A Very British Murder Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE: HOW TO ENJOY A MURDER

  1. A Connoisseur in Murder

  2. The Highway

  3. The Watchmen

  4. The Murder Circuit

  5. House of Wax

  6. True Crime

  7. Charles Dickens, Crime Writer

  8. The Ballad of Maria Marten

  9. Stage Fright

  10. The Bermondsey Horror

  PART TWO: ENTER THE DETECTIVE

  11. Middle-Class Murderers and Medical Gentlemen

  12. The Good Wife

  13. Detective Fever

  14. A New Sensation

  15. ‘It is worse than a crime, Violet …’

  16. Monsters and Men

  17. The Adventure of the Forensic Scientist

  18. Revelations of a Lady Detective

  PART THREE: THE GOLDEN AGE

  19. The Women Between the Wars

  20. The Duchess of Death

  21. A Life Less Ordinary

  22. The Great Game

  23. Snobbery with Violence

  24. The Dangerous Edge of Things

  Postscript: ‘The Decline of English Murder’

  Picture Section

  Sources

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Copyright

  About the Book

  MURDER

  A dark, shameful deed, the last resort of the desperate or a vile tool of the greedy. And yet, an endlessly fascinating storyline in popular entertainment. When did the British start taking such a ghoulish pleasure in violent death? And what does this tell us about ourselves?

  In A Very British Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail. She revisits notorious crimes such as the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, which caused a nation-wide panic in Regency England, and characters such as the murderess in black satin, Maria Manning, who helped bury her lover under the kitchen floor. Our fascination with these dark deeds would create a whole new world of entertainment, inspiring journalism and novels, plays and puppet shows, and an army of beloved fictional detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Miss Marple. During the birth of modern Britain, murder somehow slipped into our national psyche – and provided us with some of our most enduring and enjoyable pastimes.

  A Very British Murder is a unique exploration of how crime was turned into art, and a riveting investigation into the British soul by one of our finest historians.

  About the Author

  Dr Lucy Worsley is a historian and Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, where she looks after the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace among others. She has presented numerous television series, including Harlots, Housewives and Heroines for BBC4 and If Walls Could Talk for BBC1, for which she also wrote an accompanying book. Lucy has also written numerous other books, including Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses.

  ‘There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate, and expose every inch of it.’

  Sherlock Holmes

  Introduction

  ‘It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war … You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open The News of the World. A cup of mahogany-brown tea has put you just in the right mood. The sofa cushions are soft, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.’

  George Orwell, ‘Decline of the English Murder’ (1946)

  IN HIS ESSAY ‘Decline of the English Murder’, George Orwell describes for us the most satisfying kind of killer. Ideally, he’s a solicitor or doctor. He’s chairman of the local Conservative Party, or maybe a campaigner against the demon drink. He commits his crime out of passion for his secretary, but he’s really driven by fear of public shame: it’s easier for him to poison his wife than to go through the public scandal of divorcing her. The archetypal murderer, in Orwell’s mind, was a devious but apparently quiet and respectable little man, rather like Dr Crippen.

  But it wasn’t ever thus. Around 1800, people asked to imagine a murderer would have come up with a much more heroic figure: a gallant highwayman, or perhaps a charismatic career criminal who repents on the gallows. They might even have laid eyes upon him themselves, at one of the many crowded and carnivalesque public hangings. And today, by contrast, our scariest and most enjoyable fictional murderers are much less cosy than Orwell’s. They are psychopathic serial killers, nihilistic, motiveless and utterly terrifying.

  This isn’t really a book about real-life murderers, or the history of crime – although that’s certainly part of the story. Instead, it’s an exploration of how the British enjoyed and consumed the idea of murder, a phenomenon that dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century and continues to the present day.

  Perhaps appropriately, then, our two bookends will be writers. We’ll start in the late Georgian age, with Thomas De Quincey and his essay ‘On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’. De Quincey was inspired by the so-called Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811, a multiple killing that saw the beginning of the gruesome correlation between lurid reporting of a crime and a massive spike in the sales of newspapers. We’ll end at the Second World War, and Orwell’s essay, in which he laments the declining ‘quality’ of British murders and the rise of a different, more violent, less well-mannered, American-style criminal. Both writers, of course, were satirizing the business of enjoying a murder. And a large-scale, profitable and commercial business it was, too.

  As the Victorian age wore on, biographies of murderers were among its publishing sensations. In 1849, as many as two and a half million people bought a rather rushed effort purporting to be the ‘authentic memoirs’ of Maria Manning, the ‘Lady Macbeth of Bermondsey’, who had helped to kill her lover and bury him under her kitchen floor. In the middle of a cholera epidemic, Manning’s story dominated the news. Her execution was attended by thousands, including Charles Dickens, who found it horrific but nevertheless used Maria as a model for his murderess in Bleak House.

  Maria Manning’s execution was one of the last female hangings to take place in public. But even after this date you could still meet murderers face-to-face in the pseudo-scientific ‘Chamber of Comparative Physiognomy’, otherwise known as the ‘Chamber of Horrors’, at Madame Tussaud’s gallery. Or else you could watch them re-enacting their crimes in street performances, on the London stage or in puppet theatres. Or you could even buy the merchandising, which included – a particular favourite of mine – ceramic ornaments depicting the houses where notable murders had taken place.

  While researching this book, I was also making a television series on the same subject and I particularly enjoyed filming the strange and varied artefacts spewed out by a consumer society’s response to murder. I was ghoulishly pleased to handle the scales used by Thomas De Quincey to measure out the drug to which he was addicted. I myself re-murdered Maria Marten, the Suffolk mole-catcher’s daughter buried in a barn in 1828, by operating the Victoria and Albert Museum’s nineteenth-century puppets representing Maria and her killer, William Corder. It was gruesomely thrilling to handle Corder’s actual scalp, complete with shrivelled ear. It’s on display to the public, as it has been ever since his death, and can be seen in a museum in Bury St Edmunds. It was marvellously horrid to be in the Chamber of Horrors after hours, and to see the wax figure of Dr Crippen released from his cell, and to look straight into his eyes. Such experiences,
mixing horror and fun, were genuinely unsettling and genuinely pleasurable.

  The murderer’s rise to prominence in popular culture and fiction was mirrored, of course, by the rise of the detective. He – and eventually she – was greeted with suspicion and the feeling that it was distinctly un-British to ‘spy’ on members of the public. Eventually, society grew to rely upon and to respect the professional crime-solver, but the amateur remained more popular in fiction. I especially like girl detectives, having grown up believing that I was Harriet Vane from the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries reborn. Employing a female sleuth in a novel allowed authors to send feminine characters bursting out of the usual restrictions of class and home. They could follow suspects, wear disguises, spy on other people and use their intelligence to right wrongs. Even the female criminals of the Victorian age, both in fact and fiction, give voice to passions and complaints not usually heard or expressed by women in society.

  Now it’s pretty obvious that the ‘art’ of murder – its depiction in theatre, songs, stories, novels or newspapers – reflects society’s darkest fears back at itself. The Ratcliffe Highway Murders at the start of our period chimed with fears about the newly expanding city, ‘stranger danger’ and urban predators in ill-lit streets. But murder becomes more middle class as the nineteenth century matures. New types of poison (and new developments such as life insurance) provided novel means (and motives) for crime. We think of Sherlock Holmes as living in a world of gas lighting and hansom cabs and opium dens, yet actually many of his cases take him to places like Leatherhead, Esher or Oxshott, and houses with names like ‘Wisteria Lodge’, ‘Chiltern Grange’ or ‘The Myrtles’. To solve these affairs Holmes leaves Baker Street and London behind, travelling out to the Home Counties on the train.

  In the earlier nineteenth century, middle-class murderers could count on the deference that the authorities paid to their very station in society to protect them from the law. The later Victorian period saw more and more middle-class murderers, and murderesses, being caught. And eventually they would find themselves – their concern for respectability and appearances – recreated in the works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and the other great crime writers of the early twentieth century.

  Their world was rural and well ordered, with country houses and cottages alike inhabited by readers of the Daily Mail. Into its confines, the writers of the detective novel’s golden age sowed the seeds of passion and violence. But in their tens of thousands of light novels, a detective character entered the scene, cleared away the body, solved the crime, punished the wicked and neatly tidied up all the loose ends. In the years following the First World War, people wanted leisure reading to numb, not to stimulate, their capacity for experiencing horror.

  However, by 1939 something had come to seem a little too cosy about elderly ladies solving puzzles in vicarages. Graham Greene, with his insights into the mind of a killer, and James Bond, the swaggering spy, made them seem completely old hat. The old-fashioned detective may dodder on in fiction today, but since the Second World War he or she has been eclipsed by nastier, more violent colleagues in the thriller section.

  Today, one in every three books sold is a crime novel, but many people look down on them as trash, often containing a crude, indeed simplistic, message that good shall triumph over evil. But crime fiction was the relatively unsophisticated genre which taught working-class people how to enjoy reading. And despite its lack of artistic merit, the literature of murder tells us not what people thought they ought to read. It tells us what they really read.

  It was the very essence of a guilty pleasure. In the pre-war, prelapsarian words of Dorothy L. Sayers: ‘Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other subject.’ Sitting down after a hard day’s work, slippers on, guard lowered … for the last 200 years murder has been the topic to which readers turn for comfort and relaxation.

  Let’s find out why.

  Part One

  How to Enjoy a Murder

  1

  A Connoisseur in Murder

  ‘I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reed and Nilotic mud.’

  Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)

  DURING A TRIP to London in 1804, a student from Oxford’s Worcester College began to experience ‘rheumatic’ pains in his head. They were caused, he believed, by having gone to bed with wet hair. He suffered from an ‘excruciating’ pain for about 20 days in a row, until by chance he ‘met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium’.

  Thomas De Quincey remembered with immense clarity for the rest of his life the mundane events of a damp weekend that followed this chance encounter. Although he would only realize it later, this illness, this meeting and this commonplace conversation formed a major turning point upon his life’s journey.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless … my road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near ‘the stately Pantheon’ (as Mr Wordsworth has obligingly called it) I saw a druggist’s shop. The druggist – unconscious minister of celestial pleasures! – as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on a Sunday; and when I asked for tincture of opium, he gave it to me just as any other man might do, and furthermore, out of my shilling returned to me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer.

  Like so many of his contemporaries, De Quincey greatly admired the poet William Wordsworth, whose description he quotes of the famous Oxford Street assembly rooms called ‘The Pantheon’. Few, at the date of his first taste of opium, knew that Thomas De Quincey also had literary ambitions of his own.

  As the months passed, the student found himself making further sorties to the big city as a break from his studies, and for a little recreational drug use. His explorations of London’s streets, and his trips to the opera, were made stranger and more appealing by doses of the drug available with such ease at any druggist’s counter. He found himself traversing immense distances, for ‘an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motions of time’. Inevitably, he got lost, but it seemed amusing rather than tedious. In these enjoyable, early days as an opium-eater, he was still in control. ‘I used to fix beforehand how often within a given time, and when, I would commit a debauch of opium. This was seldom more than once in three weeks, for at that time I could not have ventured to call every day, as I did afterwards, for “a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar”.’

  Laudanum was the liquid form of the drug, dissolved in alcohol, often consumed in warmed wine, and, like the pills De Quincey obtained from the druggist, there was nothing shameful or unusual about the sight or use of it in late Georgian London.

  Readily available medicines such as ‘Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup’, or ‘Godfrey’s Cordial’, or ‘Kendal Black Drop’ sound beneficent, even health-giving, and yet the ingredient upon which they relied was poppy-based. Mrs Beeton recommended that the wise housewife keep a good stock of opium in her cupboard. De Quincey’s fellow users of opiates included the ultra-respectable and the creative: Florence Nightingale, Jane Morris and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He himself listed the opium-eaters he knew as including ‘the eloquent and benevolent —, the late Dean of —, Lord —, Mr. — the philosopher, a late Under-Secretary of State … and many others hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention’.

  And opium-eating was not limited to high society. De Quincey claimed that in Manchester, the city of his birth, ‘workpeople were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating; so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening’.

  A bot
tle of ‘Kendal Black Drop’, a popular brand of tincture of opium, readily available at late Georgian chemists’ shops.

  Opium was cheap, and it was everywhere.

  As his larking about in London suggests, Thomas De Quincey was not a particularly conventional or diligent student. He’d experienced a period of homelessness before arriving in Oxford. In a fit of alienation, he’d left home, embarked upon a walking tour of Wales, spent all his money and got into debt by borrowing against the expectations he had of a legacy. Estranged from his family, he ended up living in an empty house in Greek Street, Soho, comforted only by a prostitute named ‘Anne of Oxford-street’.

  But De Quincey had immense talent as a writer. After writing fan mail to William Wordsworth, he struck up an epistolary friendship with the writer whose Lyrical Ballads (assembled with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and with some involvement from his sister Dorothy) had become the centrepiece of the Romantic movement.

  When he reached the end of his Oxford career, De Quincey performed brilliantly in the first day of his examinations but lost his nerve and failed to show up on the second. Soon afterwards, he departed for the north, to live in the Lake District at what is today called Dove Cottage, a house upon Grasmere formerly rented by his hero Wordsworth.

  De Quincey lent money, when he had it, to his new friends in Grasmere. But then he fell into a deep depression after the death of Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine, to whom he had become close, and ‘often passed the night upon [her] grave’. His use of opium, which at first had been merely an occasional dip into an ‘abyss of divine enjoyment’, now became a daily necessity. The collection at Dove Cottage still contains a set of delicate nineteenth-century Chinese scales made out of bone, for weighing out opium in powdered form. It’s usually very hard to say with certainty to whom such utilitarian items from the past might have belonged, but the wooden case in which these particular scales live is carved with a clear – and rather convincing – ‘TQ’. And he must have had frequent need of them. Two hundred and fifty miles distant from London, he described his life as being: ‘Buried in the depth of mountains. And what am I doing among the mountains? Taking opium.’