The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (5 page)

“There is one other curious and chance connection between murder and the Romantic movement. De Quincey’s
Confessions
were first published anonymously, and one of those who falsely laid claim to their composition was Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Wainewright was a critic and journalist of great refinement; he was one of the few men of his time, for example, to recognize the genius of the obscure William Blake. He even praised Blake’s last epic poem,
Jerusalem
, when all of his contemporaries considered it the work of a madman who had located Jerusalem itself in, of all places, Oxford Street! Wainewright was also a vociferous admirer of Wordsworth and the other ‘Lake Poets,’ but he has one further distinction which was celebrated by Charles Dickens in ‘Hunted Down’ and by Bulwer-Lytton in
Lucretia
. Wainewright was an accomplished and malevolent murderer, a secret poisoner who dispatched members of his own family before turning his attention to chance acquaintances. He read poetry by day, and poisoned by night.”

George Gissing put down the journal; he had not yet finished the piece, but he had already noticed three errors of syntax
and several infelicities of style which disturbed him more than he could have anticipated. How could his first essay come so lame into the world? His melancholic disposition began to reassert itself, after the first great rush of enthusiasm and optimism, and he closed the
Pall Mall Review
with a sigh.

T
he early autumn of 1880, in the weeks just before the emergence of the Limehouse Golem, was exceptionally cold and damp. The notorious pea-soupers of the period, so ably memorialized by Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, were quite as dark as their literary reputation would suggest; but it was the smell and the taste of the fog which most affected Londoners. Their lungs seemed to be filled with the quintessence of coal dust, while their tongues and nostrils were caked with a substance which was known colloquially as “miners’ phlegm.” Perhaps that was why the Reading Room of the British Museum was unusually crowded on that raw September morning when John Cree arrived with his Gladstone bag and his ulster neatly folded over his arm. He had removed his coat beneath the portico, as was his custom, but before stepping into the warmth of the Museum he looked back into the fog with a curiously mournful expression. Some wreaths of it lingered about him as he walked into the great entrance hall, and for a moment he resembled some pantomime demon rising onto the stage. But he bore no other resemblance to any such apparition: he was of middling height, as the phrase then was, and he had neat dark hair. He was forty years old, sturdily built, with perhaps a trace of stoutness, and his round bland face only served to emphasize the extraordinary paleness of his blue eyes: at first sight you might have thought him blind, so pale they seemed, but a second glance would convince you that he was somehow looking
into
you.

He had a customary seat in the Reading Room, C4, but on this particular morning it had already been taken by a pale young man who was nervously tapping the green leather desk with his hand while he read a copy of the
Pall Mall Review
. There was a vacant place beside him, in a room which was already very busy, and John Cree put his bag carefully upon it. On his other side sat an elderly man with what in those days was considered an unusually long beard. The fact that he was sitting between George Gissing and Karl Marx, if he had recognized it, would have meant nothing at all to John Cree; he would have known them neither by name nor by reputation, and his only sensation that morning was one of annoyance at being, as he put it to himself, “hemmed in.” Yet Marx and Gissing would, within a very short time, have a place in his history.

What books had John Cree chosen to read on this foggy autumn day? He had reserved a copy of Plumstead’s
History of the London Poor
and Molton’s
A Few Sighs from Hell
. Both books were concerned with the life of the indigent and the vagrant in the capital, and for that reason they were of especial interest to him; he was fascinated by poverty, and by the crime and disease which it engendered. It was, perhaps, an unusual preoccupation for a man of his class and background; his father had been a wealthy hosier in Lancaster but John Cree himself, much to the disappointment of his family, had not been a success in trade. He had come to London in order to escape from the shadow of his father and also to pursue a literary career, as a journalist on
The Era
and as a dramatist; yet he had so far proved no more successful in these areas than in any other. But he believed that now, in the life of the poor, he might have found his great theme. He often recalled a remark by the publisher Philip Carew that “there was a grand book to be written about London.” Why not release his own private misery within the general sufferings of so many?

On his right hand, Karl Marx was dividing his attention
between Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
and
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens; this might seem odd reading for the German philosopher but at the end of his life he had returned to his first enthusiasm, poetry. In his early years he had read fiction eagerly and had been moved, in particular, by the novels of Eugene Sue; but Marx had characteristically expressed himself through the medium of epic poems. Now he was once again contemplating the composition of a long poem, which was to be set in the turbulent streets of Limehouse and entitled
The Secret Sorrows of London
. That was why he had spent many hours in the neighborhood of the East End, often in the company of his friend Solomon Weil.

On John Cree’s left hand, George Gissing had put down the
Pall Mall Review
and begun to skim through a number of books and pamphlets on the subject of mathematical machines. The editor of the
Review
had a particular fascination for the work of Charles Babbage, who had died nine years before, and he had commissioned this ambitious young writer to compose an essay on the inventor’s life and work. No doubt much of the technical detail would be beyond Gissing’s comprehension but the editor, John Morley, had admired “Romanticism and Crime” and trusted the young man to produce another “bright” offering for his pages. Morley also paid well—five guineas for five thousand words, an amount which would keep Gissing for at least a week. So he had eagerly immersed himself in accounts of computing machines, differential numbers and modern calculus theory.

At this particular moment he was reading Charles Babbage’s essay on artificial intelligence, while John Cree himself was studying an account of Robert Withers. Withers was a self-employed cobbler from Hoxton who had been so worn down by poverty that he had destroyed his entire family with the mallets and chisels which he employed in his meager trade. Cree was disturbed by the details of malnutrition and degradation, but he
probably could not have admitted to himself that, in reading of such misery, he felt more alive now than he had ever done before. Karl Marx, meanwhile, was making his own notes. He was reading the last installment of
Bleak House
, and had reached that point where Richard Carstone asks, on his deathbed, “It was all a troubled dream?” Marx seemed to find the remark interesting, and wrote on a sheet of lined paper, “It was all a troubled dream.” At the same moment George Gissing was transcribing this arresting passage into his own notebook: “The quest for machine intelligence must arouse fresh speculation in even the most orthodox mind: think of all the calculations which might be performed in the field of statistical inquiry, where we might find ourselves able to make many very intricate deductions.” Karl Marx had turned the pages of
Bleak House
—at his age, he tired of fiction too easily—and had come upon that passage where “… poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me that she had given her birds their liberty.”

And so the three men sat side by side on this autumn day, as unaware of each other as if they had been sealed in separate chambers. They were lost in their books, as the murmuring of all the inhabitants of the Reading Room rose towards the vast dome and set up a whispering echo like that of the voices in the fog of London.

M
y mother descended into hell at last, having been taken there by the fever. I ran out of our lodgings and purchased a jug of gin; then I poured it all over her mouth and face to cover up the smell. The young doctor scolded me for that but, as I told him, a dead body is a dead body however you look at it. She was put into the earth of the paupers’ graveyard by St. George’s Circus; one of the fishermen gave me a sail in which to wrap her body, and the ferrymen built a wooden box for her from some old ship planks. Little did they know where this new craft was sailing. I would have gladly helped them in their work but they still thought of me as “Little Lizzie” or “Lambeth Marsh Lizzie.” I smiled then when I thought of the names that my mother had called me, when she confessed to her god that I was one of her sins. I was the sign of the devil, the bitch from hell, the curse upon her.

They collected ten shillings for me after the funeral, when we gathered in the Hercules tavern, and I cried a little for the sake of it. I can always produce the goods. I left them as soon as ever I could and took the money back to Peter Street, where I hid it beneath one of the floorboards—but not before I had taken out three shillings and put them on the table. Oh what a dance I did then, among the litter of Bible pages which I had scraped from the walls, and when I could no longer dance I acted out the scene I had watched in Craven Street. I was Dan Leno mocking his naughty daughter; then I took my mother’s stained pillow, cradled it, kissed it, and flung it to the floor. If I
did not make haste I would have been late for the show, and so all at once I grabbed my mother’s old coat from its hook on the door. I knew it would fit me snugly: I had measured myself against it even as she lay upon her bed in death.