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

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СКАЧАТЬ Willesden cemetery two centuries before the gaol-breaker, was overrun with visitors, and the cemetery’s wily sexton chipped off bits of the headstone to sell. (The criminal Jack Sheppard was buried in the workhouse of St Martin-in-the-Fields, now under the site of the National Gallery. In 1866 the remains of the cemetery’s inhabitants were transferred to Brookwood, in Surrey.)

* In case someone else was accused of the crime after his death, Ferroll had deposited a confession in his fi rst wife’s coffi n. How, the reader asks, was anyone supposed to know to exhume his fi rst wife in the hope that a confession might have been buried with her? Answer comes there none.

* Vicars had a penchant for the story. A sale of autographs collected by the late Revd F.W. Joy included a letter from Aram after his arrest, as well as a letter from Bulwer authenticating it (although why Bulwer, born more than half a century after Aram died, should be an expert on his handwriting, is unclear). There were also ‘relics’: a box made from the wood of Aram’s gibbet, a bone from his skeleton, another box made from a beam from Daniel Clark’s house, as well as a portion of his skull (this time authenticated by the governor of York Castle), and there was a letter from Aram ‘relating to a recent tour on the Continent’. The idea of a poor school usher making a grand tour is so risible that it is hard to take the rest of the collection seriously, but people did. It was estimated to sell for £19, while a letter from Robert Burns was valued at £13, and an entire manuscript in Carlyle’s hand a sad little £3.

* Wills had a knack for turning theatrical fi ction into untheatrical theatre: his adaptation of Jane Eyre drops the novel’s dramatically interrupted wedding scene; instead, Jane is informed of Rochester’s previous marriage in a letter.

† Gilbert and Sullivan parodied this in Ruddigore (1887), which had dialogue accompanied in melodrama fashion. (The West End audiences were bemused, failing to recognize the convention.)

* Dickens had a history with Moncrieff and stage adaptations, however. In 1837 Moncrieff had written an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers before the serialization had reached its conclusion. Dickens took his revenge in Nicholas Nickleby, with a depiction of a ‘literary gentleman’ who had ‘dramatized … two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out’. Given this type of speedy hackwork, it is not surprising that many authors stuck to newspapers. C.H. Hazlewood, the house author at the Britannia, regularly fi lleted the newspapers, magazines and pennydreadfuls, précising the stories and fi ling ‘sundry axioms, aphorisms, and moral sentiments’ alphabetically under headings such as ‘Ambition’ or ‘Kindness of Heart’. When he began a new melodrama, he merely took one of his précis and fi lled it in with relevant quotations. Fitzball, receiving his commission from the Surrey, similarly went back to an old story.

* So popular was this novelty that it was quickly turned to satire. Only two weeks later, Figaro in London announced that Sadler’s Wells was planning a play ‘in which there is to be a scene showing twenty rooms at once, with a different tragedy acting in ten of them, operas in fi ve, and the remaining fi ve representing as many perfect comedies’.

† Another way of measuring the play’s success was the appearance of racehorses named after the murderer. The Earl of Burlington ran a gelding named Jonathan Bradford at the 1834 Derby, and on the second day of the meeting a Mr Breary was listed as the owner of another horse with the same name.

* There is also a story by Mrs Gaskell, ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, begun in late 1858, which begins as though Mrs Gaskell might have read of Jonathan Bradford. It is said, however, that she based her story on a Knutsford case of a lawyer who vanished.

* In 1896, Bernard Shaw saw a production at the Princess’s Theatre in which real water was used, which he felt destroyed the illusion, although ‘the spectacle of the two performers taking a call before the curtain, sopping wet, and bowing with miserable enjoyment of the applause’, was something ‘I shall remember … while life remains’

* Our American Cousin’s main claim to fame today is that it was the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated.

       FOUR Policing Murder

      One man, perhaps, can be credited with the creation of Scotland Yard, although he did not live to see it, and would not have enjoyed it if he had. That man was Daniel Good, and he was not a policeman or a politician, but a murderer; not the hunter, but the hunted.

      Until 1842, the police saw themselves primarily as performing the function Parliament had established them for: prevention of crime. It was hoped by Peel and his supporters that this emphasis would encourage an initially reluctant populace to view the new police as protectors of the weak and the oppressed, instead of a tool of the powerful. Up to a point, this had happened. Even with the Cold Bath Field riot a vivid memory, police crowd-control was quickly discovered to be much more satisfactory than calling out the army – truncheons got the same results, with far less damage, than mounted dragoons with sabres. One of the earliest attempts at crowd-control by the new police was in 1830, three years before Cold Bath Field, when a week of rioting followed the Duke of Wellington’s rejection of parliamentary reform. Seven thousand troops were held at the ready, but were never deployed; instead, 2,000 London policemen marched. The mobs targeted them, shouting ‘Down with the New Police. Down with the Raw Lobsters!’ Handbills were distributed: ‘These damned Police are now to be armed. Englishmen, will you put up with this?’ Yet there were no deaths, nor even any broken bones. ‘A week’s rioting in a city with a population nearing 2 million had for the first time in English history been suppressed. by a. civil force armed only with pieces of wood,’ wrote one modern historian.

      There were, however, limitations to this preventative role, and the eruption of Daniel Good into the national consciousness highlighted the one-sided nature of Peel’s force. The police were paid to prevent violent crime. What happened afterwards, if prevention failed?

      Daniel Good was a coachman employed by a Mr Quelaz Shiell in the hamlet of Roehampton, south-west of London. He had been keeping company with Jane Jones, a laundress who lived in Manchester Square, who was known as ‘Mrs’ Jones, even though there was no Mr Jones and her eleven-year-old son called Daniel Good ‘Father’. But in 1842 Good met Susan Butcher, and Mrs Jones had come to hear of it. To soothe her, Good invited her out to Roehampton, while the boy was sent overnight to a friend. The next day, Monday, 6 April 1842, Good visited a pawnbroker in Wandsworth, where he bought a pair of black knee breeches. As he was leaving, however, the pawnbroker’s assistant saw him take a second pair of trousers. The pawnbroker went to the police in the Wandsworth, or V, Division to report the matter.

      A constable was assigned this case of trouser-theft and two days later, accompanied by two stable boys (Good had a reputation for violence), he went out to talk to Good. He found him in the stables, and in an emollient frame of mind, immediately offering to return to the pawnshop with the constable to pay for the goods. The constable said that was not in his orders; he was there to search for the stolen trousers. He began in the harness room, where, moving a truss of hay, he saw what he thought was a dead goose. At that moment he heard the stable door СКАЧАТЬ