Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The Daily News reporter at the Old Bailey presents an unsettling and ambivalent picture of Christiana. It is redolent both of the conflicts she lived and of the contradictions with which she confronted her viewers. On the one hand she is a delicate and poised innocent, dainty in her gestures, a composed Everywoman. ‘Attired in sombre velvet, bare headed, with a certain self-possessed demureness in her bearing – at the first glance she seems as common-place a woman as the world might well contain.’ There is ‘no perceptible blush or tremor’ – which could suggest guilt or indeed a greater modesty than Christiana possesses – as she stands ‘in her solitude’ in the dock and looks ‘straight to the front’, or inspects the courtroom, ‘dwelling specially in her gaze’ on the benches where the ‘lady spectators’ sit and occasionally raising her brows with ‘a sudden quick flash of the dark eyes’ as she perhaps recognizes someone she knows. Once more, Christiana, an ardent writer, ‘takes copious notes’: ‘her daintily gloved hand pushed a quill pen again and again up to the inkholder bedded in the flat top of the front of the dock’. Smiling occasionally, perhaps at what she is writing, she listens with ‘attentive composure, watching every word’ the prosecutor utters, occasionally darting a sharp glance at him.

  On the other hand, Christiana is also a much more troubling creature than this would suggest. The reporter delves into animal imagery to conjure up a portrait reminiscent of the mad and prowling Bertha in Mr Rochester’s attic, a creature of dangerous instinctual and criminal force all set to burn down the respectable edifice of bourgeois life. Marking the transition between the innocent and the madly bad is the figure of the governess. Aside from the teacher, the governess is the only other respectable working woman Victorian England permits. But this respectability itself is open to challenge. Not only does the governess have to work as something of a servant. She is also the outsider in the sanctuary of the home, the ‘other’ woman. Christiana, this ‘rather careworn, hard-featured woman of 35’, might have been a ‘day governess for years – might have acquired the patience and chilled self-control that prolonged teaching under precarious conditions is calculated to impart, and that half sullen resignation – with an only occasional flash of self assertion – which successive batches of children and successive exigeant lady mothers are apt to engender’.

  And now the reporter, having pitied, is freed to move into the terrain of bestial ugliness:

  The face is plain, decidedly plain; the complexion rather dark with some colour underlying the swarthiness. The forehead, and whole forefront of the head is large, and projects with somewhat exceptional prominence ... But the character of the face lies in the lower feature. The profile is irregular, but not unpleasing; the upper lip is long, and convex; mouth slightly projecting; chin straight, long and cruel; the lower jaw heavy, massive and animal in its development. The lips are loose – almost pendulous – the lower one being fullest and projecting, and the mouth is exceptionally large.

  Like a good Victorian characterologist influenced by the ever popular ‘science’ of phrenology – an invention of the Viennese Franz-Joseph Gall, who had begun his work with criminals and the insane and in his hypotheses on brain localization had linked particular skull areas and their exaggerated bumps with murder and destructiveness – the Daily News reporter sees physiognomy as speaking a person’s essence. Just four years later, in 1876, he would have had the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso to hand to argue that criminality could be read from physiognomy and inherited facial features, and to confirm him in finding something sinister, a mark of the inborn female criminal, in the unsightly sensuality of Christiana’s pendulous lips and the force of that large, primitive, animal jaw.

  Whether or not this description of Christiana is accurate we have no way of knowing. But the unsettling clash of features the reporter gives her falls into the period’s typology of potentially dangerous women: those whose intelligence or sexuality shows, arousing anxieties about their gender. According to popular phrenological lore, the lower part of the face – lips, chin, jaw – gave evidence of ‘appetite’, the larger the first, the greater the second. Like Wilkie Collins when he first conjures up an uncannily double-gendered Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White, the reporter attributes both masculine intelligence and feminine weakness to Christiana:

  From the configuration of the lips the mouth might be thought weak, but a glance at the chin removes any such impression; and Christiana Edmunds has a way of compressing the lips occasionally, when the left side of the mouth twists up with a sardonic, defiant determination, in which there is something of a weird comeliness, that gradually hardens, and passes into absolute grimness. Of perception and intelligence the prisoner has no lack.

  Through most of the first day’s proceedings Christiana is utterly composed, bar a certain weary lassitude which creeps in with the afternoon. But everything changes when her beloved Dr Beard comes to the witness stand at the end of the day. Then, ‘her bosom heaved convulsively, and her face flushed scarlet. But a moment after it had faded to a leaden pallor, and she had regained her composure.’ The only other time that she manifests spontaneous feeling is when the last witness of the day is being examined, a woman who has lived in the same Brighton house as Christiana and her mother: the woman testifies to her ‘uniform kindliness and womanly demeanour’. Christiana yields for a moment and appears to be moved to tears. Reputation and passion are ever at war in her.

  Christiana Edmunds folded into herself the tensions that characterized what it meant to be woman in her time: the desire for virtue and reputation collide with wayward desire; the need for feminine passivity abuts on the wish – perhaps inevitably unconscious or at least repressed through time – for freedom of movement and action. All this cohabits with a restless dissatisfaction with the dividing lines between the secret and the licit.

  John Ruskin, one of the period’s leading moralists and critics – a man who, from the evidence of his own unconsummated and annulled marriage to Effie Gray, was terrified of women’s ‘living’ as opposed to idealized bodies – underlines the forces that prey on women and the taxing demands they must strive to meet. From 1 January 1871, just before Christiana’s trial, Ruskin began to publish the widely quoted and argued pamphlets that became his multi-volumed Fors Clavigera. Addressed to ‘the workmen and labourers of Britain’, these ‘letters’ both analytic and didactic on how to be and behave so as to attain the good life, mark out Ruskin’s social and moral mission. Britain had, he was convinced, become too materialistic, a land governed by the trains he so loathed and everything that came with them. Instead of food, England now produced only ‘infernal’ goods: ‘iron guns, gunpowder, infernal machines, infernal fortresses floating about, infernal fortresses standing still, infernal means of mischievous locomotion, infernal law-suits, infernal parliamentary elocution, infernal beer, and infernal gazettes, magazines, statues, and pictures’.

  Ruskin’s catalogue makes an equivalence between infernal guns, lawsuits, magazines, statues and pictures, the products of material production and media. All these latter seem to be particularly hazardous to women. He pictures a mother who may not be able to feed her children but who can ‘get to London cheap’, though she has no business to be there. Even though she has no concern for any of it, she can ‘buy all the morning’s news for a half-penny’. For a shilling, she can see that risque Frenchman Gustave Dore’s lowlife pictures – ‘and she had better see the devil’. ‘She can be carried through any quantity of filthy streets on a tramway for threepence; but it is as much as her life’s worth to walk in them, or as her modesty’s worth to look into a print shop in them.’

  In Ruskin’s vision women’s very ability to walk around freely constitutes a danger to virtue: tempted by the depravity of the streets and led astray by cheap and seductive commodities, women are really only safe at home. Letter 33 in Fors Clavigera asserts:

  The end of all right education for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place; that she s
hould as seldom leave it as a queen her queendom; nor ever feel entirely at rest but within its threshold.

  Christiana Edmunds had sinned against this ideal of womanhood in multifarious ways. She had dared to travel on her own: she had taken that smoky railway from Brighton to Margate and from there into the depravity of London; then came the two-hour journey back to Brighton on the same train as her poisoned sweetmeats. She had walked the streets on her own, an act that seems already to stand in for sexual activity, the euphemistic ‘street-walking’ that it is feared it may lead to; and she had taken a room at a ‘hotel’ on her own. This was transgression on a major scale, though to elicit Ruskin’s heated warning it must have been shared by sufficient women.

  On top of all this, in an attempt to win back her married lover together with her reputation (that term that carries the all-important Victorian slippage between status and virtue), she had planned and plotted and behaved in such a way as to divert suspicion from herself as the poisoner of Emily Beard. With no man’s help, she had allegedly purchased her sweetmeats, injected them with the strychnine and arsenic obtained through a variety of ruses, distributed her chocolate creams and publicly testified at an inquest. She had even confronted police Inspector Gibbs with the taunt that he would ‘never find it out’. The risk in all this was enormous, and at the end it had landed her here, at the Old Bailey. Christiana was definitely bad. Where that badness might shade into madness now became a matter for general conjecture.

  There were several models available, in both press reports and popular literature, for Christiana and the public to draw on and elaborate.

  Uncanny echoes of her trajectory exist in the ‘sensational’ novels of her own day. The femmes fatales here are often represented as seductively fatal to men, but in the end seem to be fatal mostly to themselves. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s bestselling novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Lady Audley uses her outstanding beauty and her native cunning to escape poverty. Her path from first love to bigamy, and finally to a ‘murder’ which isn’t quite one, is certainly bad. Yet her noble husband and nephew prefer to think such badness, when it resides in so lovely a receptacle of femininity, must be madness: otherwise, the social order would be destroyed. As the mad doctor called in to diagnose Lady Audley states: ‘You would wish to prove that this lady is mad, and therefore irresponsible for her actions.’ Our hero Robert Audley, who can find no other way to comprehend such extreme behaviour, responds: ‘Yes ... I would rather, if possible, think her mad.’

  Wilkie Collins’s Lydia Gwilt in his novel Armadale of 1866 – like Christiana and Lady Audley, a woman who can barely afford the middle-class trappings she both wants and feels she is owed – is brazen both in her desires and in her class rage. Beautiful, she takes her freedom and strides the streets of London and foreign capitals, only to end her days a suicide at the quack Dr Downward’s clinic for the mad. Fascinating it may be, but sexualized female badness slides into madness in the blink of a male eye that would prefer such excess to be utterly aberrant. Like these fictional creations, Christiana Edmunds, in that daring that had tragic repercussions, both attracted and repelled; and her much reported trial – headlined a 'sensation’ trial by some papers – filled the unoccupied hours and the imaginations of a leisured class.

  The ‘Mean Places’ of the Law

  ‘Verily we administer justice in mean places,’ the Daily News reporter opined as he navigated his way into the Old Bailey through a ‘hurry of ladies’ and robed men, through aldermen and sheriffs wearing unwieldy court swords, then through a Scylla and Charybdis of policemen. At last reached, the courtroom was a space so dingy that a surgeon would be ashamed to cut off a leg in it or a reputable professor deliver a lecture. ‘It is a square well with a lid on the top.’ To the west, the jury sits beneath a row of dirty windows. To the north is the bench, a long elevated platform, thinly upholstered. A wooden canopy and an antique sword, presumably of justice, mark the centre of the room; and next to these on either side sit the judge and the officials of the court. The room’s east side is for the privileged spectators and the press. To the south, a large wooden pen makes up the dock, glass-panelled on both sides but open in the front. The gallery is above it, and here the public are squashed in. Finally, in the well of the court sit the barristers.

  As the clock strikes two, the jury file into their box and the usher calls for silence. Ermine, gold chains and frills fill the empty bench. The judge Mr Baron Martin takes his seat, followed by the sheriffs, aldermen and under-sheriffs. This gaudy entrance almost blots out the arrival of a demure, quiet-eyed woman in black velvet trimmed with fur, who is followed by a hard-faced female warder and a male jailer. The indictment is read out. Christiana Edmunds is accused of ‘wilful murder’ in having caused the death by poisoning of the boy Sidney Albert Barker.

  ‘Not guilty,’ she says in a firm, low voice. This pronouncement was ‘followed by a momentary aversion of the face’. The jury are sworn in and she challenges none of them. Then Serjeant Ballantine, presenting the case for the prosecution, begins his address in a ‘studiously modulated voice of low pitch, and with a total absence of gesticulation’.

  William Ballantine (1812–87), Christiana’s prosecutor, was a leading criminal barrister, reputed to be a subtle and searching cross-examiner. Born into the legal profession, he had long served at the Central Criminal Court; but he loved theatre and literature above all else, and on retiring wrote Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life (1882). As a youth he had frequented literary taverns and met Dickens and Trollope. In Orley Farm, the novel that was his personal favourite, Trollope had based his wily barrister Chaffanbrass on his old friend, whose reputation had grown with his performance for both defence and prosecution. In this genial satire Ballantine becomes that ‘great guardian of the innocence or rather not-guiltiness of the public’, a lawyer who devotes himself ‘to the manumission of murderers or the security of the swindling world in general’.

  Ballantine was elevated in 1856 to the distinguished position of Serjeant at Law. The rank, which entailed the wearing of a special coif or wig, was abolished in the judicial reforms of 1873. He had tried some famous and also delicate cases, one of which was the notorious Mordaunt divorce trial of 1870 in which Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Conservative MP, sued his young and erring wife, who had just given birth, for divorce, threatening to name the Prince of Wales as co-respondent. The public scandal echoed the earlier Robinson divorce case. Harriet Mordaunt’s father, a noble and conservative Scotsman, determined madness was more reputable than divorce and had his daughter confined. Ballantine’s examination of the Prince on the witness stand was said to have been a model of tactful, prosecutorial behaviour.

  Christiana’s defence barrister, briefed by her Brighton lawyer Charles Lamb, was the eminent Serjeant John Humffreys Parry (1816–80). Parry, too, had literary leanings and had worked in the printed books department of the British Museum while studying law. He was called to the Bar in 1843 and developed a courtroom style that was notable for its clarity and simplicity, though it could also rise to melodramatic heights. Known for his criminal work, Parry also handled many compensation cases. His politics were those of an advanced liberal: he was one of the founders of the Complete Suffrage Association. Twice he contested a parliamentary seat and twice he lost. He and Ballantine were frequent sparring partners.

  Parry had defended and Ballantine had prosecuted in the first British railway murder trial, in 1864, in which a city banker, Thomas Briggs, was beaten, robbed and then thrown out of the train compartment between London’s Fenchurch and Hackney Wick, only to die after he was pulled from the tracks and taken to a Hackney pub. Public panic ensued: was this new high-speed technology of the railway not only bad for nerves and landscape, but unsafe for the respectable classes? The trail that led police to the German tailor Franz Müller began nine days later when a London cabbie came to them with suspicions. The police traced Müller to a ship bound for America and contacted police in New York. This pi
ece of transatlantic cooperation eventually saw a small Armada awaiting Müller, together with shouts of ‘Welcome to America, murderer!’ as his vessel neared New York.

  Shipped back to London, Müller stood trial at the Old Bailey that November. He maintained his innocence, and Parry battled for him against Ballantine’s wealth of evidence. Though much of this was circumstantial and Parry contested that the incriminating witness had only come forward because of the promise of reward, Muller was found guilty. The fact that he had left what witnesses said was his unusual hat on the train, and exchanged it for Briggs’s, was perhaps what did for him, though his foreignness didn’t help. Nor did his statement that he had been in a brothel at the time of the murder. Muller was sentenced to hang and even King Wilhelm of Prussia’s plea for a stay of execution couldn’t save him. He was executed on 18 November that year before a rowdy crowd numbering some fifty thousand, four years before public executions were banned. The Newgate chaplain attested that Muller had confessed – ‘Ich habe es geten’ – just before his death. Public outcry would eventually lead to trains being built with a connecting aisle between the separate compartments, together with alarms: the earlier remedy of a peep-hole between compartments had brought an outcry from lovers ...

  Parry would go on to act for the artist James McNeill Whistler, who sued the very same Ruskin who preferred his women at home, for libel: in Fors Clavigera, commenting on an exhibition of his in 1876, Ruskin had written, ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ Combative but poor, Whistler was unwise to sue: he never got damages. But Parry did win the case for the talented American-born painter, whose ‘art for art’s sake’ Ruskin deplored.