Collecting some of the most fascinating and bizarre stories from English newspapers from 1700 to 1900, Levin offers up gossip, true crime, scandal, and more. We encounter a drunken cart driver careening through Victorian London while hauling a ton of gunpowder—and matches; sit in on the first meeting of the “No-Nose Club”, a support group for syphilitics; get a gruesome glimpse of the autopsy of the Empress Maria Theresa, whose body is discovered to be full of “a great quantity of fat and viscous matter, Her Majesty having accustomed herself never to spit.