by Lucy Worsley
After leaving for her assignation – some said dressed in men’s clothes as a disguise – Maria was never seen alive again. William Corder likewise left the village. Letters arrived at intervals for Maria’s family, claiming that the happy couple were now settled on the Isle of Wight. Maria had hurt her hand, the letters stated, which was why she had not written herself.
Next, contemporaries believed, a providential or supernatural intervention worked its beneficent magic. Maria’s stepmother had a dream in which it was mysteriously revealed to her that Maria was not, after all, in the Isle of Wight. This dream or vision would feature heavily in retellings of this particular tale, and provided a key part of its popularity. The stepmother woke up believing that Maria was in fact still very close to home, buried in the barn behind the house. Maria’s father, convinced by his wife, went to have a look, and there indeed he discovered his daughter’s body. There were enough identifying marks to confirm that it was her, and around her neck was a green handkerchief that had belonged to William Corder.
It proved quite easy to catch Maria’s killer, who had by now settled down in London with a wife he had acquired since leaving Polstead. (In a bizarre twist, Corder had found this wife through advertising for a spouse in The Times.) William Corder was brought back to Suffolk for his trial, which took place, amid enormous publicity, at the Shire Hall of Bury St Edmunds. Corder’s defence claimed that the media had massively prejudiced his trial by assuming his guilt. Whether this was true or not, they ultimately failed to protect him. After all, his rather unconvincing line of defence was simply that he hadn’t done it. Once condemned to death, he did finally come out with a confession of sorts, but even then he claimed that it had been an accident: he had threatened his lover with a gun, and fired it only because of a trembling in his fingers.
Corder’s sentence decreed that he should not only be hanged – a process that took a good ten minutes, even with the hangman pulling down upon his legs – but also that his body should be dissected and ‘anatomized’. Despite the requests of his new wife for the return of her husband’s corpse, it was taken back to the Shire Hall, opened up by the slitting and peeling back of the skin and laid out upon a table. According to the papers, no fewer than 5,000 local people came trooping through the building to see the body.
The next day, science took precedence over spectacle and the body was carefully dissected for the edification of a group of young medical students from Cambridge. They were particularly interested in studying it in the light of the new ‘science’ of phrenology then in vogue, so a careful cast was taken of Corder’s head, for future reference. That cast is now in Moyse’s Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, where the curator, Alex McWhirter, showed it to me. It’s rather a distressing sight. The nose and lips are horribly swollen, as the blood vessels in these organs had burst during the process of hanging.
The murder in the Red Barn created an enormous sensation in contemporary East Anglia, and cast an unusually long shadow over what historians call ‘material culture’: everyday things like knickknacks, pictures, song-sheets and artefacts. Almost immediately, this rather sordid, rural tale of betrayal and violence struck a chord with the British public, each of whom seemed to want a tangible keepsake to remind them of the story.
For the broadside and ballad-sellers at the execution itself, William Corder would be long remembered as a great boon to their trade. The most popular item for sale was Corder’s ‘last confession’, a detailed screed reportedly taken down by witnesses the night before he died. One ‘patterer’ retained fond memories of the sales frenzy that swept through Bury St Edmunds: ‘I got a whole hatful of halfpence at that … a gentleman’s servant come out, and wanted half a dozen for his master, and one for himself.’
William Corder’s head modelled just after death, and showing the swollen lips and nose that were the effects of his hanging.
Corder’s ‘Last Dying Speech and Full Confession’ was published alongside a song called ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’, which became one of the most popular ballads of 1828. It wasn’t just a local sensation, as copies of this particular ballad still survive from named printing presses in London, Wales and even Scotland. Such was its reach and popularity that it must have been the contemporary equivalent of a number one single.
At least four different ballads about William Corder are known to have been written and printed at the time of his trial but ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’ is the best known. People purchased the printed words on a piece of paper, and learned the tune either from listening to the ballad-seller or from their friends who already knew how the music went. ‘Our servants are constantly loitering in the street,’ complained a late Georgian journalist, ‘to learn the last new song … You would be surprised, sir, could I enumerate the number of women-servants whose money has been squandered in the purchase of our Grub-street harmony.’
Or, alternatively, people may well have sung ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’ to any handy tune that they knew already. Tunes were constantly recycled with different words (just as, conversely, words could be sung to different tunes).
When I met Vic Gammon, a historian of folk music, to learn this particular ballad, I was pretty sure that the tune to a song about a murder in 1828 would be unknown to me. I was astonished to learn, though, that I was already perfectly familiar with it, and could start singing it right away, for one of the best-known tunes to which ‘Maria Marten’ was sung pops up in one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s fantasias on English folk songs, ‘Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus’, for harp and string orchestra. The composer was an avid collector of folk songs and ballad tunes who travelled the countryside collecting music and writing down old tunes which might otherwise have been lost. He wrote his fantasia on folk songs as a commission for the British Council, and it was first performed in the Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1939. The occasion was a century distant in time, and three and a half thousand miles distant in space, from Polstead and the Red Barn. But the piece opens with the best-known of the melodies to which ‘Maria Marten’ could be sung.
Ballads like ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’ tumbled off the busy printing presses in the Seven Dials area of London, the centre of the cheaper end of the publishing business. Many of them shared common features, for instance beginning with the words ‘come all, come all’, as the singer announces his presence and gathers round an audience. In the case of ‘Maria Marten’, the song begins:
Come all you thoughtless young men, a warning take by me And think upon my unhappy fate to be hanged upon a tree.
Then, at the conclusion of the song, comes the conventional, sorrowful adieu, in which the murderer bids goodbye to the world:
Adieu, adieu, my loving friends, my glass is almost run, On Monday next will be my last, when I am to be hang’d; So you young men who do pass by, with pity look on me. For murdering Maria Marten I was hang’d upon the tree.
Enormous relish is taken in the ghastliness of the crime (‘After the horrid deed was done, she lay weltering in her gore; Her bleeding mangled body he buried, under the Red-barn floor’). Yet alongside the fun to be found in the horror is the clear social purpose served by this song on everyone’s lips in 1828. It sent a strong moral message to the listener, a warning to the nation’s hot-headed young men, advising them against succumbing to their basest instincts.
WORDS AND MUSIC were not the only souvenirs. Equally as durable as the ballads and broadsides – and equally available to anyone with the cash – were the cheap and colourful Staffordshire ceramic models of the players and the barn itself, intended to be displayed on the nation’s mantelpieces. Marten and Corder, represented in ceramics, were usually shown in the early stages of the story, still in love, hand in hand, meeting at the barn for their assignation. These were poignant scenes, showing an apparently happy courtship, with their real meaning – impending doom and death – only to be decoded by the well-informed viewer. (One almost wants to shout out, ‘Maria, run away!’) The figurines were object
s that simply didn’t work without background knowledge, and they seemed perfect for creating conversation and sociability.
Ceramic figures like these, apparently so bizarre today, illustrate an important development in Victorian cultural life: the crumbling of the notion that art was not something that could be owned by working people. In the seventeenth century, only the super-rich could afford to decorate their homes with paintings and sculpture. One of the great changes in interior decoration of the eighteenth century was the filtering down of the practice. When so many more people, as the result of trade and industrialization, began to have the spare cash to flash on soft furnishings or figurines, the Georgian concept of taste emerged. As a member of the middling rank in society, you needed to decorate your house not only expensively but in a way that revealed knowledge of antiquity, history and contemporary fashion.
But Georgian working people still lacked the spare cash to trick out their parlours with anything but the most functional items. One of the greatest visual changes to the homes of working people in the nineteenth century lay in their being able for the first time to afford items whose function was purely decorative, expressions of taste, and preferences, and personality.
So now mantelpieces began to be crowded with cheap, perhaps gaudy, but very personal items, such as ceramic figurines. They were selected for no other reason than that they pleased the owner, and formed part of his or her view of the world. These figurines were talking points; they showed characters that nearly everybody could recognize – yes, even notorious murderers – and represented a world of entertainment and intrigue beyond the daily grind.
Rather more exclusive than the china ornaments were the knick-knacks made from the timbers of the Red Barn itself. The very structure of the building was ripped up and sold off in pieces. There was a local newspaper report of a man ‘seen passing through Polstead with a bundle of boards from the barn … it was his intention to take them to London to make a variety of articles for sale as curiosities’. One such article is the little snuff box in the shape of a shoe, which still remains at Moyse’s Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds. Maria’s missing gravestone suffered the same fate as the barn: it can no longer be seen as sightseers chiselled it away.
Even more desirable were items explicitly associated with the crime: one-offs, pieces that nobody else could have. In this category might be placed the lantern, also at the museum, which, it is claimed, was used by Maria’s father when he discovered the body. Alex McWhirter, the curator, doubts that this was the actual lantern Mr Marten used, but it reveals how every possible association with the crime could be milked. Even more excitingly, the museum also has the truly authentic pistols with which Corder fired the deadly shot.
A newspaper illustration of The Red Barn showing its lower timbers missing because they had been sold as souvenirs.
The most gruesome and valuable mementos of all are constituted from the actual body of the murderer. One of the highlights of the Moyse’s Hall Museum is the celebrated ‘skin book’. It’s a volume, written by a Times journalist, about William Corder’s life and death, and looks just like a normal book. Open it up, however, and a note on the inside of the cover tells you that its leather binding is in fact made out of the ‘skin of the murderer’, taken from his body, tanned and cured by one of the surgeons from the local hospital after the public dissection was over.
And then there was William Corder’s own head, which somehow found its way into the hands of showmen and became a source of enormous entertainment and profit. When it was displayed by a stallholder during the annual two-week St Bartholomew’s Fair in London soon after the trial, he took more than £100, twice the yearly salary of a shopkeeper or clerk. The display of human remains for money was not uncommon: in 1856, when the police were debating if the bodies of convicted criminals should be returned to their families, one inspector advised against it: ‘I should rather fear that they will be inclined to exhibit’ the corpses, he said, for financial gain.
William Corder’s scalp eventually made its way back to Bury St Edmunds, where it still forms one of the highlights of the town museum. When I took it from its case to handle and examine it, I experienced a mixture of macabre pleasure and guilt at interfering with the remains of a human being. The scalp is now black, crispy and shrunken, but in a terribly creepy detail it still contains the fuzz of Corder’s short, ginger hair, and still has one little round ear attached.
After the anatomization, William Corder’s skeleton ended up for many years in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, but in 2004 his remains were removed from display and cremated. The fate of his skeleton perhaps seems the more civilized option. But it has to be said that William Corder’s shrivelled ear does a great deal for the visitor numbers of the local museum in Bury St Edmunds. Its curators told me that every single week some local person with a dim memory of seeing it in childhood comes in specifically to ask if it’s still there.
9
Stage Fright
‘Of Hamlet we can make neither end nor side, and nine out of ten of us … would like to be confined to the ghost scenes, and the funeral, and the killing off at the last. Macbeth would be better liked if it was only the witches and the fighting.’
London costermonger quoted by Henry Mayhew (1861)
THE MURDER IN the Red Barn produced a significant range of souvenirs and artefacts for collectors, but it also had an unusually interesting afterlife as a story told on stage. In 1830s London, visitors to St Bartholomew’s Fair could choose between several alternative peepshow performances of the death of Maria Marten. The proprietors of peepshows always found murder a profitable subject. ‘People is werry fond of battles in the country,’ said one of their number to Henry Mayhew, ‘but a murder wot is well known is worth more than all the fights.’
The peepshow, or its close companion the puppet show, did not yet have its modern-day connotations of light comedic entertainment for children. Many puppet shows were staged with all the weight and seriousness of tragedy. In fact, this was the medium by which people living in rural England were able to experience the best plays to be seen on the London stage, and the serious, adult-orientated puppet show was a vastly popular form of entertainment.
The Victoria and Albert Museum contains a pair of rather beautiful marionettes of William Corder and Maria Marten that were originally used to recreate her murder on stage. They are among 35 marionettes in the museum’s collection, which were once possessions of the Tiller-Clowes Company, who ran a touring puppet theatre. Their ‘Maria’ had a wonderful special feature described in an inventory of their puppets as ‘hair to come away’. This probably meant a lock of hair that could be lifted up by its own special and separate string. It might have been added to allow William Corder to drag her about by the hair in the course of killing her, or it could simply have been to allow Maria’s hair to stand on end in fright. ‘Maria Marten’ puppets also often had a ‘blood string’, a string that was pulled out of their body at the moment of death, with a piece of red cloth attached to represent a sanguinary gush.fn1
I have had the pleasure of operating the museum’s puppet of William Corder under the supervision of its curator, Cathy Haill, and found myself taking an inappropriate level of enjoyment in causing him to kill his Maria once again. It’s almost impossible today to imagine the mindset where a puppet like Corder could be used to express pathos or horror rather than comedy, but that was his original purpose.
Shows like those put on by the Tiller-Clowes Company were completely portable. A wooden theatre frontage with canvas sides would be packed into wagons (or, later, vans) and driven from fair to fair. Once erected, up to 200 spectators could be packed inside, or a really big puppet theatre could seat 600. On the stage the marionettes appeared within their own miniature proscenium arch. Their features were exaggerated so that each of the five or six ‘stock’ characters could be easily recognized: the old woman, the policeman, the villain, the handsome young man and the heroine. The William Co
rder I handled has a villainous moustache, bulbous staring blue eyes, with bold and sinister black rims. He also has a red dot at the inner point of each eye: a make-up technique recommended in early greasepaint manuals for the making of a living actor’s eye look whiter and fresher. ‘Maria Marten’, on the other hand, wears a virginal white dress, has yellow ribbons in her hair and lovely pink cheeks.
The text of the play Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn that was used by the Tiller-Clowes Company indicates a conventional theatrical performance, and the audience would have expected exactly the same level of drama, excitement, tragedy and horror. ‘Oh, William, behold me on my knees,’ says Maria, as she begs for her life. A stage direction follows: ‘she tries to escape. He seizes her – throws her round’, until finally, ‘he dashes her to the earth, and stabs her. She shrieks and falls. He stands motionless till the curtain falls.’
Puppet performances continued throughout the nineteenth century, until finally brought to a halt by improvements to public transport – once people could travel to their nearest town with ease, they became less interested in having the travelling theatre come to them – as well as the growth of the cinema. The First World War proved the death blow to the old puppet show families. With the young men removed, there was no one to carve the puppets, perform the shows, or drive the van. When puppetry was revived after the war, it returned as much more of an entertainment for children.
The story of Maria Marten was so popular, though, that it remained prominent even in the dwindling repertoires of late nineteenth-century puppet troupes. It had all the characteristics of melodrama in the technical sense: an implausible, over-the-top, formulaic but extremely lively and participatory form of theatre which flourished with both mechanical and human actors, in both informal and formal settings.