A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  A good melodrama, like those based on the wildly popular ‘Murder in the Red Barn’, contained recognizable stock characters such as the village maiden and the dastardly villain. It would always end with wrongs righted and cheers from the audience.

  The new Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police was set up in 1842. Inspector Charles Field would become its most celebrated officer.

  Charles Dickens was a great admirer of Inspector Field. As a journalist, he wrote articles puffing up the new Detective Branch. As a novelist, Dickens made Field into his character Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Here, Bucket raises his ‘corpulent forefinger’ in speech, just as Field did in real life.

  Members of the early police force were greeted with suspicion and fear, but by the time of the ‘Jack The Ripper’ case the Metropolitan Police were well established. Yet prominent failures like this, and the Road Hill House case, undermined their reputation.

  The medicine chest said to belong to the archetypal murderer of the 1850s, the poisoner Dr William Palmer. ‘I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine,’ he said on the gallows, taunting the crowd with what was possibly a confession to having used some other drug.

  Road Hill House in Wiltshire, location of the original ‘country house mystery’ with its closed cast of family and servants. The killing of a little boy here in 1860 would echo throughout the decade’s ‘sensation’ novels.

  The actor Richard Mansfield transforms himself from the evil, crouching Mr Hyde into the good and upright Dr Jekyll. His performance was so frightening that ‘strong men shuddered and women fainted and were carried out of the theatre’.

  Sherlock Holmes made his first public appearance in 1887. In this story, he’s seen beating a corpse with a stick. He was researching post-mortem bruising in the course of his innovative work as a forensic scientist.

  The cover ofW. S. Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) shows a rather racy lady lifting up her skirt and smoking. She excels at her work because ‘the woman detective has far greater opportunities than a man of intimate watching’.

  After the brutality of the First World War, Hercule Poirot caught on because he was the opposite of an action hero: ‘the neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound’. In contrast, Sidney Paget’s illustrations showed that Sherlock Holmes was no stranger to violence, and was quite capable of chasing and even shooting criminals.

  ‘The Detection Club’ was founded in the 1930s to promote and celebrate the profession of crime novelist. Its members included Dorothy L. Sayers, seen here at a Club meeting, with a broad smile and glass of beer.

  Dorothy L. Sayers in the arms of her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, who brought her financial stability and fame. This humorous sketch by a friend glosses over the fact that in real life Sayers was much less lucky than her fictional characters in finding lasting love.

  ‘Eric the Skull’, with his glowing red eyes, is the property of ‘The Detection Club’, and is still used to this day at the ritual initiation of new members. (‘Eric’ was recently discovered to be female.)

  The ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction saw murder treated rather like a crossword puzzle. Here’s a book of murder puzzles ‘to be solved from given data’, and a jigsaw showing a crime scene.

  Murder, by the 1930s, had become something of a parlour game, with very little blood or violence.

  You could even buy your own ‘Murder Dossier’, a set of printed clues including photographs of cigarette butts or even actual matchsticks, with the solution in a sealed envelope at the back.

  In Alfred Hitchcock’s early films, he never shows a killing, just allows his viewers to imagine it. This is the victim in The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), the story of a serial killer with many similarities to ‘Jack The Ripper’.

  Hitchcock’s film Murder! (1930) was his only foray into the conventional ‘whodunit’ of detective fiction’s Golden Age. His work, morally ambiguous, had more in common with the sensation novelists of the 1860s, or the post-war thriller.

  Sources

  General books

  Judith Flanders’ excellent The Invention of Murder, How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (2010) greatly influenced my approach to the subject of A Very British Murder, and was an important source for the first two-thirds of the timescale covered here. Her book is highly recommended, and the obvious place to turn next for more detail on these nineteenth-century stories. At the same time, Rosalind Crone’s Violent Victorians (2012) has been essential. Reading her research into the meaning of murderous entertainments is like pushing a spring-lock that opens up Victorian society. Moving onwards, time-wise, Matthew Sweet’s provocative Inventing the Victorians (London, 2001) asks many stimulating questions about what we believe about Victorian life and its clichés, while P. D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction (2010) builds upon the essential work done by Julian Symons in Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (1972), which is necessary reading even though I disagree with many of the author’s interpretations. Two websites also fall into the general category: crimetime.co.uk, a site reviewing crime fiction, edited by Barry Forshaw and published by Oldcastle Books, and writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com produced by D.P. Lyle.

  Part One: How to Enjoy a Murder

  1. A Connoisseur in Murder

  I’m grateful to the staff at Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust, for access to their collections, and for a copy of Robert Woolf’s catalogue to Thomas De Quincey, an exhibition staged at Dove Cottage, Cumbria in 1985. Grevel Lindop’s The Opium-Eater, A Life of Thomas De Quincey (1981) provided extra detail.

  2. The Highway

  As well as Judith Flanders’ and Rosalind Crone’s work on the rise of policing in London, P. D. James’s and T. A. Critchley’s The Maul and the Pear Tree, The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (1971) was essential for the details of the crime.

  3. The Watchmen

  In addition to the sources for Chapter 2, Bob Jeffries, curator of the Thames Police Museum at Wapping, was a useful source of help, as was Simon Dell’s The Victorian Policeman (2004) and the Open University’s online resource called ‘History From Police Archives’.

  4. The Murder Circuit

  I relied on Judith Flanders here, and the very full account provided by Albert Borowitz, The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case, Dark Mirror to Regency England (1987), along with Angus Fraser, ‘John Thurtell’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

  5. House of Wax

  As well as help given by Charlotte Burford, the present archivist at Madame Tussaud’s in London, two books were particularly useful: Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud in England, Career Woman Extraordinary (1992) and, especially, Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (2003). On the earlier history of waxworks, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, edited by Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer (1994), is essential.

  6. True Crime

  In addition to the sources already quoted, especially Rosalind Crone’s Violent Victorians (2012), Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957) and V. A. C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (1994) were also useful. The Richard Altick quotation is from Victorian Studies in Scarlet (1972). See also Andrew Brown, ‘Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), and Neil R. Storey, The Victorian Criminal (2011), Robert Miles, ‘Ann Radcliffe’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), and the wonderful online resource at english.cam.ac.uk/pop ‘Price One Penny, A Database of Cheap Literature, 1837– 1860’, produced by Marie Léger-St-Jean. The interpretation of Sweeney Todd comes, via Crone, from Sally Powell’s article ‘Black markets and cadaverous pies: the corpse, urban trade and industrial consumption in the penny blood’, in A. Maunder and G. Moore (eds.), Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensa
tion (2004).

  7. Charles Dickens, Crime Writer

  Simon Callow’s Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World (2012) was supplemented by his interview in person (which included a sensational performance as Bill Sykes killing Nancy). Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens, A Life (2011), Philip Collins’s Dickens and Crime (1962, 1994) and Haia Shpayer-Makov’s The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (2011) were also useful. Rebecca Gowers has researched the case of Eliza Grimwood for her novel, The Twisted Heart (2009).

  8. The Ballad of Maria Marten

  Alex McWhirter, curator at Moyse’s Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, was a terrific source of information on William Corder, as was Vic Gammon, now retired, but a guest member of staff at Newcastle University where he was director of the degree in folk music.

  9. Stage Fright

  Rosalind Crone’s Violent Victorians (2012) was once again essential for this chapter, while the actor Michael Kirk gave me some practical coaching in the techniques of melodrama, onstage at the Old Vic. Kathy Haill, curator from the Victoria and Albert Museum, shared her knowledge of the collection’s puppets. The webpage vam.ac.uk/page/p/puppets has more on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s puppet collection, including the marionettes used to perform ‘Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red Barn’.

  10. The Bermondsey Horror

  In addition to all the general surveys of murder in the period, which uniformly mention the Mannings, Michael Alpert’s London 1849, A Victorian Murder Story (2004) was the most detailed account consulted.

  Part Two: Enter the detective

  11. Middle-Class Murderers and Medical Gentlemen

  The William Salt Library, Stafford, holds many contemporary records of the Palmer trial, and I was also able to examine the medicine chest said to belong to William Palmer, courtesy of Sarah Williams and the museum at Tamworth Castle. There is more information on it in Fiona Sheridan and Nick Thomas, Dr William Palmer, Trial by Media (catalogue of the exhibition at the Ancient High House, Rudgeley, run by Staffordshire Council, 2004).

  Ian Burney of the University of Manchester, author of several books on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century crime, shared his research published in Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (2006) and the article ‘Poison and the Victorian Imagination’, History Today (March, 2008), pp. 35–41. Other useful publications included Noel G. Coley, ‘Alfred Swaine Taylor, MD, FRS (1806–1880): Forensic Toxicologist’, Medical History, vol. 35 (1991), pp. 409–27, James C. Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was Poisoned, at Home, Work and Play (2011) and Clive Emsley, ‘Victorian Crime’, published in History Today (1998).

  12. The Good Wife

  This is a richly researched and interesting area, where the key publications are: Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses (1977), Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind (1998), Virginia Morris, Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction (1990), Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977) and, for Florence Bravo, I have relied heavily upon James Ruddick’s extremely enjoyable Death at the Priory, Love, Sex and Murder in Victorian England (2001).

  13. Detective Fever

  Kate Summerscale’s brilliant The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) was supplemented by the interview she gave me for the programme. Haia Shpayer-Makov’s The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (2011) stood out among the relevant books on the subject. Matthew Sweet also added to his published writings with an interview on Wilkie Collins, while Noeline Lyons’ A Greater Guilt: Constance Emilie Kent and the Road Murder (2009) gives an alternative interpretation, and transcribes many useful documents, relating to the murder of Savile Kent. Michael Diamond’s Victorian Sensation (2003) was also very useful. Stephanie Lyons and family welcomed us at Langham House, the modern name for Road Hill House, while James Dukes showed us Savil Kent’s grave at St Thomas’s Church, Coulston.

  14. A New Sensation

  Here, Andrew Gasson’s Wilkie Collins, An Illustrated Guide (1998) was very useful, as was Helen Rappaport’s Beautiful for Ever, Madame Rachel of Bond Street, Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer (2010). As well as Wilkie Collins’ own works, John Sutherland’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Armadale (1995) is particularly recommended.

  15. ‘It is worse than a crime, Violet …’

  Lord Petre, the current inhabitant of Ingatestone Hall, showed us round the real-life ‘Audley Court’. Katherine Mullin, ‘Mary Elizabeth Braddon’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), provides an introduction to a life explored more fully in Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1979) and Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Sensation Press, 2000). Jennifer also gave an interview in person.

  16. Monsters and Men

  Judith Flanders’ The Invention of Murder (2010) has an especially good chapter on ‘Jack the Ripper’ and Mr Hyde, also vital was Martin A. Danahay and Alexander Chisholm, Jekyll and Hyde dramatized: the 1887 Richard Mansfield Script and the Evolution of the story on Stage (2005). In addition, Michael Kirk, actor, showed me how Richard Mansfield did the transformation scene at the Lyceum Theatre. Alan Sharp’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Saucy Jacky’ was published in The Ripperologist, no. 55 (September, 2004), and online at casebook.org, a site produced by Stephen P. Ryder and Johnno.

  17. The Adventure of the Forensic Scientist

  E. J. Wagner’s The Science of Sherlock Holmes (2006) gives an overview of the relationship between Holmes and forensic science, which is built upon by James O’Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics (2013). Ken Butler, former Met fingerprint officer, explained the history of his profession in an interview, while Jonathan Evans, archivist of The London Medical College, now part of Queen Mary, University of London, elucidated early pathology for me in person. You can hear a recording of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explaining how he came up with the character of Sherlock Holmes on the BBC website, in the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Great Lives’ series 30, part 5, and Gordon Honeycombe is the author of Murders of the Black Museum, 1875–1975 (2009).

  18. Revelations of a Lady Detective

  Kathryn Johnson, the curator at the British Library responsible for the exhibition ‘Death in the Library’ (2013), gave me an interview that was essential for this chapter. Alexander McCall Smith’s quotations are taken from his article ‘Why do we enjoy reading about female detectives?’ published in The Independent (7 November 2012). Additionally, Haia Shpayer-Makov’s The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (2011) was useful, as was Michael Sims, (ed.), The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime (2011). Lucy Sussex, ‘The Detective Maidservant’, in Brenda Ayres (ed.), Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers (2003), puts the case for the forgotten Susan Hopley. The identity of Andrew Forrester as the pseudonym of James Redding Ware first appeared in Judith Flanders’ The Invention of Murder.

  Part Three: The Golden Age

  19. The Women Between the Wars

  Here P. D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction (2010) was supplemented by her interview. The biographies of the ‘Queens of Crime’ include Joanne Drayton’s Ngaio Marsh, Her Life In Crime (2008), Julia Jones’s The Adventures of Margery Allingham (1991, 2009), James Brabazon’s Dorothy L. Sayers, A Biography (1988) and Laura Thompson’s Agatha Christie, An English Mystery (2007). I also used Clive Emsley’s Crime and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (2011).

  20. The Duchess of Death

  Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (1977) reads well in conjunction with the analysis provided in Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie, An English Mystery (2007).

  21. A Life Less Ordinary

  Mike Ripley’s article ‘Dorothy L. Sayers as crime critic, 1933–35’ was published in Crime Time Magazine, and James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers
, A Biography (1988) provided the biographical details.

  22. The Great Game

  Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder (1972) was vital here, especially for details of the Club’s writers. Simon Brett, today’s Club President, gave me an informative and funny interview, while John Gannon, author of The Killing of Julia Wallace (2012), also contributed his expertise in person in an interview on William Herbert Wallace.

  23. Snobbery with Violence

  Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence (1971), Julian Symons, Bloody Murder (1972) and T. J. Binyon’s Murder Will Out, The Detective in Fiction (1989) will all get you reading detective stories with new eyes. Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories?’ was published in The New Yorker (14 October 1944) and ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ in the same magazine on 20 January 1945.