The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  105 a kind of heroine. In Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) by Thomas Carlyle.

  106 The dizzying expansion . . . by 1860. Figures on newspaper readership from Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead (1988) by Thomas Boyle. The expansion of the press was fuelled by the repeal of the stamp tax in 1855, which ushered in the first penny newspapers the next year, and the repeal of the duty on paper in 1860.

  106 The tailor had educated himself . . . do the same. Whereas Dr Kahn's anatomical museum was open only to gentlemen, according to advertisements in The Times, literate members of both sexes could read the newspapers.

  107 In answer to their questions . . . William to go with me.' From notes taken by the lawyer Peter Edlin, who was present at the interview, and passed on to the author Cecil Street, who published The Case of Constance Kent (1928) under the pen name John Rhode. These and other papers about the case are in an archive assembled by Bernard Taylor, the author of Cruelly Murdered: Constance Kent and the Killing at Road Hill House (1979, revised 1989).

  107 As the week wore on. . . body was found. A partly accurate version of the rumour was reported in the Somerset and Wilts Journal of 21 July 1860.

  107 In the evening of Saturday, 30 June . . . wicks needed trimming. From testimony given by Samuel Kent, Foley, Urch and Heritage in the magistrates' court in October and November 1860.

  109 'Every Englishman . . . closed to the world.' In Notes on England (1872).

  109 Privacy had become . . . or a tea. For discussions of middle-class domestic life in Victorian England see, for instance, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850(1987) by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (2000) by Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, and The Victorian Family: Structures and Stresses (1978), edited by A. Wohl. In an essay in this anthology, Elaine Showalter writes that secrecy was 'the fundamental and enabling condition of middle-class life . . . The essential unknowability of each individual, and society's collaboration in the maintenance of a facade behind which lurked innumerable mysteries, were the themes which preoccupied many mid-century novelists.'

  In 1935 the German philosopher Walter Benjamin connected this new privacy to the birth of detective fiction: 'For the private citizen the space in which he lives enters for the first time into contrast with the one of daily work . . . the traces of the inhabitant impress themselves upon the interieur and from them is born the detective story, which goes after these traces.' Quoted (and translated) by Stefano Tani in The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (1984).

  110 A murder like this could reveal. . . middle-class house. In an article about the popularity of detective stories, Bertolt Brecht wrote: 'We gain our knowledge of life in a catastrophic form. History is written after catastrophes . . . The death has taken place. What had been brewing beforehand? What had happened? Why has a situation arisen? All this can now perhaps be deduced.' Published in 1976 in Brecht's collected works and quoted in Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (1984) by Ernest Mandel.

  110 A month before the murder . . . oftener, a family'. Notes on Nursing quoted in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette of 31 May 1860.

  113 In the evening . . . were still green. Information on weather and crops from the Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser of 21 July 1860, and the agricultural report for July in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette of 2 August 1860.

  CHAPTER 9

  115 The chairman of the magistrates . . . the services of a detective. Information about magistrates from The Book of Trowbridge (1984) by Kenneth Rogers and the census of 1861.

  116 Shortly before three o'clock . . . no further remark to me,' said Whicher. From Whicher's testimony to the magistrates later that day.

  120 'It's no use . . . given way. From 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 27 July 1850.

  120 Dolly was a clever, energetic man . . . the first police-station library. From the census of 1841 and Critical Years at the Yard: The Career of Frederick Williamson of the Detective Department and the CID (1956) by Belton Cobb.

  120 Dolly shared lodgings . . . sixteen other single policemen. From the census of 1861.

  121 One of these, Tim Cavanagh . . . a rabbit from a near neighbour.' From Scotland Yard Past and Present (1893) by Timothy Cavanagh.

  122 His colleague Stephen Thornton . . . some of the passengers. From The Times, 18 November 1837.

  122 In 1859 an eleven-year-old girl . . . depraved imagination'. From the Annual Register of 1860.

  123 On Saturday morning . . . schoolfriends. From expenses claims in MEPO 3/61, the census of 1841 and the census of 1861.

  124 'She has spoken to me . . . deceased child.' From Louisa Hatherill's testimony at the Wiltshire magistrates' court, 27 July 1860.

  125 While Constance was in gaol . . . taken into custody. This rumour was reported in the Bristol Daily Post of 24 July 1860.

  126 Whicher was careful . . . other policemen. Fifteen years earlier, in March 1845, Mayne had reprimanded Whicher and his fellow Detective-Sergeant Henry Smith for showing a want of respect to senior officers that was 'most indiscreet and legally unjustifiable'. As it was the first time that any detectives 'had improperly come into collision' with their uniformed colleagues, Mayne let the pair off with a caution, but he warned that any future offence would be dealt with severely. From MEPO 7/7, police orders and notices from the office of the Commissioner, cited in The Rise of Scotland Yard: A History of the Metropolitan Police (1956) by Douglas G. Browne.

  129 As for her supposed lover . . . or the Neighbourhood'. In a note by Whicher on a letter from Sir John Eardley Wilmot on 16 August 1860, in MEPO 3/61.

  129 the fullest version . . . fishing in the river. Reported in the Somerset and Wilts Journal, 13 October 1860.

  129 In the county court the previous month . . . rival dairy farmer. From the Frome Times, 20 June 1860.

  CHAPTER 10

  134 A man in North Leverton . . . She fainted. Account of the Sarah Drake case from reports in The Times, 8 December 1849 to 10 January 1850.

  136 In the spring of 1860 . . .the name of her employer. Reported in the News of the World, 3 June 1860.

  137 Alienists detailed . . . cold cunning. Monomania was a condition identified by the French physician Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol in 1808. See Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (1998), edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth.

  137 The Times . . . the key to the asylum?' On 22 July 1853.

  137 It was even suggested . . . puerperal mania. Stapleton reported this rumour in his book of 1861.

  137 Perhaps the killer had a double consciousness. For double consciousness and crime, see Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (2003) by Joel Peter Eigen.

  138 'Experience has shown . . . seemingly irrelevant.' In 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe.

  138 'I made a private inquiry . . . as a trifle yet.' Arthur Conan Doyle's private detective Sherlock Holmes adopted the same techniques: 'You know my method. It is based on the observation of trifles'; 'there is nothing so important as trifles' – from 'The Man with the Twisted Lip' (1891).

  138 He asked Sarah Cox . . . within the hour. From Whicher's reports in MEPO 3/61 and Cox's testimony at the Wiltshire magistrates' court on 27 July 1860.

  139 'When I am deeply perplexed . . . work out my problems. 'From Diary of an Ex-Detective (1859), 'edited' by Charles Martel (in fact written by the New Bond Street bookseller Thomas Delf). In a similar passage in Waters' Experiences of a Real Detective (1862) the narrator mulls over a case as if assembling a jigsaw or a collage: 'I lay down on a sofa and had a good think; put together, now this way, now that way, the different items, scraps, and hints, furnished me, in order to ascertain how they held together, and what, as a whole, they seemed to be like.'

  141 As Mr Bucket says . . .
point of view.' A detective's greatest weapon, said Dickens, was his ingenuity. 'For ever on the watch, with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have . . . to set themselves against every novelty of trickery and dexterity that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise, and to keep pace with every such invention that comes out.' From the second part of 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 10 August 1850.

  In The Perfect Murder (1989) David Lehman observed that 'the detective novel took murder out of the ethical realm and put it into the realm of aesthetics. Murder in a murder mystery becomes a kind of poetic conceit, often quite a baroque one; the criminal is an artist, the detective an aesthete and critic, and the blundering policeman a philistine.' See also The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991) by Joel Black.

  142 The nightdress was his missing link . . . evolved from apes. A nightdress that tied a respectable adolescent girl to murder, like the bones that would prove the connection between men and monkeys, was a terrible object, to be feared as much as sought. For the anxieties aroused by the idea of the missing link, see Forging the Missing Link: Interdisciplinary Stories (1992) by Gillian Beer. For negative evidence and the nineteenth-century endeavour to decipher fragments, see Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle (2003) by Lawrence Frank, and the same author's 'Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin, and Conan Doyle' in Nineteenth-Century Literature, December 1989.

  142 Dickens compared the detectives . . . new form of crime. From the second part of 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 10 August 1850. In the mid-nineteenth century the idea of detection imprinted itself on natural history, astronomy, journalism – any pursuit that could be construed as a quest for truth.

  145 In Governess Life . . . destroying the peace of families'. For the sexual and social uncertainty provoked by the figure of the governess, see The Victorian Governess (1993) by Kathryn Hughes.

  146 Forbes Benignus Winslow . . . their children'. In On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, and Disorders of the Mind (1860). An extract appears in Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (1998), edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth.

  146 The detective was another . . . sully a middle-class home. For the threats to middle-class privacy posed by servants and policemen, see Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (1989) by Anthea Trodd.

  CHAPTER 11

  157 During Whicher's inquiries . . . dreadful crime.' From the Frome Times, 18 July 1860.

  158 The word 'detect' . . . fascination with the case. See Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (1989) by Anthea Trodd. In Alain-René Le Sage's Le Diable Boiteux (1707), still popular in Victorian England, Asmodeus perched on the steeple of a Spanish church and stretched out his hand to lift every roof in the city, revealing the secrets within. The Times in 1828 referred to the French detective Vidocq as 'an Asmodeus'. In Dombey and Son (1848), Dickens called for 'a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes'. In House-hold Words articles of 1850 Dickens referred to how the demon could 'untile and read' men's brains, as if bodies were buildings, and himself took 'Asmodeus-like peeps' into 'the internal life' of houses from the carriage of a train. Janin's reference to Asmodeus was in Paris; Or the Book of One Hundred and One (translated 1832).

  158 'If every room . . . travelling exhibition.' From The Casebook of a Victorian Detective.

  159 Mrs Kent gave birth . . . Acland Saville Kent. Acland was Mrs Kent's mother's maiden name; Francis, Saville's first name, had been her father's Christian name.

  CHAPTER 12

  161 Whicher reached Paddington . . . at number 40. Information about Whicher's links to Holywell Street from the census returns of 1851, 1861, 1871, 'Police Informations' of 20 January 1858 in MEPO 6/ 92, and the classified columns of The Times of 3 February 1858. 'The tricks of detective police officers' from The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew Forrester.

  162 the 'Big Ben' clock . . . giving off a brilliant incandescence. From reports in the News of the World, 17 June 1860.

  162 Dickens visited Millbank one warm day . . . as well as anyone in it.' From a letter to W.W.F. de Cerjat of 1 February 1861, published in The Letters of Charles Dickens 1859–61 (1997), edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey.

  162 The part of Millbank . . . rising off the river. Descriptions of Pimlico from 'Stanford's Library Map of London in 1862', The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life (1862) by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, and The Three Clerks (1858) by Anthony Trollope.

  163 The public entrance . . . to the south the river. Description of Scotland Yard from prints and maps in the Westminster local history library, and from Scotland Yard Past and Present: Experiences of Thirty-Seven Years (1893) by Timothy Cavanagh. In 1890 the Metropolitan Police headquarters moved to a building on the Thames Embankment, which was named New Scotland Yard, and in 1967 to an office block in Victoria Street, which was given the same name.

  163 The letters, addressed to Mayne . . . throughout the month. Most of the letters from the public are in MEPO 3/61.

  165 In early August . . . employed as a Detective, or what?' These two letters are in the Home Office file on the case, HO 144/20/49113. Sir John Eardley Wilmot, a married man of fifty with eight children, was judge of the county court at Bristol. He went on to be Conservative MP for South Warwickshire from 1874 to 1885. He was not a very successful advocate, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, but in 1881 he helped to win compensation for Edmund Galley, who had been wrongly convicted of murder in 1835. Eardley Wilmot died in 1892.

  168 The public was fascinated by murder . . . the investigation of murder, too. Punch magazine had satirised 'murder-worship' in 1849. See Victorian Studies in Scarlet (1972) by Richard D. Altick.

  In an essay of 1856, George Eliot analysed the appeal of Wilkie Collins' stories: 'The great interest lies in the excitement either of curiosity or of terror . . . Instead of turning pale at a ghost we knit our brows and construct hypotheses to account for it. Edgar Poe's tales were an effort of genius to reconcile the two tendencies – to appal the imagination yet satisfy the intellect, and Mr Wilkie Collins in this respect often follows in Poe's tracks.' From a review of Collins' After Dark in the Westminster Review.

  171 On Tuesday, 31 July . . . piece of pickled pork.' Account of the Walworth murders from The Times of 1, 8, 14, 16, 17 & 20 August 1860 and the News of the World of 2 September 1860.

  175 dramatised for the London stage. In Vidocq, by Douglas Jerrold.

  175 The Victorians saw in the detective . . . cast him out. Many learnt to find these thrills in detective fiction instead. 'Most traditional novels offer some of the pleasures of the keyhole,' observed Dennis Porter in The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (1981), 'but apart from various forms of erotica none does so more systematically than the fiction of detection. The secret of its power resides to a large degree in the trick that makes of voyeurism a duty.'

  175 A few voices . . . Whicher's defence. The Law Times was sure that Whicher had identified the murderer and her motive. 'The child was his mother's pet, and malice against his mother – a fiendish desire to inflict a wound on her through him – would be a motive neither impossible nor improbable . . . Both of them, brother and sister [William and Constance], entertained very strong feelings of hostility, almost amounting to hatred towards the mother of the child . . . they knew that she had won the affections of their father while their mother was yet living. They had complained of neglect and illtreatment by her, and of her partiality for her own children.' Since Saville had been taken from his cot by 'a light, practised hand', the journal added, a woman must have been involved in his abduction.

  CHAPTER 13

  181 A week afterwards . . . unrestrained
crying.' Account of Young-man's execution from the News of the World of 9 September 1860.

  183 On Monday, 24 September . . . quite innocent. A year later the Home Office, after prolonged wranglings, paid Slack's firm £700 for its work on the case. See HO 144/20/49113.

  187 Mrs Dallimore was a real-life version . . . The Female Detective (1864). Amateur female detectives also appear in Wilkie Collins' 'The Diary of Anne Rodway' (1856) and in Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) by 'Anonyma' (W. Stephens Hayward). This book's jacket shows the lady detective as a dangerously emancipated, sensual creature. She wears a plump red-and-white ribbon round her throat, a hat piled high with flowers, a fur stole and velvet cuffs. She gives the prospective reader a sidelong gaze while lifting her full black coat to reveal the hem of a red dress.

  188 'the late Edgar Poe'. Poe had died, aged forty, in 1849. In life, he suffered from alcoholism, depression and episodes of delirium. The critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that Poe 'invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad'. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926), quoted in Peter Lehman's The Perfect Murder (1989).

  190 'Mr Kent, intriguing . . . disposes of same.' See The Letters of Charles Dickens 1859–61 (1997), edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey.

  190 The Saturday Review . . . beyond their routine'. In the Saturday Review of 22 September 1860.

  191 The idea took hold . . . minds of our countrymen.' In Once a Week, 13 October 1860. The author pointed out that, by this argument, few murders should take place in sunny southern Europe, which in fact had many violent deaths.

  191 A freak storm had hit Wiltshire . . . Saville Kent had died. The natural historian and meteorologist George Augustus Rowell gave a lecture on the storm on 21 March 1860 and subsequently published it as a pamphlet, A Lecture on the Storm in Wiltshire.

  CHAPTER 14

  197 Saunders asked Foley . . . he did not!' In a letter to The Times, Stapleton claimed that a microscope would not have helped determine the nature of the blood on the nightdress he saw. 'I had no hesitation in advising the authorities that the nightdress shown to me . . . furnished no clue to this crime . . . I hoped that this nightdress was withdrawn for ever from public observation. However, Mr Saunders has dragged it from its obscurity again, and, as it seems to me, in wanton and useless violation of public decency and private feeling.' The nightdresses had become the emblem of the Kent family's decency and privacy; to speculate about them was to repeat the violation of their home.