The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer
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Horlock added a rider to the jury’s verdict: ‘We consider that the Legislature should take some steps to put a stop to the inflammable and shocking literature that is sold, which in our opinion leads to many a dreadful crime being carried out.’
‘There can’t be any difference of opinion about that,’ said Lewis.
In the mid-1890s the prevalence of penny dreadfuls (as they were known in the press) or penny bloods (as they were known to shopkeepers and schoolboys) was a subject of great public concern. ‘Tons of this trash is vomited forth from Fleet Street every day,’ observed the Motherwell Times in 1895, ‘and inwardly digested by those whose mental pabulum is on a level with the stuff for which it craves.’ More than a million boys’ periodicals were being sold a week, most of them to working-class lads who had been taught to read in the state-funded board schools set up over the previous two decades. An Act of Parliament of 1870 had given local authorities the power to enforce school attendance, and successive Acts made elementary education compulsory (in 1880) and then free (in 1891). Between 1870 and 1885, the number of children at elementary school trebled, and by 1892 four and a half million children were being educated in the board schools. The new wave of literate boys sought out penny fiction as a diversion from the rote-learning and drill of the school curriculum, and then from the repetitive tasks of the mechanised industries to which many of them progressed. Since cheap magazines were traded on street corners, in playgrounds and factory yards, each issue could have many readers. Penny fiction was Britain’s first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young, and was often held responsible for the decay of literature and of morality.
The bloods sold for a halfpenny, a penny or tuppence, depending on the length of the story, while proper novels for boys – whether Robinson Crusoe or The Prisoner of Zenda, the romances of Walter Scott or the adventures of Jules Verne – cost two or three shillings each. Most of Robert’s novelettes were sixty-four-page pamphlets priced at tuppence, their titles picked out in scarlet and yellow on vividly illustrated covers. At eight and a half inches tall and six inches wide, they were small enough to slip inside a jacket pocket, or between the leaves of a textbook or a prayerbook. They were sold by newsagents, tobacconists, confectioners and chandlers.
A week after Robert and Nattie’s arrest, a St James’s Gazette journalist was assigned to analyse the contents of every cheap boys’ weekly that he could lay his hands on. He read thirty-six different titles, some of which he said had a circulation of more than 300,000, and he reported on the results over several issues of the newspaper. The task was ‘repulsive and depressing’, he said; the writing ‘brutalised my whole consciousness’, reviving ‘the fundamental instinct of savagery inherent in us all. It disgusts, but it attracts; as one reads on the disgust lessens and the attraction increases.’ The Coombes boys, he concluded, ‘with their intelligence scientifically developed at the expense of the ratepayers, had been wound up to regard murder as a highly superior kind of “lark” by a sedulous study of the worst kind of gory fiction and cut-throat newspaper’.
In fact, most of the books in Robert’s collection, though slapdash and hackneyed in style, were not particularly gory. Earlier in the century, penny pamphlets had contained monstrous, Gothic tales – they were dubbed ‘dreadfuls’ because they elicited terror – but they now consisted chiefly of detective mysteries, Westerns, futuristic fantasies, tales of pirates, highwaymen, hunters and explorers. The adventure yarns were strikingly manly productions, heavily influenced by Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), whose hero boasts that ‘there is not a petticoat in the whole history’, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), which according to Arthur Conan Doyle marked the beginning of the ‘modern masculine novel’.
Many of the stories that Robert read were English re-issues of New York dime novels, among them the Jack Wright submarine tale; the Buffalo Bill adventure; a fable about the medieval crusades; and a mystery featuring Joe Phoenix, a hard-boiled Manhattan detective with an astonishing capacity for impersonation and disguise. These stories had their share of alluring women (with full, red lips, lithe figures, bright golden hair floating behind them) and of exciting violence. The brave warrior in The Secret of Castle Coucy; or, a Legend of the Great Crusade leaps on his French foe with an axe, ‘and with one tremendous thrust sent the spike between the two blades of the axe right into Gaston’s breast, piercing mail-shirt and cuirass, and casting the proud knight to the earth, gasping for breath, and uttering groans of irrepressible agony’. The detective hero of Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff feels ‘a tingling, burning, electric thrill all over his person’ when he comes upon a crook. ‘The strange and subtile power he possessed was becoming aroused. In his soul there was a mad tumult of fury.’
The novelist James Joyce, who was born in the same year as Robert Coombes, wrote in his short story ‘An Encounter’ about the cheap adventure tales circulated secretly in Dublin schools. Joyce’s narrator recalls how he used to be enthralled by Wild West stories and American detective fiction featuring ‘unkempt fierce and beautiful girls’. The boy’s teacher reprimanded his pupils for reading such rubbish, but as soon as ‘the restraining influence of the school was at a distance’, the narrator recalls, ‘I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which these chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me.’ Though he and his friends played at Indians in the streets near his house, he longed for ‘real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home. They must be sought abroad.’ The boy and a friend skipped school one day to visit the city quays, lured by the big ships and the wide sea. As they rested in a field after watching the commotion at the docks, they were approached by a well-spoken man in a shabby suit who talked to them of literature – Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer Lytton – and of the pleasure of administering warm whippings to boys. Unsettled by their encounter, a real adventure that they had not anticipated, the boys hurried home in time for tea.
The dreadfuls had their defenders. In an article of 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson recalled with rapture how he had been ‘mastered’ by penny fiction as a boy: ‘I do not know that I ever enjoyed reading more.’ Yet most commentators were alarmed by the rise of escapist stories for the young. Every month, it seemed, the newspapers reported on children led astray by such yarns. In 1889 two schoolboys aged eleven and thirteen absconded from West Ham with a pistol, an old dagger and a terrier dog, and their parents informed the magistrates that the boys’ minds had been turned by reading penny dreadfuls. In 1892 two Dundee runaways aged twelve and fourteen were apprehended in Newport, Wales, in possession of a revolver, a hundred ball cartridges, a travelling rug and a handwritten document: ‘Directions for skedaddle: Steal the money; go to the station, and get to Glasgow. Get boat for America. On arriving there, go to the Black Hills and dig for gold, build huts, and kill buffalo; live there and make a fortune.’ In 1893 a Yorkshire boy of fifteen stole £25 from his employer, a ship’s chandler, and then took the train to London with the intention of sailing for Australia. When he was caught his father said he had found hidden in the boy’s room a novelette entitled The Adventures of the Brave Boy and the Bushrangers.
Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of ‘suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels’. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had ‘an unhinging and mesmeric effect’ upon his mind. The jury was inclined to agree: ‘Deceased committed suicide whilst in an unsound condition of mind, probably produced by reading novelistic literature of a sensational character.’
Occasionally, penny dreadfuls were associated with murder. In 1888 two eighteen-year-olds were charged with killing the timekeeper at a sawmill in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. A
ccording to the Daily News, the ‘natural depravity’ of the lads had ‘found a strong stimulus in the penny dreadfuls of one sort or another which were found in their lodgings’. One of the accused men, though, said that he had attacked the timekeeper because he had docked his pay by more than two shillings – the timekeeper was ‘a master’s man’, the lad said, and not a friend to the workers. The suspect wrote a letter to a local newspaper and signed it ‘Another Whitechapel Murderer’, an allusion to the ongoing murder spree by ‘Jack the Ripper’ in East London. When the case came to trial, the jury was faced with a tangle of possible causes for the crime, as they would be in the Coombes case: social discontent, financial need or greed, innate depravity, fantasies of violence inspired by fictional or real-life stories. The men were found guilty, and the judge ignored the jury’s recommendation to mercy on account of their age; both were hanged.
Some cheap periodicals for boys tried to dissociate themselves from the dreadfuls. ‘No more penny dreadfuls!’ proclaimed the new Halfpenny Marvel, founded by the publishing magnate Alfred Harmsworth in 1893. ‘These healthy stories of mystery adventure, etc, will kill them.’ The next year Harmsworth produced another halfpenny paper, the jingoistic Union Jack, copies of which were found in the back parlour of 35 Cave Road: ‘Parents need not fear when they see their children reading the “Union Jack”,’ the editor announced. ‘There will be nothing of the “dreadful” type in our stories. No tales of boys rifling their employers’ cash-boxes and making off to foreign lands, or such-like highly immoral fiction products.’
Since 1884, when the vote had been extended to most British men, the press had often pointed out that children raised on penny dreadfuls would grow up to elect the rulers of the nation. Such pamphlets were ‘the poison which is threatening to destroy the manhood of the democracy’, announced the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886. The Quarterly Review went a step further, warning its readers in 1890 that ‘the class we have made our masters’ might be transformed by these publications into ‘agents for the overthrow of society’. The penny bloods gave a frightening intimation of the uses to which the labourers of Britain could put their literacy and newly won power: these fantasies of wealth and adventure might foster ambition, restlessness, defiance, a spirit of insurgency. There was no knowing the consequences of enlarging the minds and dreams of the lower orders.
8
HERE GOES NOTHING
In Holloway gaol on Monday 5 August, Robert became highly agitated. The warders informed George Walker, the prison’s medical officer, that the boy was singing, whistling and being impertinent. Dr Walker asked that he be brought to him in his office. Robert took a seat at the table and told Walker that he had pains in his head. The doctor asked him if he heard voices. Robert replied that he heard voices saying, ‘Kill her, kill her’, and, ‘Kill her, kill her, and run away!’ Walker questioned him about how the voices spoke to him. Robert said that they seemed to whisper into his ear.
During this interview, Robert explained to Dr Walker that he had decided to kill his mother because he was afraid that if he did not do so she would kill Nattie. She had thrown knives at his younger brother, Robert said, and had threatened to knock out his brains with a hatchet.
It was common for a parent to use physical force to discipline a child – in many households, a cane or a strap hung by the fireplace for this purpose – but Robert was describing assaults that were dangerous and uncontrolled. If his account was true, Emily Coombes was not only doting, indulgent, affectionate to her children, but also given to bursts of anger and violent reproof. She switched between surrendering her authority and enforcing it with abandon. Nattie’s complicity in the murder plot made clear that both boys could feel hatred for her. She frightened her sons.
On Saturday, Robert was frenzied again, to such an extent that he was moved to a padded room in the infirmary for several hours – most prisons were equipped with such cells, cushioned with horse-hair and leather, to contain epileptic, insane or suicidal inmates. The afternoon was humid, but the night was broken by an hour and a half of thunder and lightning, and then the rain came down in torrents. On Sunday, Robert was calmer, and he was returned to his normal quarters.
One of the more gruesome stories in Robert’s collection of penny bloods featured a wild-eyed loon. In The Rock Rider; or, the Spirit of the Sierra, an American cavalry officer called Beckford loses his wits after his wife is killed and his daughter abducted by a posse of Red Indians. For many years afterwards he lives in a cave in the mountains of the Mid-West. From time to time he hears voices in his head telling him, ‘Ride! Ride! Blood comes!’, at which he snaps ‘into the white heat of fury all at once’ and becomes ‘the maniac all over’. Blazing with hatred, Captain Beckford strikes out on his mule to slaughter Indians, carrying a shield over which he has stretched the mummified face of his wife, as menacing as the Gorgon Medusa: it is ‘pinched and white, with wide-open, staring eyes, and teeth revealed by parted lips’.
Beckford kills and decapitates Indians. He hoards their heads in a cave in the mountains, which is watched over by his negro sidekick, Cato. ‘’Tis thy place to guard the Cavern of Death,’ Beckford tells Cato; ‘’tis mine to bring in the victims, for I am the avenger of innocent blood.’ Cato is terrified by the cave. ‘Don’t make me go in dar, sah!’ he pleads. ‘De heads dey groan, and de devil he be at work at dem.’
The whites and the Indians in The Rock Rider are fighting over the land of the Mid-West, an erotic landscape of clefts, craters and recesses, wild vines and jutting mountains, hollows and pools. Much as they defend the terrain they have conquered, the white men are determined to preserve the purity of their women, whom they would rather destroy than see taken and defiled by the ‘red niggers’. Towards the end of the story, a dashing Frenchman rescues Beckford’s kidnapped daughter, Blanche, from an Indian camp in a ‘haunted gorge’. He is dressed in gleaming thigh-high boots with silver spurs, white corduroy trousers, a slashed and braided velvet jacket. Blanche wears a short, tight tunic. ‘Sooner than give you back alive,’ the French dandy promises her, ‘I will blow out your brains with my own hands.’ By the deranged chivalric code of the penny dreadfuls, to kill a woman could be the means of saving her honour. A murder pre-empted – and mimicked – a rape.
Robert and Nattie’s father spent a week in New York while the France was prepared for the return trip. It took several days for the dockhands to fuel the steamer, carrying coal alongside by barge and hoisting it up to the deck in buckets. At the company office near the pier, Coombes hired fifteen itinerant workers to look after the cargo of cattle on the journey back to England. These ‘cowboys of the sea’ would be given free passage both ways across the Atlantic, with 11 shillings to cover their board and lodging in the ten days or so that the ship was docked in London.
Several hundred head of cattle, captured on the plains of the American West and carried to New York by train, were herded up a narrow gangplank and into pens between decks. When the ship cast off on Saturday 27 July, the cows stumbled and slipped in their pens until they learned to sway with the roll of the ship. At night, some of the cattlemen patrolled the vessel with lanterns. Others rose at five to feed and water the animals. They sluiced the decks, pitched manure into the ocean, fetched hay, desalinated buckets of sea water for the cows to drink.
The France sailed in to the Thames Estuary on Saturday 10 August, the day that Robert became wild in Holloway. The cattle bellowed with excitement, sensing that land was near.
From the mouth of the Thames, wrote Joseph Conrad, London appeared in the distance as ‘a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars’. The river was busy with craft – barges, skips, yachts, tugs, lighters, steamers – and as the ship sailed into the city, the factories and warehouses reared up on either side. ‘The river runs as between high walls,’ wrote Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘shining with a more metallic glitter under smoke and the shadow of groves of masts, crane-arms, chains, cordage.’
On Sunday the Fra
nce docked at Deptford, on the south bank of the Thames. The cows were released from their pens and driven by the cattlemen down a gangway to the pier and then into a shed to be slaughtered. Coombes headed to Holloway to see his sons.
That morning at Westminster Abbey, Canon Basil Wilberforce delivered a sermon in which he contrasted the villainy of the West Ham ‘boy-murderers’ with the heroism of the East Ham sewage workers, who had given their lives in their efforts to save one another. Yet he urged compassion for the Coombes brothers. Like the French alienists, he attributed the murder to a physiological flaw that affected both boys: the Plaistow matricide, said Wilberforce, was clearly the result of hereditary madness. He asked the congregation not to think of the brothers as ‘children of the devil’ but instead to remember that they possessed a ‘deep inmost God nature, which is ever present in man, however much it might be concealed’.
The master cooper John Lawrence was raising money by subscription to hire a barrister for John Fox in the forthcoming trial. Lawrence explained in his letter to the West Ham Herald why he had such faith in Fox’s innocence. During the years of his apprenticeship, Lawrence wrote, he had found Fox ‘at all times to be very truthful, honest, civil, and industrious; in fact, all that an employer would desire, both morally and physically. But his mental capacity was far inferior to any of the children who were his chosen and only associates.’ Fox had sometimes caused him ‘great annoyance’, said Lawrence, but he had none the less ‘always been to me an object of pity’.
John William Fox was born to an unmarried, illiterate woman in a dingy courtyard opposite the Leadenhall poultry market in the City of London in April 1850. His mother was unable to support him, so when John was nine the City’s Board of Guardians sent him to its industrial school in West London. The 800 children at the school were housed in large dormitories; they spent half of their time at schoolwork and half labouring on the estate. Fox was due to be transferred at the age of sixteen to the City of London workhouse, where he would continue to be maintained at the rate-payers’ expense, but the Board managed to find him a position as an apprentice instead. He was indentured to John Lawrence in the summer of 1866, his parish providing £50 to contribute to his board and lodging over the next seven years. Fox remained with Lawrence for the full term of the apprenticeship, living with him and his wife and daughter in their house in the Holloway Road.