From the Staffordshire Sentinel of 1 November 1878, this account of Edith Shaw, a former governess with a taste for the high life, charged at the Dublin Commission Court with stealing passengers’ luggage at railway stations:

Edith managed a number of successful thefts before she was apprehended in the act of pawning some of her ill-gotten goods. Although she gave her address as Patrick Place, Cork, at the time of her arrest she was staying at the Grosvenor Hotel, Westland Row, where an oyster supper with a number of gentlemen was scheduled for the evening of her arrest. She was described as speaking with an English accent.

The fullest account of the evidence given against Edith, which gives some idea of her modus operandi, may be found in the below report from the Irish Times of 17 October 1878:

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