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

… So the Clerk and the wife, they each took a knife,

And the nippers that nipp’d the loaf sugar for tea;

With the edges and points they severed the joints

At the clavicle, elbow, hip, ankle, and knee.

Thus, limb from limb they dismember’d him

So entirely, that e’en when they came to his wrists,

With those great sugar-nippers they nipp’d off his ‘flippers’

As the Clerk, very flippantly, termed his fists.

… They determined to throw it where no one could know it, Down the well, – and the limbs in some different place.

… They contrived to pack up the trunk in a sack,

Which they hid in an osier-bed outside the town,

The Clerk bearing arms, legs, and all on his back,

As that vile Mr. Greenacre served Mrs. Brown …

The crowd at Greenacre’s execution was large, vocal and perfectly good-humoured, purchasing ‘Greenacre tarts’ from a pie-seller while they waited. Seven weeks later, Princess Victoria became Queen Victoria, and public opinion began to change.

* A harmanbeck is a constable. A buffer might, as in our current use of the word, mean a doddery old man, or it might be one of two slang words in use at the time: a dog, or ‘A Rogue that kills good sound Horses only for their Skins’. Either way, Thurtell was not happy. I have been unable to discover why a green coat is a term of contempt. Perhaps they were old-fashioned, reinforcing the ‘old man’ element of the insult?

* One legal historian has suggested that this verdict had more to do with a private feud between the insurance company’s lawyer and the judge than with the merits of the case.

* This example of servant humour provided the middle classes with much merriment. Even forty years later, Dickens knew his readers would recognize the reference in Our Mutual Friend when he suggests that a Fat Lady at a fair kept up her weight ‘sustained upon postponed pork’.

* This meeting has been much disputed, and Egan may simply have worked from press reports and information supplied by sporting friends.

* The Coburg changed its name to the Royal Victoria (the Vic) in 1833. Later in the century it became known fi rst colloquially, then formally, as the Old Vic, which it remains today.

* All plays were subject to governmental oversight, and all theatres had to submit their scripts to the offi ce of the Lord Chamberlain before performances could be licensed. Historians have cause to be grateful for this censorship. The Lord Chamberlain’s offi ce kept the scripts, and they are frequently the only surviving copies, particularly for plays produced at the minor theatres. Much of the material that follows relies heavily on the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, now held in the British Library, and only slightly the worse for wear after being kept for a century or so in a coal cellar in St James’s Palace.

* The author of the Surrey’s play is always listed as ‘unknown’, but a seemingly hitherto unnoticed letter from the journalist Leman Blanchard, dated 23 April 1883, has survived in the British Library: ‘The piece called The Gamblers [was] hashed up by Milner if I remember rightly.’ Blanchard cannot actually have ‘remembered’ the production at all, as he was born only in 1820, but he was a professional playwright by 1839, and his father, William Blanchard, was a comic actor before him, so he may well have heard the play spoken of. Certainly its notoriety long outlived its run at the Surrey.

* Some of these items retained a posthumous glamour. In the twentieth century Norwich Public Record Offi ce was the proud owner of a pair of scissors said to have been Thurtell’s in his cloth-merchant days, and of his original certifi cate in bankruptcy.

* Almost every report agrees that Thurtell read his defence, and read it well. Yet a contemporary scholar thinks that Thurtell’s letters ‘show him to have been semi-literate’ at best, and suggests that Egan may have had a hand in his defence speech. Perhaps Thurtell, a lover of theatre, had memorized it.

* Probert’s escape via immunity was short-lived. In 1825 he was convicted of stealing a horse and hanged at Newgate. A broadside claimed that so many people attended his execution that ‘a boy actually walked from one side of the street to the other, on the heads of the people’.

† Mulready also sketched both Hunt and Probert. The drawings are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

§ Thurtell lived on among the sporting set. In 1868, at a dog show, a ‘champion stud’ included the pups Palmer, Probert and Williams. For Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, see below, pp.258ff. Williams may either be the Ratcliffe Highway murderer, or one of a trio of murderers in the Burke and Hare style, who was executed for the murder of an Italian beggar-boy in 1831.

* Jack Ketch was a seventeenth-century hangman, and his name was used colloquially to mean any executioner.

* Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) was born Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, and until 1838 he was known as Edward Lytton Bulwer. On his father’s death he became Sir Edward Bulwer, and in 1843 he added his mother’s maiden name, Lytton, to become Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Ultimately he became 1st Baron Lytton of Knebworth. For simplicity, I refer to him as Bulwer throughout. Unlike Bulwer, Hannah Jones’s success was one of scale, not fi nance or renown: she wrote and sold widely, but was, according to The Times, given a pauper’s burial. For more on penny-bloods, see pp.58–60.

* Catherine Hayes (1690–1726) murdered her coal-merchant husband by beating him to death with the help of two men, then dismembering the body. She was the last woman in England to be burned alive for petty treason.

† It perhaps suits the theatricality of Thurtell’s legend that Lyon’s Inn was later pulled down to build the New Globe Theatre.

* Jerrold (1803–57) was a prolifi c playwright, with over seventy plays to his name, including the smash hit Black-Ey’d Susan. He wrote for Punch, and from 1852 he was the editor of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. His son Blanchard Jerrold (1826–84) was also a journalist, and became editor of Lloyd’s on his father’s death. He was named for his father’s great friend, the journalist Laman Blanchard (1803–45), not to be confused with the playwright Leman [sic] Blanchard (1820–1889), who was no relation, but who also turns up in this book.

* In very simplifi ed form, until the 1880s, prosecutions in England and Wales were brought privately, by the victims or (in cases of murder) representatives of the victims. (Scottish law had slightly different procedures.) The most important cases were frequently taken over by the Home Offi ce, with the Treasury Solicitor overseeing the case for the prosecution. In 1879 the creation of the Department of Public Prosecutions gave the Attorney General an enhanced role, and improved coordination. The police, as hunters of criminals, gradually took over the preparation of the prosecutions through the century.

While the government was not necessarily involved in any prosecution, for much of the century there was a marked lack of separation of function. As late as 1877, in the case of a woman accused of murdering a child, the Chief Constable sat on the bench during the magistrates’ hearing, and a policeman who gave evidence at the same hearing served as a juror at the inquest on the child.

† Many newspapers claimed that Corder was planning to use Thurtell’s defence speech. He may have been planning it, although given the different circumstances of the two cases it would be hard to understand how, much less why. Ultimately he did not, and the story is probably more likely to be newspaper hype, a way of alluding to the previous exciting murder.

* It is probably safe to say that Huish was the only penny-blood author who was also an expert on beekeeping. For many years he was a columnist for the Gardener, Florist and Agriculturalist, and he was the author of A Treatise on the Nature, Economy, and Practical Management of Bees.

* John Williams’ body, too, had been described as ‘naked’, and it too was dressed in shirt, trousers and stockings. For much of the century ‘naked’ meant dressed only in underclothes, but in these cases it seems to mean without jacket, hat, kerchief or neck-cloth – that is, without any outdoor clothes.

† In 1943 The Times reported that the town clerk in Bury St Edmunds had turned up the prosecution brief for the trial. It was given to the Bury St Edmunds museum, which was already the proud possessor of the book bound in Corder’s skin, and his preserved scalp.

* Almost everything we know about penny theatres comes from middle-class journalists, who wrote for equally middle-class readers who expected to be horrifi ed and perhaps titillated by their reports. Class biases are a given, even from the most sympathetic reporters.

* Some puppets from the Tiller-Clowes company have survived and are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The museum has fi lmed a tiny clip of the marionettes in action in the Red Barn, which was at one point viewable on its website. It has recently vanished, and can now be seen only by appointment at their Hammersmith archive. This is a great pity, for it is well worth watching for the red handkerchief that fl owers on Maria’s bosom as she is knifed, and the dastardly Corder’s fi nal ‘heh-heh-heh’ and hop for joy after her death.

* Benefi ts were performances for which the box-offi ce receipts were given to a particular actor, playwright, or some other person connected with the theatre. At many East End theatres, all actors and writers – even the stage manager – expected to have a benefi t every season. The theatres also had benefi ts for local causes, or for famous people in need of fi nancial support, like Lee.

* There is no evidence that Hare or Burke ever married the women they lived with, but under Scottish law, living together made them legally man and wife.

† ‘Not proven’ is a verdict in Scottish law, indicating that the prosecution has failed to make its case suffi ciently strongly to secure a conviction, yet neither has the jury been persuaded that the accused had no involvement in the crime. A ‘not proven’ verdict means that the prisoner is released.

* He may not have gone, but he remained fascinated: two years later he wrote to the publisher of one of the trial reports, saying he had compared Burke’s and Hare’s confessions, and listing over twenty instances where they confl icted.

* It seems impossible that Stevenson could be thinking of anyone except Sir William Fergusson here (see p.63).

* I will deal with policing and enforcement practices as they related to the crimes I discuss, but the major change – how the centralization of policing led to it becoming part of the apparatus of state – needs another book.

* The Riot Act (1 Geo. I St.2. c.5) of 1715 permitted ‘tumults and riotous assemblies’ to be broken up after strict procedure was followed: the Act had to be read aloud, using a set form of words, to those whom the offi cials wished to disperse. The crowd then had one hour to leave the area. Force was not permitted until that hour had elapsed.

* The Hue and Cry was the offi cial police publication, founded in 1786 by a Bow Street magistrate, a bi-weekly four-page paper which itemized crimes, described wanted criminals, listed stolen property and publicized government rewards.

* The wadding clue in the Ashton case spawned a number of fi ctional descendants. In Bleak House (1852–53) Dickens has his police detective, Inspector Bucket, recognize the wadding found near the murdered lawyer Tulkinghorn as ‘a bit of the printed description of your house at Chesney Wold’. In Andrew Forrester’s early 1860s story ‘The Judgment of Conscience’, Miss G., his female detective, builds her entire case around wadding made from a page of Johnston’s Chemistry of Common Life, an East End cobbler’s constant companion (for more on Miss G., see pp. 300–301). Reality only caught up with fi ction in 1884, when John Toms was convicted of murder on the evidence of a piece of wadding recovered from the body of his victim, which was identifi ed as matching a broadside in his possession.

* A patterer sold broadsides – ‘pattering’, or reading from them, and teaching the tunes to the songs. A standing patterer had a fi xed pitch; a running patterer roamed a district with his goods.

THREE Entertaining Murder

One of the most influential stories of murder throughout the Victorian age was not Victorian at all, but had taken place while Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandfather was on the throne. Yet this 1745 crime resonated as late as the 1880s, when the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry toured in a heavily romanticized version of the life and death of Eugene Aram.

Eugene Aram was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1704, the son of a gardener. He received a fairly good education, and by the 1730s he was living in the town of Knaresborough, Yorkshire (today on the edge of Harrogate), married, with four or five children, and employed as steward to a local landowner. Daniel Clark was a shoemaker, about twenty-three years old, doing well in business, and with a fiancée who was known to have some money. He was thus able to order plate and silver on credit for his forthcoming wedding breakfast, to be held on the night of 7 February 1745. He also ordered other goods, probably more than he should have, but nothing sinister. Not sinister, that is, until the night before his wedding, when he told his brother-in-law he was going to visit his fiancée, and vanished. It was quickly discovered that £200 in cash and plate had gone with him, although his horse had not. Two men had been seen with him earlier that evening: Richard Houseman, a flax-dresser (someone who wove linen), and Eugene Aram. Their reputations were poor, and when their houses were searched, goods identified by the creditors were found. Aram said Clark had asked him to keep the things for him, and he was released, although it was noted that he had recently paid off a mortgage, and was unusually flush with cash. Soon afterwards, he abandoned both Knaresborough and his family. And that was the way things remained. He got a succession of jobs, first in London, ultimately in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, as an usher in a school (an usher was a junior teacher, with little respect attached to the position, and even less money).

Fourteen years later, a labourer digging in a field outside Knaresborough found a skeleton. Daniel Clark’s abandoned fiancée’s brother claimed that it must be that of Clark, as no one else had gone missing from the area in the previous two decades. Eugene Aram’s wife Anna gave evidence at the inquest on the bones, and said quite straightforwardly that she believed her husband and Houseman had murdered Clark. The jury’s verdict was that ‘from all apparent circumstances, the said skeleton is the skeleton of Daniel Clark’. Houseman protested: an eye-witness had seen Clark a few days after his disappearance. When questioned, however, this witness turned out only to have heard from a third person that yet a fourth person had said that he had once seen someone who resembled Clark. Houseman was arrested, and evidently began to think of how to save himself. He said that the skeleton was not Clark’s, because he knew where Clark’s body really was, and he sent officials to a local beauty spot called St Robert’s Cave, where another skeleton was duly found. Houseman claimed that he had last seen Clark heading off to Eugene Aram’s house on the night of his disappearance, while he, Houseman, had been left with the goods Clark had ordered, which they planned to fence. The next day his story had altered: he now said that he, Aram and Clark had all gone to St Robert’s Cave together to divide up the goods, and Aram had killed Clark there. At the reconvened inquest Mrs Aram testified to seeing the three men set out in the early hours of the morning, after which Aram and Houseman had returned alone and burnt some clothing in the fire. The jury found that Daniel Clark had been murdered by Eugene Aram and Richard Houseman.

There are many versions of how Aram was found, usually involving the miraculous workings of providence. In reality, the speed of his arrest suggests that everyone had known where he was, but for the previous fourteen years hadn’t much cared. Later rumour said he was living with a woman whom he passed off as his niece; others suggested it was his daughter; still others that he was living incestuously with his daughter. It could simply be that his daughter or niece was keeping house for him, and that that was how he was located. The warrant was delivered to the King’s Lynn Justice of the Peace and MP, and he accompanied the constables to the school where Aram was employed. Aram denied knowing Clark at all, and claimed never to have been to Knaresborough. He was arrested nonetheless. By the time he was taken to York Castle (the nearest gaol to Knaresborough), he recalled that he had known Clark, but otherwise amnesia ruled his life: he couldn’t remember when he had last seen Clark, nor that he had been friends with Houseman, nor what they were doing on the night Clark vanished, nor that he had paid off his debts afterwards. The only thing he could remember was that both his brothers had seen Clark after his disappearance, but, like Houseman’s eye-witness, this came to nothing. Later his memory improved: Houseman and Clark had planned the fraud with another man, he said, and the four of them had gone to St Robert’s Cave, but he had remained outside the cave, and when the others came out without Clark, they had told him that he had gone away.

Either Houseman or Aram was going to have to turn king’s evidence if the prosecution was to succeed. Houseman was the logical choice, as Mrs Aram’s testimony was crucial. Later accounts claimed that Houseman was found not guilty, but in fact the prosecution against him was withdrawn in order for him to testify against Aram. Houseman claimed pretty much what Aram had at the magistrates’ hearing, just shifting the characters around: they had all gone to the cave, but now it was Aram who killed Clark, while Houseman remained outside. At the trial there were fourteen witnesses against Aram, while his defence, in later legend held up as a model of its kind, was in actuality poor.* In an age when character – reputation – meant a great deal to perceptions of guilt and innocence, Eugene Aram could not find a single witness to vouch for him. And a legal historian has noted that he could think of no other defence that ‘condescends so little to any notice of so vulgar a thing as evidence’. Most defendants, he suggested, ‘do make some endeavour to meet the case against them’, but Aram did – or could – not. Instead, in his defence he set out his life history, trying to act as his own character witness; then he claimed he had been too ill at the time, too ‘enfeebled’, to commit murder (perhaps he hoped no one would remember the witnesses who had seen him walk several miles to St Robert’s Cave two nights in a row); then he simply stressed the unreliability of circumstantial evidence. To no one’s surprise, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Initially his body was to be anatomized after his execution, as was standard, but such was local feeling that the jury asked to have the punishment increased: Aram would be gibbeted – hanged in chains after death, for his body to decay slowly in front of the local population.

That was the end of Eugene Aram, but only the beginning of the romance. In 1794, thirty-five years after the trial, the philosopher William Godwin published Caleb Williams, planned as a fictional counterpart to his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice. This endeavoured to show how those who lived in an unequal society were victimized by it, but it is Godwin’s links to Aram that matter here. Godwin grew up only twenty-five miles from King’s Lynn, and later studied at the Hoxton Academy under Andrew Kippis, who was working on a Biographia Britannica which included an entry for Eugene Aram, taking the standard eighteenth-century view that he was a thief and murderer. But when the story reappeared later in the Newgate Calendar it focused more on Aram’s self-education, sliding over the fact that he was a receiver of stolen goods, and concentrating instead on the picture of a man with a thirst for learning, oppressed by a rigidly hierarchical society. In Caleb Williams, Godwin expands this theme: when hiding from his unjust persecutors, Caleb finds ‘a general dictionary of four of the northern languages’ and determines ‘to attempt, at least for my own use, an etymological analysis of the English language’. This is the earliest linkage of Aram to linguistics or philology, and thereafter virtually no recounting of the story was complete without a breathless recapitulation of his brilliance as a scholar.

In 1828 the poet and comic writer Thomas Hood added to the growing myth with ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’, a ballad that was to shape ideas of Aram for the rest of the century. One pleasant summer, ‘four and twenty happy boys/Came bounding out of school’. As they frolic, however, ‘the usher sat remote from all,/A melancholy man’, watching a boy who is reading ‘The Death of Abel’. He winces, tormented, telling the boy ‘Of horrid stabs in groves forlorn,/And murders done in caves’. He himself dreamed of murdering ‘A feeble man and old. here, said I, this man shall die,/And I will have his gold!’ Then, retribution: ‘That very night, while gentle sleep/The urchins’ eyelids kiss’d,/Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,/ Through the dark and heavy mist/And Eugene Aram walk’d between/With gyves upon his wrist.’

Now, instead of a ruffian who killed a fellow criminal when dividing up their spoils, Aram is depicted for the first time as a tormented, repentant sinner. By casting the act of murder as a dream, Hood was able to ignore entirely the mercenary element, making the criminal more important than the crime. The enormous success of the poem swept away more down-to-earth retellings. In the Manchester Times, the ballad was reprinted with a preface telling readers that ‘The late Admiral Burney [brother of the novelist Fanny Burney] went to school … where the unhappy Eugene Aram was usher … The admiral stated, that Aram was generally liked by the boys; and that he used to discourse to them about murder in somewhat of the spirit which is attributed to him in this poem.’ (Burney had been dead for seven years when this report appeared, so was not in a position to confirm or deny it.) Three years later, from ‘generally liked’, the Examiner now said firmly that Aram was ‘beloved’. This is no longer a comment on the poem, but is presented as a biographical fact.

The next person to handle Aram’s story was the most influential. Bulwer, fresh from his triumphs with crime and criminals in Pelham and Paul Clifford, in 1832 took on Eugene Aram. Bulwer begins his story in Grassdale, where Aram, a reclusive scholar-genius, falls in love with Madeline Lester, the squire’s daughter. All are pleased except her cousin Walter, who is in love with Madeline himself, and who now travels to forget. In a saddler’s shop in the north, he recognizes his long-vanished father’s whip. But he is told it was owned by a man named Daniel Clark, a villain who was later murdered. Walter meets Houseman, who incautiously connects Clark’s murder to Aram.Walter thunders home to prevent the wedding of his cousin to a murderer, Aram is arrested, tried and convicted, and Madeline dies of grief. Aram confesses: he was ‘haunted with the ambition of enlightening my race’, but was prevented from making ‘a gigantic discovery in science’ by ‘the total inadequacy of my means’. He decided, therefore, that it was ‘better for mankind – that I should commit one bold wrong, and by that wrong purchase the power of good’. His crime was further diminished: Clark was a vicious aristocrat who had raped a ‘quiet, patient-looking, gentle creature’, who subsequently killed herself. Aram’s repentance, such as it is, entirely revolves around the shame he has brought to the noble family of Lester, out of remorse for which he then commits suicide.

Bulwer aimed to make Aram a tragic figure: a noble man destroyed by a single flaw. To do so he had to rewrite almost all the known facts, apart from the long-undiscovered crime itself.* Clark, instead of a young labouring man, is now, melodrama-fashion, an upper-class despoiler of women; Aram’s abandoned wife and half-dozen children vanish without a trace; while Aram himself is no longer a humble usher, but a scholar of international renown.