The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor

Chatterton

First Light

English Music

The House of Doctor Dee

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

biography

T.S. Eliot

Dickens

poetry

The Diversions of Purley

criticism

Notes for a New Culture

O
n the 6th April, 1881, a woman was hanged within the walls of Camberwell Prison. The ceremony was to be performed at eight o’clock, according to custom, and just after dawn the other prisoners began their ritual howling. The death bell of the prison chapel tolled as she was led from the condemned cell and joined a procession which included the governor, the prison chaplain, the prison doctor, the Roman Catholic priest, who had heard her confession the night before, her solicitor, and two witnesses appointed by the Home Office. The public executioner was waiting for them in a wooden shed across the yard where a gallows had been erected—only a few years before the woman could have been hanged beside the walls of Newgate Prison, to the delight of the vast crowd assembled there throughout the night, but the chance of such a great performance had been denied her by the progressive legislation of 1868. So she had to die in mid-Victorian privacy, in a wooden shed that smelled of the sweat of the workmen who had erected it two days earlier. The only tribute to sensationalism was her coffin, which had been strategically placed in the prison yard so that she might pass it on the way to her death.

The Burial Office was read, and it was noticed that she participated in this with great fervor. The condemned are supposed to remain quite silent at this solemn time but she lifted her head and, staring through the little roof of glass at the foggy air beyond, begged loudly for the safety of her own soul. The customary incantation came to an end, and the hangman stood behind
her as she climbed the wooden block; he was about to place the coarsely woven cloth over her, but she brushed it away with the motion of her head. Her hands had already been bound behind her back with leathern thongs, but there was no difficulty in interpreting the gesture. While she stared down at the official witnesses, the rope was placed around her neck (the executioner, knowing her precise size and weight, had measured the hemp exactly). She spoke only once before he pulled the lever and the wooden trapdoor opened beneath her. She said, “Here we are again!” Her eyes were still upon them as she fell. Her name was Elizabeth Cree. She was thirty-one years old.

She had been wearing a white smock, or gown, at the moment of her deliverance. It had been the custom, during the days of public execution, for the dress of the dead to be torn apart and sold in pieces to the assembled crowd as mementos or magical talismans. But this had become an age of private possessiveness, and the white gown was taken from the body of the hanged woman with great reverence. Later that day it was handed to the governor of the prison, Mr. Stephens, who accepted it without a word from the female warder who carried it to his office. He did not need to inquire about the body itself; he had already agreed that it should be dispatched to the medical surgeon of Limehouse Division, who specialized in examining the brains of murderers for any signs of abnormality. As soon as the warder had closed the door behind her, Mr. Stephens folded the white gown very neatly and placed it in the Gladstone bag which he kept behind his desk. That night, in his small house on Hornsey Rise, he took it carefully from the bag; he lifted it above his head, and put it on. He was wearing nothing else and, with a sigh, he lay down upon the carpet in the gown of the hanged woman.

W
ho now remembers the story of the Limehouse Golem, or cares to be reminded of the history of that mythical creature? “Golem” is the medieval Jewish word for an artificial being, created by the magician or the rabbi; it literally means “thing without form,” and perhaps sprang from the same fears which surrounded the fifteenth-century concept of the “homunculus” which was supposed to have been given material shape in the laboratories of Hamburg and Moscow. It was an object of horror, sometimes said to be made of red clay or sand, and in the mid-eighteenth century it was associated with specters and succubi who have a taste for blood. The secret of how it came to be revived in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and how it aroused the same anxieties and horrors as its medieval counterpart, is to be found within the annals of London’s past.

The first killing occurred on the 10th September, 1880, along Limehouse Reach: this, as its name implies, was an ancient lane which led from a small thoroughfare of mean houses to a flight of stone steps just above the bank of the Thames. It had been used by porters over many centuries for convenient if somewhat cramped access to the cargo of smaller boats which anchored here, but the dock redevelopments of the 1830s had left it marooned on the edge of the mud banks. It reeked of dampness and old stone, but it also possessed a stranger and more fugitive odor which was aptly described by one of the residents of the neighborhood as that of “dead feet.” It was here, at first light on a September morning, that the body of Jane Quig was
discovered. She had been left upon the old steps in three separate parts; her head was upon the upper step, with her torso arranged beneath it in some parody of the human form, while certain of her internal organs had been impaled upon a wooden post by the riverside. She had been a prostitute who had found her custom among the sailors of the area and, although she was only in her early twenties, had been known to her neighbors as “Old Salty.” Of course the popular opinion, inflamed by gruesome reports in the
Daily News
and
Morning Advertiser
, declared that a “fiend in human form” was at work—a supposition which was strengthened when, six nights later, another killing took place in the same area.

The Jewish quarter of Limehouse comprised three streets beyond the Highway; it was known as “Old Jerusalem” both by those who inhabited it and those who lived beside it. There was a lodging house here, in Scofield Street, where an old scholar by the name of Solomon Weil resided; he had two rooms upon the top floor, filled with old volumes and manuscripts of Hasidic lore, from which he journeyed every weekday morning to the Reading Room of the British Museum; he always traveled there on foot, leaving his house at eight in the morning, and arriving at Great Russell Street by nine. On the morning of September the 17th, however, he did not leave his rooms. His downstairs neighbor, a clerk with the Commission on Sanitation and Metropolitan Improvements, was sufficiently alarmed to knock gently upon his door. There was no reply and, believing that Solomon Weil might have been taken ill, he boldly entered the room. “Well, this is a pretty business!” he exclaimed when he came upon a scene of indescribable confusion. But, as he soon discovered, it was not pretty at all. The old scholar had been mutilated in a most strange manner; his nose had been cut off and placed upon a small pewter plate, while his penis and testicles had been left upon the open page of a book which he must
have been reading when he was so savagely disturbed. Or had the volume been left by the killer as some clue to his appetites? The severed penis was decorating a long entry on the golem, as the police detectives from “H” Division duly noted, and within a few hours this was the word being whispered throughout Old Jerusalem and its environs.

The reality of this malevolent spirit was enhanced by the circumstances surrounding the murder in Limehouse two days later. Another female prostitute, Alice Stanton, was found lying against the small white pyramid in front of the church of St. Anne’s. Her neck had been broken, and her head unnaturally turned so that she seemed to be staring just beyond the church itself; her tongue had been cut out and placed within her vagina, while her body itself was mutilated in a manner reminiscent of the killing of Jane Quig nine days before. Upon the pyramid itself the word “golem” had been traced in the blood of the dead woman.

By now the inhabitants of the entire East End of London were thoroughly alarmed and inflamed by the sequence of strange deaths. The daily newspapers reported every practice in which “The Golem” or “The Golem of Limehouse” engaged, while certain details were embellished, or on occasions invented, in order to ensure more notoriety for what were already gruesome accounts. Could it have been the journalist on the
Morning Advertiser
, for example, who decided that the “Golem” had been chased by an “irate crowd” only to be seen “fading away” into the wall of a bakery by Hayley Street? But perhaps that was not an instance of editorial license since, as soon as the report was published, several residents of Limehouse confirmed that they had been among the mob which had pursued the creature and watched it disappear. An old woman who lived by Limehouse Reach swore that she had seen a “transparent gentleman” moving swiftly by the waterside, while an unemployed tallow chandler
told the world through the pages of the
Gazette
that he had seen a figure soaring into the air above Limehouse Basin. So the legend of the Golem was born, even before the final and most shocking act of murder. Four days after the killing of Alice Stanton by St. Anne’s, an entire family was found slaughtered in their house beside the Ratcliffe Highway.