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

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:

… 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.

* (#ulink_932ab65e-be41-5b26-a3b0-dd3fe5f950bc) 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?

* (#ulink_1fb268cf-4916-5afb-82ca-04347bcbb79b) 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.

* (#ulink_e8baca49-3a7f-50ac-a564-3ca4abce30d1) 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’.

* (#ulink_4591d582-98b2-59bc-a719-fd23dd1fe094) This meeting has been much disputed, and Egan may simply have worked from press reports and information supplied by sporting friends.

* (#ulink_9dc7c297-12e6-54be-9ab3-8e9b767a723f) 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.

* (#ulink_9dc7c297-12e6-54be-9ab3-8e9b767a723f) 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.

* (#ulink_7cdc6708-292b-5c2e-8ddd-f7eb516ef56a) 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.

* (#ulink_5e2a2cc5-dbc2-5c32-8b98-2c7d0617786c) 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.

* (#ulink_8e754325-bf5c-5c14-9120-ac0546a12182) 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.

* (#ulink_01d34d59-0898-5c91-8c7f-b77351f71d75) 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’.

† (#ulink_77643a66-f767-5b73-9ad9-de32f7b59e95) Mulready also sketched both Hunt and Probert. The drawings are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

§ (#ulink_f94dad10-087e-5e60-ae9a-171cb096a520) 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.

* (#ulink_f94dad10-087e-5e60-ae9a-171cb096a520) Jack Ketch was a seventeenth-century hangman, and his name was used colloquially to mean any executioner.

* (#ulink_3a4b23da-b8f0-5834-8c4d-ad292dd4575e) 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.

* (#ulink_f0357ba4-2785-51c3-9dea-65a66d8b958e) 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.

† (#ulink_98eff2b7-176d-5f3b-8a26-e1ef03d60746) It perhaps suits the theatricality of Thurtell’s legend that Lyon’s Inn was later pulled down to build the New Globe Theatre.

* (#ulink_675bc8fd-d60b-515a-b631-35e5028d9518) 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.

* (#ulink_3edde225-26b8-5ee1-a767-9d47cf925820) 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.

† (#ulink_e170a7bc-9f46-50e2-8d7f-e1442ebcb73d) 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.

* (#ulink_6b06bd35-1275-51c7-b4d3-af1ac5275705) 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.

* (#ulink_57eca2df-d11e-5784-8071-1090b49d3ab6) 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.

† (#ulink_57eca2df-d11e-5784-8071-1090b49d3ab6) 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.

* (#ulink_1d7b676a-73bb-578c-9231-6f5f1fcad7f6) 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.

* (#ulink_d4efc2db-c29b-5886-a34f-4e8d641b70a3) 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.

* (#ulink_80b0839f-c3c1-5bd8-bbf6-6f11dca4f2c0) 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.

* (#ulink_110fa384-0ed1-5d56-8111-5a1898c2d600) 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.

† (#ulink_a7223346-d242-580d-b481-2d15622585dd) ‘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.

* (#ulink_46d16a7b-213f-5b22-964e-5f030e21bba4) 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.

* (#ulink_2d2bf923-815c-501f-8d8f-a1c1b65b262b) It seems impossible that Stevenson could be thinking of anyone except Sir William Fergusson here (see p.63).

* (#ulink_388adc8d-b40a-55d2-8c79-f32eb0489c01) 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.

* (#ulink_8270ccf5-cfd6-5db7-b44c-f17bfd4f1534) 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.

* (#ulink_d4a17a91-0459-5787-8efa-a51333be70a1) 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.

* (#ulink_4f92070f-85a1-50bf-9432-51d7e16fc54b) 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.