Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  A crowd had by this time gathered, and Turner’s “dreadful annunciation” was received as the signal for action. The bystanders, driven, De Quincey says, by a “passionate enthusiasm,” rose as one man to catch “the wolfish dog in the high noon and carnival of his bloody revels—in the very centre of his own shambles.”

  The door of the King’s Arms and the cellar flap were instantly forced, and the crowd rushed in. Mr. Williamson lay in a pool of spreading blood in the basement, beside the stairs that led to the tap room. His head had been beaten bloody; his throat had been cut; and part of his hand had been hacked away. The body of his wife was found in the kitchen; her throat, too, had been cut, and her skull broken. Not far from her lay Bridget Harrington. Her labors were complete: her throat had been cut to the bone. Only the grandchild, the young Kitty Stillwell, was yet living—she had slept through the horror.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Subjective Correlative

  The phantasms themselves do not believe, or at least affect disbelief, in their own reality, and laughingly style themselves delirium, or hallucination.

  —D. S. Merezhkovsky

  De Quincey was far from being a scrupulous historian of murder. His carelessness in the relation of facts drew upon him the rebuke of William Roughead, who said that he resembled the character in Scott’s The Antiquary, Sir Arthur Wardour, who disdained a “pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact,” a “tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory. . . .”

  Yet much as one may deplore De Quincey’s infidelities to fact, his account of the Wapping murders remains the most insightful thing ever to have been written about them. To be sure, he lazily accepted the official version of the case, which held that the murders had been committed by one John Williams, a twenty-seven-year-old sailor. In their meticulous study, The Maul and the Pear Tree, P. D. James and T. A. Critchley conclude that Williams was almost certainly not the killer, though he may have been one of the killer’s accomplices. They finger instead a sailor from Danzig, William Ablass, “Long Billy,” who, however, was never brought to trial. Nor indeed did Williams himself have his day in court: not long after his arrest, he was found dead in his cell in Coldbath Fields Prison, “suspended by the neck from an iron bar which crossed the cell.”

  It is unlikely that the identity of the killer will ever be known with certainty, but whoever he was, De Quincey saw more deeply into the nature of his character than any of his contemporaries. Nor, but for De Quincey’s guidance, could we who study the case today comprehend just why these particular murders should have been felt, at the time, to be so uniquely and preternaturally appalling. For the Wapping murders do not affect us in the way they did De Quincey and his contemporaries. Not only are they remote from us in time, they have no master-image of grotesquerie capable of closing up the temporal gap, no talisman in which the macabre essence of the thing is efficiently concentrated—no gory head fished up from the depths of a London canal, no loin of pork feasted upon by one who had just beaten a man’s brains out in an adjacent lane.

  The Wapping murders are no less at a disadvantage in their mise-en-scène. Try as I might to worm my way into the evil spirit of that time and place, I am not so immediately, viscerally appalled by the atmosphere as I am, say, by that of such a killing as Julia Wallace’s, in the hag-ridden darkness of Depression-era Liverpool, with its attendant circumstances of rain-slick streets, of grime and petrol exhaust, of a solitary telephone booth and a mysterious caller, “R. M. Qualtrough,” of 25 Menlove Gardens East. In the Wallace murder, as in those committed by Christie in 10 Rillington Place, I find a quality of horror very nearly related to that which I have been prepared to feel by books like Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, with their aroma of slop pails, greasy cookery, and coal fires burning in sordid lodgings. The bleakness of the Wallace and Christie murders is deepened for me by the police photographs of the crime scenes, which distill their peculiar nausea more effectually than any prose writer can. The image of the soiled water closet in the Wallaces’ house at 29 Wolverton Street, with the single clot of blood upon the lavatory, is as harrowing as anything in the purely literary canon of horror.

  Not even De Quincey can rival a mid-twentieth-century crime-scene photographer, painting darkly with light; but sketching merely with words, he gets closer to the heart of the Wapping horrors than his coevals Coleridge and Southey, who were as deeply shocked by them. To be sure, it was hardly a feat of intellect, on De Quincey’s part, to see that the horror of the killings was heightened by the want of adequate motive. T. S. Eliot said that Hamlet was an artistic failure because Shakespeare found no means of expressing the particular emotional complexion of the hero dramatically, in scenes and incidents: the play lacked what Eliot called an “objective correlative,” a “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” which would be the external “formula” of Hamlet’s inward despair. In the Wapping murders, the case is reversed. The outward, objective expression of the killer’s state of mind, the external “formula,” couldn’t be clearer—seven bodies savagely done to death. It is the subjective correlative that is lacking: what were the passions that found release, that found fulfillment, in such a blood-letting?

  Material gain was perhaps the ostensible motive for the Wapping murders; but it was obvious to De Quincey that no mere desire for money could account for the savagery of the slayings. Nor were the murders in any conventional sense crimes of passion. A spurned and brain-sick lover might indeed have sought to avenge himself on the young and reputedly pretty Celia Marr through a murderous vendetta. Yet the same erotic motive could hardly have induced him to murder, with a no less intense ferocity, Mr. and Mrs. Williamson, a couple past fifty, and their middle-aged serving-woman.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Wolf’s Paw

  But are they really superstitions? I see these preferences rather as denoting a kind of wisdom which savage races practised spontaneously and the rejection of which, by the modern world, is the real madness.

  —Claude Lévi-Strauss

  De Quincey’s insight into the deeper evil of the Wapping murders began with his perception of their close resemblance to a class of evils found in myth and fairytale—that is to say, to real evils, but evils described in a language that had long since come to seem childish and fantastic. The folk culture on which De Quincey drew was concerned to account for what were known as “bestial” acts, acts so abhorrent they could be explained only on the supposition that the perpetrators had been supernaturally transformed into (or taken possession by) beasts.

  To a modern reader it soon becomes evident that this folklore of bestialism was concerned primarily with offenses which we today should classify as crimes of sexual deviancy, acts of brutal cruelty with an under-flavor of warped sensuality. Thus David Rose and Hugh Evans were hanged at Guildford, in April 1804, for the “bestial” crime of having cut the face of a young woman, Elizabeth Palmer, after Evans said to her, “Damn you, Miss Palmer, I’ll spoil your pretty face for you.” The Victorian cleric Sabine Baring-Gould was among the first English scholars to see that the old legends were naïve attempts to understand what was in fact a form of mental illness, a pathology which brought its sufferers not merely to ravish or kill their victims, but to defile them in cruel and grotesque ways.

  Baring-Gould belonged to a now virtually extinct race of Anglican clerics, cultivated and eccentric, who under the mild yoke of their pastoral labors found leisure to pursue such curious scholarship as beguiled their fancy.* There was the vicar who composed a book on the flowers in Shakespeare, with a great show of horticultural learning, and another who wrote a voluminous account of the treatment of the naked female in antiquity, in which a good deal of prurient erudition is expended on the art of Zeuxis and Praxiteles, the ring of Gyges, the gymnastic exertions of the Spartan girlhood, and the lascivious manners of the Corinthian hetairai. Baring-Gould’s own strain of inquisitiveness led him to attem
pt to thread the labyrinth of another disciplina arcani, and in his 1865 Book of Were-Wolves he delved into the stories of such sick souls as Jacques Roulet (the “werewolf of Angers”) and Jean Grenier (the “French wolf boy”), early serial killers who were thought to have been supernaturally transformed into beasts when they committed their crimes.

  What startled Baring-Gould was less the superstitious explanations of the various murders and disappearances than the fact that such explanations should still have been current in the France of the 1860s. He described how, in a provincial village in Poitou-Charentes, the Mayor warned him against crossing a certain stretch of land near Champigny-le-Sec after dark: “Monsieur can never go back tonight across the flats, because of the—the . . . the loups-garoux (werewolves).”

  A little reflection, however, convinced Baring-Gould that a normal human being might indeed prefer, if only unconsciously, to overlook the brutal facts of certain kinds of crimes, and to draw over them a supernatural veil of lycanthropy, witchcraft, or vampirism. He saw that, as a species, human beings do not like too much reality: when facts make us uncomfortable, we seek refuge in the quasi-truths of myth. Child-murder, torture, cannibalism—the morbidities in question were, Baring-Gould saw, so “ghastly and revolting” that it was only natural that people should have been “disposed to regard as a myth that which the feared investigation might prove a reality.”†

  De Quincey himself had, of course, no belief in the actual transmogrification of men into beasts: he used the old language of bestiality figuratively and imaginatively, to describe evils about which the educated Englishman of his day was considerably more in the dark than the unlettered French peasant. The Englishman was between two worlds: he had lost touch with all that was true in the old myths (to which the peasant still clung), but he had not yet attained the lucidity of modern science. De Quincey sought to enlighten him: he used the archaic language of myth to understand abnormalities which were inexpressible in the conventional language of his day; and he did so with an acuity of insight that anticipated that of the modern scientific investigator.

  * Among his other accomplishments, Rev. Baring-Gould composed the words of the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” He also, unusually for one of his class in that age, engaged himself to marry the daughter of a mill hand from the West Riding of Yorkshire. Grace Taylor was sent to York for two years to acquire genteel manners, and in 1868 the couple were married in Wakefield. The marriage was happy.

  † The case of Andreas Bichel, the Bavarian Mädchenshclächter (girl-butcher), was characteristic of those of Baring-Gould’s volume. Bichel, he writes, “enticed young women into his house, under the pretence that he was possessed of a magic mirror, in which he would show them their future husbands; when he had them in his power he bound their hands behind their backs, and stunned them with a blow. He then despoiled them of their clothes. . . .” A catalogue of reputed beast-men would include Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century child murderer; Peter Stumpp, the sixteenth-century Rhenish killer known as the “Werewolf of Bedburg”; Jacques Rollet, burned at the stake as a loup-garou in the Place de Grève in 1577; Thiess of Kaltenbrun; the so-called “werewolfs” of Châlons, Dole, and Auvergne; Martin Dumollard, the “vampire of Lyon”; and Manuel Romasanta, the “werewolf of Allariz” in Spanish Galicia.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tory Murder

  Like most odd and old ideas, it has much truth.

  —Bagehot

  A “bloodhound,” a “wolfish dog,” a fiend with a “tiger’s heart”—so De Quincey paints the Wapping murderer, whom he took to be the sailor Williams. He has it on good authority, he says, that Williams’s hair resembled that of a tiger, being “of the most extraordinary and vivid colour,—viz. bright yellow, something between an orange and a lemon colour.” The man’s hair was an outward sign of his inward “tiger character,” as was also his sinister complexion, which “wore at all times a bloodless ghastly pallor.”

  It is true that this picture of Williams, with his “cadaverous ghastliness,” his “extraordinary hair,” and his “glazed eyes,” has only the slenderest connection to ascertainable fact.* But like the opium-inspired meditations of the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, it is not without its kernel of truth. As much as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who would identify the pathology of “lust-murder” in his 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, De Quincey is alive to the erotic element in such crimes. Circumstances, he said, might oblige Williams to hurry his killings, but in “a murder of pure voluptuousness” he would take his time, in order to revel in the “unnatural luxury” of the slaughter, and to satisfy his “wolfish craving for bloodshed.” De Quincey used words like “luxury” and “voluptuousness” in their strictly concupiscent sense: he meant to finger the misdirected desires that led the killer to seek his highest sensual gratifications in killing. The killer’s “wolfish” instincts are, for De Quincey, a form of debauched Eros, for he seeks not to caress and adore the flesh, but to destroy it.

  The Wapping slaughterer was at once a wolf and an aesthete: De Quincey says of the slaughter of the Marrs that it was the “début” of an “artist.” He compares the killer to a malignant painter, the dark cousin of Titian, Rubens, and van Dyck. Like them, the wolf of Wapping has diverted a portion of his natural passion away from its natural outlet. The artist, according to Plato, has been endowed by the Muses with the supreme creative gift of Eros, but only on condition that he devote the first fruits of its power not to mundane sexual commerce, but to art, to poetic creation. De Quincey’s murderous man is a morbid variation of the type, his own fund of erotic power being held in trust not, as it were, for the Muses, but for the devil.

  As much as Ibsen, De Quincey knew that the trolls and goblins of myth are real, only, like Ibsen, he saw that they are not (as our ancestors supposed) outside of us, but inside. The old folk languages, however crude they might have been, were for his purposes superior to the ready-made idioms of his own day. The English prose of his time was formed largely on the models of eighteenth-century writers; and the eighteenth-century mind, if it was, as T. S. Eliot said, a mature one, was also, where the deeper springs of human passion are concerned, a shallow one. Compared to De Quincey’s portrait of Williams, Gibbon’s sketch of Commodus, the depraved tyrant “with an insatiate thirst of human blood,” is psychologically naïve: as instruments with which to probe the deeper recesses of mind and feeling, Gibbon’s enlightened and neo-classical vocabularies are less supple than De Quincey’s archaic-mythical ones.

  As both a prose-writer and an historian of murder, De Quincey is a disciple of his hero, Edmund Burke: he uses the resources of the past to understand the complexities of the present. In this he resembles his contemporary Charles Lamb, who pillaged the old authors to form a prose “villainously pranked” with “antique modes and phrases,” but only in order that he might convey states of mind wholly modern. In the same way, De Quincey, who is closer in spirit to the unreformed prose masters who wrote before Swift than he is to Gibbon and Dr. Johnson, makes no fetish of the archaic, is always a modern ancient; and his antiquated style is the bearer of truths which are even now not obsolete.

  De Quincey is the Tory historian of murder; but he wrote in an age of triumphant Whiggism, and was not understood. Nowhere is his insight into the erotically deformed killer more penetrating than when he argues that his malady is not acute but chronic. “All perils, specially malignant,” he says, “are recurrent.” The man with a taste for “unnatural luxury” does not “relapse into inertia”: he continues to seek satisfactions which are, for him, the only “condiment” capable of “seasoning the insipid monotonies of daily life.”

  De Quincey warned that the sexually sullen man, nursing an erotic grudge against the world, would not be content to strike once: if he got the chance, he would strike again and again. He further believed that there would be more such men in the future. He lamented the “gathering agitation of our present English life,” with its “fierce condition of
eternal hurry”: it was productive of “so chaotic a tumult” that the “eye of the calmest observer” was troubled. Modernity was an acid, one that rapidly corroded customs and restraints that in the past had done something to restrain the sick man’s more vicious impulses. At the same time, the monster-cities of the modern world gave such a soul a new habitat in which to hunt: he found a protective coloration in the anonymity of the urban crowd, with which he could blend himself more easily than his counterparts in less congested ages.

  De Quincey was a prophet; but like those of Cassandra, his prophecies were not believed. The evil that was not comprehended could not be rooted out; it flourished unnoticed, and like an unpruned weed assumed ever more rankly luxuriant forms. At last, a quarter of a century after De Quincey’s death, it assumed a form so malignant that it could no longer be overlooked.

  * De Quincey drew extensively on the Wapping murders in his 1838 tale The Avenger, which describes a mass-murderer whose “human tiger-passion” rages “unchained” in a German city in 1816; but the most original insights of “Three Memorable Murders” are in the story sacrificed to the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Autumn Rose

  And not far from me is the place where the Tauric altar of the quivered Goddess is fed with dreadful slaughter.

  —Ovid

  It sometimes happens that a cultural form reaches its perfection only at the end of the generative season, when it blossoms with a fragrance which, amid so many presages of decay, seems sweeter than the perfumes of the prime. Such was the philosophy of Plato, the last expression of the pure original genius of Hellas before its extinguishment. Such was the antique virtue of Brutus and Cato as it flowered in a degenerate age of Caesarian dictatorship, the final vestige of the old republicanism of Rome before it succumbed to the corruptions of empire. Such, too, was that last and sweetest fruit of English Gothic art, the chapel of the King’s College, Cambridge, crowned with pinnacles that asserted the pathos of a declining mediaevalism in the very dawn of English Renaissance.