A Very British Murder (9 page)

By the end of the eighteenth century, though, Gothic novels such as Radcliffe’s were looking dated. Jane Austen’s first completed work,
Northanger Abbey
(written in 1798–9, but published only posthumously in 1817), is a send-up of the genre and
Udolpho
is Austen’s target.

The overfanciful Catherine Morland, who by the age of 17 is firmly ‘in training for a heroine’, finds herself on a visit to a country house, Northanger Abbey itself. She is addicted to novels with titles like
Mysterious Warnings
or
Necromancer of the Black Forest
. At Northanger Abbey, based on her reading of Ann Radcliffe, she firmly expects to find dark passages, secret rooms, locked chests containing clues and, ultimately, some piece of evidence to show that her host, General Tilney, has murdered his dead wife. Instead, the house is warm, welcoming, light and refurbished in the modern style, and the naïve Catherine finds only embarrassment and shame when her Gothic fantasies are revealed. ‘Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you,’ says General Tilney’s son, a young man whom she much admires. ‘Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?’

But the cool, sophisticated humour of Jane Austen was lost upon those who, like Catherine Morland, had a cheap and lurid taste for horror and mystery. Had she been born a decade or two later, and belonged to a lower social class, Catherine Morland would have been an avid reader of the so-called ‘Penny Blood’, a downmarket version of the Gothic novel.

Brought out in instalments, these trashy ‘Bloods’ became an important feature of publishing after 1828. Each week you could buy the next eight pages of the story, illustrated by a woodcut, for a single penny. (Meanwhile, a lofty, three-volume, middle-class novel would cost you over a pound.) From the 1830s, the first generation of working-class people who’d learned to read at school became avid consumers of literature.

Real, hard-core ‘Penny Bloods’ were often set in the past, and bore some sort of relationship to supposedly real events. They included the
Calendar of Horrors
, published between 1835 and 1836, and a long-running publication called
The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c., &c
. Both purported to be a history of true crimes and mysterious happenings, but were in fact largely fictional. In the latter, various genuine highwaymen are introduced, and then go on to share adventures together, despite having lived at different times in the eighteenth century.

‘Penny Blood’ writers often wrote extremely quickly, infrequently revised their work for publication and bulked it out with all kinds of plagiarized and extraneous material. Their plots were implausible, their characterizations crude and their locations usually included prison cells, haunted castles, sinking ships and desolate heaths. ‘More blood, much more blood’ was the instruction issued to his writers by one ‘Penny Blood’ editor.

It may not sound particularly edifying, yet, a generation earlier, devotees of ‘Penny Bloods’ would not have had any access to literature at all. And the genre quenched a great new thirst. It’s been estimated that in the year 1845 the publishing house of Lloyd’s, based in Fleet Street, sold half a million copies each week of the
various magazines and ‘Penny Bloods’ it produced – and each one of these would have been read by several people, bringing the total number of readers into the millions. Henry Mayhew, recorder of the lives of the London poor, found an interviewee who described how the reading of ‘Penny Bloods’ was a shared and sociable experience: ‘on a fine summer’s evening a costermonger, or any neighbour who has the advantage of being a “schollard”, reads aloud to them in the courts they inhabit’.

Costermongers were people who sold fruit, vegetables or other perishable goods on the London streets. (A ‘monger’ is a ‘seller’, and ‘costards’ were a type of apple.) And Edward Lloyd, the publisher, stated himself that these people constituted his audience. He wished to lay ‘before a large and intelligent class of readers, at a charge comparatively insignificant, the same pleasures of imagination which have, hitherto, to a great extent, only graced the polished leisure of the wealthy’.

Successful ‘Penny Blood’ writers needed dedication, a good nose for the kinds of story that ordinary, unpretentious people liked to read and a wealth of invention. They did not need a fancy education, or artistic aspirations – quite the opposite, in fact. Many of them were driven to their work by financial desperation, and some of them had lives no less sensational than their fiction.

George Augustus Sala, a favourite young writer of Charles Dickens’s, was typical. Originally a hard-working ‘Blood’ writer, he cut his teeth on these products before going on to become a celebrated journalist and leader writer for the
Daily Telegraph
. Described as ‘a red, bloated, bottle-nosed creature’, he also had a seamier side to him: when times were hard, he produced both
‘Bloods’ and pornography. Towards the end of his life he wrote
The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala
, an autobiography fittingly described by the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
as ‘notoriously unreliable’. The adventures he writes about include going to Russia, being imprisoned for debt and reporting from the American Civil War.

Another ‘Blood’ writer was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose most famous opening line you’ve almost certainly heard before: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. The son of a general, he was seduced in his youth by Lady Caroline Lamb, the former lover of Lord Byron (and the lady who had dubbed the poet ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.) Lady Caroline was 18 years older than Edward, and embarrassed him by rejecting him after a brief affair. He was then cut off by his family when he married a celebrated but penniless Irish beauty. He had to support himself by producing fiction of all kinds, and in fact was extremely successful at it and made a great deal of money.

Bulwer-Lytton’s novel
Pelham, Or the Adventures of a Gentleman
(1828) was a huge hit, and was so beloved by George IV that the king ordered copies to be kept at each of the royal residences. The eponymous ‘gentleman’ leaves behind a life of leisure to become an amateur sleuth, determined to clear a friend from a charge of murder. In 1832, Bulwer-Lytton’s
Eugene Aram
, the story of a Georgian murderer, told with some sympathy for his plight, became another bestseller.

But the apparent immorality of making a murderer into a hero turned literary London against Bulwer-Lytton. At the same time, his relationship with the romantic Rosina, his wife, soured, and
when he stood for Parliament she herself publically denounced him at the hustings for mistreating her. Following a course worthy of one of his own characters, he had her committed to a lunatic asylum, before embarking on a career as an MP and, ultimately, being raised to the peerage.

Elsewhere in his enormous scrapbook of impressions of life on the London streets, Henry Mayhew described how the people he met devoured such fiction as Sala’s and Bulwer-Lytton’s. ‘You see’s an engraving of a man hung up, burning over a fire,’ said one ‘intelligent costermonger’ of its appeal, ‘and some costers would go mad if they couldn’t learn what he had been doing, who he was, and all about him.’

By the time of Queen Victoria, the ‘Penny Blood’ had morphed into the ‘Penny Dreadful’, and maintained its large sales figures. The stories that unfolded retained quite simple contrasts between good and evil, with violence and murder woven into a view of the world that was nostalgic for the simple pleasures of a rural past.

The story of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber, for example, expressed deep concerns about the problems posed by a new kind of life in the city. In this tale, originally called ‘A String of Pearls’ after a lost necklace, a succession of customers seat themselves in Sweeney’s chair for a shave, before being ejected down a trapdoor into a prison below. There, their bodies are cut up and a local businesswoman in partnership with Sweeney makes them into pies.

Sweeney Todd reflected the concerns of people who had moved to the city in search of work, and who were now living an unfamiliar urban life. Most of the customers were in the barber’s shop only because they were looking for someone else, having lost their
friends among the crowds. On top of that, city dwellers could not know exactly what was in the tasty fast food (pies) that they bought so cheaply on the streets. Fears of tainted meat were profoundly felt in the age when tinning or canning was in its infancy. Indeed, poor little Fanny Adams, the victim of a Victorian child-murderer, would lend her name both to the expression ‘Sweet FA’, meaning something small or negligible, and also to the unpopular tinned mutton given to sailors: it tasted so bad they thought they must be eating a child.

The story of Sweeney Todd even, it’s been argued, tapped into a new fear about what would happen to Londoners’ bodies after they died. No longer could they hope to rest peacefully in a grassy village churchyard. The urban deceased would be crammed into crowded city burial grounds. And as people knew from the real-life exploits of Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh body-snatchers who committed murders to sell the corpses to medical schools, there was a commercial demand even for corpses.

THE FACT THAT
violence, horror, prostitution, madness and murder continued to form such a large part of people’s reading matter seems at odds with our impression of a society that was growing increasingly respectable and prim. Is there something contradictory about the unabashed pleasure that the buttoned-up Victorians took in murder?

The explanation put forward in 1972 by Richard Altick might at first sight seem convincing. In his seminal book
Victorian Studies in Scarlet
, he argued that the Victorians’ love of murder was a
product of ‘their intellectually empty and emotionally stunted lives, so tightly confined by economic and social circumstance’. Reading about a murder gave them, he argued, ‘a ready channel for the release of such rudimentary passions as horror, morbid sympathy, and vicarious aggression and for the sheer occupation of minds otherwise rendered blank or dull by the absence of anything more pleasing’.

This notion that the Victorians were the prisoners of etiquette and respectability, leading circumscribed lives of hard work, actually emerged very soon after Victoria’s reign ended. In particular, it was down to Lytton Strachey, with his immensely influential book,
Eminent Victorians
(1918). Strachey defined the generation just gone as straitlaced, pompous and slightly laughable. He found them hypocritical, anxious and false. But of course, as with all historians, his work says just as much about his own time as it does the past. Strachey was a member of the Bloomsbury set, a group of writers and painters who defined themselves as freethinking, radical and iconoclastic. How better to develop this image than to attack others for being different?

Even at the time, some people recognized that Strachey had painted an unbalanced, if powerful, picture of an age. The
Times Literary Supplement
immediately suggested that he was wrong to mock: ‘we live in a world that [the Victorians] built for us, and though we may laugh at them, we should love them, too’. Historians of the nineteenth century, even to this day, have continuously repeated this caveat. Strachey’s image of the Victorians as being collectively and seriously repressed was so powerful, and so striking, even if untrue, that it somehow stuck.

In the 1970s, when Altick argued that consuming horror provided the Victorians with a release from the mundane nature of their lives, he was partly still under Strachey’s spell and partly reflecting the values of his own time. This was the decade in which historians sought to suggest that the prosperity of the Industrial Revolution had been bought at an enormously high price. To tell the story of the nineteenth century as a journey from an agrarian economy to a capitalist one, from country to city, from community to anonymity, from good to bad, was a story that chimed with the spirit of the 1970s.

Today, historians are at pains to point out how Victoria’s subjects were not seething with passion buried below a bland surface: their sensations, pleasures and vices were just as vivid to them as ours are. In fact, as Rosalind Crone argues, the Victorians shared a love of violence and blood with their Georgian grandparents, equally avid attenders of boxing matches and public hangings. And, indeed, the Victorians might well have found something very familiar in our own modern obsession with brutal horror films and violent computer games. This pleasure taken in violence is timeless; it just takes different forms and emphases depending on the technologies and economy of an age. In the nineteenth century, the rise of literacy and the fall of the price of print allowed a love of blood to flourish in new ways. But it was always there – and still is today.