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

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СКАЧАТЬ authority in overall control of policing throughout London. Robert Southey, who would be named Poet Laureate the following year, and was now as ardent an opponent of political reform as he had once been a promoter of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, agreed: ‘I have very long felt the necessity of an improved police, and these dreadful events, I hope and trust, will lead to the establishment of one as vigilant as that of Paris used to be. The police laws cannot be too rigorous; and the usual objection that a rigorous police is inconsistent with English liberty might easily be shown to be absurd.’ True, there was a dissident voice in the Earl of Dudley, who said that he ‘would rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than to be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances’.* But then, Dudley’s socio-economic position made him safer than most.

      Thomas de Quincey might at first appear to have taken the affair more lightly, as he mockingly reported on his neighbour, who after the murders ‘never rested until she had placed eighteen doors. each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing room, was like going … into a beleaguered fortress.’ This seemed at first simply a comic coda, but de Quincey’s contribution was greater than anyone at the time could have imagined, as the Ratcliffe Highway murders spurred him to one of literature’s greatest flights of fancy, in the satirical essays referred to collectively under the title On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. In the first essay, de Quincey’s narrator introduces himself and his subject at a meeting of connoisseurs of murder: ‘GENTLEMEN, – I have had the honour to be appointed by your committee to the trying task of reading the Williams’ Lecture on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts’ – a task, he goes on to explain, which is increasingly difficult, as excellence in the field raises the bar for more aesthetic murders: ‘People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads. a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us. he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity.’ De Quincey is making a serious point: in Macbeth, we are interested not in the victim, Duncan, but in the thoughts of the murderer, Macbeth, just as we are more interested in murderers than we are in their victims. De Quincey’s narrator suggests that murder is an art, that murder is theatre, and that Williams was an artist who had written a sensational play that hundreds of thousands wanted to see.

      De Quincey then takes the story of the Marr and Williamson murders and himself turns them into art. The main figures are given psychological depth, and a motive is imagined. Most importantly, Williams is turned, as one literary critic observes, into ‘a sort of Miltonic, ruined God’, with a glamorized physical description to match his inward corruption of spirit. A sandy, undistinguished-looking man in life, in art Williams has a ‘bloodless, ghastly pallor’, and hair of ‘the most extraordinary and vivid colour … something between an orange and a lemon colour’. His clothes, too, undergo a metamorphosis. He no longer wears the rough dress of a sailor. Instead de Quincey imagines a dandified being, dressing for an evening’s slaughter in black silk stockings and pumps and with a long blue coat of ‘the very finest cloth. richly lined in silk’. The murderer is now more vampire than cash-strapped sailor, more great actor than street thug.

      In reality, there were few of de Quincey’s type of murderer. Yet, as his imaginary lecturer knows, ‘the world in general. are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood’. How this desire was transformed over the nineteenth century, and how it, in turn, transformed that century, is my subject.

* Even a decade later, after the arrival of some gas lighting, the streets were still darker and more confusing than can be imagined today. In 1822 Daniel Forrester, a detective for the City of London, became involved in a street fracas. It was only when he got the man who rescued him under a street lamp that he realized it was his own brother. With streets as dark as that, it is not surprising that ‘One gas light is as good as two policemen’ was a common maxim.

* The stages of prosecution for felonies and serious crimes were as follows: fi rst, the accused appeared before a justice of the peace or a magistrate, where it was decided whether there was a suffi ciently strong case; if so, the prisoner was committed for trial; a bill of indictment was drawn up, setting out the charge; a Grand Jury then considered the written depositions of the witnesses and, if they found a ‘true bill’ that there was a case to answer, the prisoner was tried by a jury. For murder cases, the early hearings often coincided with the inquest on the body, which was held separately. For concision’s sake I have omitted the repetition of evidence from one stage to the next.

* Perceval would himself be murdered four months later, the only British Prime Minister ever to be assassinated, but for some reason the crime barely captured the imagination of the public, and will feature no further in this book. Similarly, I will not be discussing the seven attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria.

* Colquhoun and the River Police were among the first to use the word ‘police’ in English. There had been a London Police Bill in 1785, and the magistrate John Fielding used the word that same year, but it was not yet common. In 1814 the Irish police (Sir Robert Peel’s first attempt to form a centralized force) were called the ‘Peace Preservation Force’ and manned by ‘constables’ not ‘policemen’.

* Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) was Napoleon’s Minister for Police. He had been an ardent Jacobin in the early part of the French Revolution, eventually being dubbed the ‘Executioner of Lyons’, as he oversaw so many executions that the victims’ blood blocked the city’s gutters. Under Napoleon, he exerted an iron grip on state security, and the British considered – rightly – that his police force consisted almost entirely of spies and agents provocateurs, hence Dudley’s comment.

       TWO Trial by Newspaper

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ