A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  The so-called ‘Matrimonial Causes Act’ meant that marriages could now be dissolved on the production of ‘evidence’ of adultery, and an army of private investigators would be kept busy hunting it down on behalf of wives with adulterous husbands. In Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1866), the characters spend an awful lot of time spying upon each other, often using a paid inquiry agent, and exchange views illustrating that detection was still seen as a dirty business: ‘the Confidential Spy of modern time … There he sat – the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilisation … a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors.’

  Meanwhile, Whicher himself was fictionalised by Collins in his next novel, The Moonstone (1868), as Sergeant Cuff, the unsuccessful detective. Like Mr Whicher, Sergeant Cuff is a man of mystery who lacks the social status to mingle easily with the family he is investigating. Nobody knows what he is really thinking as he prattles on about his beloved hobby of growing roses. Like so many fictional detectives, Sergeant Cuff is given a hobby to cover up this essential blankness at his centre. Just as Inspector Morse is really little more than a hyper-intelligent and grumpy collection of hobbies (beer-drinking, opera and crossword puzzles), Sergeant Cuff’s central preoccupation is gardening. He is treated as a mere mechanic by the snooty household who have called him in. And yet, at the same time, they don’t understand him and fear the searching beam of his gaze. His eyes ‘of a steely light grey, had a disconcerting trick when they encountered [you] of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself’.

  He is an ambiguous, incomprehensible, possibly dangerous character, and, as such, he reflects the status of the detective himself in society in the 1860s. Although Jack Whicher is today the most celebrated detective of the Victorian age, it took him many years (and Constance’s eventual confession) to recover anything like the standing he had held before Road Hill House.

  14

  A New Sensation

  ‘We look upon the detective officer as the magician of modern life.’

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  A RESPECTABLE FAMILY, a country house, a limited number of suspects, a lower-class investigator lurching in from outside: the crime and setting of the Road Hill House Murder seemed like a real-life equivalent of a rather thrilling new form of literature: the ‘sensation’ novel. And as this new genre developed, details of the Road Hill House Murder would crop up time and time again in its plots.

  In the 1860s, the ‘sensation’ novel would come to supersede both the ‘Newgate Novel’ and melodrama as the nation’s favourite form of crime story. Instead of featuring lowlifes and criminals, black and white passions and interventions by Providence, ‘sensation’ novels were set in ordinary domestic situations, often involving the middle- and upper-middle-class families who believed themselves to be too grand to be investigated by the police.

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one of the ‘sensation’ novel’s greatest authors, pinned down a definition of the type of murder that would now arouse maximum interest in the reading public. It has to be ‘uncommonly cruel, cowardly, and unmanly,’ she wrote, but, most importantly, it had to take place ‘in a respectable rank of life’. The implication that even the best families might have secrets was a pleasantly scandalous notion, and there was something more than a little shocking and improper about a good ‘sensation’ novel. ‘Indications of widespread corruption,’ the philosopher Henry Mansel called these books in 1863, ‘called into existence to satisfy the cravings of a diseased appetite.’

  But perhaps the best known of the ‘sensation’ novelists was Wilkie Collins. Henry James later described Collins as ‘having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors’. ‘Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho”,’ he continues, ‘we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings.’ Collins’s first success, The Woman in White (published in serial form, 1859–60), has many of those telltale sensational qualities: a country house, a conspiracy and a mystery solved by an amateurish alliance between the hero and a friend, first-time detectives both.

  It was The Moonstone eight years later, however, that became his best-known work, and his first to feature a professional detective. Even though it lacks an actual murder, The Moonstone has nearly everything else one might require from a detective story: a substantial country property as a setting, a closed circle of suspects, a professional investigator, hidden clues, even a style of writing that reads like the presentation of a file of evidence to a court. The solution to the puzzle will defeat all guesses, but it is in fact scrupulously signposted by clues that you will pick up on rereading. This is why T. S. Eliot made the claim that The Moonstone is ‘the first, the longest, and the best of the modern English detective novels’.

  Wilkie Collins, opium addict and ‘sensation’ novelist.

  It also has the special domestic quality that Henry James saw as the secret of Wilkie Collins’s success. The theft of a famous jewel, the Moonstone itself, took place in a country house in Yorkshire. The exact layout and decoration of each of its rooms is conjured up for us by Collins, down to the painted door and Indian cabinet in the young female heroine’s boudoir.

  At the same time, though, the country house could have been in any county of England. It was the archetypal, comfortable, prosperous Victorian home. And the wellspring of the plot was a very everyday domestic detail. The hero of the story, Franklin Blake, wishes to give up cigar smoking, because the girl he loves dislikes the smell. Deprived of nicotine, he feels uncomfortable and cannot sleep. The solution to this minor inconvenience will come as no surprise: of course, it is that Victorian cure-all, laudanum. The opiate helps Franklin Blake to get through the night, and ultimately, it explains the whole mystery of The Moonstone.

  Yet what people remember most from their first reading of The Moonstone is its addictive, page-turning, brain-teasing, feverish quality. ‘Sensation’ when applied to novels had two meanings. Firstly, the subject matter was ‘sensational’ in the sense of lurid and gripping. But the ‘sensation’ novel was also supposed to arouse real ‘sensations’ in the reader. The style was hard-hitting and jagged. ‘Sensation’ writers often employed characters’ first-person recollections, scraps of conversation, or their transcribed letters or diaries. Ideally, a ‘sensation’ novel will accelerate the heart, quicken the breath and constrict the blood vessels so the reader grows pale – experiences to be had today watching a horror film at the cinema.

  The Moonstone also has much in common with the case at Road Hill House. In both, a maidservant becomes the chief suspect, but the detective prefers to think it was the respectable daughter of the house. In both cases, a nightgown provides an important clue. Even the style of the nightgown is similarly important: in The Moonstone, it is notably plain, as a servant’s would be, and at Road Hill House the item’s simplicity showed it belonged to one of the older, less loved children. And, in both cases, the detective was treated by the family as somebody rather like a tradesman. He still was not quite yet a professional, socially acceptable person in middle-class circles. Geraldine Jewsbury, a contemporary critic for the Athenaeum magazine, noted that the strength of The Moonstone was the ‘wonderful construction of the story’ rather than the ‘sordid detective element’.

  Interestingly, although T. S. Eliot and others have argued that The Moonstone is ‘the first’ English detective novel, it actually breaks two of the cardinal rules that would develop in the coming ‘Golden Age’ of early twentieth-century detective fiction: that the narrator himself must not have done the deed, and that the solution should not be a powerful drug that compels people to act out of character. In a magnificently unexpected twist, Franklin Blake, one of the narrators, discovers that he’d been dosed with opium without his knowledge and that under its influence he himself had stolen the jewel.


  THE COMMITTING OF a crime in a drug-induced dream may provide the thrillingly unpredictable ending of The Moonstone, but it was also yet another example of the ubiquitous, unsensational presence of narcotics in Victorian daily life. What seems jarring, and indeed criminal today – the spiking of someone’s drink with a heavy-duty drug – is presented by Collins as little more than a foolish (albeit dangerous) prank. It’s not surprising to learn, then, that Wilkie Collins was himself writing The Moonstone under the influence of opium.

  By 1869, he was describing serious attempts to give it up: ‘I am stabbed every night at ten with a sharp-pointed syringe which injects morphia under my skin – and gets me a night’s rest without any of the drawbacks of taking opium internally’, he wrote. ‘If I only persevere with this, I am told I shall be able, before long, gradually to diminish the quantity.’

  But this was a wish made in vain. Collins’s obituary recorded that he still depended daily upon ‘more laudanum than would have sufficed to kill a ship’s crew or company of soldiers’. No wonder opiates appear in so many of his books.

  Collins’s addiction wasn’t the only unconventional feature of his life. He was the son of an artist, a hedonist, and a life-long indulger in food and drink. He worked in his youth for a tea merchant in the Strand, and found it boring, though the job gave him plenty of time for writing stories and essays. He was called to the bar, but never practised; his family money meant that he didn’t have to.

  Collins became great friends with Charles Dickens, 12 years older, who gave him excellent editorial advice but sometimes despaired of his protégé’s unconventional habits. Everyone addressed him very informally as ‘Wilkie’ (his middle name, rather than his first name, William), he wore flamboyant clothes and – infamously – maintained two separate establishments with two women, neither of whom he married. Dickens worried that his gifted young friend was ‘unnecessarily offensive to the middle class’.

  Collins was adamant that he didn’t draw his plots from true crime, but literary critics have certainly discovered enough clues to prove that he was being disingenuous in his claims of complete novelty. It was a round-up of celebrated French crimes that provided the inspiration for The Woman in White. The plot hinges on a dastardly deed: a young woman committed to a madhouse so that her fortune could be stolen. This is to be brought off on the basis of her physical similarity to her illegitimate half-sister who has already been imprisoned.

  The crime is solved by a young drawing master working in tandem with the splendid Marian Halcombe, another half-sister of the heroine. Marian identifies the two villains, eavesdrops upon them, is captured, falls ill of fever, recovers, bribes the attendant to let her half-sister out of the asylum and discovers that the villain himself was born out of wedlock and is therefore not entitled to his fortune or position in society. She does all this with vigour, charm and good humour despite – O tragedy! – being ‘ugly’. She has a ‘large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw’, down on her upper lip that was ‘almost a moustache’ and a waist ‘undeformed by stays’. Despite all these supposed defects, her expression is ‘bright, frank, and intelligent’. The critic John Sutherland calls her ‘one of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction’.

  ‘Sensation’ novelists were particularly good at showing women stepping outside the normal conventions of behaviour, and, among them, Wilkie Collins was best at it. Just as he used current events to shape his work, he also used his own experience of women. This is perhaps best seen in Armadale, with its evil but impressive heroine, Miss Lydia Gwilt. To make it absolutely clear of her wickedness, not only is her surname a mere letter away from ‘Guilt’, she also has wickedly red hair.

  The plot of Armadale is really quite ludicrous. But this story, too, was related to contemporary events, however much Collins may have claimed otherwise. In it, two men both named Allan Armadale, one rich, one poor, become friends. (They are related, but don’t know it.) Lydia Gwilt’s plan is to marry the poor one, thereby legally becoming ‘Mrs Armadale’. Then, having bumped them both off, she would pose as the widow of the rich one in order to claim his estate.

  This sort of thing was in fact no stranger than the real-life affair of the Tichborne Claimant. In 1854 Roger Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and fortune, was lost at sea and presumed dead. His devoted mother, however, believing that he might have survived, advertised widely in Australia, his supposed destination, and heard back from a butcher from Wagga Wagga. The butcher came to see her in England, and despite his uncouth ways, was accepted as the missing man by Lady Tichborne, and by many of his friends. (The family doctor claimed that both the missing man and the butcher shared an unusual deformation of the genitals.) But the rest of the family scented fraud and refused to accept him. Eventually the Tichborne Claimant was accused of perjury, and died destitute.

  This idea of using a false identity to claim an inheritance is central to Armadale. But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel is found in the relationship between the two central female characters. The plot depends upon a passionate, though quite frankly unbelievable, friendship between Allan Armadale and the other Allan Armadale (of mixed race), who goes by the assumed name of Ozias Midwinter. Far more engaging is the rivalry for the rich Allan’s affections between Neelie Milroy, the teenage daughter of one of his neighbours, and the thirty-something Lydia Gwilt, who contrives to be engaged as Miss Milroy’s governess specifically for the purpose of meeting and snagging him as a husband.

  The character of Lydia Gwilt shocked and horrified readers upon her first appearance, but from today’s vantage point she is much more sympathetic, coping rather valiantly with the setbacks of life (albeit, like Collins himself, with the help of her bottle of laudanum). Born illegitimate, she spent the first eight years of her life in the care of a ‘baby farmer’, or paid foster mother, Mother Oldershaw. When the money from Lydia’s family mysteriously stopped, Mother Oldershaw put Lydia out to work, sending her, at twelve, to become a servant in a large Norfolk household. Here, her employer gets her to forge a letter on his behalf, because of her ‘wicked dexterity’ with the pen. John Sutherland points out that, of course, this wasn’t the real reason: Lydia’s wicked master knew that forgery was a capital offence, and wanted the actual crime off his hands. Also, the sub-text is that he seduced his maid as well. The family get rid of this inconvenient girl by sending Lydia to France, where she is next accused of seducing her music teacher and thereby sending him mad. Lydia goes into a convent for a while, before becoming a pianist in Brussels then being recruited by a female criminal baroness as bait for a gambling scam. After five years of this, Lydia marries a rich young Englishman, but her by now heinously corrupt nature causes her to take a lover. Her husband horsewhips her for this; she poisons him. She is caught and convicted, but is pardoned on the basis that people feel sorry for her. All this takes place before the story of Armadale even starts.

  At its opening, Lydia’s plan is to support herself by marrying Allan Armadale. After having exhausted so many other options, it’s hard to see how else she might be able to earn a living. But the plan is eventually foiled when Lydia falls in love with her victim. It is her only weakness. In every other respect, she is a female Victorian Jason Bourne, employing the latest technology to achieve her ends. She aims to poison her victim by wafting carbonic acid into a bedroom through the air-conditioning in a new and purpose-built mental asylum. She also uses the facilities offered by London’s smart new railway stations, carrying out a complex skein of manoeuvres to get her possessions, her correspondence and her travel arrangements lined up without being detected:

  to the cloakroom of the Great Western, to get the luggage which I sent there … next to the cloak-room of the South Eastern (to leave my luggage) … to wait for the starting of the tidal train on Monday. Next to the General Post Office, to post a letter to Midwinter at the Rectory, which he will receive to-morrow morning.

  The most enjoyable passage of the book concerns the battle for Arma
dale’s affections between Lydia, with all her splendid mature beauty (maintained by artifice), sophistication and wily ways, and, on the other, the peachy and unstudied attractions of her young rival, Neelie. The pull between these two different types of woman was something that Wilkie Collins had experienced at first hand. Among his many unconventional views was the belief that marriage was unfair to women, and he campaigned vigorously against what he saw as the injustices of the law regarding it. He avoided marriage all his life, but certainly did not live alone and celibate in consequence.

  When he began Armadale, Collins was cohabiting with Caroline Graves, a woman in her mid-thirties, and her daughter, Harriet, whom Caroline had had with another man. (Wilkie loved Harriet and acted as her father.) Although they were not married, Caroline was the wise and worldly woman to whom he introduced his friends and with whom he discussed his work. In 1864, though, after ten years with Caroline, Wilkie Collins met the 19-year-old Martha Rudd, from Norfolk, the daughter of a shepherdess. He encountered her in Great Yarmouth as he was researching the East Anglian location of the action in Armadale, and persuaded her to come to London. He set her up in a house in Bolsover Street (only a ten-minute walk away from his and Caroline’s home in Gloucester Place) and she bore him three children.

  The competing charms of Wilkie’s two mistresses are paralleled, in Armadale, by Lydia and Neelie’s rivalry. ‘Am I handsome enough, today?’ Lydia asks her diary. ‘Well, yes. Handsome enough to be a match for a little dowdy, awkward, freckled creature, who ought to be perched on a form at school.’

  And yet, Allan Armadale would chose dim, dumpy little Neelie, malleable and easy-going, instead of the splendid Lydia.

  In real life, Caroline’s response to the arrival of Martha upon the scene was almost worthy of Lydia herself. She didn’t poison anyone, but she finally decided that she’d had enough, left Collins and married someone else. And yet, despite this, Wilkie and Martha never married, and he never introduced her to his friends as his ‘official’ consort. Something went wrong with Caroline’s new relationship and, within a couple of years, she was back in residence with Collins, even though he now had three children in the other home he shared with Martha. It was Caroline who nursed him in his final sickness, and Caroline was the ‘wife’ with whom Wilkie Collins was buried – in life, if not in literature, the older woman beat the younger.