by A. N. Wilson
Was marriage, as an institution, on the way out? H. G. Wells, who had a sexual career which was to say the least mouvementé, certainly hoped so. On 18 October 1906 he read a paper for the Fabian Society advocating Free Love. Mrs Webb was not impressed.
There remains the question whether, with all the perturbation caused by such intimacies, you would have any brain left to think with? I know that I should not, and I fancy that other women would be even worse off in this particular. Moreover, it would mean a great increase in sexual emotion for its own sake and not for the sake of bearing children. And that way madness lies?
So, the childless Mrs Webb tantalizingly confided in her diary:
H. G. Wells is, I believe, merely gambling with the idea of free love. Throwing it out to see what sort of reception it gets, without responsibility for its effect on the character of hearers.3
Years later, in 1922, when H.G. was proposed as parliamentary Labour candidate for London University, she noted:
To refuse such an obviously eligible candidate, except for his scandalous exploits (none of which however have come to the courts), seemed an unjustifiable insult, so Sidney and I acquiesced and he accepted the candidature. Whereupon R.H. Tawney resigns from the chairmanship of the University Labour Party, but before doing so, proposes as the alternative Bertrand Russell! He declares that Bertrand Russell is a gentleman and H.G. a cad, which is hardly relevant if it is sexual morality which is to be the test.4
In today’s media-dominated, intrusive climate, an aspirant politician with Wells’s erotic track record would be seen as more a vote-loser than an asset by party selection boards. The morality of the times was what later ages would deem hypocritical. Lloyd George and Asquith were both rampant adulterers, but nothing of this ever reached the newspapers. It was Wells’s absence of hypocrisy which made him a political liability. Advocates of Free Love still belonged to the eccentric edges of society.
Augustus John, the son of a solicitor in the West Welsh small town of Haverfordwest, threw off the restraints of his conventional upbringing and became a by-word for the Bohemian way of life, with strings of mistresses, a fascination with gipsies, and self-conscious desire to live on the fringes. At the same time, and not just because he needed the cash, he became a portrait-painter of huge popular appeal, immortalizing many of his contemporaries, from Lloyd George to Lawrence of Arabia, in splashily coloured, exuberantly ‘painterly’ canvases. Some of his female sitters, most notably Lady Ottoline Morrell, stare at him, and at us, with a mixture of rapture and wariness. It does not surprise us to discover that they were among the great company who shared his bed.
His sister Gwen John’s trajectory is altogether more muted. As the canvases of Augustus became brighter and splashier, Gwen’s became ever more etiolated and pale, resembling fabric whose colour has been bleached out by too bright sunshine. Her exile in France, her besotted love for the sculptor Rodin, its frustration, and her subsequent nunlike devotion to Catholic simplicities reflect another side of the attempts by women, at this date, to defy the conventions. There were rules, and if you defied them, you paid the consequence.
Otto Gross, a pupil of Dr Freud’s, was a great success with women although or perhaps because he was suffering from dementia praecox. It was heady stuff for one of his mistresses, Frieda Weekley, to receive his assurance:
I know now what people will be like who keep themselves unpolluted by all the things that I hate and fight against – I know it through you, the only human being who already, today, has remained free from the code of chastity, from Christianity, from democracy and all that accumulated filth – remained free through her own strength – how on earth have you brought this about, you golden child – how with your laughter and your loving have you kept your soul free from the curse and the dirt of two gloomy millennia.
Frieda, born von Richthofen in 1879 outside Metz, was a voluptuous, blonde, highly sexed girl who had married an English professor fourteen years older than herself who had taken her to live in a dark, miserable middle-class house on the outskirts of Nottingham. They had three children in close succession, but the marriage was sexually unsatisfying to her. On her wedding night she had waited by the bedroom door for her Mr Casaubon. ‘When Ernest came in, I threw myself naked into his arms. He was horrified and told me to put my night-dress on at once.’5 It is not surprising that she found Otto Gross such an exciting companion. In March 1912, a former pupil of her husband’s from Nottingham University College, David Herbert Lawrence, came to lunch at the Weekleys’ house, and within twenty minutes she had Lawrence in bed.6
D. H. Lawrence, known in the title of a film about him as The Priest of Love, was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated exponents of erotic freedom. Born the son of a coal miner at Eastwood, Nottingham, on 11 September 1885, the fourth of five children, he was totally overshadowed by his diminutive, intense, puritanical mother, Lydia. The nature of their relationship was made public by his third – and perhaps best – novel Sons and Lovers, which tells of the agonizing rivalry between the girl he loves and his mother.
This girl in real life, Jessie Chambers, told a friend that she had had the following exchange with Lawrence – David as she called him, Bert to his family:
‘You know, Jessie, I’ve always loved mother.’
‘I know you have,’ I replied.
‘I don’t mean that,’ he answered, ‘I’ve loved her – like a lover – that’s why I could never love you.’7
Lawrence had worked his way through Nottingham High School, became a junior clerk at Haywoods Surgical Appliances in Nottingham, and then, at his mother’s urging, began a teaching apprenticeship, and won a place at Nottingham University College (founded by Boot, the local chemist). As a young teacher, he found work in the dreary London suburb of Croydon, teaching at Davidson Road School for £15 per year – less than a miner’s pay.
Lawrence’s eldest brother George had ‘had to’ marry – that was his mother’s morality forcing him – because he got a girl pregnant. D.H., who disliked rough boys’ games and preferred painting and flower-arranging, was timid in his sexual attitudes. When he was a clerk the voracious girls at the Surgical Appliances factory set on him and tried to debag him, a trauma he worked up in a powerful short story, ‘Tickets Please’, where six vengeful girls attack a young man on a tram. He was astounded, at college, when his friend George Neville told him that women have pubic hair. (Lawrence leapt from his chair and pummelled Neville crying: ‘It’s not true!’) Thin, intense, slight, bisexual, timorous, Lawrence was as much of a windbag as Otto Gross, and every bit as demanding, from an emotional viewpoint, as the three children from whom Frieda was forcibly separated when they eloped.
The children are miserable, missing her so much. She lies on the floor in misery – and then is fearfully angry with me because I won’t say ‘stay for my sake’. I say ‘decide what you want most, to live with me and share my rotten chances, or go back to security, and your children – decide for yourself – choose for yourself.’ And then she almost hates me, because I won’t say, ‘I love you – stay with me whatever happens.’ I do love her. If she left me, I do not think I should be alive six months hence. And she won’t leave me, I think – God how I love her – and the agony of it.7
Lawrence’s greatness as a writer, which coexists with the childishness and the windbaggery, could not find romance among the suburbs. Before Frieda, peculiar metaphors of frustration clog his letters. ‘I’ve now got to digest a great lot of dissatisfied love in my veins,’ he had written to Louie Burrows, to whom he was engaged. ‘It’s very damnable, to have slowly to drink back again into oneself all the lava and fire of a passionate eruption … The most of the things, that just heave red hot to be said, I shove back.’8
When he actually took the plunge with a woman and ran away with Frieda, D.H. seems to have required exotic backgrounds for the romance – Cornwall, Tasmania, Mexico – as though the molten lava of passion was chilled by the kind of suburban res
idences in which most people led their lives.
Only two years before Lawrence wrote that letter, Arnold Bennett had stood in the chill of an exceptionally cold April evening outside the nondescript semi-detached villa of The Pines, Putney, where Algernon Charles Swinburne, Victorian advocate of Baudelairean erotic wickedness, lay dying in suburban respectability. His hectic alcoholic youth, enlivened – he was tiny – by visits to Amazonian prostitutes who inspired his wonderful poem to ‘Dolores’, ‘Our Lady of Pain’, had led to collapse. He had been rescued by one of the dullest men who ever lived, a literary-minded lawyer, dear to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, called Theodore Watts-Dunton, and there Swinburne had lived, allowed his one bottle of Bass each day, and a walk on Putney Common, where he could indulge his passion for looking in babies’ prams. In The Pines he grew stone-deaf. Max Beerbohm and Arthur Benson made visits, largely in order to mock the silvery-haired squeaky-voiced poet. But Bennett perhaps came closest to the heart of The Pines and its tragicomedy, when he wrote: ‘A few yards from where the autobuses turned was a certain house with lighted upper windows, and in that house the greatest lyric versifier that England has ever had, and one of the great poets of the whole world and of all ages, was dying. But nobody looked; nobody seemed to care; I doubt if anyone thought of it.’9
There is something very moving about Bennett, vulgar, successful, cocky, who had written so well about sexual love and its possibilities of tragedy, bothering to leave the West End of London and to seek out the lighted window where the tiny Victorian poet lay on his deathbed. (The night nurse thought he was muttering in a foreign language, perhaps Greek.) Bennett’s novels – Hilda Lessways, These Twain, Clayhanger, The Old Wives’ Tale – tell so well the story, of which Swinburne’s death was a kind of parable, of the incompatibility of Romance with the humdrum aspirations of every day. Dire physical and emotional disappointments lay in store for those who married, and those who did not. As Edward VII canoodled with Mrs Keppel, the queen of England felt as spurned as any suburban wife would have done if betrayed. Being well born did not numb the pains of betrayal, disappointment or sheer disgust.
The shocking thing about Jane Ridley’s book10 about her great-grandparents Ned and Lady Emily Lutyens is not that their wretched marriage was unusual, merely that so much articulate evidence of anger and frustration from it survives. When Emily married, her mother Lady Lytton gave her only one piece of advice, which was never to refuse her husband, and to keep a jar of cold cream beside the bed.11 She and Ned read Edward Carpenter’s book Love’s Coming of Age, which sought to elevate the ‘sex passion’, and which advocated the rhythm method of contraception. Emily was dissatisfied by Ned’s rough and hasty lovemaking. With Pussy Webbe, a leading light of the Women’s Movement, she attended the Lock Hospital for Venereal Disease and read aloud to the sick prostitutes. She went to conferences to hear eminent doctors lecturing ‘on sex and family planning to a room packed with women and crackling with suppressed sexual anger’.12 She yearned for a sexually satisfying love-match, and failing to get it, she brought her physical relations with her husband to an end when the children had been born. ‘I have suffered intensely physically during all my married life,’ she wrote to him.13
There must have been so many less articulate women in Edwardian Britain who could have echoed these words. In Edwardian Britain? In any age – but in that age of suburban restraints and middle-class rectitude it was possible to be trapped in a marital cage from which it seemed as if there was no escape but the death of one party or another.
Asked if she had ever contemplated divorce, the aged Elizabeth Longford, long married to a philanthropic peer, replied in the late twentieth century: ‘Divorce never – murder often.’ That was her choice. In the early twentieth century, the kind of scandals started by H. G. Wells or Frieda Weekley were not strictly imaginable. Each age finds in its favourite crimes images of what it would most love/hate to do. Our own generation of overworked, guilty, child-dominated couples makes of child-abduction the ultimate horror, perhaps because with a dark part of themselves they wish their children dead. The favourite Edwardian murder was undoubtedly centred upon adultery in the suburbs.
The prodigious popularity of the Crippen murder case, the mesmeric hold with which it possessed the newspaper-reading public, surely reflected some deep general preoccupations. Dr Crippen’s ‘ordinariness’, his mildness, were harped on again and again in the reports of the case. His address, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway, North London, was in the same postal district as that charming fictitious address ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, where Carrie and Charles Pooter led their tedious existence in The Diary of a Nobody. ‘There was something almost likeable about the mild little fellow who squinted through thick-lensed spectacles, and whose sandy moustache was out of all proportion to his build,’ thought the detective who had led the Crippen investigation, Chief Inspector Walter Dew.14 It was not sadism which attracted so many people to the story, so much as Romanticism, a sense that it was a lower-middle-class Héloïse and Abelard, a Tristan and Isolde played out behind lace curtains. It was not alone the fate of Crippen and his lover which fascinated the readers of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. It was their own fates, their own lives, their own missed opportunities, stuck in unrewarding jobs, and poky, jerry-built houses, and stultifying conventional marriages.
That was what made the trial of this quiet, dull little man one of the most sensational London ever saw. W. S. Gilbert – ‘always attuned to popular emotion’15 – was assiduous in his attendance at the committal proceedings, and wrote a one-act play, The Hooligan, based on Crippen. At the trial itself at the Old Bailey theatrical impresarios as grand as Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Sir John Hare joined the crowds in the public gallery. The demand for seats in Court Number 1 was so strong that a two-house-a-day system was inaugurated, Blue Tickets for one show, Red for the next.
Crippen was charged with the ‘murder and mutilation’16 of his wife, some of whose remains were found buried beneath the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent. The head was never found, but there was plenty to excite the ghoulish, as when a piece of skin eight inches long, horseshoe-shaped and fringed by what appeared to be pubic hair was passed around the jury. The trial marked the debut of Bernard Spilsbury, then aged thirty-three, who was to become the most celebrated pathologist of his day. He gave evidence at every important murder trial for the next quarter-century.
It has never been established beyond question exactly how Mrs Crippen died. The senior Home Office analyst, Dr W. H. Wilcox, found two-fifths of a grain of hydrobromide of hyoscine in the organs submitted to him, and this drug, which had been used as a means of quelling the rage of mental patients in the London Bethlehem Hospital, the Bedlam, when Crippen worked there, was probably used to poison her. (There is also a theory that he shot her.)
The drama of the case was not how Mrs Crippen died but how she and her husband lived. In fact, no one could have been less like Carrie and Charles Pooter. Both Crippens were working-class Americans. Belle Crippen had been born Kunigunde Mackamotzki and was the daughter of a poor Polish grocer from Brooklyn. She had dreamed of being an opera diva. It was the age of such great divas as Adelina Patti, who earned $5,000 per performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Instead, she ended up, having married the ten-years-older widower Dr Crippen, a travelling salesman in quack medical cures, in London, as Belle Ellmore, a somewhat shrieky soprano whose speciality, when she found work at all in the music halls, was a ballad entitled ‘Down Lovers’ Walk’.
Being an American should have helped her career. English music hall turns at this date were changing their accents and appearing as ‘The Knickerbocker Kut-ups’ or ‘The Madcaps from Manhattan’. Belle’s trouble, from the musical point of view, was lack of talent. She blamed her failure on her husband, and, as they took in lodgers to pay for the brandy she consumed in great quantities, she lost no time in regaling everyone with accounts of his selfishness. It had been a shaky marriage
from the start, made even less happy by brandy, and unfaithfulness. They had separate bedrooms at Hilldrop Crescent, and when Crippen found her in bed with one of the lodgers, a young German student, it was his signal of release.
Although he is always known as ‘Doctor’ Crippen, and although he left the University of Michigan’s School of Homeopathic Medicine in 1883, he did so without graduating. His employment was on the edge of the medical world, selling first the notorious Munyon’s homeopathic cures for piles. Millions of Americans hopefully bought the suppositories, which were advertised with a picture of Munyon himself, his arm upraised and one finger pointing suggestively upwards.
When Munyon fired Crippen as his London agent – Crippen had been spending too much time vainly trying to promote Belle’s stage career – he found work at a questionable establishment called the Drouet Institute for the Deaf. Dr Drouet, representing himself as ‘a respectable man of science’, was an alcoholic Frenchman, operating first at 72 Regent’s Park Road, then from premises near Marble Arch. He claimed to have discovered a cure for deafness. Evan Yellon, editor of the Albion Magazine, and stone-deaf, went along for an examination and was appalled to find himself being examined by a quack doctor, fantastically dressed in a bright shirt, cracked patent-leather shoes, and frock-coat. The doctor, with an American accent, put a filthy speculum into one ear, and then into another without disinfecting it. None of his instruments had a disinfectant bath. Two years after Crippen’s death, the Royal College of Surgeons officially condemned the patent medicines being purveyed by the Drouet Institute.
Ethel Clara LeNeve was an archetypically respectable lower-middle-class girl, of just the class which was soon to be emancipated politically. When she was seventeen, she had gone to work at Drouet’s as a short-hand typist, fresh from Pitman’s School. She was highly intelligent, and by the time Crippen, eighteen years her senior, arrived at the Institute she was effectively running the administration of the place. She fell in love with him, and, using the sleazy hotels off Argyle Square near King’s Cross Station, they became lovers.
