A Very British Murder Read online

  As well as taking opium, he was reading Kant, studying German metaphysics and living on what his fellow gentlemen would have called his ‘private fortune’. He spent a good deal on expensive books as well as drugs. One visitor described his rather chaotic living arrangements, which contained ‘a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all over the floor, the tables, and the chairs – billows of books’.

  But De Quincey’s inherited income was too inadequate to fulfil his needs. Financial necessity compelled him to leave behind his indolent ways and start to write essays for periodicals. He found it hard work. ‘He has always told me,’ wrote his editor, ‘that he composes very slowly; that his language costs him a great deal of attention.’ De Quincey had to persevere, though, for as time went by he acquired further financial obligations in the form of numerous children. He married a farmer’s daughter, after having a child with her out of wedlock, and together they would go on to produce eight more offspring.

  In 1821, with creditors snapping at his heels, he finally produced the piece of writing for which he is best known. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater outlines the bizarre oriental fantasies he had at first enjoyed under the influence of the drug. It made his name almost instantly. The fabulously creative visions he described, combined with the horrific squalor of his addiction itself, were equally shocking and attractive.

  Thomas De Quincey’s reputation would wane in the twentieth century, as his florid, luscious word games were seen as overblown. With the growth of counter-culture in the 1960s, however, he became celebrated once more as a visionary and an example of a creative drug-user. Those seeking validation for the powers of narcotics point to the fact that De Quincey’s best writing is inspired by opium, and that his productivity rose and fell alongside his consumption.

  On the other hand, De Quincey himself wrote his Confessions explicitly to warn others of the dangers of addiction, and to share the pain of his weaning himself off his dependency. He was not entirely successful in the former. The glamorous example he set seduced, among others, the Brontë sisters’ disappointing brother, Branwell, into similar debauchery – without, however, similar achievements. The Family Oracle of Health, published in 1824, censoriously noted how:

  the use of opium has been recently much increased by a wild, absurd and romancing production, called The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. We observe, that at some late inquests this wicked book has been severely censured, as the source of misery and torment, and even of suicide itself, to those who have been seduced to take opium by its lying stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense.

  And De Quincey’s own troubles were not eased by his notoriety. People jealous of his success publicized the fact that he had fathered an illegitimate child. His family were evicted from their house for unpaid rent and his wife was threatening to commit suicide. De Quincey was failing to meet the demand for his articles from the editors of The London Magazine. Desperate for money, he roused himself to produce some essays for Blackwood’s Magazine. Among them was a playful, creative, coolly humorous piece called ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’.

  DE QUINCEY’S ESSAY on murder, a ‘complex exercise in sinister irony’ as his biographer Grevel Lindop calls it, was published in February 1827. The essay purports to have been written by a member of an imaginary new London club, ‘The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder’, a group who ‘profess to be curious in homicide, amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of carnage, and, in short, Murder-Fanciers’. At their meetings, the members of this club discuss and assess the work of various murderers: ‘every fresh atrocity of that class which the police annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticize as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art’.

  The members of the society, like De Quincey himself, were what we might today call achingly cool hipsters. They were well aware that modern times demanded a new level of knowingness and sophistication – in crime, as in everything else. ‘In this age,’ declaimed one of the club’s supposed speakers, ‘when masterpieces of excellence have been executed by professional men, it must be evident that in the style of criticism applied to them the public will look for something of a corresponding improvement.’

  De Quincey begins his essay by describing a mishap that was universally judged by the connoisseurs to be an unfortunate event of disappointingly poor quality, because in it no one had even died.

  A fire had broken out in a piano-maker’s workshop, once again in Oxford Street, and close to the home of Mr Coleridge where the author had been attending a party. (This was an in-joke: De Quincey was friends with his fellow opium addict, William Coleridge.) The poet’s guests had left off drinking tea to go and look at the fire, but De Quincey (or at least the voice narrating his essay) had been forced, by another engagement, to leave before it had been extinguished. A few days later, he asked his friend Coleridge for a verdict on the entertainment the fire had provided. ‘Oh Sir,’ said he, ‘it turned out so ill, that we damned it unanimously.’

  The fire engines had arrived in good time; there were no deaths; the only loser had been the insurance company. De Quincey takes pains to point out that Coleridge was not an evil or unpleasant person: like others of his time, he had simply assumed the right ‘to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any other performance that raised expectations in the public mind’.

  And here De Quincey reveals the central phenomenon of his essay (and this book) – murder as a ‘performance that raised expectations in the public mind’. The idea that crime, particularly murder, provided entertainment was only born in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but it would bloom into one of the greatest mass-market interests of all time.

  The ‘art of murder’ would give rise to sensational journalism, plays, murder-site tourism and memorabilia and the whole body of detective fiction. Its development went hand in hand with ‘civilization’, gas-lighting, industrialization, life in the city: everything that allowed people to feel safe from nature and its dangers. Barricaded behind locked doors, sitting by the fire, curtains closed, people living in the late Georgian age started almost to miss the violence and death that had once been all too much part of daily life, but which could now, mercifully, be recast in the category of entertainment.

  In due course murder would thrill and horrify and delight millions of peaceful people who really, like Coleridge in De Quincey’s essay, should have known better. In the words of the satirical magazine Punch, a truly thrilling novel was written with the intention of ‘Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on end, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System … and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life’.

  The idea that murder and pleasure are intertwined – horribly, yet inescapably – has become an important part of modern life. It was a drug-addled, indebted, unreliable dropout who first revealed this to us. But sometimes, of course, it is the outsider – in his own words, ‘he came to be looked upon as a strange being who associated with no one’ – who can see society most clearly. Thomas De Quincey had put his finger upon an entirely new type of behaviour and skewered it to the page, and, in satirizing it, completely condemned it. Despite appearances, his essay was written entirely against the new practice of ‘consuming’ crime, as if indeed it were one of the fine arts.

  It also identified the exact point at which so much began to change: the horrific events of 1811 known as the Ratcliffe Highway Murders.

  2

  The Highway

  ‘Murder! Murder! Come and see what murder is here!’

  The Marrs’ neighbour discovers their bodies (8 December 1811)

  UNTIL THE END of the eighteenth century, people’s attitudes towards murder had been very different. Of course, the crime of killing had existed. But Judith Flanders writes that in the year 1810, out of a population of nearly ten million Britons, only 15 people were convicted of murder. No wonder, for there were no police or detective
s in the sense that we know today. But there was indeed a proto-police force based in Wapping, east London, that became involved in the very first ‘notorious’ or ‘horrid’ murders. The ‘Ratcliffe Highway Murders’ were hailed by De Quincey in his essay as ‘the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed’.

  Today, the Highway, as the Ratcliffe Highway is now known, roars with traffic coming into the City from Docklands. One January dusk, after my day’s work at the Tower of London, I set off further east, into Wapping, to find the site of the house where Timothy and Celia Marr, their baby son and their young apprentice boy were killed in 1811.

  This was the year in which the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, was appointed Prince Regent, as it had become clear that his father, George III, had descended into debilitating ‘madness’ and senility. Slaves were revolting in the southern states of America, the British were fighting Napoleon’s forces in Spain and closer to home the hand-loom weavers known as the Luddites, deprived of their livelihood by the coming of machines, were using violent protest in the Midlands. It was a time of great upheaval and uncertainty.

  Wapping was a busy if impoverished maze of crowded tenements housing the people who serviced the nearby docks. Sailors, boat-builders, victuallers and those aspiring to join those trades all settled here. It was notably rough. The ‘Marine’ or ‘Thames River Police’, an early, independent force of professional, paid policemen, was established here in 1798 specifically to deal with the problem of theft from the ships in the Pool of London. They travelled up and down the river in small boats, armed with cutlasses and heavy wooden guns. One of the sights of Wapping was ‘Execution Dock’, where pirates met their very public end on a gibbet.

  Little trace now remains of the area’s infrastructure after its bombing in the Second World War, but the dim warehouses lining the alley called Breezer’s Hill, now converted into flats, are still topped by winches. The naval character of the area is recorded in street signs for ‘Tobacco Dock’, ‘Rum Close’ and ‘Cinnamon Street’. According to De Quincey’s anonymous (and admittedly unreliable) narrator in the essay ‘On Murder’, in Regency Wapping ‘every third man at the least might be set down as a foreigner. Lascars, Chinese, Moors, Negroes were to be met at every step.’ In addition to all these supposedly dodgy foreigners, the settlement was ‘the sure receptacle of all the murderers and ruffians whose crimes have given them a motive for withdrawing themselves for a season from the public eye’.

  Because of the nature of my mission, and the growing darkness, Wapping seems to me, as I walk east, still to maintain an atmosphere of menace. Along the Highway, I pass Secrets table dancing club, high brick walls topped with spiked metal defences and a huge glowing billboard for a new television drama promising ‘A Dark Future’. When I pull out my map to check if I am near the site of No. 29, the home of the Marr family, it is bathed red in the light from a sign in the window of Machine Mart. I am disturbed by a woman with a buggy who bumps into me from behind while coming out of the 24-hour McDonald’s attached to the neighbouring petrol station. My map reveals that I am in exactly the right place.

  My jumpy journey to Wapping was made in the spirit of murder connoisseurship that Thomas De Quincey identified and condemned, but I find my nerve and sense of irony failing me as I peer down dark, deserted cobbled streets. Wapping is not a dangerous area now. It’s known for newspaper production, 1980s yuppie housing and for having a big Waitrose. But the thought of gruesome murder still makes it seem so.

  The first of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders took place late at night on 7 December 1811. At the time, the story of the murders was seen to end with a completely satisfactory conclusion, the death of the supposed killer, John Williams. Williams had been arrested later that month and hanged himself in his prison cell three days after Christmas. The Marine Police, the local constables and watchmen and the authorities in general heaved a huge sigh of relief at his decease. It would appear that the murderer had been caught, that peace could return to the streets and that justice could be ‘seen’ to be done.

  A huge procession was mounted to show Williams’s dead body to the people of Wapping. On New Year’s Eve, his body was taken for burial. A huge crowd, said to number 180,000 people, lined Ratcliffe Highway to watch the cart pass. Contemporary prints show the dead body mounted on the back of a cart, surrounded by watchmen armed with staves, watched by seas of faces on the pavements and crowded into the windows of houses. On the cart with Williams’s body were displayed his presumed murder weapons: a chisel, a crowbar and the tool used by ships’ carpenters known as a ‘pen maul’.

  The procession stopped for 15 minutes outside No. 29, the house where the Marrs died. Now a member of the crowd climbed up on to the cart and forcibly turned the dead man’s head to look at the home of ‘his’ victims, confronting him with what he had done. He was eventually taken to a crossroads, the conventional burying place for a suicide. At the junction of the new Commercial Road and Cannon Street, his body was ‘tumbled out of the cart’, lowered into a grave and ‘someone hammered a stake through his heart’.

  This last action was to ensure that an unquiet soul would not go wandering. The veracity of the report seemed to be confirmed in 1886, when gas pipes were being buried. At the same road junction, workmen digging a trench discovered a skeleton, buried at a depth of 6 feet, face down and with a stake through its heart.

  But despite all this trouble, taken to bring a sense of closure to a troubled community, the startling thing about the Ratcliffe Highway Murders from today’s vantage point is just how weak the case for Williams as the culprit seems to have been. Even the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, admitted that his guilt ‘was still wrapped up in mystery. It undoubtedly seemed strange that a single individual could commit such accumulated violence.’

  What was Williams said to have done, and what were the flaws in the evidence for his having done it?

  TIMOTHY MARR AND his family lived above their shop at No. 29 on Ratcliffe Highway. It had a fine painted sign reading ‘Marr’s Silk, Mercery, Lace, Pelisse, Mantle & Furr Warehouse’ above its shuttered bow window. Marr was a former seaman who had only recently, in his mid-twenties, set up in business as a draper. His 22-year-old wife, Celia, had given birth just 14 weeks earlier to a baby boy and had still not quite recovered her strength. Their young male apprentice was a mere 13. They also had a maid, Margaret. Just before midnight (Saturday nights, being payday, were busy in the shop), Timothy Marr directed Margaret ‘to go out and purchase some oysters for the family supper’.

  Far from being an expensive delicacy, oysters were still the ubiquitous cheap and cheerful street food of Regency London. But, this late at night, Margaret had trouble finding a shop that was still open. She also had to pay a bill at the baker’s. When she got back, it seemed that everyone in the house had gone to sleep and she was locked out.

  In his essay De Quincey now began to imagine the Gothic and horrific scene. Margaret (or Mary, as De Quincey called her) the maid, out on the midnight street, listened at the door, and heard … something.

  What was it? On the stairs – not the stairs that led down to the kitchen, but the stairs that led upwards to the single storey of bedchambers above – was heard a creaking sound. Next was heard most distinctly a footfall: one, two, three, four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly descended. Then the dreadful footsteps were heard advancing along the little narrow passage to the door. The steps – oh heavens! whose steps? – have paused at the door. The very breathing can be heard … there is but a door between him and Mary.

  The scene could come from any thriller written between 1811 and 2011. The sense of ‘stranger danger’, of the murderer having mysteriously got inside a secure, workaday, domestic setting, and the defenceless young girl listening in silent terror to his approach are just as fresh and horrifying today as they were to De Quincey’s readers.

  Margaret banged on the door and the sound aroused the Marrs’ neighbour, a pawnbro
ker. He climbed over the wall between his own and the Marrs’ garden at the back, and found the shop’s back door open wide. The murderer (or murderers) had fled, but they had left their mark. Inside the narrow passage was ‘so floated with gore that it was hardly possible to escape the pollution of blood in picking out a path to the front-door’. Father, mother, apprentice and baby had all been slain. The murder weapon was apparently the bloodied ship’s carpenter’s hammer – the pen maul – which was discovered in the kitchen.

  From this point on, though, events became confused and, ultimately, mishandled. The Thames Police were called in, but these official visitors were accompanied by a whole swarm of unofficial sightseers who wished to see the murdered bodies laid out dead upon their beds. The crime scene was thoroughly contaminated. What forensic and material evidence there was they were not skilled in reading: it took 12 days before anyone noticed that the maul in the kitchen was marked with the initials JP. The Thames Police also struggled to handle a crime which had had no witnesses. And when information arrived in response to a proffered reward, it came – all too neatly – from a woman whose husband was in the debtors’ prison, and greatly in need of financial aid. She was the landlady of the nearby Pear Tree Tavern. She reported that she had a lodger named John Petersen, representing the initials found on the maul. Petersen was absent away at sea at the time of the murder, but he had left his tools behind him. However, John Williams, another of her lodgers, had had access to the tools, had mysteriously shaved himself clean the day after the crime and had been seen washing what were possibly bloodied stockings at the Pear Tree’s pump.