A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  Victorian readers, however, didn’t take to Lydia at all, finding her immorality revolting – ‘a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets’ – and Armadale was something of a disappointment in sales terms. Another of Lydia’s defects was the attention she paid to maintaining her striking good looks, a type of duplicitous vanity considered to be rather wicked.

  This disapproval carried over to minor characters like Mother Oldershaw, whom contemporaries would have recognized instantly as the fictional equivalent of the beautician, con woman and procurer of abortions known as ‘Madame Rachel’. Born in the East End as Sarah Rachel Levison, Madame Rachel of Bond Street promised those who visited her salon that she would make them – in the words of her advertising slogan – ‘Beautiful for Ever’. Her cosmetic secrets included a process called ‘enamelling’, which involved plastering the face with a white paste designed to tighten, brighten and smoothen the skin. Today, we would presumably think it looked rather like the make-up of a clown, but to rich ladies – including the Princess of Wales herself – it was highly desirable.

  Distinctly unnatural, though, an ‘enamelled’ or made-up face became easy to spot, and was the target of the sort of moral disapproval aimed at Botox today. ‘We feel alarmed,’ wrote a journalist in the Glasgow Herald,

  when a beauty looks as if she were going to be betrayed into a smile lest her cheek should suddenly become fractured. We shall watch with tremendous apprehension when some beauty applies her pocket handkerchief to her nose, lest four or five guineas worth of its exquisite proportions should come away with it.

  The historian Helen Rappaport has discovered that some of Madame Rachel’s clients required ever more personal services. One Mrs Esdaile, for example, embarked upon a course of Arabian Bath treatments at Madame Rachel’s salon. She complained that her diamond earrings had gone missing from the changing room. Mrs Esdaile’s husband marched her along to a solicitor: he believed that the earrings had been stolen, and wanted Madame Rachel’s salon investigated. However, as the couple concluded their meeting with the solicitor, Mrs Esdaile nonchalantly left her gloves on his desk. Returning later, alone, to pick up the gloves, she admitted that she’d been using the salon to meet up with a lover in a private cubicle.

  Madame Rachel’s fees for this extra service and for her continued discretion had escalated over the months to the level of blackmail. It was no good Mrs Esdaile refusing to pay, Madame Rachel had threatened: ‘I know who you are. I have had you watched. I know where you live.’ But Mrs Esdaile quietly asked her husband’s solicitor to abandon the case. She knew that she had even more to lose than Madame Rachel if he brought about a successful prosecution.

  The fraudster and blackmailer was eventually indicted in 1865 for a poignant crime: she’d undertaken to remove the smallpox scars from the face of a client who had, in return, promised to give Madame Rachel all her jewellery. Madame Rachel was finally exposed in a trial conducted under a glare of publicity, and was confirmed as a celebrity criminal when her waxwork entered Madame Tussaud’s.

  The fictional Madame Rachel, Mother Oldershaw, the nearest person Lydia has to a mother, lends the anti-heroine money and helps her with her schemes, but is ready to turn and stab her in the back on the slightest provocation. Collins ran the risk of libel in creating such similarities between Oldershaw and Rachel, although Helen Rappaport has discovered no evidence to prove that the real-life Madame Rachel had links with backstreet abortionists, like her fictional equivalent. Setting the novel in 1851, ten years before its date of publication, Rappaport suggests, was a deliberate strategy that Collins came up with to defend himself from accusations of feeding upon the distress of real people.

  Despite the scandal caused by characters like Lydia Gwilt and Mother Oldershaw, the sympathy that Collins showed for women and the engaging complexity that he gave to his female characters ensured that he had many devoted female readers. A manual for women published in 1889 told them how they ought to react to the disappointments of life: ‘Perhaps you are unhappy; perhaps your heart is bursting. But do not look for consolation, even in the realm of ideas, these are dangerous if they can become sinful. Resign yourself. Lose yourself completely in your children.’

  ‘Sensation’ novels like Armadale – or Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret – provided an alternative to this. In them women were often bad, mad, dangerous and murderous. ‘Female anger, frustration and sexual energy’ bursts out of these stories, writes the critic Elaine Showalter, and often ‘the death of a husband comes as a welcome release, and women escape from their families through illness, madness, divorce, flight and, ultimately, murder’.

  The ‘sensation’ novel has retained its admirers ever since its emergence in the 1860s. The magnificent detective novelist of the 1930s Dorothy L. Sayers was devoted to the form. In her masterpiece Gaudy Night (1935), her bluestocking heroine Harriet Vane returns to her old Oxford college to research a very appropriate pet project: the work of ‘sensation’ novelist Sheridan Le Fanu.

  And Collins and his contemporaries still influence writers today. Sarah Waters was inspired by the hits of the 1860s for her fabulous novel Fingersmith (2002). ‘I was hooked on the “sensation novels” of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’, she wrote in the Guardian in 2006, ‘novels whose pre-occupation with sex, crime and family scandals had once made them runaway bestsellers.’ In Fingersmith, Sue, the child of an urban baby farmer (like Mother Oldershaw), is sent by her family of thieves to a remote country house. Her mission is a plot against Maud, an isolated, strange young lady, who lives with her uncle, a noted collector of pornography. The plan is that Sue will persuade Maud to elope with a man who’s really a fraudster. He will then place her in a madhouse and claim her fortune.

  It’s a story Wilkie Collins would have loved.

  15

  ‘It is worse than a crime, Violet …’

  ‘Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on end, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System … and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life.’

  Punch, describing the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  LIKE MANY OF her contemporary writers, and many of her own heroines, Mary Elizabeth Braddon would probably have preferred to live a less lurid life. But she had little choice. She desperately needed the money to be made by exploiting the British weakness for crime.

  The daughter of a solicitor, she grew up in Frith Street, Soho. In 1839, when she was four, her parents broke up. Braddon’s father’s infidelity and spend-thriftery drove her mother to leave him, taking her daughter with her, and to set up home in Kensington. Here the future novelist received a good education at a girls’ school.

  Yet cash was short. In her early twenties, Braddon was forced to find work, to make ends meet, and she chose to go on the stage. With her mother in tow, she toured the Midlands as an actress. Suitably for a girl forced by circumstances to act older and wiser than her years, she often took the part of a middle-aged matron rather than the ingénue.

  Even during her theatrical years, though, Braddon had an alternative career in mind. Eventually she picked up an admirer who was willing to fund her to write, full-time, for six months. Her earliest published efforts were Penny Dreadfuls, which were published weekly, and cheaply, in serial form – ‘Dreadfuls’ were aimed at a slightly younger market, particularly boys. Judith Flanders points out that, in 1861, 9 out of the total population of 20 million were aged 18 or under, so 45 per cent of the potential reading public were children. Feeding their demand for entertainment as a serial writer involved sustained, disciplined work, which evidently suited Braddon: ‘I have never written a line that has not been written against time.’ And yet, as she began to find success, she also found herself constrained by her genre, complaining: ‘the amount of crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning and general infamy required by the halfpenny reader is something terrible’.
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br />   Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

  Braddon lost her generous patron, because she had set herself up with another man. She became a literary assistant to John Maxwell, publisher of fiction magazines. He was married, and had five children, and in a turn of events that would not be out of place in one of Braddon’s own novels, his wife had been locked away in a lunatic asylum.

  Braddon (her faithful and long-suffering mother still in tow) now moved into John Maxwell’s house in Bloomsbury, and began to act as his wife and as stepmother to his five children. She would live with him, unmarried, for many years, and have a further five children with him, giving her many critics ammunition for accusations of impropriety.

  And bigamy formed the central theme of Braddon’s first great triumph, Lady Audley’s Secret. Published in serial form in 1861, it sold enormously well. The story of Lady Audley’s infamy unfolds through the investigative work of her husband’s nephew, a handsome, lazy and unemployed barrister called Robert Audley. As the book progresses, he toughens up, becomes increasingly dedicated to his task, and finishes up as the rather high-handed arbiter of retribution. At the very end, once it has become clear that Lady Audley was indeed guilty of attempted murder, Robert Audley takes it upon himself to imprison her in a mental institution rather than drag his family name through the scandal of the criminal courts.

  At the heart of Lady Audley’s Secret is the ancient mansion of Audley Court. Braddon’s model for the house was Ingatestone Hall in Essex, dating from the 1540s. It was the secondary home of its owners, the Catholic Petre family, who rented it out as a series of apartments. It seems that John Maxwell rather than Braddon herself was their tenant, and it’s unclear whether his landlords knew that the lady writer whom he installed for a while in the apartment was his lover. Braddon’s description of Audley Court still applies to Ingatestone Hall to this day:

  The house … occupied three sides of a quadrangle. It was very old, and very irregular and rambling. The windows were uneven; some small, some large, some with heavy stone mullions and rich stained glass; others with frail lattices that rattled in every breeze … the principal door was squeezed into a corner of a turret at one angle of the building … a glorious old place. A place that visitors fell in raptures with; feeling a yearning to have done with life.

  Running alongside a sluggish green canal behind Ingatestone Hall is the celebrated Lime Walk. In the story, the Lime Walk leads to the infamous well down which Lady Audley pushes her first husband. Braddon claimed later that it was walking beneath the Ingatestone limes that inspired the whole story. Only to a ‘sensation’ novelist like Braddon would this peaceful and secluded spot have suggested (in her words) ‘something uncanny’ and ‘a history of domestic crime’.

  Robert Audley and Lady Audley at the well down which she has pushed her husband.

  Middle-class reaction to this scandalous book (and to its equally scandalous author) was predictable. ‘She has temporarily succeeded in making the literature of the kitchen the favourite reading of the drawing room,’ sniffed one critic. She satisfied only ‘the cravings of a diseased appetite,’ huffed another, while a third marvelled at her invention, ‘which could only have been possible to an Englishwoman knowing the attractions of impropriety’.

  Much of the impropriety of the book lay in its anti-heroine, Lady Audley. She looked good as gold with her china-doll, passive prettiness, and yet she was quite capable of murder. The heroine in Braddon’s next book, Aurora Floyd (1862), would be even less womanly: she actually horse-whips her blackmailer, in a celebrated scene, which deranges her clothing in a manner that suggests that she enjoyed the sadism.

  But it was Lady Audley who made her creator a fortune, and with it Braddon purchased a grand house in Richmond where she wrote many of the rest of her 80 novels. Lichfield House (dating from the eighteenth century, and demolished in the 1930s) was grand and substantial, not quite as grand as the ancient Audley Court but more than respectable. Braddon’s publisher, William Tinsley, built himself a villa at Barnes, Audley Lodge, with his own share of the profits.

  Reading Lady Audley’s Secret today, one is struck by how unfair the contemporary vilification of the heroine seems. We know that Helen (alias Lady Audley) is a villainess by the repeated references to her beautiful, ethereal, feathery golden curls: the sub-text is that she (shamefully) dyes her hair. Just as with Lydia Gwilt, though, it’s hard to dismiss Lady Audley as a truly evil character.

  She was parted as a child from her own mad mother to grow up with her alcoholic father. Once married, and with a young baby, she is deserted by her husband George Talboys, who goes off to Australia without a word. It is the action of a heartless villain, though contemporary readers found him a paragon of virtue. It may have been his intention to seek – and in fact he did succeed in finding – a fortune in Australia for the benefit of his wife and child, but Helen is abandoned to a life of poverty. I find it quite understandable that she should give him up as a bad lot, find work as a governess and then marry the aged and wealthy baronet Sir Michael Audley. But then she has a stroke of bad luck: it turns out that Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew, was also a friend of her first husband. Robert grows increasingly suspicious about what might have happened to George Talboys, and who the new Lady Audley might really be.

  Helen’s greater crime was the abandonment of her child to the not-so-tender mercies of her drunken father, although her husband George – held up as a hero – does exactly the same thing when he returns from Australia and the boy becomes his responsibility. Even Robert Audley, inheriting the problem of what to do with the child after his friend’s supposed murder, does nothing more than pack the poor boy off to school. I like to think that Lady Audley finally saves her own life by pretending to be mad, thereby persuading the stuffy Robert Audley that she should live, at his expense, in Belgium for the rest of her life rather than face trial for attempted murder.

  Despite the resetting of our moral compasses, one of the enduring pleasures of the story of Lady Audley is working out who’s good and who’s bad, and changing one’s mind as new facts emerge. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was instinctively aware of what her readers would praise and blame, and managed to walk the tightrope between the two in a manner that kept people reading even if they didn’t approve. ‘It is worse than a crime, Violet, it is an impropriety’ is a celebrated line spoken by a character in one of her later works, which could only have been written by a clear-eyed observer of contemporary society.

  Jennifer Carnell, Braddon’s biographer, points out that contemporaries would have judged many of Braddon’s characters more harshly than their creator did herself. Those who commit murders and other crimes (and there are many of them in her many books) are often allowed to escape hanging or death, and Braddon sends them off instead to a long life of quiet repentance. This enraged her more moralistic readers, but, from a modern vantage point, it looks as if Braddon had more insight into human weakness than many of her male fellow writers. Life had not treated her kindly, and she therefore understood what circumstances could drive people to do.

  Indeed, in the midst of her wealth and achievements, the past caught up with her. When John Maxwell’s legal wife eventually died in the psychiatric institution in Ireland, Braddon’s detractors made sure that the death was announced widely in the press. Letters of condolence began to arrive at Braddon and Maxwell’s house in Richmond, as everyone assumed that it was Braddon herself, his presumed wife, who was dead. When it became clear that she was still very much alive, the respectability of this apparently affluent couple living in Richmond was shredded, and all but one of their servants left. Yet, even if Braddon wasn’t immensely respectable, when she died in 1915, she was immensely successful and immensely rich, the reward of a career providing Victorian readers with exactly the stories they desired most.

  16

  Monsters and Men

  ‘Strong men shuddered and women fainted and were carried out of the theatre.’

  Richard Mansfield
’s obituary describes the effect of his performance as Mr Hyde

  IN 1888, A serial killer was terrorizing the East End of London. The few undisputed facts about him are rather grubby and shop-soiled from so much handling, and the identity of the murderer is still a complete mystery. Over the summer and autumn, several killings of prostitutes on the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields became linked – at least in the public’s imagination – with a single perpetrator. The removal of internal organs from three of the women led people to think that he must have had medical knowledge, and be experienced in dissection. The final touch came from a hoax letter, purporting to be from the killer but probably written by a journalist aiming to stir up the story. He signed it with the name that stands today as shorthand for a whole ragbag of half-facts and inferences: the assumption that there was a single killer and mutilator, trained as a doctor, who called himself ‘Jack the Ripper’.fn1

  The case was recreated in fiction almost immediately. The Curse Upon Mitre Square is a novelette inspired by one of the Ripper killings and published by John Francis Brewer as early as October 1888. And, of course, its influence is felt to this day, with TV dramas like Whitechapel and Ripper Street.