Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  “11s. 5d. in a blue leather purse, and a brass clasp and chain....” Every single detail fit, except one. Jane was hardly twenty-three-years old; the police and the doctors were in error there. Jane was a girl, not a woman: sixteen years old. No, seventeen: she had passed if not celebrated her seventeenth birthday just two days before—in her coma, her uncle now knew.

  Jane—Jane Maria Clouson, the daughter of his wife’s sister—had been deeply attached to her cousin Trotts, and they to her. Indeed, since Jane’s mother had died four years before, and since her father and sister had scattered, the Trotts had been the closest thing Jane had to a family. Jane was particularly close to her cousin Charlotte, William’s daughter. And when William Trott broke the terrible news to his family that night, Charlotte must have been the most shocked of all. For Charlotte thought she knew where Jane had been last week—thought she had been miles away from Kidbrooke Lane that fatal Tuesday night.

  Jane had for two years worked as a servant in Greenwich, but had abruptly left her place three weeks before. After that Jane had been miserable, but when she came to tea at the Trotts’ the Sunday before, her mood had altered completely. And that evening Jane revealed to her cousin the secret of her happiness. Her lover, she told Charlotte, had proposed to her. The two were about to run away together and marry. She would therefore be out of contact for some time, but told Charlotte not to worry. Although Jane had sworn Charlotte to secrecy, Charlotte couldn’t help it and told her mother. And so, as the Trotts heard the description and knew that it had to be Jane, any joy they had felt for her metamorphosed into black foreboding.

  William and Elizabeth Trott knew that they had to go to the police in Greenwich to identify their niece, and decided to leave Charlotte behind with her six younger siblings. They sought out items with which they could positively identify Jane, and found two: a scrap of imitation Maltese lace from which Jane’s jacket collar had been cut, and a recent photograph taken of her. And then, they seemed to hesitate, perhaps unsure whether or not to wait until morning to speak with the police. In the end, overcome by their need to know for certain that the victim was their niece, they set out with their two items after midnight.

  They arrived at Blackheath Road Station before one o’clock and learned that Jane was dead.

  If Superintendent Griffin, who lived around the corner from the station, was not awake when they arrived, the Trotts’ information, combined with the lace and photograph, was important enough to rouse him, and important enough to impel him to swift action. He dispatched officers to wake the landlord and boarders at 12 Ashburnham Road in Greenwich, where, the Trotts told them, Jane had been living with a friend ever since she left her servant’s place. The officers were to find out whether Jane had been living there since the previous Tuesday. She had not. But neither the landlady there, nor Jane’s friend, a girl by the name of Emily Wolledge, seemed particularly concerned by her absence. For before this, when she worked, Jane had often spent her days off with her aunt and uncle Trott; everyone at Ashburnham Road simply assumed that Jane had been staying in Deptford.

  Superintendent Griffin heard enough from the Trotts to ask them to identify the victim’s body. But he decided to wait until morning to do that; he would meet them and their daughter Charlotte and ride with them to Guy’s. Inspector Mulvany, who lived in Lambeth and near the hospital, would be there, and the two would interview the Trotts more fully. In the meantime, Griffin ordered the victim’s clothes sent from the station house at Lee to Guy’s, so that the Trotts could identify those as well.

  And so William and Elizabeth Trott returned home, surely spent a sleepless night, and at nine in the morning of the next day—Monday, May Day—they and Charlotte arrived at Guy’s with Superintendent Griffin, who asked them first to examine the clothing. There was no question that the dress and petticoats were Jane’s. The scrap of imitation Maltese lace they brought matched the lace on her jacket perfectly. The three were then led into the morgue. In the morning light they gazed upon the battered and swollen face of the corpse. Again, there was no doubt: the nose, the mouth—it was Jane. To be absolutely certain, Elizabeth and Charlotte told the police of Jane’s birthmark—a mole on her right breast. They looked; it was there.

  There was the photograph, as well. It was a small studio portrait—a cabinet card, as it was then called.*1 In 1871 the cost of a photograph had lowered to the point that a servant having her portrait taken was not unheard of. Even a high-quality set of cabinet cards would have cost only a few shillings—and Jane’s portrait likely cost less than this. Even so, it would without doubt have been a luxury on a servant’s wages. But it would be well within the range, perhaps, of a doting aunt and uncle. In any case, it was clearly Jane’s photograph, and it matched the body before them, at least in those few places undistorted by injury. Finally, after five days, the police could assign a human face to the victim’s body. From the photograph, Jane Clouson gazed calmly and steadily at them, offering up the barest hint of a Mona Lisa smile. She had dressed for her portrait in all the finery she could muster—frilly cap, lace about her neck, shiny gloves covering her roughened hands. She had obviously aimed to project a sense of independence and maturity. But the shape of her body and her face—particularly of her pudgy cheeks and thick chin—betrayed her. Aunt Trott was later to describe her—obviously approvingly—as “very stout and well-looking.” And for all of Jane’s poise and placidity in the photograph, there is an unmistakable sense of innocence, in the shining eyes and upon the tentative lips. Jane might pretend to be a woman in the photograph, but the pretense was obvious. The police must have realized how ridiculous they had been in thinking the victim was twenty-three or twenty-five. She was a pretty child in the photograph, and she was a pretty child when she walked to her death.

  The Trotts gave Mulvany and Griffin a history to accompany that young face.

  The Clousons, Jane’s family, were, like the Trotts, intimately connected with the river and with the sea. Jane’s father, James, had been a fisherman before taking up work closer to home, as a laborer, first on the Deptford docks, and then aboard passenger steamboats plying the Thames. James’s wife, Jane Elizabeth, bore a son who died as an infant, and bore three daughters: Sarah Ann, Jane Maria, and Maria Cecilia. They grew up in Deptford near their Trott cousins. Jane was a “religious and virtuous” and “good handsome” girl, William Trott said, a diligent student both at a local day school and at Sunday school. For the three years after young Maria’s birth in 1860 the Clouson family remained intact. After that it fragmented.

  In 1863, tuberculosis killed Jane’s thirteen-year-old sister, Sarah. In 1866, it killed her mother. And by 1868, James Clouson had abandoned his remaining daughters. He slipped across the Thames to the Isle of Dogs, moved alone into a boardinghouse, and took up employment as a night watchman at a Millwall ironworks. Jane’s younger sister, Maria, not old enough to take a place as a servant, was apparently farmed out to others by her father: in the census of April 1871 she is listed as a “visitor” with a family in Croydon. Jane, on the other hand, had turned twelve in 1866; twelve was the usual age at the time for entering domestic service, and so Jane then began her working life, first for a butcher in Deptford, and soon afterward for a sea captain and his family in New Cross. There, she did well and was well liked; nevertheless, after two years, in the spring of 1869, she gave up her place—perhaps because tending to the captain’s many children and grandchildren proved overwhelming for her. She quickly took up another place, at 3 London Street, in the commercial heart of Greenwich. Her employers were the Pook family—Ebenezer, Mary, their elder son, Thomas (who had married and had moved away, but often stayed at London Street); their younger son, twenty-year-old Edmund; and Mary’s cousin, a woman by the name of Harriet Chaplin.

  When Inspector Griffin heard of Ebenezer Pook, his world and Jane’s suddenly overlapped. Griffin knew Ebenezer Pook and he knew him well. Ebenezer had been proprietor of a printer’s and stationer’s shop in Greenwich
for the better part of a decade. Ebenezer had in that time become well known—as a successful businessman, as a Freemason in the local lodge, and as a committed member of the congregation of St. Alfege, Greenwich’s central and distinctive church, which towered over the Pooks’ end of London Street.

  Ebenezer Pook’s printer’s shop occupied the ground floor of 3 London Street, and his family lived on the upper two floors. Ebenezer Pook employed, besides his sons, six men and boys in the shop. But upstairs, in the home, he had employed only a single servant: Jane Clouson. Jane, in other words, toiled at one of the most grueling, and at the same time one of the most common, of mid-Victorian occupations: she was a maid-of-all-work.

  Our notions about English and even Victorian domestic service are colored indelibly by those post-Victorian domestic epics Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, with their portrayals of large, variegated, usually busy, and generally cheerful bands of servants. In 1871, such service to the gentry was not rare. But it was not the norm; servants such as Jane Clouson were. This was the time of the rise of the middle class and its attendant cult of respectability, and no family could even begin to consider itself to be middle-class or respectable without employing at least one or two servants. And so, just like hundreds of thousands of English middle-class families, the Pooks had in their maid-of-all-work—their Jane—not simply their means of remaining respectably clean and tidy, but as the primary emblem of their social stature. Of the 1.2 million English servants recorded in the 1871 census, 780,040, or roughly two-thirds, were “general domestics,” or maids-of-all-work. Most of these were girls like Jane, who began service at twelve or thirteen; most, though far from all, moved on by their twenties—to marriage, which would by custom end their careers as live-in maids-of-all-work, or to a more specialized and more remunerative level of domestic service.

  For nearly all maids-of-all-work, even those lucky enough to work for generous and benevolent employers, life was solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, if not always short. Maids-of-all-work combined the duties of cook, kitchen maid, housemaid, and even valet, footman, and boot-boy. Isabella Beeton, who with the publication of her Book of Household Management in 1861 had become the doyenne of Victorian domestic order, sympathized with their plight. “The general servant, or maid-of-all work, is perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration,” Beeton wrote. “Her life is a solitary one, and in some places, her work is never done.” Beeton was not exaggerating. Maids-of-all-work were the foot soldiers in an unceasing battle against grime in a grimy world: taking on the filth of sooty kitchens, and the dust and dirt of drawing-, dining- and bedrooms, dirtiness endlessly replenished by the belching chimneys of British industry. Their battles against dirt typically occupied a maid-of-all-work for eighty hours a week or more: fifteen to eighteen hours a day, with a few hours off on Sundays and some evenings. (The factory laborer of the time, by contrast, averaged fifty-six hours of work a week.) Her duties, as elaborated by Beeton, amounted to a daily marathon of chores: lighting fires; polishing and cleaning the stove, the grates, the windows, and, in that peculiarly Victorian ritual, the front stoop and steps; sweeping and dusting; cleaning the boots; emptying the slops and rinsing the chamber pots; making the beds, setting the table, doing much of the cooking, carrying up meals, serving the family, washing the dishes. Beeton leaves out the task of cleaning the privy or water closet, but this, too, was among the duties of a maid-of-all-work. And while the maid-of-all-work wallowed in filth to satisfy her employers’ compulsion, their social imperative, to be clean, she, too, was expected to be clean and so reflect her employer’s cleanliness: to be spotless whenever she appeared before master or mistress and whenever she showed herself to visitors. At the sound of her mistress’s call or the doorbell, therefore, the maid-of-all-work had to stop whatever she was doing, to quickly wash hands and face, and to cover her dirty clothes with a clean apron before answering.

  The maid-of-all-work lived among a family, but she was never part of it. She ate alone, after serving the family its meals; she was expected to do her work out of the family’s sight. She generally interacted almost entirely with her mistress, who gave her daily orders and sometimes helped with cooking, making beds, and more delicate housework. (In Jane’s case, assistance likely came from Mary Pook, as well as Mary’s cousin Harriet.) To the master and the young masters she was expected to be formal and deferential, never familiar; to remain employed she needed to understand her distinct place on the class divide that existed in every English middle-class household. In terms of knowing who gave and who obeyed orders, that divide was absolute. In terms of relative class standing, however, it was often slight. Beeton notes that the maid-of-all-work “is subject to rougher treatment than either the house- or kitchen-maid” because she has “some small tradesman’s wife as her mistress, just a step above her in the social scale”—a type, Beeton asserts, that includes “some very rough specimens of the feminine gender.” Whether Mary Pook was such a rough specimen remains to be seen. But it is true that the Pooks were not all that far above the Clousons on the social scale. The Pooks were relatively new to the middle class, Ebenezer having been a skilled laborer—a compositor of type for the Times—before moving to Greenwich to start his own business. A dozen years before, then, young Edmund and younger Jane inhabited a similar social world—and had the Pooks lived in Deptford then instead of Southwark, they might have been playmates.

  No longer.

  If the social distance between them was slight, then the need to observe and preserve that distance became that much greater. Keeping to one’s place, to someone like Jane, meant to submitting and adopting the demeanor expected of servants, to be respectful, deferential, and self-effacing. Any hint of friendliness between Jane and Edmund was forbidden. Jane’s very uniform, the universal maid’s uniform in 1871—black dress, white apron, and white cap—signified her social distance from the family that employed her and demonstrated to all who saw her that she was a part of the household machinery, not a part of the family. And even when Jane had free time and could temporarily free herself from the uniform and the mask of deference, she could never free herself from the need to follow her mistress’s strict moral code. Maids-of-all-work were generally prohibited from having “followers,” for one thing (though many did, anyway). Any serious moral breach, inside or outside the house—the catastrophe of a pregnancy, for example—would be grounds for instant dismissal, dismissal of course without a written character reference. Indeed, any moral failing on her part could result in a month’s notice or a month’s pay in lieu of notice. Under these circumstances, whether a servant left a home with or without a character reference was entirely up to the mistress. Without one, a maid-of-all-work’s reputation and her chance of obtaining a place with any other respectable family were destroyed. For Jane and her thousands of sisters, the perils of forgetting one’s place were extreme.

  And Jane Clouson had forgotten her place. Her cousin Charlotte and her aunt Elizabeth knew this.

  During almost all of her time at London Street, the Trotts thought, Jane had been dutiful and hardworking, and the Pooks apparently had nothing to complain about—except perhaps about one thing, if they had known it. In the face of an almost certain prohibition against followers, Jane did have one: an otherwise eminently appropriate suitor by the name of James Harley Fletcher, whose widowed mother kept a ham and beef shop around the corner from the Pooks. James Harley Fletcher, however, had the local urge and had gone to sea. And because he was not fated to become the hero of a real-life Victorian melodrama, James Harley Fletcher had remained at sea, and had not returned in the nick of time to save Jane Clouson from her death.

  With Fletcher gone, Jane’s troubles began. Two or three months before this first day of May, Jane began to speak to her cousin and her aunt about Edmund Pook, not with the respectful deference of a servant, but with the courage and recklessness of a lover. She and Edmund were now keeping company, she told them, walking out whenever they cou
ld, up on Blackheath where they could find privacy. (Not surprisingly, none of the Trotts had ever actually seen the two together.) Edmund had given her gifts, she told Charlotte, and she had shown her cousin the locket she said Edmund had given her. This was apparently the locket that Sergeant Haynes had pulled from the wounded girl’s jacket pocket.

  Aunt Elizabeth, herself once a servant—and one who obviously held stronger ideas about a servant’s place than her niece did—disapproved of Jane’s behavior and tried repeatedly to dissuade Jane from seeing Edmund. It was obvious to the Trotts that Jane’s new relationship did nothing to make her happy: she had been miserable for weeks. And then, on April 13, Jane abruptly left the Pooks and moved in with Emily Wolledge, a friend who had also at one time worked for the Pooks. Jane told Charlotte that she had left by choice: she had given the Pooks a month’s notice in March because she had decided to find work in a Deptford factory rather than remain a servant. By hindsight, Jane’s explanation didn’t make sense. She had said nothing to Charlotte about leaving the Pooks before she actually left. Moreover, she certainly had said nothing about being pregnant, which she had probably realized just about the time she left the Pooks. And Jane was, if anything, even more miserable after she left.

  And then her misery vanished, as the Trotts realized on the last day they saw her alive, the Sunday before when Jane had come to their house for tea. Charlotte revealed to Mulvany and Griffin the secret Jane had told her that evening, as the two walked out after tea, through Greenwich, up to Blackheath, and finally into Greenwich Park. “Charlotte,” Jane had told her cousin, “you must not be surprised if I am missing for some weeks, for Edmund says I must meet him at Shooter’s Hill either tomorrow night or on Tuesday night to arrange to go with him into the country. He says he will have such a deal to tell me, and we shall have to make all the arrangements. He says he is going to take me to a christening with him at St. Ives. Then we shall go somewhere else, to such a nice place, where I shall be so happy; but I am not to tell anyone where I am going or write to anyone for some time, as he does not want anyone to know where I am. You must not be surprised if you miss me for some weeks, but you shall have the first letter I shall write to anyone. Edmund says I shall not want for money, and if it’s five pounds I shall have it, and I shall be so happy.” Jane then told Charlotte that she was worried about her future relationship with Edmund’s parents, particularly with Mary Pook. Mrs. Pook and she had not parted on good terms, Jane said, and she feared that Edmund’s mother would not accept a former servant as her daughter-in-law. “I told Edmund,” she said, “that after I was married to him I should never speak to his mother.” But in speaking to Charlotte, she reconsidered: she knew that Edmund’s brother, Thomas, had married a working girl, an apprentice in a dressmaker’s shop—and Mrs. Pook had in time become a good mother to her. Perhaps she might grow to accept Jane as well.