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

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

JUDITH FLANDERS. The Invention of Murder. How the Victorians Revelled in Death and. Detection and Invented Modern Crime

CONTENTS

TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

A NOTE ON CURRENCY

ONE Imagining Murder

TWO Trial by Newspaper

THREE Entertaining Murder

FOUR Policing Murder

FIVE Panic

SIX Middle-Class Poisoners

SEVEN Science, Technology and the Law

EIGHT Violence

NINE Modernity

NOTES

1: Imagining Murder

2: Trial by Newspaper

3: Entertaining Murder

4: Policing Murder

5: Panic

6: Middle-Class Poisoners

7: Science, Technology and the Law

8: Violence

9: Modernity

SOURCES

Newspapers

Magazines and Journals

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Playbills

Broadsides

Playscripts

Penny publications

Published primary sources

Secondary sources

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

For Susan and Ellen without whom …

Title Page

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Melodrama, too, took Maria Marten to its heart. The earliest stage version of the story was announced at the Pavilion Theatre, Mile End, shortly after the trial, and there is a brief outline of the scenes in the playbill. In Act I, Corder promises to marry Maria, but is already planning her betrayal: ‘The deed were bloody, sure, but I will do’t …’ After Maria’s murder, her mother wakes from a nightmare: ‘Help, help! My child! I saw her, sure, lifeless, smeared with blood! ‘Twas in the Red Barn! – and there stood Corder with a pickaxe digging out her grave.’ When Mr Marten discovers the body, there is an ‘affecting scene’: ‘she was the darling of my age, the prop of my existence’. In the final scene in Bury Gaol, Maria appears to Corder as a ghost. His last words are ‘Guilt, guilt … I am, I am her murderer!’

This story remained a favourite: a version in Cheltenham in 1828 had Miss Marten shot in front of the audience’s eyes; a production in Weymouth introduced gypsies into the plot (this element swiftly infiltrated most productions, usually in the guise of Pharos Lee, the renamed Runner); there was a Welsh version in 1829, in Monmouth and later in Cardiff; an undated production in Swansea; a production in Hull advertised ‘Maria Marlin [sic], the Pride of the Village’, who after death conducts her mother to her resting place ‘IN A FLAME OF FIRE’. In an early 1860s version, James Lee, the Bow Street Runner who had arrested Corder, now aged seventy-six, recreated his arrest onstage for a benefit performance. *All of these productions conformed to the standard melodrama casting, with Corder played by the ‘heavy’; Mr Marten the ‘second heavy’, or ‘heavy father’; Tim Bobbin, the comic servant, by the ‘first low comedian’; Mrs Marten the ‘character old woman’; and Maria herself, the ‘leading lady’.

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