The Mysterious Case of Adelaide Bartlett - Victorian England's Most Baffling Poisoning (1886)

London, England, 1886. A young French-born wife stood trial at the Old Bailey for the chloroform poisoning of her husband — and 140 years later, the case has never been explained. In the early hours of the first of January, eighteen eighty-six, the wealthy Pimlico grocer Edwin Bartlett was found dead in his bed at his rented flat on Claverton Street. The post-mortem revealed his stomach contained between three and four fluid ounces of liquid chloroform — fifty to a hundred times a lethal dose. His mouth, throat, tongue, larynx, and windpipe were entirely free of the chemical burns it should have caused on the way down. His lungs were entirely free of any trace. By every law of Victorian medicine, the chloroform could not possibly be where it was. RELATED EPISODE ▶ The Chilling Case of Florence Maybrick — Victorian England's Most Controversial Poisoning (1889) The Chilling Case of Florence Maybrick - V... SOURCES & FURTHER READING Wikipedia — Pimlico Mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimlico... Wikipedia — Adelaide Bartlett: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaid... Hargrave L. Adam — The Trial of Adelaide Bartlett (Notable English Trials series, 1927) — full text on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/trialofad... Yseult Bridges — Poison and Adelaide Bartlett (1962) — the definitive modern study British Medical Journal — Michael Farrell, "The Pimlico Mystery" (medical re-examination) Old Bailey Online — original trial transcripts (search "Adelaide Bartlett, April 1886"): https://www.oldbaileyonline.org Brief Ledger is a documentary channel covering forgotten Victorian and Edwardian-era true crime, narrated in a cinematic style. New historical cases. If you enjoy true crime documentary content with a focus on 19th and early 20th century history, please subscribe — it really helps these stories reach the people who love them. #TrueCrime #VictorianCrime #PimlicoMystery #HistoricalCrime #BriefLedger