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Once again to Grevel Lindop and Robert Morrison,
for guiding my journey into all things Thomas De Quincey;
and to historian Judith Flanders, for leading me along dark Victorian streets
INTRODUCTION
A NEW KIND OF DEATH
It’s difficult to imagine the extent of the British Empire during the nineteenth century. British maps of the era depicted its territories in red, vividly illustrating that they stretched around the globe: Canada, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Gibraltar, Cyprus, a large swath of Africa, India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, on and on. As the saying went, the sun never set on the British Empire. It dominated a quarter of the planet’s landmass and a third of everyone living on it, far more than Alexander had conquered or the Romans had dreamed of possessing.
Britain—the nation that controlled this immensity—was, by comparison, small. At first, this might be surprising, but Britain’s compact size gave it a major advantage over larger areas such as Europe and the United States. Ideas and innovations could spread rapidly throughout its limited space, creating a strong core for the empire’s globe-spanning might—a power that increased dramatically after the invention of a new wonder of the world.
The distance between the port of Liverpool and the factories of Manchester is thirty-five miles. Today, that distance can be traveled in as little as half an hour. But in the early 1800s, wagons and barges were the only ways to transport raw materials and finished products. Both methods were difficult and time-consuming, limited by potholed gravel roads or narrow congested canals, requiring at least a day’s travel under the best of conditions and weeks of delays during the worst of winter.
But in 1830, something astonishing was created—a railway between Liverpool and Manchester, the first of its kind. That railway was so expensive and experimental that many financiers considered it a folly, yet it proved so successful that only a month after it opened, a railway from Manchester to London was proposed. Ten years later, almost two thousand miles of tracks crisscrossed England. By 1855, a mere twenty-five years later, six thousand miles of tracks united every corner of the nation, with more being planned.
Materials, products, and coal could now be transported with such speed and profit that more and more factories were built until, within a few amazingly rapid decades, England became the first nation to take full advantage of the Industrial Revolution, achieving unprecedented world dominance.
Thomas De Quincey, one of the most notorious and brilliant literary figures of the nineteenth century, mourned the change. “Out of pure blind sympathy with trains, men will begin to trot through the streets,” the Opium-Eater wrote, “and in the next generation, they will take to cantering.” In his nostalgic essay “The English Mail-Coach,” he eulogized the horse-driven vehicles upon which he’d traveled in his youth. Their dependable ten miles an hour had been fast enough for him. He’d felt a unity with the landscape through which he’d passed and a sympathy with the mighty animals that charged him forward. Now, as trains reached an unimaginable velocity of fifty miles an hour, it seemed to him that “iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man’s heart.” He recalled the excitement with which a trumpet had once heralded the arrival of a mail coach into a relay station and the awe of the spectators at the thunder of the horses. “The gatherings of gazers about a mail-coach had one center and acknowledged only one interest. But the crowds at a railway station have as little unity as running water and own as many centers as there are separate carriages in a train.”
Always interested in violent death, De Quincey was quick to note that on the first day of the Liverpool to Manchester railway, a politician named Huskisson had climbed down from the ceremonial train when it stopped to put water in its boiler at the midpoint of the inaugural journey. Huskisson wanted to apologize for his recent argument with England’s then prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, whose victory over Napoléon at the Battle of Waterloo had made him one of the most revered men in the nation. Huskisson proceeded along the tracks, reached the prime minister’s compartment, and shook hands with him, becoming so distracted that only at the last moment did he notice a locomotive speeding toward him on a parallel set of tracks.
The prime minister’s train began to move forward. Huskisson hurried next to it. He grabbed a door to climb inside, but the door swung open into the route of the approaching train. He dangled, lost his grip, fell onto the tracks, and was run over.
The news of Huskisson’s gruesome death spread across the country, making him famous, causing people throughout England and the world to become aware of this stunning invention and a new kind of transportation that they couldn’t previously have imagined.
But the railway also brought a new kind of death, and as De Quincey—an expert in the fine art of murder—discovered, there were many more deaths to come.
I seemed every night to descend into chasms and sunless abysses,
depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could
ever re-ascend.
—Thomas De Quincey,
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
The Opium-Eater is [the] ruler of the night.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas De Quincey
ONE
THE LOCKED COMPARTMENT
London
On Thursday evening, 22 March 1855, a frowning gentleman studied a two-page document that lay on his substantial desk. His name was Daniel Harcourt. Fifty years old, the solicitor was stout, a consequence of his sedentary profession. His gray frock coat and waistcoat were of the finest tailoring. His gold watch chain indicated his respectability. The glowing coals in his fireplace worked to remove the damp chill from a recent rain, but at the moment, a fire wasn’t necessary. As Harcourt looked up from the pages, he felt the internal heat of triumph.
“Are you quite certain about these details? The house in Bloomsbury? Everything?”
The man who stood on the opposite side of the desk wore a faded greatcoat of inferior quality. His raw face had the creases of someone who worked outside for long periods in all kinds of weather.
“I did the job myself, Mr. Harcourt. If you patrol the streets the way I did for ten years, you get to know who to talk to. Newsboys, crossing sweeps, water boys at cabstands—that sort don’t miss a thing, and for as little as sixpence, they’ll prove it. The best street artist in Bloomsbury drew the man’s face. What I gave you is gospel.”
Harcourt removed a piece of paper from a desk drawer and slid it toward the man. He dipped a pen into an inkwell and handed it to him. “Write your name.”
“But you already know my name. It’s John Saltram.”
“Write it anyhow.”
“You think I don’t know how to write?” Saltram asked with muted indignation. “You think the Metropolitan Police Force hires constables who can’t write?”
Harcourt set a gold sovereign next to the piece of paper. “Humor me. Write your name.”
After a long look at the gold coin, Saltram obeyed, scratching with the metal nib. “There, you see,” he announced, returning the pen and the piece of paper.
&nb
sp; “This isn’t the same handwriting that’s on the pages you gave me,” Harcourt observed.
“I said I could write. I didn’t say I could write neatly. My missus wrote those pages. She put down what I told her. I wasn’t about to trust it to anybody else.”
“How do I know she didn’t make a copy? How do I know you won’t try to sell these pages to the man you followed?”
“That wouldn’t be too smart of me, would it, Mr. Harcourt? I want steady work, not trouble, from a man the likes of you.”
Harcourt thought a moment and put five more gold sovereigns on the desk. They were the equivalent of five weeks’ pay for a constable.
“Here’s what we agreed upon,” he said. “Keep the other sovereign as a bonus.”
“Thank you, Mr. Harcourt. Thank you kindly.” Saltram stuffed the coins in a pocket of his trousers. “Any more work you need me to do…”
“I can always use a man who controls his tongue. In fact, your services might be required very soon. But right now, it’s late, and I’m certain you want to return to your wife.”
“Yes, Mr. Harcourt. Very good, Mr. Harcourt.”
As Saltram backed away, he wiped a hand across his lips in a manner that suggested he intended to go to a tavern rather than to his wife.
Harcourt watched him step into the lamp-lit corridor outside the office and shut the door. He listened until he could no longer hear Saltram’s footsteps descending the stairs.
Only then did he allow the heat of triumph to thrust him into motion. He quickly removed his gold watch from his waistcoat. The time was twenty-seven minutes after eight. He seldom worked this late, but there hadn’t been a choice—his meeting with Saltram had needed to occur when the building was deserted and no one would see the man arrive.
In a rush, he tossed the piece of paper with John Saltram’s name into a wastebasket under his desk. Then he hurriedly put on his overcoat, gloves, and top hat. He shoved the two-page document into a leather case, grabbed his umbrella, extinguished the lamps in his office, and stepped into the hall. After locking the door, he swiftly descended the stairs, extinguishing more lamps as he went.
Harcourt’s office was in Lombard Street, which tonight was cold and thick with mist. It was one of the shortest streets in this exclusive business district of London, a square mile known reverently as the City, always with a capital C. But despite the modest length of Lombard Street, its location near the palatial Bank of England and the Royal Exchange made it one of the most influential places in the world.
Harcourt took long steps over the dark, wet pavement and reached a cabstand at the corner. During the day, there were as many as twenty cabs here, the most that the law permitted at one time, but now, after business hours, he felt lucky to find two.
Climbing rapidly into the first, he called up to the top-hatted driver on his roost at the back, “Euston Station! I need to be on a nine o’clock train!”
“That doesn’t give us much time, guv’nor.”
“Triple your usual fare.”
The driver enthusiastically cracked his whip, and the sprightly two-seated cab surged forward. The clatter of the horse’s shoes echoed off the deserted stone buildings. At once, the driver dodged this way and that through a sudden chaos of vehicles coming north from Blackfriars Bridge. Cracking his whip harder, he urged his horse along Holborn Hill and turned right into Grays Inn Road.
Harcourt patted his leather case with the pages inside it. As the cab passed a mist-shrouded streetlamp, he studied his watch and saw that he now had only ten minutes to reach the station.
Harcourt tried to breathe slowly and calmly. He never failed to be nervous whenever he needed to make a railway journey. He remembered the mail-coach era, when speed was exhilarating rather than threatening.
“Nearly there, guv’nor,” the driver called, swerving left into the New Road.
“It’s almost nine o’clock!”
“No fears, guv’nor. Just have your coins ready when you jump out.”
As Euston Square appeared before him, Harcourt clutched his document case and umbrella, waiting anxiously for the cab to pass through the immense Roman arch that led to the station. At the curb, he threw the coins to the driver and raced into the Great Hall. Ignoring the pillars, statues, and grand staircase, he reached the only ticket window that remained open.
“The nine o’clock to Sedwick Hill,” he told a clerk, shoving a crown toward him.
The clerk didn’t need to ask if he wanted first class; Harcourt’s gold watch chain told him everything. “Better hurry, sir.”
Harcourt grabbed the ticket and rushed away.
“You forgot your change, sir!”
Ignoring the shout behind him, Harcourt pushed through a gate and reached the platform. After the classical architecture of the Great Hall, the ugliness of an iron-and-glass ceiling stretched before him. Smoke from countless departing engines had coated the glass with soot.
Harcourt showed his ticket to a guard and hurried along the waiting train, its hissing engine seeming to indicate impatience. He passed the third-class carriages in which passengers could only stand. Then came the second-class carriages with their hard benches. The social importance of wealthy passengers required them to take precedent and be at the front, even though that put them behind the noise and sparks from the belching engine.
Out of breath, Harcourt finally reached two first-class carriages. Each had several compartments, and each compartment had its separate entrance.
He peered through the first open door, but that compartment had passengers. He loathed sharing a confined space with strangers. Propriety obligated him to exchange a few pleasantries with them, but after that, the situation became awkward. During daylight, he could ignore the other occupants by reading a newspaper that he’d purchased from the W. H. Smith bookshop in the station, but at night, the single lamp in each compartment wasn’t sufficient to allow him to read, forcing him to avoid conversing with strangers by staring out the window into the darkness.
The passengers Harcourt saw through the open door didn’t look like they belonged in a first-class compartment anyhow. One was a short elderly man who wore what appeared to be a suit appropriate for attending a cheap funeral. Even the single lamp in the compartment was enough to show that the little man was agitated. Although he was seated, he moved his boots up and down as though walking in place. He clenched and unclenched his hands. His face was beaded with perspiration.
Seated opposite him, the elderly man’s young female companion looked peculiar also. She was attractive, Harcourt admitted, with lustrous blue eyes that turned to focus on him through the open door, but her clothing had the same look of belonging to a mourner at a cheap funeral, and she wore, in place of the fashionable hoops of ladies in society, trousers, which were evident to the observer because they extended below her skirt. No, Harcourt was definitely not inclined to spend even twenty minutes locked in a compartment with two such people.
He hurried nearer to the front of the train and peered through the next open door. Mercifully, the lamp on the wall revealed that there weren’t any occupants.
The small compartment had four seats on the right and four on the left, facing each other. A farther door allowed access if the train arrived at a station that had a platform on the opposite side. There wasn’t a corridor linking all the compartments; instead, each set of passengers occupied an isolated chamber.
Harcourt climbed inside and settled onto a thick cushion of blue satin. As he placed his document case and umbrella next to him, he realized how agitated he’d become during his rush to reach the train. He removed one of his gloves and touched his face, discovering that his cheeks were slippery with perspiration. Reminded of the little man in the compartment behind him, he wondered if he’d been too quick to pass judgment.
“Just in time, sir,” a guard said at the open door.
“Indeed,” Harcourt replied, concealing his relief.
But he wasn’t the person whom the
guard had addressed.
An out-of-breath man climbed into the compartment, politely looking down so that he and Harcourt wouldn’t be forced to converse. In fact, the newcomer was courteous enough to move all the way over and sit near the other door. He even sat on the same side as Harcourt, relieving them of the awkwardness of facing each other.
Harcourt leaned back but couldn’t relax. There hadn’t been time to send a telegram to the man he was hurrying to see, but he assumed that when he reached Sedwick Hill, someone in a local tavern would be eager to earn a half crown and take a message to the nearby estate. A carriage would soon arrive for him. The household would be in a state of confusion, having been roused by his urgent summons, but when Harcourt delivered the two precious pages, he had no doubt that his client would be immensely grateful.
The guard shut the door, inserted a key, and locked it. Despite the hiss of the locomotive, Harcourt heard the scrape of metal as the guard locked the next compartment also—and the next and the next.
When Harcourt was a child, his two older brothers had locked him in a trunk in a storage room. Squeezed by the dark, narrow confines, he’d pounded at the lid, begging to be let out. The trunk’s interior had become warm and damp from the accumulation of his frantic breathing. His shouts had weakened, his breath slowing, his mind blurring. Abruptly, light had blinded him as his brothers threw the lid loudly open and ran away, laughing.
Harcourt couldn’t help remembering.
The man who shared his compartment seemed anxious also, sitting rigidly straight.
As the locomotive made chugging sounds, the iron pillars on the platform outside appeared to move. Through the window, Harcourt watched the soot-blackened glass ceiling recede as the train departed the station, heading north. He had difficulty concentrating on the view, if it could be called that, because of the distraction of the brass bars at the window. The bars prevented passengers from leaning out and being killed by a blow to the head from an object that the train passed. For a similar reason, each compartment was locked from the outside, lest someone accidentally open a door or even do so deliberately, foolishly peering out for a better view and then perhaps being struck by something or losing his or her balance and falling.
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