We travel back in time to the 1860s today - courtesy of Marjorie Hewitt, who unearthed among her godmother's belongings a pristine copy of The York Herald, dated February 4, 1860.

Mrs Hewitt lives in Surrey, and her godmother was from Huddersfield. But her godmother's husband, Stephen Squire-Chrispin, was from Sheriff Hutton, which is presumably how the newspaper came into the family's possession.

In those days, the Herald was a fat broadsheet, printed on high-quality paper.

News then was a more leisurely affair than today.

The front page consisted entirely of classified adverts - in which, for example: "Mr William Burnett begs most respectfully to announce that he has received authority from the Executors acting under the Will of Mr Richard Warneford, late of Nether Poppleton, deceased, to sell by public auction valuable farming stock."

Inside, on the news pages, things got more racy. Under the headline "Child murder at Pickering: committal of the mother to York Castle," the horrified reader discovers that: "A few days ago a rumour got into circulation in the town of Pickering that a young woman of the name of Spence had been delivered of a child, and that she had made away with it in some way or other."

It's a quietly tragic tale in which, eventually, the body of a baby girl is found "in the cesspool of a privy, behind a cluster of cottages called the Wasp Nest".

The York Herald ranged wider afield in its search for news than simply the area around York. Readers learned of a suspected murder near Wolverhampton; the "extensive robbery of a jeweller's shop" at Sunderland; and the "manslaughter of a child by its father at Barnsley".

Photographs weren't a priority for newspapers in 1860. The pages of this venerable copy of the Herald consist entirely of dense print.

To illustrate today's Yesterday Once More, therefore, and to give you a feel for what York looked like in those days, we have turned to the City of York Council's excellent Imagine York archive - visit www.imagineyork.co.uk. All the photos here date from the 1860s. They show, in no particular order, carriages and carts standing on a cobbled Blossom Street; Burton Stone Windmill in Burton Stone Lane; two Victorian gentlemen looking at the Minster across the rooftops from Monk Bar; and a three-horsepower cart standing in Lawrence Street.