‘East London Advertiser’. . . Interview published on 3 August 1895.
‘Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff ’. . . Published by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York on 2 May 1894, as Fire-Eye: the Thugs’ Terror; or, Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff, and reprinted in London in 1895 by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library.
CHAPTER 7: CHRONICLES OF DISORDER
‘Leytonstone Express’. . . 3 August 1895.
‘Sun’. . . 29 July 1895.
‘India in London’. . . See Daily Telegraph, 2 July 1895, and Evening News, 3 July 1895.
The Children’s Act of 1889. . . Law of Parent and Child, a guide of 1895, quoted Lord Coleridge: ‘It is not enough to show neglect of reasonable means for preserving and prolonging the child’s life; but to convict of manslaughter it must be shown that the neglect had the effect of shortening life.’ For the Peculiar People cases, see also Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England.
Lewis announced that he was ‘sick and tired’. . . See Evening News and Daily Chronicle, 26 July 1895.
Lewis berated the parents. . . See Barking, East Ham & Ilford Advertiser, 3 August 1895.
penny dreadfuls. . . For the history of the penny dreadful, see John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta Rap, 1830–1997 (1999); E. S. Turner, Boys Will be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al (1948); Robert J. Kirkpatrick, From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller: A Bibliographical History of the Boys’ Periodical in Britain, 1762–1950 (2013); Kelly Boyd, Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (2002); Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson, Juvenile Literature and British Society 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (2009); Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (1991); and Troy Boone, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (2005).
penny bloods. . . ‘Bloods is what we calls ’em in the trade,’ a London shopkeeper told the journalist John Foster Fraser in 1899 – quoted in Fraser’s Vagabond Papers (1906). ‘“Penny bloods” is the trade name for penny dreadfuls’, reported the Bristol Mercury on 27 September 1895.
‘Tons of this trash. . .’ Motherwell Times, 2 March 1895
proper novels for boys. . . See Freeman’s Journal, 6 November 1895 and Fortnightly Review, November 1895.
a ‘St James’s Gazette’ journalist. . . His articles were published on 25, 26, 29 and 30 July 1895. He reported that the authors of penny dreadfuls were paid three and a half to four shillings per thousand words. The speed at which the bloods were composed is apparent in some of the stories in Robert’s collection. William G. Patten’s Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff, published by Beadle’s in 1894, is laden with errors of typing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as if written in a tremendous rush and printed without being read over: ‘Her eyes unclosed,’ writes Patten, ‘at the very instant when his fingers were present over her lips’ (that is, the heroine opened her eyes just as the villain was about to touch her lips); ‘The open air was grateful to the lovers after the time they had spent in the mysterious cottage.’
The adventure yarns. . . Quotes from John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999).
New York dime novels. . . On 16 November 1895 the Marlborough Express in New Zealand compared ‘these vile, flaringly coloured, cheap novels’ to undesirable immigrants and suggested that they should be destroyed by the Customs authorities.
‘The Secret of Castle Coucy’. . . A story by the British New Yorker Frederick Whittaker, published by Beadle’s Dime Library in 1881 as The Severed Head; or, The Secret of Castle Coucy, A Legend of the Great Crusade and reprinted by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library in about 1894.
The novelist James Joyce. . . ‘An Encounter’ is the second story in Dubliners, a collection completed in 1905 though not published until 1914.
In an article of 1888. . . ‘About Penny Dreadfuls’, Pall Mall Gazette, 29 June 1888.
Every month, it seemed. . . The reports cited here are from the Gloucester Citizen, 29 March 1889; Dundee Courier, 29 November 1892; Manchester Evening News, 31 October 1893; Yorkshire Evening Post, 17 November 1892; Coventry Evening Telegraph, 8 January 1894.
In 1888 two eighteen-year-olds. . . See London Daily News, 15, 18, 26, 27 October and 15 December 1888.
the publishing magnate Alfred Harmsworth. . . In an article in the Sunday Times in 1948, A. A. Milne remarked that Harmsworth eventually ‘killed the “penny dreadful” by the simple process of producing the ha’penny dreadfuller’. Harmsworth also owned the bestselling Evening News, in which Robert had planned to place an advertisement, and in 1896 founded the Daily Mail.
‘Union Jack’. . . Justice Kennedy referred to issues of this magazine being found in Cave Road (see News of the World, 22 September).
the press had often pointed out. . . For instance, Edward G. Salmon in Juvenile Literature as It Is (1888) argued that the dreadfuls were dangerous because they ‘are patronised chiefly by the sons of working-men, who are the future masters of the political situation’. For the national anxiety about penny dreadfuls, see especially Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics, which includes a discussion of the Coombes case.
‘Pall Mall Gazette’. . . 4 November 1886.
‘agents for the overthrow of society’. . . Francis Hitchman in the article ‘Penny Fiction’: ‘We have cast out the unclean spirit of ignorance from the working-class mind, and left it empty, swept, and neatly garnished with “the three Rs”. Let us beware lest the unclean spirit returns with seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and turn the class we have made our masters into the agents for the overthrow of society.’ Quoted in Boone, Youth of Darkest England.
CHAPTER 8: HERE GOES NOTHING
It was common for a parent. . . See Rose, The Erosion of Childhood.
She switched between surrendering her authority. . . In Studies of Childhood (1895) the psychologist James Sully warned against ‘alternations of gushing fondness with almost savage severity, or fits of government and restraint interpolated between long periods of neglect and laisser faire’.
‘The Rock Rider’. . . A story by Frederick Whittaker, author of The Secret of Castle Coucy, first published in 1880 by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York and reprinted by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library in London in 1894.
Robert and Nattie’s father spent a week in New York. . . Details of employment of cattlemen and of the ship’s schedule in NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France. For life on a cattleship, see Plimsoll, Cattle Ships; W. H. Davies, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908); I. M. Greg and S. H. Towers, Cattle Ships and our Meat Supply (1894); Chadwick et al., Ocean Steamships; and Report of the Departmental Committee of the Board of Trade and the Board of Agriculture on the Transatlantic Cattle Trade, C6350 (PP, 1890–91, vol. LXXVIII).
From the mouth of the Thames, wrote Joseph Conrad. . . In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). H. G. Wells describes the ‘monstrous variety of shipping’ on this stretch of the river: ‘great steamers, great sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world. . . witches’ conferences of brown-sailed barges, wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars, and wharves and stores’ (Tono-Bungay, 1909).
‘The river runs. . .’ In Hueffer’s The Soul of London. Joseph Conrad writes that the Thames near the city ‘flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust’ (The Mirror of the Sea, 1906).
On Sunday the ‘France’ docked. . . See NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France. In The Atlantic Transport Line 1881–1931: a History with Details on All Ships (2012), Jonathan Kinghorn notes that in the 1890s cattle could be landed only at the Deptford wharf; the meat w
as sold at Smithfield Market. By 1896, more than 200,000 head of cattle a year were being landed in London (see Paula Young Lee, Meat, Modernity and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, 2008). In ‘The Feeding of London’, published in The Leisure Hour in 1889, W. J. Gordon describes the process of transporting and slaughtering cattle (online at victorianlondon.org).
Canon Basil Wilberforce delivered a sermon. . . See East Ham Echo, 16 August 1895.
Lawrence explained in his letter. . . In West Ham Herald, 27 July 1895.
John William Fox was born. . . He was born on 19 April 1850 to Hannah Fox, who signed his birth certificate with a cross, in 4 Bell Yard, off Gracechurch Street. She was resident in the Flower Pot pub in Bishopsgate when he was sent to the Hanwell School, and she had married a shoemaker in Shoreditch, East London, by the time he was apprenticed to Lawrence – see LMA: CBG/359/006 and LMA: CBG/361/003.
industrial school in West London. . . See Central London District Poor Law School admission and discharge register, 14 Apr 1857–20 Jul 1863: LMA: CLSD/165 7.
apprenticeship . . . See City Board of Guardians Register of Apprenticeship and Service Papers 1866–97, LMA: CBG/36, apprentice bundles LMA: CBG/359/006 and LMA: CBG/361/003, and City of London Union Minute Books, March to Dec 1866 (2 volumes, LMA: CBG/47 and LMA: CBG/48). See also London City Press, 28 April and 20 October 1866.
a fire broke out. . . Account of fire on Egypt from Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 26 July 1890.
on which Fox had also once served. . . Fox joined the Erin at Gravesend in August 1885 as a captain’s servant on a voyage to New York (NMM: RSS/CL/1885/50274 SS Erin).
‘Evening News’. . . Interview conducted on 3 August and published 13 August 1895.
The new home secretary. . . See Manchester Courier, 17 August 1895.
‘Leeds Times’. . . 3 August 1895.
‘Lancet’. . . 17 August 1895.
‘Penny Dreadfuls Again’. . . See Evening News, 27 August 1895. The same headline was given in the Nottingham Evening Post on 10 September to an article about a fifteen-year-old from Shepherd’s Bush, West London, who had poisoned himself with carbolic acid. His father had given him a ‘good hiding’, the paper reported, because he had been out of work for a month. The boy left a note reading ‘I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work’, but the judge none the less ascribed his death to his consumption of ‘literary offal’.
Hugh Chisholm. . . In ‘How to Counter-act the Penny Dreadful’, Fortnightly Review, November 1895.
Wilde’s decadent productions. . . See also Merrick Burrow, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Plaistow Matricide: Competing Critiques of Influence in the Formation of Late-Victorian Masculinities’, Culture, Society and Masculinities, 1 October 2012.
twenty boys at a north-west London board school. . . See Hampshire Advertiser, 21 August 1895.
‘epidemic of suicide’. . . See Evening News, 25 July, and The People, 28 July 1895.
childhood had been prized. . . See Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (2010), Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind (edition of 1895), James Crichton-Browne, ‘Education and the Nervous System’ in Malcolm A. Morris (ed.), The Book of Health (1883), and Sully, Studies of Childhood.
interview to the ‘Evening News’. . . Published on 16 September 1895.
Sir Forrest Fulton. . . Fulton had been elected Conservative MP for West Ham North in 1886. When unseated by a Liberal in 1892, he was appointed Common Serjeant of London, deputy to the most senior permanent judge at the Old Bailey.
Kennedy proceeded to hear. . . See OBSP.
a fifth of Londoners. . . According to White’s London in the Nineteenth Century, one in five Londoners was a regular churchgoer in the 1890s. The proportion in the east of the city was even lower: Besant reported in East London that in a census on church attendance in 1886 just 7 to 8 per cent of East Londoners said that they took part in a form of worship on a Sunday.
Francis Longsdon Shaw. . . See Clergy List of 1896, Crockford’s Clerical Directory of 1898, and Nigel Scotland, Squires in the Slums: Settlements and Missions in Late Victorian Britain (2007). Shaw’s conversion was reported in the North Wales Chronicle of 30 August 1890 and his ordination in the Chelmsford Chronicle of 25 May 1894. For a photograph of the vicar and curates of St Andrews, including Shaw, see TNA: 1/436/885.
Allen Hay. . . See Crockford’s Clerical Directory of 1898.
a mandolinist called Miss Halfpenny. . . From West Ham Herald, 16 June 1894.
PART III: THESE TENDER TIMES
CHAPTER 9: COVER HER FACE
taken from their cells. . . For the trip to Newgate and Old Bailey, see Departmental Committee on Prisons, Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).
Paul Koczula. . . See Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates and Universal Information (1895) and Morning Post, 15 August 1894.
the Old Bailey courthouse. . . For Old Bailey building and procedures, see Sims, Living London, Vol. I; R. Thurston Hopkins, Life and Death at the Old Bailey (1935); Anon, London Characters and the Humorous Side of London Life (1870); Anon, The Queen’s London: A Pictorial and Descriptive Record of the Streets, Buildings, Parks, and Scenery of the Great Metropolis in the Fifty-Ninth Year of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (1896): Montagu Williams, Round London: Down East and Up West (1894); and the page on the Old Bailey on Lee Jackson’s website www.victorianlondon.org.
‘Star’. . . 16 September 1895.
‘pea-soupers’. . . See Inwood, City of Cities.
Justice William Rann Kennedy. . . See obituary in The Times, 18 January 1915, entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and report in Liverpool Echo, 28 October 1892. The National Portrait Gallery in London has a photograph of him in the early 1900s: NPG x35957.
The case against Robert and Fox. . . The prosecution case had been prepared by Frederick Frayling, a clerk in the joint office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Solicitor to the Treasury. The total cost of the case to the Crown, from its inception on 19 July to its conclusion on 17 September 1895, was £63 10/ 10d – see Report of the Commissioners of Prisons and the Directors of Convict Prisons 1895–96, for the Year Ended 31 March 1896, PP, 1896, XLIV, p. 235.
Charles Gill. . . See obituary in The Times, 23 February 1923, and portrait by ‘Spy’ in Vanity Fair, 9 May 1891.
Horace Avory. . . See entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and caricature by ‘Spy’ in Vanity Fair, June 1904.
the Crown had made the fullest possible inquiries into Robert’s state of mind. . . This arrangement dated from 1886, when the offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Solicitor to the Treasury were merged, and the Treasury solicitor was required to ensure that any evidence about a prisoner’s sanity was placed before the court. See Tony Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939 (DPhil thesis, 1996).
In reply to his questions . . . The examination of the witnesses is drawn from newspaper reports and the transcript of their testimony in OBSP. In places, a barrister’s question has been inferred from his witness’s response.
trajectory of degeneration . . . Bénédict Morel, Traité des Dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (1857).
‘Sun’. . . 16 September 1895.
Newgate. . . See Griffiths, Secrets of the Prison House; Anon, The Queen’s London; Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives; and the Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).
W. T. Stead in 1886. . . In ‘My First Imprisonment’, quoted in Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives. Stead was a renowned investigative journalist and crusader against child prostitution. He was a passenger on the Titanic in 1912, and died after the ship hit an iceberg.
‘Saturday Review’. . . 21 September 1895.
‘Spectator’. . . 21 September 1895.
a wax worker was offering models. . . In an advertisemen
t in the Era, 27 July 1895.
a melodrama about the murder. . . See Spectator, 21 September 1895.
CHAPTER 10: THE BOYS SPRINGING UP AMONGST US
‘Evening News’. . . 17 September 1895.
‘London Daily News’. . . 18 September 1895.
‘Sun’. . . 17 September 1895.
From nine o’clock to twelve o’clock. . . For the board school regime, see Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street 1870–1914 (1986); Hugh B. Philpott, London at School: The Story of the School Board, 1870–1904 (1904); and Rose, The Erosion of Childhood.
endeavoured to train their young charges not to drop the ‘h’s. . . See Charles Morley, Studies in Board Schools (1897). In The Soul of London, Hueffer identified south Essex as the source of the ‘extraordinary and miasmic dialect’ of East London. As well as dropping and misplacing aitches, the late-nineteenth-century East Londoner would replace ‘e’ for ‘a’ in such words as ‘catch’, according to White’s London in the Nineteenth Century, ‘v’ for ‘th’ in words such as ‘they’ or ‘there’ and ‘ff’ for ‘th’ in ‘three’ and ‘thank you’. He or she would typically use double negatives (‘I don’t know nuffing’), double superlatives (‘more quicker’), pronounce ‘gate’ as ‘gite’ and ‘Victoria’ as ‘Victawia’. Most of the witnesses’ dialect in the Coombes case was standardised by the court reporters, but the occasional Cockney idiom slips through, for instance, in Mrs Hayward’s phrase ‘on the look’ or in an unaltered transcription of Nattie’s brief exchange with Robert after the murder: ‘I done it’; ‘You ain’t done it.’ Some of Robert’s penny bloods revelled in the street slang of East London. Cockney Bob in Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff is full of ripe expostulations: ‘Blow me, but you are a stunner’, ‘Oh, drop it, darling’, ‘Capital!’, ‘Well, I should smile!’
an academic ‘standard’. . . See William W. Mackenzie, A Treatise on the Elementary Education Acts, 1870–1891 (with the Acts in an Appendix) (1892).
‘oases’, as one commentator described them. . . Masterman, The Heart of Empire.
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer Page 28