The phenomenon of the autumn rose is not unknown in the morphology of murder: but, like all the flowers of evil, it blossoms only blackly. It was the great ambition of the Romantic poets to isolate a strain of horror that would rival those of Moloch-Dionysus antiquity, lust flowering hard by hate in “wanton rites . . . besmeared with blood.” But the springtide of Romanticism yielded only inferior blossoms: Byron’s incests, Coleridge’s ghouls, the fabricated monsters of the Shelleys—it is pretty tame stuff, when it is not actually ludicrous.
De Quincey, eschewing fiction, got farther: his writings on Charles Lloyd’s madness, or the orphans of Blentarn Ghyl, or his own opium-taking are more terrible than anything in the poets. And yet his studies of the summum malum of horror—murder itself—leave, I think, something to be desired. Among the English authors of his century, De Quincey was the master scribe of murder, but he had the misfortune to live before the appearance of the century’s master killer. It is as though Tacitus had lived before Nero, or Burke had died on the eve of the fall of the Bastille.
The discovery of the body of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel, early in the morning of August 31, 1888, seemed, to an untrained eye, to herald the appearance of something new under the sun, a previously unsuspected species of evil. “At a quarter to four o’clock” that morning, says the writer for The Times, “Police Constable Neill, 97 J, when in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel, came upon the body of a woman lying on a part of the footway.” On “stooping to raise her up in the belief that she was drunk, he discovered that her throat was cut almost from ear to ear.” Dr. Llewellyn, summoned from his surgery in Whitechapel Road, “discovered that, besides the gash across the throat,” the woman had suffered “terrible wounds in the abdomen.” The police ambulance came, and the body was taken to Bethnal Green Police Station, where a “further examination showed the horrible nature of the crime, there being other fearful cuts and gashes, any one of which was sufficient to cause death apart from the wounds across the throat.”
It was the first of a series of murders which, in their overripe malignity, threw those of the century’s other killers into the shade. The consummate figure had appeared; but there was no scholar to do justice to his deviltry.
To be sure, the time was ripe for his appearance. London had once been a city of parishes, of little cities within the big one, each with its own highly developed protocols of soul-care. In its pastoral prime, in the high mediaeval city, the parish bore responsibility for the souls of its flock; the phrase “lost lamb” was not yet a sentimentality. But an influx of newcomers overwhelmed the old social architecture, and by the nineteenth century it had broken down. It was replaced by a modern police system, one that cared less for saving souls than solving crimes; the wheels of its machines began to turn only after the sick soul had done something morbid. Nor did the police have any notion of the particular kinds of soul-sickness which were growing ever more prevalent in the metropolis. De Quincey, working imaginatively on opium, had compiled, in “Three Memorable Murders,” a kind of dossier on the nature of the mass killer, a résumé of his attributes; and Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, which appeared in 1886, had supplemented his findings with a wealth of new detail. But neither work had penetrated the consciousness of the police, or indeed of the public.
Anyone today who rummages about the files of Victorian newspapers will see that other artists were working in the same macabre line as the Whitechapel killer, and anticipated his methods. But their significance was overlooked, not only by the police, but by the English clerisy as a whole, by the writers, politicians, and civil servants who directed the intellectual gabble of the age. The clouds had long been gathering on the horizon; but with the exception, perhaps, of a few souls such as Mr. Ruskin, none had recognized in them the portents of the coming storm.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Weight of Incubus
unrecognized compulsions of my being
—Ralph Ellison
St. Giles’s in the 1860s was as vile as ever, and George Street in particular was “one of the worst neighborhoods in the metropolis.” Beasts of prey pursued their courses for the most part unmolested by authority, although on occasion they were brought to justice. In 1861 there was a notorious incident in George Street in which a cab-driver, according to The Times, attempted “to get a young woman who had been his fare into one of the brothels there.” He first “hocused” her—stupefied her with drugs—and afterwards stripped her naked. But in “consequence of the resistance offered by the person who was in charge of the house,” the cabman was “prevented from carrying out the worst part of his design,” and was captured, tried, and convicted.
Two years later, in April 1863, another young woman found herself in George Street. Emma Jackson was not a typical “unfortunate.” She had a home and a family; she lived with her mother, a shirt-maker, and her father, an unemployed clerk, in Berwick Street, Soho. Twenty-eight years old, she was said to be of a “quiet, peaceable” disposition, though given to occasional “fits of irregularity.” She would “remain at home for weeks working hard” at her shirts, one of her girlfriends recalled, and “conducting herself reputably,” but then she would “break out.” She would leave home for days together and “go with anybody.”
Around seven o’clock on the morning of Thursday, April 9, 1863, Emma Jackson was seen on the doorstep of No. 4 George Street. With her was a man in his late twenties, in a dark coat and dark trousers. He stood about five foot seven and was fair-haired; he wore a wideawake hat and had small, rather sunken eyes.
No. 4 George Street was one of those houses which “took in people at all hours, without inquiry as to their characters.” As Emma Jackson and her man came in, another couple was going out. The servant girl, Martha Curley, showed them to the back room on the first floor; the man gave her a shilling for her pains.
The couple hired the room for the morning only, but noon came and went with no sign of them. Sometime between four and five o’clock, Miss Curley told the under-servant, Catharine Mulind, to go upstairs and “find out why the parties had not left the room.” On entering it, Miss Mulind found it streaming with blood; the “bed was saturated and the walls spattered” with it. Emma Jackson lay on her back on the bed with the staring eyes of death. She “only had on her chemise,” which “was turned low below the breasts.” Her neck and hair were “a mass of congealed blood.” Her throat had been “frightfully cut,” and the internal jugular vein severed; she had suffered a number of puncture wounds, and on the back of her neck were “two large stabs running obliquely towards each other.” On her “left buttock was a mark of the grasp of two fingers,” and the window was open.
Miss Jackson’s father and brother were summoned to identify the body; and one of her girlfriends told the police that she had seen Emma that morning “in the company of a foreigner, who was having his boots cleaned at the corner of Greek Street* and Compton Street.”
The murder in George Street caused a momentary sensation, and was as quickly forgotten. The killer embodied a type already recognizable in Victorian England, but one that neither the police nor the writers for the press had learned to recognize. Confronted with the coroner’s opinion that “no intercourse had taken place,” a police detective today would ask himself whether the killer did not nurse a grievance of some kind, perhaps a sexual one. He would note that he wielded the knife with a ferocity out of proportion to the object merely of extinguishing life. He would ask himself what sort of hatred could have driven a man to such an act, and what sort of morbid satisfaction he might have derived from it. Mindful of the admonition that a man with a taste for “unnatural luxury” does not “relapse into inertia,” the detective would be quick to consult his own files and those of the police in other cities. Had the man struck before in another port? Was he likely to strike again? But in 1863, police detectives did not ask themselves these questions.
* Readers of the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater will remember
that Greek Street was one of De Quincey’s old haunts.
CHAPTER NINE
Unnatural Conjunctions
Tiresias being blind on earth sees more than all the rest in hell.
—Sir Thomas Browne
It must be admitted that, where murder is concerned, De Quincey himself was only intermittently a sensitive oracle. He overlooked entirely the nasty yet illuminative murder that took place in December 1827 at Oxford, in the shadow of the domes and spires of the university. It was a place De Quincey knew well, for as a young scholar he had passed several unsatisfactory years among its towers and cloisters, breathing “the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning.” He might, indeed, deplore the limitations of Oxford as an instructress of the young, but he would surely have acknowledged her virtues as a theater of evil. The commission of an act of the utmost savagery in a place where so much civilization had long been concentrated—a place practically devoted to softening the ruder excrescences of barbarism—makes for a collision of worlds, a smashup not only dramatic in itself, but one that throws into the sharpest relief the particular evil in question.
The day—it was Thursday, December 6, 1827—was fine; but as darkness came on, the temperature fell to freezing. Ann Priest, a young woman of twenty-four, was walking with a companion, Harriet Mitchell. Miss Priest was a girl of “great personal beauty,” but one who under a load of misfortune had yielded her maidenhood and sunk into the character of an unfortunate; her friend Miss Mitchell was, in this respect, not less compromised. They went down the High Street. Perhaps they passed Gibbon’s college, the indolence of whose fellows—the “monks of Magdalene,” steeped in port and prejudice—the historian of the Roman Empire had memorably deplored. At all events, they came eventually to Brasenose, the college of the “brazen nose,” its name derived from the bronze knocker that once adorned its portal. There they saw, through undraped windows, what must always be an agreeable sight on a December night, candle-lit merry-making in a warm room. A drinking party was under way in the rooms of one of the undergraduates of the college. The young collegians were jolly, and in an access of boisterousness they called out to the two young women, who promptly came to the window. Might not the good fellows give them some wine? Alas, replied a young man, there was no wine; but he should be happy to give them brandy, if they would drink it.
He was twenty years old, this hospitable young man, and he occupied a station in life widely different from that of the young women to whom he now ministered. His name was Houstonne John Radcliffe, and he had high connections amongst the gentry, baronetage, and clergy of England. His grandfather, the Venerable Houstonne Radcliffe, had been Archdeacon of Canterbury, a position of splendor in the English Church; and as if this were not enough, he had also been Subdean of Wells, Prebendary of Ely, and the master of a number of other richly beneficed livings. The young man’s father, the Rev. John Radcliffe, had been a fellow of Brasenose, and was now Rector of St. Anne’s Limehouse, a pretty Hawksmoor church in London. As for his mother, she was the former Miss Anne Leigh, cousin of Sir Roger Holt Leigh, Baronet. In July the young man’s sister, Anne, married the diplomat Sir John-Frederick Croft, Baronet, of Dodington, Kent, and the particular friend of Sir Joseph Banks, botanically illustrious.* A formidable family, young Houstonne’s, and highly respectable in clerico-gentry circles, with so many fat livings and eminent relations to their credit—the sort of people who would have been at home in the world of Trollope’s Dean Arabin and his Archdeacon Grantly.
The young women were pleased to accept the young gentleman’s offer of brandy. But the windows of the young man’s rooms were grated with iron, which prevented the passage of glass or bottle. Houstonne John Radcliffe, exhibiting something of the dexterity which had enabled his grandpapa to accumulate, in the rapacious race for Anglican patronage, so many opulent livings, ingeniously overcame the difficulty. He poured the brandy into a teapot, and stuck the spout between the bars. The young women applied their lips to the protrudant instrument and drank deeply of its precious elixir.
What happened afterwards is not clear, but at a quarter past midnight Miss Priest was found in Blue Boar Street, a narrow alley perhaps two hundred yards from the southwestern-most extremity of Brasenose, but rather closer to the still more august precincts of Christ Church, primus inter pares among the colleges of Oxford. A man named Hedges, a porter of All Souls, was coming off duty when he found Miss Priest “slumped unconscious in the doorway of his house” in Blue Boar Street. Various watchmen and bystanders offered their assistance, and there was talk of taking Miss Priest away to safety in a barrow; but in the end nothing was done.
Some time after “Tom,” the bell of Christ Church, struck two, a watchman named James Cox found Miss Priest bleeding. He and two other watchmen brought her to the nearest apothecary, who told them she must be taken to the hospital. The watchmen instead took her to her lodgings, where they left her in the care of her landlady, Mrs. Cox. Mrs. Cox, under the impression that the girl was not seriously hurt, “laid her on some blankets in front of the fire to sober up” and went to bed. It was only later, when she examined Miss Priest with a lantern, that she discovered that the girl “was bleeding heavily from her ‘woman’s parts.’”
Ann Priest died later that day of the injuries she had sustained in the night. She had been cruelly and unusually violated. De Quincey, had he interested himself in the case, might have extracted from it the last drop of terror. The girl was a sympathetic victim, for although poor and fallen, she was beautiful: after viewing her body at the inquest, the jurors, who had returned a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown, agreed that she was “the most handsome” woman “they had ever seen,” with the “most perfect symmetry and delicacy of limbs.” De Quincey, who candidly acknowledged his own opium addiction, was not one to shrink from scandal, but he might well have quailed before details which, even if relegated to the decent obscurity of a learned language, were shockingly obscene. The bruises to Miss Priest’s “left breast, which were believed to have been caused by pressure from four fingers and the thumb of a man’s hand,” he might have recorded with comparative equanimity; but the outrage to her womanhood was something else altogether.
The human fiend or fiends who mutilated Ann Priest were never punished. A house painter, John Williams, was charged with the crime, but the evidence against him was slight, and the grand jury declined to find a true bill. Houstonne John Radcliffe confessed to having given Miss Priest brandy on the last night of her life, and he was formally “sent down” by his college the following month, in January 1828, it being understood that he was free to return to Brasenose after the summer or “long” vacation. Houstonne, however, declined to avail himself of this privilege, and indeed he left Oxford before the decision was handed down. He never returned. He died, in the autumn of 1829, at the age of twenty-two, in the house of his aunt, Mrs. Pemberton, in Spring Garden Terrace, London. Curiously enough, his name is not inscribed in the pages of The Radcliffes of Leigh Lancashire, A Family Memorial. The reader who takes the trouble to examine that obscure volume will find the names of his two sisters duly set down, together with those of their clerical and diplomatic husbands—but he will search in vain for that of Houstonne; it is as though he had never been.
* John Radcliffe afterwards became Vicar of Dodington and Teynham, and likely delegated his duties as Rector of Limehouse to a curate.
CHAPTER TEN
Whig Murder
prosaical rogues
—Dr. Johnson
The Ripper had other forerunners. On May 6, 1838, Eliza Grimwood, who worked as a prostitute in the West End, was found murdered in a room at 2 Wellington Terrace, Lambeth. She had been stabbed twice in the neck and throat, and after her body “had been divested of the clothes in which it was enveloped,” as the writer for The Times put it, it was found that “she had received a severe wound a little above the nipple of the left breast,” and two other deep wounds in the abdomen, all of which “were no doubt
inflicted by a sharp-pointed instrument,” for her “outward dress and also her stays, which were made of a very strong material,” had been cut through.
On March 26, 1841, Elizabeth Winks, a woman of thirty-six with “very creditable connexions,” was found near death on the grass at the end of a lane in the London suburb of Norwood. It “was evident that the unfortunate woman had been brutally maltreated,” as her clothes “were dragged nearly over her head,” and there “were appearances of severe bruises about her person.” She afterwards died of her injuries. On January 18, 1843, the body of a woman, mutilated and burned, was fished out of the river Aire in Liverpool. On January 6, 1845, the body of a well-dressed woman in her early twenties, Emma Ashburnham, was discovered dead in the mud of the Thames near the steps of Waterloo Bridge; a “dreadful wound,” of “considerable depth,” had been inflicted upon her in the vicinity of the left hip-bone.
If none of these murders lives in the imagination of history, it is partly because they were recorded by inferior scribes. The “common reporter,” says a character in Arthur Machen’s novel The Inmost Light, “is a dull dog; every story he has to tell is spoilt in the telling. His idea of horror and what excites horror is so lamentably deficient.” At the same time, the crueler sorts of crimes were becoming more common; murders far more gruesome than Thurtell’s of Weare excited nothing like as much popular revulsion, and were instead shrugged off as a fact of metropolitan life.
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