The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford University Press, 1986). This is a gorgeously detailed overview of German immigration to Britain in the nineteenth century, focusing on the poets, philosophers, political radicals, the composers, the authors. It is excellent on the ideas and the innovations that came with them. Quite apart from the ideas of Marx and Engels, there was also the popular introduction of the kindergarten and of German beers and lagers to public houses. Given that there currently seems to be such an intense focus on Europe and its future cohesion, it is wonderfully instructive to find out more about an age which had genuine freedom of movement.

  The Victorian Home by Jenni Calder (Batsford, 1977). Again, for me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Bastendorff story was the character of the household and the day-to-day nature of domestic life. Calder’s book is illuminating, not only on the history of interiors, but also on their meanings and the psychological impulses that could be detected in the way homes were made.

  Psychiatry for the Poor by Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1974). For the part of this story that ends in the Colney Hatch hospital, I confess I went in with heavily weighted preconceptions about the nature and quality of Victorian mental health care. This book is a corrective to that, tracing the development of the first properly medical institutions, with specific focus on Colney Hatch and the efforts made not only to cure, but also to treat patients with kindness and compassion.

  A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 by Margaret Beetham (Routledge, 1996). I was very keen to understand about the growth of womens’ magazines in the late nineteenth century and the sorts of features that appealed to readers then: this wonderful book contains many reproduced images and is of serious social historical fascination. One might imagine that it was a more innocent age: yet there appeared to be a sly, humorous knowingness about some magazine features.

  Victorian Prison Lives by Philip Priestley (Methuen, 1985). Again, the Victorian prison system is one that we imagine we are at least partly familiar with; this book both confirms and confounds preconceptions of punishment and rehabilitation. Throughout the Victorian era, attitudes towards penal servitude swung like a pendulum: periods when liberal reformists came forward, demanding better opportunities for former convicts; and times when prison meant retribution through soul-crushingly futile labour and floggings for minor infractions.

  The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant by Pamela Horn (Gill and Macmillan, 1975). There are so many layers to explore in stories of servants and employers; not just in terms of exploitation and low pay, but also in terms of how essential strangers sharing the same home in these circumstances negotiated means of living with one another.

  The Nether World by George Gissing (Smith, Elder, 1889). Written in 1889, but set some ten years beforehand, Gissing’s novel is a powerfully evocative piece of social realism. While in previous decades, even the poorest of Dickens’s characters were animated with colour and eccentricity and energy, here are Londoners who are crushed under a sky that seems perpetually low and grey. Set in and around the streets of Clerkenwell, about a mile away from Euston Square, it also gives a valuable taste of the sharp contrasts between different districts and even streets; and also a sense of the lives that are lived behind doors that never usually get a second glance.

  The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (Methuen, 1907). Though written (and set) some years after the Euston Square mystery, this profoundly unsettling story of anarchists and radicals and terrorists prowling the narrow London streets feels in some ways like the culmination of the real-life political fervour that had been building in the taverns around Fitzrovia and Euston Square – embodied, as we saw, in the case of Inspector Hagen arresting Johann Most in 1881. Here is a city seething with firebrand figures from Germany to Russia: from spies to bomb throwers. And, indeed, in real life, there is a fascinating and direct line from the socialists handing out revolutionary literature in the 1870s, and Stalin’s sojourn in Whitechapel at the turn of the century.

  In addition, there are some rather more obscure titles that can be found in the stacks of the London Library and the British Library. Among them are Charles Wittingham’s The Wilds of London (Chatto and Windus, 1881) and The Golden Guide to London (Chiswick Press, 1879), roughly synchronous with the Euston Square mystery and quite simply captivating in their own right – peregrinations through the Victorian city, the writer gazing upon all the quite new marvels that it boasted. There is also the magisterial six-volume Old and New London (Illustrated) by Walter Thornberry (Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1881), and taking us, district-by-district, through every corner of London with exquisite engravings. These volumes are a little more widely available and are worth seeking out as works of art in their own right. They are a glimpse of huge Victorian pride in the capital.

  Also beguiling are works on the development of music hall (one such is DF Cheshire’s Music Hall In Britain (David and Charles, 1974); and the story of Euston Station itself in Alison and Peter Smithson’s The Euston Arch and the Growth of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (Thames and Hudson, 1968), with a foreword by Nikolaus Pevsner himself. And indeed, for those who want a further taste of the rural world in which the Bastendorff family grew up, WJ Taylor Whitehead provides a charming insight in the very rare volume Luxembourg: Land of Legends (Constable, 1951).

  Acknowledgements

  First of all, I would like to draw attention to a quiet (and wonderful) institution called the London Metropolitan Archives, based in Clerkenwell, which proved beyond value in research. These archives contain so much beautifully preserved and catalogued historical material, from house leases to handwritten ledgers to vintage photographs. For further information, visit www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitan-archives.

  There is another interesting archive with a range of material concerning Somers Town and St Pancras at the Holborn Library, 32–38 Theobalds Road, London WC1X, which all can visit (and which in itself is a terrific piece of architecture from 1960).

  Huge gratitude to my brilliant agent Anna Power for wisdom and encouragement and enthusiasm, and to all at White Lion Press: Richard Green, Jennifer Barr, Kerry Enzor, Charlotte Frost, Julia Shone and Stacey Cleworth for pretty much the same. And particular thanks to Aruna Vasudevan at The Literary Shed for her sharp, insightful editing.

  Sinclair McKay lives in the East End of London, in the shadow of Canary Wharf. He previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday. His previous books – ranging from the stories of the Bletchley Park codebreakers to the history of rambling – have been linked by a focus on English social history. When not researching in archives, he is fascinated by the living history of London’s streets: the traces and tokens left behind by different ages.

  The landlord of 4, Euston Square and his brothers – who were among those about to be drawn into a vortex of luridly gothic allegations – hailed from the countryside near Echternach in Luxembourg. It was then a remote rural region, but rich in religious history and steeped in colourful folk tales.

  Landlord Severin Bastendorff, who ran a successful furniture business, was naturalised as a British subject in 1878; this records book, now in the National Archives, and filled with French, German and Italian names, is a fascinating testament to the fluidity of continental immigration in the 19th century.

  One of the most popular celebrities of the 1870s, singer Nelly Power was a powerful role model for young working class and servant women everywhere. Apart from her music hall work, the public were gripped by her public divorce and finance battles and her fierce spirit of independence.

  Matilda Hacker, one of the tenants at number 4, Euston Square, had always attracted jovial local notoriety for her eccentricity. She and her sister, both of a certain age, used to promenade in Canterbury and Brighton dressed as young girls.

  Matilda Hacker was addicted to what she called ‘the Book of Dre
ams’; this was published in various forms and under various titles and purported to be filled with mystical prognostications.

  The house maid and the tenant; these portraits of Hannah Dobbs and Matilda Hacker can’t convey the curious claustrophobic closeness of some servant/resident relationships within respectable boarding houses.

  Hannah Dobbs came from Bideford, in north Devon. The arrival of the railway in the 1850s transformed this deeply rural area and also the imaginations and desires of its young people, who could now travel and move to cities such as London with ease.

  Harnessing the new power of mass readership, the proprietor of the ‘Illustrated Police News’ issued this pamphlet, purportedly by the housemaid Hannah Dobbs, containing wildly sensational (and libellous) allegations about life at 4, Euston Square, of which murder seemed among the least shocking.

  For the journalists of popular weekly sensation paper ‘The Illustrated Police News’, the ‘Euston Square Murder’ was the perfect story to keep their readers hooked: a middle-class family, the discovery of a slain corpse, and the revelations in court of scandalous sexual relationships.

  Imprisonment in the Clerkenwell House of Detention not only brought the fearful prospect of hard labour – oakum picking, the treadwheel – but also a range of humiliations that middle-class convicts, such as the resident from Euston Square, found essentially annihilated their old identities.

  This rare photograph of Euston Square was taken in the 1930s – by then, the area had gone rather to seed. But it is possible to imagine how much brighter and smarter the terrace was in 1879 as the Bastendorffs presided over their eminently genteel boarding house, with its professional tenants and neighbours.

  The Colney Hatch asylum, in north London, on the fringes of the open countryside, was regarded by many with terror: what if one were to be committed for the rest of one’s life? Yet in the Victorian age, this institution did much to try and help and understand its patients: including the tormented inmate from Euston Square.

  ‘I had walled the monster up within the tomb!’

  – The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe

  First published in 2018 by White Lion Publishing,

  an imprint of The Quarto Group.

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  Text © 2018 Sinclair McKay

  Sinclair McKay has asserted his moral right to be identified as the Author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Digital edition: 978-1-78131-799-0

  Hardcover edition: 978-1-78131-798-3

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