by Lucy Worsley
The sight of Maria’s death left a lasting impression on many in the crowd. Charles Dickens described her body as ‘a fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it swung slowly from side to side’. She would live on in popular imagination, transformed into the character of Hortense, the murderous maid in Bleak House. Like Maria, Hortense is an uncomfortable, edgy character, who helps the lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn to uncover the secrets of her employer, Lady Dedlock. ‘I don’t know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless she is mad,’ Tulkinghorn says. When Tulkinghorn dismisses Hortense and fails to find her another job, she shoots him, and attempts to frame Lady Dedlock herself for the murder.
Like Manning, Hortense came to stand for fear, social disorder and the unknown. Bleak House’s narrator, Esther Summerson, thought Hortense ‘seemed to bring visibly before me some woman from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror’. Even more disturbingly, it’s hinted that Hortense is a lesbian, and thereby even outside the sexual control of men. Dickens shows her as a wild beast, with a ‘feline mouth’. She pants, like a tigress, or else paces about, ‘a very near She-Wolf imperfectly tamed’. (‘You are a vixen, a vixen!’ says her victim.) Hortense is one of Dickens’s few effective grown-up female characters, and perfectly captures the middle-class fear that even the trusted servant living beneath one’s own roof could in fact be a murderer.
Maria Manning also achieved lasting fame at the Waxworks. In Madame Tussaud’s gallery, Punch noted, she stood ‘in silk attire, a beauteous thing to be daily rained upon by a shower of sixpences’. The moral poison of this display, the writer thought, seeped out ‘from the Chamber of Horrors, contaminating not only Baker Street, but all London’. Despite – or, perhaps, because of – the immorality she represented, her effigy became one of the ‘immortals’ of the gallery, remaining on display for well over a century. She was still there, on my very own first visit to the Chamber of Horrors, in the 1970s. And in a final, brilliantly weird detail, the gallery also displayed a model of Manning’s notorious Bermondsey kitchen.
AS WE HAVE seen, Dickens took a good deal of trouble to enjoy the Mannings’ execution, hiring a room, inviting friends, organizing refreshments. But in the end he found the occasion distressing and it caused him to become a vociferous opponent of public hangings. In his opinion, the crowd, baying for blood, was uncouth, frightening and uncivilized, and displayed tremendous ‘wickedness and levity’. In a letter to The Times, Dickens described how:
The figure of Maria Manning displayed in Madame Tussaud’s gallery, dressed in her celebrated black satin dress.
Thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment.
All in all, Dickens thought that:
When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, no more restraint … than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world.
Dickens soon started up a campaign against the practice of public hangings. But it was a form of spectacle that was already on the decline. The Mannings’ execution had drawn such a great deal of attention in part for the very reason that hangings had become something of a rarity.
The change had been inevitable since 1823 and the repeal of the set of laws known today as ‘The Bloody Code’. By 1800, there were more than 200 different crimes punishable by death. Many of these had been added to the statute book over the course of the eighteenth century, and were crimes against property: crimes carried out, essentially, by the poor, against the rich. You only had to steal goods worth twelve pence to run the risk of death by hanging.
The year 1823 had seen the passing of the ‘Judgement of Death Act’, which greatly reduced the number of capital crimes. From now on, the only criminals who would be punished by death were those guilty of treason or murder. Those convicted of property crimes were to be transported instead. It has long been traditional among historians to ascribe the change to a humanitarian and tolerant spirit among law-makers. But V. A. C. Gatrell finds our ancestors less sentimental than that, claiming that the legal system simply couldn’t cope with the huge number of hangings. The penalties were reduced simply to get justice moving again.
Either way, the reduction in the number of hangings was accompanied by a change in the nature of the criminals hanged. The eighteenth-century hanged man or woman was very often an Everyman or Everywoman, someone who had perhaps stolen goods worth a few pence and had the bad luck to be caught. There was a sense that anybody could accidentally become a criminal; that culpable weakness lurked in every human being. That is why the ‘loveable rogue’, the ‘Robin Hood’ figure and the gallant highwayman are stock figures in Georgian culture.
From 1823 onwards, though, only really bad men and women would be hanged. These people were seen as profoundly flawed, and fundamentally different from the spectators of their deaths. This essential otherness, this difference from the rest of us, is an essential angle of the glamorous murderer created by Thomas De Quincey.
Dickens in 1849 was acting, as he so often did, as a barometer of popular public opinion. If he thought that the spectacle of a hanging had grown distasteful, then so too would his enormous number of readers. People who believed themselves to be civilized no longer felt the need to experience the punishment dealt out to the guilty. They began to trust the proper authorities to see that done.
The law took a little time to catch up, but change it did, and the last public hanging took place in 1868. Capital punishment continued, but invisibly, behind the walls of prisons. And this was a vital precondition for the classic detective story to emerge. Detective fiction, unlike melodrama, or ‘Penny Blood’ fiction, didn’t care about retribution. Its concern was more the solution of crime.
Murderers themselves, the detectives who hunted them down, and the authors who processed real life into fiction: all were about to reach a new level of sophistication.
fn1 An inspector in the Metropolitan Police in 1866 made the parallel explicitly. It was his duty to mix ‘frequently with crowds, at theatre and different places […] it appears to me that they look upon a theatrical scene precisely in the same way as upon an execution’.
Part Two
Enter the detective
11
Middle-Class Murderers and Medical Gentlemen
‘Fie on these dealers in poison, say I: can they not keep to the old honest way of cutting throats?’
Thomas De Quincey, ‘On Murder’ (1821)
THE RATCLIFFE HIGHWAY Murders took place beneath the high walls of London’s Tobacco Dock, while Frederick and Maria Manning lived in cholera-stricken Bermondsey. John Williams, the seaman, and Maria Marten, the mole-catcher’s daughter, never brushed with high society. The events and characters of the first part of our story seemed a world away from the secure, prosperous homes of the West End. But once the ‘great’ murders of the earlier nineteenth century had given readers a taste for lurid death, the activity of enjoying a murder became increasingly acceptable higher up the social scale. Victorian murder became something of a middle-class pastime, and began to take place – both in real life and in fiction – at the heart of the supposedly safe haven of the respectable home.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the murder rate, as far as we can identify it, was once again falling: from 1.7 per 100,000 people in the 1860s, to 1 per 100,000 in the 1890s. Most crime continued to take place among the poverty-stricken and desperate, and criminals were most frequently young men accused of theft. Yet a murder in a well-to-do family was far more attractive t
o journalists and authors. We start to hear less about stabbing, bludgeoning and the cutting of throats, and much more about madness, bigamy and poison. And the archetypal murderer’s weapon of choice was something fairly ubiquitous in the Victorian home: arsenic.
Historian James Whorton describes the poison’s devastating effects if swallowed:
it produces a sharp, burning sensation in the stomach and oesophagus (usually about 30 to 60 minutes after ingestion), and then profuse vomiting and diarrhoea lasting for hours. Ultimately, the poison damages the heart and other viscera, but typically death comes only after 12 to 24 hours, or even longer. Statistics from the 1800s suggest that about half of those poisoned died.
Unfortunately for the health of the Victorians, arsenic was also a very useful chemical. It was commonly used for killing rats, in colouring green wallpaper and in fixing the bright new dyes that caused mid-century fashions to flare brightly with colour. Its insidious effects could be extremely debilitating: sometimes invalids got better during a trip to the seaside simply because they were no longer breathing in toxic fumes from their bedroom wallpaper at home.
And it was very readily available. ‘On account of the facility with which it may be procured in this country, even by the lowest of the vulgar,’ wrote one toxicologist in 1829, ‘it is the poison most frequently chosen for the purpose of committing murder.’ Completely odourless, it could easily be slipped into food or drink. In France, arsenic was known as poudre de succession, or ‘inheritance powder’, and until 1836 it was impossible to detect whether arsenic was present in a dead body. Its effects were almost indistinguishable from those of cholera.
That year, however, a chemist named James Marsh published an article in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal titled an ‘Account of a method of separating small quantities of arsenic from substances with which it may be mixed’. This was the so-called ‘Marsh Test’, a method of detecting arsenic, and the discovery would have far-reaching effects, raising people’s awareness of this silent, secret killer.
The 1840s became a decade characterized by a new fear of being poisoned. The journal Household Words claimed that 249 people had been poisoned to death between 1839 and 1849, but that only 85 murderers had been convicted. Poisoning was ‘a moral epidemic more formidable than any plague’, claimed the Pharmaceutical Journal. Likewise, The Times believed that many deaths by poison escaped the notice of doctors, and one of its writers pointed out the peculiar horror of a poisoning: ‘domestic treason’ was implied, the poisoner presenting the smiling face of spouse, friend or doctor.
But a big dose of arsenic was a crude and violent way of finishing someone off, and once the Marsh Test had been created, the murderer was in danger of detection if the remains of his victims were examined. It was much more sophisticated and slick to administer poison drop by drop, causing the victim’s health to decline over time, so that the final coup de grâce would arouse no suspicion. The ‘clumsy method of poisoning by large doses of arsenic’, as the Pharmaceutical Journal put it, was about to give way to poisoning ‘as an exact science’.
One of the most prolific poisoners of the period (at least among those caught) was Mary Ann Cotton, who seems to have successfully killed three husbands, fifteen children or step-children and a lodger. Her motive was to benefit financially from insurance policies taken out in their names. Suspicion was aroused when, after the death of one of her little boys, she visited the insurance company’s office even before calling on the doctor. She was found guilty and hanged at Durham Gaol.
Many believed (albeit without particularly convincing proof) that the new and vigorous industry of life insurance was growing hand in hand with sales of deadly arsenic. Such was the concern that, in 1850, Parliament decided that the lives of children under three years old could not be insured for more than £3.
But the most sensational poisoner case of the nineteenth century was that of William Palmer, of Rugeley. Its notoriety was due to the fact that – like Harold Shipman in the twentieth century – every affluent newspaper reader felt that he or she could easily have become one of his victims. For Palmer was a doctor.
Born in Staffordshire in 1824, Palmer trained as a chemist in Liverpool, studied medicine in London and obtained his licence from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1846. He then returned to his native Rugeley to practise. Palmer struggled to live within his means, and also seemed terribly unlucky in his family life. He married, and his mother-in-law came to join his household. She soon died in mysterious circumstances. Four of Palmer’s children then died, of ‘convulsions’. These deaths didn’t seem unusual at first – infant deaths were much more common at the time – but when his wife died, too, at the age of 27, it seemed that Palmer was shedding relatives with remarkable rapidity. He had insured her life for £13,000.
Dr William Palmer of Rugeley, poisoner.
Palmer attempted to take out another life insurance policy on his brother, who suffered from alcoholism, but now his actions were beginning to arouse suspicion. The insurance company sent Dickens’s friend, Inspector Field, to Rugeley to investigate what was going on (Scotland Yard detectives were available for private hire by anyone with the money to pay). Field concluded that the company should not pay up, as Palmer had been encouraging his brother to drink himself to death. Meanwhile, he’d also begun an affair with his housemaid, with whom he had an illegitimate child. It seemed that Palmer’s life was slipping out of his control.
Financial security could, perhaps, have been restored if Palmer’s final plot, against another friend, John Parsons Cook, had succeeded. Cook was a rich if weak-willed young man, who was Palmer’s betting buddy. After a very successful day’s gambling together at the horse races in 1855, Cook was flush with funds. But instead of enjoying his triumph, he felt rather sick, and was overheard to claim that ‘that damn Palmer has been dosing me’. Cook retreated to the Talbot Arms Inn, in Rugeley, to recuperate. Luckily, it seems, this inn was situated opposite Palmer’s house, so Cook’s friend was on hand to provide treatment. But the patient’s condition only improved when Palmer was called away to London.
On Palmer’s return, the pattern of sickness returned too. Cook seems repeatedly to have fallen ill after drinks given to him by his doctor: after the brandy, a cup of coffee, and after the coffee, a bowl of soup. (Palmer is often credited with introducing a novelty into the English language: the friendly offer of a drink, ‘What’s your poison?’ Rather disappointingly, however, its first recorded use dates from well after his death.) Poor old Cook eventually expired, vomiting and writhing, his entire body convulsed by his agonising final throes.
The death throes of Joseph Cook were much discussed. The arching of the body could have been the result of tetanus, or strychnine poisoning.
It later emerged that Palmer had been a frequent purchaser of strychnine, although the two chemists who’d sold it to him had both failed to record the fact – as they were obliged to by law – in their shop’s ‘Poison Books’. And, once Cook was dead, Palmer was able further to exploit his standing as a doctor. Even though Cook had accused Palmer of poisoning him during his last, painful hours, the doctor was allowed, as a courtesy, to attend his friend’s post-mortem.
It was a procedure flawed from start to finish. The coroner’s assistant, Charles Newton, had been drinking, and Palmer exploited the general atmosphere of disorganization to jostle the person charged with removing Cook’s stomach so that its contents were spilt on the floor. Later, it seems that Palmer tried to bribe the courier charged with taking the stomach to the London train to make it go missing, and when it arrived in London for analysis the jar in which the stomach had been placed was found to have been tampered with: its top had been slit open. Palmer also wrote to the coroner, asking for Cook’s death to be ascribed to natural causes, and enclosing a ten-pound bribe.
All this came out at Palmer’s trial, which was followed with enormous interest and enthusiasm. The Law Times would call it ‘the longest, greatest, gravest and mo
st important criminal trial of the nineteenth century’. It piqued the interest of a generation who believed that poison and poisoners were everywhere. It also brought to prominence a new type of medical expert: the analytical chemist.
The prosecution’s job was to prove that Palmer had used poison. A vast array of expert witnesses now appeared in the courtroom, some to make the case, others to refute it. These people and their expertise were unfamiliar to the reading public, but now they stepped forward into the limelight and into the newspapers. Numerous pictures of the ‘analytical chemists’ appeared in the press, and their testimony was reproduced, word for word, for the nation to read over breakfast.
‘Expert witnesses’ in toxicology had begun to appear in trials in the eighteenth century, but it was the development of the Marsh Test for arsenic that gave the specialist chemist his role in murder cases. From 1836, when the test was established, it gradually became clear that it needed to be conducted by a qualified chemist, and not simply by the doctor who performed the post-mortem. The test itself was dangerous: indeed, by the year 1900, no fewer than eight scientists had themselves died from inhaling the fumes while performing it. In the media glare of Palmer’s trial, specialist toxicologists such as Alfred Swaine Taylor, of Guy’s Hospital in London, and William Herapath, of St Peter’s Hospital in Bristol, became the faces of an exciting new profession.