'The World to an End Shall Come, In Eighteen Hundred and Eighty One'
'Mother Shipton' Prophecy Ends the World in 1881. Its Author Had Already Confessed to Writing It in 1873
The famous couplet was added to an 1862 reprint of the Yorkshire prophetess's sayings. The man who wrote it owned up in 1873. People still watched 1881 nervously.
What was said
“The world to an end shall come, In eighteen hundred and eighty one.”
— Charles Hindley (Brighton bookseller; added the couplet to his 1862 Mother Shipton reprint) · said 1862 · due 1881
1881 ended on December 31, like the years before it. The prophecy had been fabricated, and the fabricator had said so eight years earlier.
The fine print
The couplet does not appear in the older Mother Shipton texts. William H. Harrison's 1881 book Mother Shipton Investigated reports that Notes and Queries, April 26, 1873, printed Hindley's admission: 'Mr. Charles Hindley, of Brighton, in a letter to us, has made a clean breast of having fabricated the Prophecy quoted at page 450 of our last volume, with some ten others included in his reprint of a chap-book version.' The owner of the 1881 deadline is therefore Hindley's reprint, not the 16th-century prophetess. Date made: 1862, the reprint.
As of Oct 9, 2026
since it didn't happen
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