Oxford Bookworms Library 2: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

People caroused at 29 Hanbury Street, gawking, some of them laughing and joking, while the rest of London fell into a "kind of stupor," said The Times. The crimes were "beyond the ghastliest efforts of fiction" - even worse than Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, and "nothing in fact or fiction equals these outrages at once in their horrible nature and in the effect which they have produced upon the popular imagination." Chapter Seventeen. The Streets Until Dawn Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Varieties was one of the most vulgar music halls in London. It was Sickert's favorite haunt the first eight months of 1888, and he went there several nights a week. Built into a 250-foot-wide arch underneath the South Eastern railway near Charing Cross Station, Gatti's could seat six hundred, but on some nights as many as a thousand rowdy spectators crowded in for hours of drinking, smoking, and sexually charged entertainment. The popular Katie Lawrence shocked polite society by dressing in men's breeches or a loose, short frock that exposed more female flesh than was deemed decent at the time ...»