Historian • Broadcaster • Victorian Pop Culture • Presenter of 'Killing Victoria' on @BBCSounds 🎙️ • Curator of @OldJokeArchive • Co-Director of @EHUNineteen
Pity the 'little wife' who gets trapped in this man's fantasy 
Firstly, they accurately predicted the arrival of broadcast news! Or, at least, that it would be 'read out' to audiences thanks to the perfection of Edison's phonograph.
This allows us to 'distant read' the archive by graphing how often a particular word or phrase appeared each year. It's similar to google's ngram tool (books.google.com/ngrams) but for newspapers! /2 
This panel, for instance, ridicules the idea of men being publicly shamed by women. 
The imagined dreams of Charles Peace — infamous Victorian burglar and murderer — on the night before his execution.
My favourite thing about these illustrations is always the face of the person observing the adulterers... 
Honesty, it’s almost as if moaning about something on Twitter for three years has absolutely no real impact!?
Here's how the matchmaking process worked — a bit slower than swiping on tinder. 
They opened the first issue with a portrait of Lady Godiva — whose story features the original Peeping Tom — and an address to their readers, outlining their intention to "peep into every hole and corner where a 'thing or two' of a spicy nature is to be learnt." /2 
Let’s take a closer look. Here’s the alleged annual income of several government officials in 1883. Interesting that the PM didn’t receive more than his cabinet members! 
I’m impressed — and slightly dizzy — after reading the winner of “The longest sensible sentence, every word of which begins with the same letter” competition.
The term 'American Drinks' didn't always refer to alcohol. It covered a range of other exotic new drinks from the USA, usually involving sugar or ice. Ice cream soda (optimistically described here as 'healthy') seems to have become popular following the Paris Exhibition of 1867! 
Mind you, it was published in December 1938, so that laugh count might’ve proven tragically true for a lot of readers.
Here's the accompanying article. Shadowy Tarquin stalking his negligee-clad prey in an Adamless Eden! 
The accompanying article claimed to feature extracts from Le Figaro, the Parisian newspaper, but I haven't been able to find any matching stories (though I can't read much French!). The IPN might've got her name wrong, but it's much more likely that they made it all up.
The accompanying article reports that some people were left hanging, in the 'greatest agony', for upwards of FIVE MINUTES! 
According to this report, it took fifteen men to operate the octopus. The monster was named 'Hic-Hac-Hoc'! 
He fled into a drugstore; she whipped him in there too. 
The Illustrated Police News straddled the boundary between pornography and respectable print. So many of the scenarios depicted in the paper also appeared in 19thC erotica, and the illustrations were often framed with an unmistakably pornographic gaze. (1877) 
The accompanying story describes her as 'A BAD WOMAN', but, honestly, it sounds like George Bartley had it coming. 
I particularly enjoyed the saucy stage directions in this story. '(waist business)'! 