John Christie

After Handel introduced Italian opera to London, Georgians and Victorians went to performances to wear their diamonds and meet friends. As Victoria’s reign progressed, opera percolated down, via brass bands, organ grinders, music hall warblers and whistling delivery boys. In 1869, the Leeds impresario Carl Rosa set up ‘a sort of operatic Woolworths’, a touring company putting on shows in cinemas and working men’s clubs Lilian Baylis was the other great populariser. In 1897, she took over her aunt’s music hall, the Old Vic, and threw herself into social improvement: ‘My people must have the best. God tells me the best is grand opera.’ With 2,000 seats priced between 3d

‘You never seem to get a good murder nowadays.’ With this ‘fretful complaint’ George Orwell imagined newspaper readers bemoaning the decline of the classic English murder. Gone were the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ – a solicitor or dentist killing his wife in a quiet suburban home – which made the perfect News of the World spread to curl up with after Sunday lunch. In their place was an altogether more brutish type of murder committed by ruthless serial killers. Everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of 10 Rillington Place Orwell was writing in 1946. Seven years later, one of the most notorious serial killers in British criminal