Another mid-Victorian couple who lived together without any question of being married, and whose relationship ended in a brutal murder. Susan Owen did meet her death in after an evening in one of local beer houses. Whether her death was caused directly by Willson is rather murky. A lot of witnesses say they were leaving the pub together and she was heard to fall over several times in the courtyard.
He never married, two years later we find him living as a boarder and then twenty years later we find him a pauper in the workhouse. Professor Probert has been researching the extent of unmarried couples living together in Victorian London. She looked at Neithrop in Banbury because it had been claimed co-habitation was common there and because of the quality of the information available. Some historical sources claimed that 5 out of 8 houses in one street were occupied by co-habiting couples.
My investigations have found this was not the case. That there were a large number of these communities in Neithrop, but nothing to suggest that co-habitation was rife there. In fact it was extremely rare in Victorian Britain. But there were certainly parallels between some communities in Neithrop and the less salubrious parts of London that Dickens describes so powerfully in novels such as Oliver Twist.
