by Lucy Worsley
Charles Dickens, Crime Writer
‘We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days. How dreadful its rough heavy walls, and low massive doors … made for the express purpose of letting people in, and never letting them out again.’
Charles Dickens, an essay on the criminal courts
ON 13 NOVEMBER 1849, a young writer and four of his friends rented a room in a house near Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Bermondsey. They wanted to get a good view of that day’s execution of a villainous couple, the murderers Mr Frederick and Mrs Maria Manning. Their crime had been to kill Maria’s lover, and to bury him beneath their kitchen floor, and The Times reported that at least 10,000 people had come to watch them swing.
Most of the crowd attended for pleasure, but the writer judged that there was something degrading and animal about the relish he saw being taken all around him: ‘Upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.’
He and his party had set out to enjoy the spectacle, but it had turned out to be disgusting and disappointing. The murderers, he thought, had ‘perished like beasts’.
Charles Dickens had always been fascinated by crime and its consequences, and his interest pervades his novels. Dickens isn’t easy to categorize, and fails to fit comfortably into any single genre. But one strand of his work that’s often underappreciated is that which overlaps with the type of books known as ‘Newgate Novels’.
These novels were set in the London underworld, in and about the world of Newgate Prison that had so attracted Dickens as a boy. Built in the 1780s in a style designed to strike fear into the heart of the offender, Newgate was the site of public hangings and it had the dubious distinction of providing training to all the nation’s hangmen.
Stories about crime and criminals had for a long time been published in a collection known as The Newgate Calendar (subtitled The Malefactors’ Bloody Register). It started out simply as a list of the criminals who had been executed at Newgate, but subsequent editions were padded out with peripheral information and context about their life and crimes. Almost inevitably, reality became embellished and, indeed, glamorized. In the timeless journalistic manner, the regurgitation of the gory details is justified on moral grounds by an editorial voice that condemns each fact even as it relishes it.
By 1774, you could buy a standard five-volume compendium of all the most popular stories. Respectable middle-class readers found the whole idea of reading fiction with thieves and murderers as heroes to be repellent, and yet it was said that, after the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Newgate Calendar was the book most likely to be found in an ordinary working person’s home.
The forbidding entrance to Newgate Gaol.
The subject matter was attractive and addictive, and many authors used the Calendar as a jumping-off point for stories of crime set in the London world dominated by the prison. In a similar vein, another long-running series called The Mysteries of the Courts of London, which was published between 1844 and 1848, had more than 40,000 subscribers.
In the hands of the right author, the ‘Newgate Novel’ could become great literature. Charles Dickens was not one who aimed at producing high art, or a social climber who placed himself above his subjects. Indeed, although he hated to mention it in later life, he had worked for part of his boyhood in a blacking factory during a period of parental poverty. He climbed his way back to respectability, but he well understood that he closely escaped falling further and becoming ‘a little robber or a little vagabond’ himself. He therefore knew something of life on the London streets, and kept up his knowledge even after his great successes by walking out and talking to the kinds of people who populate his work. Not all of them were on the right side of the law.
Oliver Twist (1838) was Dickens’s second novel, and the very title points to the fact that this is a crime novel: to ‘twist’ – in thieves’ language – means to hang for a crime. The young hero, Oliver, becomes a member of a gang of boy criminals. And yet, as Judith Flanders points out, he is also designed to appeal to the middle-class readers who bought novels. Although he doesn’t know it, Oliver has been exiled from a much higher social class and ends up in the workhouse because of the cruelty and neglect of his relations. He naïvely and unwittingly joins Fagin’s gang rather than being born into it. And, indeed, Dickens does not glamorize the criminals in Oliver Twist as a true ‘Newgate Novelist’ would have done. Sikes and Fagin are clearly bad, sordid and wrong.
Oliver Twist, though, is characteristic of the ‘Newgate Novels’ in being closely linked to a real-life crime. Eliza Grimwood, a murdered woman, appears in Oliver Twist as Nancy, the victim of murderer Bill Sikes. In real life, Eliza’s poise and elegance meant that she was known as ‘The Countess’, but actually she was a prostitute from Waterloo. She was also ‘about twenty-five years of age, of sober habits, and had saved a little money’. In 1838, she set off from her lodgings in Waterloo in search of clients, whom she picked up around the theatres in Drury Lane across the river. Eliza shared her room with William Hubbard, her lover and pimp, who would leave it when Eliza was working. One particular night, Eliza returned to her room accompanied by a tall man ‘who had the look of a foreigner, and dressed like a gentleman’.
But the following morning, coming back to the room, Hubbard claimed to have found it empty, except for her dead body. It was an appalling sight. Even the professional and experienced policeman who investigated the case confessed to Dickens: ‘when I saw the poor Countess (I had known her well to speak to), lying dead, with her throat cut, on the floor of her bedroom, you’ll believe me that a variety of reflections calculated to make a man rather low in his spirits, came into my head’.
Eliza’s horrible fate sparked a good deal of attention, both from journalists and fiction writers. Eliza Grimwood, for example, written by Alexander Somerville, was a ‘Penny Blood’ giving a glamorous riff on her life and death. As well as ‘biographical notices of her fair companions’, the work also promised the usual cast of ‘Penny Blood’ characters from high and low: ‘sketches of dukes, lords, Hon. M.P.’s, magistrates and her murderer’.
In real life, William Hubbard, suspected of killing Eliza, got off. In fiction, Dickens, who was always on the side of fallen women and streetwalkers, made it clear that he thought the murderer should pay for his deeds. In Oliver Twist the evil Bill Sikes is served just retribution for murdering Nancy: haunted by remorse, chased by a furious mob, he is eventually killed while trying to escape.
In later years, Dickens carried out a great number of hugely popular and profitable dramatic readings from his work in lecture halls and theatres, and the murder of Nancy was always well received as the very climax of the performances. This was done in defiance of a ban placed upon dramatic versions of the story of Oliver Twist by the Lord Chamberlain. The censorship was motivated by a concern for public order and the morale of Londoners. The authorities did not want the real murder of Eliza Grimwood to be given any more notoriety by its being shown on stage. They wanted it to be forgotten, and for all the fuss to die down. But Dickens, through Oliver Twist, and even more through his readings, kept an echo of the memory of ‘The Countess’ alive.
DICKENS’ LIFE-LONG INTEREST in social justice took a new direction in 1850 when he began to write more and more often about the Metropolitan Police. Embarking upon a series of articles in the magazine he edited, Household Words, he set out to present this new profession to his middle-class readership as respectable, admirable and, indeed, quite as glamorous as the thieves had appeared to be in old-style ‘Newgate’ fiction. He took it upon himself to promote London’s detectives to the world, explaining that the force: ‘proceeds so systematically and quietly, does its business in such a workman-like manner, and is always so calmly and steadily engaged in the service of the pu
blic, that the public really do not know enough of it, to know a tithe of its usefulness’.
In an essay called ‘The Modern Science of Thief-Taking’, Dickens described the Detective Branch in similarly awe-struck terms: ‘forty-two individuals, whose duty it is to wear no uniform, and to perform the most difficult operations of their craft’.
The creation of the Detective Branch was, as we have seen, not universally welcomed. Its members were seen as upstarts, busybodies and spies. Dickens did them a great service by depicting them differently. He transformed the members of this newly established profession into crime specialists, people with unique qualities and abilities.
To them, a crime scene presented ‘tracks quite invisible to other eyes’. In a room where a jewel robbery had taken place, for example, a skilled detective might trace the hallmarks of a particular gang of criminals simply ‘by the style of performance’. In one of his essays for Household Words, Dickens shows a detective in action, addressing the couple whose jewels have been lost. The couple themselves epitomized the sort of well-off readers of Household Words who might well have resented the intrusion of a detective into their comfortable world. After examining the crime scene, the detective gives his verdict:
‘All right, Sir. This is done by one of “The Dancing School!”’
‘Good heavens!’ exclaims your plundered partner. ‘Impossible, why our children go to Monsieur Pettitoes, of No. 81, and I assured you he is a highly respectable profession. As to his pupils, I –’
The Detective smiles and interrupts. ‘Dancers’, he tells her, ‘is a name given to the sort of burglar by whom she had been robbed; and every branch of the thieving profession is divided into gangs, which are termed “Schools”…’
Dickens became such a fan of the detectives that in 1850 he invited the entire squad to attend a party in the office of Household Words. Over brandy and water (‘very temperately used indeed’) and cigars, the staff of the magazine and the detectives made ‘a review of the most celebrated and horrible of the great crimes that have been committed within the last fifteen or twenty years’. One of those present, an inspector whom Dickens calls ‘Wield’, would have a particularly notable effect on Dickens’s writing in the 1850s. Inspector Field, as he was really called, had joined the force in its very earliest days in 1829. His career had seen steady progress, and he had ended up as the head of the newly formed Detective Branch on its formation in 1842.
Dickens captured his friend’s real-life physical tics with a novelist’s trick of bringing a character to life: ‘A middle-aged man of a portly presence, with a large, moist, knowing eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his conversation by the air of a corpulent fore-finger, which is constantly in juxta-position with his eyes or nose.’
In a subsequent essay, called ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, Dickens follows his favourite policeman on a regular night’s work, as he makes his rounds of the ill-famed St Giles area of London.
Here an enormous ‘rookery’, or mass of overcrowded housing, covered the area now surrounding the Centrepoint building next to Tottenham Court Road tube station. It was one of the worst slums in Europe. Henry Mayhew described the parish in 1860 as consisting of ‘nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers … the synonym of filth and squalor’.
The journalist and ‘Penny Blood’ writer George Augustus Sala also revelled in the horror of St Giles. His prurient tone places him firmly in the character of the middle-class people who enjoyed ‘slumming it’, or visiting these areas for a salacious thrill, and who treated their inhabitants, with unattractive condescension, as a subhuman species:
From a hundred foul lanes and alleys have debouched … unheard-of human horrors. Gibbering forms of men and women in filthy rags … hang around your feet like reptiles, and crawl round you like loathsome vermin, and in a demoniac whine beg charity from you. One can bear the men; ferocious and repulsive as they are, a penny and a threat will send them cowering and cursing to their noisome dens again. One cannot bear the women without a shudder and a feeling of infinite sorrow and humiliation. They are so horrible to look upon, so thoroughly unsexed, shameless.
Eventually, like the lancing of a boil, New Oxford Street was cut through the depths of the slum.fn1
Dickens’s tour of St Giles with Inspector Field begins with the clock of St Giles church striking nine, and his arrival at the Police Station House nearby. There he discovers a host of lost souls: a boy who can’t find his way home to Newgate Street, an inebriated woman, a quiet woman imprisoned for begging, a watercress seller, a pickpocket and a drunken male pauper.
Dickens and Field then set off on Field’s nightly round of the area. Dickens is amazed and impressed by Inspector Field’s lack of fear, his knowledge of his beat and his knack of getting what he wants. ‘I should like to know where Inspector Field was born,’ he muses. ‘In Ratcliffe Highway, I would have answered with confidence, but for his being equally at home wherever we go.’ Inspector Field invades lodging houses and slums, brutally turning out nests of thieves from their beds in search of malefactors.
Saint Giles’s church strikes half-past ten. We stoop low, and creep down a precipitous flight of stairs into a dark close cellar. There is a fire. There is a long deal table. There are benches. The cellar is full of company, chiefly very young men in various conditions of dirt and raggedness. Some are eating supper. There are no women or girls present. Welcome to Rats’ Castle, gentlemen, and to this company of noted thieves!
Inspector Field searches the cellar, and soon has the young men standing up and respectfully taking off their caps. He knows each and every occupant. His is the hand ‘that has collared half the people here, and motioned their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, male and female friends, inexorably to New South Wales … Inspector Field stands in this den, the Sultan of the place’.
The year following their night-time jaunt through the slums of St Giles, Dickens would fictionalize his friend, placing him, as ‘Inspector Bucket’, into the novel Bleak House (1852). Inspector Bucket captures the murderous maid, Hortense, who is herself based on Maria Manning.
Although the overarching theme of the novel is the condemnation of the ponderous, slow and therefore unjust Court of Chancery, and although the murderess and the policeman are minor characters, Dickens is nevertheless often credited with writing, in Bleak House, what may be described as the first detective novel. His character Hortense murders a lawyer and frames her employer, Lady Dedlock, for the crime. Inspector Bucket, originally employed to investigate Lady Dedlock, follows the clues and catches the murderess.
Dickens himself would deny the link between the real-life Inspector Field and the fictional Inspector Bucket. After all, a novelist wishes to be known for his or her imagination, not for journalistic observation. But the link of the lifted finger points to the connection. Like Field’s, Bucket’s ‘fat forefinger seems to rise to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears, and it whispers information … he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent.’
Just as John Williams, in the mind of De Quincey, became literature’s first glamorous murderer, Inspector Field has a good claim for providing, in Dickens’s work, the model for the first fully formed professional detective in fiction.
fn1 St Giles is also the location of the opening scene, where we meet one of the book’s many prostitutes, in Michel Faber’s magnificent homage to Victorian fiction, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002).
8
The Ballad of Maria Marten
‘There’s nothing beats a stunning good murder, after all.’
Ballad-seller commenting on his profession’s most profitable moments
FAR DISTANT FROM the noisome slums of St Giles, the peaceful Suffolk village of Polstead is a quiet and picturesque place amid fields and woods.
The village has a lovely medieval church on a knoll grazed by sheep, an idyllic pond and a green with a comfortable pub c
alled the Cock Tavern. In 1828, however, a particularly brutish and nasty crime took place here. In the graveyard of the church, a wooden sign tells the visitor that the body of Maria Marten is buried somewhere close by. Poor Maria, the victim of the celebrated Murder at the Red Barn, was only 25 years old. The wooden sign is necessary because her actual gravestone has disappeared (more on this shortly).
The people who live in Polstead today aren’t particularly interested in this local murder, and would rather forget about it. Indeed, when I was there, a passing local family told me that the village doesn’t like to talk about Maria. ‘You won’t find we’re keen,’ the father said. Yet her presence is still clearly felt: in the plaque in the churchyard, at her cottage (clearly signposted as ‘Maria Marten’s’) and in the prominent signpost marking ‘Corder’s House’, the home of her killer, William Corder. That same afternoon, others tweeted that I might as well give up looking as I wouldn’t find the remains of the Red Barn. Indeed, I was already well aware that they had vanished.
Maria was the daughter of a mole-catcher and had two illegitimate children with different fathers. In time, as Maria’s tale became embroidered in the retelling, this somewhat disreputable back-story would be glossed over. Many later accounts make her out to have been an innocent, pure and virginal young maid of the village. In 1827, though, she gave birth to a third baby, fathered by William Corder, who lived in a much bigger and grander Elizabethan house over near the pond. The son of a prosperous yeoman farmer, Corder had a slightly dodgy reputation and criminal contacts in London. But, again, in order to make a better story, he would later be elevated into the more straightforward and recognizable role of village squire.
Corder seems to have promised Maria that they would marry, or at least elope together, and an assignation was made at the ‘Red Barn’, a structure on the hill behind Maria’s house. This barn, later so illustrious in fact and fiction, took its name from its partially red-pantiled roof. But also, it was said, its position allowed it to catch the rays of the setting sun, which nightly turned it a bloody and ominous red.
