The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. Judith Flanders
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime
A dramatic version of the murder was reported to have been presented at the Stoke-by-Nayland Fair in May 1828; in July, while Corder was still awaiting trial, two ‘theatrical representations’ of ‘The Late Murder of Maria Marten’ were staged at the Cherry Fair in Polstead itself, one of which included a scene in the Red Barn, ‘where the mutilated body was [seen] lying on … the floor, surrounded by the Coroner and the gentlemen of the jury as they appeared … after the fatal discovery’. Ballad-singers also cried their wares, selling broadsides that stated outright that Corder was a murderer.
The prosperous were as much absorbed as the masses. Staffordshire pottery figures were produced of Corder and Miss Marten, and, even more importantly, of the Red Barn, impossibly bucolic, and frequently with Maria Marten looking winsome in the doorway. These were big, expensive pieces, not for the working classes. There were further options for those who wanted to disguise their interest under the cover of morality: long before the trial began the Revd Mr Young preached an entire sermon on Corder’s evil deed, to a congregation said to number 5,000.
When Corder finally came to trial in August, the court spent some time on these affronts to justice.
DEFENCE: Pray had you not got a person preaching about this murder in the very barn itself?
THE LORD CHIEF BARON: What! what d’ye mean by preaching? – Is it a sermon?
DEFENCE: Yes, my Lord, and to a congregation of several thousand persons, specially brought together after regular notice in the parish, to hear this man described as the murderer of this unfortunate girl.
THE LORD CHIEF BARON: Scandalous! …
[Mr. W. Chaplin, the churchwarden is asked by the defence]: Did you hear the parson preach in the barn?
MR CHAPLIN: No, certainly not; but I heard of the occurrence.
DEFENCE: And you never interfered to prevent it?
MR CHAPLIN: I did not.
DEFENCE: Are there not exhibitions going round the neighbourhood, representing Corder as the murderer. And you’ve not interfered to prevent them? Is there not a camera obscura near this very hall at this moment, exhibiting him as the murderer?
MR CHAPLIN: There is a camera obscura, I believe about the streets, but I do not know the nature of the exhibition, neither am I aware that I have any power to prevent them in my own parish, much less in this town.
Technically, a camera obscura is a box with a lens, which projects an image of a place or a person onto a flat surface. They were frequently used by artists at the time for sketching from nature. It may be that here the term is used to describe some form of peepshow using projections. George Sanger, later the proprietor of one of Europe’s largest circuses (self-ennobled as ‘Lord’ George Sanger), as a boy in the late 1820s and 1830s toured fairgrounds with his father. Their peepshow ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ had pictures ‘pulled up and down by strings’, lit at night by candles.
I stood outside and asked the folks to ‘Walk up and see the only correct views of the terrible murder of Maria Martin. They are historically accurate and true to life … see how the ghost of Maria appeared to her mother on three successive nights at the bedside.’
When we had our row of spectators getting their pennyworths from the peep-holes I would describe the various pictures as they were pulled up into view. The arrest of Corder was always given special prominence, as follows: ‘The arrest of the murderer Corder as he was at breakfast. Observe the horrified faces, and note also, so true to life are these pictures, that even the saucepan is shown upon the fire and the minute glass upon the table timing the boiling of the eggs.’
None of this publicity was enough to halt the trial, any more than the irregularities of the inquest had been. Corder had been barred from attending by the coroner, who claimed that ‘he did not believe that the accused had any right to be present [at an inquest]; he never knew an instance of the kind’. It was explained to the coroner at the trial that, on the contrary, it was an obligation of the court that the accused should hear the depositions against him. Yet his abrogation of Corder’s rights did not appear to be any bar to him taking part in the trial itself, in which he acted as a prosecuting counsel.*
It probably made no difference. James Lee, the Bow Street Runner, had found Miss Marten’s reticule in Corder’s study, together with a pair of pistols and a sword, which was proved to have been sharpened at Corder’s request just before the murder. Furthermore, letters from Corder to Miss Marten’s parents, claiming his ‘wife’ was with him in ‘our lodgings, in the Isle of Wight’, were read out, in which he told them how they had married in Ipswich and that she ‘unites with me for your wellfare [sic]’, together with an ominous ‘P.S. I think you had better burn all my letters.’ Corder put up a miserable defence.† He claimed that Miss Marten had left Polstead to hide a new pregnancy from her family. (Why? She had already had three bastard children.) Then he asserted that she had had some unspecified relationship with an unnamed man in London, and that when she reached the barn, ‘she flew into a passion, upbraided me with not having so much regard for her as the gentleman before alluded to’, and shot herself. Terrified to find himself with a body on his hands, he buried her. The stab wounds noted at the autopsy must have been made by a spade when the body was exhumed, he claimed.
This last is not as implausible as it sounds today. Post-mortems were still rudimentary (the first use of the term had only appeared a decade before). An initial post-mortem had decided that the ‘chief cause of death’ was ‘a [bullet] wound in the orbit [eye-socket]’, but after the remains had been re-interred, ‘It has been regretted that for the ends of justice, more time was not given for the inspection of the body, or that the inspection had not been minutely made,’ as on reflection a bullet through the eye was ‘little likely to be chosen for the perpetration of a murder of this deliberate character’. The body was therefore re-exhumed, and two stab wounds were now found, one between the ribs and one in the heart, both entirely unnoticed at the first PM. By the time the trial was under way, yet further thought had suggested that the silk kerchief Miss Marten had worn had been pulled ‘so tight upon the neck as to have produced death by strangulation’.
Corder was found guilty and sentenced to death. The Times was not sure which was more important, the verdict itself, or the speed with which the newspaper had reported it. ‘We yesterday morning, by extraordinary exertion, published the proceedings of the court up to the adjournment on the previous day, – or, in other words, gave in six closely printed columns the report of a trial which took place on the previous day at a distance of 72 miles from London, and which was not adjourned till eight o’clock in the evening,’ it boasted.
More sermons were immediately preached. On 17 August, the Revd Charles Hyatt of the Ebenezer Chapel, Shadwell, travelled to the Red Barn to deliver a sermon to ‘about 2,000 persons’, taking his text from Numbers 32:23: ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’, and using it to recycle the type of newspaper rumour familiar from the Thurtell case. When Corder was at school, Mr Hyatt told his congregation, ‘the depravity of [his] nature often displayed itself, by his constant habit of telling falsehoods, and by the depredations he committed upon his companions’; he had later formed ‘an acquaintance with a girl of very loose character’ and, as ‘the wages of her iniquity’, had supplied her with ‘peas and other articles from his father’s farm’. The sermon ended by warning ‘the peasantry’ against poaching, which Mr Hyatt stressed would lead to greater vices (presumably murdering women and burying them in barns).
That same evening, the Revd J. Pilkington preached from the same text at the Baptists’ Meeting House in Rayleigh, Essex, and at Bury St Edmunds the Revd George Hughes took a different text, but also preached on Corder. ‘A Suffolk Clergyman’ published An Address to My Parishioners and Neighbours on the Subject of the Murder lately committed at Polstead, in Suffolk, in which a certain amount of space was given to how the wages of sin lead only to death, while a great deal more was devoted to the details of Miss Marten’s murder. Furthermore, the clergyman had attended Corder’s