The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

All three were committed for trial. Although the newspaper reports are not explicit, it looks as though William Moseley turned king’s evidence and testified against the other two. Joseph Moseley and Garside were committed for murder, William Moseley for aiding and assisting. Each of them blamed the others. William Moseley said he had been looking for employment near Macclesfield when he met a man named Stanfield or Schofield, who was with Garside and Joseph Moseley. The three men talked, and William said he caught the words ‘the union’. Garside and Joseph then told him that they had agreed to shoot one of the Ashtons, ‘because of the turn-outs’ (strikes), and they would be paid £10 for the murder. He said they signed a book, and he made his mark. ‘We then all went down on our knees, and holding a knife one over the other, said. “We wished God might strike us dead if we ever told.” ‘ Garside said Joseph Moseley was the one who fired the gun, while Joseph Moseley, who had no legal representation, simply said that his brother William had committed ‘many crimes’, while Garside would swear to anything for the price of a drink. As to himself, ‘It is not likely that he should shoot a man that he never saw or knew any ill of.’ This was his only defence. The jury took a few minutes to decide that Garside was the actual murderer, but that Joseph Moseley was equally guilty. They were sentenced to hang. William was found guilty as an accessory, but later reprieved.

The resolution of this three-year-old crime caused a sensation among all classes and types. The Stockport Advertiser couldn’t keep up with demand, and was driven to produce single sheets of the trial transcript. It was anti-climactic, therefore, when the executions were delayed into the following year, after legal wranglings over jurisdiction. Thus, while the Manchester Guardian dedicated nearly 27,000 words to the trial, by the time the two men were finally executed it was no longer topical, and the paper did not cover it at all.

This sad little case would merit no more than a mention in a history of labour unrest, were it not for two works of literature that it spawned. As a preliminary, however, in 1842 came a novel that in no way qualifies as literature. William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord was written by the daughter of the owner of the Manchester Chronicle, whose previous work, the title page advertised, was The Art of Needlework. The book reads pretty much as one would expect from the authoress of The Art of Needlework. Although set among the cotton mills, William Langshawe has a heroine who dresses in ‘a gossamer robe of spotless white’, a hermit with a secret sorrow (of the sort so often seen in the industrial heartlands) and the occasional outbreak of Italian banditti. The important thing about the book for our purposes is that there is a millhand named Jem, who loves another millworker, Nancy, who has ideas above her station and is conducting a flirtation with the son of a factory owner. Jem, in his anguish, turns to ‘The Union’, a fearful organization that plans turn-outs in order to reduce ‘beneficent and liberal masters. to the very edge of ruin’. Twenty pages before the end a factory owner’s son sets off for his mill, shortly after which ‘a sudden knock was heard at the hall door’, and, just as with Thomas Ashton, a messenger comes in to say, ‘I’m afeard he is down in the loan [sic], much hurt.’ The young man is ‘borne in by the men – a corpse’, while ‘not a clue, not the remotest trace of the villains remained’. There is a footnote: ‘Let not my readers image [sic] that this awful incident has been invented. A few years ago a young cotton manufacturer of the highest respectability, and most excellent character, was murdered even so, and as suddenly, as we have described, by order of the Spinners’ Union.’

That readers could have forgotten the Ashton case was confirmed in 1848, with the publication of one of the great works of nineteenth-century fiction. Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton used the incidents of the case, but while many reviewers commented on her fictional interweaving of the realities of industrial unrest and the battles between the owners and the workers, none seems to have recognized the origin of her story. In Mary Barton, Mary, a milliner’s assistant, is loved by Jem Wilson, a factory mechanic. She initially rejects him in favour of Harry Carson, the son of the local mill owner, although she soon realizes she loves Jem and breaks off with Carson. He and Jem fight, and are stopped by a policeman, in whose hearing Jem threatens Carson. Meanwhile, the millworkers are striking. Mary’s father, John Barton, takes part in a plan to murder one of the owners, for which lots are drawn. John Barton goes to Glasgow to talk to the workers there; Jem simultaneously agrees to accompany his cousin Will Wilson on the walk back to his ship in Liverpool. That night, Harry Carson is found shot dead in the lane. The gun is identified as Jem’s, and he is arrested. The wadding from the gun is found by Mary’s aunt. It is part of a valentine Jem sent Mary, but Mary alone knows this is evidence of his innocence, and her father’s guilt – she had given the paper to her father.*She sets out for Liverpool to get Will to return and testify to Jem’s alibi, the only way to save Jem without endangering her father. Will’s ship has left, and Mary goes out in a small boat, shouting up to him that he is needed. His captain refuses to give him leave, but Will arrives to give his evidence in the nick of time, Jem is saved and Mary declares her love for him. John Barton, now dying, confesses to Carson’s father, who forgives him.

The novel was quickly acclaimed as being by an ‘author in the very front rank of modern novelists’, but it was not recognized that the author had used reality as the basis for her (or, as this reviewer thought, his) art. Even the Manchester Guardian failed to recognize the case it had reported so thoroughly a decade earlier. Instead, it says that while Mary Barton is well written and well constructed, ‘the authoress has [?erred – semi-illegible] against truth, in matters of fact’. Her tale of murder was a libel on the workers, it went on, because ‘they never committed a murder under any such circumstances’, and a libel on the owners, ‘who have never been exceeded … in acts of benevolence and charity’.

While Thomas Ashton may have been forgotten, Mary Barton’s story became hugely popular among the working classes. Three plays, all at minor theatres, were based on Mrs Gaskell’s novel, and two scripts survive. In the script of the 1850 version, the Examiner of Plays has scored through all the political references – gone is the workers’ delegation to Parliament, and no longer is Barton a Chartist delegate. Gone too is the scene where the workers conspire to kill Carson (which must have made the plot difficult to follow), and in the final courtroom scene, respect for sacred personages meant that the swearing-in of witnesses takes place in dumbshow. After the acquittal of James (not Jem in this version), the dying Barton begs Carson: ‘Oh sir, say you forgive me the anguish I have caused you. I care not for death, but oh man forgive me the trespass I have done thee. I die, oh. The world fades from me, a new one opens to you, James and Mary,’ and the play ends with a final tableau.

For many theatres, spectacle was the essential ingredient, with various types of lighting and stage effects used to create the required ‘sensation-scene’, the high point of the evening, full of special effects and new technology. The stage manager at the Britannia reminded himself of what was needed for one scene:

Ring Down [curtain] when shower of fire out.

Screams & yells & all sorts of noises. Coloured fires burning.

Braces falling on sheet iron. [clanging noises of battle]

… sparks from Dragon Mouth.

… Red Lights full up.

Quite how realistic these effects were is difficult to judge. In 1871, a melodrama at the same theatre had a scene in which the heroine, trapped on an ice floe with the villain, is rescued by a passing steamer. This sounds technically astonishing, until one reads the stage manager’s diary entries:

21 AUGUST: ‘This night our large steam-ship in the last scene … stuck … on the stage midway & would not come down.’

22 AUGUST: ‘This night our large steam-ship broke through the stage, & stuck fast mid-way.’

23 AUGUST: ‘This night our large steam-ship broke through a plank at the back of the stage and would not come any further … on Tuesday night, the wheels caught in the shaking waters & clogged & wouldn’t come down.’

25 AUGUST: ‘Tonight it stuck at the back of the stage & would not come forward at all.’

26 AUGUST: ‘Tonight it broke through the Vampire Trap!’

In Mary Barton, or, The Weavers’ Distress at the Grecian Saloon in Shoreditch in 1861, the high point was the sensation-scene in which the workers set Carson’s mill alight, and Jem roars in to rescue the trapped Henry. Then Mary has a dramatic speech – ‘I see naught but Jem, a dying man on the gallows. I hear naught but his groans ringing in my ears’ – Will arrives in the courtroom on cue and the drama ends with a rousing speech from the judge – ‘I tell you, that you are bound to give the Prisoner the full Benefit of the slightest doubts you may have on your minds, such is the Law of England, such is the Law of humanity.’ – and Barton’s revelation that it was not he who killed Carson after all, but another character who never appears in the play, and is anyway dead: a murder where no one is to blame.

It was Dion Boucicault (1820–1890) who returned Mrs Gaskell’s story to the middle classes. The Long Strike (1866) followed Boucicault’s great success, The Colleen Bawn, another play based on a murder (see pp.130–33), and he went back to the elements that had worked for him in the past. The fire that had thrilled the Grecian audiences is gone, but Boucicault knew better than to deprive his audience of a sensation-scene. He himself played Johnny Reilly, the renamed Will. When his captain refuses him permission to go ashore, Reilly cries, ‘Jane [the Mary character in this play] has called me back, and back I’ll go,’ and ‘goes to the window, throws out coat and hat, takes stage to foot lights, runs up, springs through window, disappears’. In Act IV comes the great innovation. Jane no longer walks to Liverpool – that is far too old-fashioned. Instead, she and the lawyer Mr Moneypenny plan to send a telegram from the ‘Telegraph Office – Messages sent to all parts of the United Kingdom’. They arrive, only to find that the line is closed for the night. Much still needed to be explained to the audience about this miracle of the modern world, so the clerk laboriously spells it out: ‘The telegraph is a private enterprise, and maintained for profit. The business coming in after nine o’clock would not pay, except on the main lines.’ Moneypenny ratchets up the drama: ‘. that wire was the thread on which the lad’s life was suspended, and it fails her’. The operator is sympathetic and says maybe, just maybe, they can get through. The tension is heightened by the slow relaying of and replying to the messages coming and going, but then – miraculously – a signal!

Boucicault, a great admirer of French theatre (or, as his many enemies had it, a frequent plagiarizer of French plays), may have known of a play Dickens had seen in Paris ten years before. La Rentrée à Paris was, said Dickens, barely a play at all, but while ‘There is nothing in the piece. it was impossible not to be moved and excited by the telegraph part,’ where, in a Paris railway station, the crowds wait for the soldiers returning from the Crimea. There is an electric telegraph office to one side, and a ‘marquis’ offers:

‘Give me your little messages, and I’ll send them off.’ General rush … ‘Is my son wounded?’ ‘Is my brother promoted?’ etc. etc. Last of all, the widowed mother. ‘Is my only son safe?’ Little bell rings. Slip of paper handed out. ‘He was first upon the heights of Alma.’ General cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. ‘He was made a sergeant at Inkermann.’ Another cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. ‘He was made colour-sergeant at Sebastopol.’ Another cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. ‘He was the first man who leaped with the French banner on the Malakhoff tower.’ Tremendous cheer. Bell rings again, another slip of paper handed out. ‘But he was struck down there by a musket-ball …’ Mother abandons all hope; general commiseration; troops rush in. son only wounded, [enters] and embraces her.

Boucicault’s version was similarly effective, so much so that at the end of the century some variety bills were still running the scene on its own, amputated from the rest of the play.

‘Amputate’ is the key word for the next horror that titillated the reading public. On 28 December 1836, a labourer walking past a building site on London’s Edgware Road saw a sack tucked under a flagstone propped at the side of the road. Upon investigation it proved to contain the body of a woman ‘in a horridly mutilated state’. When the report said ‘body’, it meant ‘body’: it was a torso (complete with arms), packed in with some towelling, a child’s dress and a piece of shawl. No identification could be made, and nothing further happened until 6 January 1837, when a lock-keeper at Regent’s Canal lock in Stepney, in the East End of the city, found his gates blocked. He felt around with his boat-hook and, to his horror, pulled up a human head. One of the eyes ‘was quite cut out, by means of a blunt instrument’, and the earlobes were slit, as though earrings had been torn out. The head was taken to Paddington workhouse, where it was judged to be a match for the torso. Both were preserved in spirits, and kept for viewing by those who were searching for missing friends or relatives. On 2 February, a pair of legs was dredged out of a bed of reeds near Coldharbour Lane, in Brixton, south of the river, wrapped in a sack on which the letters ‘eley’ and ‘erwell’ could be read.

Although the police force’s role was officially only preventative, detective work, and forensic science, were beginning to develop. The constable on the beat at Edgware Road, PC Pegler, traced the sacking to a Mr Moseley, a corn chandler in Camberwell. The parish surgeon added his information: the torso was that of a woman, about five feet six inches; her skull had been fractured, and he thought that most probably her eye had been knocked out before death, but the decapitation had been performed after. He judged that the head had been in the water for four or five days. (The parish surgeon in Paddington was less helpful: he reported that the torso had been dead only twenty-four hours, and then added, confusingly, that that meant three or four days.)

Even with this information, nothing further transpired until 20 March, when a man named William Gay provisionally identified the head as that of his sister, Hannah Brown, a washerwoman. Mrs Brown had been engaged to a cabinetmaker named James Greenacre, and they were to marry on Christmas Day, with another cabinetmaker, named Davis, to give her away. Mrs Brown sold off her mangle and laundry equipment, and on Christmas Eve she moved out of her lodgings. Late that night, Greenacre appeared at Davis’s house to tell the family the wedding was off: ‘He had discovered that she was without property, which she had led him to believe she possessed,’ they had ‘had some slight words’, and she had left him. He was ‘much agitated’, but given the circumstances there was nothing odd in that, nor in ‘his having a bundle under his arm. as he might have been providing for his Christmas dinner’. When Mrs Brown failed to appear at the Davises’ that night as expected, they assumed she was embarrassed.

The police asked Davis to view the head, and he agreed it was Mrs Brown. When the police arrived at Greenacre’s lodgings he denied all knowledge of her. A woman named Sarah Gale was living with him, and she seemed to the policeman to be hiding something. He asked to see it, and it turned out to be two rings, a pair of earrings and a pawnbroker’s ticket for two silk dresses, which were identified as Mrs Brown’s, as was the jewellery. In the next room, Sarah Gale’s boxes were found to contain part of a child’s dress which matched the piece of fabric that had been found with the torso. Greenacre and Mrs Gale were both arrested.

Interest was at fever pitch, as was hostility to the two supposed murderers. The Times took the lead in producing a positive waterfall of vicious rumour: that Greenacre had advertised for a wife after Hannah Brown’s death (shades of Corder); that he had murdered his illegitimate child (he didn’t appear to have had one); that he had previously been charged with ‘administering a drug to a female … for the purpose of procuring abortion’ (why, if he was so ready to kill children?); that he had had a boy apprenticed to him for a high fee, then accused him of stealing, so he could discharge him but keep the premium; that there were two more illegitimate children, one of whom he had left at a workhouse door, the other he had ‘made away’ with; that he was one of the Cato Street conspirators (who had planned the mass assassination of the entire cabinet sixteen years before); that he had encouraged someone to kill the Duke of Wellington; and that he had put ‘inflammatory bills’ and ‘the King’s speech, turned upside down’ in his shop windows, signs of incendiary radicalism. A broadside further claimed that Greenacre had made ‘overtures. of a base kind’ to the daughter of a friend, and when she resisted he ‘made a forcible attempt’ on her. His friend protested, and Greenacre in revenge got the man’s son to summons his father, claiming he wasn’t being taught his trade, as set out in his indentures. This was disproved immediately, and the son’s remorse was so great that he ‘did not survive, and died a maniac’. (This beautifully moral story is embellished with a gory picture of Greenacre cutting off Mrs Brown’s head.)

At the magistrates’ hearing, Greenacre said that Mrs Brown ‘had often dropped insinuations in my hearing about her having property enough to enable her to go into business, and that she had said she could command at any time 300l. or 400l. I told her I had made some inquiry about her character and had ascertained that she had been to Smith’s tally-shop [which gave goods on credit] in Long-acre, and tried to procure silk gowns in my name, she put on a feigned laugh, and retaliated by saying she thought I had been deceiving her with respect to my property by misrepresenting it.’ They had been drinking, and he struck her, whereupon she fell off her chair, hit her head and died. At which point, ‘I unfortunately determined on putting her away.’ Then he backtracked: she had arrived at his lodgings already ‘rather fresh from drinking’ and ‘was very aggravating … I own that I tilted the chair with my foot, and she fell with her head against a clump of wood, and appeared insensible; I shook her, and tried to restore her, but she was quite gone.’ His main concern in every statement was to stress that Mrs Gale knew nothing of the matter. She had not been there, and Mrs Brown’s body was gone by the time she returned; he told her they were keeping her belongings in payment of a debt. But both were committed for trial, Greenacre for wilful murder, Mrs Gale as an accessory after the fact. As they left the court, the mob had to be held back by the police: ‘thousands of persons’ followed the coach ‘the whole of the way to Newgate, with the officers of police, their staves out, running by the sides and after the coaches’.

At the trial a surgeon testified that the blow to Mrs Brown’s head had definitely taken place before death, and worse, her eye had also been knocked out before she was dead. Even worse still, ‘the head had been severed from the body while the person was yet alive’. This may or may not have been the case – forensic science was still very basic – but it was generally believed. It took the jury only fifteen minutes to find Greenacre guilty of murder, and Sarah Gale as an accessory.

Soon after his conviction, Greenacre confessed, although he still insisted the death was accidental. He said that he had waved a wooden towel-jack at Mrs Brown, to frighten her, and had inadvertently put out her eye; she fell, and he found she was dead, so he dismembered her to get rid of the body. He took two omnibuses to reach the canal, sitting quietly with the head wrapped up on his lap. He later walked towards the Edgware Road with the torso in a sack until a passing cart gave him a lift some of the way. For the last stage of the journey he said he had taken a hackney cab.

The newspapers fell on these details. The Champion and Weekly Herald, a Chartist paper run by William Cobbett’s two sons (including the one who had supposedly learned to read by keeping up with news of Thurtell), gave all four of its pages to the trial. The Figaro in London satirized the financial bonanza: ‘Greenacre positively established two weekly papers. and it is a well known fact that had this murderous wretch been acquitted, a piece of plate would have been presented to him by the proprietors. for his invaluable services in advancing [their] interests.’ This is a joke, but the idea was valid: four months later the Age was only half-satirical: ‘every line that came from [Greenacre’s] mouth was worth at least threepence’.

Yet Greenacre broadsides were not selling well. One patterer* was wise after the event: ‘Greenacre didn’t sell so well as might have been expected, for such a diabolical out-and-out crime as he committed; but you see he came close after Pegsworth [who murdered a draper over a £1 debt], and that took the beauty off him. Two murderers together is no good to nobody.’ But this didn’t mean no one was interested. While the trial was pending, two men charged sightseers 3d. to see Greenacre’s rooms, especially ‘the arm-chair and block of wood which it was said the unfortunate woman fell on. This sum was readily paid by an immense number of persons.’ Catchpenny works proliferated, including one claiming to be an autobiography (almost certainly a journalist’s confection), and another, the partial title of which was: ‘GREENACRE, OR, THE EDGEWARE-ROAD MURDER. Presenting an Authentic and Circumstantial Account of Thismost sanguinary outrage of the Laws of Humanity; and Showing, upon theconfession of the culprit, the Means he Resorted to, in Order to Effecthis bloody purpose; Also his Artful and Fiendlike Method of Mutilating his murdered victim

Greenacre was also popular in penny-gaffs. James Grant, a journalist, reported that ‘the recent atrocity known by the name of the Edgeware murder, was quite a windfall’ to them, theatres choosing ‘the most frightful of the circumstances’ to display ‘amidst great applause’. Current murders were popular because, as the audiences already knew the stories, they could be pared down to the most sensational episodes. This suited the gaffs, which crammed in as many daily shows as the market would bear – one performer remembered that he did twenty-one shows in twelve hours on Boxing Day in 1835 – and therefore concision was essential. Likewise, for current events, a script could be dispensed with and the company simply ad-libbed: ‘Number one is told, “You, sir, play the hero and have to frustrate the villain in all and every scene. You, number two, are the villain, and must pursue the lady, make love, stamp in fury when you are refused. You, number three, are the juvenile … make love, embrace, weep and swear to die for her you love … Now you, madam … you are the heroine, and must rave and roar when you refuse the villain’s proffered love, and mind you scream right well.” ‘

The middle classes loved to condemn this sort of working-class entertainment, believing it led to vice. In 1844 the chaplain of the Brixton House of Correction said that ‘almost all’ of the boys there had first been led astray by visits to penny-gaffs or fairs, where they had watched depictions of crimes ‘calculated to inflame the passions’. Yet no one regarded Greenacre as fearful in the way Burke and Hare had been fearful; for some reason, he was funny. Greenacre’s whole life had been marked by ‘treachery and deception – in small matters as well as great’, claimed John Bull: when he took Mrs Brown’s head on the omnibus, it solemnly revealed, he had asked what the fare was. ‘Sixpence a head, sir.’ He paid his sixpence, ‘thus paying only for one head instead of two’. Bell’s Life filled its correspondence columns with answers to readers’ questions about the betting on whether or not Greenacre would hang. (These columns printed only the editor’s answers; the questions must be inferred.) A report on a prize fight in the same paper uses the word ‘Greenacre’ quite casually to mean a blow – ‘the Black thought he could not do better than again try to pop in another “Greenacre” under Preston’s left ear …’ Even the intelligentsia joined in: Jane Carlyle thought a portrait of her husband Thomas had ‘a gallows-expression … I have all along been calling it Greenacre-Carlyle’. And the Revd R.H. Barham’s Ingoldsby Legends commemorated Greenacre in jingly nursery-rhyme rhythms: