A Very British Murder (10 page)

‘We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days. How dreadful its rough heavy walls, and low massive doors … made for the express purpose of letting people in, and never letting them out again.’

Charles Dickens, an essay on the criminal courts

ON 13 NOVEMBER
1849, a young writer and four of his friends rented a room in a house near Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Bermondsey. They wanted to get a good view of that day’s execution of a villainous couple, the murderers Mr Frederick and Mrs Maria Manning. Their crime had been to kill Maria’s lover, and to bury him beneath their kitchen floor, and
The Times
reported that at least 10,000 people had come to watch them swing.

Most of the crowd attended for pleasure, but the writer judged that there was something degrading and animal about the relish he saw being taken all around him: ‘Upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to
feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.’

He and his party had set out to enjoy the spectacle, but it had turned out to be disgusting and disappointing. The murderers, he thought, had ‘perished like beasts’.

Charles Dickens had always been fascinated by crime and its consequences, and his interest pervades his novels. Dickens isn’t easy to categorize, and fails to fit comfortably into any single genre. But one strand of his work that’s often underappreciated is that which overlaps with the type of books known as ‘Newgate Novels’.

These novels were set in the London underworld, in and about the world of Newgate Prison that had so attracted Dickens as a boy. Built in the 1780s in a style designed to strike fear into the heart of the offender, Newgate was the site of public hangings and it had the dubious distinction of providing training to all the nation’s hangmen.

Stories about crime and criminals had for a long time been published in a collection known as
The Newgate Calendar
(subtitled
The Malefactors’ Bloody Register
). It started out simply as a list of the criminals who had been executed at Newgate, but subsequent editions were padded out with peripheral information and context about their life and crimes. Almost inevitably, reality became embellished and, indeed, glamorized. In the timeless journalistic manner, the regurgitation of the gory details is justified on moral grounds by an editorial voice that condemns each fact even as it relishes it.

By 1774, you could buy a standard five-volume compendium of all the most popular stories. Respectable middle-class readers found the whole idea of reading fiction with thieves and murderers as
heroes to be repellent, and yet it was said that, after the Bible and
The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Newgate Calendar
was the book most likely to be found in an ordinary working person’s home.

The forbidding entrance to Newgate Gaol.

The subject matter was attractive and addictive, and many authors used the
Calendar
as a jumping-off point for stories of crime set in the London world dominated by the prison. In a similar vein, another long-running series called
The Mysteries of the Courts of London
, which was published between 1844 and 1848, had more than 40,000 subscribers.

In the hands of the right author, the ‘Newgate Novel’ could become great literature. Charles Dickens was not one who aimed at producing high art, or a social climber who placed himself above his subjects. Indeed, although he hated to mention it in later life, he had worked for part of his boyhood in a blacking factory during a period of parental poverty. He climbed his way back to respectability, but he well understood that he closely escaped falling further and becoming ‘a little robber or a little vagabond’ himself. He therefore knew something of life on the London streets, and kept up his knowledge even after his great successes by walking out and talking to the kinds of people who populate his work. Not all of them were on the right side of the law.

Oliver Twist
(1838) was Dickens’s second novel, and the very title points to the fact that this is a crime novel: to ‘twist’ – in thieves’ language – means to hang for a crime. The young hero, Oliver, becomes a member of a gang of boy criminals. And yet, as Judith Flanders points out, he is also designed to appeal to the middle-class readers who bought novels. Although he doesn’t know it, Oliver has been exiled from a much higher social class and
ends up in the workhouse because of the cruelty and neglect of his relations. He naïvely and unwittingly joins Fagin’s gang rather than being born into it. And, indeed, Dickens does not glamorize the criminals in
Oliver Twist
as a true ‘Newgate Novelist’ would have done. Sikes and Fagin are clearly bad, sordid and wrong.

Oliver Twist
, though, is characteristic of the ‘Newgate Novels’ in being closely linked to a real-life crime. Eliza Grimwood, a murdered woman, appears in
Oliver Twist
as Nancy, the victim of murderer Bill Sikes. In real life, Eliza’s poise and elegance meant that she was known as ‘The Countess’, but actually she was a prostitute from Waterloo. She was also ‘about twenty-five years of age, of sober habits, and had saved a little money’. In 1838, she set off from her lodgings in Waterloo in search of clients, whom she picked up around the theatres in Drury Lane across the river. Eliza shared her room with William Hubbard, her lover and pimp, who would leave it when Eliza was working. One particular night, Eliza returned to her room accompanied by a tall man ‘who had the look of a foreigner, and dressed like a gentleman’.

But the following morning, coming back to the room, Hubbard claimed to have found it empty, except for her dead body. It was an appalling sight. Even the professional and experienced policeman who investigated the case confessed to Dickens: ‘when I saw the poor Countess (I had known her well to speak to), lying dead, with her throat cut, on the floor of her bedroom, you’ll believe me that a variety of reflections calculated to make a man rather low in his spirits, came into my head’.

Eliza’s horrible fate sparked a good deal of attention, both from journalists and fiction writers.
Eliza Grimwood
, for example, written
by Alexander Somerville, was a ‘Penny Blood’ giving a glamorous riff on her life and death. As well as ‘biographical notices of her fair companions’, the work also promised the usual cast of ‘Penny Blood’ characters from high and low: ‘sketches of dukes, lords, Hon. M.P.’s, magistrates and her murderer’.

In real life, William Hubbard, suspected of killing Eliza, got off. In fiction, Dickens, who was always on the side of fallen women and streetwalkers, made it clear that he thought the murderer should pay for his deeds. In
Oliver Twist
the evil Bill Sikes is served just retribution for murdering Nancy: haunted by remorse, chased by a furious mob, he is eventually killed while trying to escape.

In later years, Dickens carried out a great number of hugely popular and profitable dramatic readings from his work in lecture halls and theatres, and the murder of Nancy was always well received as the very climax of the performances. This was done in defiance of a ban placed upon dramatic versions of the story of
Oliver Twist
by the Lord Chamberlain. The censorship was motivated by a concern for public order and the morale of Londoners. The authorities did not want the real murder of Eliza Grimwood to be given any more notoriety by its being shown on stage. They wanted it to be forgotten, and for all the fuss to die down. But Dickens, through
Oliver Twist
, and even more through his readings, kept an echo of the memory of ‘The Countess’ alive.

DICKENS’ LIFE-LONG INTEREST
in social justice took a new direction in 1850 when he began to write more and more often about the Metropolitan Police. Embarking upon a series of articles in
the magazine he edited,
Household Words
, he set out to present this new profession to his middle-class readership as respectable, admirable and, indeed, quite as glamorous as the thieves had appeared to be in old-style ‘Newgate’ fiction. He took it upon himself to promote London’s detectives to the world, explaining that the force: ‘proceeds so systematically and quietly, does its business in such a workman-like manner, and is always so calmly and steadily engaged in the service of the public, that the public really do not know enough of it, to know a tithe of its usefulness’.

In an essay called ‘The Modern Science of Thief-Taking’, Dickens described the Detective Branch in similarly awe-struck terms: ‘forty-two individuals, whose duty it is to wear no uniform, and to perform the most difficult operations of their craft’.

The creation of the Detective Branch was, as we have seen, not universally welcomed. Its members were seen as upstarts, busybodies and spies. Dickens did them a great service by depicting them differently. He transformed the members of this newly established profession into crime specialists, people with unique qualities and abilities.

To them, a crime scene presented ‘tracks quite invisible to other eyes’. In a room where a jewel robbery had taken place, for example, a skilled detective might trace the hallmarks of a particular gang of criminals simply ‘by the style of performance’. In one of his essays for
Household Words
, Dickens shows a detective in action, addressing the couple whose jewels have been lost. The couple themselves epitomized the sort of well-off readers of
Household Words
who might well have resented the intrusion of a detective into their comfortable world. After examining the crime scene, the detective gives his verdict:

‘All right, Sir. This is done by one of “The Dancing School!”’

‘Good heavens!’ exclaims your plundered partner. ‘Impossible, why our children go to Monsieur Pettitoes, of No. 81, and I assured you he is a highly respectable profession. As to his pupils, I –’

The Detective smiles and interrupts. ‘Dancers’, he tells her, ‘is a name given to the sort of burglar by whom she had been robbed; and every branch of the thieving profession is divided into gangs, which are termed “Schools”…’

Dickens became such a fan of the detectives that in 1850 he invited the entire squad to attend a party in the office of
Household Words
. Over brandy and water (‘very temperately used indeed’) and cigars, the staff of the magazine and the detectives made ‘a review of the most celebrated and horrible of the great crimes that have been committed within the last fifteen or twenty years’. One of those present, an inspector whom Dickens calls ‘Wield’, would have a particularly notable effect on Dickens’s writing in the 1850s. Inspector Field, as he was really called, had joined the force in its very earliest days in 1829. His career had seen steady progress, and he had ended up as the head of the newly formed Detective Branch on its formation in 1842.

Dickens captured his friend’s real-life physical tics with a novelist’s trick of bringing a character to life: ‘A middle-aged man of a portly presence, with a large, moist, knowing eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his conversation by the air of a corpulent fore-finger, which is constantly in juxta-position with his eyes or nose.’

In a subsequent essay, called ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, Dickens follows his favourite policeman on a regular night’s work, as he makes his rounds of the ill-famed St Giles area of London.

Here an enormous ‘rookery’, or mass of overcrowded housing, covered the area now surrounding the Centrepoint building next to Tottenham Court Road tube station. It was one of the worst slums in Europe. Henry Mayhew described the parish in 1860 as consisting of ‘nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers … the synonym of filth and squalor’.

The journalist and ‘Penny Blood’ writer George Augustus Sala also revelled in the horror of St Giles. His prurient tone places him firmly in the character of the middle-class people who enjoyed ‘slumming it’, or visiting these areas for a salacious thrill, and who treated their inhabitants, with unattractive condescension, as a subhuman species: