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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ