A Very British Murder (8 page)

‘Jack the Ripper’ would never appear among the murderers, as he was never caught. The modellers of Tussaud’s prided themselves on the accuracy of their depictions, which were based on sittings in the studio, where that was possible (for non-murderous models), or else on sketches made in court or, in due course, on photographs.

As photography was banned at the Old Bailey, photographs were hard to obtain. The chief modeller in the later nineteenth century, John Theodore Tussaud, great-grandson of the founder, was said to work from pictures taken secretly during the course of murderers’ trials by journalists who had cameras hidden within their hats.

At Madame Tussaud’s, a true picture was painted of the type of personalities that the general Victorian public wanted to meet. This was quite different from the pantheon of great men celebrated by the nation in Westminster Abbey, received at Windsor Castle by the Queen, or commemorated by statues in town squares. In 1918, W. R. Titterton, a writer on London topics, summed up what the Waxworks really meant in the Victorian age: ‘You perceive that this is some sort of holiest of holies, the nearest Victorians got to a cathedral, with its saints enniched within.’

It turns out that what the lower middle and working classes most wanted to do, in their leisure time, was to come face-to-face with murderers. And if that wasn’t possible, they wanted to read about them.

Shakespeare
, Hamlet

IN 1811, AT
the time of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, Thomas De Quincey noted the curious and irrational behaviour of one of his neighbours in Grasmere. Even in the peaceful Lake District, the killings had caused an ‘indescribable’ panic. The little old lady who lived next door to De Quincey ‘never rested’, he said,

Until she had placed eighteen doors … each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing room, was like going, as a flag of truce, into a beleaguered fortress; at every sixth step one was stopped by a sort of portcullis.

How had De Quincey’s neighbour managed to work herself into such a fearful state in remote Grasmere? A frenzy of fear that swept
the nation was achieved by the newspapers, as one of the chief ways that people consumed murder was through print.

The easiest and cheapest way to find out about murder was the broadside. This very simple kind of newspaper, often just one piece of paper, was printed on one side only. It lay just within the financial reach of even the working man or woman.

Though only just. The rise in prosperity and living standards that one could have expected the Industrial Revolution to provide for everybody in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards failed to filter down to the workers until about halfway through the nineteenth century. The 1840s were known as ‘the Hungry Forties’ and it’s no surprise that in the first few decades of the 1800s Britain teetered on the edge of riot and disorder. The people who provided the manpower to operate the new factories and cities found themselves being employed in new ways, but still living in the old squalor and poverty.

The notion that a man’s wages could support a stay-at-home wife and family would only really hold true from the 1850s onwards. Until then, low-paid urban workers lived in crowded conditions, ate poorly, and often, when times were hard, dipped temporarily into criminal pursuits such as thieving or prostitution. When times were good, they enjoyed watching cockfights, betting on prizefights, or attending melodrama at the huge and illegal theatres of east London.

Despite their low and precarious standards of living, these people had higher standards of literacy than their agricultural forbears. Exactly how many of them could read is difficult to ascertain, but in 1840, 60 per cent of the people getting married were able to sign
their own names in the parish register. This figure – a very basic indicator of writing skills – had remained the same for the previous hundred years. As historian Rosalind Crone tells us, reading was taught
before
children moved on to writing, leading us to believe the figure for readers must have been much higher.

The beginning of the nineteenth century also saw a great increase in the educational opportunities available to the children of working people. There were Sunday Schools, and National Schools, many of them set up by evangelists who promoted reading skills alongside new and unconventional forms of religion.

It also seems very likely – if hard to prove – that the range and variety of cheap printed materials now becoming available to these people spurred them on to read more. For example, the hugely popular
Penny Magazine
, covering topics from art, history and society, and illustrated with attractive engravings, sold 200,000 copies a week by 1832. If you consider that each copy must have been passed on among friends and neighbours, it probably had a readership of about a million.

Broadsides, the basic way in which you could read about current affairs, developed out of a tradition of scurrilous, subversive and sometimes even radical pamphlets, which had long kept up a commentary of catcalls on the doings of the rich and respectable. By the nineteenth century, though, broadsides were dwelling more and more often on violent crimes like murder. In some ways this seems paradoxical, because the number of executions was in decline. The historian V. A. C. Gatrell, however, argues that as hangings became rarer, they became more relished as not-to-be-missed events, and therefore caused more significant spikes in sales.

A ‘stunning good murder’, as it was called, would be covered by the broadsides in a certain predictable way. The first reports of the crime would appear, briefly, on a quarter-sheet of paper, or the smallest possible edition of this particular form of journalism. Soon, bigger half-sheets would appear, with more details of the crime itself, and also of its investigation. The climax would be the day of the execution, when a proper ‘broadsheet’, a whole piece of paper, would be printed, summarizing everything so far, plus an account of the execution. It often had a striking picture of the gallows as well.

The most infamous crimes were honoured with the publication of ‘books’, consisting of more than one broadsheet folded together. The printers discovered that they could sell ‘books’ about old murders, too, at the time a new one occurred. It seems that once people were in a murder mood, they wanted as much of it as they could get. The sales could be very significant indeed: in 1849 they rose to the almost incredible figure of two and a half million copies of a book on the crimes and deaths of the husband and wife murderers Maria and George Frederick Manning.

And you didn’t even have to know how to read in order to join in the fun. Rosalind Crone describes the activities of the specialized London street-sellers whose product was the news. They were ultimately trying to sell broadsides, but in order to catch the attention of the crowd they would call out, perform or even sing the main story of the day. Henry Mayhew, one of the co-founders of
Punch
, was also the compiler of a tremendous work of oral history gathered from people on the streets of London in the 1840s. One of his interviewees was a street ‘patterer’. Posted on a street corner, he kept up a lively constant ‘patter’ of verbal information, and worked
with a partner to perform dramatic mini-reconstructions of crimes: ‘He always performs the villain, and I take the noble characters. He always dies, because he can do a splendid back-fall, and he looks so wicked when he’s got the moustaches on.’

These two were ‘standing patterers’, who took up a fixed spot on a street corner. They were complemented by ‘running patterers’, who moved constantly through the crowds, shouting out details of what was in their broadsides. Emphasizing words such as ‘horrible’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘murder’, they made a vital contribution to the very distinctive aural landscape of the Victorian city.

There were also ‘chaunters’, or ‘singing patterers’, whose sales technique was music. They incorporated the stories of a crime into a song or chant. All three types of patterer would converge on the prison on the day of an execution, contributing greatly to the noise and energy of the scene. ‘Where they came from was as much a mystery to the inhabitants [of a town hosting a hanging] as whither they disappeared when the last dying speech had been sold,’ recollected one Victorian gentleman. The patterers turned up in such large numbers because, of course, on hanging days they could expect to make their greatest sales.

No horrible detail was overlooked by the printers of the broadsides, and their careful technical language and close observation is strikingly similar to the police procedural fiction of today. The crime scene incorporating the body of Mrs Lees, murdered by her husband William in 1839, was described like this:

there were several gashes on her face, and a deep wound on the throat separating the jugular vein, there was also a
bruise on the right eyebrow, which appeared to have been inflicted by the same blunt instrument from which it appears that the murderer, after striking his hapless victim with a stick or piece of wood and rendering her perfectly senseless, completed by cutting her throat.

The illustrations usually showed the criminal and victim in the throes of the crime, with melodramatic poses and spurts of blood. Today they appear comical, because so unconvincing, and yet also horrific, when you stop to consider what is actually being shown.

But despite the sensationalism, the broadsides ultimately had a moral message. The gallows confession of the repentant criminal was almost always included, though inevitably made up, because of the need to have it printed and ready by the time of the actual execution. Writing these ‘confessions’ was a specialized job. ‘I wrote Courvoisier’s sorrowful lamentation,’ explained one man who wrote for the cheap printers. ‘I wrote a pathetic ballad on the respite of Annette Meyers. I did the helegy, too, on Rush’s execution,’ he continued, tossing off a list of murderers’ names. Rush’s ‘was supposed, like the rest, to be written by the culprit himself, and was particular penitent’.

Reading through a series of broadsides, it’s striking that all the confessions are penitent and the lamentations sorrowful. Each crime closes, satisfyingly, with the confession and final punishment of its perpetrator. We have no real idea whether these murderers did indeed repent on the gallows and regret their crimes. We cannot even know if some of them were truly guilty. But no reader of broadsides could have been left without
the impression that to turn to crime leads inevitably to shame, repentance and death.

THE MIXTURE OF
fear and pleasure produced by reading about true crime applied to fiction as much as factual writing. There had existed since the eighteenth century a separate school of fiction, the Gothic novel, devoted entirely to creating feelings of horror, revulsion, awe and excitement.

The quintessential work in the genre was Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794). During the course of this long, intricate and frankly implausible story, the young and orphaned Emily St Aubert is imprisoned in a remote castle. Its hectically plotted pages are packed with sublime scenery, malevolent characters and feisty heroines. Indeed, Radcliffe’s novels have been described as ‘the verbal equivalent of Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine’ in art. Poor Emily becomes the captive of the evil, haughty and brooding Montoni (an Italian brigand masquerading as an aristocrat, who has also murdered her aunt) but finally flees just before he can force her to sign over to him all her property.

Udolpho
was hugely popular. Radcliffe received an astonishing £500 for her work, in an age when the average fee for a copyright to a novel was £80. Radcliffe herself was a figure of some mystery: she broke off publishing novels at the height of her success, and eventually died of asthma, at her home in Pimlico, in 1823. Various inaccurate but more exciting stories circulated about what had happened to her (and, wisely for the purposes of sales, she did nothing to correct them). She’d been confined, mad, it was said, to
Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, or else maybe she’d died, in 1810, ‘in that species of derangement called “the horrors”’.