Biography of William Onion, the Prison Bard. Britain's most convicted man who reformed after a fifty-year addiction to alcohol and became a celebrity poet, friends with the magistrates who used to send him to jail. Accused of being Jack the Ripper Onion lived through the reigns of four monarchs and witnessed enormous social change. A rare life of a forgotten working-class legend documented alongside the political events that shaped his existence and the world that followed.