Читать книгу The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime - Judith Flanders - Страница 9

‘A copious effusion of blood’ was something that John Thurtell certainly provided. His crime has been said to have founded newspaper fortunes, for his was the first ‘trial by newspaper’, his actions read and judged by people across the country long before he was brought to trial. That it should have been Thurtell who caught the imagination of the public in this way is extraordinary, for his was a sordid, brutal and remarkably unsuccessful crime. John Thurtell, failed cloth merchant, failed publican and failed gambler, was also a failed murderer.

On 28 October 1823, one Charles Nicholls, of Aldenham in Hertfordshire, arrived in Watford, anxious to notify the magistrates of ‘some singular circumstances pointing to foul play’. He had been passing through Gill’s Hill Lane (then countryside, now in the small town of Radlett) when he saw some road-menders combing the bushes. They told him that that morning they had met a stranger searching the verge. He explained that his gig had overturned the previous night, and he was trying to find his missing penknife and handkerchief. After he left, the road-menders continued his search, hoping that valuables might also have fallen from the gig. Instead they found a knife and a pistol, both of which had dried, caked, brownish deposits on them, looking suspiciously like blood; the pistol, furthermore, had hair and what might even be brains sticking to its butt. Charles Nicholls consequently hot-footed it to Watford.

One of the magistrates immediately went to Gill’s Hill – with no police, magistrates did their own investigation. He learned enough there to lead him to arrest a man named William Probert, who rented a cottage nearby. Two men, John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt, were reported to have spent the night at Probert’s cottage, but they had returned to London that morning. The next day, therefore, the magistrate sent for the Bow Street Runners.

The Runners had no formal status, and were not linked to the metropolitan police offices, which were under the aegis of the Home Office. The Bow Street magistrates were, for historical reasons, paid from a secret-service account, while the Runners were in turn Bow Street’s own, privately paid detective force. The Runners’ salary was small, 25s. a week plus 14s. expenses, their main income coming from hiring themselves out to other police offices or to private individuals across the country. Now two Runners were hired to locate the suspicious Thurtell and Hunt. After a brief visit to Gill’s Hill the senior Runner, George Ruthven, returned to London, where:

I found [Thurtell] at the Coach and Horses, Conduit Street. I said: John, my boy, I want you. Thurtell had been anticipating serious proceedings against him for setting his house on fire in the city [see p. 24] … It was highly probable that he supposed that I wanted him on that charge. My horse and chaise were at the door. He got in and I handcuffed him to one side of the rail of my trap … On the road nothing could be more chatty and free than the conversation on the part of Thurtell. If he did suspect where I was going to take him, he played an innocent part very well, and artfully pretended total ignorance. I drove up to the inn, where Probert and Hunt were in charge of the local constables. Let us have some brandy and water, George, said Thurtell. I went out of the room to order it. Give us a song said Thurtell, and Hunt, who was a beautiful singer, struck up ‘Mary, list awake’. I paused with the door in my hand and said to myself – ‘Is it possible that these men are murderers?’

The newspapers had no such doubts, even though no charges had yet been laid and there was as yet no body. One week after the crime took place, six days after the weapons were found in the bushes, two days after the arrest of Thurtell, the Morning Chronicle ran its first piece on the ‘Most Horrible Murder Near Watford’.

Thurtell and his friends had the disadvantage of poor reputations. Thurtell himself had been born into relative gentility: his father was a prosperous Norwich merchant, later an alderman and in 1828 mayor. Thurtell had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines in 1809, when he was fifteen or sixteen. Despite the French wars, he saw action only once, and in 1814 he retired on half-pay and returned to Norwich. His father set up him as a bombazine (woollen cloth) manufacturer, but Thurtell became enamoured of ‘the fancy’, the world of Regency prize-fighters, gamblers and their followers.

This was his first downward step. Prize-fighting was illegal, and fights were held in fields, for preference near county boundaries, so that in case of trouble the crowds could disperse across more than one jurisdiction. Thurtell became what in modern parlance would be called a fight promoter, or manager, although the role was then much more informal. The first fight that we know he was involved in was between Ned ‘Flatnose’ Painter, a Norwich fighter, and Tom Oliver, in July 1820. This meeting was later immortalized by George Borrow, in Lavengro in 1851 (‘Lavengro’ is Romany for ‘philologist’, supposedly the name given to Borrow himself by the Rom he befriended). Much of Lavengro is fictionalized, but the description of Thurtell is based on reality:

a man somewhat under thirty, and nearly six feet in height … he wore neither whiskers nor moustaches, and appeared not to delight in hair, that of his head, which was of light brown, being closely cropped. the eyes were grey, with an expression in which there was sternness blended with something approaching to feline; his complexion was exceedingly pale, relieved, however, by certain pockmarks, which here and there studded his countenance; his form was athletic, but lean; his arms long. You might have supposed him a bruiser; his dress was that of one … something was wanting, however, in his manner – the quietness of the professional man; he rather looked like one performing the part – well – very well – but still performing the part.

Borrow recounted how one day Thurtell and Ned Painter called on a local landowner, asking for the use of a small field in which to stage a fight. They were refused, the man explaining that, as a magistrate, he could not become involved. ‘Magistrate!’ says Thurtell, ‘then fare ye well, for a green-coated buffer and a Harmanbeck.’* The magistrate was wiser than he knew, as Thurtell had a reputation for being ‘on the cross’ – involved in match-fixing. When in September 1820 Jack Martin, ‘the Master of the Rolls’ (he was a baker), fought Jack Randall, ‘the Nonpareil’, the match was thought by many to have been a cross arranged by a gambler named William Weare to allow Thurtell to recoup some of the money Weare had won off him. Thurtell, ultimately, would be the death of Weare – and vice-versa.

Borrow, although obviously impressed by Thurtell, had no illusions about him: ‘The terrible Thurtell was present. grim and pale as usual, with his bruisers around. He it was, indeed, who got up the fight, as he had previously done twenty others; it being his frequent boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed amidst rural scenes and transformed a quiet slumbering town into a den of Jews and metropolitan thieves.’

Thurtell by now had a thorough knowledge of metropolitan thieves and Jews. (All moneylenders were regarded as Jewish, whether they were or not.) He had failed as a cloth merchant in Norwich, after defrauding his creditors by claiming to have been robbed of the money he owed them. Few believed in these convenient thieves, and Thurtell was declared bankrupt in February 1821. Shifting his base of operations to London, where his reputation might not have preceded him, he set up as the landlord of the Black Boy, in Long Acre, but the pub became a byword for illegal gambling, and soon lost its licence. Thurtell moved from job to job, from money-making scheme to money-making scheme. At the Army and Navy pub he met Joseph Hunt, briefly its manager, a gambler who had already been to prison once; he met William Weare and his friends at yet another pub. Weare claimed to be a solicitor, and lived at Lyon’s Inn, formerly an Inn of Chancery and now lodgings frequented by legal professionals. In fact he had been a waiter, then a billiard-marker, and had finally joined a gang ‘who lived by blind hooky [a card game], hazard [dice], billiards, and the promotion of crooked fights’. He was a legendary figure in the gambling underworld, and it was reported that he always carried his entire savings, said to be £2,000, with him.

Thurtell’s brother Thomas was the landlord of the Cock Tavern, in the Haymarket, and there they became acquainted with Probert, a spirit merchant who helped them to raise money on dubious lines of credit. Thurtell was operating once more as a cloth merchant, but just as his credit ran out, by an amazing coincidence his warehouse, insured to the hilt, was destroyed by fire. The insurance company refused to pay, and in 1823 Thurtell sued. Despite witnesses testifying that he had earlier discussed arson with them; despite information that he had bought fabric on credit and resold it for less than he had paid; despite evidence that he had blocked up the single window that would have permitted the nightwatchman to see the flames as they started – despite all this, the jury found for Thurtell, with £1,900 damages. *The insurers appealed, withholding the insurance money, while the money from the damages went to Thurtell’s creditors. The Thurtell brothers’ financial situation continued parlous.They were by now reduced to selling off the drink from the pub they managed in order to eat, while they couldn’t leave the building in case the insurance company had them arrested for conspiracy to defraud; they would have been unable to post bail.

Weare, meanwhile, was doing splendidly, alternating between trips to the races and days spent in billiard saloons. Then one day he said he was off to Hertfordshire for the weekend to go shooting with Thurtell. There would be shooting, it is true, but it was not Weare who held the gun.

On 24 October, two men who very strongly resembled Thurtell and Hunt bought a pair of pistols from a pawnbroker in Marylebone. The same day, Hunt hired a gig and horse, and asked at the stable where he could buy a rope and sack; at a public house in Conduit Street, he was overheard to ask Probert if he wanted to be ‘in it’. In the late afternoon, Thurtell drove Weare down to Probert’s cottage at Gill’s Hill in the gig, leaving Probert to follow on with Hunt. Their horse was a grey with unusual markings: a white face and white socks. Probert dropped Hunt at an inn near Gill’s Hill, to wait for Thurtell as arranged, and drove on to his cottage on his own. As he neared home, he found Thurtell in the lane. Thurtell asked him where Hunt was, and grumbled – or boasted – that he had ‘done the business without his help’. Probert returned to the inn to collect Hunt, and on his return Hunt and Thurtell reproached each other for missing the appointment. It didn’t matter, said Thurtell off-handedly, he had killed Weare on his own: the pistol had misfired, so he had bludgeoned him to death, ‘turning [the pistol] through his brains’, and then slitting his throat.

Hunt poured all of this out at the magistrates’ hearing. When more than one suspect was arrested for a crime, only one could be given immunity from prosecution by turning king’s evidence. This frequently produced an unseemly scramble to be the first person to ‘peach’. Hunt’s ‘natural pusillanimity’ encouraged his pragmatism, and he revealed all. After the three men met up at the cottage, he said, they ate the pork chops Hunt had brought with him for supper. (At the trial, Probert’s servant was asked, ‘Was the supper postponed?’ ‘No,’ she replied innocently, ‘it was pork.’)* Telling Mrs Probert that they had to visit a neighbour after supper, they collected Weare’s body from where Thurtell had stashed it, took what valuables he had on him, and put the corpse in a sack. Back at the cottage, Thurtell presented Mrs Probert with a gold chain. Mrs Probert, greatly wondering, later watched from a window as Thurtell and Hunt, who said they would sleep in the sitting room, instead took a horse from the stable. When they returned, having dumped Weare’s body in a nearby pond, she overheard them dividing the money they had found on Weare’s body, which was a wretched £15, instead of the legendary £2,000. The next day Thurtell and Hunt took the gig back to London, together with some of Weare’s clothing. They returned the following day, Hunt bringing a newly purchased spade. Probert was anxious about the proximity of the body to his cottage, so soon Weare was on the move once more, this time to a pond near Elstree.

As soon as the authorities located the body, Thurtell was committed for trial, with the other two remanded as accessories. Things were not looking good for them – some of Weare’s belongings had been found in Hunt’s lodgings, and a shirt marked ‘W’ in the stable near Probert’s cottage. The gig and the unusual horse were identified at various pubs along the route between Gill’s Hill and London, as were its passengers. At the inquest Hunt claimed that he had no connection with Thurtell and Probert, that he had only been hired to sing (he was a modestly successful tavern performer; his more famous brother sang at Covent Garden). He agreed that he had bought a sack and rope before he left London, but said they were for the game that Probert and Weare planned to shoot. Probert too tried to claim that Thurtell acted alone, but the jury found that Weare had been murdered by Thurtell, while Probert ‘counselled, procured, incited, and abetted the said John Thurtell the said murder and felony to do and commit’. Thomas Thurtell meanwhile was arrested for conspiracy to defraud the County Fire Office.

In November, Probert’s wife, sister-in-law and brother were all arrested. Mrs Probert’s brother Thomas Noyes had played cards with the men after the murder, and she herself had received what was now identified as Weare’s watch-chain. Noyes and his sister were soon released, but Mrs Probert remained under arrest, while the authorities approached Probert to turn king’s evidence. Hunt had proved an unreliable witness, clearly terrified, happy to agree with anything anyone suggested. The main reason to use Probert, however, was that if he were indicted, Mrs Probert’s evidence of what had passed at the cottage could not be heard – a wife could not testify against her husband.

In the run-up to the trial the newspapers whipped themselves into a frenzy. At the end of the French wars, a 4d. tax had been added to the price of a newspaper, ensuring a hefty cover price – at the time of Thurtell’s trial, the Morning Chronicle, The Times, the Morning Herald and the Observer each cost 7d. Yet their prosperous, middle-class readers were avid for crime stories.On a random day in the month of Weare’s murder, the four pages of The Times consisted of two pages of advertisements, two columns of news, a few letters, some birth and death announcements; and the rest of the paper was entirely given over to police, trial and magistrates’ court reports. The Morning Chronicle similarly gave the majority of its editorial space to crime on a regular basis, continuing a long tradition of prurient upper-middle-class love of crime: the Gentleman’s Magazine had, between 1731 and 1818, reported on 1,172 murders – over one a month for nearly a century.

Pierce Egan, one of the most famous journalists of the day, claimed to have interviewed Thurtell as he awaited trial. Egan had started as a sporting journalist, writing Boxiana, or, Sketches of ancient and modern pugilism in 1812. In 1821 his Life in London, or, The day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, illustrated by the Cruikshank brothers, a comic story of two young swells on the razzle, was wildly popular. Imitations and even outright plagiarisms quickly appeared, as well as several stage versions. As a member – albeit a more respectable one – of the fancy, Egan dealt with Thurtell’s story as sympathetically as possible, while still maintaining an appropriately shocked tone.* His piece was very much for slightly raffish men about town, presenting Thurtell as a ‘foolish young [man] from the country’ whom the professional gamblers had ‘picked up as a good flat [an easy dupe]; and the rolls of country flim-seys [banknotes] which he brought with him to town, were soon reduced … The Swell Yokel as he was first termed … was hailed as a rare customer; and numbers were on the look out to have a slice of his blunt [piece of his money]…Mr. Weare was one of this number: (he was what is termed in the sporting world a dead nail [a crook]), a complete sharper [swindler].’

Thurtell in this version is not only naíve, but even cowardly. Egan gives a history of incidents where Thurtell had issued challenges, or pretended to, but was not actually willing to fight. This is all done very delicately, by imputation rather than outright statement. After telling the history of the fire and the arson trial, Egan concludes, ‘It is decidedly the opinion of Thurtell’s most intimate friends, that his conduct for the last two years, had been more like that of a madman than of a rational being.’

This seems kind when compared to the newspapers. Long before the trial began, The Times printed a stream of vitriolic – and completely unsubstantiated – stories. On 6 November it told its readers that ‘Thurtell is reported to have been with Wellington’s troops at the siege of San Sebastián, where he lurked behind the lines to murder and rob a fallen officer,’ and he was reported as saying of this victim, ‘I thought by the look of him that he was a nob, and must have some blunt about him; so I just tucked my sword in his ribs, and settled him; and I found a hundred and forty doubloons in his pocket!’ This was one of the few stories that was denied in print, as commentators noted that 140 doubloons would be so heavy the possessor would not have been able to walk. Nothing daunted, that same day there was another story about Thurtell, saying that in his lodgings the police had found an air-gun in the shape of a walking stick, cunningly painted to look like wood, although nothing more was ever heard of it. Four days later, a story appeared about one James Wood, Thurtell’s supposed rival for the supposed charms of Miss Caroline Noyes, Mrs Probert’s sister. Wood was said to have been decoyed into an ambush in a tenement, where he was attacked by Thurtell with a pair of dumbbells. The Times added, as proof of this remarkable story, that a search of the building had produced a set of dumbbells. And on the same day the paper reported that Probert had testified that Thurtell had ‘picked out 17 persons of substance that he intended to rob and murder, and that [Weare] was one of them’. The journalist had no doubt that the remaining sixteen had had lucky ‘escapes from the late horrid conspiracy’, and added a story of a man named Sparks, who declined to go into business with Thurtell, thus escaping a ‘horrible doom, which otherwise, in all probability, awaited him’. A week later the daily update, otherwise relatively low-key, referred to Thurtell, Hunt and Probert – still awaiting trial – as ‘the guilty culprits’.

The Morning Chronicle, too, referred to the three as ‘the murderers’. The Hampshire Telegraph claimed that Probert had ‘debauched’ both the unnamed wife and daughter of his unnamed landlord, and ‘Indeed … no woman, whom he wished to possess, could escape him; for if he could not get her by fair means, he would not scruple to assail her by foul.’ The Derby Mercury reported that an unnamed ‘person who was known to be acquainted with the Thurtells. [had] suddenly disappeared, and has not since been heard of’. The Caledonian Mercury liked the death-by-dumbbells story, and threw in an additional report of ‘an offensive smell’ emanating from Probert’s cottage, similar to ‘that which proceeds from a corpse in a state of decomposition’. The Examiner reported that yet another unnamed man had been murdered, this time ‘cast into the Thames from Battersea Bridge’. For good measure it added that Thurtell and his gang had also attempted to murder Mr Barber Beaumont, the director of the County Fire Office, and had only been foiled because, contrary to habit, on the night of the attempt Mr Beaumont had failed to take his usual seat by a window. Many of the papers featured this story, apparently never pausing to ask themselves why such a dastardly gang had not summoned the energy to make a second attempt on Mr Beaumont’s life. The Bristol Mercury reported yet another ‘mysterious disappearance’, this time an unnamed pregnant woman, said to be a clergyman’s daughter, who had been ravished by one of the gang. ‘The worst is surmised,’ it added hopefully.

The hysteria infected everyone. A thirteen-year-old schoolboy wrote to his mother that Thurtell had ‘positively’ plotted to murder ‘a long catalogue of rich persons’: his schoolmaster had assured him that ‘the bodies of 6 persons have been found in the Thames, 2 of them are women. Two clergymen are engaged in this scandalous affair. Two clergymen of the Established Church!’

In this febrile atmosphere, a fortnight before the trial was scheduled to begin, plays were advertised at two London theatres, the Surrey and the Coburg.* Since 1737, a Licensing Act had severely restricted the number of theatres that were permitted to stage spoken drama or comedy; these were referred to as ‘legitimate’ theatres. The Act had not, however, included musical theatre, which could legally be performed in theatres licensed by local magistrates and known in London as ‘the minors’.*

Throughout the century working-class theatre audiences were an increasingly powerful economic force, particularly in industrial areas. In the East End of London the rapid development of the docks along the Thames created a vast, and almost entirely working-class, community: from 125,000 people in 1780, the population grew to just under a million in 1888, and nearly two million by the end of the century, when it became perhaps the largest working-class community in the world. To serve its needs, theatres, taverns, saloons and other places of entertainment sprang up: ten new theatres in the quarter-century after 1825. These were not small places, either: at mid-century the Standard held 3,400 people, the Pavilion 3,500, the Royal Victoria gallery alone nearly 2,000. (The Vic was not in the East End but south of the river, but the audiences for the ‘transpontine theatres’, as they were known, came mainly from the river-workers and other East End residents.) Other new industrial cities had equally large spaces: in Birmingham in 1840, a single theatre gallery held 1,200 people. Working-class audiences far outnumbered middle-class ones: in 1866 there were 51,363 nightly seats in twenty-five London theatres; of these, 32,395 were located in the East End or south of the river in the transpontine theatres – the Coburg, the Surrey and Astley’s Amphitheatre being the most famous. When the cheap seats in the West End, and the sort of places that were too rough or too small even to be considered theatres, are added in, it is clear why working-class tastes predominated.

In 1840, a writer on theatre noted that at the Pavilion Theatre in Stepney, ‘the Newgate calendar [a multi-volume true-crime compendium] and tales of terror stand in the same place as Homer did to the ancient dramatists’. Punch parodied this taste, describing a leading man at the minor theatres as one ‘who is murdered at least twice a week, commits parricide several times in the course of the year, and is torn by remorse every night at about nine o’clock’.

Playwrights were thus always on the lookout for new murderous material, and with two plays called The Gamblers, a stimulated public immediately made the connection to the story that had been monopolizing the newspapers. The Gamblers opened at the Surrey on 17 November 1823, The Gamblers, or, The Murderers at the Desolate Cottage at the Coburg the following day.*

The Surrey and the Coburg were two of the homes of melodrama, the century’s predominant dramatic form. Melodrama simplified an increasingly complex world. It depicted brutal crime and violent death, which were familiar enough in the world its audiences inhabited; but unlike real life, in the world of melodrama justice always triumphed in the last act. What realism rejects as ludicrous coincidence is, to a melodrama audience, the workings of providence: the greater the coincidence, the greater the sense of meaning. The subjects tended to be those audiences could identify with: the rustic adrift in the big city, or working men oppressed by evil masters; the ‘pride of the village’ seduced by a villain. The villains were authority figures (squires, landlords, judges) or those who served them (stewards, lawyers, beadles). Melodrama characters have preordained parts: a villain is a villain, and will not become a hero. Costume was as much an indicator of character as occupation. The heroine wore white; heroes, even those with no connection to the sea, were frequently dressed as sailors (the dockyards were the major employers around many minor theatres); while villains wore the guise of men about town, usually with the addition of a dashing pair of boots.

This typing permitted stock companies to function: the rustic, the ‘heavy’, the heroine, the comic servant, were all a standard type, with standard make-up and a standard costume. Each week, therefore, a new drama could draw in the same audiences to watch similar characters in different situations, which were also standard: the last-minute reprieve from the gallows, the overheard conversation, the long-lost foundling child, the secret marriage. Melodrama also relied on highly stylized speech, in which thoughts were articulated – in Tom Bowling, a well-loved 1830 melodrama, Dare-Devil Bill, the smuggler, shouts that his enemy: ‘shall hang! hang! hang! and on the same gibbet as myself! And how I will exult, and how my eyeballs, starting from their sockets, will glare upon him in their convulsive brilliancy! And I will laugh, too … ha, ha, ha!’ – regularly interspersed with comedy, mime, spectacle, song and dance, all no more realistic than the dialogue. Nor were they intended to be. In an 1829 adaptation of Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, a character is lost on a storm-racked Scottish heath, when suddenly: ‘Ha! What do I see on this lonely heath? A Piano? Who could be lonely with that? The moon will shortly rise and light me from this unhallowed place; so, to console myself, I will sing one of Julia’s favourite melodies.’ And he does.

The surviving playbill for The Gamblers gives some indication of the furore that the Surrey expected. Unusually, the standard description of the evening’s entertainment is prefaced by a notice ‘To the public claiming, implausibly, that the play had been written before ‘the recent SANGUINARY MURDER’. After the news broke, it continued, the managers had considered withdrawing the play, but as the newspapers had printed ‘columns filled with the most trivial particulars of the Murder, [and] have also given illustrations of every Scene attached to the fatal deed’, they felt that ‘in denying to our Audience a Drama’ they would be failing ‘a duty unquestionably due both to them and to ourselves’. Having set out their virtuous credentials, only now do they come to the play’s great selling point: sets ‘illustrated by CORRECT VIEWS taken on the SPOT, and ‘THE IDENTICAL HORSE AND GIG Alluded to by the Daily Press’, which, in a moment of commercial genius, the theatre had purchased.

The play itself was a standard melodrama, telling the tale of a country innocent taking a bloody revenge after being fleeced by big-city gamblers. The highlight was the horse and gig; this, said the Observer the next day, ‘formed the strongest feature of interest in the eyes of the audience, if we could safely collect that expression from the applause that followed their appearance’. The Times tsk-tsk-ed at the very idea of showing William Weare’s murder onstage, but its reviewer the next night was nonetheless disappointed to discover that the Coburg’s The Gamblers, or, The Murderers at the Desolate Cottage had no connection to the murder of William Weare at all, ‘except we could fancy the cabriolet in which the ghost travels to be Probert’s gig. and a French hut being Gill’s-hill-cottage, and a pool of fire to be his pond’.

The horse and gig were easy for the Surrey to get hold of: they had only been hired by the murderers. Other, more personal, items were also available. Probert had owed rent on the cottage, and an auction quickly sold off most ordinary household goods at ordinary household prices.* While purchasers were not plentiful, many came for a day out as murder tourists, wandering through the grounds and, for a shilling, even the cottage itself. One publication claimed that five hundred people had paid the entrance fee. Soon a little sightseeing route was worked out: ‘At Elstree the curious made their first halt. Here the grave of Mr. Weare, in Elstree Church-yard, was visited, and the pond, about a quarter of a mile out of the village … The Artichoke Inn, to which the corpse was carried, and where the Coroner’s Inquest was held. Mr. Field, the landlord, being one of the Jury, was therefore fully competent to the task of answering the numerous questions put to him by his customers. Here the sack, in which the remains of the victim had been carried from Probert’s cottage, was shown. The marks of blood which it bears gave it peculiar interest.’

Just as with a sightseeing trip today, the circuit could be finished off with a souvenir: a lucky few managed to buy a bit of the sack; for others, a Staffordshire pottery figure was soon available; those with less money could buy a book at the cottage, complete with a map of Weare’s posthumous journeys. Those with no money at all could still take away a memento: the Caledonian Mercury reported that by mid-November the hedge outside the cottage was vanishing, filched ‘by those curious people, who consider a twig from the hedge, through which the remains of a murdered man had been dragged, must furnish a treat to their equally curious friends’.

Murder tourists came from all walks of life. As late as 1828, Walter Scott recorded in his journal that he and his companions travelled out of their way to visit Gill’s Hill Lane and do the circuit. After taking in the lane and the ponds, they went on to the cottage itself, now partially dismantled, and were shown around by a ‘truculent looking hag’ for 2s.6d. Five years after the event, the ‘hag’ could ask, and receive, nearly a week’s pay for a workman.

Private entrepreneurship was one thing. Theatre was another. After the Surrey’s first night, the Lord Chamberlain stepped in and ordered the play to be withdrawn. Furthermore, Thurtell’s solicitor swore out an affidavit for an attempt to pervert the course of justice by showing Thurtell and Hunt committing murder onstage before they were tried, much less convicted. The management attempted to claim that there was no resemblance at all between the play and the murder of William Weare, but the purchase of the gig and the white-faced horse made this impossible to sustain.

When the Hertfordshire Assizes, at which Thurtell and Hunt were to be tried, opened on 4 December, Thurtell’s lawyer immediately applied for a postponement because of pre-trial prejudice, claiming that the press had caused ‘the grossest injustice towards his client’. As if to prove his case, his affidavit was immediately reprinted in The Times, despite a judicial ban on its publication, as it contained a compilation of all the worst articles that had appeared. The papers followed every twist and turn of these legal arguments. The Morning Chronicle gave thirteen of its daily twenty columns to the subject, and it also produced snappy summaries: the judge, for example, ‘loves the Press, but wishes it had fewer readers’. The crusading liberal paper the Examiner, which had been founded in 1808 by Leigh Hunt and his brother as a Radical voice to counter both the Tory government and the (then) Prince Regent’s Whig cronies, agreed: the judge ‘has been guided throughout by that keen and constant hatred of the press which is the mainspring of two-thirds of the political sentiments of his party … And why is all this? Because the press is the great organ of knowledge. To keep the body of the people in the dark, is the dear and leading aim of many …’ The leader-writer added that the law as it stood did not permit the accused to know what the prosecution’s case would be: ‘A pretty law, then, truly!’ which forbids a man to know what he will have to refute. The newspapers’ job, as he saw it, was to supply that lack.

The trial was postponed for a month, to January 1824, although the press excitement then was no less. The Chronicle printed a supplementary sheet after the first day, and also doubled its normal four pages to eight for a full report; on the second day it returned to four pages, but devoted three of them, plus a leader, to the trial. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle devoted five of its six pages to the trial. The Chronicle calculated that over the two days of the trial there were a hundred horses reserved to carry the reports from Hertford by express, to feed the insatiable demand. Even local papers had expresses: the Ipswich Journal finished its report of the opening of the assizes with a triumphant, ‘BY EXPRESS. HERTFORD. FRIDAY, ONE O’CLOCK’.

The Observer printed five pictures in its report – a great novelty, as technology was just beginning to permit the use of engravings in newspapers, instead of the clumsier, and slower-to-produce, woodblocks. Another paper included illustrations of the court, maps of Gill’s Hill, and views of Probert’s cottage. Pictures could also be purchased separately. A journalist returned to London after the adjournment in company with ‘a tradesman from Oxford-street, who had been frightened out of his wits. by hearing that pictures of Gill’s Hill Cottage were actionable, for he had brought “some very good likenesses of the Pond to sell”, and had been obliged to take them out of the window of [his shop], almost the very moment they were placed there!’

The trial itself almost reads as an anti-climax. At this period, prisoners accused of a felony could have legal counsel, but only for advice and to deal with points of law. How rigorously this was applied varied from circuit to circuit, but the theory was that it was up to the prosecution to prove its case so well that no defence could be mounted. And in this particular case there was no defence: publicans and stablemen between London and Gill’s Hill all testified to seeing Thurtell with Weare in the gig. Then Weare vanished, while the pistol with human remains on it was found just where Thurtell had been seen searching. Items belonging to Weare were in the possession of the three men, and Hunt knew where the body was to be found. Thurtell spoke in his own defence, as the law permitted. He read out a list he had compiled of wrongful convictions throughout history, but one journalist thought it was so long that it was counterproductive: everyone stopped listening.*He blamed everybody except himself for his misfortunes: his creditors, his solicitor, fellow merchants, the insurance office – all had betrayed him. As to the murder itself, Hunt and Probert had done it, he said. Hunt tried to read his defence, but was so overcome he managed to read only a bit of it ‘in a poor dejected voice, and then leant his wretched head upon his hand’ while someone else read the rest.

The law required that trials were held continuously, unless the jury demanded a break. Thurtell and Hunt’s trial began at eight o’clock on the morning of 6 January, and ran without pause until after nine o’clock that night, when the jury called a halt. The two defence speeches and the summing-up were heard the next day, after which the jury may not even have retired to consider their verdict: the journals merely say the members ‘conferred’ for twenty minutes. Hunt was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to transportation; Thurtell was found guilty of murder, and the only sentence for that was death.*

Immediately, the horse expresses set off for the printers. For some, even that wasn’t fast enough. The artist William Mulready, having attended the trial, quickly sent a long account to his patron in Northumberland – the trial finished on a Wednesday, and this way he would receive the news long before the Sunday newspapers’ account.† By then, the execution would have taken place – forty-eight hours from verdict to gallows was the rule, unless a Sunday intervened.

This compression was a godsend to the newspapers, the weeklies in particular: they could print the trial, verdict and execution, all in one. The Observer advertised that its execution special would be double its usual length (which was only two pages), and would cost 14d., instead of 7d. Bell’s advertised the same: a double issue, at double the price, and, for its sporting readership, ‘The same publication will contain an account of the Great Fight for Six Hundred Sovereigns between SPRING and LANGAN, for the rival Champions of England and Ireland. written by the celebrated PIERCE EGAN.’ Thurtell’s supporters loved a good fight, and ‘among the sporting circles bets are still offered on the result of the trial, and in many cases these are connected with the fight between Spring and Langan’, noted the Chronicle. § The connection continued to be made. An anti-capital-punishment essay from the 1860s reported on Thurtell’s execution: ‘It is said that the championship of England was to be decided. on the morning of the day on which Thurtell was executed, and that, when he came out on the scaffold, he inquired privily of the executioner if the result had yet become known. Jack Ketch*was not aware, and Thurtell expressed his regret that the ceremony in which he was chief actor should take place so inconveniently early in the day.’

For those who could not afford newspapers, Thurtell broadsides had been pouring out over the past months. Many provided updates and trial reports, while others had songs and poetic effusions. One had an ‘action’ picture, with Thurtell dragging Weare’s body into the bushes (this cost double the normal price, 2d.). ‘The Hertfordshire Tragedy; or, the Fatal Effects of Gambling. Exemplified in the Murder of Mr. Weare and the Execution of John Thurtell’, a particularly long example, can stand here for many. It opened with a description of Thurtell’s idyllic childhood, and his poor, loving mother. But then he sets off for that fatal city, London, and

Like many a gay young man,

He mix’d with thoughtless company,

Which thousands has trepan’d [sic].

He soon forgot his mother dear,

And all his friends behind …

From bad to worse he did proceed,

‘mid scenes of guilt and vice,

Until he learn’d the cursed art,

To play with cards and dice.

And from that fatal, fatal day,

His ruin we may date,

Nor were his eyes e’er open’d,

Until it was too late.

The story of his being fleeced by Weare is rehearsed, and then the unsuspecting gambler heads for Hertfordshire.

When they had reached Gill’s Hill Lane,

That dark and dismal place,

Thurtell drew a pistol forth,

And fir’d it in Weare’s face.

The helpless man sprung from the gig,

And strove the road to gain,

But Thurtell pounc’d on him, and dash’d

His pistol through his brains.

Then pulling out his murderous knife,

As over him he stood,

He cut his throat, and, tiger-like,

Did drink his reeking blood.

This was accompanied by what were claimed to be portraits of Thurtell and Hunt, and eight illustrations.

Yet after the verdict was handed down, strangely, Thurtell the monster, Thurtell the drinker of blood, began to disappear, to be replaced by Thurtell the gallant, Thurtell the debonair. One broadside respectfully reported his considerate behaviour on the day of his execution, when he stood under the scaffold: ‘he looked at the crowd, and made a slight bow, instantly every head was uncovered, and many muttered “what a Gentleman”. His appearance at that moment was affecting beyond description.’ In the 1920s the historian G.M. Trevelyan claimed that, a hundred years before, children wrote the sentence ‘Thurtell was a murdered man’ as an exercise in penmanship.

In 1857 George Borrow drew for his middle-class audience a picture entirely in keeping with this debonair post-trial image. In his novel The Romany Rye, the narrator is in money difficulties. ‘A person I had occasionally met at sporting-dinners’ comes to hear of his trouble and lends him £200.

I begged him to tell me how I could requite him for his kindness, whereupon, with the most dreadful oath I ever heard, he bade me come and see him hanged when his time was come. I wrung his hand, and told him I would, and I kept my word. The night before the day he was hanged at H—, I harnessed a Suffolk Punch to my light gig … and … in eleven hours I drove that Punch one hundred and ten miles. I arrived at H—just in the nick of time. There was the ugly jail – the scaffold – and there upon it stood the only friend I ever had in the world. Driving my Punch, which was all in a foam, into the midst of the crowd, which made way for me as if it knew what I came for, I stood up in my gig, took off my hat, and shouted, ‘God Almighty bless you, Jack!’ The dying man turned his pale grim face towards me – for his face was always somewhat grim, do you see – nodded and said, or I thought I heard him say, ‘All right, old chap.’ The next moment – my eyes water.

He concludes philosophically, ‘Well, some are born to be hanged, and some are not; and many of those who are not hanged are much worse than those who are.’

It was said that 40,000 people attended Thurtell’s execution, and afterwards his body was sent to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection by the faculty of medicine and its students, as was standard for felons. In theory, the anatomization process was a matter for the faculty alone, but on the day crowds of people descended on the anatomy theatre. For those who couldn’t be there, The Times reported on the appearance of the body in the dissecting room, and Pierce Egan’s Account of the Trial of John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt carried a notice from the publisher: ‘SPECIAL PERMISSION having been given to the Editor of the MEDICAL ADVISER to examine the body of Thurtell after the execution, a full account of the PECULIAR CRANIOLOGICAL Appearances, with illustrative engravings, will appear in the next Number.’ Rowlandson produced a watercolour of the scene, ‘The Lancett Club at a Thurtell Feast’. (The surgeon doing the dissection is grotesquely caricatured, while the corpse of Thurtell is entirely realistic.)

Despite the finality of death, some found it hard to let go of such a money-spinner. ‘Light be the stones on Thurtell’s bones,’ Thackeray wrote satirically; ‘he was the best friend the penny-a-line men had for many a day. and when he was turned off [hanged], their lamentation was sincere. There are few windfalls like him.’ It was later claimed that James Catnach, the most successful broadside printer of the day, had sold 250,000 Thurtell broadsides, and after his execution he produced yet another, headlined ‘WE ARE ALIVE’, with the space between ‘we’ and ‘are’ so reduced that the unwary read ‘WEARE ALIVE’. Another was less tricksy, and simply lied. ‘The Hoax Discovered; or, Mr. Weare Alive’ claimed that Thurtell had bet Weare that he could be arrested, tried and then, ‘at the very crisis of their fate, the supposed murdered man should appear, stagger the belief of the world, and make John Bull confess his being hoaxed’.

The theatres returned to this profitable subject. At the Coburg, The Hertfordshire Tragedy, or, The Victims of Gaming was back onstage the day after the execution. The Surrey re-offered The Gamblers three days later, and as well as the ‘identical Horse and Gig’, it also promised an eager public that the set now contained the ‘TABLE AT WHICH THE PARTY SUPPED, The SOFA as DESCRIBED to having been SLEPT on, with Other Household Furniture, AS PURCHASED AT THE LATE AUCTION’. In January, the theatre combined two items of popular interest by adding a ‘new scene of Jackson’s Rooms [Jackson was a prize-fighter who taught the gentry], for the purpose of introducing the celebrated Irish Champion’, Langan himself.

The selling of Thurtell went on. A novel, The Gamblers; or, The Treacherous Friend: A Moral Tale, Founded on Recent Facts, by Hannah Maria Jones, appeared, borrowing elements from the play (both have characters named Woodville). The novel also acquiesced in the growing legend of Thurtell’s nobility of spirit. Here Arthur Townley is purely ‘a victim to his own lawless passions’, a noble dupe brought down by ‘hardened villains’. The novel, by one of only two women known to have successfully produced penny-bloods (her speciality was gypsies and gothic subjects), is unimportant except insofar as it may have influenced Edward Bulwer-Lytton. *Bulwer has been called one of the forefathers of the detective novel, and he popularized the outlaw-as-hero in Paul Clifford (1830), a novel with a good-hearted highwayman, and Eugene Aram (1832), this time with a self-sacrificing scholar-murderer (see pp.99–123). In Pelham (1828) his hero is Lord Pelham, who steps in to save a friend from a false accusation of murder. Thornton, the real murderer, is a fairly straightforward portrait of Thurtell. Unlike the prevailing attitudes to Thurtell, Thornton here is not a good-hearted naíf, but has coldly murdered his victim in a botched robbery.

Everything to do with Thurtell had a commercial value. In February 1824 an advertisement in The Times offered for sale the model of the cottage and outbuildings that had been used in court to explain the details of the crime to the jury. The advertisement appeared only once, so presumably the model sold quite quickly. This would hardly be surprising, for the Thurtell legend was growing with every day that separated him from his brutal crime. The most unlikely people were fascinated. The Radical journalist William Cobbett claimed that his son Richard had learned to read ‘to find out what was said about THURTELL, when all the world was talking and reading about THURTELL’. Richard was born in 1804, and was therefore nineteen or twenty when Thurtell came to notoriety, yet the legend made it worth building stories around him. The philosopher Thomas Carlyle also followed the case closely, complaining that, ‘Thurtell being hanged last week, we grew duller than ever.’ He soon cheered himself up, however, with one of his longest-running jokes. An (erroneous) trial report claimed that a witness had considered Thurtell to be respectable ‘because he kept a gig’. Carlyle found this immensely comic, and coined the words ‘Gigmania’ and ‘Gigmanity’ to describe those who judged character by the value of a person’s possessions. George Eliot later expanded this, writing of ‘conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish. proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build’. And in 1848, towards the end of his novel Vanity Fair, Thackeray gave the dangerous Becky Sharpe a law firm named Burke, Thurtell and Hayes – the reader is entirely expected to recognize the three murderers’ names.* And the joke ran and ran. In 1867, in Miss Jane, the Bishop’s Daughter, a novel that used elements of the Constance Kent case (see pp.362–79), the Bishop is advised to put his case ‘into the hands of Bedloe [a seventeenth-century fraudster], Wade and Weare of Thurtell’s Inn … Very respectable solicitors in, ahem! their own line.’

In 1862, this kind of post-mortem approval made Thurtell, Probert and Hunt names to give authority pause. The Marylebone Theatre, a melodrama house, applied for a licence for a play to be called The Gipsey [sic] of Edgware. On the manuscript submitted for approval, in handwriting that appears to be that of the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays himself, notations marking the resemblances between the play and the murders appear in red ink throughout. At the end of the script ‘Turtle’s’ half-sister dies, crying out, ‘You are innocent, I know it.’ Next to this, the censor simply added a large red exclamation point, and the licence was refused.

Another quarter of a century later, the poet Robert Browning remembered a bit of doggerel he had learned as a child:

His throat they cut from ear to ear,

His brains they battered in,

His name was Mr William Weare,

Wot lived in Lyons Inn.*

* * *

When the next great murder to capture the public’s imagination rolled around only four years later, Thurtell was the reference point to which people naturally returned. Maria Marten was the daughter of a mole-catcher in Polstead, a small Suffolk village. She was no better than she should be, having had two illegitimate children by two different men. A third man, a farmer named William Corder, was her current companion, by whom she had a third child. This time she was pressing for marriage. She was last seen in May 1827, heading to meet Corder at his barn on her way to Ipswich to be married. Corder returned to Polstead several times that year, telling her father and stepmother that he and ‘Mrs Corder’ had settled in the Isle of Wight. At first he said she had hurt her hand, and so couldn’t write; then that she had written and her letters must have gone astray. After the harvest, he left Polstead for good. Eleven months after the supposed marriage, her father found his daughter’s remains buried in a shallow grave in the Red Barn (barns in the area were traditionally painted red, but this one quickly became the Red Barn). The local magistrates sent for a Runner to trace Corder, and he was soon arrested in the London suburb of Ealing, where he was now married and the proud co-proprietor of a girls’ school.

Seducer-murders were not unknown, but the details of this one were a newspaper’s dream. First Miss Marten was tidied up, while opprobrium was spread over Corder. From a modestly prosperous tenant farmer, he was transformed into the rich squire of melodrama, preying on the innocent village maiden: one broadside called him the ‘son of an opulent farmer’, ‘living in great splendour’. Miss Marten, by contrast, was ‘a fine young woman’ who had merely formed an ‘imprudent connexion’. George IV, the erstwhile Prince Regent whose numerous affairs had been daily fodder for prints and satire, had come to the throne in 1820; Victorian mores were some time in the future, and the broadsides do not deny her two illegitimate children, they just don’t think they mattered. In one, Miss Marten was ‘of docile disposition’, inculcated with ‘moral precepts’, and her behaviour aroused ‘the esteem and admiration of all’; her little missteps (the children) were caused entirely by a ‘playful and vivacious disposition’; although ‘her conduct cannot be justified, much might be said in palliation’. The Times even commended the father of her second child, for sending financial support; and his letters to his discarded mistress ‘express the goodness of his heart … his conduct throughout has been that of a man and a Christian’.

Corder was condemned untried. He was ‘unfeeling and wretched’, said The Times, adding that he had also attempted to kill his mistress’s second child. The Observer picked up this story, which it elaborated. Corder had offered the child a fig, but – ‘as if by Divine interference’ – it was refused. Miss Marten’s stepmother, the story went on, cut open the fig, to find ‘something in the shape of a pill. in it’. Oddly enough, Mrs Marten did not trouble to question Corder about this, and he next gave the child a pear. Mrs Marten, fruit-examiner-extraordinary, again found a pill in it, and again did nothing – from which we may safely conclude, unlike the newspapers at the time, that the incident never took place. But the newspapers were in full cry: Corder had murdered his child by Miss Marten, they reported; Corder had been involved in forgery; Corder had been engaged with ‘the convict Smith’ in ‘transactions of a felonious nature. such as pig and horse-stealing’. Another report stated that Miss Marten’s first child was by Corder’s own brother.

But the real excitement for the readers was the facts of the murder and its discovery. Corder had persuaded Miss Marten to wear men’s clothes for her trip to the barn: he claimed, falsely, that the village constable was going to arrest her for having no visible support for her surviving child. (A later broadside gives an alternative explanation, that she was dressed this way to throw his disapproving relatives off the track.) Then there was the legend of the discovery of the body. Broadsides and even sermons recounted how Miss Marten’s stepmother had had a dream, three nights running, as in a fairy tale, in which she saw Miss Marten dead and buried in the barn. At these supernatural promptings, she persuaded her husband to go and search the Red Barn. The story of the dream was put in evidence at the inquest, although it is noticeable by its absence at the trial itself, being replaced with a more pragmatic explanation: as Miss Marten’s continuing silence became more worrying, a neighbour remembered that Corder had borrowed a spade on the day of her disappearance, and another person had seen him leaving the barn with a pickaxe. More cynically, the Observer suggested that the Martens had not worried unduly until Corder stopped sending money; then ‘the old people. began to dream about the murder of their child’. Most print outlets, however, were happy to give credence to the dream: ‘For many a long month or more, her mind being sorely oppress’d … she dream’d three nights o’er, Her daughter she lay murdered, under the Red Barn floor.’ Theatres loved it too: W.T. Moncrieff, in an 1842 version of the Red Barn story, The Red Farm, or, The Well of St Marie, noted in his foreword to the printed edition that ‘The extraordinary discovery of a murder … through the agency of a dream, might reasonably be doubted, did not the Judicial Records of our own Criminal History place it beyond all reach of scepticism.’ As late as 1865–66, the dream in particular continued to be a perennial favourite.

Another piquant detail was found in Corder’s life after he left Polstead, for he had met his wife by placing advertisements in the Morning Herald and the Sunday Times:

MATRIMONY. – A Private Gentleman, aged 24, entirely independent, whose disposition is not to be exceeded … To any female of respectability. and willing to confide her future happiness in one every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable, as the advertiser is in affluence; the lady must have the power of some property, which may remain in her own possession. should this meet the eye of any agreeable lady, who feels desirous of meeting with a sociable, tender, kind and sympathising companion, they will find this advertisement worthy of notice. Honour and secrecy may be relied on.

Scandalized and thrilled, readers learned that Corder had received more than forty replies from the Herald alone; there had been another fifty-three from the Sunday Times, but by then he was fixed up, so he never bothered to collect them. After the murder the owner of the accommodation address where the replies to the newspaper advertisement had been sent published them in a pamphlet, to the delight of all. In Douglas Jerrold’s play Wives by Advertisement, a send-up of Corder’s love life, the Hon. Jenkins Cigar advertises: ‘To the fair sex possessed of ten thousand a-year! A desirable opportunity! The advertiser is a gentleman aged five-and-twenty … has been inoculated and had the measles. he wears his own hair, and his moustachios, though in the stubble at present, promise to be forward in the spring. The advertiser wishes to meet with an agreeable partner. No letters received unless brought in a carriage and four …’*

After a number of fairly standard farcical scenes, Cigar, ‘alias Tomkins, alias Winks, alias Puppylove’, is arrested, and the remaining characters, having learned their lesson, sing:

… oh, ye youths, the dame for ever scorn That’s advertised with horses, pigs, and corn! …

And, oh, ye maids, from husbands turn away, If advertized with razors, dogs, and hay! …

Jerrold’s farce was at least staged after the trial. The same could not be said for many others. A dramatic version of the murder was reported to have been presented at the Stoke-by-Nayland Fair in May 1828; in July, while Corder was still awaiting trial, two ‘theatrical representations’ of ‘The Late Murder of Maria Marten’ were staged at the Cherry Fair in Polstead itself, one of which included a scene in the Red Barn, ‘where the mutilated body was [seen] lying on … the floor, surrounded by the Coroner and the gentlemen of the jury as they appeared … after the fatal discovery’. Ballad-singers also cried their wares, selling broadsides that stated outright that Corder was a murderer.

The prosperous were as much absorbed as the masses. Staffordshire pottery figures were produced of Corder and Miss Marten, and, even more importantly, of the Red Barn, impossibly bucolic, and frequently with Maria Marten looking winsome in the doorway. These were big, expensive pieces, not for the working classes. There were further options for those who wanted to disguise their interest under the cover of morality: long before the trial began the Revd Mr Young preached an entire sermon on Corder’s evil deed, to a congregation said to number 5,000.

When Corder finally came to trial in August, the court spent some time on these affronts to justice.

DEFENCE: Pray had you not got a person preaching about this murder in the very barn itself?

THE LORD CHIEF BARON: What! what d’ye mean by preaching? – Is it a sermon?

DEFENCE: Yes, my Lord, and to a congregation of several thousand persons, specially brought together after regular notice in the parish, to hear this man described as the murderer of this unfortunate girl.

THE LORD CHIEF BARON: Scandalous! …

[Mr. W. Chaplin, the churchwarden is asked by the defence]: Did you hear the parson preach in the barn?

MR CHAPLIN: No, certainly not; but I heard of the occurrence.

DEFENCE: And you never interfered to prevent it?

MR CHAPLIN: I did not.

DEFENCE: Are there not exhibitions going round the neighbourhood, representing Corder as the murderer. And you’ve not interfered to prevent them? Is there not a camera obscura near this very hall at this moment, exhibiting him as the murderer?

MR CHAPLIN: There is a camera obscura, I believe about the streets, but I do not know the nature of the exhibition, neither am I aware that I have any power to prevent them in my own parish, much less in this town.

Technically, a camera obscura is a box with a lens, which projects an image of a place or a person onto a flat surface. They were frequently used by artists at the time for sketching from nature. It may be that here the term is used to describe some form of peepshow using projections. George Sanger, later the proprietor of one of Europe’s largest circuses (self-ennobled as ‘Lord’ George Sanger), as a boy in the late 1820s and 1830s toured fairgrounds with his father. Their peepshow ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ had pictures ‘pulled up and down by strings’, lit at night by candles.

I stood outside and asked the folks to ‘Walk up and see the only correct views of the terrible murder of Maria Martin. They are historically accurate and true to life … see how the ghost of Maria appeared to her mother on three successive nights at the bedside.’

When we had our row of spectators getting their pennyworths from the peep-holes I would describe the various pictures as they were pulled up into view. The arrest of Corder was always given special prominence, as follows: ‘The arrest of the murderer Corder as he was at breakfast. Observe the horrified faces, and note also, so true to life are these pictures, that even the saucepan is shown upon the fire and the minute glass upon the table timing the boiling of the eggs.’

None of this publicity was enough to halt the trial, any more than the irregularities of the inquest had been. Corder had been barred from attending by the coroner, who claimed that ‘he did not believe that the accused had any right to be present [at an inquest]; he never knew an instance of the kind’. It was explained to the coroner at the trial that, on the contrary, it was an obligation of the court that the accused should hear the depositions against him. Yet his abrogation of Corder’s rights did not appear to be any bar to him taking part in the trial itself, in which he acted as a prosecuting counsel.*

It probably made no difference. James Lee, the Bow Street Runner, had found Miss Marten’s reticule in Corder’s study, together with a pair of pistols and a sword, which was proved to have been sharpened at Corder’s request just before the murder. Furthermore, letters from Corder to Miss Marten’s parents, claiming his ‘wife’ was with him in ‘our lodgings, in the Isle of Wight’, were read out, in which he told them how they had married in Ipswich and that she ‘unites with me for your wellfare [sic]’, together with an ominous ‘P.S. I think you had better burn all my letters.’ Corder put up a miserable defence.† He claimed that Miss Marten had left Polstead to hide a new pregnancy from her family. (Why? She had already had three bastard children.) Then he asserted that she had had some unspecified relationship with an unnamed man in London, and that when she reached the barn, ‘she flew into a passion, upbraided me with not having so much regard for her as the gentleman before alluded to’, and shot herself. Terrified to find himself with a body on his hands, he buried her. The stab wounds noted at the autopsy must have been made by a spade when the body was exhumed, he claimed.

This last is not as implausible as it sounds today. Post-mortems were still rudimentary (the first use of the term had only appeared a decade before). An initial post-mortem had decided that the ‘chief cause of death’ was ‘a [bullet] wound in the orbit [eye-socket]’, but after the remains had been re-interred, ‘It has been regretted that for the ends of justice, more time was not given for the inspection of the body, or that the inspection had not been minutely made,’ as on reflection a bullet through the eye was ‘little likely to be chosen for the perpetration of a murder of this deliberate character’. The body was therefore re-exhumed, and two stab wounds were now found, one between the ribs and one in the heart, both entirely unnoticed at the first PM. By the time the trial was under way, yet further thought had suggested that the silk kerchief Miss Marten had worn had been pulled ‘so tight upon the neck as to have produced death by strangulation’.

Corder was found guilty and sentenced to death. The Times was not sure which was more important, the verdict itself, or the speed with which the newspaper had reported it. ‘We yesterday morning, by extraordinary exertion, published the proceedings of the court up to the adjournment on the previous day, – or, in other words, gave in six closely printed columns the report of a trial which took place on the previous day at a distance of 72 miles from London, and which was not adjourned till eight o’clock in the evening,’ it boasted.

More sermons were immediately preached. On 17 August, the Revd Charles Hyatt of the Ebenezer Chapel, Shadwell, travelled to the Red Barn to deliver a sermon to ‘about 2,000 persons’, taking his text from Numbers 32:23: ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’, and using it to recycle the type of newspaper rumour familiar from the Thurtell case. When Corder was at school, Mr Hyatt told his congregation, ‘the depravity of [his] nature often displayed itself, by his constant habit of telling falsehoods, and by the depredations he committed upon his companions’; he had later formed ‘an acquaintance with a girl of very loose character’ and, as ‘the wages of her iniquity’, had supplied her with ‘peas and other articles from his father’s farm’. The sermon ended by warning ‘the peasantry’ against poaching, which Mr Hyatt stressed would lead to greater vices (presumably murdering women and burying them in barns).

That same evening, the Revd J. Pilkington preached from the same text at the Baptists’ Meeting House in Rayleigh, Essex, and at Bury St Edmunds the Revd George Hughes took a different text, but also preached on Corder. ‘A Suffolk Clergyman’ published An Address to My Parishioners and Neighbours on the Subject of the Murder lately committed at Polstead, in Suffolk, in which a certain amount of space was given to how the wages of sin lead only to death, while a great deal more was devoted to the details of Miss Marten’s murder. Furthermore, the clergyman had attended Corder’s final church service in gaol before his execution, a regular stop on the route to the gallows. The condemned was placed in a special, black-painted pew, while the coffin that he or she was shortly to fill stood in the centre of the chapel. The Suffolk clergyman evidently paid little attention to divine service that day, for he was able to describe Corder’s every gesture for his readers.

A novel, published together with a transcript of the trial, quickly appeared. This was ‘founded on fact’, the reader is assured, although it is an absolutely standard melodrama: there is the pure maiden, with her virtuous father, a model of ‘industry and frugality’; a gypsy fortune-teller; some smugglers; a gambler who in a Thurtell-ish moment ‘plucks’, or cheats, the Corder character; and a rejected suitor who returns having made a fortune in India. The author was probably the penny-blood writer Robert Huish (possibly together with the journalist William Maginn), who later wrote similar ‘true’ crime novels about James Greenacre and Maria and Frederick Manning (see pp.92–8, 157–82).*

The Times reported that by nine o’clock on the morning of the execution a thousand people had gathered at the scaffold in Bury St Edmunds. Three hours later this had swelled to 7,000. Unlike Thurtell’s, Corder’s death could not be mythologized. At the scaffold, claimed one broadside, he was ‘so weak as to be unable to stand without support’, and ‘he looked somewhat wildly around’ while he waited for the rope to be adjusted. In 1824, technical changes had been made to the scaffold, allowing adjustable chains which reduced delays while the hangman corrected the length of the rope. Even so, prisoners were still assessed only by height, not by weight, and some, in the phrase of the day, ‘died hard’. Corder was one of them. The hangman had to perform the ‘disgusting but necessary task, of suspending his own weight around the body of the prisoner, to accelerate his death’. Even then, it took another eight minutes for him to die.

Not everyone was disturbed. Physical remains were treated with a pragmatism that has since vanished. During the trial, the surgeon had ‘produced the skull of the deceased’, which was handed round to the jury members so they could see the fracture for themselves. A broadside commemorated this moment: ‘They brought her heart, her scull [sic], and ribs,/And showed before his face …’ Mr Marten, testifying to the finding of his daughter’s body, merely said he had ‘put down a mole spike into the floor … and brought up something black, which I smelt and thought it smelt like decayed flesh’. For those who may have missed these details in the newspapers and broadsides, Corder’s body itself was soon on display. After the execution it was transported to the town’s Shire Hall, where ‘Two incisions were made in the breast, the skin taken of [sic], and the muscles exposed to view.’ Then the body was displayed on a table in the middle of the Court, ‘quite naked, with the exception of the trowsers, shoes, and stockings’. *‘Many thousands’ were admitted. For those who couldn’t be there, ‘two eminent artists, Mr. Mizotti of Cambridge and Mr. Child of Bungay’, made plaster casts. The following day the body was taken to the County Hospital and wired up to a battery to make it twitch in a demonstration of galvanic power, while the phrenologists, quack scientists who read character from the shape, or bumps, in the skull, competed for a cast of the head. Only after that did dissection proceed, for the benefit of the medical students. The bones ‘having been cleared of the flesh’, they were ‘re-united by Mr S. Dalton, and the skeleton is now placed in the Suffolk General Hospital’ (one visitor was reported to be Mr Marten himself). ‘A great portion of the skin has been tanned, and a gentleman connected with the hospital intends to have the Trial and Memoirs of Corder bound in it. The heart has been preserved in spirits.’ Many years later the pickled scalp was displayed by a leather-seller in Oxford Street.†

Other souvenirs, slightly less macabre, were also available. The executioner, as a matter of right, got the clothes Corder died in, and also the rope. Such was the excitement over this case that it was reported that he had sold off the rope sections at a guinea an inch, including among his purchasers, it was rumoured, a gentleman from Cambridge who came especially to add this trophy to the university collection. For the artistic, a miniature of Corder was on display at the following Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. (The journals claimed to be appalled that respectable people were interested: ‘we looked, paused, reconsulted our catalogue, looked again, rubbed our eyes. No, it is impossible!’ But they reported it all the same.) For those with less cash and more enterprise, there was the barn itself, which was taken apart and ‘sold in tooth-picks, tobacco-stoppers, and snuff-boxes’.

Kaleidoscope magazine mocked the entire circus, with a picture of Corder lying on a dissecting table under which are sacks labelled ‘Mr Corder’s clothes’ and ‘Relics for sale’. Standing on the table over the body is an auctioneer, who is calling out, ‘Now then, Ladies & Gentlemen – the Halter is going at a Guinea an inch,’ while a person in the crowd responds, ‘I want some of it for the University,’ and another cries, ‘Oh! how delightfully Horrible!’ To one side, a man is saying to another, ‘The Officer says, Mr Sheriff, that the Pistols belong to him,’ while the other replies, ‘Why I would not part with them man for 100 Guineas!’ A second picture shows Corder’s body twitching, naked, on the dissecting table. A man at the door says, ‘I came to take a cast of his head,’ only to be told, ‘You must wait till the galvanic operations are over.’ Outside, the crowd gathers around a sign advertising ‘Camera obscura of the murder’.

From the outset fairs loved the story of the doomed Maria Marten. The journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed a strolling player who performed the Red Barn murder at a fair ‘in cavalier costume’. Reality was not the key: excitement was. The whole country was getting younger: at the end of the eighteenth century, 17 per cent of the population was between five and fourteen years old; by the 1820s, it was 25 per cent, and almost half the population was under twenty. This was an audience worth catering to: even if, individually, they had almost no money, collectively they could create riches. For many children, however, even minor theatre was out of reach. A place in the gallery of somewhere like the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton appeared cheap to the middle classes, but it cost between 3 and 4d., a significant sum to the less fortunate. Instead many boys and girls frequented illegal, unlicensed penny-gaffs, housed in disused shops and turned into theatres by erecting a rough stage at one end, with the remaining space filled with benches.

In 1838 it was estimated that there were about a hundred gaffs in London, each with a capacity of one hundred to 150 per sitting, with up to nine daily sittings. Thus attendance in any twenty-four hours was, at the least, and in London alone, 50,000 people. The audiences, almost entirely under the age of sixteen, were given, for their penny, three-quarters of an hour of some abbreviated play, two further pieces of about twenty minutes each, and a song. Much of the material was a debased version of what the regular theatres showed, and a great deal of it was obscene.* There were no playbills, only a board with details of the evening’s entertainment outside. One example was:

On Thursday next will be performed

at

Smith’s Grand Theatre,

THE RED-NOSED MONSTER,

or,

THE TYRANT OF THE MOUNTAINS.

To conclude with

the BLOOD-STAINED HANDKERCHIEF,

or,

THE MURDER IN THE COTTAGE

Marionettes were frequently on the bill at the gaffs, and at fairs across the country. By the 1870s some marionette companies were substantial outfits, having five or six wagons touring in annual circuits, performing on stages set up at each stop for up to seven hundred people nightly. Thomas Holden, a later Victorian puppeteer, had a stage that was eight feet deep, and a proscenium arch fourteen feet across. Maria Marten was one of the touring staples, in the repertory of companies in the Midlands, Yorkshire, Wales and even into Europe. The Times report of a police raid on a penny-gaff in 1844 noted that the play being performed by ‘automaton figures. made to move with wires’ was Maria Martin, or, The Red Barn Murder. The police took into custody not only eighty-three audience members, but also ‘the wretch Corder, and his victim, Maria Martin; also the figure of death’.* Later Clunn Lewis, the proprietor of a long-lasting marionette company, claimed that Corder’s son came to see his family perform; Charles Middleton, another proprietor, countered by saying that in the 1860s his company had from delicacy refrained from performing in Colchester, where a surviving Corder lived.

The youth audience was avid, and penny-bloods quickly appeared. ‘Penny-bloods’ was the original name for what, in the 1860s, were renamed penny-dreadfuls. Each booklet, or ‘number’, consisted of eight (sometimes sixteen) pages, with a single black-and-white illustration on the top half of the front page. Double columns of text filled the remainder, breaking off wherever the final page finished, even in the middle of a sentence. The numbers appeared weekly, and could be bought as they were issued, or in monthly parts of four numbers bound together in a coloured wrapper. Bloods developed out of late-eighteenth-century gothic tales. G.A. Sala, in his youth a blood-writer, later a renowned journalist, described the bloods as ‘a world of dormant peerages, of murderous baronets, and ladies of title addicted to the study of toxicology, of gipsies and brigand-chiefs, men with masks and women with daggers, of stolen children, withered hags, heartless gamesters, nefarious roués, foreign princesses, Jesuit fathers, gravediggers, resurrection-men, lunatics and ghosts’.

The bloods’ astonishing success created a vast new readership for cheap fiction. Between 1830 and 1850 there were probably as many as a hundred publishers of penny fiction – ten for every one publisher of ‘respectable’ fiction. Many magazines, previously seen as improving reading for the working classes, now wholeheartedly gave themselves over to this type of tale. The first ever penny-blood, in 1836, was The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c., in sixty numbers. Gentleman Jack followed, running for 205 parts over four years, without too much worry for historical accuracy or continuity. (The historical highwaymen Claude Duval, Dick Turpin and Jack Rann all appear as coevals, even though their lives actually spanned a century; Jack Rann is, rather carelessly, killed twice.) The main characteristics of the highwaymen conformed to melodrama type: they were upper-class, usually switched at birth, and yet despite being reared among thieves, they were noble and protected the poor and virtuous. The illustrations, crude to modern eyes, were an essential element. One publisher’s standing instruction to his illustrators was, ‘more blood – much more blood!’ The most successful penny-blood, and what might be the most successful series the world has ever seen, first appeared in 1844, written by G.W.M. Reynolds, politically a Radical, who two years later founded the journal Reynolds’s Miscellany. His Mysteries of London was based on a French series, Mysteries of Paris, by Eugène Sue, but it took on a life of its own, spanning twelve years, 624 numbers, nearly 4.5 million words and a title change to Mysteries of the Courts of London.

Henry Mayhew interviewed thousands of the working class in the 1840s and 1850s for his monumental study of street life, London Labour and the London Poor. These people were Reynolds’ prime market, and Mayhew reported that an ‘intelligent costermonger’, who regularly read bloods aloud to his less literate friends, told him: ‘You see’s an engraving of a man hung up, burning over a fire, and some costers would go mad if they couldn’t learn what he’d been doing, who he was, and all about him.’ The illiteracy of the auditors did not mean they had little vocabulary or understanding, however. The costermonger told Mayhew of ‘one of the passages that took their fancy wonderfully’: ‘With glowing cheeks, flashing eyes, and palpitating bosom, Venetia Trelawney rushed back into the refreshment-room, where she threw herself into one of the arm-chairs … scarcely had she thus sunk down upon the flocculent cushion, when a sharp click … met her ears; and. her wrists were caught in manacles which sprang out of the arms of the treacherous chair. ‘ Anyone who was happy to hear about flocculent cushions and palpitating bosoms could take most things in their stride.

In the1860s, after highwaymen and evil aristocrats, the next penny development was the remorseless policeman hunting down criminals. A Corder blood merged the two genres. The evil William Corder, hoping to marry ‘lady Amelia’, has first to ‘dispose’ of his illegitimate child by Maria, who stands between ‘Amelia, happiness and myself!’ Maria threatens to tell Amelia of her situation, and, ‘yelling in demoniac rage and ungovernable passion, the sinful man’ drives his knife ‘into her throbbing breast, from which the fell demon had torn the covering’, shoots her for good measure and buries her in the barn. Now Captain Dash, a notorious highwayman, appears at Corder’s ‘grand masked ball’ and reveals all, before taking up a siege position in the Red Barn. Dash turns out to be Maria’s rejected suitor, who loved her truly and became a highwayman from grief. There is no date on this publication, but it must be post-1860, as a detective appears to tidy away everything at the end, and a further title is advertised on the back cover: ‘Lightning Dick, the Young Detective’ – boy detectives first appeared in the 1860s.

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’.

Despite the multiplicity of productions, only two Red Barn scripts survive from the nineteenth century, one from what may be the Swansea production, the second from an 1890s northern touring company. The Swansea production conforms to all the standard melodrama requirements: it has the aged father blessing his child’s forthcoming marriage, the comic servants, the villain resolved on murder, the beautiful heroine pleading for her life ‘For my aged parents’ sake’, ‘the voice of Heaven conveying to a mother’s heart the murder of her darling child’, and finally, forgiveness for the sinner, amidst scenic effects in the condemned cell: ‘Ghost music. Blue fire. The spirit of Maria Marten appears.’ Corder confesses, ‘Bell tolls. Characters form picture [that is, stand frozen in a tableau]. Blue fire.’

By the 1890s, melodrama was no longer treated entirely seriously. A Manchester revival had music-hall turns interpolated into the story: ‘Sometimes the actor brings in a sly sentence in a burlesque of a line in Hamlet, and sometimes the house is made to roar over an allusion to a great cabbage which is brought on the stage.’ There was also a role for the ‘intelligent donkey, Jerry’, who would ‘prove that all men are descended from donkeys’, not to mention an unexplained ‘statue song’ and some dancing.

Long before the intelligent donkey took over, more frightening murderers were to stalk the stage. These were two Irishmen living in Edinburgh: William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare were, if you will, pioneers of capitalism, meeting rising demand with a more efficient supply. Medical schools officially used only the corpses of executed criminals for dissection, but by the late 1820s demand far outstripped the number of criminals executed – in Surgeons’ Square, Edinburgh, alone there were six lecturers on anatomy, all of whom required bodies on which to demonstrate. Thus, most medical schools quietly dealt with resurrection men, men who stole recently buried corpses from cemeteries. This was semi-illegal (‘semi’ because dead bodies in law belonged to no one; resurrectionists could be charged only with stealing grave clothes), but for the most part the trade was winked at.

The resurrection market was, however, tightly controlled, and two good-for-nothings like Burke and Hare had no hope of entering this macabre profession. These two men, whose names became synonyms for brutal murder, stumbled into their occupation by chance. Burke had been a navvy on the Union Canal, and then a cobbler; Hare kept a poor man’s lodging house in Tanner’s Close, where a third-share in a bed could be purchased for 3d. a night. Sometime in 1827, Burke and his common-law wife Helen McDougal moved in with Hare and his wife Margaret, after their own lodgings had burned down. Together they drank and got through life as best they could until a pensioner named Dougal died owing Hare rent. Burke and Hare recouped the debt by selling his body to Dr Knox, who ran one of Edinburgh’s three anatomy schools. To their astonishment, they received £7.10s. for the body – easily six months’ pay for an unskilled labourer. They lived off this windfall for the entire winter, and it was only in the new year that they realized that even £7.10s. would not keep them for ever. But old, frail people with no family ties don’t die on command. Then they had their brainwave – old, frail people with no family ties died every day among Edinburgh’s underclass, and no one questioned the death of one pauper more or less. So Burke, the more personable character, lured the unwary to Hare’s lodgings, where the two men gave them a drink and, when they were pleasantly fuddled, asphyxiated them. Then there was another fresh corpse for Dr Knox, and another few months’ income for the Burke and Hare families. In February 1828 an old woman, name unknown, vanished from their lodgings; sometime later that winter so did ‘Joseph the miller’. There were possibly more before Mary Paterson, a local prostitute, was disposed of the same way in April. But the pair were getting reckless. Mary Paterson’s friend Janet Brown had accompanied her when Burke enticed them to his lodgings, offering to keep them in fine style. Mary became stupefied with drink, but Janet left before she reached that stage. There was now a witness to the fact that at least one person had visited the Tanner’s Close lodging house and then vanished. Mary Paterson had been dead only five or six hours when her body was purchased by Dr Knox’s attendant. Yet no questions were asked about her obviously recent death, nor the lack of any indication that she had ever been buried. In his confession, Burke said no questions ever were asked. The assistant who bought Mary Paterson’s corpse was one William Fergusson – later Sir William Fergusson Bart, FRS, Serjeant-Surgeon to Queen Victoria and President of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Fergusson and his associates regularly paid Burke and Hare between £8 and £10 per corpse, and things went on smoothly until October 1828, when hubris was followed by nemesis. James Wilson, or ‘Daft Jamie’, was their next victim. Daft Jamie was a well-known Edinburgh street character who lived by begging and petty trading. He was about twenty years old at the time of his murder, physically large, but simple-minded and with a physical handicap, possibly club feet. It appears that Jamie refused the offers of alcohol, and thus, unlike all the other victims, was young, strong and sober, and able to fight back. Burke and Hare finally overpowered him, but it was impossible that his body showed no signs of violent death. It was even more impossible that no one would recognize his corpse. Some of the students did, but this simply hastened the dissection. Daft Jamie’s head and feet, which would have been familiar to many, were kept separate, again contrary to practice, as if Dr Knox and his assistants wanted to get rid of the recognizable bits first.

Even then, Burke and Hare continued unchecked. Their final victim was an elderly Irishwoman named Docherty. The Burkes had lodgers sharing their room, an ex-soldier named Gray and his wife. They were asked to move to Burke’s brother’s room for the night so the Burkes could entertain their ‘kinswoman’. The next morning, the Grays were told that she had become drunk and quarrelsome, so they had sent her on her way, Burke adding, ‘She’s quiet enough now.’ They also told Mrs Gray to stay away from a pile of straw in the corner. She had never been forbidden any area of their room before, so when the Burkes went out she investigated, and uncovered the corpse of an old woman. The couple, shocked, told Mrs Hare, who blandly offered them £10 to keep quiet. They left and notified the police.

By the time the police arrived, there was no body, but it was soon located in Dr Knox’s rooms, and the story unfolded. The Burkes and the Hares were all arrested, yet a successful prosecution was uncertain. The medical evidence for death by asphyxiation without violence on an old and frail woman like Mrs Docherty would be minimal, and apart from this one body, all the previous ‘sales’ had already been disposed of through the dissecting room. Hare was therefore chosen to turn king’s evidence, particularly as, if he had been charged, Margaret Hare would not have been able to testify against her husband.* It was Hare’s evidence that enabled indictments to be laid against Burke and his wife, Helen McDougal, on 8 December, for the murders of Mrs Docherty, Mary Paterson and Daft Jamie, and it was these three murders that formed the basis of the prosecution’s case.

Huge crowds surrounded the court for the trial, with three hundred special constables drafted in to hold people back, and the cavalry and infantry on standby. The trial lasted two days – 24 and 25 December – and it took the jury only fifty minutes to find Burke guilty, and the case against McDougal ‘not proven’.† Burke was sentenced to be hanged, dissected and anatomized. Helen McDougal was officially released, but was kept in custody to protect her from the mob, who felt that she too should be ‘burked’. The Hares were kept in prison while the courts heard a suit by Daft Jamie’s mother to bring a private prosecution for his death; when that failed, another civil action, for ‘assythment’, or compensation, kept them imprisoned until after Burke’s execution.

All three ultimately skulked out of town, trying to escape their notoriety. Hare was recognized in Dumfries, and a crowd estimated at 8,000 gathered, hoping to lynch him. It took a hundred special constables to rescue him, and he was kept in prison overnight for his own protection before being set on the road to Carlisle. McDougal, according to one broadside, was recognized as she was attempting to get passage to Ireland, and at a cry of ‘Hare’s wife! Burke her!’ a mob gathered. Legends of the afterlife of all three abounded, particularly for Hare – he was said to have been tossed in a lime kiln and blinded, or to have ended as a beggar on London’s Oxford Street – but nothing more is known of any of them.

Public interest in the case was all-consuming. In 1815, in his novel Guy Mannering, Walter Scott had briefly mentioned the earlier case of Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, ‘resurrection women’, as he styled them. They had promised to procure a child’s body for a surgeon and, no child having conveniently died, they murdered one. Now Scott, sorry to be away during Burke’s trial, was amused to receive that same month ‘a very polite card from the Medical Society inviting me to dine with them. It sounded like a card from Mr Thurtell inviting one to a share of his gig.’ At the same time an enterprising citizen had rented Hare’s cellar, and was showing it ‘for a trifle’ to visitors who queued twenty deep to have a look, and Scott was a wry observer of the ‘well dress’d females’ who visited it: ‘I did not go. although the newspapers reported me one of the visitors.’*

Everything to do with the case was enthusiastically retailed in the newspapers. The Aberdeen Journal gave four of its five columns to the trial transcript, plus an editorial, and then ended with the rather naked hope that a local woman, one ‘Abigail Simpson, a miserable old woman, a pauper’, who had vanished some time before, might also have been one of the victims. The Courant’s circulation increased by 8,000 copies on the day it reported the trial. Nothing was too minor to be repeated, and, in default of other news, repeated several times. Many newspapers, rather than sending their own journalists, simply copied other papers’ reports, creating an echo chamber of innuendo and rumour. This applied to the London dailies as well as the smaller provincial weeklies or bi-weeklies. The Times had no non-Scottish-sourced article on Burke and Hare until after Burke’s conviction, and even then it was only an editorial. That same day, an article on Burke’s confession stressed that ‘The information from which the following article is drawn up we have received from a most respectable quarter’ – but that ‘we’ is somewhat fudged, as the entire article, ‘we’ included, is an unacknowledged reprint from the Caledonian Mercury.

The crowd at Burke’s execution – perhaps 20,000 people – cheered as the scaffold was built. For most executions, the labourers who constructed the scaffold drew lots to decide which of them would perform the hateful task. This time there were volunteers. Not for this crowd the respect frequently given to a gallant outlaw, or the pity for a pathetic victim only too closely resembling themselves. When Burke appeared, the crowd screamed its hatred: ‘The murderer! burke him! choke him!’ A journalist reported one spectator ‘hallooing and encouraging the mob to persevere in these manifestations of their feelings’, raising a roar each time the dying Burke was convulsed, conducting the crowd’s response until the body was cut down. The Times, normally quick to condemn not only the behaviour of the crowds at an execution, but their very presence, praised these outbursts as ‘ebullitions of virtuous and honest resentment. we honour them for it’.

As Burke’s body was removed from the scaffold, souvenir-hunters descended, grabbing at shavings from the coffin, or pieces of the rope.As usual, these relic-gatherers were condemned by the middle-class press. Yet middle-class scavengers were every bit as avid: a wallet made from Burke’s scalp is in the History of Surgery Museum in Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons. Meanwhile Burke’s corpse took the same trip to an anatomy theatre as had many of those he had accompanied. This time, though, it was to the rooms of Professor Monro, a competitor of Knox, who was keeping a very low profile. First the grandees got a private viewing – the surgeon Robert Liston; the phrenologist George Combe; his follower, the sculptor Samuel Joseph, who took a cast of Burke’s head; and Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and Combe’s enemy, as a debunker of phrenology. Then Monro performed a public dissection, initially delayed by a riot staged by the vast number of students refused entry. The police restored order only when they promised that all would get a turn, fifty at a time. The next day, there was a display of the now-anatomized corpse for non-medical visitors. Visitors filed past Burke’s body between ten in the morning and dusk – perhaps as many as 30,000 came through the anatomy theatre. One man recorded in his diary: ‘Burke’s body was lying stretched out on a table in a large sort of lumber or dissecting room, quite naked. The upper part of the skull had been sawn off and the brain extracted, but in other respects he was untouched, except, indeed, that the hair had been all shaven off his body.’

All of these episodes were repeatedly recounted, not only in the newspapers, but in broadsides and ballads. The distinction between these forms of news was less rigid than it seems retrospectively. ‘The Confession of Burk’ [sic] is a broadside, but the content is in fact a reprint of news that had appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant the previous Saturday, while some of the newspapers elaborated an already extraordinary story with fictional devices: the Aberdeen Journal evidently saw no crossing of boundaries when it described, as though by an eye-witness, the death of one of the elderly victims.

This type of true-crime fiction was spreading. The Murderers of the Close was what today would be called a novelization, with ‘conversations put into the mouths of the different persons, as well as a few of the events, trifling in themselves, [that] are indeed fictitious’. The story sticks pretty closely to fact, with additional dialogue tacked on for drama or pathos. The book ends with Burke’s execution, and his religious meditations and remorse, and Hare’s escape, rounded off with pious thoughts for all. The illustrations were provided by Robert Seymour, whose fame was otherwise for comic imagery. (Seven years later he was to suggest to his publisher creating a series of comic illustrations, with text to be provided by a young journalist. Mr Charles Dickens duly agreed, and what became The Pickwick Papers was born.)

Actual Burke and Hare comedy was supplied by ‘Mansie Wauch’s Dream’ in the Aberdeen Journal the month after Burke’s execution. ‘Mansie Wauch’ was a fictional creation of David Macbeth Moir, a Scottish doctor, whose Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor had appeared in Blackwood’s magazine and then in book form the previous year. Now, in his dream, Mansie is assaulted and boxed up for Dr Knox. First he is sanguine: ‘I had once dined with Dr Knox, and had some hope that, if I were beside him, I had a fair chance for my life.’ But when he is unpacked in the dissecting room, he hears Knox saying, ‘[T]his is indeed a prize; you have heard of Mansie Wauch, that’s him. I’d get five guineas for his skull from Mr—, the Phrenological Lecturer.’ ‘[M]y hopes in his mercy vanished like the morning dew,’ despairs Mansie, but fortunately the phrenologist is unwilling to buy a burked corpse. And so Mansie takes heart and shouts: ‘Murder – murder! I am Burked, but I winna be Knoxed.’

Unlike their practice with Maria Marten, the theatres in Britain at first held off from transforming this ugly story into melodrama. Not so in France, where the father of melodrama, René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773–1844), adapted it immediately as Alice, ou, Les Fossoyeurs écossais (‘Alice, or, The Scottish Grave-diggers’). Alice, a poor orphan, works for her aunt, a French innkeeper, and is in love with their lodger Edouard, a Scottish medical student. When he is wounded in a duel, Alice absents herself on mysterious trips, which the audience understands are to raise money for his medical care by in some way selling her body to be anatomized while she is alive – she daily ‘bares her arm to the unskilled knife of a young surgeon’, we are told vaguely. Edouard, recovered, goes home to Scotland to see his dying mother, and never returns. The abandoned Alice travels to Inverness, where Edouard confesses that he now has a rich fiancée. Alice then mysteriously vanishes, and in the last scene three resurrection men, Burke, Mac-Dougall and Rosbiff, arrive to sell Edouard a corpse, which is of course Alice. A very similar if much less elaborate British short story on the theme appeared two years later, when ‘The Victim. A True Story. By a Medical Student’ was published in the New Monthly Magazine. Again, a medical student’s fiancée vanishes, he buys a corpse from ‘an exhumator’, and it again turns out to be the missing fiancée, at which point the student goes mad.

Apart from these two forays, Burke and Hare provided little immediately in the way of popular entertainment that we know of. Generally the story was transformed into urban legend and scandalized word of mouth – in the early 1830s a friend of the poet John Clare was warned that trapdoors on London’s streets were left open deliberately, for the unwary to fall into underground lairs where they were robbed, killed and sold to the doctors. However, one newspaper reference to a fairground exhibition might indicate that there were ephemeral shows that were never recorded. The Examiner recorded that at Barnet, then a town outside London, an exhibition of some form of painted display, possibly a long, panoramic illustration on rolled canvas, showed the murderous pair at work, ‘certified to be correct to the minutest particular’. It had apparently also been shown in Edinburgh, and was to tour further.

There were a few other scattered references. Madame Tussaud, the founder of the waxworks dynasty and creator of the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ (at this date more sedately known as the ‘Separate Room’), had arrived in England in 1802, with models of the heads of executed French revolutionary heroes and villains. She spent the next thirty years touring the country, and in 1829, sixteen days after Burke’s execution, the Liverpool Mercury reported that she had on display ‘a likeness of the Monster Burke said to be taken from a mask of his face. we have no doubt that it will cause her exhibition to be crowded by persons anxious to see the features of a wretch whose crimes have hardly any parallels’. Two years later an advertisement for her show in Bristol promised that ‘THE BAND WILL PLAY EVERY EVENING’ while visitors examined both Burke and Hare’s features.

There appear to be no surviving plays about Burke and Hare in the Lord Chamberlain’s files, although there almost certainly were some productions at the minor theatres, never submitted for a licence. H. Chance Newton, a theatre critic born in 1854, said that among the earliest crime dramas he ever saw was one called Hawke the Burker. Leman Blanchard, in 1877, remembered that a theatre called the Shakespeare in Curtain Road, London, had at some time in the past produced ‘a piece founded on the murder of the Italian boy by Burke and Hare’. Whatever Blanchard was remembering had now become hopelessly confused: the murder of ‘the Italian boy’ took place in London in 1831, when two thugs named Bishop and Williams killed Carlo Ferrari, a street beggar, and tried to sell his body; Burke and Hare had no connection to this crime. Cecil Pitt’s Carlo Ferrari, or, The Murder of the Italian Boy played at the Britannia in 1869, but it seems unlikely that Blanchard would be so confused about a play that had been staged only eight years previously. Furthermore, the most comprehensive listing of London minor theatres gives only two named the Shakespeare, but neither was in Curtain Road.

By the 1860s, however, there was renewed interest in the Burkers. In 1859 the journalist G.A. Sala published ‘How I went to Sea’, a reminiscence of his schooldays, in which the boys were served up ‘a dreadful pie for dinner every Monday; a meat pie with … horrible lumps of gristle inside, and such strings of sinew (alternated by lumps of flabby fat) … We called it kitten pie – resurrection pie – rag pie – dead man’s pie.’ More soberly, Alexander Leighton, who otherwise specialized in tales of Scottish folklore, brought out The Courts of Cacus in 1861. (In Greek myth, Cacus was one of the sons of Vulcan, an eater of human flesh.) This was a highly romanticized novelization, beginning: ‘When the gloaming was setting in of an evening in the autumn of 1827, and when the young students of Dr Knox’s class had covered up those remains of their own kind from which they had been trying to extract nature’s secrets, one was looking listlessly from the window into the Square …’ and continuing with seventy-five pages of colourful tales of resurrection men, before finally getting around to the story of Burke and Hare.

Soon after came Mary Paterson, or, The Fatal Error, a serial in twenty-eight parts, by David Pae, a respected Scottish novelist, and pioneer of newspaper serial-fiction. Mary Paterson, the prostitute murdered by Burke and Hare, is here transformed, like Maria Marten, into the most beautiful girl in the village, the daughter of a respected village elder. She is loved by an honest farmer, but, ‘vain, giddy, and thoughtless’, she has ‘given her heart to one who moved in a higher station’, who has ‘wooed her clandestinely for the basest of all purposes’. This is Duncan Grahame, an Edinburgh medical student who is already engaged to his heiress cousin. He makes Mary pregnant and secretes her in a lodging run by Helen McDougal. Mary gives birth, finds out that Grahame is married, and returns home in remorse, only to discover that her aged father has died of grief and the wicked lawyer has managed to gain possession of the family farm – and that’s all in the first fifty pages. We skip over two years, and Mary is now walking the streets, Burke and Hare murder her, and when her corpse inevitably shows up on Grahame’s dissecting table, he is filled with ‘remorseful memories’, as well he might be. There is a particularly nasty section where the farmer, now the guardian of Mary’s child, watches Burke’s execution, ‘clap[ping] his hands with frantic vehemence’. Meanwhile Helen McDougal dies of exposure in a snowstorm, to be found the following spring with her face eaten away by rats; Margaret Hare is washed overboard as she travels back to Ireland; and Hare is set on the road to Carlisle, where we lose sight of him. After a lot of picaresque adventures, finally a murdered hermit is revealed to be Hare, the murderer-in-chief turns out to be Hare’s unknown son, who goes mad, runs amok and kills the alcoholic village doctor, who is – Mary’s Edinburgh student love, Duncan Grahame!

An advertisement for a penny-dreadful on the same subject followed the next year, but no copy of it seems to have survived, so it is unclear if this is Pae’s story repackaged, or whether his serial triggered a revival of interest. Now plays began to be staged. Again, no scripts appear to have survived, or even playbills. But the Era, a journal for theatre professionals, has an advertisement in 1867 offering: ‘BURKE and HARE … Manuscripts of this Startling Drama – terrific Situations, and Incidents Unparalleled in History of Fiction – now Ready. Terms moderate’. Over the next forty years, further Burke and Hare advertisements appear, never that many, but regularly: plays for sale, advertisements for a Burke and Hare ‘amusement’ (type unspecified), or a request for employment by a ‘Scotch Actor, accustomed to [play] daft Jemmy’. These plays were probably of the type known as ‘fit-up’, staged by travelling troupes in barns or saloons. One version toured Scotland for decades: the actors knew the outlines of their parts and nightly created their own dialogue, modified to suit the number of actors – if a second low-comedy player was available, an organ grinder was inserted into the action (another conflation with the Italian boy). Local children were always welcome additions as the burkers’ victims.

Only in the 1880s did Burke and Hare begin to appear in literature by writers of quality, and even then it tended to be among their weaker works. Conan Doyle, in his pre-Sherlock Holmes days, produced ‘My Friend the Murderer’, about a New Zealand bushranger who in seven months ‘hocussed and made away with’ twenty or thirty people. When the story begins, he is on the run after turning informer. As with Hare, he is constantly recognized and barely escapes lynching, before he is killed in a brawl. Conan Doyle was piling on effects: the bushranger is called Wolf Tone Maloney, the name echoing that of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the founder of Irish republican separatism. The choice probably reflects Doyle’s deep dislike of such politics (the story was written shortly after the Phoenix Park murders) and is at least an unsubtle reminder of Hare’s Irish origins. Robert Louis Stevenson, two years later, also chose the short-story form for a treatment of Burke and Hare’s crimes. His narrator is Fettes, an alcoholic village doctor, who studied in his youth under ‘a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here designate by the letter K’. Fettes’ job was to deal with ‘the unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table … It was the policy of Mr K—to ask no questions … “They bring the body, and we pay the price.” ‘ But when Fettes recognizes the body of ‘Jane Galbraith’ [Mary Paterson], whom he had seen only the previous night, he knows that the crime is not simply grave robbery. He consults with a more senior student, who tells him to shut his eyes: ‘Do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us – the lions and the lambs. If you’re a lamb, you’ll come to lie upon these tables like … Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion, you’ll live and drive a horse like me, like K—, like all the world with any wit or courage.’* Then the plot veers off and the two turn resurrection men themselves. One dark night they set out to disinter a newly buried farmer’s wife. On the way home they become more and more uneasy about their gruesome burden, until finally they open the sack. ‘A wild yell rang up into the night’: instead of the farmer’s wife, inside is the body of one of K—’s long-dissected corpses.

The Pall Mall Gazette, which published the story in its 1884 Christmas issue, ran an advertising campaign that was long acknowledged as being uniquely macabre: one man remembered ‘posters so horrific that they were suppressed’, another that it had included a procession of sandwich-board men dressed as corpses, carrying their own coffins. While the advertising was unusual, the story was less so. Stevenson had initially set out with a fictionalized version of the facts, only to turn gruesome reality into nothing more than a standard ghost story.

Genre fiction was embracing Burke and Hare. James McGovan, the pseudonym of William Crawford Honeyman (1845–1919), an early writer of detective stories set in Edinburgh, returned frequently to the subject. In ‘The Missing Bookbinder’ a woman consults a detective: ‘If this is no another Burke and Hare business I’ll eat my ain bannet.’ Her sister has vanished from her lodgings at a cobbler’s, and ‘they would get something for her body; and ye ken Burke was a cobbler too, but he found that bodies paid better’. The all-knowing professional is patronizingly dismissive: ‘Nothing could dissuade this big, warm-hearted woman from the idea that doctors were still eager and willing to buy bodies from the first offerer, asking no questions as to how the goods came to be bodies; or from believing that her sister’s delicate frame had been utilised in that manner after the brutal fashion introduced by Burke and Hare.’ (The sister, it turns out, died naturally, but the cobbler registered her death under his wife’s name to get some insurance money.)

The detective’s superior tone was now the prevailing attitude to these anatomization fears. As early as 1844, the comic sporting writer R.S. Surtees had treated the common people’s fascination with Burke and Hare in precisely this manner: when the grand Duke of Donkeyton recommends a speech by the MP and political theorist Edmund Burke: ‘Fine speech of Burke’s; monstrous fine speech,’ but the lower-middle-class Mr Jorrocks knows better: ‘ “He was ‘ung for all that,” observed Mr. Jorrocks to himself, with a knowing shake of the head.’

Finally, Burke and Hare, those thuggish, vicious men, like Thurtell ended up as a children’s jingle:

Up the close and doun the stair,

But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare.

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

Knox the boy that buys the beef.

* * *

The crimes of Burke and Hare had convulsed the entire country. Other stories were more local, but in retrospect may have had more importance. Such a one was the killing of John Peacock Wood in 1833.

For decades, policing had been endlessly discussed. Originally, the term ‘police’ had merely meant the administration of a city, and the civic well-being that followed (the word derives from the same source as ‘policy’); but during the French Revolution ‘police’ in France began to mean the men who were charged with maintaining ‘public order, liberty, property, individual safety’; in Britain, nothing like it existed. Even a century earlier, a French visitor had been amazed: ‘Good Lord!’ he cried, ‘how can one expect order among these people, who have no such word as Police in their Language.’ The government regularly called out the army to control mobs and quell uprisings, but there was no civil force whose job included the prevention and detection of crime. This lack was considered a virtue: Fouché’s police force was regarded as nothing but a nest of paid governmental spies.

Before 1829, changes to the parish and watch systems had been blocked by a coalition of right-wing ‘county’ elements joined by their opposite numbers, the political Radicals. Both groups feared, for different reasons, that a professional force would destroy civil liberties, bring in a system of secret-service spying to consolidate political power and introduce what was, in effect, a standing army. In short, they believed the new police would be ‘expensive, tyrannical, and foreign’, and most people felt they would ‘rather be robb’d. by wretches of desperate fortune than by ministers’. Nonetheless, the Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, a political operator of brilliance, persuaded many that the rise in crime made some sort of solution imperative. There probably was no such rise – there was a rise in prosecutions, the consequence of a change in social expectations, and a growing intolerance of disorder; there were also more governmental surveys and early attempts at statistical analysis of crime figures. Together these created an appearance of increasing crime. Peel may or may not have understood that this was a difference in perception, not reality; in either case he used this perception to promote his end.*

For the most part, over the previous two decades high-profile stranger-murders requiring this new type of policing had been rare: the Ratcliffe Highway murders, the death of Spencer Perceval, and Burke and Hare. The other cases that had attracted attention were domestic, and were easily dealt with by older methods – Corder, Fenning (pp.183–200), Scanlan (pp.130–39), even Thurtell had killed an acquaintance. But the times were uneasy, people apprehensive. The end of the French wars had seen the return of large numbers of suddenly unemployed men inured to violent death; high food prices and chronic unemployment were producing ever more incidents of civic unrest, from machine-breaking to the Corn Bill Riots, the Spa Field Riots, bread and wage riots and Peterloo. Now the police were presented as agents who would prevent civic disorder.

Thus on 29 September 1829, parishes within twelve miles of Charing Cross saw the first ‘new police’ on the streets: five divisions, with 144 Metropolitan Police constables apiece. Within eight months there were 3,200 men, all dressed in blue. The Bow Street Runners had worn red waistcoats, but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. The new police’s uniforms had been carefully chosen to indicate their professionalism, while at the same time the colour had been selected to reassure the population that, unlike the red-coated army, this was a civil, not a military force. (Not that the new colour choice made much difference: the police were quickly dubbed ‘raw lobsters’ or ‘the unboiled’. An unboiled lobster is blue; when it is put in hot water it turns red. Thus a policeman was only ‘hot water’ away from being a soldier.) The uniform was also protective: the stock at the neck was leather, not linen, and the rabbit-skin top hat had a reinforced leather top and bracing; according to one policeman’s memoir, it weighed eighteen ounces. (In 1864 it was replaced by the ‘Roman’ helmet that is still worn.) The only weapon carried was a baton, with a rattle (replaced by a whistle in 1884) to summon aid.

Peel’s instructions for the new police stressed that constables ‘will be civil and obliging to all people’, while being ‘particularly cautious not to interfere idly or unnecessarily in order to make a display of his authority’. ‘The object to be attained is the prevention of crime,’ yet the police also had what today would be called ‘caring’ roles in their communities: looking after ‘insane persons and children’, ensuring that street nuisances (rubbish, waste, building materials) were removed, enforcing Sunday trading laws and preserving public order. The middle classes quickly came to accept this ideal as the reality, while the working classes were less persuaded, frequently with good reason. The early recruits were not exactly the crème de la crème, and of the initial intake of 2,800 men, 2,238 were swiftly dismissed, 1,790 for drunkenness.

This distrust came to a head in three separate incidents in 1833. The first was what became known as the Cold Bath Field riot. In May a group of workers calling themselves the National Political Union organized a rally in London. Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, ruled it an unlawful assembly, and flyers were posted warning the population not to participate. On the morning of 13 May about seventy-five constables were stationed near Cold Bath Field, the planned rallying point, with reinforcements backing them up – altogether, about 450 men were on call. When the workers arrived, the police superintendent moved his men in. Bricks were thrown, baton charges were led, many were injured, three constables were stabbed and one died. The policeman in command, Superintendent Mays, claimed he and his men had marched slowly down the street towards the speakers’ platform, planning to arrest the leaders and give the crowds time to leave under their own steam. They only charged, he said, when bricks and stones were thrown; he also claimed that the rioters had guns (although everyone agreed that no shot had been fired). On the other side, eye-witnesses reported that the police had charged immediately, indiscriminately attacking men, women and children, many of whom had nothing to do with the rally, but were simply passers-by. The officers made no attempts to rein in their men, and the crowd response was purely self-defence. The jury at the inquest on PC Robert Culley reached a verdict of justifiable homicide, noting that the Riot Act had not been read, which made the police charge illegal.*This verdict was quashed on appeal, and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry found that the police had not used excessive force. This was decidedly not the public’s view. The caricaturist Robert Cruikshank wrote a savage attack on the authorities, inflating the number of police to eight hundred, and suggesting that Culley had probably been stabbed by another policeman. He ended by parodying Peel’s instructions with a set of his own ‘Necessary Qualifications’ for policemen: ‘He must be utterly destitute of all feelings of humanity … He must qualify himself for action, by knocking down, every half hour, all the poor fruit-women he can find and other peaceable hardworking people, who endeavor [sic] to get an honest livelihood to support their large families. If able to perjure himself with a clear conscience he may depend upon speedy promotion.’

While the inquest and inquiry were continuing, public outrage was exacerbated by the ongoing case of Popay, known generally as ‘the police spy’. William Popay was a police sergeant sent to infiltrate the National Political Union. He pretended to be an artist and attended meetings in ‘coloured clothes’ (plainclothes), acting as an agent provocateur, inciting his supposed fellow workers to illegal actions. When he was unmasked, earlier fears about the true nature of the police force seemed to be justified. It was, said the Radicals, nothing but a government-sanctioned spy network, paid for, to add insult to injury, out of working men’s taxes. Another select committee was set up, but before it could deliver its report the death of John Peacock Wood suddenly assumed significance.

Wood should have had no fame at all. He was a waterside character in Wapping, by the London docks, an amiable drunk, a man of no trade or settled way of life. But he was harmless. On the night before his death he was drinking at the White Hart tavern with a friend, his wife and the landlady. According to witnesses at the inquest, a squabble arose over who was to pay for a pint, and this attracted the attention of a policeman, who ‘laid hold of the deceased, and shoved him “right slap” into the street’, where he fell on the pavement. A succession of witnesses agreed that Wood had been knocked down by a policeman, while another constable was seen with ‘a stick in his hand’, and another ‘lift[ed] the man up, whose head fell again to the pavement; the blow was violent’. It was not the first blow, either: the policeman’s hands were ‘stained with blood’. Somehow it took four policemen an hour to carry Wood the 250 yards from the tavern to the police station. A man in the cells saw him dragged by his feet into a cell (‘A deep murmur and expression of horror here burst forth’), where he was left until ten o’clock the next morning, at which point a doctor was sent for. Wood was treated and taken home, but he died that afternoon of a fractured skull caused, said a doctor, not ‘by a lateral fall, but. by a large round stick’.

It was not just the death, but the behaviour of the police and the coroner at the inquest that incensed the population. The police swore that the cells’ other occupant could not have witnessed Wood’s treatment, because he had been discharged at six (said the charge book), or maybe it was 2.30 (the inspector). The police were permitted to sit in the court before they testified, unlike the other witnesses, which meant that they would be able to tailor their evidence. (The coroner stoutly protested that no policeman would think of doing any such thing.) At an identification parade the constables arrived dressed in street clothes, rather than their uniforms – to evade recognition, thought many.

The fractious bickering between jury and coroner continued for thirteen hours on the first day. On the second, four doctors testified that Wood’s fracture had been caused by a truncheon-shaped object. Another witness testified to seeing him being chased by the police, but the coroner refused to accept this evidence, dismissing it as ‘disgraceful’. A juror snapped back, ‘If an honest perseverance to elicit the truth was disgraceful, he would admit that their conduct throughout the whole proceedings was disgraceful indeed.’ The coroner backed down, mumbling that it was ‘the firing and cross-firing’ of questions that he had been referring to, before adjourning the sitting.

On the third day, another twelve hours was spent on the case. A number of policemen testified to the very great care they had lavished on the unconscious Wood. One ‘burst into tears, and said he had an aged mother, whose feelings had been much hurt by his name being mixed up with the affair’. A juryman, unmoved, asked him if it were not true that he had previously ‘broken a man’s head with his truncheon’. The coroner refused to let him answer the question, and the court was adjourned in uproar once again.

On day four, a witness agreed with the police account, testifying that she had seen Wood carried carefully. On cross-examination, however, it was found that her evidence matched nothing that anyone else had seen that night, that it followed a private interview with the police inspector before the hearing, and furthermore that she had been seen drinking with another policeman only that morning. The coroner said he had received a note suggesting that Wood’s head ‘might have been accidentally struck against a beam at the entrance of the station-house’, but even the police agreed that that was not possible, and ‘the Foreman of the Jury observed – “The writer of the note must have had a beam in his eye.” ‘

On the fifth day, a witness who testified against the police was so confused and contradictory that the jury showed their independence of mind by saying they refused to believe a word. The solicitor watching proceedings for the police leapt up and asked that the witness be committed for perjury, at which the jury noted sourly that none of the police witnesses who had obviously lied had been so threatened. The coroner, not knowing when to let well alone, smugly commented, ‘I hope that the eyes of the Jury are now opened. I cannot but say from my heart, that there is not a tittle of evidence that can be relied on against the police: not a tittle that can be placed in comparison with the manly, straightforward evidence given by the police themselves … I cannot help saying, that since the Court was opened, the Jury have pursued a course such as I have never before witnessed in the course of my life, and such as I hope never to see again.’ The jury cried, ‘“Shame, shame!” and with clenched fists approached the Coroner … An indescribable scene of confusion followed. The people in the room united in the vociferations of the Jury, and the crowd in the street. expressed their approbation by loud shouting and clapping of hands.’ The coroner realized the position he’d put himself in, and added hastily, ‘I feel deep sorrow for having expressed myself in a manner disagreeable to the Jury, whose conduct, it is my duty to state, as far as the ends of truth and justice are concerned, does them great credit: I did not mean in what I said to censure them morally.’ The jury were having none of it, and the foreman responded: ‘We stand here as honest men, having characters to support, and I can say before God, that I came into this room unbiassed against the police. Nothing that can be said to us, in the way of censure, can affect our verdict. If we are to be taxed with having a bias against the police, I, for one, would lay down my fine of 10l. [for refusing jury service], and walk home.’ Then the coroner tried to speak, but one of the jury interrupted him: ‘You have called us biassed men; we have been ill treated by you individually and collectively: your conduct has been most partial [great confusion].’ The inquest was once more adjourned.

When it resumed, the coroner finally summed up: ‘When I found that some members of the Jury endeavoured to degrade my office [the Jury here exclaimed that they did not], and to impugn my impartiality – when I perceived the spirit of persecution in which the examinations were conducted [cries of ‘No, no!’], and the intemperate manner in which all interference on behalf of the police was resisted – I felt bound by every obligation … to extend the broad shield of the Judge over the devoted heads of the policemen, and protect them from the cruel inquisition to which they were exposed.’ He then admitted that he might have been led into ‘some warmth of expression’, which he regretted. The jury took three hours to consider their verdict (this in an age when death sentences were routinely agreed in twenty minutes), returning with a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder against some policeman unknown’, adding a rider that the death certificate should be altered to read ‘We are of opinion [sic] the murder was committed with a truncheon by a policeman of the K Division.’ The coroner responded coldly: ‘The verdict is yours, and not mine, and on you rests the responsibility.’

And there the case rested: no one was ever identified, so no one was ever charged. But a few weeks later, the House of Commons reported on Popay, condemning his behaviour as ‘highly reprehensible’ and blaming his superiors for their lack of proper supervision. The public too made its feelings known: on Guy Fawkes Night, the two police commissioners, Richard Mayne and Charles Rowan, were burnt in effigy on local bonfires, together with a third guy, labelled ‘Justifiable Homicide’.

The following year, the police distinguished themselves even less, demonstrating the limitations of preventative policing. This time it was not the murder of a friendly drunk, but of a respectable member of the merchant class. Thomas Ashton, the twenty-two-year-old son of a mill owner, had left the family house at Gee Cross, near Ashton-under-Lyne (now part of Greater Manchester), at 7.30 one evening in 1834 to deputize for his brother at their father’s Apethorne factory (Ashton usually managed another family mill, at Woodley). Minutes later, a messenger from the mill rushed in: ‘He believed Mr. Thomas was down in the lane, and hurt.’ Mr Thomas was not hurt, but either dying or dead, having been shot at point-blank range. At the inquest, a nine-year-old girl said that she had seen three men on the road, and thought one of them had been carrying a gun, which he tried to conceal as she passed. A book-keeper from the mill testified that three men had been sacked the week before, ‘for irregularity in their general conduct’, but none of them was known to have made any threats against any of the Ashton family, and one had already been rehired. This was a time of great labour unrest, and there was some discussion about whether the men had belonged to the Spinners’ Union, but no evidence was offered, and in any case the Ashton mills were in full employment. Mention was made of a ‘piece of thin and soft blue or purple paper’ which had probably been used as wadding in the gun that was fired, but this clue seemed to lead nowhere. The jury brought in a verdict of ‘wilful murder against three persons at present unknown’, and the government offered a £600 reward.

The Manchester Guardian said that the perpetrators must have been outsiders: not only had no one recognized them, but they had made no attempt to hide their faces, as though they had no fear of recognition. The case remained in limbo for three years, until William (or James, depending on which newspaper you read) Garside, in gaol for stealing tools, told the authorities that he knew something about the murder. He refused to speak to the magistrate, however, until a three-year-old copy of the Hue and Cry *was found, to prove to him that the government was offering a reward (now raised to £1,500) and a pardon to anyone except the person who had actually fired the gun who could give information leading to the discovery of the murderers. Garside could not read, but the offer was read aloud to him. As a result he admitted to being present at the crime, and named two brothers, Joseph and William Moseley, as the perpetrators.

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:

… 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.