A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  But historians have recently pointed out an extremely interesting relationship that goes in the other direction, from fiction to real life.

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) was inspired by a nightmare – ‘I was dreaming a fine bogey tale’, as he put it – and he wrote it in three furious days. The short novel is about a respectable doctor with a split personality. By day, he is a fine, upstanding member of his profession and community. At night, though, he is transformed into a terrible, dark inversion of himself. Through the consumption of a magic medicine, he would ‘turn into’ the other, baser, half of his character: the monstrous killer Mr Hyde. The story opens with a description of Mr Hyde, rampaging down a London street at night, and in a blind fury trampling down and crushing a little girl who had been sent out by her family to run for a doctor for a sick relative. His evil actions are particularly terrifying because they appear to be random and without motive.

  Accosted by spectators, Mr Hyde agrees to pay compensation to her family for hurting the child, but the cheque he makes out is in the name of the highly respectable Dr Jekyll. This is the first hint that the evil, deformed and violent Mr Hyde – he later bludgeons someone to death with a walking stick – has some sort of relationship with the virtuous doctor. It’s initially assumed that Mr Hyde is blackmailing Dr Jekyll, but the two of them are never to be seen in the same place at the same time. Eventually, when Hyde is suspected of having murdered Jekyll, the secret comes out that they are one and the same person. Along with it the source of the transformation is revealed: it lies in the potion and the special salt with which it must be mixed. Dr Jekyll had been performing chemical experiments to explore the ‘thorough and primitive duality of man’, and, through a batch of contaminated drugs, had stumbled upon unforeseen and tragic consequences.

  Once again the Victorian love/fear of poisons raises its head, as does the idea that darkness lurks in the heart of the respectable doctor, like William Palmer. The theme of a man’s being able to present two very different faces to the world runs through Victorian literature: it would be seen again in The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde (1890).

  Stevenson’s book was enormously successful and soon became a stage play, which opened at London’s Lyceum Theatre on 5 August 1888. The murder of Martha Tabram, a crime some people think is the first in the series committed by ‘Jack the Ripper’, took place just two days later. Other murders followed swiftly on.

  Every night at the Lyceum, in front of a couple of thousand people, an actor named Richard Mansfield (1857–1907) played both of the characters, the good Dr Jekyll and the evil Mr Hyde. The climax of the play came when he transformed himself, on stage, from Mr Hyde back into Dr Jekyll. The film versions of the story show the transformation going the other way, from good to bad, from Jekyll to Hyde. But the original stage version showed the monster turning into the man.

  Stevenson’s story described the transformation as:

  the most racking pangs … a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet.

  This was what Richard Mansfield had to convey – and he was an extraordinarily skilled actor. His background had been in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and he would go on to be a hugely popular Shakespearian performer. When he died, the New York Times called him ‘the greatest actor of his hour, and one of the greatest of all times’.

  Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde was the role that made Mansfield’s reputation. The Daily Telegraph claimed that ‘his nervous electricity caused silence throughout the house – the surest test of power’. (This also shows that audiences were not yet expected to sit in the well-mannered, attentive silence that we know today.) ‘Mr Mansfield,’ the reviewer continued, ‘has come, he has been seen, and he has conquered as an actor of remarkable power and intelligence.’

  How did Mansfield achieve the changeover from Hyde to Jekyll? There was much speculation about his use of make-up, trap doors and secret lighting effects. ‘Every one speculated on the secret of the transformation which they saw yet could not believe’, Mansfield’s obituary would claim. ‘He was accused of using acids, phosphorus and all manner of chemicals.’ Indeed, one witness ‘declared it was “all perfectly simple. He uses a rubber suit which he inflates and exhausts with pleasure!”’

  Mansfield was understandably reluctant to reveal the secrets of his craft, but it does seem that the transformation was achieved through the physical body alone. He did, however, receive help from the swelling music of the orchestra, and some nifty lighting. As Mr Hyde, he was lit from below, to darken and deepen the eye sockets. As Dr Jekyll, he was lit, flatteringly, from above, as the conventional, handsome, juvenile lead in any play would have been. (The critics generally preferred Mansfield as the twisted Mr Hyde rather than as the much more straightforward and run-of-the-mill hero, Dr Jekyll.) But most of the effect he achieved by himself. The moment Mr Hyde swallowed the magic potion, Mansfield would turn his back on the audience, writhing and grimacing as it went down his throat. Then, as he completed his circuit, he faced them once again as the smiling doctor. The Evening Standard described how: ‘It is the puny fiend that swallows the draught, then the figure straightens itself, actually seems to increase in stature, passes its hands upwards over its face, and Jekyll stands revealed. The change is amazing in its completeness and rapidity.’

  Mansfield would have adopted the overblown, melodramatic acting style necessary for two thousand people to be able to see clearly what he was doing, and they found it thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.

  It was a remarkable performance, and people were amazed partly because they had simply never seen anything like it before. The effect on the audience’s nerves was so deep as to be almost dangerous. One newspaper reported:

  I was attracted by a crowd in the Strand the other night, and on investigating the matter, found that they surrounded a well-dressed young man who had bolted out of a ’bus while it was going at a rapid rate, and then fallen down in a fit. It appeared that he had been to see Mr Mansfield as Dr Jekyll, and on getting into the ’bus found himself beside a most repulsive-looking man, whom he immediately concluded must either be the Doctor himself or the Whitechapel Murderer. In a fit of fearful nervousness, he jumped from his seat, and came to grief as mentioned.

  The press were reporting that ‘Jack the Ripper’ had been removing internal organs from his victims with some skill, suggesting that he, too, had a medical training – and it wasn’t long before people began to mix up fact and fiction. In an article for The Ripperologist (the journal for historians of ‘Jack the Ripper’), Alan Sharp analyses the links the media made between the ‘Ripper’ and Mr Hyde during London’s fearful summer of 1888. He notes how the Freeman’s Journal began in a sober, comparative note, reflecting that ‘these atrocities and apparently causeless murders show that there is abroad at the present time in the East End a human monster even more terrible than Hyde’. Meanwhile, another gentleman wrote to the Telegraph with a stronger connection, suggesting that ‘the perpetrator [of the ‘Ripper’ killings] is a being whose diseased brain has been inflamed by witnessing the performance of the drama of “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”’. Others went still further than the facts warranted. A correspondent to The Star insisted that: ‘You, and every one of the papers, have missed the obvious solution of the Whitechapel mystery. The murderer is a Mr Hyde, who seeks in the repose and comparative respectability of Dr Jekyll security from the crimes he commits in his baser shape.’

  There were even those who insisted that the actor Richard Mansfield was himself the killer. After all, every night, on stage, he showed that he had the capacity to be both a healer and a killer: ‘I do not think there is a man living so well able to disguise himself in a moment as he does in front of the public,’ cla
imed the Pall Mall Gazette under the headline ‘Mr Hyde at large in Whitechapel’.

  As Judith Flanders has pointed out, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has had a powerful effect upon people’s understanding of who ‘Jack the Ripper’ might have been. The killer is never assumed to be a local East Ender with a history as a ne’er-do-well. He’s always judged to be a man out of place, flipping between high society by day and the dark and dirty streets of Whitechapel by night. The suspects put forward include the artist Walter Sickert, the writer Lewis Carroll, and Edward VII’s eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, all of them embodying the idea that within a respectable man may lurk a monster.

  Reality and fiction seem to become entangled even further when one considers the interrelationship between ‘Jack the Ripper’ and another character who began walking London’s streets around the same time, the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes made his first appearance in a Christmas album in 1887, and the same story, A Study in Scarlet, was published as a novel in 1888, the same year that the ‘Ripper’ terrorized the nation.

  The ‘Ripper’s’ crimes had not yet taken place at Holmes’s debut, but as his character developed during the numerous stories that followed, Holmes seems to become almost a mirror image of ‘Jack the Ripper’. Where ‘Jack’ is uncontrollable, mysterious and motiveless, a creature of the night, Sherlock is rational, reassuring and brilliant, shining a light into the darkest places. Where the police fail – both in the real-life Whitechapel murders and in the many fictional cases described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Holmes is always successful. And in a strange intertwining of our images of ‘Jack’ and Sherlock, one of the very few eyewitnesses thought to have actually seen the serial killer reported that he was wearing a deerstalker hat.

  Fittingly, it is to Sherlock Holmes that government ministers, successful businessmen and the royal families of Europe turn for solutions to their knottiest problems. On the whole, though, Holmes’s clients aren’t the great and the good. They also include vicars, typists, engineers, landladies, governesses … the very sort of people who had to walk home along the streets at night, who read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in magazines and who were encouraged by them to imagine that ‘Jack the Ripper’ might yet be caught.

  There is something solid and reassuring about both Sherlock Holmes and his world. At the same time, though – exactly in common with many people’s conception of the ‘Ripper’ – Holmes is an oddball, somebody standing outside normal society. Lacking close family ties, subject to spells of deep depression, dependent on morphine and other drugs to carry him through periods of boredom and lassitude, he is so unfailingly devoted to what he sees as justice that it sometimes causes him to act thoughtlessly or even dangerously.

  It makes for a thrilling, if occasionally unsettling, reading experience. Holmes is the hero of the story, taking hansom cabs and chasing criminals through the Pool of London by boat. But he also haunts opium dens, and the very first time we see Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet, he is indulging in a suitably ‘Ripper’-ish activity: beating a corpse with a stick.

  This, of course, was part of his work as that latest of Victorian inventions: the forensic scientist.

  fn1 When I interviewed Judith Flanders about the ‘Ripper’, she pointed out that of the many hundreds of Victorian murders she investigated in her research, only four remained unsolved. Of these, three had a closed group of suspects of whom the guilty party must have been one. Only the ‘Jack the Ripper’ case remains completely open. More than one hundred different named suspects have been put forward during the course of the century that has followed.

  17

  The Adventure of the Forensic Scientist

  ‘A medical man, when he sees a dead body, should notice everything.’

  Alfred Swaine Taylor, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence (1844)

  WHAT WAS IT like to enter a Victorian mortuary?

  It was a room in a hospital likely to look out upon an internal courtyard, so that members of the public couldn’t see in. Its windows would be rubbed with soap or tallow to obscure the view, but natural light was preferred. In the centre of the room would stand a stone table, without a rim or drain: any fluids ran off it to be soaked up by the sawdust on the floor.

  Sometimes there was a secret chamber above the fireplace, where a dubiously acquired corpse would be lifted, via hooks and pulleys, to evade any investigation. The notion that medical students needed to hone their skills by dissecting corpses caused great distress, and in previous centuries had been condemned by the Church.

  Since the seventeenth century, doctors’ practice had been to use the bodies of condemned criminals, and, when the supply ran short, to use the services of the ‘Resurrection Men’. These murky characters robbed fresh graves of their corpses, and sold them to medical schools for a profit. (It wasn’t illegal to steal a body, but body snatchers could be prosecuted for the theft of the clothes in which corpses had been buried.)

  The 1832 ‘Anatomy’ Act was an attempt to make it easier for medical students to acquire the bodies they needed without breaking the law. From then on, corpses of the inmates of workhouses left unclaimed by their families for 48 hours or more could be sent on to the hospitals. But problems remained. Sometimes families were not told that the body released to them for burial had already been dissected at a hospital, and such was the authority and stature of the workhouse that some relatives did not dare claim their dead at all, and gave them up to dissection silently and unwillingly.

  The cadavers required for dissection by medical students would arrive in barrels labelled ‘pork’ or ‘beef’, and preserved in alcohol. Firstly, any identifying features would be removed. Then a body would be arranged on its back on the table, a block of wood raising the head, the chest presenting itself for the initial cut down from the chin to the pubic bone. Before electric saws, it required extremely energetic work to cut open a ribcage. The oscillating surgical saw was only invented in 1947 by the Dr Homer Stryker who gives it its name.

  In these smelly rooms, medics risked exposure to infectious diseases, working as they did with bare hands and faces, their bodies protected only by aprons. But they were gradually establishing the details of how a human being was made – and how it might have died.

  They were learning how to read a body.

  OVER THE COURSE of the nineteenth century, the art of interpreting the medical evidence of a crime developed in two related but separate arenas. First, there was the reading of the body itself, in the mortuary, or through chemical analysis of the type used in the case of William Palmer. Second, there was the reading of the minute evidence left at the scene of the crime itself, which was slower to become established.

  It is in both of these contexts that we first meet Sherlock Holmes, though his work in the latter field is much more innovative. In his very first appearance in print, A Study in Scarlet (1887), Dr John Watson hears that a friend of friend – ‘a fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital’ – is looking for a lodger. Dr Watson himself wants to rent a room, so is keen to meet the unknown chemist.

  The mutual friend takes Dr Watson to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where the as-yet-unknown Sherlock Holmes spends much of his time. Dr Watson’s friend warns him that Holmes is a crank, ‘a little queer in his ideas’. He has been seen, for example, pounding a human corpse, apparently to establish how far bruises may be created post-mortem. We learn that Holmes is unnaturally interested in poison:

  I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of enquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.

  Dr Watson discovers Holmes at work in a chemistry laboratory, in high spirits because he has just discovered a new way of identifying bloodstains. ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!�
� Holmes cries, as he comes running to meet his visitors ‘with a test-tube in his hand’.

  Sherlock Holmes then shakes John Watson’s hand: ‘“How are you,” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”’

  Dr Watson is astounded by this, and only some time later, after an appropriate build-up of suspense, do we learn about the thought process by which Holmes pulled off this feat of deduction:

  ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan’. The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.

  In the very first few pages, then, of Holmes’s life in print, we’re introduced not only to the character of the detective himself but to the business of applying science to detection. We see him at work in the laboratory, researching toxicology and inventing a new chemical test for the identification of blood, ‘the most practical medico-legal discovery for years’, as Holmes himself puts it. And then we see his process of step-by-step, deductive reasoning at work when he flabbergasts Dr Watson by reading the evidence hidden in Watson’s own appearance to conclude that he has done military service in Afghanistan.

  Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was himself trained as a doctor, and it was one of his own teachers, Dr Bell, whose methods inspired Holmes’s. In an audio recording made shortly before his death in 1930, he describes the process by which his detective was brought to life. Speaking slowly and clearly in his Scottish/Northumbrian accent, with his rolled ‘r’s providing the occasional flourish, Conan Doyle explains how he had been, at the time of writing A Study in Scarlet: