundreds of images, many never seen before. The material admittedly is somewhat emotive and quite graphic at times, which is what the Victorians relished in their mundane, repetitive, and somewhat arduous lives.

Think of the Victorians as straight-laced and boring? Think again—nothing captured the imagination of 19th century readers like the strange, macabre and bizarre—newspapers created a thirst for scandal. The history of British newspapers however, dates back to the 17th century with the emergence of regular publications covering news and gossip.

The relaxation of government censorship in the late 17th century led to a rise in publications, which in turn led to an increase in regulation throughout the 18th century. The Times began publication in 1785 and became the leading newspaper of the early 19th century, before the lifting of taxes on newspapers and technological innovations led to a boom in newspaper publishing in the late 19th century.

In the same way in which the internet has overwhelmed us today, during Queen Victoria’s reign, the circulation of books had rapidly increased, there was a huge reduction in the prices of newspapers and magazines. All these factors established a link between the masses and the printed world.

Mass education and increasing affluence led to new papers such as the Daily Mail (1896) emerging at the end of the 19th century, aimed at lower middle-class readers. Newspapers of the Victorian era published articles which reported news in a factual way.

The articles just revealed the basic story and excluded commentaries and opinions of the reporter, unlike today. In my attempt to create a book about the area, my object was not merely to give a collection of chronologically-arranged facts and incidents, but to show, to the best of my ability, the various changes that have taken place since those dark times.

For example, when 9-year-old’s were killed or maimed whilst “labouring” to men in iron works, when the closest thing to an ambulance was a ride home with a horse and cart along a bumpy road. When your life was deemed to be in peril if walking even a short journey from one village to the next.

ContentPreface 4Chapter 1 Water fatalities 5Chapter 2 Coroners’ inquests 77Chapter 3 Accidents 172Chapter 4 Executions 279Chapter 5 Concealment of birth 373Chapter 6 Miner’s evictions/“Blacklegs” 417. .