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

      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 After the Surrey’s first night, the Lord Chamberlain stepped in and ordered the play to be withdrawn.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!’