Shooting Victoria (77 page)

134:   Crowds at public executions could be fickle: Gatrell,
67
, 98–100.

134:    “… you will leave the world unrespected and unpitied by any one”:
Times
14 May 1842, 8.

134:   … “a good deed done”: For the details of Good's murder, see
Times
8 April 1842, 13, 9 April 1842, 7;
Morning Chronicle
9 April 1842, 7.

134:   Queely (or Quelaz) Shiell, who had made his fortune as the largest slaveholder on the West Indian island of Montserrat: 1841
England census
(incorrectly transcribed as Queeley Thiel); Browne 114; Dodd 64; Shiell and Anderson.

134:   There, Good bought on credit a pair of breeches:
Times
8 April 1842, 13.

135:   Good planted his back against the door and refused entry:
Morning Chronicle
9 April 1842, 7;
Times
8 April 1842,13.

135:   “My God, what's this?”:
Times
8 April 1842,13.

135:   Daniel Good bolted, slamming the stable door to, locking it, throwing the key and a lantern into a hedge, and lighting out across the fields:
Times
8 April 1842, 13; 9 April 1842, 7.

136:   It had been gutted—sliced in a ghastly cross vertically from sternum to pubes, and horizontally around the top of the pelvis, in a single cut from one side of the backbone around to the other:
Times
13 April 1842,14; 22 April 1842, 6.

136:   Gardiner sent Samuel Dagnall to the station house in Wandsworth to fetch help, give a description of Good, and raise the alarm:
Times
9 April 1842, 7;
Morning Chronicle
9 April 1842, 7.

136:   … Sergeant Palmer[,] opened the door to the adjoining harness room and was nearly knocked over by the overpowering stench:
Times
8 May 1842,13.

137:   … two bloody fragments of a woman's petticoat, “violently torn asunder”:
Times
22 April 1842, 6.

137:   The Sunday before, on Good's orders, an anxious Jane Jones had left the boy to sleep with a neighbor while she went to visit Good in Putney:
Times
13 April 1842,14.

137:   He saw his father make a gift to the young woman: a gown, a shawl, a fur tippet, a pair of gloves, a pair of boots, and, in a hatbox, a blue bonnet:
Times
9 April 1842, 7; 13 April 1842,14.

138:   … the trousers … which the boy swore his father never took:
Times
13 April 1842, 13.

138:   … the trunk—which he first thought was the body of a pig:
Times
13 April 1842, 13.

138:   Young Daniel apparently disclosed that address to one of the policemen investigating the stables:
Times
8 April 1842,13; Browne 115.

138:   The metropolitan police were adept, through an established system of “route-papers,” at communicating information about breaking crimes and fleeing criminals to all metropolitan station houses and to all active officers in a matter of hours: Lock 36; Cobb 102, 188.

138:   “V division, April 6, 1842.—Absconded, about half-past 9 o'clock, from Mr. Shiell's”:
Times
28 April 1842, 6.

139:   … according to local legend, he tossed the gatekeeper his coachman's coat as he flew by: Féret 1:65.

139:   … a policeman who had at 5
A.M.
witnessed Good hailing a cab:
Morning Chronicle
22 April 1842, 7.

139:   Tedman was suspended from the force for several weeks because of this mistake: Cobb 188.

139:   … he sought out his actual wife, Molly Good, whom he had abandoned a good two decades before:
Times
11 April 1842, 3.

139:   Together, Daniel and Molly pawned and sold most of Jane Jones's worldly goods:
Morning Chronicle
26 April 1842, 7.

139:   The newspapers soon excoriated the police for their lack of diligence in catching the murderer:
Morning Chronicle
15 April 1842, 6.

139:   … the
Times
reported the public sense of “unmitigated indignation” against the police:
Times
15 April 1842, 6.

140:   “The conduct of the metropolitan police in the present case … is marked with a looseness and want of decision”:
Times
11 April 1842, 3.

140:   Typical of the problem was … Inspector M'Gill of the Holborn division: Cobb 193–94.

140:   “Thus … the circumstance soon got circulation through the neighbourhood, and thus the chances of detection were considerably lessened”:
Times
11 April 1842, 3.

140:   … he was enraged by M'Gill's hamfisted intrusion: Cobb 196.

141:   By a remarkable coincidence, Rose had been a constable in V Division:
Morning Chronicle
18 April 1842, 3.

141:   Thomas Cooper, a morose 23-year-old who had an obsession with guns: For details of Cooper's shooting, see
Morning Chronicle
20 June 1842, 6;
Times
20 June 1842, 7.

141:   The superintendent of this police division … had assigned extra officers to patrol the area:
Era
8 May 1842, 7.

141:   … Charles Moss, was carefully watching a gentleman ostentatiously exhibiting a heavily ornamented watch chain:
Morning Chronicle
20 June 1842, 6;
Times
20 June 1842, 7.

142:   … both to reload his pistols (using grass instead of wadding to hold his bullets in place), and apparently to gulp down a vial of poison:
Morning Chronicle 7
May 1842, 7; 20 June 1842, 7;
Times 7
May 1842, 7.

142:   “I don't think those pistols are loaded,” he called out:
Morning Chronicle
20 June 1842, 7.

142:   One pursuer took up a brick, and another—probably Mott—a stick:
Times
20 June 1842, 7.

143:   Daly reeled half a circle and fell dead:
Era
19 June 1842, 7.

143:   … he was so angry at the treatment of his mother by the arresting officer, Inspector Penny, that Cooper assaulted Penny brutally:
Times 7
May 1842, 7; 20 May 1842, 8.

143:   … he only regretted killing Daly instead of Penny:
Morning Chronicle
20 June 1842, 8.

143:   … he seemed pleased to have killed a policeman: it served him right:
Times
, 6 May 1842, 6.

143:   “I shall never be happy until I am the death of one of them”:
Morning Chronicle
20 June 1842, 8.

144:   He stuck to the same story he had blurted out the moment his sentence of death was spoken:
Times
23 May 1842, 6.

144:   “I never touched the body of the woman, alive or dead! So help me God!”:
Times
23 May 1842, 6.

144:   He climbed, unassisted, the steps of the scaffold to the thunderous noise of an enraged mob:
Morning Chronicle
24 May 1842, 7.

144:   “Stop! Stop!” Good cried:
Times
24 May 1842, 8.

145:   Hanging “was much too good for such a fellow”:
Caledonian Mercury
4 June 1842, 2.

145:   Later this day he was to take a lease on a shop and parlor at 63 Mortimer Street:
Times
1 June 1842, 7.

146:   His parents still lived there with his sisters Mary and Jane: 1841
England Census;
TNA PRO HO 45/3079.

146:   He attempted—feebly, it seems—to survive as a journeyman carpenter in the adjoining neighborhood of Paddington:
Times
1 June 1842, 7.

146:   … his father mentioned that he came for Sunday dinner:
Morning Chronicle
2 June 1842, 6.

146:   He was too proud to tell them that he was finding few jobs and was almost out of money, having been too poor for the last three months to pay rent for his room:
Caledonian Mercury
4 June 1842, 2;
Times
30 May 1842, 5; 1 June 1842, 7.

146:   He was a close and long-standing friend of the head machinist, Henry Sloman, who had been a witness to the marriage of John Francis Sr. and Elizabeth, Francis's mother, in 1817:
London, England, Marriages and Banns, 1754–1921
.

146:   John Francis Jr. had been born in November 1822:
Caledonian Mercury
4 June 1842, 2

146:   … perhaps witnessing as a child the slapstick antics of Grimaldi, the sublime acting of Kean, the dazzling virtuosity of Paganini, or, more recently, the seductive dancing of young Lola Montez: Stott, throughout; Wyndham 47–52, 78, 117–120.

146:   … the census of 1841 lists John Francis Sr. as a carpenter, and his son as an apprentice carpenter: 1841
England Census
.

147:   … “one of the Artisans of Your Majesty's Theatre Royal Covent Garden … for more than 23 years”: TNA PRO HO 45/3079.

147:   Victoria and Albert had seen all these shows in the early months of 1842: Rowell 131.

148:   They employed well over a hundred men (including twenty-six carpenters) to deal with creating props and machinery: Wyndham 2.317.

148:   … a “Star of Brunswick” rising out of the ocean, “which opens as it enlarges”:
Times
13 February 1840, 5.

148:   … the first performance in London in which Mendelssohn's famous music was employed: Planché,
Recollections
2:51.

148:   Madame Vestris, renowned for her beautiful legs and for displaying them without shame in breeches roles, was responsible for that innovation: Bratton; Rowell 40.

148:   The play was a hit largely because of its showstopping finale: Haugen 99.

148:   … John Francis was specifically noted for his cleverness in construction of pantomime tricks:
Caledonian Mercury 4
June 1842, 2

148:   
The Castle of Otranto or, Harlequin and the Giant Helmet
, was arguably the most mechanically laden pantomime of all time—a “machinist's Sabbath,” according to one historian, a pantomime possibly even
written
by a Covent Garden machinist, to show off his crew's talents: Haugen 103, 107. Other accounts attribute authorship to Vestris's and Mathew's house-writer, J. R. Planché.

149:   The pantomime essentially ditched the frenetic human interaction which, when the clown Joseph Grimaldi ruled the pantomime stage two decades before, was crucial to the genre: Planché,
Castle of Otranto;
Stott.

149:   … she liked pantomime least—noting in her journal after one that it was “noisy and nonsensical as usual”: Rowell 24.

149:   … after his quarrel with his father at the end of 1841, he turned his back on Covent Garden and on his family:
Caledonian Mercury
4 June 1842, 2.

149:   … a few months after he left, the Vestris-Mathews management had collapsed: Haugen 134. 149:   Charles James Mathews was arrested for debt and had spent the two weeks before Good's execution at Queen's Bench Prison:
Times
10 May 1842, 5; 23 May 1842, 7.

150:   … after extensive renovations, the theatre finally found success opening in 1847 as an opera house: Wyndham 2:179–80.

150:   Robert Gibbs, the proprietor of the Caledonian Coffee House, who had endless opportunities to observe him, considered him “idle and reckless”:
Times
2 June 1842, 5.

150:   … he wrote poetry, for one thing, and preferred musing over coffee to seeking work:
Times
1 June 1842, 7;
Morning Chronicle
2 June 1842, 6.

150:   Francis was arrested on suspicion of stealing more than thirty-two sovereigns from an 85-year-old man he had met at a coffee house:
Times
3 June 1842, 8.

150:   Charles Johns, an outfitter of chemists and tobacconists, would in two days, on Wednesday, be delivering a full inventory to Francis's shop, and he would be expecting full payment on delivery:
Examiner
4 June 1842, 360.

151:   To fill his shop, then, he lied to Johns outright, presenting himself as a young man with great expectations:
Examiner
4 June 1842, 360.

151:   … bundles of Havana cigars (and imitation Havanas), bales of loose Virginia and Middle Eastern tobacco, packages of snuff; clay and meerschaum pipes:
Times
1 June 1842, 10.

151:   Grimstone's Eye Snuff:
Times
1 Feb. 1842, 8.

151:   Francis's friends at the coffee house, and the youth he slept next to, William Elam, were startled by Francis's sudden foray into keeping shop:
Morning Chronicle
2 June 1842, 6.

151:   Charles Johns was the one certain visitor to Francis's shop on this day:
Examiner
4 June 1842, 360.

151:   Francis fended him off: the executors of his grandmother's will were being difficult, delaying on signing off on his inheritance:
Examiner
4 June 1842, 360.

152:   … he would borrow £10 from “the old man”:
Examiner
4 June 1842, 360.

152:   Francis was, according to those who knew him, “good-tempered” and “inoffensive,” a sober lad, patron of coffee houses, not public houses or gin palaces, who came to his meals regularly and did not stay out late at night:
Times
1 June 1842, 7.

Chapter 9: Royal Theatre

153:   Usually, that theatre housed the Italian Opera, just reaching the peak of its season with performances of Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor
and
Lucrezia Borgia
: Rowell 130.

153:   Just before 10:30, the carriages drew up to the entrance on Charles Street reserved exclusively for the Queen's use: For details of the Spitalfields ball at Her Majesty's Theatre:
Times
27 May 1842, 6;
Morning Chronicle
27 May 1842, 6;
Illustrated London News
28 May 1842, 43.

153:   … the Count's four sons, who had emerged from the carriage in front of them:
Caledonian Mercury
30 May 1842, 4.

154:   … a “simultaneous sensation of delight” thrilled the audience:
Times
27 May 1842, 6.