The excursion steamer Princess Alice collided with the cargo ship Bywell Castle near Woolwich in September 1878. The steamer broke apart and sank in a heavily polluted section of the River Thames. More than 600 people died in Britain's deadliest inland-water shipping disaster.

William McGonagall commemorated the event in The Collision in the English Channel, commonly associated with his body of disaster verse, while numerous street ballads mourned the victims. The wreck gave popular poetry an urban maritime tragedy occurring within the capital itself.