The Victorians
Page 34
We shall not abandon the grown-up world but look at it, as it were, from the nursery window, recognizing always, of course, that the concerns of the middle and upper classes – war and peace in America; the extension of the franchise; the final emergence of Gladstone and Disraeli as the two titanic opposites of the political world; the continuing controversies between science and religion; the dread of revolution and the pricking of conscience in the face of poverty; the Woman question, and the beginnings of modern feminism; the story of literature, of Trollope, the later Browning; the growth of Morris and Co., the origins of the aesthetic movement; the expansion of the British Empire; and the ever-widening circle of the Queen’s European dynastic connections through her children’s marriages – these and many other matters about which articles and books have been written and which concerned the periodical-readers of the day in clubs and rectories and suburbs were of little or no concern to those urchins who never had a nursery, never learnt to read, never in many respects had that middle-class privilege, a childhood.
*
The poor, and the children of the poor, continued throughout this decade to lead their scarcely endurable existences. On 13 April 1861 the Statistical Society of London visited a single room, occupied by five families. A separate family ate, drank, and slept in each of the four corners of the room, a fifth occupying the centre. ‘But how can you exist?’ asked the visitor of a poor woman whom he had found in the room (the other inmates being absent on their several avocations).39 ‘How could you possibly exist?’ ‘Oh, indeed, your honour,’ she replied, ‘we did very well until the gentleman in the middle took a lodger.’
Victorian children had to be seen as expendable, life had to be seen as cheap, when so it was, since there was no remedy in that unreformed and in many regards unformed society. In August 1861 a lunatic was brought before Thames Police court, ‘charged with revolting assaults upon female children’. He had been the terror of his neighbourhood for some time, but – having nowhere else to dispose of him – the magistrate sent him back to the workhouse.40
In that same year, in April, Lord Palmerston rose to his feet in the Mansion House and praised the beneficial effects of Free Trade. He spoke of the healthy ‘internal condition of the country’. By many standards what he said was perfectly reasonable. Yet while he spoke in the Mansion House, a horrifying murder took place in the picturesque village of Danbury in Essex when a married woman called Martha Weaver strangled an illegitimate little boy aged three, named John Gipson. The murderess was the wife of a respectable mechanic. No motive was ever found for her crime.41
A few days earlier, a much more disturbing case occurred in Stockport, in the North-West of England. It is doubly extraordinary for the modern reader, since it is a case with obvious parallels with the murder of James Bulger in 1993. When the defendants, Peter Henry Barratt and James Bradley, were brought to trial at Chester Assizes before Mr Justice Crompton in August 1861, their heads hardly appeared over the dock, since they were only eight years old, ‘quite incapable of giving a plea or knowing what was going on’. The prisoners, utterly neglected and uneducated, had murdered a little boy called George Burgess aged two years and nine months.
The infant’s parents both worked as cotton operatives at a mill and farmed out young George Burgess to Sarah Anne Warren, described as a nurse, who allowed her charges to play on waste land near the Star Inn. A little before three o’clock in the afternoon a woman called Whitehead saw Barratt and Bradley, with the two-year-old, walking towards Hempshaw Lane, where the body was eventually found. Barratt was pulling the younger child by the hand. It was crying and Whitehead had asked whether it was a boy or a girl. She was told it was a little boy. By four, two other witnesses, Emma Williams and Frank Williams, saw Barratt dragging the child, now naked, into a field, and Bradley got a stick from the fence with which he hit the child. Emma Williams called out, ‘What are you doing with that child undressed?’ but the boys made no reply and walked on in the direction of a brook where the body was at length discovered.
The corpse was found the next day, face down in the water, naked save for a pair of clogs on its feet. It was badly bruised and since the bruises were ecchymosed they must have been administered before death.
It was on Saturday 13 April that a police officer called Morley questioned first Barratt, and then took Barratt to Bradley’s house. Morley asked Barratt, ‘Who did you play with on Thursday afternoon?’ He said, ‘With Jimmy Bradley.’ Morley said, ‘Where did you go?’ He said, ‘We went beside the Star Inn, down Hempshaw Lane and up Love Lane.’ Morley then said to Bradley, ‘Did you see anyone in Love Lane?’ He said, ‘Yes, we saw a woman.’ And he also said, in answer to a question from Morley, ‘We had a little boy with us as we met beside the Star Inn.’ Slowly the story emerged, with Bradley confessing, ‘Peter said I must undress it’ and Barratt interposing, ‘Thou undressed it as well as me.’ Morley said, ‘Then you both undressed it?’ Bradley said, ‘Yes.’ Morley said, ‘What did you do then?’ Bradley said, ‘Peter pushed it into the water, and I took my clogs off and went in and took it out again. Peter then said, “It must have another.”’ Morley said, ‘Another what?’ Bradley said, ‘Another dip in the water.’ And there followed a dispute between the two boys about who exactly hit the child where and when.
The killing of this child, George Burgess, who actually went unnamed in The Times account, is fascinatingly similar to the killing of Jamie Bulger in the late twentieth century by two comparably cruel little tykes. The contrast between the treatment of the killers in the two cases throws an interesting light on the difference between ourselves and the Victorians. Though this case, ‘unparalleled in the annals of crime’, clearly horrified both police and court, as well as The Times, there seems to be none of the sentimentality, none of the vindictiveness or spite, none of the hysteria which accompanied the twentieth-century case. Bulger’s killers were sent down for murder, and when they approached their eighteenth birthdays there were howls for vengeance not only from the working-class ‘communities’ from which they sprang, but also from the press.
Barratt and Bradley’s counsel at Chester pleaded that they were themselves mere babies, with no notion of the injury they were committing. He called upon the jury to acquit altogether and ‘not to let the brand of felons fall upon such infants as they saw before them’.
The learned judge then summed up and told the jury that if they were not completely satisfied that the children had considered the full effect of what they were doing, then the crime should be reduced to manslaughter. Judge Crompton did in effect direct the jury to reach this merciful and sensible conclusion – unlike the judge in the Bulger case. Whereas in the case of the Bulger killings, the populist home secretary intervened – unlawfully as it subsequently transpired – to try to extend the prison sentences of the children responsible, the judge in this case of 1861 imprisoned the boys for one month, followed by five years in a reformatory. There were some 3,712 children in reformatories in 1866, and some 8,029 juveniles in British prisons.42
It would be interesting to know what befell Bradley and Barratt in later life. Almost certainly, like so many juvenile criminals in Victorian England, they will have joined the army, perhaps going to some such heroic fate as befell ‘the Private of the Buffs’ in Sir Francis Hastings Doyle’s poem – ‘poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught’. The Victorians had many vices but they did not have the bad taste to make the dead infant into a saccharine icon, nor to victimize the almost equally wretched killers. Nor could they pretend that such abominable cruelty in two young boys was altogether unique. At Birkenhead at about this time one boy knifed another in the jugular, killing him instantly, while at a farmhouse near Barnard Castle, a twelve-year-old shot dead his housekeeper with no obvious provocation.43
A case which was much more disturbing to them, since it happened in a middle-class household – not in the unimaginable slums, but actually within the shrubbery where good bourgeois children played �
� was that of Constance Kent. On the night of 19 June 1860 the almost decapitated body of a nearly four-year-old boy, Savill Kent, was found in the garden privy, hidden by shrubs, of Roadhill House in Wiltshire. He was the son of Samuel Kent, a factories inspector, and his second wife, the former governess to the children of the first Mrs Kent. (She gave birth to ten, five of whom survived infancy.)
‘Shall not God search this out? For he knoweth the secrets of the heart?’ were the words which his grief-stricken parents put on the child’s gravestone. The police arrested the child’s nurse, Elizabeth Gough, and released her for lack of evidence. No ‘leads’ appeared, and the case seemed insoluble until Constance Kent, the murdered child’s half-sister, now aged nearly twenty-one, was unable to keep her secret any longer. She had become religious – specifically, Anglo-Catholic – and had turned to the Reverend Arthur Wagner, perpetual curate of St Paul’s Church, Brighton. Wagner was a colourful figure, who spent a considerable fortune building Anglo-Catholic churches in that jolly seaside town. His father, the vicar of Brighton, watching the family money evaporate as yet another incense-drowned brick fane was erected, once preached a sermon on the text ‘Lord have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatick.’ He it was who prepared Constance Kent for baptism and confirmation. When she was twenty-one she inherited £ 1,000 from her mother’s estate and offered it to Wagner. He refused, and it was then that she made her confession to him, adding that it was her intention to give herself up to the police and to make a clean breast of it. She made the written statement, ‘I, Constance Emilie Kent, alone and unaided on the night of the 19 June, 1860, murdered at Road Hill House, Wiltshire, one Francis Savill Kent. Before the deed, none knew of my intention nor after of my guilt: no one assisted me in the crime, nor after in my evasion of discovery.’
It seems as though Wagner made it a condition of pronouncing absolution over her in the confessional that she should answer before the law. Her motive seems truly like something in the darkest Greek tragedy. Her governess had persuaded her to hate her own mother. As she grew into her teens Constance came to see that her mind had been corrupted against her mother, that the governess, now the stepmother, had poisoned the love which was most important to her. She took revenge by killing her stepmother’s child.
When the truth emerged there was enormous public interest, not least because it enabled the newspapers to deplore the Puseyite excesses of Father Wagner. He was a steadfast friend to her, interceding on her behalf at the highest level. After the trial, he wrote to his fellow Puseyite Gladstone, then chancellor of the Exchequer:
I cannot of course but feel very thankful, for her friends sake that Her Majesty has been pleased to commute Constance Kent’s sentence to penal servitude for life, yet that Commuted Sentence is in her case who was, I trust, well prepared for death, and possessed of great courage, almost a worse punishment than the original one, not so much because it involves a life-long penance, as because it cut her off from some of the means of grace to which she has become accustomed, and from the use of many spiritual books, which may be of great benefit to her soul, exposed as she is likely to be as life advances, and with such sad antecedents, to great internal temptations.44
Wagner begged the home secretary to permit her to be incarcerated in some Anglican sisterhood, or similar institution, but the request was refused. She served twenty years. There, it was assumed, the story fizzled out, until a brilliant piece of detective work by Bernard Taylor – Cruelly Murdered – Constance Kent and the Killing at Road Hill House (1979, revised 1989) – presents convincing evidence that she emigrated to Australia, worked as a nurse, and did not die until she was over a hundred, in 1944. She appears to have been a saint-like figure who devoted herself to the welfare of others.
There is an apocryphal story that when tiny Harriet Beecher Stowe, less than five feet in height, was presented to the tall lanky president at the White House in 1862, Abraham Lincoln said, ‘So, you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.’ Even if this exchange did not take place, Lincoln certainly did entertain the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Moreover it is from this book, now classifiable as children’s literature but not especially meant as such, that many people in the Western world formed their impressions of the United States, and of the convulsions which would engulf them during the momentous 1860s. More than a million copies of the book sold in England on its first publication there in 1852, ten times as many as had previously been sold of any work except the Bible.
Yet, as we have seen, the American Civil War and its aftermath by no means inspired the English to support or even much to sympathize with the Union. It is possible to generalize and say that many English people, particularly those who had admired Uncle Tom’s Cabin, took a pride in the part their country had played in the abolition of slavery, but would defend the right of the Southern states to determine their own affairs. But this generalization might provide too sweet an interpretation of public mood. One wonders whether Uncle Tom’s Cabin, so popular in the England of 1852, would have gone down so well in the England of, say, 1868. The Sixties were a decade, after all, in which the English were compelled to confront their own attitudes to the issues raised by the liberation of slaves. But the theatre in which the drama was played out was not Alabama or Mississippi but the colony of Jamaica.
In 1865, when the war between the Confederacy and the Northern states was concluded in the supposed liberation of African Americans, Jamaica had a population of something over 440,000. Thirteen thousand were white, the remainder were the descendants of the former slave population (320,000 Jamaican slaves had been liberated in 1807). The island was ruled by a governor, flanked by a council, and an elective assembly of forty-seven members. Two thousand Jamaicans, by virtue of being property-owners, were entitled to vote. As a ‘settled’ colony, Jamaica was under the law of England – a crucially important fact in the story, since technically exactly the same laws should have applied there as in Britain. There were very strong feelings of discontent among the blacks, especially those who, through the medium of the Baptist Church, hid acquired a modicum of political education. They resented their political destiny being determined by an assembly overwhelmingly supported by the planters, the former slave-owners, and the triumphs of the anti-slavery armies, marching through Georgia, had fired them with dreams of liberty: government of, for and by the people.
Edward John Eyre became the governor of Jamaica, aged forty-nine, in 1864. Of English birth, the son and grandson of clergymen, his colonial career in Australia and New Zealand had been conspicuous for its fairness. He defended the aborigines against white Australians. In 1845 he took two abo boys with him to visit the Queen and Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace.45 It was his enlightened experience with aborigines and the Maoris which led to his appointment first as captain-general, then governor, of the Caribbean sugar-island.
Eyre tried to broker peace between the planters and the political malcontents, and in so doing excited the scorn of George William Gordon, the illegitimate son of a wealthy white planter and a slave woman. Gordon was elected to the assembly in 1863 and made the new governor’s life as difficult as possible. ‘When a Governor becomes a dictator, when he becomes despotic, it is necessary to dethrone him … I have never seen an animal more voracious for cruelty and power than the present Governor of Jamaica …’ Gordon predicted ‘anarchy and bloodshed’ if the franchise were not extended.
In October 1865 there was an uprising of black peasants in the planting district of Morant Bay. The courthouse was burned to the ground and at least twenty whites were killed. A riot spread. There was talk of the slaughter of Frenchmen when the natives of Haiti proclaimed a republic. The governor received reports that ‘the most fearful atrocities were perpetrated … The Island curate of Bath, the Rev. V. Herschell, is said to have had his tongue cut out whilst still alive, and an attempt is said to have been made to skin him. One person (Mr Charles Price, a black gentleman, formerly a Member of the Assembly) was ri
pped open and his entrails taken out.’
Eyre had to act and the possibility of total anarchy, of the British being driven from the island altogether, made him act with great severity. First he declared a state of martial law in Morant Bay. Then he had Gordon arrested in Kingston, but rather than allowing him a civil trial there, Eyre had him moved to Morant Bay, where he was tried by court martial and summarily hanged. Over the next month, 608 people were killed or executed, 34 were wounded, 600, including some women, were flogged and about 1,000 leaf-hut dwellings were destroyed. Eyre was regarded by the whites on the island as their saviour. The Council was abolished and Jamaica became a Crown colony. The magistrates and clergy, and many other groups, showered Governor Eyre with loyal addresses. ‘We the undersigned, Ladies residing in the County of Cornwall, Jamaica, and on its borders, beg to tender our heartfelt thanks to you for the prompt and wise measures which we believe, under God, to have been the means of saving us and our children from a fate too terrible to contemplate.’