The Lady in the Cellar
Page 30
13 – As above
14 – As above
15 – As above
16 – As above
17 – The further mortuary details as reported in The Times, 17 May 1879
18 – As above
19 – As reported in Reynolds News, 17 May 1879
20 – As above
21 – Severin Bastendorff, as relayed to a correspondent from the Dundee Courier, 17 May 1879
22 – As above
23 – As above
Chapter 6
1 – From ‘The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World: Shewing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him and Who Passed Him By’ by William Makepeace Thackeray, first published in serial form in Cornhill magazine, 1861–62
2 – Paul Kelver by Jerome K Jerome (Hutchinson and Co., 1902)
3 – The Nether World by George Gissing (Smith, Elder, 1889)
Chapter 7
1 – The Morning Post, 17 May 1879
2 – As above
3 – The Morning Post, 19 May 1879
Chapter 8
1 – London Evening Standard, 19 May 1879
2 – As above
3 – ‘Our Canterbury Correspondent Writes’ in the London Evening Standard, 19 May 1879
4 – As above
5 – As above
6 – As above
7 – ‘A Brighton correspondent says …’ The intelligence sent via telegram and published in the London Evening Standard, 20 May 1879
8 – As above
9 – London Evening Standard, 21 May 1879
Chapter 9
1 – Sometimes known as Napoleon’s Oraculum and The Book of Dreams or Dream-Book, this text, said by eager publishers to have been by Napoleon’s side constantly, was first translated into English in 1822, and subsequently went through many reprints and inspired many fortune-telling rivals. The text itself featured hundreds of closely typed prognostications, many of which now have the distinct feel of fortune cookies.
2 – As above
Chapter 10
1 – As reported in the London Evening Standard, as well as other newspapers around the country, 24 May 1879
2 – As above
3 – As above
4 – As above
5 – As reported in the Daily News, 27 May 1879. In contrast to the Standard’s reporter finding Hannah Dobbs stout, the News correspondent was adamant that she was ‘tall, good-looking’.
6 – As above
7 – As above
8 – As above
9 – As reported in The Times, 21 June 1879
Chapter 11
1 – As compiled in Luxembourg: Land of Legends by W.J. Taylor Whitehead (Constable, 1951)
2 – From Severin Bastendorff’s own written testimony, reproduced later by the Daily Telegraph on 20 December 1879
3 – As above
4 – In the 1870s, the front page of each day’s edition of The Times carried not news or photographs, but hundreds of small classified advertisements arranged by area of interest. The furniture advertisements were profuse.
5 – As above
6 – Henry Mayhew writing for the Morning Chronicle and published in London Labour and London Poor, Vol. 3 (Giffin Bohn, 1861)
7 – As described in Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford University Press, 1986)
Chapter 13
1 – As reported in numerous newspapers, including the London Evening Standard on 4 June 1879, and the Illustrated Police News. As with previous court reports, there are some variations; this chapter presents a synthesis of these reports.
2 – As above
3 – As reported by the Illustrated Police News, a few days later, on 14 July 1879
Chapter 14
1 – Grand Guignol was a turn-of-the-century French theatre genre specialising in baroque depictions of murder and violence, from dismemberments to scalping
2 – Editorial from The Spectator, 12 July 1879
3 – As above
4 – The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant by Pamela Horn (Gill and Macmillan, 1975)
5 – As above
6 – Victorian Women’s Magazines – An Anthology, edited by Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman (Manchester University Press, 2001)
7 – As above
Chapter 15
1 – The trial was reported in numerous newspapers; this chapter draws chiefly on the account given in The Times, 3 July 1879
2 – As above
3 – As above
4 – As above
Chapter 16
1 – As with the previous day’s proceedings, the case was comprehensively covered in a wide variety of publications; and again, this chapter draws chiefly on the account given in The Times, 4 July 1879
2 – As above
3 – As above
4 – As above
5 – As above
6 – As above
7 – As above
8 – As above
Chapter 17
1 – This detail, together with a brief account of her life in what was then called Devonshire, appeared in the opening section of ‘Hannah Dobbs’ – a pamphlet published by George Purkess in September 1879. The autobiographical pamphlet, for which Hannah Dobbs received payment, was ghostwritten and its true author or authors are not named. It is available to read at The British Newspaper Archive at the British Library Reading Rooms, St Pancras, and at Boston Spa.
2 – Victorian Womens’ Magazines, as above
3 – The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, as above
4 – The phrase is from Tess of the D’Urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
5 – From the pamphlet ‘Hannah Dobbs’, in the first section of which she sketched out her early life and career
6 – As above
7 – As above
Chapter 18
1 – Details from the pamphlet ‘Hannah Dobbs’, as above
2 – As above
3 – As reported in The Era, October 1875
Chapter 19
1 – There is a file in the National Archives on the case chiefly composed of correspondence between various police departments. It is under the reference HO 144/41/8411
2 – From the pamphlet ‘Hannah Dobbs’, which although relatively short, was split into several sections. This was from the second, headlined ‘The History of Miss Hacker while in Euston Square’.
3 – As above. Throughout the course of the mystery, Hannah Dobbs never gave a consistent account of the miscarriage; at one point, it was darkly alleged in a hint that Severin Bastendorff was partly responsible – that he ‘gave her something’.
4 – As above. The hyper-focused nature of her memories of Matilda Hacker and the details of ordinary domestic life are in fascinating contrast to the ambiguity that is to follow.
5 – As above
Chapter 20
1 – From the pamphlet ‘Hannah Dobbs’, as above. It was the point in the narrative which Scotland Yard knew would have to be investigated with some speed, despite Dobbs subsequently refusing to answer any straightforward questions on the matter.
2 – From the back page of the pamphlet ‘Hannah Dobbs’, placed directly beneath the reproduction of her signature
Chapter 21
1 – This delightfully cynical and true sentiment – voiced in the Kerry Evening Post, 1 October 1879
2 – As reported in The Morning Chronicle, 5 October 1879
3 – The response from Hannah Dobbs, issued through her solicitor based in Grays Inn Square, was reported on the same day
4 – The Morning Chronicle, 5 October 1879
5 – The Morning Chronicle, 5 October 1879
6 – London Evening Standard, 11 October 1879
Chapter 22
1 – The Times gave a full report of the hearing on 1 November 1879
2 – As above
3 – As above
Chapter 23
1 – As reported in The
Times, 4 December 1879
2 – The unexpurgated transcript – The Times moderated much of Dobbs’ sensational evidence, redacting and substituting much of her explicit language with the term ‘improprieties’ – is available at www.oldbaileyonline.org which has many historical trials
3 – As reported in The Times, 5 December 5, 1879
4 – As above
5 – As above. The legal wranglings concerning the need for Peter Bastendorff to be either present or absent from the court had previously proceeded at some length.
Chapter 24
1 – The Times’ leader was interestingly reproduced by The North Devon Journal on 11 December 1879; the local interest was of course intense
2 – London Evening Standard, 18 December 1879
3 – Daily Telegraph, 20 December 1879
4 – Victorian Prison Lives by Philip Priestley (Methuen 1985)
5 – As above
6 – Daily Telegraph, 20 December 1879
7 – Victorian Prison Lives, as above
8 – As above
Chapter 25
1 – Reported in the Pall Mall Gazette, 27 January 1881
2 – As above
3 – Census details to be found at the London Metropolitan Archives; they are also available via subscription to ancestry.co.uk
4 – Quoted in Psychiatry for the Poor by Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine (Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1974)
5 – As displayed in the London Evening Standard on 3 October 1885
6 – Reported at his court case by the London Evening Standard, 13 January 1886
7 – As above
8 – As reported, among other newspapers, by the Yorkshire Gazette, 28 May 1887
9 – Severin Bastendorff’s records are held in the London Metropolitan Archives. It is necessary to visit the site to see them. Nor are they filed directly under his name; rather, the Archives hold files of ledgers from the former Colney Hatch hospital, handwritten and kept alphabetically by patient name, year by year.
10 – As above
11 – As above
Chapter 26
1 – As reported in Reynolds Newspaper, 3 April 1881
Chapter 27
1 – First published in 1903, and serialised across the country for several years afterwards, in newspapers such as the Derbyshire Courier.
2 – Rooms of Mystery by Elliott O’Donnell (Philip Allan and Co., 1931)
3 – The Canterbury Belles, staged by The Really Promising Company in 2017
Picture credits
p.1 Above: © Mary Evans Picture Library, below: Courtesy of The National Archives, ref. HO334/8/2587
p.2 Above: © Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo, below: © Mary Evans Picture Library;
p.3 Above: © Mary Evans Picture Library, below: Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk);
p.4 Above: © 19th era 2/Alamy Stock Photo, below: Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
p.5 Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk);
p.6 © Mary Evans Picture Library;
p.8 above: © London Metropolitan Archives, City of London, below: © Antiqua Print Gallery/Alamy Stock Photo.
Afterword:
A Bloomsbury and Somers Town Walk
Number 4, Euston Square – and, indeed, half of the square itself – is long gone. In the 1960s, the northern half was redeveloped as offices and a bus station for the railway station. But it is still possible, in some nearby corners, to see the city that Hannah Dobbs, Severin Bastendorff and Matilda Hacker moved through daily.
Just a few streets south of the Euston Road and St Pancras station is Mecklenburgh Square. Although hit in the Blitz, it has two beautiful surviving Georgian terraces which look over a large garden square. The terraces are close in feel and style to those of Euston Square in 1879. The wide road, at the weekend, is broadly traffic free. And it is possible to stand here, gazing at the houses, and imagine what it would be like filled with horse-drawn vehicles.
Now, dart a few hundred yards north, over the Euston Road, up past the red brick wonder of St Pancras International station, and thence to the extraordinary graveyard of St Pancras Old Church: the Hardy Tree – with all the gravestones pressed and clamouring around it – is still there. And, if you step inside the church, dating back to the eleventh century, you feel thrillingly removed from time.
Then beyond to Camley Street, Goods Way and the renovated wonder of the gas works, canal and rail-marshalling yards: Victorian industrial architecture on a vast scale, now repurposed for the modern city. The Bloomsbury promenading enjoyed by young Victorians has been transposed here triumphantly – now couples stroll along a landscaped towpath, past dancing fountains, enjoying the restaurants, theatres, nature reserve.
And, more than anyone, Matilda Hacker, dressed in her blue silk dress and sash, would have absolutely adored this fashionable concourse.
Afterword Two:
Illustrated Murder and Mayhem! – The Victorian Press
For those who loathe the excesses of today’s popular press, it will be no consolation to hear that it used to be very much worse. Throughout the latter years of the Victorian age, the reading public thrilled to the gaudy, gory reporting featured in the Illustrated Police News. This was a publication that danced weekly along the borders of extreme bad taste. It was the prototype for the modern tabloid.
Despite the title, the paper – published on Saturdays – had no official connection with Scotland Yard. This was the news as gleaned from the courts and inquests: and reported with all the juiciest details. Also thrown into the mix were disasters: horse-drawn coach crashes, people falling off roofs, accidental drownings.
Of course, the case of Severin and Mary Bastendorff, Hannah Dobbs and ‘The Euston Square Mystery’ was rich material for the paper in 1879; not just the murder, but the unfolding multiple scandals of sexual impropriety. And the paper’s proprietor, George Purkess, bought Hannah Dobbs’s exclusive and wildly libellous story for a spin-off publication. It brought ruin to the Bastendorffs, but it was all just business for Purkess. He had started the paper in 1864, casting his news wide on a weekly basis to catch all sorts of sensational stories: shootings, suicides, domestic violence, colonial massacres.
The front page of every Saturday carried a variety of engraved illustrations: the highlights of that week’s menu of mayhem. ‘Shocking Suicide on a Train’ had an image of a train conductor finding a young man slumped in his seat, bleeding from the temple, a revolver at his feet. Elsewhere, there was an ‘Assault with a Flat Iron’, with a husband pictured in the act of raising the weapon to his wife.
Some of these lurid stories were a little more baroque: ‘Attempted Assassination of Two Priests’ was illustrated with a gunfight in a large Catholic church. ‘The Policeman and The Ghost’ had a wonderfully creepy night-time engraving of a constable in a graveyard in Bootle being startled by a staring, wide-eyed woman in white.
There were lighter items, too. Amid the assaults and stabbings were ‘Monkey Chased Across Town’ and ‘Fall from an Omnibus’, as well as an unlikely tale concerning a sailor on a tropical island being speared just as he found a chest of treasure.
The paper covered disasters as well: on 28 December 1879, during a violent storm in the Tay Estuary, the railway bridge to Dundee collapsed and a train was derailed and fell calamitously into the churning waters beneath. The Illustrated Police News depicted various scenes from the tragedy, including an engraving of divers under the water fishing corpses from the carriages. There was no sense of holding back. (Indeed, the paper was keenly aware of questions of class: one of its illustrated panels of the disaster involved the ‘search for the First Class carriage’.)
Though always popular, it hit a giddy new height in the late summer of 1888. ‘Revolting and My
sterious Murder of a Woman in Whitechapel’ ran the headline beneath an engraving of a female corpse in an East End alley. Jack the Ripper’s dark career had begun. But it was a while before the killer was given this name. The Illustrated Police News was there to report that ‘the Monster of Whitechapel’ had struck again. It started carrying drawings of suspects wearing butcher’s aprons; little scenes with early speech balloons featuring men accosting women outside East End pubs and offering them drinks (‘will you?’); and local women preparing to fight back: ‘Ready for the Whitechapel Fiend: Women Secretly Armed’ came with an illustration of ladies in Commercial Street holding knives.
The Ripper struck five times; sales went into the stratosphere. And amid the illustration panels were captions involving ‘a foreign-looking gentleman’ – the publication had always had an undercurrent of xenophobia.
By the turn of the century, the News was focusing ever more strongly on immigration, playing on racist notions of violent foreigners: this was the poisoned atmosphere in which the first serious government effort to restrict immigration – the Aliens Act of 1905 – was brought in. By this time, Purkess was dead (he had passed away in 1892), but the News lived on; surprisingly, into the 1930s.
It is instructive to look back at issues from its earlier years: of course, fascination with crime and murder has been with us since Cain and Abel. But what we see in these late Victorian engravings is a distinct aesthetic: the frozen, captured moment of violence or terror, the captions written in a stylised, florid hand. It is real-life given the patina of drama or fiction: knowing and brashly entertaining. The front page illustrations for ‘The Euston Square Mystery’, featuring portraits of Mr and Mrs Bastendorff, Hannah Dobbs and the house itself, conveyed a sense of a tasteful middle-class world, juxtaposed with Gothic menace and seamy scandal. George Purkess, in commissioning these images, did much to create an idea of the Victorian age that we still hold today. And however much we may disapprove of such vulgar excess, it remains to us undeniably and shamefully alluring.
Selected Further Reading
When you find yourself looking at a nineteenth-century street map, or a similarly old street photograph or engraving, there is sometimes that strong yearning to physically enter the past: to see the people, the shops and the traffic, to summon the sights and flavours, the smells in the air. While researching this book, there were so many times – buried in various volumes and original Victorian documentation – when I found myself in a trance-like state. From the prospect of mules pulling blue-liveried trams along the Euston Road to the dense, clanking, nocturnal industry of the great rail terminals to the first widespread use of electric light and the fascinating tokens of immigration, the London of 1879 seemed, at once, a different world and incredibly close at hand. For those who want to know more, there are a few fascinating books focusing in on these and related areas.