by Sarah Wise
These arguments notwithstanding, it is possible to piece together a plausible explanation for what instinct urges: that the author of Fagin’s trial scene had reported the trial of Bishop, Williams, and May. Firstly, there is no need to search for evidence that Dickens had any official connection with the Times or with any other publication, for that matter: it is perfectly conceivable that “The Most Deathlike Silence” paragraphs were the work of a “penny-a-line” freelancer syndicating his work to more than one newspaper. “The Most Deathlike Silence” appeared first in the Times of Saturday (morning), 3 December, and then made its way into the Globe and Traveller of Saturday evening, 3 December, then the Sunday Times, the Observer, and the Weekly Dispatch, all of Sunday the fourth, and it then filtered down to the broadsheet by Fairburn and another published by one J. Kiernan, called The Execution of Bishop and Williams for the Horrid and Inhuman Murder of the Italian Boy. Pierce Egan’s own pamphlet, which went on sale on Tuesday, 6 December, also reproduced the passages; Egan’s effort simply grafted onto a foreword and afterword some underworld slang (“flash”) words—his literary party trick.
There is anecdotal evidence that as early as the age of fourteen, Charles Dickens was attempting to sell penny-a-line journalism that he had produced on a speculative basis. Samuel Carter Hall, in his 1883 memoirs, Retrospect of a Long Life, recalls the boy calling at the office of the newspaper the British Press, where Hall worked alongside Dickens’s father, John. Charles would drop off his own reports of news that, claimed Hall, had escaped the attention of the regular reporters of the British Press.
John Dickens had embarked on his journalistic career in the mid-1820s. He was working as a shorthand writer and reporter when the British Press ceased publication in the autumn of 1826; he subsequently appears to have joined the parliamentary staff of the Morning Herald and then the Mirror of Parliament, a rival to Hansard (the official published record of the proceedings in the Houses of Parliament), set up in 1828 by John Dickens’s brother-in-law, John Henry Barrow, the man with the Times connections. Another maternal uncle, Edward Barrow, was a newspaper reporter and may also have offered a helping hand to the impecunious John Dickens. Charles Dickens, meanwhile, left school in 1827, aged fifteen, and worked as a lawyer’s clerk for about two years and at seventeen or eighteen began work as a freelance shorthand reporter, renting an office at 5 Bell Yard, close by the court of Doctors Commons, where he obtained most but not all his work; he did not relinquish this office until April 1832. By some point in 1831, Charles was also working for the Mirror of Parliament, alongside his uncle and father. (I have followed W. J. Carlton’s attempted chronology of Dickens’s early career in Charles Dickens: Shorthand Writer [1926].)
Precise dates and employers (and knowledge of which stints of moonlighting overlapped with which bouts of more established, regular employment) are maddeningly hard to come by for Charles Dickens’s very early career, and even W. J. Carlton found himself flummoxed when attempting a definitive chronology—a likely result of Dickens’s own attempts to make murky his early years. Dickens rarely spoke or wrote about his pre-1834 career—1834 being the year in which he gained a full-time staff position (as parliamentary reporter) on a noteworthy publication (the Morning Chronicle), at a salary of five guineas a week. Presumably in reply to a specific inquiry from novelist and friend Wilkie Collins, Dickens wrote, on 6 June 1856, an uncharacteristically imprecise and unmistakably disdainful summary of his early working life: “I was put in the office of a solicitor, a friend of my father’s, and didn’t much like it; and after a couple of years (as well as I can remember) applied myself with a celestial or diabolical energy to the study of such things as would qualify me to be a first-rate parliamentary reporter.… I made my debut in the Gallery (at about 18, I suppose) engaged on a voluminous publication no longer in existence called The Mirror of Parliament. When the Morning Chronicle was purchased by Sir John Easthope and acquired a large circulation, I was engaged there, and I remained there until I found myself in a condition to relinquish that part of my labours. I left the reputation behind me of being the best and most rapid reporter ever known, and could do anything in that way under any sort of circumstances, and often did” (quoted in Carlton’s Charles Dickens: Shorthand Writer).
“[He] was extremely sensitive as to the possibility of any rubbish being given to the public in the form of ‘early writings’…” wrote Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth to H. G. Kitton, who was compiling a memorial volume of tributes to Dickens, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil. Hogarth recalled an incident when a female friend from Dickens’s late adolescence proudly presented the now famous novelist with the manuscript of a play he had written in 1833. “He made a bargain with her,” Hogarth told Kitton, “by making her a present of a Christmas Book just completed, on condition that she gave up the boyish production to him, which he had the satisfaction of putting into the fire with his own hands.” Dickens wrought a campaign of ruthless destruction on his personal archive: for all the volumes of Dickens’s letters that have been found and published, an even greater number were destroyed at his hands or by friends at his request. On 3 September 1860, he was observed building a bonfire in his garden and committing to the flames caches of letters and papers.
Furthermore, Dickens came to disapprove strongly of newspaper accounts of murderers in the dock, execution scenes, last words, and official confessions. It is difficult to date with precision this change of heart, the point at which the author of such Grand Guignol passages as the death of Bill Sikes, the murder of Nancy, and Fagin’s last night alive decided that criminals’ final hours should not be committed to print; but the conviction was certainly strongly felt by 1849. On 17 November of that year Dickens wrote to the Times to express his disgust at public executions. (He had recently gone to Horsemonger Lane Gaol, Newington, and reported on the dreadful public scenes at the hanging of husband and wife Charles and Maria Manning, condemned to death for killing a former lodger.) “I would place every obstacle in the way of his sayings and doings being served up in print on Sunday mornings for the perusal of families,” wrote Dickens of the executed murderer. Seven years later he expanded on this theme—claiming that the way in which the press reported the final days of murderers made killers appear noteworthy, even admirable—in two articles in his magazine, Household Words, “The Demeanour of Murderers” (published 14 June 1856) and “The Murdered Person” (published 11 October 1856).
A genuine change of heart, doubtless, but was it also informed by the wish to shake off his past career? The epitome of the nineteenth-century self-made man, Dickens was never generous in acknowledging sources, influences, and helping hands. He wished to appear as though he had sprung from nowhere. Hence his slightly sniffy denials in response to queries about inspirations, role models, his early years. If he had indeed been part of the tribe of shabby, opportunistic penny-a-liners who made a living, and received useful introductions, at courthouses and inquests, he is very likely to have made every effort to suppress any reminders of that past. Unless a letter by, or addressed to, Dickens comes to light or a manuscript memoir from a contemporary of his early reporting years turns up, the authorship of “The Most Deathlike Silence” must remain, like so much else in this case, a mystery.
Chapter Twelve: A Newgate Stink
1. Reprinted in [Harmer?], The History of the London Burkers (1832).
2. “A Visit to Newgate,” Sketches by Boz (1836).
3. Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1831); [Harmer?], Old Bailey Experience (1833); The Hangmen of England by Horace Bleackley (1929). The condemned cells stood near to where the Old Bailey’s current service road abuts Newgate Street.
4. Quoted in The Life and Work of Astley Cooper by R. C. Brock, p. 15.
5. Forty-eight-year-old Wontner had only one leg, after a fall from a horse in 1821; he would die in 1833 and his successor, William Cope, would prove incompetent.
6. Report
and Evidence of the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Cause of the Increase in the Number of Commitments and Convictions in London and Middlesex (1828), p. 307.
7. [Harmer?], Old Bailey Experience, p. 339.
8. Corporation of London Records Office, Report Delivered to the Court of Aldermen by the City Gaols Committee, on the Conduct of the Reverend the Ordinary Cotton, Key Rep 1831/32, p. 163.
9. If these sheets should ever come to light they would help fill the many vast gaps in what is known of the London resurrection community.
10. [Harmer?], Old Bailey Experience, p. 105. In extraordinary circumstances, a “writ of error” could overturn a verdict, but only by challenging a point of law. The author of Old Bailey Experience could recall only one instance in which a writ of error had overturned a death sentence.
11. Fontblanque, England under Seven Administrations, p. 161.
12. Extract from Cotton’s Book of Reports and Occurrences, copied into the Report Delivered to the Court of Aldermen by the City Goals Committee, p. 163.
Chapter Fourteen: Day of Dissolution
1. This is where the Morning Advertiser’s reporter was stationed; he only knew the execution had happened by the reaction of the crowd.
2. Bean’s evidence to the Court of Aldermen, 28 December 1831; Corporation of London Records Office, Key Rep 1831/32, p. 175.
3. Edward Pearson, porter to the Royal College of Surgeons, had bought refreshments for the twelve policemen on duty at Hosier Lane and along the route: four half-quartern loaves, 1s and 6d; one and a quarter pound of cheese, 11d; six pints of porter, 2s (manuscript diaries of William Clift, Royal College of Surgeons Library, 5 December 1831).
4. Calcraft (1800–79) had been in the job only two years. He was originally a cobbler.
Chapter Fifteen: The Use of the Dead to the Living
1. Morning Advertiser, 7 December 1831.
2. Guthrie’s letter quoted by Jessie Dobson in her essay “The Anatomising of Criminals,” Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 9, no. 2 (August 1951): 112.
3. Letter forwarded to Tuson from the police, Public Record Office, Metropolitan Police Outgoing Correspondence, 3 December 1831–16 March 1832, MEPO 1/8/10163-12032.
4. Times, 29 December 1831. Superintendent Thomas had presented, or perhaps sold, Bishop’s apprentice indentures to Egan too, which Egan claimed were signed “Thomas” Bishop; however, the killer had an elder brother called Thomas (born on 5 January 1794), and it is likely Superintendent Thomas had acquired the wrong document—or had perhaps been sold a fake memento. Needless to say, Superintendent Thomas had no right to sell these objects.
Clift’s drawing of Williams’s tattoo is to be found in his diaries, housed in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons; entry dated 5 December.
5. Lancet, 14 January 1832.
6. Gall, quoted by Elliotson in Lancet, 14 January 1832, as part of the report of Elliotson’s London Phrenological Society lecture on Bishop and Williams. Elliotson (1791–1868) was University College London’s first professor of the principles and practice of medicine, in 1832. He became a personal friend of Charles Dickens, and the two men shared an interest in mesmerism, the field that Elliotson moved on to when he had tired of phrenology.
7. Repeated by John Wade in his Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis, p. 204.
8. “Mask of decorum” is borrowed from Sir Walter Scott by John Wade in his Treatise, p. 149.
9. Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 11 December 1831.
10. Times, 12 December 1831.
11. Advertisement for phrenological casts in The Phrenological Record by A. L. Vago (1883).
12. According to H. Lonsdale’s Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox (1870), quoted in Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute, p. 96.
13. Knight, London, vol. 1, p. 424; [Harmer?], Old Bailey Experience, p. 40.
14. Globe and Traveller, 5 December 1831.
15. New Monthly Magazine, June 1833.
16. Figaro in London ran from November 1831 until December 1834, and its first editor was Henry Mayhew, future compiler of the influential volumes London Labour and the London Poor. George Rowland Minshull found himself one of its targets when it reported his bad-tempered decision to jail a vagrant mother who refused to name her child’s father, even though he had deserted her; Figaro in London stated that Minshull himself was probably the father. But the newspaper subsequently decided that it liked the magistrate when he released a boy who had been arrested for selling Figaro in Leicester Square—Minshull was seen chuckling in court over the newspaper’s cartoons.
17. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 27 February 1832, p. 836.
18. Pelham, Perceval, and Hunt were speaking on 17 January 1832 (Hansard, pp. 578–83).
19. Guthrie, Letter to the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for the Home Department Containing Remarks on the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Anatomy (1829).
20. Hansard, 6 February 1832, pp. 1276–78.
21. As Ruth Richardson points out in her meticulous account of the passage of the Anatomy Act: “At several crucial moments in the parliamentary progress of the [second Anatomy] Bill, when the opposition had argued persuasively, or when general discussion threatened to delay its passage, the Bill’s supporters did not scruple to remind all present of the late ‘enormities.’ The reminder served as a way of curtailing debate by the introduction of a note of urgency, and decoyed parliamentary attention from important issues arising from the Bill” (Death, Dissection and the Destitute, p. 198).
Chapter Sixteen: How Many?
1. Hansard, 12 December 1831, pp. 154–55.
2. The earliest reports to escape Newgate also stated that Bishop and Williams vigorously denied that pitch plasters were used in killing their victims—surely one of the least important aspects of the case, but one that was given prominence in the Sunday papers. Perhaps it was in response to the rash of alleged burking attacks across London, which, victims claimed, had involved pitch plasters being sealed across the mouth and nose for suffocation.
3. J. C. Reid’s book Bucks and Bruisers (1971) and Serjeant Ballantine’s Some Experiences of a Barrister’s Life (1882) are the sources for the interesting connection between Cotton and Egan. Cotton was, according to Ballantine, fond of a joke, “well-fed,” rubicund, and a keen book and curiosity collector. He is said to have invited Egan to a number of banquets at Newgate/Old Bailey.
4. If, as I suspect, Old Bailey Experience was written by James Harmer, then it would make sense for Cotton (Harmer’s friend) to be so warmly defended and for an evangelical “interloper” such as Dr. Whitworth Russell to be criticized.
5. Sources for Theodore Williams’s misdemeanors: Report of the Evidence, with Bill of Costs, in a Suit Promoted in the Consistory Court by the Reverend Theodore Williams, Vicar of Hendon, against James Hall, a Resident of That Parish, for Brawling at a Vestry Meeting, Held for the Purpose of Making a Church Rate (1838), a pamphlet in the British Library; The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Middlesex, vol. 5 (1976); and The History and Topography of the Parish of Hendon, Middlesex by Edward T. Evans (1890). Evans points out that Williams had a library of thousands of volumes at his vicarage in Parson Street and an unusual collection of potted conifers in the garden there. Williams died in 1875, aged ninety-one, and is buried in the graveyard of his church, St. Mary’s, on Greyhound Hill, Hendon.
6. Times, 2 October 1839.
7. Sun, 5 December 1831 reprinted in Times, 6 December 1831.
8. Globe and Traveller, 5 December 1831. The authorship of this report becomes clear when we read Theodore Williams’s reply to Bishop’s inquiry about the thief on the cross: “Yes, but he had no knowledge of our blessed Redeemer till that moment, but you have from your earliest days been taught to know Christ and have rejected his precepts. Besides, yours cannot be called a true repentance, it is incomplete. Yours is more
the fear of human punishment, in consequence of your offence having been discovered, than the repentance of a true Christian. The first step towards a true repentance is a full and open confession of your crimes. Still, I exhort you to pray with all the sincerity and fervour you are capable of. And as the mercy of God is unbounded, your prayers may obtain favour in his sight.” In this way, not only would Theodore Williams save a soul, he would get the full confession to publish, too.
9. Sun, 12 December 1831.
10. Extracts from Cotton’s journal relating to the events of 3–5 December 1831 copied into Report Delivered to the Court of Aldermen by the City Gaols Committee, p. 163.
11. Times, 24 December 1831.
12. Report Delivered to the Court of Aldermen, p. 163.
13. Hansard, 28 June 1832, p. 1086.
14. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 28 January 1832, pp. 258–59.
15. Letter dated 5 December 1831, in the Westminster Archives at the Westminster Reference Library, St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, Parish Records Letter Book, H864.
16. Globe and Traveller, 3 December 1831.
17. Ibid., 15 December 1831.
18. Westminster Archives, St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, Parish Records, Annual Accounts, 1829–54, H872.
19. Morning Advertiser, 22 December 1831.
20. Public Record Office, Home Office Domestic Letter Book, vol. 67, letter from the Home Office to Joseph Paragalli, 10 January 1832, HO 43/41.
21. Westminster Archives, Parish Records Letter Book, H865. In addition, “The sum of £2 was contributed by a lady, per Mr Minshull, towards these expenses whilst the proceedings were pending.… As the contribution was anonymous, no opportunity has been offered of thanking the donor” (H872).
