The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

So about Bob I pray no Bobbery, Ma’am

Tho’ in the Mayne force not the Royal Blues,

I’ll use no force, but what I’m forced to use …

Eily and Danny appear in a washing tub, and she turns up alive for the finale, to join in the dancing and the singing. The West End versions were not much more sophisticated. In Byron’s version, when Danny tries to drown Eily, she pops back up repeatedly – ‘Here we are again!’ – before catching cold from her ducking. The Colleen Bawn Settled at Last was more of a West End play, its humour based on the exquisitely comic notion of an Irish peasant girl married into the gentry, and the hilarious mistakes she makes across the class divide. Lord Dundreary, a character from Tom Taylor’s 1858 play Our American Cousin,* (#ulink_878d717f-f1b5-5f85-a794-6200afaaba95) wanders in, and Eily turns out to be his long-lost daughter and therefore a well-born heiress, something that happens frequently in melodrama, if not in life.

There were also ‘narrative entertainments’ of The Colleen Bawn, for those who wouldn’t go to the theatre. Mr and Mrs German Reed,specialists in the genre, advertised a musical version. Upmarket, Julius Benedict wrote an opera version, The Lily of Killarney, in 1862. Downmarket, a penny version of the play appeared, for those who couldn’t afford the gallery seats, or who wanted a more permanent souvenir; this included Lowry Lobby [sic] and Michil [sic] O’Connor, misspelled characters from The Collegians who had failed to make the transfer to the stage, which is an indication of the source. The frontispiece is suitably dramatic, with Danny poised to wallop Eily, who sits with ferociously glowering eyebrows in a small boat. The play was popular at fairgrounds too: there is evidence of a marionette version being performed in Sunderland in the early 1860s; in the 1870s the D’Arc marionettes had a ‘Cave [i.e. lake] Scene [that] is a work of art’, according to the Era. In the 1880s, Bryant’s marionettes were performing the rescue scene at the Britannia.

Ellen Hanley may have had a grim life and a worse death, but as Eily she lived on and saw the century out. By that time she had long left the world of murder and crime behind her. Others could not, and would be remembered only for how they changed crime – and crime policing – for ever.

* (#ulink_889eb17b-1e15-5b0f-a5b5-141c3ced0209) In George Borrow’s novel Lavengro (1851), Thurtell boasts that he is ‘Equal to either fortune’, which was said to be a quote from Aram’s defence speech. Most commentators have taken this to indicate that Thurtell was acquainted with the details of the murder of Daniel Clark. All it really means is that Borrow, the author who put these words into Thurtell’s mouth, was familiar with Aram’s defence, and since as a young man he had compiled a six-volume edition of Celebrated Trials, this is hardly a surprise.

* (#ulink_dddd7e0d-dd7f-5c07-b866-0a5df7eb2af3) While Bulwer may have thought his novel a moral portrait, Pierce Egan was more clearsighted. After its publication he called on Bulwer to present him with his treasure, the caul of Thurtell, as a tribute to a man he obviously thought of fi rst and foremost as a murder specialist. Bulwer was appalled.

* (#ulink_4945ee17-fb74-5337-b2c0-6596a5e17671) Even in today’s size-zero world, I don’t think anyone has defended themselves against a charge of murder by claiming they were too thin to have done it.

† (#ulink_8b1d5ed7-c976-5c56-aeff-886ee222fe20) At first I thought this must be satire, but it doesn’t appear to be; the basic information was reprinted the following day in another context.

* (#ulink_2e783304-0835-586d-ac9e-0ea2181f412e) Before 1832, copyright in a novel did not extend to other art forms: anyone could write and produce a play based on any fi ction. After 1832, legislation protected plays that had been published from being re-produced by other theatres, but if the play was staged without the script being published, then it too was fair game.

* (#ulink_55ff8f29-da23-564b-876c-9553ebebb869) Dickens is ‘literature’ now, and it takes an effort to see him through different eyes. Yet the number of murders and otherwise unnatural deaths that occur in his novels is astonishing: Oliver Twist has a murder, an accidental death by hanging, an execution, and a dog’s brains are smashed out for good measure; a murder, a violent riot leading to many deaths and a double execution appear in Barnaby Rudge; a murder, attempted murder and suicide by a murderer in Martin Chuzzlewit; while in A Tale of Two Cities there is a guillotining, and Madame Defarge shoots herself; David Copperfi eld has two accidental drownings and one suicide; a character falls down an abandoned mineshaft in Hard Times; Bleak House has two deaths from exhaustion, one suicide, one murder and one spontaneous combustion; in The Old Curiosity Shop there is one death by drowning, one from exhaustion; the fi rst person killed by a train in literature appears in Dombey and Son; Our Mutual Friend has a double, murderous drowning, another accidental death on the river, and two attempted murders; in Great Expectations there are two attempted murders and one death by drowning; in Little Dorrit a house crushes a self-confessed murderer. In the unfi nished Edwin Drood it is perfectly clear that the eponymous Drood has been murdered, but Dickens himself died before that murder was unravelled.

* (#ulink_0cbe9f9b-2df0-546e-acd8-acd1765492fa) Punch really had its knife out for Bulwer, and ran a series triggered by Eugene Aram, in which parallel columns compared Bulwer’s romanticized version of Aram’s life with the rather sordid facts. It later mocked Bulwer’s many names by referring to him as ‘Sir E. L. B. L. BB. LL. BBB. LLL.’

* (#ulink_bac3c5a9-080a-5133-a74a-5cbc43d8d3ff) After the success of the play, the grave of a completely unrelated Jack Sheppard, who had been buried in Willesden cemetery two centuries before the gaol-breaker, was overrun with visitors, and the cemetery’s wily sexton chipped off bits of the headstone to sell. (The criminal Jack Sheppard was buried in the workhouse of St Martin-in-the-Fields, now under the site of the National Gallery. In 1866 the remains of the cemetery’s inhabitants were transferred to Brookwood, in Surrey.)

* (#ulink_f99e3a27-1fc3-53de-9d33-37bd725f37a0) In case someone else was accused of the crime after his death, Ferroll had deposited a confession in his fi rst wife’s coffi n. How, the reader asks, was anyone supposed to know to exhume his fi rst wife in the hope that a confession might have been buried with her? Answer comes there none.

* (#ulink_76c38003-b706-57b0-9948-036afa87ead0) Vicars had a penchant for the story. A sale of autographs collected by the late Revd F.W. Joy included a letter from Aram after his arrest, as well as a letter from Bulwer authenticating it (although why Bulwer, born more than half a century after Aram died, should be an expert on his handwriting, is unclear). There were also ‘relics’: a box made from the wood of Aram’s gibbet, a bone from his skeleton, another box made from a beam from Daniel Clark’s house, as well as a portion of his skull (this time authenticated by the governor of York Castle), and there was a letter from Aram ‘relating to a recent tour on the Continent’. The idea of a poor school usher making a grand tour is so risible that it is hard to take the rest of the collection seriously, but people did. It was estimated to sell for £19, while a letter from Robert Burns was valued at £13, and an entire manuscript in Carlyle’s hand a sad little £3.

* (#ulink_01c07f25-6006-5902-8904-d2ce04c48846) Wills had a knack for turning theatrical fi ction into untheatrical theatre: his adaptation of Jane Eyre drops the novel’s dramatically interrupted wedding scene; instead, Jane is informed of Rochester’s previous marriage in a letter.

† (#ulink_1dcc73da-bcf6-5a51-a5b7-69107b24defa) Gilbert and Sullivan parodied this in Ruddigore (1887), which had dialogue accompanied in melodrama fashion. (The West End audiences were bemused, failing to recognize the convention.)

* (#ulink_017a7315-617d-59f3-bef3-dff580db2a87) Dickens had a history with Moncrieff and stage adaptations, however. In 1837 Moncrieff had written an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers before the serialization had reached its conclusion. Dickens took his revenge in Nicholas Nickleby, with a depiction of a ‘literary gentleman’ who had ‘dramatized … two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out’. Given this type of speedy hackwork, it is not surprising that many authors stuck to newspapers. C.H. Hazlewood, the house author at the Britannia, regularly fi lleted the newspapers, magazines and pennydreadfuls, précising the stories and fi ling ‘sundry axioms, aphorisms, and moral sentiments’ alphabetically under headings such as ‘Ambition’ or ‘Kindness of Heart’. When he began a new melodrama, he merely took one of his précis and fi lled it in with relevant quotations. Fitzball, receiving his commission from the Surrey, similarly went back to an old story.

* (#ulink_08b4c7cc-8d59-5a39-9ee0-87e41813e03a) So popular was this novelty that it was quickly turned to satire. Only two weeks later, Figaro in London announced that Sadler’s Wells was planning a play ‘in which there is to be a scene showing twenty rooms at once, with a different tragedy acting in ten of them, operas in fi ve, and the remaining fi ve representing as many perfect comedies’.

† (#ulink_08ae3b6d-084b-5070-8eb1-b256e4aa23dc) Another way of measuring the play’s success was the appearance of racehorses named after the murderer. The Earl of Burlington ran a gelding named Jonathan Bradford at the 1834 Derby, and on the second day of the meeting a Mr Breary was listed as the owner of another horse with the same name.

* (#ulink_4b3ff892-4e1e-5057-9590-882a8cd46fbc) There is also a story by Mrs Gaskell, ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, begun in late 1858, which begins as though Mrs Gaskell might have read of Jonathan Bradford. It is said, however, that she based her story on a Knutsford case of a lawyer who vanished.

* (#ulink_39cd643c-43b8-5544-bfc0-b6626b56ab4e) In 1896, Bernard Shaw saw a production at the Princess’s Theatre in which real water was used, which he felt destroyed the illusion, although ‘the spectacle of the two performers taking a call before the curtain, sopping wet, and bowing with miserable enjoyment of the applause’, was something ‘I shall remember … while life remains’

* (#ulink_8624002d-dc30-5d77-9454-e6a9e5d36081) Our American Cousin’s main claim to fame today is that it was the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated.

FOUR Policing Murder (#ulink_d4501495-b9e1-5577-ae5f-b7a6f43fb94b)

One man, perhaps, can be credited with the creation of Scotland Yard, although he did not live to see it, and would not have enjoyed it if he had. That man was Daniel Good, and he was not a policeman or a politician, but a murderer; not the hunter, but the hunted.

Until 1842, the police saw themselves primarily as performing the function Parliament had established them for: prevention of crime. It was hoped by Peel and his supporters that this emphasis would encourage an initially reluctant populace to view the new police as protectors of the weak and the oppressed, instead of a tool of the powerful. Up to a point, this had happened. Even with the Cold Bath Field riot a vivid memory, police crowd-control was quickly discovered to be much more satisfactory than calling out the army – truncheons got the same results, with far less damage, than mounted dragoons with sabres. One of the earliest attempts at crowd-control by the new police was in 1830, three years before Cold Bath Field, when a week of rioting followed the Duke of Wellington’s rejection of parliamentary reform. Seven thousand troops were held at the ready, but were never deployed; instead, 2,000 London policemen marched. The mobs targeted them, shouting ‘Down with the New Police. Down with the Raw Lobsters!’ Handbills were distributed: ‘These damned Police are now to be armed. Englishmen, will you put up with this?’ Yet there were no deaths, nor even any broken bones. ‘A week’s rioting in a city with a population nearing 2 million had for the first time in English history been suppressed. by a. civil force armed only with pieces of wood,’ wrote one modern historian.

There were, however, limitations to this preventative role, and the eruption of Daniel Good into the national consciousness highlighted the one-sided nature of Peel’s force. The police were paid to prevent violent crime. What happened afterwards, if prevention failed?

Daniel Good was a coachman employed by a Mr Quelaz Shiell in the hamlet of Roehampton, south-west of London. He had been keeping company with Jane Jones, a laundress who lived in Manchester Square, who was known as ‘Mrs’ Jones, even though there was no Mr Jones and her eleven-year-old son called Daniel Good ‘Father’. But in 1842 Good met Susan Butcher, and Mrs Jones had come to hear of it. To soothe her, Good invited her out to Roehampton, while the boy was sent overnight to a friend. The next day, Monday, 6 April 1842, Good visited a pawnbroker in Wandsworth, where he bought a pair of black knee breeches. As he was leaving, however, the pawnbroker’s assistant saw him take a second pair of trousers. The pawnbroker went to the police in the Wandsworth, or V, Division to report the matter.

A constable was assigned this case of trouser-theft and two days later, accompanied by two stable boys (Good had a reputation for violence), he went out to talk to Good. He found him in the stables, and in an emollient frame of mind, immediately offering to return to the pawnshop with the constable to pay for the goods. The constable said that was not in his orders; he was there to search for the stolen trousers. He began in the harness room, where, moving a truss of hay, he saw what he thought was a dead goose. At that moment he heard the stable door slam, turned around and found that Good had fled, locking him and his companions inside. The constable now realized that the goose was actually a woman’s torso, without legs, arms or head, ‘the belly. cut open, and the bowels taken out’. He and the stable boys broke down the door, but once free, instead of pursuing Good, who at that point had been gone less than a quarter of an hour, the constable resumed his search of the barn, finding a bloodstained mattress. Only then did he send off for reinforcements, waiting for them at the stable. When they arrived, they too showed little desire for the chase, and instead everyone returned to Wandsworth police station for further orders.

When, nearly two hours later, more senior police arrived, they too thought their first task was to search the stable. Evidence of a horrible crime was readily found: an axe, saw and knife covered with blood, together with a fire that showed signs of having recently burnt fiercely – ‘there were pieces of wood, coal, and straw, a great quantity more than was necessary for any common fire’ – while in the ashes underneath were pieces of bone. Only now was Mrs Jones’s young son questioned, and the police heard that he had been sent away for a night. The gardener’s son added that he had seen Mrs Jones that same day at Roehampton, wearing a blue bonnet.

In the late 1830s Commissioner Richard Mayne had instituted a city-wide system of ‘route-papers’ for the dissemination of police information. Every morning, the superintendent of each division had to write a complete summary of all unsolved crimes that had occurred in his district over the previous twenty-four hours, with full details, including whatever information was available concerning the suspects. A copy of every route-paper was sent daily to all divisions, so that each superintendent had a list of every unsolved crime throughout London, plus information about wanted men, suspects and so on, information which was in turn passed to the constables on the beat.

No route-paper was written on the missing Daniel Good for twenty-four hours. And when it was, there being no overall detective organization, each division that held a piece of the jigsaw started work on its own. Nine divisions followed different leads, with no coordination. Putney police discovered that Good had been seen quarrelling with a woman at the Spotted Horse tavern in Roehampton. Meanwhile in Marylebone, D Division learned that Good had spent the night at Mrs Jones’s lodgings, but by the time they arrived at the house he was long gone, taking with him Mrs Jones’s bed, trunk, a box and a hatbox. The cab driver who had driven him away was identified, and he said he had driven his passenger to Whitcombe Street, near Pall Mall. As this was not in D Division’s area, Marylebone police took no further action. C Division covered Whitcombe Street, and they printed handbills describing Good, and posted placards throughout London and the suburbs detailing the crime and Good’s appearance. Witnesses reported that Good had gone from Whitcombe Street to the Spotted Dog pub in the Strand, before moving on to Spitalfields, in H Division. C Division therefore lost sight of him. It was only on yet another search of the stables that a letter from Mrs Butcher, from an address in Woolwich, was found. V Division forwarded this information to R Division at Greenwich, who questioned Mrs Butcher at her lodgings. On the day the murder was discovered Good had visited her, leaving behind some clothes he said had belonged to his dead wife. The items included a blue silk bonnet and a reticule, both of which had been described by the Manchester Square residents as belonging to Mrs Jones. The bonnet, furthermore, looked very much like the one the gardener’s son had seen Mrs Jones wearing. Good had also told Mrs Butcher about a mangle she might have, although she could not remember precisely where he had said it was. The police may not have been able to find Good, but here was confirmation that they were hunting the right man: the day before the discovery of the body, Good had been giving away Mrs Jones’s possessions. He, at least, appeared to think she would no longer want them. The police offered a £100 reward for information, to which on 12 April, four days after the discovery, the Putney magistrates added another £50.

After the discovery of what was presumed to be Mrs Jones’s body, the coroner for the district had initially requested that it be kept in situ at the stable, for identification purposes – the assumption was that Good would be rapidly captured, and that the inquest jury would visit the scene of the crime. Very shortly, however, her body was instead playing a part in the entertainment world, as it was displayed to the curious. The Times was eloquent on the subject. On 8 April it commended the viewings: ‘very properly’, the police were permitting entry only to ‘the principal inhabitants of the neighbourhood’. Four days later, however, ‘vehicles of every description, from the aristocratic carriage to the costermonger’s cart’ were permitted to enter, and with the arrival of these working-class spectators the display had now become a ‘disgusting exhibition’.