Murder by Candlelight (29 page)

The murder in George Street caused a momentary sensation, and was as quickly forgotten. The killer embodied a type already recognizable in Victorian England, but one that neither the police nor the writers for the press had learned to recognize. Confronted with the coroner's opinion that “no intercourse had taken place,” a police detective today would ask himself whether the killer did not nurse a grievance of some kind, perhaps a sexual one. He would note that he wielded the knife with a ferocity out of proportion to the object merely of extinguishing life. He would ask himself what sort of hatred could have driven a man to such an act, and what sort of morbid satisfaction he might have derived from it. Mindful of the admonition that a man with a taste for “unnatural luxury” does not “relapse into inertia,” the detective would be quick to consult his own files and those of the police in other cities. Had the man struck before in another port? Was he likely to strike again? But in 1863, police detectives did not ask themselves these questions.

*
Readers of the
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
will remember that Greek Street was one of De Quincey's old haunts.

CHAPTER NINE

Unnatural Conjunctions

Tiresias being blind on earth sees more than all the rest in hell.

—
Sir Thomas Browne

I
t must be admitted that, where murder is concerned, De Quincey himself was only intermittently a sensitive oracle. He overlooked entirely the nasty yet illuminative murder that took place in December 1827 at Oxford, in the shadow of the domes and spires of the university. It was a place De Quincey knew well, for as a young scholar he had passed several unsatisfactory years among its towers and cloisters, breathing “the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning.” He might, indeed, deplore the limitations of Oxford as an instructress of the young, but he would surely have acknowledged her virtues as a theater of evil. The commission of an act of the utmost savagery in a place where so much civilization had long been concentrated—a place practically devoted
to softening the ruder excrescences of barbarism—makes for a collision of worlds, a smashup not only dramatic in itself, but one that throws into the sharpest relief the particular evil in question.

The day—it was Thursday, December 6, 1827—was fine; but as darkness came on, the temperature fell to freezing. Ann Priest, a young woman of twenty-four, was walking with a companion, Harriet Mitchell. Miss Priest was a girl of “great personal beauty,” but one who under a load of misfortune had yielded her maidenhood and sunk into the character of an unfortunate; her friend Miss Mitchell was, in this respect, not less compromised. They went down the High Street. Perhaps they passed Gibbon's college, the indolence of whose fellows—the “monks of Magdalene,” steeped in port and prejudice—the historian of the Roman Empire had memorably deplored. At all events, they came eventually to Brasenose, the college of the “brazen nose,” its name derived from the bronze knocker that once adorned its portal. There they saw, through undraped windows, what must always be an agreeable sight on a December night, candle-lit merry-making in a warm room. A drinking party was under way in the rooms of one of the undergraduates of the college. The young collegians were jolly, and in an access of boisterousness they called out to the two young women, who promptly came to the window. Might not the good fellows give them some wine? Alas, replied a young man, there was no wine; but he should be happy to give them brandy, if they would drink it.

He was twenty years old, this hospitable young man, and he occupied a station in life widely different from that of the young women to whom he now ministered. His name was Houstonne John Radcliffe, and he had high connections amongst the gentry, baronetage, and clergy of England. His grandfather, the Venerable Houstonne Radcliffe, had been Archdeacon of Canterbury, a position of splendor in the English Church; and as if this were not enough, he had also been Subdean of Wells, Prebendary of Ely, and the master of a number of other richly beneficed livings. The young man's
father, the Rev. John Radcliffe, had been a fellow of Brasenose, and was now Rector of St. Anne's Limehouse, a pretty Hawksmoor church in London. As for his mother, she was the former Miss Anne Leigh, cousin of Sir Roger Holt Leigh, Baronet. In July the young man's sister, Anne, married the diplomat Sir John-Frederick Croft, Baronet, of Dodington, Kent, and the particular friend of Sir Joseph Banks, botanically illustrious.
^*
A formidable family, young Houstonne's, and highly respectable in clerico-gentry circles, with so many fat livings and eminent relations to their credit—the sort of people who would have been at home in the world of Trollope's Dean Arabin and his Archdeacon Grantly.

The young women were pleased to accept the young gentleman's offer of brandy. But the windows of the young man's rooms were grated with iron, which prevented the passage of glass or bottle. Houstonne John Radcliffe, exhibiting something of the dexterity which had enabled his grandpapa to accumulate, in the rapacious race for Anglican patronage, so many opulent livings, ingeniously overcame the difficulty. He poured the brandy into a teapot, and stuck the spout between the bars. The young women applied their lips to the protrudant instrument and drank deeply of its precious elixir.

What happened afterwards is not clear, but at a quarter past midnight Miss Priest was found in Blue Boar Street, a narrow alley perhaps two hundred yards from the southwestern-most extremity of Brasenose, but rather closer to the still more august precincts of Christ Church,
primus inter pares
among the colleges of Oxford. A man named Hedges, a porter of All Souls, was coming off duty when he found Miss Priest “slumped unconscious in the doorway of his house” in Blue Boar Street. Various watchmen and bystanders offered their assistance, and there was talk of taking Miss Priest away to safety in a barrow; but in the end nothing was done.

Some time after “Tom,” the bell of Christ Church, struck two, a watchman named James Cox found Miss Priest bleeding. He and two other watchmen brought her to the nearest apothecary, who told them she must be taken to the hospital. The watchmen instead took her to her lodgings, where they left her in the care of her landlady, Mrs. Cox. Mrs. Cox, under the impression that the girl was not seriously hurt, “laid her on some blankets in front of the fire to sober up” and went to bed. It was only later, when she examined Miss Priest with a lantern, that she discovered that the girl “was bleeding heavily from her ‘woman's parts.'”

Ann Priest died later that day of the injuries she had sustained in the night. She had been cruelly and unusually violated. De Quincey, had he interested himself in the case, might have extracted from it the last drop of terror. The girl was a sympathetic victim, for although poor and fallen, she was beautiful: after viewing her body at the inquest, the jurors, who had returned a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown, agreed that she was “the most handsome” woman “they had ever seen,” with the “most perfect symmetry and delicacy of limbs.” De Quincey, who candidly acknowledged his own opium addiction, was not one to shrink from scandal, but he might well have quailed before details which, even if relegated to the decent obscurity of a learned language, were shockingly obscene. The bruises to Miss Priest's “left breast, which were believed to have been caused by pressure from four fingers and the thumb of a man's hand,” he might have recorded with comparative equanimity; but the outrage to her womanhood was something else altogether.

The human fiend or fiends who mutilated Ann Priest were never punished. A house painter, John Williams, was charged with the crime, but the evidence against him was slight, and the grand jury declined to find a true bill. Houstonne John Radcliffe confessed to
having given Miss Priest brandy on the last night of her life, and he was formally “sent down” by his college the following month, in January 1828, it being understood that he was free to return to Brasenose after the summer or “long” vacation. Houstonne, however, declined to avail himself of this privilege, and indeed he left Oxford before the decision was handed down. He never returned. He died, in the autumn of 1829, at the age of twenty-two, in the house of his aunt, Mrs. Pemberton, in Spring Garden Terrace, London. Curiously enough, his name is not inscribed in the pages of
The Radcliffes of Leigh Lancashire, A Family Memorial
. The reader who takes the trouble to examine that obscure volume will find the names of his two sisters duly set down, together with those of their clerical and diplomatic husbands—but he will search in vain for that of Houstonne; it is as though he had never been.

*
John Radcliffe afterwards became Vicar of Dodington and Teynham, and likely delegated his duties as Rector of Limehouse to a curate.

CHAPTER TEN

Whig Murder

prosaical rogues

—
Dr. Johnson

T
he Ripper had other forerunners. On May 6, 1838, Eliza Grimwood, who worked as a prostitute in the West End, was found murdered in a room at 2 Wellington Terrace, Lambeth. She had been stabbed twice in the neck and throat, and after her body “had been divested of the clothes in which it was enveloped,” as the writer for
The Times
put it, it was found that “she had received a severe wound a little above the nipple of the left breast,” and two other deep wounds in the abdomen, all of which “were no doubt inflicted by a sharp-pointed instrument,” for her “outward dress and also her stays, which were made of a very strong material,” had been cut through.

On March 26, 1841, Elizabeth Winks, a woman of thirty-six with “very creditable connexions,” was found near death on the
grass at the end of a lane in the London suburb of Norwood. It “was evident that the unfortunate woman had been brutally maltreated,” as her clothes “were dragged nearly over her head,” and there “were appearances of severe bruises about her person.” She afterwards died of her injuries. On January 18, 1843, the body of a woman, mutilated and burned, was fished out of the river Aire in Liverpool. On January 6, 1845, the body of a well-dressed woman in her early twenties, Emma Ashburnham, was discovered dead in the mud of the Thames near the steps of Waterloo Bridge; a “dreadful wound,” of “considerable depth,” had been inflicted upon her in the vicinity of the left hip-bone.

If none of these murders lives in the imagination of history, it is partly because they were recorded by inferior scribes. The “common reporter,” says a character in Arthur Machen's novel
The Inmost Light
, “is a dull dog; every story he has to tell is spoilt in the telling. His idea of horror and what excites horror is so lamentably deficient.” At the same time, the crueler sorts of crimes were becoming more common; murders far more gruesome than Thurtell's of Weare excited nothing like as much popular revulsion, and were instead shrugged off as a fact of metropolitan life.

There is another reason why the crimes left short smart upon the collective psyche. Murder was coming to be looked at in a new way. Once it had been conceived as a demonic act, with mysterious springs in the reptilian depths of the soul. But in the age of Victoria, it was being rationalized into a social fact, with its ultimate cause in the material circumstances of the murderer's life. The word “conditions” had come into vogue. By “conditions” was meant the various antecedent causes that contribute to particular results. The great thing about “conditions” is that they could be studied empirically, by means of the social and natural sciences. Moreover, they could be remedied politically, through social legislation. Murder, in the new theory—the Whig theory—differed from bad drains and inadequate plumbing in degree but not in kind; it, too, could be alleviated by Acts of Parliament. The criminal, it was pointed
out, had had a hard childhood; had lived unhygienically; had been fed an unsatisfactory diet; was insufficiently educated. Alter the conditions, and you would have fewer criminals.

The Whig theory of crime was sound, so far as it went; the vital statistics have long shown that in hard times, the number of certain kinds of crime (housebreaking, larceny, embezzlement) goes up. The trouble with the Whig theory is that in good times, the number of depraved crimes does not go down. Since the reign of Victoria, countless slums have been cleared and social welfare programs instituted; the poor, in Europe and America today, enjoy luxuries unknown to the rich of a century ago; and obesity has replaced hunger as the curse of the lower classes. Yet mass murders have become as innumerable as the leaves of Vallombrosa. Like cancer and mental depression, the phenomenon of the psychopath appears to be one of those malignancies which flourishes most abundantly in the sunshine of progress and enlightenment.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Trivialization of Evil

For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the Symbol proper, what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite. . . .