How are you doing there, big guy? he asked.

John Bishop and another grave-robber called Thomas Williams had drowned the boy, a woman and another boy in a well in John Bishop's garden in Bethnal Green... Bishop and Williams were hanged outside Newgate Prison in December 1831 in front of an angry crowd of 30,000.

[…] booted he was after Saincte Benettes guise, and a blacke Stamell robe, with a lothlie monsterous hoode hanging backward […]

From behind that structure came out an impression of pale plumpness in a frock-coat.