Why the Victorians are responsible for today’s acid attacks

It was a crime of passion of such disfiguring violence that Victorian London was left scandalised. In November 1865, Felix Deacon, a young lithographer who had fallen for a married woman, Sarah Ann Peacock, was attacked in the street. His assailant was not her husband but another man, a dentist by the name of Wainwright, who was equally smitten with Mrs Peacock and therefore saw Deacon as a rival.

The method he employed to warn him off was as familiar and feared in those times as it is today in modern Britain. Wainwright threw vitriol, a form of sulphuric acid, into Deacon’s face, blinding him. He was jailed for 20 years for his crime.

No longer able to work because he could not see, Deacon, ended up destitute in the St Pancras workhouse, but help was at hand. A volunteer from the Home Teaching Society for the Blind taught him Braille, and a public appeal raised the £50 needed to buy him an adapted knitting machine so he could once again earn his own living.

The headlines in recent years that have accompanied spiralling numbers of acid attacks – up from 261 cases reported to the Metropolitan Police in London in 2015 to 454 in 2017 – tend to treat them as a new kind of threat to public safety. Yet, as the case of Felix Deacon reveals, they have around for a long time. Their characteristics, though, have changed.

Last year, in one much-reported case, Arthur Collins, the former boyfriend of reality TV star Fearne McCann, was sentenced to 20 years – the same jail term as Wainwright the dentist – after throwing acid across an East End dance floor in what the judge called a “despicable act”, burning 16 people and blinding three.

Thankfully, unlike Felix Deacon, those three people have been able to regain their sight; in the 150 years that separate these two appalling crimes, medicine has advanced beyond all recognition. The campaigner Katie Piper, who featured in the current series of Strictly and, in 2008, was attacked with acid by her ex-boyfriend, underwent pioneering surgery, including the use of a skin substitute, to restore her face and vision.

And as treatment methods have improved, so too has support for those who suffer acid attacks, notably from Changing Faces, one of the three charities in the 2018 Telegraph Christmas appeal.

“We know from research and experience,” says its founder and chief executive, Dr James Partridge, “that the emotional and social impact of the disfigurements caused by burns can often really kick in after discharge from the acute phase.

“When people are back at home, alone or trying to return to work, that’s when the problems can be felt most: they can feel low and very self-conscious about their scars. Everywhere they go, they feel other people staring or are asked intrusive questions.”

Dr Katherine Watson, a lecturer in the history of medicine at Oxford Brookes University, has studied the similarities and differences between what the Victorians called “vitriol-throwing” and today’s acid attacks. Her research of 400 such cases in 19th-century London shows, she says, that they were “a regular, if not common occurrence” back then.

When they ended up in court, though, sentencing was less predictable and often less severe. “Jurors could often be remarkably sympathetic to perpetrators. In many cases, juries convicted but made a recommendation to mercy. Judges usually accepted these and gave light sentences of a few months or years in prison, sometimes with hard labour.”

Not, she stresses, in all cases. Wainwright the dentist got 20 years, but in 1834, Hugh Kennedy – a man described as of previously “irreproachable character” who had fallen out with a fellow servant and decided to take his revenge by pouring acid on his face while he slept – was sent to the gallows by a Glasgow court.

He is the only person known to have received the death penalty in this country for an acid attack. His victim, the judge was told, “awoke in agony, one of his eyes being literally burned out”.

In many other cases, though, Dr Watson has found a tendency to leniency, quite different from the attitudes of our lawmakers today who have responded to public concern over acid attacks by increasing the length of sentences. One reason for this leniency may have been the large number of women among those standing trial. Between 1837 and 1913, almost twice as many women as men appeared at the Bailey for throwing corrosive fluid.

In 1883, Sarah Newman was found guilty at the Old Bailey in London of “intent to burn and disfigure” after the 28-year-old attacked the father of her three children, Cornelius Mahoney, with whom she lived. The court had heard how Mahoney had abandoned her to take up with another woman. Though he lost the sight in one eye, her jail sentence was 12 months.

Acid attacks are believed to date back in Britain to the Industrial Revolution, when these substances became more freely available as part of new processes for bleaching cotton and treating metals. Some of the earliest recorded incidents of vitriol-throwing arise as part of industrial protests in Glasgow in the 1820s, and involved damage done to machinery as much as they did to human faces.

But the methods used in industrial disputes quickly crossed into a means of solving personal clashes. There are, though, few of the connections between vitriol-throwing and criminal gangs that have been suggested as explaining the sudden rise in acid attacks today.

And while they continued to feature in literature in the first half of the 20th century – including by the murderous sociopath, Pinkie Brown, in Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock, where ends up accidentally splashing himself rather than his target with a vial of vitriol and falling to his death – in real life for much of the century they became much rarer.

Various reasons have been suggested for this: some practical (tighter controls on the sale of acid from 1933), and some societal, including greater freedom for betrayed partners in a relationship, especially women, to go to court to get justice by gaining a divorce and a financial settlement.

In global terms, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh register some of the highest levels of acid attacks today, despite being a capital offence, with men usually the perpetrators and women their targets. However, the ongoing crisis in British cities has also put the UK near the top of the league table.

But, in a sign of how much times have changed since the Victorian age, it is now men who are most likely to carry out acid attacks – and more likely to be the victims. 

Changing Faces is one of the Telegraph’s three chosen charities for our 2018 Christmas appeal. For details of how to donate, call our charity phoneline (0151 284 1927) or visit telegraph.ctdonate.org