The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  200 The persistent feeling . . . of the nightdress?'). In The Road Murder: Being a Complete Report and Analysis of the Various Examinations and Opinions of the Press on this Mysterious Tragedy (1860) by A Barrister-at-Law.

  200 His colleagues had to conduct . . . leave of absence. From correspondence in HO 45/6970.

  201 In the last days of November . . . compact of secrecy'. This letter was not made public until 24 July 1865, when it was published in The Times, but it was dated 23 November 1860. A letter Constance wrote that day has also survived, a note in which she thanks Peter Edlin, her lawyer, for 'the pretty pair of mittens and the scarf that he had given her: they 'will remind me whenever I look at them', she writes, 'of how much I am indebted to the giver'.

  CHAPTER 15

  207 At the beginning of 1861 . . . failing to examine Samuel. Nor was any importance attached to allegations that the jury had been 'packed' in Samuel's favour. Before the inquest opened James Morgan, the parish constable, and Charles Happerfield, the postmaster, had replaced two of the randomly selected jurors with 'men of judgement'. The two discharged were a tailor (whose wife had asked that he be excused) and William Nutt's father, a shoemaker who lived in the cottages next to Road Hill House. Their replacements were the Reverend Peacock and a prosperous farmer called William Dew, who – like Happerfield – was an activist in the temperance movement.

  207 'You talk of the Road murder . . . may be never discovered now.' Letter to W.W.F. de Cerjat in The Letters of Charles Dickens 1859–61 (1997), edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey.

  208 Later that month, Samuel applied . . . cannot be acceded to'. From correspondence in HO 45/6970.

  209 The Kents instructed . . . dispose of their belongings. Account of the auction from the Somerset and Wilts Journal and the Trow-bridge and North Wilts Advertiser.

  211 Over the summer the factory commissioners . . . in the Dee valley. From HO 45/6970. William may have visited Constance in Brittany that summer – according to the Passport Office files, a William Kent was issued with a passport for travel on the Continent on 10 August.

  211 For several months . . . unlikely to attract attention. Whicher's name appeared in The Times of 2 March 18 61 when he testified against a man accused of stealing a crate of opium worth £1,000 from the London Dock Company, but this was a case that had been assigned to him a year earlier. The man he arrested was acquitted. Perhaps the jurors were suspicious of the prosecution witnesses – a convict and an opium dealer. Or perhaps, after the Road Hill case, it was Whicher they mistrusted.

  211 Just one was covered in any depth . . . his uncle's will. Whicher obtained the vicar's address by pretending to be a lawyer – the adoption of a false identity was a common if unpopular detective practice. From reports in The Times and a transcript of the trial of James Roe at the Old Court, 21 & 22 August 1861.

  212 In the summer of 1861 . . . since Road Hill. Account of the Kingswood murder from MEPO 3/63, the Metropolitan Police file on the case; and reports in The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Annual Register of 1861.

  215 The Kingswood investigation had unfolded . . . a mockery of a detective's skills. Franz's solicitor offered Dickens an article on the mindboggling coincidences of the case (see Dickens' letter to W.H. Wills of 31 August 1861, in The Letters of Charles Dickens). The solicitor's article was published anonymously in All the Year Round the next January.

  216 'If I was not the cleverest . . . of their own accord.' From 'Bigamy and Child-Stealing' in Experiences of a Real Detective by Inspector 'F', edited by Waters.

  216 'I believe that a chain . . . corrupt testimony.' From 'Circumstantial Evidence' in Experiences of a Real Detective.

  216 'The value of the detective . . . what they mean.' In The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew Forrester.

  217 This novel, a huge bestseller . . . terrified of exposure. It went into eight editions in three months.

  219 'those most mysterious of mysteries . . . London lodgings'. From 'Miss Braddon', an unsigned review in The Nation, 9 November 1865.

  219 In 1863 the philosopher Henry Mansel . . . conjured at Road. Sensation literature was 'moulding the minds and forming the tastes and habits of its generation', wrote Mansel, 'by preaching to the nerves'. From an unsigned review in the Quarterly Review of April 1863. For discussions of the sensation novel, see especially Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (1988) by Thomas Boyle; Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (1989) by Anthea Trodd; From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection and Narrative (1992) by Martin A. Kayman; The Novel and the Police (1988) by D.A. Miller; In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988) by Jenny Bourne Taylor; 'What is "Sensational" About the Sensation Novel?' by Patrick Brantlinger in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37 (1982).

  220 Joseph Stapleton's book . . . Rowland Rodway. It cost 7s.6d. a copy.

  220 It was as if the domestic angel . . . bloodthirsty ghoul. Other writers had noticed women's enthusiasm for brutal crimes. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for instance, argued in England and the English (1833) that it was women who showed 'the deepest interest over a tale or a play of tragic or gloomy interest . . . If you observed a balladvender hawking his wares, it is the bloodiest murders that the women purchase.'

  221 Stapleton suggested that . . . corrupting sins'. As a physician, Stapleton would have been familiar with essays like Benedict Morel's Treatise on the Degeneration of the Human Species, serialised in the Medical Circular in 18 57, which argued that the sins of parents were visited on their children in the form of physical weaknesses.

  221 Mansel, too, cited the Road Hill murder . . . and adultery. In 'Manners & Morals', Fraser's magazine, September 1861.

  221 Its influence was evident . . . Aurora Floyd (1863). 'I think of a quiet Somersetshire house-hold in which a dreadful deed was done,' says the narrator of Aurora Floyd, 'the secret of which has never yet been brought to light, and perhaps never will be revealed until the Day of Judgement. What must have been suffered by each member of that family? What slow agonies, what everincreasing tortures, while that cruel mystery was the "sensation" topic of conversation in a thousand happy home-circles, in a thousand tavern-parlours and pleasant club-rooms.'

  In the 1950s the popular historian Elizabeth Jenkins wrote an essay on the ways in which the Kent family story influenced Charlotte Yonge's novel The Young Step-Mother; Or, A Chronicle of Mistakes (1861). The stepmother of the title marries into the Kendal family, and faces resistance from a sulky adolescent stepdaughter, four of whose siblings have died in childhood. The stepdaughter accidentally knocks unconscious her half-brother, a three-year-old who is 'a marvel of fair stateliness, size and intelligence'. Jenkins subsequently discovered that most of the novel was published in serial form in the first half of 1860, before the Road Hill murder. Her mistake serves as a caution against seeing the influence of Road Hill everywhere; though Jenkins pointed out that the fact that the novel preceded the murder could make the similarities seem stranger still.

  222 The novelist Margaret Oliphant . . . taste or morals.' From 'Sensation Novels', an unsigned review in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine of May 1862.

  222 A year later she complained . . . modern fiction'. In the Quarterly Review of April 1863.

  222 bestsellers in 1861. Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh and The Sliding Scale of Life, both published in 18 61 – the first sold 20,000 copies in three months, according to an article in The Times in July that year.

  223 'The modern detective is generally at fault . . . low and mean.' From 'Crime and its Detection', an unsigned article by Thomas Donnelly in the Dublin Review of May 1861.

  223 The word 'clueless' . . . in 1862. The phrase was 'clueless wanderings in the labyrinth of scepticism', according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

  223 'a cowardly and clumsy giant. . . who comes in his way'. Published on 25 October 1863 and quoted in Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in
New York and London, 1830–1870 (1999) by Wilbur R. Miller.

  223 In the Saturday Review . . . middle-class crimes. In 'Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life', Saturday Review, June 1864.

  224 This establishment . . . Anglican Church. See Wagner of Brighton: The Centenary Book of St Paul's Church, Brighton (1949) by H. Hamilton Maughan.

  224 His friend Detective-Inspector . . . in charge of the department. From the census of 18 61, Thornton's death certificate, MEPO 4/2 (a register of deaths in the Metropolitan Police) and MEPO 4/333 (a register of admissions and promotions). The detective division had expanded a little but was still only about twelve men strong, in a force that now boasted some seven thousand officers.

  224 In September 1862 . . . the Tsar's family. See MEPO 2/23, the Metropolitan Police file of 1862 on aid given to the Russian government to reorganise the Warsaw police. Joseph Conrad's father, Apollo, had been a leader of this insurgency until 1861, when he was arrested and exiled to Russia.

  224 Superintendent Walker. Walker was with the detectives when they met Dickens in 1850 – Dickens dubbed him 'Stalker'. He was not himself a detective but a member of the Commissioner's office.

  225 On 18 March 1864 . . . 'congestion of the brain. See MEPO 21/7, Metropolitan Police retirement papers.

  225 'protracted mental tension.' From A Practical Treatise on Apoplexy (with essay on congestion of the brain) (1866) by William Boyd Mushet.

  CHAPTERS 16 & 17

  The account in the next two chapters of the events of 18 65 is drawn mainly from the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, the Observer, the Western Daily Press, the Somerset and Wilts Journal, the Penny Illustrated Paper, the News of the World and the Bath Chronicle, and from the files MEPO 3/ 61, HO 144/20/49113 and ASSI 25/46/8. Additional sources are listed below.

  CHAPTER 16

  227 On Tuesday, 25 April 1865 . . . Covent Garden. Weather conditions from reports on the Spring Derby at Epsom, seventeen miles from London, which fell on 25 April that year. After the coldest March since 1845, the Derby was the hottest in years, according to The Times, the temperatures higher than the July average.

  227 The Bow Street office . . . discoloured walls. The Builder of April 1860 reported that conditions in the court were bad in winter, abominable in summer. Magistrates had been trying to secure new premises since the 1840s. Details of courtroom from Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens and Survey of London Volume 36 (1970), general editor F.H.W. Sheppard.

  229 Wagner was a well-known figure. . . danger to the English Church. See Wagner of Brighton: The Centenary Book of St Paul's Church, Brighton (1949) by H. Hamilton Maughan and Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis.

  231 In the course of this examination . . . summoned from Scotland Yard. Dolly Williamson had married since his return from Road, and now had a daughter, Emma, aged two. Durkin had been in charge of a notorious case of July 18 61 that inspired one of the essays in William Makepeace Thackeray's Roundabout Papers. A money-lender in Northumberland Street, off the Strand, had opened fire on a new client, Major William Murray of the 10th Hussars, a veteran of the Crimea. Murray fought back and eventually killed his assailant by smashing him over the head with a bottle. It emerged that the money-lender's rage sprang from a secret obsession with Murray's wife.

  'After this,' wrote Thackeray, 'what is the use of being squeamish about the probabilities and possibilities in the writing of fiction? . . . After this, what is not possible? It is possible Hungerford Market is mined, and will explode some day.' The eruption of irrational violence could arouse excitement, wonder, even awe – the safety of the world was suddenly blown apart and anything at all could follow. The Northumberland Street crime, which also features in The Moonstone, is one of the cases explored in Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations (1986) by Richard D. Altick.

  232 (John Foley had died . . . aged sixty-nine). His death certificate states that he died of a hydrothorax at St George's Terrace, Trowbridge, on 5 September 1864.

  233 'angel in the house'. The term is from a poem published by Coventry Patmore in 1854, which describes the self-sacrificial purity and devotion of his wife, Emily.

  233 'Constance Kent, it is said . . . other agency than their own.' In The Times, 26 April 1865. The Bath Express was similarly cynical about women's instincts. It argued on 29 April that this crime had a 'finesse of cruelty' of which only a woman was capable. The Saturday Review said it hoped that Constance was a 'psychological monster' rather than the embodiment of female adolescence. For attitudes to female killers, see Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (1998) by Judith Knelman.

  235 Detective-Inspector Tanner . . . a week at a time. Tanner retired from the force due to ill-health in 1869 and opened a hotel in Winchester. He died in 1873, aged forty-two. See Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders: Scotland Yard's First Detectives (1990) by Joan Lock.

  241 The Reverend James Davies . . . very wicked young woman.' From The Case of Constance Kent, viewed in the Light of the Holy Catholic Church (1865) by James Davies and The Case of Constance Kent, viewed in the Light of the Confessional (1865) by Edwin Paxton Hood.

  242 James Redding Ware reprinted his pamphlet . . . death of her brother.' From The Road Murder: Analysis of this Persistent Mystery, Published in 1862, Now Reprinted, with Further Remarks (1865) by J.R. Ware. The 1862 pamphlet was also published as a short story in Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864) – 'Forrester' was a pseudonym, probably an allusion to a family firm of private inquiry agents based in the City of London.

  243 From her cell . . . undeceived on this point.' Rodway passed the statement on to the press, and it appeared in several newspapers that summer.

  244 Children, he wrote elsewhere . . . the figure of the child. See Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (1998), edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth. 'The moral lesson to be learned is the existence of evil passions in the breasts of even young children,' said the Medical Times and Gazette on 22 July 1865 – quoted in Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (1977) by Mary S. Hartman.

  244 Later, Bucknill told the Home Secretary . . . her father and brother. From a letter of 30 August 1865 in HO 1144/20/49113.

  244 Rodway explained Constance's rationale . . . urged on her behalf.' From a letter in HO 1144/20/49113.

  CHAPTER 17

  248 John Duke Coleridge . . . getting up my speech.' Coleridge earned more than £4,000 a year, according to the Dictionary of National Biography. Diary extract from Life and Correspondence of John Duke, Lord Coleridge (1904).

  248 He composed a letter . . . my conviction.' Correspondence in Bernard Taylor's archive.

  251 As soon as the death sentence was passed. . . A maiden die on the fatal tree.' Broadside ballads, in order of quotation: 'The Road Hill Murder Confession of the Murderess', published by Disley, 1865; unnamed ballad quoted in the North Wilts Herald of 1 o September 1865; 'Trial and Sentence of Constance Kent', also printed by Disley, 1865, and reprinted in Charles Hindley's Curiosities of Street Literature (1966). See Roly Brown's article on Constance Kent and the Road Murder, no. 15 in his series on the nineteenth-century broadside ballad trade in Musical Traditions magazine (mustrad.org.uk).

  252 A Devonshire magistrate . . . lunacy in the 1840s. See affidavit from Gustavus Smith, dated 24 July 1865, in HO 1144/20/49113.

  253 On the morning of Thursday . . . slightest emotion.' Pritchard was hanged on Friday.

  253 (in fact, Willes had decided . . . passed in confession'). Letter from Coleridge to W.E. Gladstone, 6 April 1890, quoted in Saint – with Red Hands? (1954) by Yseult Bridges.

  258 Bucknill finished his letter . . . could succumb to insanity. In a lecture on 'Insanity in its Legal Relations' delivered before the Royal College of Physicians thirteen years later – in April 1878 – Bucknill said more about Constance's motive. The girl had stored
up a 'fund of rage and revengeful feeling' against her 'high-spirited' stepmother, on account of the disparaging comments the second Mrs Kent made about Constance's 'partially demented' mother. Constance tried to run away from the stepmother's 'hated presence', but when she was caught and brought home resolved to take vengeance. She thought poison would be 'no real punishment' and decided instead to kill Saville. 'A dreadful story this,' remarked Bucknill, 'but who can fail to pity the depths of house-hold misery which it denotes?' Quoted in Celebrated Crimes and Criminals (1890) by Willoughby Maycock.

  259 Forty years later . . . at every pore.' From 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' (1905) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1953–74), edited by James Strachey, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. This essay concerned one of Freud's first patients, the eighteen-year-old 'Dora'.

  CHAPTER 18

  261 In October 1865 . . . behind Millbank's high walls. Information on Millbank gaol from The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life (1862) by Henry Mayhew and John Binny; The Princess Casamassima (1886) by Henry James; and the Penny Illustrated Paper of 14 October 1865.

  262 In 1866 he married his landlady . . . sheep grazed on the green. From Whicher's marriage certificate, on which he described himself as a bachelor, not a widower. Hippolyte Taine referred to sheep grazing outside Westminster Abbey in his Notes on England (1872).

  263 Private inquiry agents . . . Ignatius Pollaky. Pollaky had become a successful private detective with offices at 13 Paddington Green, near the railway station. In 18 66, according to The Times, he broke a ring of white slave traders who were kidnapping young women in Hull and selling them in Germany. A song in Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera Patience, which opened in London in 1881, praised 'the keen penetration of Paddington Pollaky'. He died in Brighton in 1918, aged ninety.