Amelia Jeffries and the Power of Outrage

On Februrary 22, 1890, The Illustrated Police News (IPN) devoted about half its front page to illustrations reporting the brutal rape and murder of Amelia Jeffries, a fifteen-year-old girl from the working-class London neighborhood of West Ham. Referring to her in the familiar terms that her neighbors might have used, the IPN named “Amelia Jeffs” as “the West Ham Victim.” They picture her first in a headshot, as if alive, with hair pulled neatly back and high-necked lace collar. The picture of tidy but wide-eyed, animated youth stands in stark contrast to the illustration that sits at the center of the page: entitled “A Little Girl Outraged and Murdered at West Ham,” the image shows her brutalized body in the moment she is discovered by “Two Detectives.” She has been stuffed into a cupboard with the scarf around her neck that had been used to strangle her. The contrast between her portrait and this scene of discovery serves to dramatize the most horrific aspects of the crime, verging on what some readers might have seen as luridly sensational. The detectives stand agape, eyes and arms wide in extreme shock—a shock that the style of sensational reporting proposes to reproduce in its readers. 

Reiterating the language “outraged and murdered” in the titles of their cover art in consecutive issues, the IPN captured in widely-used euphemistic terms the violation Jeffries experienced. Nowhere do they say she was raped, utilizing the softer term “outraged” to depict the crime while encouraging what the newspaper seems insist is the appropriate, widespread public response to her rape and murder (February 22, 1890, p. 1). Her body had been “outraged” and so too should reader-citizens be outraged.

Perhaps, the paper further implies, we have not been adequately outraged—outraged enough to do something about it; outraged enough to protect a young woman like Amelia Jeffries from the violence that has ended both her innocence and her life. The visuals do crucial work in signifying the extent of violence done to the little girl—a representation that stands in stark contrast to the tamer linguistic description of the crime. In the issue of February 22, 1890, the reporter says, “The girl Amelia Jeffs, aged fifteen, who has been missing since Friday evening, January 31st, from her home at 38, West-road, West Ham, has been found dead in the cupboard of at attic at the house No. 126, The Portway, West Ham” (p. 2). The language relays factual details that we might find in any other newspaper. Echoing the euphemistic language that expresses and yet also partly obscures the true extent of the brutality, this language retains a cool expository tone at odds with the graphic visuals.

These visual depictions clearly provide evidence for claims, then and now, that the IPN was little more than a salacious peddler of the horrific and lurid—melodramatic and unduly manipulating of its audience. The more straightforward and neutral verbal content cited above could hardly elicit the kinds of criticism that the illustrations more clearly could. Perhaps, though, the editors thought the public needed the kind of wake-up call forced on its readers by the contrast. The public is used to reading about crime in cooler, neutral tones that do not merely convey unbiased facts but also perhaps serve to tame our feelings about the horrifying facts. Perhaps, too, that language helps to detach us from the kinds of horrors that working-class girls like Amelia Jeffries are subject to more often than her middle- and upper-class counterparts despite the fact that she was, as the newspaper reminds us, “a well-conducted girl” (The Morning Post, February 15, 1890, p. 5). If this is plausible, then these images might be said to function quite differently—the outrage us, yes, but not just for the sake of titillation; to press us to consider the larger, widespread social, political and economic conditions that make a the life of a “well-conducted girl” from a hardworking family so remarkably unsafe.