Wells Asylum Authorities/Wikimedia Commons There can be few more difficult things imaginable than handing your child over to the care of a stranger, saying a silent prayer for the life you won’t see unfold. Hoping, despite yourself, that you will one day meet again. But for many poor, desperate women in the Victorian era, there was no other choice. There were many reasons why a woman might give up her child, putting her trust in those who promised them a way forward. A way that wasn’t headed towards the workhouse or a cold bed on a dirty street. And so it was that a monster like Amelia Dyer arose, a nightmarish figure made possible by the restrictive, patriarchal society that kept women from having any real power or agency of their own. The same moralising society that would later ring its hands over her diabolically unfeminine crimes. PA Images By the time Dyer swung from a rope at Newgate Prison on the morning of June 10, 1896, it’s believed she had murdered between 200 and 400 child...