“Two months later in April, in a post office in the south London suburb of Penge, a man named Casabianca overheard a stranger enquiring where he should go to register the death of a woman named Staunton. This was an unfortunate coincidence for Louis Staunton, for Casabianca was married to Harriet Staunton’s sister, and he knew of Mrs Butterfield’s unsuccessful attempts to find her.”
This, a detail from a real case, the almost perfect opening for an old-fashioned detective story, appears on page 344 of The Invention of Murder. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for in this hypnotically absorbing account of the golden age of capital crime, Judith Flanders has impressively combined speculative sociology, the livid contemporary press, earlier broadsheets and old fashioned detective stories. The paper seller’s cry, “Horrid Murder!” became the publisher’s product – awful novel! Nobody worked a harder shift than the dedicated Mary Elizabeth Braddon who, knowing her market, found “the amount of crime, treachery, murder and slow poisoning and general infamy” it required “something terrible.”
The list of Mrs Braddon’s novels mentioned here has a nice ring: Aurora Floud; Birds of Prey; The Black Band or The Mysteries of Midnight; Charlotte’s Inheritance; Thou Art the Man; The Trail of the Serpent and, of course, the big one – big bucks, sorry, splendid sterling – Lady Audley’s Secret. Lady Audley, the married up Lucy Graham, governess, lower middle class, poor with it and not at all the thing, is horrified when George Talboys, husband supposedly sunk in fictionally strategic Australia, returns (a) alive and (b) rich. Naturally, she pushes him down a well, which is what a socially challenged governess did. That failing, she burns down the inn where he is staying, without long term effect.
Oddly, Mrs Braddon, in laying on George’s miraculous recovery, has denied us the execution in which Agatha Christie delighted. Readers of Lady Audley’s Secret must settle for Lucy’s certification as insane. Meanwhile George, surviving fire and water and still rich, can choose (carefully) among more suitable candidates. This business of the public being denied a nice hanging could have a shocking side effect in real life.
Christina Edmunds of Brighton – whose otherwise forgotten case turns up in Middlemarch when Dr Lydgate worries about medically inadequate coroners’ courts – was given a reprieve to life, in Broadmoor, something which provoked an instance of purple municipal indignation for the record books. “Brighton is now saddled,” said a councillor, “as long as Miss Edmunds lives, with the expense of her maintenance. I say this is one of the greatest pieces of injustice ever perpetrated.”
More men commit murder but women murdering make better copy – classics of the trade. So, on New Year’s Eve, 1885, Adelaide Bartlett, to skip legal sensitivities, murdered a multiple grocer, also her husband, perhaps with liquid chloroform. It had been bought by her resident lover, a Methodist minister. To improve an overwriting by real life at which Mrs Braddon would have hesitated, she also claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of the Duc de Trémouille and protested that the chloroform was to keep off the grocer unreasonably contemplating sexual intercourse. Bartlett got off altogether, no need for certification, because Edward Clarke QC, having in her a more discreet client than he would get in Oscar Wilde, stuck to the impossibility of using liquid chloroform without leaving very obvious burns – not present. The jury’s public query over doubts about who administered the chloroform made a verdict of not guilty inevitable: “Cheering, shouting, clapping of hands… while shouts of ‘Bravo!’ rang through the building.” Clearly, she murdered him some other way. Flanders adds a nice statistical point: men murder their wives for adultery, not the reverse. If Adelaide Bartlett did kill her husband to be with a lover “she would be a statistical anomaly.”
Mary Ann Cotton was not middle class, not even a governess. She lived in County Durham, then and now, apart from the disappearance of work, the most working class, miserable and denied corner of England. Not reprieved, in 1873, she died in long convulsions, something euphemised here, in a miscalculated and protracted hanging. She was guilty, surely, but miserably represented, the object of more gossiping breaches of evidential law than could be counted and the trial postponed to accommodate her pregnancy. It was the real thing, of no interest to novelists of the fashionable and sensational: a trail of post office savings accounts for small sums, arsenic bought “to kill bedbugs,” an application for childrens’ coffins, deaths not noted as unusual in the general welter of early death among the labouring poor around Sunderland, some of the deaths probably not actually murder, everything as sordid as sordid gets. What Flanders doesn’t record is that in County Durham, “Mary Ann Cotton” long survived as an active verb: “Aal Mary Ann Cotton yus yet.”
Last week I reviewed a book on popes on these pages; now with 468 pages on murderers, it’s very tempting to make comparisons and set up Mary Ann against Gregory XIII. Which is to say compare a clutch of husbands, lovers and children dying suspiciously in County Durham in the 1870s and, 300 years earlier, 20,000 persons, unsound on transubstantiation, slaughtered in a frenzy across France.
It is, though, a commonplace that death, whether or not it is murder, intensifies with particularisation. In other words, fewer is sadder: the child in the pond against a million lost in Chinese floods. Further, The Invention of Murder sticks to the 19th century which was not so much snobbish – too light a word – more socially segregated. Unsuitably dressed, poor looking people were “moved on” like Dickens’ little Jo, for being in the wrong place, the operation of an invisible apartheid pertaining to class.
However, if a lower class murder was horrible enough, it could still get attention. Witness “Sweet Fanny Adams,” a phrase still in use. For the record, it was the killing in 1867, near Alton in Hampshire, of a little girl, a crime made memorable by her decapitation, dismembering and the casting around of her body parts. The name has stuck, but the detail is understandably tucked away.
A murder and execution familiar at one remove, to the reading public, concerns poor Tess Durbeyfield, when “Justice was done and the President of the Immortals in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.” But Thomas Hardy, a very different sort of novelist, drew for that unbearable episode upon the hanging in Dorchester for a killing in Beaminster of Martha Brown which he, 16, new into architect’s articles, witnessed in 1856 and never forgot. She was an older woman, married to a younger man, and, as Flanders puts it memorably: “They appear to have been unhappy in routine fashion.”
Brown drank, slept with another woman, and was violent. He came home drunk and died by violence. Martha blamed a kick from a horse, the verdict reflected belief in a flat iron. Convicted, she confessed, credibly, to his repeatedly hitting her then reaching for a horsewhip; after which she reached for the coal hatchet and killed him. She was hanged before a not very large crowd. A man in a contemporary case, who killed his wife with a brick, got three months. The literate world knows Tess and, such is Hardy’s melancholy magic, laments a death which never happened. Martha Brown is a learned footnote, one of 24 women executed for husband killing.
Judith Flanders has a good grip on the statistics. Though men had long escaped consequences more often, conviction for husband murder between 1840 and 1900 showed some distaste at 46 per cent; and, in figures measured from 1843, only 13 per cent of such women were actually hanged. Quite enough, but in a way sadly different from Adelaide Bartlett, the ghostly precursor of Tess Durbeyfield was a statistical anomaly.
