The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  At the Raree-Show

  Nov. 12-13, 1849

  Dickens first met Inspector Field at a public hanging. It was an event of great notoriety, the execution of the murderess Sylvia Manning and her sniveling husband.*

  It was a foggy November, fog everywhere, fog invading one’s very pores. Charles was working on David Copperfield, at a pace which left all of us in awe. I was one of Dickens’s “new-found friends,” as that petulant boor, Forster, would say to Dickens. “Your new-found friend, young Wilkie, is a ubiquitous presence lately, is he not?”—followed by some fragmentary remark about “clinging vines” generally turning out to be “climbers.” I never have, through all the years, gotten on well with Forster. He and I were often in each other’s company and always civil, but it was no secret that neither was comfortable in the presence of the other. Dickens was attached to each of us for different reasons. Forster was his closest advisor and confidant. I was his court jester and dining companion; he liked me with him when we walked out at night because I was young and stout. What lurking robber was going to accost a tall man with a powerful stride accompanied by a wide-shouldered, thick-wristed bulldog?

  As we walked, he noticed everything, pointed out the smallest details, the light on the water, sinister bills posted on dirty walls, shadowy wretches slouching into dark byways, or sleeping in doorways. He was constantly making writing plans. “I can use this place,” he would say, as we looked out over the Thames from the railing on London Bridge. Or, “That sound, mark it, it’s perfect!” he would exclaim, as a posh coach, its velvet curtains drawn tight, clattered past, and was swallowed by the fog, only to leave its receding sound lingering in the air. None of our night walks were ever planned. The night of the Manning hanging, however, was different.

  Leech, his illustrator, suggested it. It was to be a historical moment in the annals of London crime and Punch had commissioned Leech to capture this triumph of British justice, morality, and barbarism. Leech invited Dickens to accompany him to the hanging, and Charles, in turn, invited me.

  “Leech will be at his sketchbook the whole time,” he insisted. “You must come, Wilkie, I’ll need support in this.”

  As usual, he was manifestly right.

  Though the expedition had been Leech’s idea, once underway, it became Dickens’s project. He made all the arrangements, like some playwright blocking out the movements of his actors. He reserved space for our dinner, and rented space on a rooftop overlooking the gallows so that our view would be unobstructed.

  “Young Wil,” he said excitedly, “it is going to be a night we will all remember.” Night indeed! In all his planning, he only overlooked one small detail: sleep! When I had the temerity to point out that his schedule demanded we remain awake all night, he snorted once, then chuckled slyly. “I’ll wager it is not the first time you’ve watched the sun rise, Wilkie, in rather unwholesome circumstances.”

  The hanging was to be carried out at dawn on November thirteenth, but our plan was to spend the night at the site of the command performance. Both Forster and William Wills, a man Dickens had met at the Daily News, joined our party that evening. At Dickens’s urging, we all muffled up, and walked out to dinner. On the way, Dickens engaged Forster and Wills in animated conversation concerning a plan for a new periodical, a weekly, that he wanted to start up. Leech and I walked silently behind, he carrying a small carpetbag containing his sketchbooks and the utensils of his trade.

  “We’ll call it The Shadow,” Dickens insisted to Forster and this Wills person, who seemed the real target of his arguments. “To bind it all together will be the ubiquity of its conductor, a mysterious personality called the Shadow, who may go into any place by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight, candlelight, gaslight—who may be in the theatre, in the palace, the House of Commons, the prisons, the churches, the railroad, in the sea, in every dirty byway and crumbling tenement and pestilent alley of every rookery and rats’ castle of this great verminous sinkhole of London. I want him to loom as a fanciful thing, so that everybody, from the Queen to the most destitute crossing sweep, will be wondering, ‘What will the Shadow say about this? Is the Shadow here? Does the Shadow know?’ I have not breathed this idea to anyone, but I have a lively hope that it is an idea, and that out of it the whole scheme may be hammered.”

  Wills seemed interested.

  Forster scoffed. “Sounds like the scheme for some profane novel!” he barked. “Adventures of a Fly on the Wall of a Gentleman’s Brothel.”

  “Ah, are you conversant with that species of literature, old man?” Dickens teased him. Little did we know that there already was such a shadow as Dickens had described in London, and we would meet him for the first time that very night.

  We supped in a private room at the Piazza Coffee House, Covent Garden, just a bit after eleven p.m., on smoked chops with boiled potatoes, a steaming cauliflower with cheese melted atop it, and a delicate plum pudding. We smoked cigars as we walked over Hungerford Bridge to Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the site of the executions. The closer we approached the actual scene of the evening’s entertainment, the more subdued Dickens became. It was almost as if he were having second thoughts about all the elaborate arrangements for the celebration of such an inhumane event. But he was never one to back away from experience or reality, and we pressed on, though not the jolly troupe we had been earlier.

  We went first to inspect our perch on the rooftop. The landlord had dragged every available stick of furniture out for the accommodation of his influential (not to mention highpaying—he had charged Dickens two guineas for each of us) guests. Below, at the closed end of the street, built against the front gate of the gaol, stood the gallows. The gibbet posts and the crossbar shown silver grey in the cold moonlight, and cast skeletal shadows against the white stone of the high gaolhouse wall. The crowd had already gathered in the street, and the wardens of the gaol and a detachment of Metropolitan Protectives had thrown up barriers around the sinister scaffolding to keep the crush of people some small distance from the gallows itself.

  Dickens’s plan had been for us to walk down amongst the spectators to observe their behavior, and, perhaps, even collect their opinions of the event. But none of our party seemed immediately so inclined. That gallows, ghostly in the moonlight, sobered us. We sat in the landlord’s chairs and finished our cigars. Only Leech showed any inclination toward activity. His hands were already moving across the first tabula rasa of his sketchbook.

  The crowd below grew increasingly restless. Sounds of impatience and anger and laughter and obscene flirtation floated up. The street was flooded with humanity, and it was still five hours until dawn. Leech’s pencils flew over his pages.

  “Let us descend into this inferno,” Dickens said, finally breaking in on our private rooftop reveries. “We didn’t come here to sit brooding over our cigars like a tribe of tired old voyeurs.”

  “Ah, by all means,” Forster piped up, sarcastically.

  “Maybe we can wangle an interview with Jack Ketch.”*

  Dickens ignored him. We descended the tenement staircase, but at the street door to Horsemonger Lane we were stopped momentarily by a crush of bodies moving in a slow stream. It was an unruly crowd. There were constables in blue uniforms everywhere, each carrying a bright bull’s-eye. * Even as we were pushing our way out of the door, a young woman, carrying a basket, slipped to her knees or was pushed in the street. Before she could right herself, the crowd came on and trampled over her like some blind Juggernaut. She would have died but for a young bobbie who rushed in swinging his bull’s-eye like Samson’s jawbone through the unfeeling crowd to where the poor girl lay stunned on the grimy stones. She was dazed and breathless, but, aside from a few rising bruises, seemed to have no serious injuries. Her basket was gone forever, crushed, then carried off like shattered jetsam on the human tide. It was a warning to beware the ugly wave that could engulf us and batter us into shipwrecked splinters. We made our way toward the gallows, which rose above the crowd
like some perverted altar. More than once, I was forced to shove an uncouth ruffian out of our way, who would turn with a murderous glare and his hand rising to strike. But each immediately noticed that we were gentlemen, and backed away snarling, but unwilling to risk attacking us. Leech disappeared almost immediately upon our entering the street. He was sketching madly. Foul language floated in the air. Dirty clots of people had staked out their territories for viewing the proceedings. All were drinking openly, and howls were raised from time to time, which could remind one only of that place where such disturbing sounds were commonplace—Bedlam.*

  Other groups yelled and caroused to the tune of parodies of the vulgar Negro melodies of the day:

  Oh, Mrs. Manning,

  Don’t you cry for me.

  For I’m goin’ to hell this morning

  My true love for to see.

  As the crowd grew, thieves, low prostitutes, murderous ruffians, and filthy vagabonds of every size and shape and species of wretchedness flocked onto the ground, displaying countless varieties of offensive and foul behavior. Men and women alike fainted in the crush, and were carried out by the constables. Other women, swooning, clearly victims of more than merely superficial liberties, were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered. As these poor victims passed, the crowd greeted them with hoots of obscene speculation.

  As we loitered in the shadow of the gallows, Dickens spotted a reporter from the Daily News. The man, pen flying in a small notebook, was conducting an interview. Dickens maneuvered closer, to eavesdrop. The man under interview was of burly composition, wide of shoulder and thick of neck, wearing an unobtrusive brown longcoat of a heavy military cut with round collars lying across his shoulders. Jammed tight on his head was a low, square hat. As the interviewer plied him with questions, the man stood as if sculpted in stone, unmoving, attentive, yet his eyes darted over the crowd, missing nothing.

  “Ought to be done inside the walls,” the burly man in the hat was saying as the reporter’s pencil flew. “Look at ’em! Bloodthirsty mob!”

  Dickens turned to us: “Who is Axton interviewing over there?”

  “Inspector Field, of the Peelers,” Wills answered.

  “Good Lord, that’s Field?” Dickens exclaimed, openly excited.

  “Who’s that?” Forster harumphed.

  “The famous Inspector Field,” Dickens explained in the voice of a ha’penny broadside enthusiast, “the Detective Genius responsible for the apprehension of the Mannings. I must meet him.”

  Dickens quickly turned back, and hailed the reporter. The sharp-eyed man’s attention throttled Dickens immediately. What have we here? The sharp-eyed man tried to place him. Tall, urgent, foppishly bearded man interrupts my interview.

  “Young Axton, halloa,” Dickens clumsily intruded.

  “Mister Dickens, sir,” the reporter said, recognizing him, and replying respectfully, in fact with a certain amount of awe.

  At the mention of that name, the burly, sharp-eyed man’s attention immediately relaxed. His face softened into a congenial smile of recognition as if he were thinking Dickens, indeed, I want to meet this duck.

  “Working hard tonight, heh Axton?” Dickens moved in, and clapped the startled young man congenially on the shoulder, all hail-fellow-well-met.

  “Yes sir, quite sir,” Axton stammered.

  The burly man waited, amused.

  Dickens froze in awkward silence, as the befuddled Axton groped for his wits. Finally, the young man, realizing that all eyes were upon him, waiting, did what was expected.

  “Mister Dickens, sir. Detective Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Protectives.” His introduction complete, young Axton, trailing his pencil and pad, dropped immediately out of existence, and, to my knowledge, was never seen nor heard from again.

  Dickens and Field stepped toward each other, and shook hands warmly.

  “My great pleasure Mister Charles Dickens, sir. I ’ave read a number of your creations. I ’ave admired your work for many years.”

  “And I yours, Inspector Field,” Dickens laughed, as he nodded up toward the sinister scaffolding towering above us. *

  Field didn’t join in the levity. His grim, crook’d forefinger snaked out from under his coat and struck at the side of his eye. “Can’t say I’m too fond of all this,” Field said evenly.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Dickens, taking the cue, also sobered. “It is a barbaric spectacle.”

  “That certainly is the case from a philosophic point of view,” Field agreed, “but, from a practical point of view, this is a criminal’s convention. Every thief, pickpocket, gonoph, woman molester, and strong-armer in London is in attendance today, workin’ this crowd.”

  “The crowd is getting out of hand,” Forster complained from Dickens’s elbow. “We ought to get back, out of this crush.”

  Dickens and Field ignored him.

  “Thanks to ingenious men like you,” Dickens said, bestowing the compliment warmly, “Scotland Yard is gaining a reputation.”

  “Don’t spend much time there,” Field replied matter-of-factly. “Bow Street Station is my beat. All of the West End to the river’s where I spend my evenin’s.”

  I had been watching the man’s incredible darting eyes. Not for a second, though by all evidence the conversation was the object of his full attention, did they cease roaming over the crowd like two swift birds of prey, gliding, waiting for their victim to break cover.

  “Excuse me one moment, sir,” Field suddenly brought their conversation to a halt. “I’ve just marked an old friend whose acquaintance I expressly came ’ere to renew tonight.”

  With that, Field took off his hat, and passed it once through the air above the heads of the crowd. Within seconds, two uniformed constables in stovepipe hats materialized. “Against the buildin’ in the grey overcoat and bowler,” Field ordered.

  Dickens couldn’t take his eyes off of the two constables making their way through the crowd. Coming up, one on each side, they took custody of the designated man easily. The crowd was never aware of the tiny drama in its midst.

  “Ah,” Field turned back to Dickens, “now it ’as been a profitable evenin’. I’ve got the man I came for.”

  “Who was that?” Dickens asked eagerly.

  “’Arry the ’Oly,” Field’s eyes were alive with satisfaction, “one of the most proficient swell mobsmen* in all of London. Does ’is best work in well-dressed crowds leavin’ church on Sunday mornin’s. I was sure this would be too promisin’ a ceremony for ’im to decline attendance. I’ve been after ’im for two months. Knocked down an old lady name of Summerson outside a church in Russell Square during a bungled purse snatch. Old lady died later of the shock of it. ’Ee’s been lyin’ low ever since. With good reason. But I knew this would bring ’im out.”

  Field was soft-spoken of voice but strangely commanding in tone. His speech had but a lingering trace of the cockney. He chose his words carefully. Even in one of his novels, Dickens couldn’t have invented a more interesting place for the two of them to meet than there in the middle of a ghostly, moonlit night, in the shadow of the gallows.

  “Would you join us for some tea, Inspector Field? I would very much like to pursue our conversation,” Dickens said, and went on to explain how our party had accommodations on a nearby rooftop.

  “With ’Oly ’Arry taken up,” he answered blithely, “I ’ave time for that. But I must be back on duty down ’ere before the festivities begin.”

  With that, we all withdrew to our aerie, and I brewed the tea. We sat in a tight little circle on common kitchen chairs near the edge of the roof, where we had a clear view of the street below all the way to the gallows. Dickens asked Field for the particulars of the Manning case, and that worthy was more than willing to regale us with the story.

  He told how Mrs. Manning, originally Sylvia de Roux, of Swiss-French extraction and personal maid of Lady Blantyre, the daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, simultaneously contra
cted sexual liaisons with the Irishman Patrick O’Connor, a customhouse officer and stock speculator, and Frederick George Manning, a guard on the Great Western Railway; how she married Manning yet continued to welcome O’Connor in her husband’s house and meet with O’Connor alone in his rooms. Dickens listened to every prurient detail.

  Field told how she and her husband found out about O’Connor’s great wealth in foreign railway stocks, and invited O’Connor to dinner; how Frederick Manning purchased a large shovel, and had a bushel of lime delivered to the house; how O’Connor appeared the fatal night, and smoked a cigar on the back porch while talking intimately with Mrs. Manning; how Mrs. Manning led him to the kitchen on the lower level to wash his hands, raised a pistol to O’Connor’s head as he bent over the wash basin, and fired without hesitation; how, when her husband joined her in the kitchen and found O’Connor still alive, he battered him to death with a ripping chisel; how, after they covered the body with lime and buried it in the kitchen beneath two flagstones, they sat and feasted on a goose dinner in the very room where they had murdered and buried the man who was to have been their dinner guest. Dickens never blinked at the utter savagery of it.

  Field told how he collected all of the circumstantial evidence which pointed to Mrs. Manning, then went to the house to question the suspects. Dickens hung on every word.

  Field was an eloquent, graphic and economical storyteller. No wonder he and Dickens hit it off so well from the very beginning.

  “‘Ma’am,’ says I, ‘I work at the customhouse with one Patrick O’Connor, who ’asn’t appeared for work in more than a week. Some friends ’ave said ’ee was last seen on ’is way to dine with you last Thursday night.’

  “‘Friends must be mistaken, ’aven’t seen ’im,’ says she.