by Lucy Worsley
The aim of ‘the Medical Gentlemen’, as they were called, was ambitious: it was to make the corpse speak. They claimed, in their laboratories, to be able to read invisible evidence from the dead body that could tell the story of a crime. As one writer put it of the contemporary toxicologist, his work caused ‘the vulgar to marvel at the mysterious power by which an atom [of poison] mingled amidst a mass of confused ingesta can still be detected’.
But Dr William Palmer’s case was filled with suspense because, despite their best efforts, these magicians of the modern age failed to prove that there was strychnine in Cook’s stomach. Taylor, the most prominent among all the toxicologists, was on the prosecution side. But he was unable to identify strychnine in Cook’s body, finding instead only a little bit of antimony, a heavy metal. This latter drug was indeed poisonous, but it was also a constituent of many medicines, and its presence did not prove murder. The difficulty was that strychnine was extremely hard to find. It was, as Taylor said, ‘so speedily absorbed in the blood that in the course of an hour after the administration no chemical test at present known could detect it’.
Taylor, a well-known expert witness and the author of a book called A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, was particularly good at combining legal precedent and knowledge of the workings of the law with chemistry. Unlike others, he understood the different standards of ‘proof’ required in the courtroom and in medicine. ‘A court of law,’ he wrote, ‘requires to know whether arsenic [for example] was present and was the cause of death, rather than whether it was mixed with traces of bismuth or lead, a fact which however interesting in a chemical, is wholly unimportant in a medico-legal way.’
At Palmer’s trial, though, William Herapath, a pioneer of arsenic testing, provided Taylor with a worthy adversary. The two of them were in competition for status and success, and Herapath led the team of ten medical witnesses for the defence, all of them arguing for the weakness of the process of identifying strychnine in the body.
However, despite the absence of evidence for strychnine, Palmer was still convicted. The evidence of the poison purchase, Palmer’s parlous financial situation and his suspicious behaviour at the postmortem all told against him. The work of Taylor and the medical experts for the prosecution was bolstered by the testimony of the chambermaid at the inn who witnessed Cook’s death: the arching of his spine as he died, the stiffening of his limbs and the wild look in his eyes were all considered compatible with the poison theory.
Palmer was hanged on 14 June 1856, before a crowd of 30,000 at Stafford prison. On the scaffold, he apparently teased or taunted those following his case with these words: ‘I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.’ Did he mean he was altogether innocent? Or was he hinting at the use of some other poison? It was a wonderfully titillating moment, and there are still residents of Rugeley today who believe that Palmer, their local hero, was innocent.
Taylor seemed to have won the tussle between the toxicologists. But despite his star status among the medical witnesses, his failure to find any evidence of strychnine in Cook’s body damaged his reputation. In subsequent editions of his Manual, which had been published before the Palmer trial, he took the trouble to include several pages justifying his actions. And years later, Herapath would get his revenge. In 1859, Taylor made an unfortunate mistake in the trial of one Thomas Smethurst. He’d relied upon just one type of test for arsenic, when it would have been wiser to check his results with the multiple methods by then available. Herapath wrote to The Times, accusing Taylor of ‘a bungle’, and claiming that ‘no sound chemist’ would have certified ‘to the presence of arsenic by such an analysis’. It’s amusing to hear these lofty and respectable men of science doing each other down, but it also shows how they, along with the science they represented, were still feeling their way, testing and promoting different means of determining the truth.
AS THE HISTORIAN Ian Burney has pointed out, poisoning was a crime that was peculiarly attractive to the Victorian imagination. Murder by poisoning fitted in with much that was novel about their contemporary society. People now lived in cities, cheek by jowl with strangers, at a distant remove from their kin and friends. Poison was administered remotely, impersonally. It wasn’t a crime of passion, but instead embodied what might even be considered to be typical Victorian virtues: forethought and meticulous planning.
Poison was unnatural and invisible, like many of the chemicals that made the Victorians’ world comfortable and convenient by comparison with the past. It could only be detected by modern medical professionals with skills and subtlety as advanced as those of the poisoner himself. As William Baker, a coroner, said in 1840: ‘In the rude ages, the means resorted to … was always of a bold and violent description, and left its traces behind, but now villainy is so refined … that the murderer leaves scarcely a clue to his discovery.’
The fathers of prosperous families who were living the Victorian ideal – a big, respectable town house, servants, wife’s life insured – were particularly affected by the story of poisoners like William Palmer. He even looked like one of them. In physical appearance, Palmer was likened to ‘John Bull’: the archetypal red-faced, bluff, hearty Englishman.
And yet, at the same time he had enormous debts, he was addicted to betting on horses, he had voracious and improper sexual appetites. In short, he was a man with a secret darkness at the heart of his apparently successful life. William Bally, one of the phrenologists who examined Palmer’s head, claims to have read exactly this from the bumps of the murderer’s skull: ‘a man who, as a rule, would be respectful, polite and even charitable; but one who, for any preconceived object, would act most cunningly and secretly, perfectly indifferent to honour or truth.’
To middle-class readers of the newspapers, the respectable sounding Dr William Palmer was the first in a run of a new and horrifying type of murderer, who seemed to have access to their very own drawing rooms. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may have had the last word on the specific threat he presented. ‘When a doctor goes wrong,’ said Sherlock Holmes of Palmer, years later, in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, ‘he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.’
12
The Good Wife
‘The men of the middle classes do not choose that their females should work for money, so we have no option but … the monotonous round of home-pursuits – busy idleness, unremunerative employment.’
Anonymous female writer in The National Magazine, 1857
AS WE’VE SEEN in the case of Maria Manning, the Victorians found it hard to know what to think about murderesses. The female members of middle-class families were supposed to be pure, virtuous, most influential within, and best confined to, the domestic realm. What was a murderous woman, then? She must be crazed, wanton, or suffering from some horrible sickness. This was necessary to protect her father, husband and male associates from accusations that they had failed to keep her in check. It was impossible that she could look or behave like a normal person.
And if she did look and behave normally, what then? Despite the difficulties that lie in revisiting and attempting to resolve cases more than a century old, it seems perfectly possible that a couple of the celebrated poison cases of the later nineteenth century involved women who actually managed to get away with their crimes. This was in part because, despite the considerable evidence against them, people simply couldn’t quite believe that a well-born, well-spoken, attractive young female could have committed murder.
IN 1857, WHEN she was only 22, a young lady named Madeleine Smith was accused of poisoning Pierre Émile L’Angelier, a young man from a lower social class. Brought up in upper-middle-class Glasgow, cosseted by her parents, Madeleine began her relationship with L’Angelier when she was 19 and recently returned home from boarding school. Conventionally for her background and station, Madeleine’s education had been devoted to preparing her for life as a wife. This was, in many ways, a training in the art of deception. In many boarding schools
, the mistresses read all the pupils’ correspondence, with the result that the girls would bribe servants to deliver private letters. ‘Concealment and deception prevail in girls’ schools,’ ranted Fraser’s Magazine. ‘Girls learn to grasp after show and pomp; and, as women can rarely acquire these for themselves, they are taught to look at marriage as the means of making their fortune.’ It was true too of life beyond the schoolroom: Madeleine’s success or failure would be measured by the speed and splendour of her engagement.
Despite his romantic name, L’Angelier was far from being the rich, dream husband Madeleine’s parents desired. Originally from Jersey, he had spent some time in France, and was now a clerk in a shipping firm. His friends in Glasgow described him as being moody and dissatisfied with his lot. He met Madeleine in the only possible place where such an intersection of the classes could happen: out on the public street. Attraction sparked between them immediately, and they went on to exchange over 60 letters, which were smuggled out of Madeleine’s parents’ house by a maidservant. Madeleine showed herself to be pragmatic to the point of cold-heartedness in arranging all this. She blackmailed a family servant into delivering the letters, by threatening to reveal that this maid had an unauthorized young man of her own.
Madeleine and L’Angelier (they called each other ‘Mimi’ and ‘Émile’) also had secret meetings during which their physical relationship progressed beyond the point – for a Victorian young lady – of no return. She took issue with the very real expectation that she should marry well. ‘It was expected that I would marry a man with money,’ she wrote to Émile, but ‘I take the man I love. I know that all my friends shall forsake me, but for that I don’t care.’
When Madeleine’s side of this correspondence emerged during the course of her trial, it caused a sensation. It showed that even a middle-class girl could want, indeed enjoy, sex. ‘I am now a wife, a wife in every sense of the word,’ she wrote to Émile on 27 June 1856, although they had not of course actually undergone a wedding ceremony. ‘I can never be the wife of another after our intimacy,’ she promised, reassuring herself that: ‘Our intimacy has not been criminal, as I am [his] wife before God, so it has been no sin our loving each other.’
However, Émile never married his Mimi. Over time she cooled towards him – something else that young ladies were not supposed to do – and tried to fob him off with various excuses. Her parents, unaware of their daughter’s relationship, were putting pressure on her to marry, and she feared they might discover everything. Finally, Émile learned from a third party that Madeleine’s parents had arranged for her to marry someone else who was much more suitable, one of her father’s business associates.
It seems that Madeleine feared that her cast-off lover, hurt and angry, had the power to ruin her life by revealing all about their relationship. She certainly begged him not to, writing: ‘Émile, for God’s sake, do not send my letters to papa. It will be an open rupture. I will leave the house. I will die …’
In March 1857, they had several more assignations – tearful and tortured, one imagines – Madeleine inside her parents’ house and talking to Émile through the kitchen window. At one of them she gave him a cup of hot chocolate; afterwards he suffered from an upset stomach. Two days after their final meeting, he died.
It was the discovery of Madeleine’s letters at Émile’s lodging house that drew her to the attention of the police. They also found her name in a chemist’s ‘Poison Book’, which revealed that she had made two recent purchases of arsenic. The poison could have been intended, as Madeleine claimed, to kill rats, or else as a facial treatment. But it could also have been a way of ridding herself of a grave, and potentially life-wrecking, embarrassment.
Madeleine’s letters themselves were not read out during her trial, and now we see how a descending veil of decency began to obscure the true details of her actions: ‘All objectionable expressions, all gross and indelicate allusions were carefully and studiously omitted … that the feelings of the prisoner might not be overwhelmed by such a terrible publicity.’
And, despite the damage to her reputation, Madeleine Smith got off. She was a young, attractive, romantic figure, and aroused a great deal of sympathy. She simply didn’t look like a murderess. Reports of her behaviour in prison made her sound well brought up and innocent: she spent her time ‘in light reading, with occasional regrets at the want of a piano’. Even the phrenologist appointed to ‘read’ Madeleine’s character from the shape of her skull found her admirable, with a propensity for mathematics. ‘Owing to her strong affections and healthy temperament,’ he wrote, ‘she will make a treasure of a wife to a worthy husband.’ This was a sharp contrast to the conclusions reached on William Palmer. One suspects that these phrenologists tended to be influenced by the impression they had formed of the person before even feeling his or her head.
The young and attractive Madeleine Smith, whose guilt was ‘not proven’.
The Scottish jury voted the accusations against her ‘not proven’, the announcement was cheered in court and the world at large glowed with compassion for Madeleine. Among women, she became ‘quite a heroine’. The Northern British Mail claimed that her fellow females regarded her as:
a thoughtless but most interesting and warm-hearted young woman – one who in the simplicity of her heart, in her first love affair, abandoned herself to the man of her choice, with an amount of confiding love and outspoken artlessness of purpose, which, censure or regret as they may, they cannot regard without sympathy and admiration.
To many, it was all Émile’s fault, for seducing her.
The tradesmen of Glasgow even raised a subscription so that the now-glamorous Madeleine would have some money upon which to live. Newspapers bandied around the figure of £10,000. This was raised for the intriguing young girl who may or may not have killed Émile (the verdict of ‘not proven’ was quite as good as ‘not guilty’). Meanwhile, as Judith Flanders points out, Émile’s poor old mother, whose son was dead and who had been left with absolutely no means of support, was also given a gift by the public. She received just over £89.
It’s tempting to see Madeleine’s rebelliousness, her increasingly dangerous choices, as being motivated by boredom with a restrictive, unexciting, middle-class domestic life. The idea that nineteenth-century life was split into separate spheres of influence, public and private, male and female, the powerful and the powerless, can easily be created with choice quotations from advice and etiquette manuals.
But in reality it disguised a more complicated picture. The Victorians defined ‘work’ as an activity that took place outside the home. Therefore, much of what Victorian women did in running houses and contributing to family businesses seemed invisible to the eyes of outsiders. Indeed, to appease the pride of their husbands, many women pretended to work less than they really did.
Even if it was often ignored, though, there was a powerful image in contemporary culture of the ideal female as calming, decorative, exerting a moral influence through virtue, rather than an active influence through the toil of her hands or brain. Madeleine Smith seemed unenthusiastic, or at least ambivalent, about this vision of her future – but it was an ideal that eventually saved her.
This story of a young girl hiding from the consequences of her crime behind the conventional view of Victorian womanhood seems almost too good to true, bringing out as it does all the clichés about nineteenth-century society. Historians of the period are at pains to point out that the supposed neuroses and anxieties about the body that make up such a significant part of our popular idea of Victorian middle-class life are merely a twentieth-century construct. For example, the celebrated myth that the Victorians thought piano legs immodest and covered them up in special fabric sleeves has long been exploded. Of course not every Victorian female teenager was virginal, nor was every married woman in comfortable circumstances kept happy and busy by domestic duties, church attendance and bringing up her children. Yet neither were they all seething with repressio
n and passions unfulfilled. We still remember women like Maria Manning and Madeleine Smith because they made contemporaries ask questions of themselves about what was womanly, and what was not.
FLORENCE BRAVO, THE heroine of the so-called ‘Balham Mystery’ or ‘The Murder at The Priory’, was an even more intriguing character than Madeleine Smith. Young, rich and beautiful, Florence was also rather a poor picker when it came to men. Her first husband, Alexander Ricardo, whom she’d married at 19, gradually revealed himself to be a violent and unfaithful alcoholic. ‘I was very happy with him when we first met,’ Florence recalled, ‘but he gradually became more and more abusive – always attacking me and saying terrible things.’
The feisty Florence wouldn’t stand for this. In the teeth of opposition from her family, she left her husband, claiming ill health, and retreated to a hydro in Malvern to recuperate. The hydro Florence attended was run by Dr James Gully, a man with a magnetic personality. Then in his sixties, but vigorous and energetic, he worked hard on behalf of his female patients, whose problems were frequently emotional as much as physical. On Florence’s behalf, he now negotiated with her family for a financial settlement upon which she could live. Florence repaid his kindness by falling in love with him, and they embarked upon a physical relationship.
Florence now had the financial means to live a more exciting life within reach of London. She rented a new home, The Priory, a grand house in Balham, and persuaded Dr Gully to take a house of his own nearby. But their affair petered out after Florence had a miscarriage.
The beautiful, rich and young Florence Bravo, who may have got away with poisoning her husband.
She wanted the respectability of being married once more, and again, in 1875, she chose badly. Charles Bravo was young, handsome and an ambitious barrister. However, it seems pretty clear that he married Florence merely for her money. Tensions arose almost immediately, because the ‘Married Women’s Property Act’ had just been passed (1870), which allowed Florence to insist upon maintaining control over her very considerable estate.