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

Playwrights were thus always on the lookout for new murderous material, and with two plays called The Gamblers, a stimulated public immediately made the connection to the story that had been monopolizing the newspapers. The Gamblers opened at the Surrey on 17 November 1823, The Gamblers, or, The Murderers at the Desolate Cottage at the Coburg the following day.* (#ulink_afcb235f-9844-540c-9398-5894f1f30d3d)

The Surrey and the Coburg were two of the homes of melodrama, the century’s predominant dramatic form. Melodrama simplified an increasingly complex world. It depicted brutal crime and violent death, which were familiar enough in the world its audiences inhabited; but unlike real life, in the world of melodrama justice always triumphed in the last act. What realism rejects as ludicrous coincidence is, to a melodrama audience, the workings of providence: the greater the coincidence, the greater the sense of meaning. The subjects tended to be those audiences could identify with: the rustic adrift in the big city, or working men oppressed by evil masters; the ‘pride of the village’ seduced by a villain. The villains were authority figures (squires, landlords, judges) or those who served them (stewards, lawyers, beadles). Melodrama characters have preordained parts: a villain is a villain, and will not become a hero. Costume was as much an indicator of character as occupation. The heroine wore white; heroes, even those with no connection to the sea, were frequently dressed as sailors (the dockyards were the major employers around many minor theatres); while villains wore the guise of men about town, usually with the addition of a dashing pair of boots.

This typing permitted stock companies to function: the rustic, the ‘heavy’, the heroine, the comic servant, were all a standard type, with standard make-up and a standard costume. Each week, therefore, a new drama could draw in the same audiences to watch similar characters in different situations, which were also standard: the last-minute reprieve from the gallows, the overheard conversation, the long-lost foundling child, the secret marriage. Melodrama also relied on highly stylized speech, in which thoughts were articulated – in Tom Bowling, a well-loved 1830 melodrama, Dare-Devil Bill, the smuggler, shouts that his enemy: ‘shall hang! hang! hang! and on the same gibbet as myself! And how I will exult, and how my eyeballs, starting from their sockets, will glare upon him in their convulsive brilliancy! And I will laugh, too … ha, ha, ha!’ – regularly interspersed with comedy, mime, spectacle, song and dance, all no more realistic than the dialogue. Nor were they intended to be. In an 1829 adaptation of Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, a character is lost on a storm-racked Scottish heath, when suddenly: ‘Ha! What do I see on this lonely heath? A Piano? Who could be lonely with that? The moon will shortly rise and light me from this unhallowed place; so, to console myself, I will sing one of Julia’s favourite melodies.’ And he does.

The surviving playbill for The Gamblers gives some indication of the furore that the Surrey expected. Unusually, the standard description of the evening’s entertainment is prefaced by a notice ‘To the public claiming, implausibly, that the play had been written before ‘the recent SANGUINARY MURDER’. After the news broke, it continued, the managers had considered withdrawing the play, but as the newspapers had printed ‘columns filled with the most trivial particulars of the Murder, [and] have also given illustrations of every Scene attached to the fatal deed’, they felt that ‘in denying to our Audience a Drama’ they would be failing ‘a duty unquestionably due both to them and to ourselves’. Having set out their virtuous credentials, only now do they come to the play’s great selling point: sets ‘illustrated by CORRECT VIEWS taken on the SPOT, and ‘THE IDENTICAL HORSE AND GIG Alluded to by the Daily Press’, which, in a moment of commercial genius, the theatre had purchased.

The play itself was a standard melodrama, telling the tale of a country innocent taking a bloody revenge after being fleeced by big-city gamblers. The highlight was the horse and gig; this, said the Observer the next day, ‘formed the strongest feature of interest in the eyes of the audience, if we could safely collect that expression from the applause that followed their appearance’. The Times tsk-tsk-ed at the very idea of showing William Weare’s murder onstage, but its reviewer the next night was nonetheless disappointed to discover that the Coburg’s The Gamblers, or, The Murderers at the Desolate Cottage had no connection to the murder of William Weare at all, ‘except we could fancy the cabriolet in which the ghost travels to be Probert’s gig. and a French hut being Gill’s-hill-cottage, and a pool of fire to be his pond’.

The horse and gig were easy for the Surrey to get hold of: they had only been hired by the murderers. Other, more personal, items were also available. Probert had owed rent on the cottage, and an auction quickly sold off most ordinary household goods at ordinary household prices.* (#ulink_0938c28a-7c3b-5fac-8aa1-b77f178baab0) While purchasers were not plentiful, many came for a day out as murder tourists, wandering through the grounds and, for a shilling, even the cottage itself. One publication claimed that five hundred people had paid the entrance fee. Soon a little sightseeing route was worked out: ‘At Elstree the curious made their first halt. Here the grave of Mr. Weare, in Elstree Church-yard, was visited, and the pond, about a quarter of a mile out of the village … The Artichoke Inn, to which the corpse was carried, and where the Coroner’s Inquest was held. Mr. Field, the landlord, being one of the Jury, was therefore fully competent to the task of answering the numerous questions put to him by his customers. Here the sack, in which the remains of the victim had been carried from Probert’s cottage, was shown. The marks of blood which it bears gave it peculiar interest.’

Just as with a sightseeing trip today, the circuit could be finished off with a souvenir: a lucky few managed to buy a bit of the sack; for others, a Staffordshire pottery figure was soon available; those with less money could buy a book at the cottage, complete with a map of Weare’s posthumous journeys. Those with no money at all could still take away a memento: the Caledonian Mercury reported that by mid-November the hedge outside the cottage was vanishing, filched ‘by those curious people, who consider a twig from the hedge, through which the remains of a murdered man had been dragged, must furnish a treat to their equally curious friends’.

Murder tourists came from all walks of life. As late as 1828, Walter Scott recorded in his journal that he and his companions travelled out of their way to visit Gill’s Hill Lane and do the circuit. After taking in the lane and the ponds, they went on to the cottage itself, now partially dismantled, and were shown around by a ‘truculent looking hag’ for 2s.6d. Five years after the event, the ‘hag’ could ask, and receive, nearly a week’s pay for a workman.

Private entrepreneurship was one thing. Theatre was another. After the Surrey’s first night, the Lord Chamberlain stepped in and ordered the play to be withdrawn. Furthermore, Thurtell’s solicitor swore out an affidavit for an attempt to pervert the course of justice by showing Thurtell and Hunt committing murder onstage before they were tried, much less convicted. The management attempted to claim that there was no resemblance at all between the play and the murder of William Weare, but the purchase of the gig and the white-faced horse made this impossible to sustain.

When the Hertfordshire Assizes, at which Thurtell and Hunt were to be tried, opened on 4 December, Thurtell’s lawyer immediately applied for a postponement because of pre-trial prejudice, claiming that the press had caused ‘the grossest injustice towards his client’. As if to prove his case, his affidavit was immediately reprinted in The Times, despite a judicial ban on its publication, as it contained a compilation of all the worst articles that had appeared. The papers followed every twist and turn of these legal arguments. The Morning Chronicle gave thirteen of its daily twenty columns to the subject, and it also produced snappy summaries: the judge, for example, ‘loves the Press, but wishes it had fewer readers’. The crusading liberal paper the Examiner, which had been founded in 1808 by Leigh Hunt and his brother as a Radical voice to counter both the Tory government and the (then) Prince Regent’s Whig cronies, agreed: the judge ‘has been guided throughout by that keen and constant hatred of the press which is the mainspring of two-thirds of the political sentiments of his party … And why is all this? Because the press is the great organ of knowledge. To keep the body of the people in the dark, is the dear and leading aim of many …’ The leader-writer added that the law as it stood did not permit the accused to know what the prosecution’s case would be: ‘A pretty law, then, truly!’ which forbids a man to know what he will have to refute. The newspapers’ job, as he saw it, was to supply that lack.

The trial was postponed for a month, to January 1824, although the press excitement then was no less. The Chronicle printed a supplementary sheet after the first day, and also doubled its normal four pages to eight for a full report; on the second day it returned to four pages, but devoted three of them, plus a leader, to the trial. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle devoted five of its six pages to the trial. The Chronicle calculated that over the two days of the trial there were a hundred horses reserved to carry the reports from Hertford by express, to feed the insatiable demand. Even local papers had expresses: the Ipswich Journal finished its report of the opening of the assizes with a triumphant, ‘BY EXPRESS. HERTFORD. FRIDAY, ONE O’CLOCK’.

The Observer printed five pictures in its report – a great novelty, as technology was just beginning to permit the use of engravings in newspapers, instead of the clumsier, and slower-to-produce, woodblocks. Another paper included illustrations of the court, maps of Gill’s Hill, and views of Probert’s cottage. Pictures could also be purchased separately. A journalist returned to London after the adjournment in company with ‘a tradesman from Oxford-street, who had been frightened out of his wits. by hearing that pictures of Gill’s Hill Cottage were actionable, for he had brought “some very good likenesses of the Pond to sell”, and had been obliged to take them out of the window of [his shop], almost the very moment they were placed there!’

The trial itself almost reads as an anti-climax. At this period, prisoners accused of a felony could have legal counsel, but only for advice and to deal with points of law. How rigorously this was applied varied from circuit to circuit, but the theory was that it was up to the prosecution to prove its case so well that no defence could be mounted. And in this particular case there was no defence: publicans and stablemen between London and Gill’s Hill all testified to seeing Thurtell with Weare in the gig. Then Weare vanished, while the pistol with human remains on it was found just where Thurtell had been seen searching. Items belonging to Weare were in the possession of the three men, and Hunt knew where the body was to be found. Thurtell spoke in his own defence, as the law permitted. He read out a list he had compiled of wrongful convictions throughout history, but one journalist thought it was so long that it was counterproductive: everyone stopped listening.* (#ulink_1e7be728-05e2-5019-a946-2beca296b4d0)He blamed everybody except himself for his misfortunes: his creditors, his solicitor, fellow merchants, the insurance office – all had betrayed him. As to the murder itself, Hunt and Probert had done it, he said. Hunt tried to read his defence, but was so overcome he managed to read only a bit of it ‘in a poor dejected voice, and then leant his wretched head upon his hand’ while someone else read the rest.

The law required that trials were held continuously, unless the jury demanded a break. Thurtell and Hunt’s trial began at eight o’clock on the morning of 6 January, and ran without pause until after nine o’clock that night, when the jury called a halt. The two defence speeches and the summing-up were heard the next day, after which the jury may not even have retired to consider their verdict: the journals merely say the members ‘conferred’ for twenty minutes. Hunt was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to transportation; Thurtell was found guilty of murder, and the only sentence for that was death.* (#ulink_fb88e2bd-668f-5063-9c59-0a2942b35f4e)

Immediately, the horse expresses set off for the printers. For some, even that wasn’t fast enough. The artist William Mulready, having attended the trial, quickly sent a long account to his patron in Northumberland – the trial finished on a Wednesday, and this way he would receive the news long before the Sunday newspapers’ account.† (#ulink_fa821ef3-e1fd-5627-87d4-497c996f2042) By then, the execution would have taken place – forty-eight hours from verdict to gallows was the rule, unless a Sunday intervened.

This compression was a godsend to the newspapers, the weeklies in particular: they could print the trial, verdict and execution, all in one. The Observer advertised that its execution special would be double its usual length (which was only two pages), and would cost 14d., instead of 7d. Bell’s advertised the same: a double issue, at double the price, and, for its sporting readership, ‘The same publication will contain an account of the Great Fight for Six Hundred Sovereigns between SPRING and LANGAN, for the rival Champions of England and Ireland. written by the celebrated PIERCE EGAN.’ Thurtell’s supporters loved a good fight, and ‘among the sporting circles bets are still offered on the result of the trial, and in many cases these are connected with the fight between Spring and Langan’, noted the Chronicle.§ (#ulink_791fcf34-51b1-557e-8fe8-3dc1eab3ca14) The connection continued to be made. An anti-capital-punishment essay from the 1860s reported on Thurtell’s execution: ‘It is said that the championship of England was to be decided. on the morning of the day on which Thurtell was executed, and that, when he came out on the scaffold, he inquired privily of the executioner if the result had yet become known. Jack Ketch* (#ulink_6a2c17b6-10b5-532b-ae93-9534b1e1e0d6)was not aware, and Thurtell expressed his regret that the ceremony in which he was chief actor should take place so inconveniently early in the day.’

For those who could not afford newspapers, Thurtell broadsides had been pouring out over the past months. Many provided updates and trial reports, while others had songs and poetic effusions. One had an ‘action’ picture, with Thurtell dragging Weare’s body into the bushes (this cost double the normal price, 2d.). ‘The Hertfordshire Tragedy; or, the Fatal Effects of Gambling. Exemplified in the Murder of Mr. Weare and the Execution of John Thurtell’, a particularly long example, can stand here for many. It opened with a description of Thurtell’s idyllic childhood, and his poor, loving mother. But then he sets off for that fatal city, London, and

Like many a gay young man,

He mix’d with thoughtless company,

Which thousands has trepan’d [sic].

He soon forgot his mother dear,

And all his friends behind …

From bad to worse he did proceed,

‘mid scenes of guilt and vice,

Until he learn’d the cursed art,

To play with cards and dice.

And from that fatal, fatal day,

His ruin we may date,

Nor were his eyes e’er open’d,

Until it was too late.

The story of his being fleeced by Weare is rehearsed, and then the unsuspecting gambler heads for Hertfordshire.

When they had reached Gill’s Hill Lane,

That dark and dismal place,

Thurtell drew a pistol forth,

And fir’d it in Weare’s face.

The helpless man sprung from the gig,

And strove the road to gain,

But Thurtell pounc’d on him, and dash’d

His pistol through his brains.

Then pulling out his murderous knife,

As over him he stood,

He cut his throat, and, tiger-like,

Did drink his reeking blood.

This was accompanied by what were claimed to be portraits of Thurtell and Hunt, and eight illustrations.

Yet after the verdict was handed down, strangely, Thurtell the monster, Thurtell the drinker of blood, began to disappear, to be replaced by Thurtell the gallant, Thurtell the debonair. One broadside respectfully reported his considerate behaviour on the day of his execution, when he stood under the scaffold: ‘he looked at the crowd, and made a slight bow, instantly every head was uncovered, and many muttered “what a Gentleman”. His appearance at that moment was affecting beyond description.’ In the 1920s the historian G.M. Trevelyan claimed that, a hundred years before, children wrote the sentence ‘Thurtell was a murdered man’ as an exercise in penmanship.

In 1857 George Borrow drew for his middle-class audience a picture entirely in keeping with this debonair post-trial image. In his novel The Romany Rye, the narrator is in money difficulties. ‘A person I had occasionally met at sporting-dinners’ comes to hear of his trouble and lends him £200.

I begged him to tell me how I could requite him for his kindness, whereupon, with the most dreadful oath I ever heard, he bade me come and see him hanged when his time was come. I wrung his hand, and told him I would, and I kept my word. The night before the day he was hanged at H—, I harnessed a Suffolk Punch to my light gig … and … in eleven hours I drove that Punch one hundred and ten miles. I arrived at H—just in the nick of time. There was the ugly jail – the scaffold – and there upon it stood the only friend I ever had in the world. Driving my Punch, which was all in a foam, into the midst of the crowd, which made way for me as if it knew what I came for, I stood up in my gig, took off my hat, and shouted, ‘God Almighty bless you, Jack!’ The dying man turned his pale grim face towards me – for his face was always somewhat grim, do you see – nodded and said, or I thought I heard him say, ‘All right, old chap.’ The next moment – my eyes water.

He concludes philosophically, ‘Well, some are born to be hanged, and some are not; and many of those who are not hanged are much worse than those who are.’

It was said that 40,000 people attended Thurtell’s execution, and afterwards his body was sent to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection by the faculty of medicine and its students, as was standard for felons. In theory, the anatomization process was a matter for the faculty alone, but on the day crowds of people descended on the anatomy theatre. For those who couldn’t be there, The Times reported on the appearance of the body in the dissecting room, and Pierce Egan’s Account of the Trial of John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt carried a notice from the publisher: ‘SPECIAL PERMISSION having been given to the Editor of the MEDICAL ADVISER to examine the body of Thurtell after the execution, a full account of the PECULIAR CRANIOLOGICAL Appearances, with illustrative engravings, will appear in the next Number.’ Rowlandson produced a watercolour of the scene, ‘The Lancett Club at a Thurtell Feast’. (The surgeon doing the dissection is grotesquely caricatured, while the corpse of Thurtell is entirely realistic.)

Despite the finality of death, some found it hard to let go of such a money-spinner. ‘Light be the stones on Thurtell’s bones,’ Thackeray wrote satirically; ‘he was the best friend the penny-a-line men had for many a day. and when he was turned off [hanged], their lamentation was sincere. There are few windfalls like him.’ It was later claimed that James Catnach, the most successful broadside printer of the day, had sold 250,000 Thurtell broadsides, and after his execution he produced yet another, headlined ‘WE ARE ALIVE’, with the space between ‘we’ and ‘are’ so reduced that the unwary read ‘WEARE ALIVE’. Another was less tricksy, and simply lied. ‘The Hoax Discovered; or, Mr. Weare Alive’ claimed that Thurtell had bet Weare that he could be arrested, tried and then, ‘at the very crisis of their fate, the supposed murdered man should appear, stagger the belief of the world, and make John Bull confess his being hoaxed’.