The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse
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And then there was Dickens’ lifelong friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, credited with the invention of detective fiction in his mystery novel The Moonstone (1868). A bachelor throughout his life, Collins, like the 5th Duke of Portland, preferred the company of those socially below him. A master of the double existence, he had two mistresses – Caroline Graves, a widow from a humble family, and Martha Rudd, also a working-class girl, with whom he had several children. When in the company of Martha he assumed the name William Dawson, and she and his children by her took the last name of Dawson themselves. Lodging very close to the Duke of Portland’s London residence with his ‘official’ mistress Caroline Graves, Collins’ separate household headed by Martha Rudd was installed at the top of the very same road. As a result, Collins was able to switch identities between ‘Collins’ the dilettante writer and ‘Dawson’ the family man, with the same ease that he changed his frock coat for his overcoat, according to the weather.
Victorian celebrities who had led less than straightforward private lives were represented equally well on the eastern side of the cemetery. For here were to be found the graves of the female novelist George Eliot (in real life Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch). She was laid to rest next to her lover, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. The couple lived together in Richmond, despite the fact that when he met George Eliot, Lewes was already married to another woman, Agnes Jervis, with whom he had agreed to have an ‘open relationship’. In fact, Agnes had children by both Lewes and other men, several of whom were falsely registered on their birth certificates as Lewes’ children. Also living in Richmond, although not buried at Highgate, was the Victorian sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon – author of the bestselling novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Her partner, the periodical publisher John Maxwell, was already married with five children when he met Mary, his wife conveniently locked up in an Irish asylum. Mary acted as stepmother to Maxwell’s children until his wife died in 1874, finally enabling the couple to marry. She had six children by him, several born before they were married.
Nor were double lives limited to bohemian members of the Victorian literary establishment. Members of the solid middle class also indulged in alternative existences. On 22 November 1875, a respected businessman who had owned a brush-making firm stood trial at the Old Bailey. Henry Wainwright, aged thirty-eight, was married with four children, kept a house at the eminently respectable Tredegar Square, and was a pillar of the local church. However, he had also maintained a second establishment in the East End where he went by the name of Percy King, with his mistress Harriet, who was known as ‘Mrs King’, and their children. When his business failed and he ran short of cash, Wainwright downgraded Harriet to a less salubrious abode. Understandably unhappy about the new arrangements, she threatened to reveal all to Wainwright’s wife. Wainwright lured her to his warehouse at Whitechapel, shot her in the head, ‘inexpertly’ chopped her body into ten pieces, and buried them in lime under the warehouse floor. When he subsequently went bankrupt, he attempted to remove the remains in parcels, fearing they would be discovered by the new occupier of the warehouse. He got one of his former employees to help him remove the parcels. Unfortunately for Wainwright, the man – who was later to claim that a supernatural voice urged him to ‘Open that parcel!’ – looked into one of the boxes, and discovered a human hand. Wainwright was followed to a pub in Borough, where he was arrested and charged with murder, along with his brother as an accomplice. Having made a full confession, he was hanged in December 1875.
From the famous to the infamous, real-life cases showed that it was by no means unheard of for eminent and even ordinary Victorians, faced by the restrictive social and moral conventions of the time, to adopt double lives. Victorian literature, too, was saturated with motifs of duplicity and deception. As Dr Jekyll explains at the end of Robert Louis Stevenson’s late Victorian novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), when in the character of Dr Jekyll he was cursed with a ‘certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public’. Hence it came about that the pressures of living an irreproachably ‘moral’ life led Dr Jekyll to develop another persona – Mr Hyde – to indulge in the immoral, sensuous, shocking and, ultimately, murderous fantasies that social convention obliged him to conceal from the world. In short, he ‘stood committed to a profound duplicity of life’. A sensation on publication, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reached an even wider audience when it was adapted as a stage play in 1887, originally in the United States, but subsequently touring Britain in the 1890s, with the great actor Richard Mansfield performing the two title roles.
Hot on the heels of Jekyll and Hyde in 1895, only three years before Mrs Druce filed her astonishing claim, a new play, The Importance of Being Earnest, was successfully produced in the West End. In a razor-sharp satire of the age’s obsession with adopting a high moral tone, or ‘earnestness’, the play portrayed two young men who each took on another ‘persona’ in order to have free rein to indulge in their fantasies and more wayward leanings, away from the prying eyes of society. Thus Jack, the guardian of the young ward Cecily, claims to have a fun-loving younger brother by the name of Earnest in town. As he says:
when one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so. And a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness.
Jack is therefore ‘Earnest in town and Jack in the country’. Similarly, Jack’s friend Algernon invents an ailing invalid of a friend called ‘Bunbury’ – a pretext which enables him to escape from town, to a freer life in the country, when he chooses. The Importance of Being Earnest ran for just under a year, until it was suddenly cancelled, owing to the newly surfacing scandal surrounding the homosexual double life of its author, Oscar Wilde. The battle between Wilde and the Marquess of Queensberry – the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas or ‘Bosie’ – led to a notorious libel trial, which Wilde lost. This was followed by his conviction for sodomy and gross indecency, and his subsequent social disgrace and incarceration in Reading Gaol.
Secrets, lies, aliases and double identities: all were integral to, and enmeshed within, the very fabric of late Victorian society. In the circumstances, if the 5th Duke of Portland had led a double life, would there have been anything exceptional in that? Would he not simply have been following in the footsteps of dozens of other ostensibly ‘respectable’ members of the Victorian establishment?
Je est un autre.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
Nobody knew much about the past of Thomas Charles Druce of Baker Street, for he kept himself to himself. He first appeared in town in 1830 – turning up, as if from nowhere, to work as a salesman for old Mr Munns, an Oxford Street upholsterer and furniture dealer. By the end of 1832 he had left Munns for the Baker Street Bazaar.
‘Bazaars’ did not mean the same thing to Victorians as they mean to us today. A ‘bazaar’ was not a colourful local market, but rather an early precursor of the department store – one of the vast and spectacular shopping centres which were then springing up around the capital. First came the Soho Bazaar, specializing in ladies’ fashion and millinery, and occupying several houses in the north-west corner of Soho Square. The impressive queue of splendid carriages drawing up at the bazaar’s doors at the height of the ‘season’ was proof of its prestige. The Pantheon Bazaar was newer and flashier. Formerly a place of eighteenth-century public entertainment – whose site is now occupied by Marks and Spencer’s ‘Oxford Street Pantheon’ branch – it was, in Victorian times, a shopping complex. Converted from an old Oxford Street theatre that had fallen on hard times, its entrance, by way of a statue-adorned vestibule, gave way to a picture gallery on the first floor (the pictures being, by general acknowledgmen
t, of rather indifferent merit), flanked by a bird-filled con-servatory of hothouse plants and a shop selling children’s toys, knick-knacks, trinkets, photograph albums and other ephemera. The combination of toys and trinkets with the presence of wildlife inevitably acted as a magnet for London’s young ladies, governesses and their charges, leading to the bazaar also being frequented by a certain type of dissolute flâneur or lounger – that is, a London gentleman at least as interested in the bazaar’s clients as in its wares. Then there was the bazaar known as the Pantechnicon: a splendid establishment in Belgravia that sold larger items of furniture and horse-drawn vehicles, stocking everything from the dress carriage to the light gig.
The Baker Street Bazaar was a direct rival of the Pantechnicon. Originally a market for horses, this bazaar had, by the 1830s, become a forum for a hotchpotch variety of goods: everything from carriages, harnesses and horse-furniture to stoves and ‘furnishing ironmongery’ could be acquired there. It was also the initial home of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, before it relocated to Marylebone Road in 1883.
Once at the Baker Street Bazaar, the humble furniture salesman of obscure origins rose through the ranks with astonishing swiftness. By the 1850s Thomas Charles Druce was a partner in the business, earning a small fortune. But he was a man of abstemious habits. He travelled unostentatiously, driving to and from his office in a discreet brougham. He dined just once a day, at midday, on a plain meal of fish or chicken (the sight of red meat was abhorrent to him). He did not smoke, and had an aversion to wine. His dress, however, was distinctive. He typically wore a high hat and old-fashioned collar, and had a particular fondness for wigs, which he had fitted by the fashionable London wig-makers, Truefitt & Co. of Bond Street. Sometimes he wore a rose or flower in his buttonhole. Sporting an impressively large, bushy beard and sideburns, with a sallow complexion and a slightly jaundiced appearance, T. C. Druce cut a formidable figure as he strode about his business in the bustling precincts of Baker Street. An immensely hard worker, he imposed the same demands on his staff as he did on himself: he was stern and overbearing towards his employees, and brooked no contradiction or argument. He had a habit of turning up when least expected, entering the shop via one of the underground passages that ran from the mews at the rear, and surprising his unsuspecting employees. ‘The old man’, one of his sons was later to remark, ‘had an eye that could see right through you.’ Around his office, which was separate from the shop, there were red curtains. If these were open, the shop staff knew they might approach him. If they were drawn, no one could do so, however urgent the reason.
At some point in the 1840s, Druce took up with a beautiful young girl called Annie May, over thirty years his junior. It was whispered that the couple did not marry for many years, despite Annie bearing him several children. The rumours were enough for the Druces to be ostracized by polite society. This may have been exactly what old T. C. Druce wanted, for he never showed much inclination for genteel company. Much, in fact, was said about Thomas Charles Druce, but virtually nothing was known about him. His response to questions on the subject of his antecedents was always the same: that he had neither father nor mother, and that he was ‘sprung from the clouds’. A relative was later to say of him that ‘Mr Druce never divulged anything with regard to his parentage or friends and kept the subject a profound secret’. In all matters he was incredibly reticent, refusing to deal with all but his regular business acquaintances. He changed house frequently: every two years or so, the family was forced to relocate, criss-crossing London in a series of moves which appeared to defy any logical pattern. It seemed, indeed, as though T. C. Druce were on the run from something… Or someone.
Thomas Charles Druce’s last home – to which he moved in 1861 – was a majestic mansion called Holcombe House, situated in Mill Hill, Hendon. Mill Hill at that time was still in the country, but it had, from the eighteenth century, become a favoured abode for the rich and fashionable seeking a spacious retreat within easy reach of London. An imposing, three-storeyed mansion of grey stone enclosed by a high wall with iron gates, Holcombe House had been built in 1775 for a former Lord Mayor of London. The house was surrounded by beautiful lawns, gravelled paths and flowerbeds, and boasted five hothouses and a conservatory. The interior of the house was equally impressive. The hall had a sweeping balustrade and marble floor. The dining room was furnished in crimson velvet, with walls to match, and had a thick Turkish carpet on the floor. Next to the well-appointed kitchen were a scullery and butler’s pantry. The bedrooms of Mr and Mrs Druce were located on the second floor. On the third floor, where the children slept, were a night nursery, a day nursery, bathroom, pantry and five bedrooms. In the grounds of the mansion were stables and coachmen’s quarters, and the outdoor staff included three gardeners, two coachmen, a groom, a cowherd and a lampman. There was no butler in the house, on account of Mrs Druce being ‘very nervous’. There was a governess for the children, a nurse, a parlourmaid, housemaid, schoolroom maid, kitchen maid and cook. This was, without doubt, the residence of a man of means.
It was in his bedroom on the second floor of Holcombe House that Thomas Charles Druce supposedly drew his last breath. It was December 1864, and he was – according to the official story – seventy-one years old. The wishes he had expressed for his funeral were simple. There was to be no fuss or show, and the funeral expenses were not to exceed £20. In the event, the ceremony was actually rather grand: twelve men and two four-horse coaches, heavily feathered and plumed, were hired for the occasion. The workers at Mr Druce’s Baker Street offices were bitter about the whole business, for the lavishness of the event contrasted so greatly with the meanness he had shown to them. ‘Not even so much as a pair of gloves to commemorate the event,’ grumbled Mr Redgell, a former shop worker, to a journalist from the Daily Express many years later. But Druce’s employees were more frightened than resentful. For there was persistent talk that the old man’s ghost still paced the warren of underground passageways beneath the shop in Baker Street. In fact, rumour had it that old Mrs Pledger, the shop forewoman, had gone out of her mind in fright from seeing the figure of her erstwhile master loom up among the packing boxes, just as he used to do in life. She died soon after the event, and her last words were said to have been: ‘I see him now, the dead man!’ Yes, there was a great deal of queerness surrounding Thomas Druce. The old man had carried many secrets to his grave in 1864. That is, if he had gone to his grave in that year…
*
As Thomas Charles Druce sat behind the scarlet curtains of his Baker Street office, another reclusive individual paced, imprisoned, in the vault-like gloom of his London home, barely a mile away. Harcourt House was the London residence of the 5th Duke of Portland. An eighteenth-century townhouse occupying almost the entire west side of Cavendish Square, it did not benefit from its privileged position in one of London’s most prestigious locations. Rather, it confronted the square with a vast and forbidding expanse of wall, punctured by heavy wrought-iron gates topped with sharp spikes. Behind the walls was a stucco-fronted, cavernous house, barely more welcoming than the gates. Originally designed for Lord Bingley in the 1720s, Harcourt House had become a London landmark known for its dismal grandeur and excessive privacy. Thackeray used it as the model for Lord Steyne’s dreary mansion, Gaunt House, in Vanity Fair:
All I have ever seen of it is the vast wall in front, with the rustic columns at the great gate, through which an old porter peers sometimes with a fat and gloomy red face – and over the wall the garret and bedroom windows, and the chimneys, out of which there seldom comes any smoke now. For the present Lord Steyne lives at Naples, preferring the view of the Bay and Capri and Vesuvius to the dreary aspect of the wall in Gaunt Square.
The writer E. Beresford Chancellor was one of the few people allowed to visit Harcourt House. He wrote of the house in his 1908 book, The Private Palaces of London Past and Present:
…nothing could have exceeded the dreariness of its interior, except perhaps the gloom w
hich sat perpetually on its outward walls. The very size of its rooms, and the remains of their former magnificence, with their elaborately carved and moulded cornices; their ceilings painted ‘en grisaille’ and their fine old chimneypieces, added to the sense of desolation which seemed to have irrevocably settled on the whole place.
As if the towering surrounding walls and spiked entrance gates were not enough, the 5th Duke had tall iron and glass screens built round the garden of Harcourt House to shield him from the curious eyes of his neighbours. The screens were a massive 80 feet high by 200 feet long, and presented an extraordinary sight. The duke’s fear of public appearances was such that he took most of his exercise within his private garden, which had a large, circular path running round it for precisely this purpose. Little else existed in the garden save for a few stunted trees and some blackened grass that pushed up in miserable patches around the path. The basement of the house was taken up almost entirely by a huge bathroom containing various baths, in which the duke spent a great deal of time trying out vapour treatments for his mysterious skin disease. A trapdoor from this bathroom led directly up to his bedroom above.