The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  In January 1868, while Whicher was hunting down witnesses in Wapping, the first instalment of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone appeared in All the Year Round. It was an immediate bestseller. 'It is a very curious story,' observed Dickens, 'wild and yet domestic.' The Moonstone, a founding fable of detective fiction, adopted many of the characteristics of the real investigation at Road: the country-house crime in which the criminal must be one of the inmates of the house; the secret lives led behind a veneer of propriety; the bumbling, pompous local policeman; the behaviour that seems to point to one thing yet turns out to point to another; the way that the innocent and the guilty alike act suspiciously, because all have something to hide; the scattering of 'real clues and pseudo clues', as a reviewer described them (the term 'red herring' - something that puts bloodhounds off the scent - was not used to mean 'pseudo clue' until 1884). In The Moonstone, as at Road Hill, the original source of the crime was a wrong done in a previous generation: the sins of the father were visited on the children, like a curse. These ideas were taken up by many of the detective novelists who succeeded Collins, as was the novel's air of uncertainty, what one of its characters calls 'the atmosphere of mystery and suspicion in which we are all living now'.

  The story diluted the horror of Road Hill: instead of a child-murder, there was a jewel theft; instead of bloodstains, splashes of paint. Yet the plot borrowed many specifics from the Road case: the stained and missing nightdress; the laundry book that proves its loss; the renowned detective policeman summoned to the countryside from London; a house-hold that shudders at his invasion; the indelicacy of a lower-class man accusing a middle-class girl. Most significantly, it translated Whicher into the prototypical detective hero, 'the celebrated Cuff'. ('To cuff', in contemporary slang, was to handcuff.) The seventeen-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson, when he read the novel that year, wrote to his mother: 'Isn't the detective prime?'

  Physically, Sergeant Cuff is a papery, hawkish old thing, quite unlike Whicher. In character, though, they are akin. Cuff is melancholy, sharp-witted, enigmatic, oblique - he has 'round-about' and 'underground' ways of working, by which he lures his sources into disclosing more than they intend. His eyes 'had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself'. Cuff is after unconscious secrets as well as facts that are deliberately withheld. He acts as a foil to the novel's sensation, a thinking machine to interpret the palpitations and pulsings of the other characters. By identifying with Cuff, readers could shield themselves from the thrills they sought - the story's untrammelled emotion, the tremble of danger. The fever of feeling was transmuted into the 'detective-fever' that burnt in the novel's characters and its readers, a compulsion to solve the riddle. In this way the detective novel tamed the sensation novel, caging the emotional wildness in an elegant, formulaic structure. There was madness, but it was mastered by method. It was Detective Sergeant Cuff who made The Moonstone a new kind of book.

  Yet Cuff, unlike the detectives he inspired, gets the solution wrong: 'I own that I made a mess of it,' he says. He is mistaken in believing that the criminal is the daughter of the house - the secretive, 'devilish self-willed', 'odd and wild' Miss Rachel. She turns out to be more noble than his policeman's nature can understand. In so far as it reflected the events at Road Hill, the novel ignored the official solution - Constance Kent's guilt - and instead gave voice to the unease that still surrounded the story. It aired the notions of somnambulism, unconscious deeds, double selves that the Road case had aroused, the dizzying whirl of perspectives that had been brought to bear upon the investigation. The solution Collins gave to the mystery of the moonstone was that the odd and wild Miss Rachel had drawn suspicion to herself in order to protect someone else.

  In 1927 T.S. Eliot compared The Moonstone, favourably, to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle:

  The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element . . . the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.

  In his lifetime, Collins was often dismissed as a master of plot with little aptitude for depicting his characters' interior lives. By comparison with novelists such as George Eliot, he built his stories from the outside rather than from within. Henry James characterised them as 'monuments of mosaic art', then amended this: 'They are not so much works of art,' he said, 'as works of science.'

  In May 1866 Samuel Kent renewed his plea to the Home Office to retire on his full salary, which had risen to PS500 when he completed thirty years' service that April. Since Saville's death, he explained in his letter, the family had experienced 'indescribable pain and anguish greatly aggravated by the disclosures which the penitence of his daughter Constance ultimately constrained her to make'. His attempts to find the murderer and shield his family, he said, had left him in debt. The health of his second wife was 'entirely shattered' - Mrs Kent was losing her sight and had fallen prey to a 'hopeless and helpless paralysis', so he had to nurse her and tend to their four young children.

  In August, to his dismay, the Home Office granted Samuel a pension of PS250, half of what he had requested but the maximum the rules allowed. He desperately backtracked, begging to withdraw his resignation - he would continue working, he said; he had not intended to resign, only to enquire into the possibility; he could not manage on so little money. The Home Office questioned whether he was fit to discharge his duties. Yes, he replied at the end of August: he no longer needed to nurse his wife - Mary Kent, nee Pratt, had died earlier in the month aged forty-six, of congestion of the lungs.

  The Home Office allowed Samuel to continue as a sub-inspector. That summer he was awarded PS350 damages by the Edinburgh Daily News for an article that had portrayed his second wife as common and cruel. With the four surviving children of his second marriage - Mary Amelia, Eveline, Acland,Florence - Samuel went north to the small Welsh town of Denbigh, where he employed an Australian governess and two other servants. His eldest daughters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, moved to London together. William also headed for the capital city, with the PS1,000 inheritance he had secured on his twenty-first birthday in July.

  Through the winter of 1867, William took evening classes at King's College, where he studied the 'new science' being forged by Darwin and others. William's passion was microscopy, and by the end of the year he had been elected a Fellow of the Microscopical Society. The biologist Thomas Huxley, one of the most influential scientists of his time, became William's sponsor. He encouraged the young man to investigate infusoria, single-celled water bacteria visible only through a magnifying lens.

  Huxley was known as 'Darwin's bulldog' for his ardent advocacy of the natural historian's ideas. He gave the name 'retrospective prophecy' to the process of imagining the past by observing the present. A natural historian sought to see into the past as a prophet saw into the future - 'Would that there were such a word as 'backteller'!' said Huxley. In a lecture to working men in 1868, he took the piece of chalk he was holding as the starting point for an account of the geological history of the earth. 'A small beginning,' he concluded, 'has led us to a great ending.' From the tiny, a world could unfold.

  William Kent had a furious curiosity about little things, a conviction that they held the big secrets. Over the next five years he pursued his calling at the Cambridge Zoological Museum, then at the invertebrate collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, and then at the zoology department of the British Museum, where his salary rose above PS300. Here he fell for corals - he declared himself 'smitten with them'. Corals are small, soft marine animals whose limestone skeletons create reefs in tropical seas. Through their 'agency', in William's words, 'new islands and countries are made to rise from the bed of the trackless ocean' - they connected zoology and geology, the quick and th
e dead.

  Charles Dickens died in 1870, leaving an unfinished work The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By dint of its author's death, this novel became the purest kind of murder story, the kind whose tension was never dissolved. 'Alone, perhaps, among detective-story writers, he never lived to destroy his mystery,' wrote G.K. Chesterton. 'Edwin Drood may or may not have really died; but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our real detective liveth and shall appear in the latter days of the earth. For a finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.'

  In 1865 Dickens, like many others, had been forced to question his belief that Samuel Kent and Elizabeth Gough had committed the Road Hill murder. As if revisiting the case, his last novel featured a brother and sister who recall Constance and William Kent. The orphaned and exotic Helena and Neville Landless frequently ran away from their unhappy home. 'Nothing in our misery ever subdued her,' Neville says of his sister, 'though it often cowed me. When we ran away . . . the flight was always of her planning and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it off.' Helena may have been the leader, but Neville admits to having a 'misshapen young mind' and murderous desires. He matches his sister in loathing and in cunning: 'I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful.'

  Dickens depicted the two as dark, foreign creatures, the embodiment of suspense. They are 'slender, supple, quick of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or a bound'.

  In January 1872 Samuel Kent fell seriously ill with liver disease and William took the train up to Wales. From his father's bedside he wrote a letter to his supervisor at the British Museum, who had lent him PS5 for the trip: 'You can imagine how thankful I am to have the opportunity to stay with him for a few days there being so many little things I can do to contribute to his comfort.' On 5 February he wrote in another letter: 'All is over! In the sorrow in which we are all plunged you will I am sure excuse my absence for a few more days.' Samuel was buried next to his second wife at Llangollen. He left his money to the children of his second marriage, to be held in trust until they reached the age of twenty-one. William and the proprietor of the Manchester Guardian - presumably a friend of the family - were joint executors.

  Four months after his father's death, William married Elizabeth Bennett, a barrister's daughter of twenty-two, and moved to Stoke Newington. At William's request, his new father-in-law petitioned the government for Constance's release, but without success. In 1873 William was appointed resident biologist at the Brighton Aquarium, which had opened the previous year, a spectacular gothic arcade sunk into the promenade by the pier. He and Elizabeth took up residence at Upper Rock Gardens, a Regency terrace near the seafront.

  The public craze for aquaria provided scientists with unprecedented opportunities for studying live sea creatures, but William claimed that the commercial backers of the Brighton venture thought a resident naturalist 'an unnecessary extravagance', and were hostile towards him. He fell out with his colleagues as well. He accused one of his juniors of undermining him, and then was himself accused of ungentlemanly conduct by a fellow researcher. The pair had witnessed the aquarium's two octopuses copulating, and agreed to write a joint paper on the subject. When some of William's observations appeared in a letter to The Time, the colleague accused him of duplicity. William indignantly resigned his post. He had a high-handed, insensitive streak, a side-effect of the sometimes maniacal passion with which he approached his work.

  The next year William was appointed curator and naturalist at the new Manchester Aquarium. He rebuilt the tanks, fitted blinds to block out glare, installed a system to circulate the water and solved the problem of how to keep large seaweeds alive in artificial conditions. His official guidebook to the creatures in his care, published in 1875, conjured up an underwater world of great range and drama, in which he observed the victims and the predators alike with unflinching yet tender fascination. He wrote of the 'brilliant expressive eyes' of the smooth blenny in tank 13, a 'brave little knight' who protected his blenny 'wives'; of the 'remarkably pugnacious' spider crab in tank 6, who tore the limbs off his brother crabs; and of the spotted dogfish in tank 10, whose second eyelid during the day remained 'entirely closed over the true eye. When darkness has fully set in, this diaphragm is completely retracted, leaving the eyeball free and gleaming.'

  At the Manchester Aquarium, William discovered that seahorses used sound to communicate:

  The knowledge of this remarkable circumstance was arrived at in the following manner. Early last May, the majority of the specimens of the fine collection of these singular little fish were brought to England from the Mediterranean . . . Among them were several examples remarkable at the time, for the brightness of their colours, some being bright red, others pale pink, yellow, almost pure white . . . A few of these were kept by the writer for some days in a private room, to permit the opportunity of a hurried coloured sketch. An ordinary inverted bellglass was devoted to their reception, while the individuals 'sitting for their likeness' were for a short time isolated in a still smaller glass receptacle. During one of these occasions a sharp little snapping noise was heard at short and even intervals, to proceed from the larger vase on a side table, and which was immediately afterwards responded to in a similar manner from the smaller one close at hand. Surprise and admiration was intense on discovering that it proceeded from the mouth of the usually regarded dumb little fish, and closer inspection elicited that the sound was produced by a complex muscular contraction and sudden expansion of the lower jaw.

  In 1875 William's wife, Elizabeth, died suddenly aged twenty-five, of an obstruction of the bowel. Within a year he married again - his second wife was Mary Ann Livesey, a handsome, square-faced woman of thirty - and moved to London to become curator and naturalist of the new Royal Aquarium, a magnificent construction opposite the Palace of Westminster. Over the next few years William won a reputation as an expert in marine biology. In 1882 he published the third and last volume of his nine-hundred-page A Manual of the Infusoria, with fifty of his own illustrations of the microscopic water creatures. At 87 St Stephen's Avenue, Shepherd's Bush, his wife was delivered that May of a stillborn boy.

  Jack and Charlotte Whicher moved south of the river in about 1880, to a small terrace on the brow of Lavender Hill, Battersea. This district, a mile from Westminster, was known for its market gardens, like the village in which Whicher was raised, but the flowerbeds and nurseries were disappearing under rows of suburban houses. The Whichers' house, 1 Cumberland Villas, had a substantial garden to the rear - the biggest in the block - with views down to the railway. From January 1881, horse-drawn trams rattled along the road in front of the house. Directly opposite, a Mr Merryweather ran a nursery garden, the last to survive on a hill that only a few years earlier had been famous for its fields of lavender.

  In the summer of 1881 Whicher fell ill with gastritis and a stomach ulcer, and on 29 June, after his stomach wall was perforated, he died, aged sixty-six. His ward Amy Gray, now a twenty-five-year-old milliner, was at the deathbed; on the death certificate she was registered as his niece. Whicher left Amy PS150 in his will, and a gold Swiss watch. He left PS100 to Emma Sangways, the other girl whom he and Charlotte had looked after, and PS300 to his niece Sarah Holliwell. He bequeathed PS150, a gold watch and chain and a signet ring to a friend called John Potter, a surveyor's clerk who worked in Whitehall Place, and PS100 to his friend and proteegee Dolly Williamson, now Chief Superintendent of Scotland Yard. These two were appointed executors of the will. The remain
der of his estate - about PS700 - went to his wife.

  A three-sentence obituary of Jonathan Whicher appeared in the Police Gazette. He had been almost forgotten. For all the brilliance with which he investigated the Road Hill murder, Whicher had been powerless to give the public the certainty that they craved or to deliver them from the evils that he saw. He was punished for his failure. From now on, the detective heroes of England would be found only in the realm of fiction.*

  After Jack's death, Charlotte moved to the house of John Potter in Saunders Road, Notting Hill. Amy Gray and Emma Sangways went with her. Charlotte died in January 1883, at the age of sixty-nine, leaving the bulk of her assets to Amy and Emma. She appointed Dolly Williamson the sole executor of her will.

  Williamson was 'a quiet, unpretending, middle-aged man', recalled the police historian and prison governor Major Arthur Griffiths, 'who walked leisurely along Whitehall, balancing a hat that was a little large for him loosely on his head, and often with a sprig of a leaf or flower between his lips. He was by nature very reticent; no outsider could win from him any details of the many big things he had 'put through'. His talk, for choice, was about gardening, for which he had a perfect passion; and his blooms were famous in the neighbourhood where he spent his unofficial hours.'

  The Chief Superintendent was known as 'the Philosopher' for his abstracted, intellectual manner, and was said to direct operations from his desk as if playing a game of chess. A colleague described him as 'A Scot, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, loyal, hardworking, persevering, phlegmatic, obstinate, unenthusiastic, courageous, always having his own opinion, never afraid to express it, slow to grasp a new idea, doubtful of its efficacy, seeing its disadvantages rather than its advantages, but withal so clear-headed, and so honest, and kind-hearted to a fault, he was a most upright and valuable public servant.' Williamson was the antithesis of Whicher's early partner Charley Field, who revelled in his proximity to a criminal underworld. These two men bracketed Whicher, defined the range of what a Victorian detective could be. Field - who by the 1870s was reduced almost to poverty - recalled the daredevil thief-takers of the eighteenth century, while Williamson gestured forward to the careful commanders of the twentieth.