Most foul
The Invention of Murder: how the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime
Judith Flanders
HARPER PRESS, 556PP, £20 ■Tablet bookshop price £22.50 Tel 01420 592974
Quincey: “Pleasant it is, no doubt, to drink tea with your sweetheart, but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea-urn.” Judith Flanders’ tour of nineteenth-century murder leavens its often appalling subject matter with a generous helping of humour. It’s just as well, as the glossy plates illustrating this history’s more savage episodes often do little to lighten the tone. Flanders’ long history of Victorian true crime takes in many of its best-known murders. The greatest hits include Dr William Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner; sweet Fanny Adams, a girl dismembered in a hop field, whose name was later invoked as slang for tinned meat; the nefarious doings of Burke and Hare; and the Constance Kent case, lately popularised
I
t’s hard not to warm instantly to a book that begins with this, by Thomas de
The murder of Harriet Staunton as depicted in Illustrated Police News
once more in Kate Summerscale’s award-winning account The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Aside from these, there are rehearsals of more crimes: Madeleine Smith, a well-to-do Glasgow girl who poisoned her secret lover (and got away with it); Maria Marten, victim of the Red Barn murder, whose killer, William Corder, advertised for a wife to replace her in the
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pages of The Sunday Times; Harriet Staunton and son, starved to death by other family members in the infamous Penge murders. Those searching for novelty will find some, however, as Flanders also digs up the details of cases which failed to capture the popular imagination. One such is the 1871 case of Christiana Edmunds, a spinster who lived with her mother and who became friendly with a Dr Beard and his wife. Edmunds fell in love with the doctor and, allegedly, attempted to poison Mrs Beard with a sweetmeat, after which they broke off all contact with her (but failed to go to the police). In the following weeks, a number of prominent Brighton families received anonymous parcels of cakes and sweets; everyone who ate them became ill. Earlier that year, a four-year-old, Sidney Barker, had died of strychnine poisoning after eating sweets from a local shop. The shop owner testified that Miss Edmunds had been paying boys to return packets of chocolates to him. The same Miss Edmunds was identified as having bought strychnine from the chemist and playing with a dog that later died of poisoning. When brought to trial, she was found guilty and her death sentence commuted to life in Broadmoor on grounds of insanity. She died, forgotten, in 1907. As Flanders points out, a case can have all the elements one would have thought guaranteed ongoing notoriety – “indiscriminate poisoning, philandering doctors, unrequited love and madness” – but fail, somehow, to make the grade. Large portions of Flanders’ book are given over not just to retellings of the murders themselves but to their afterlives in ballads, broadsides, penny dreadfuls, plays, popular entertainments and novels. It is this adoption by literary practitioners which accords a murderer immortality. In 1833, the killer Jonathan Bradford received his tribute in the form of an eponymous play which dramatised the happenings at his roadside inn and put the four rooms of the hotel all onstage at once with the murder scene occurring simultaneously across them. The play ran for 161 consecutive performances. The uses to which sensational fiction, as practised by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, put popular crimes is also made much of, particularly with regard to the changing emphasis across the century from an early interest in true crime to an increasing focus on its detection. At the last, though, it’s difficult not to tire of such an endless catalogue of death and destruction, however engagingly retold. The last chapter reaches the horrors of Jack the Ripper, in all their queasy excesses, and it would be a hard-hearted reader who didn’t close the book’s covers feeling slightly grubbier. Flanders succeeds in her aim of showing just how enthusiastically our forebears revelled in this stuff, but by the book’s end, we too are in blood steeped so far that I, for one, was pretty glad to wade no further. Nicola Smyth
26 | THE TABLET | 12 March 2011
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