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of investigators who gathered information by accompanying London School Board “visitors” on their rounds and Scotland Yard officers on their beats. For a time one of his investigators was Beatrice Potter (later Webb), soon to become a prominent social activist, not to be confused with Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, though both women led nearly contemporaneous lives and would die in the same year, 1943, Beatrice at eighty-five, and Beatrix at seventy-seven. Booth was stunned to find that the incidence of poverty actually was greater than even the socialists had proclaimed. He found that just over 30 percent of the city’s population lived below the “poverty line,” a term he invented. He distilled his findings into seven groups from poor to rich and assigned a color to each, then applied these colors block by block to a map of 1889 London, thereby making the disparities in wealth vividly apparent. Hilldrop Crescent was colored red, for “Well-to-do. Middle class,” Booth’s second-wealthiest category.

A decade later Booth saw a need to revise his findings and again set out to tour the streets of London. At least three of Booth’s walks with police officers took him into Hilldrop Crescent itself or adjacent streets. In his summary remarks for one walk, Booth wrote, “The best people are leaving.” On another walk Booth followed Camden Road where it crossed the entrance to Hilldrop Crescent. Here he found “substantial houses” but “not such a good class of inhabitants as formerly.” The decline continued a trend already well under way in neighborhoods just to the north. Booth wrote, “District is rapidly going down.”

Various forces drove the trend, among them the increasing ease of transportation. A spreading network of suburban and subterranean railways enabled families of modest means to escape “darkest London” for distant suburbs. But the area around Hilldrop also happened to be blessed, or cursed, with the presence of three institutions unlikely to encourage housing values to soar. It is possible that Crippen persuaded himself that none of the three would have any direct effect on his life, but it is equally likely that he simply failed to notice their presence when making his choice. This state of ignorance could not have endured for long.

One of these institutions began its vast and fragrant sprawl about a minute’s walk to the southeast of Crippen’s house. Here lay the Metropolitan Cattle Market on Copenhagen Fields, opened in 1855 to replace the Smithfield Market where, as Charles Dickens observed in Oliver Twist, “the ground was covered nearly ankle deep with filth and mire” and the air was filled with a “hideous and discordant din.” The new market covered thirty acres. Each year four million cattle, sheep, and pigs passed through its gates either for evisceration and dismemberment or to be sold on market days from its enclosed market stalls and “bullock lairs.” There was less filth than at Smithfield, but the din was no less hideous, and when the weather was right and the market at its peak, typically Mondays—especially the Monday before Christmas, always the single busiest day—the chorus of lowing and bleating could be heard many blocks away, audible even to the residents of Hilldrop Crescent. Charles Booth found that animals were driven to the market through neighborhood streets, occasionally with comic effect. “Some go astray,” he wrote. One bull remained loose for thirty-six hours. Another time a flock of sheep invaded a dress shop. “Loose pigs are about the worst to tackle,” Booth noted: “they will spread so: attract a crowd in no time: make the police look ridiculous.”

The market environs tended to draw a class of residents less savory than what the Crippens had encountered in Bloomsbury. “Very rough district,” Booth observed, “many of the men working at the cattle market as drovers, slaughter-men, porters, &c; great deal of casual work. Some old cottage property partly in bad repair.”

The two other institutions that tended to suppress the allure of Hilldrop Crescent were prisons. One was Holloway Gaol,