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
coffin that he or she was shortly to fill stood in the centre of the chapel. The Suffolk clergyman evidently paid little attention to divine service that day, for he was able to describe Corder’s every gesture for his readers.
A novel, published together with a transcript of the trial, quickly appeared. This was ‘founded on fact’, the reader is assured, although it is an absolutely standard melodrama: there is the pure maiden, with her virtuous father, a model of ‘industry and frugality’; a gypsy fortune-teller; some smugglers; a gambler who in a Thurtell-ish moment ‘plucks’, or cheats, the Corder character; and a rejected suitor who returns having made a fortune in India. The author was probably the penny-blood writer Robert Huish (possibly together with the journalist William Maginn), who later wrote similar ‘true’ crime novels about James Greenacre and Maria and Frederick Manning (see pp.92–8, 157–82).*
The Times reported that by nine o’clock on the morning of the execution a thousand people had gathered at the scaffold in Bury St Edmunds. Three hours later this had swelled to 7,000. Unlike Thurtell’s, Corder’s death could not be mythologized. At the scaffold, claimed one broadside, he was ‘so weak as to be unable to stand without support’, and ‘he looked somewhat wildly around’ while he waited for the rope to be adjusted. In 1824, technical changes had been made to the scaffold, allowing adjustable chains which reduced delays while the hangman corrected the length of the rope. Even so, prisoners were still assessed only by height, not by weight, and some, in the phrase of the day, ‘died hard’. Corder was one of them. The hangman had to perform the ‘disgusting but necessary task, of suspending his own weight around the body of the prisoner, to accelerate his death’. Even then, it took another eight minutes for him to die.
Not everyone was disturbed. Physical remains were treated with a pragmatism that has since vanished. During the trial, the surgeon had ‘produced the skull of the deceased’, which was handed round to the jury members so they could see the fracture for themselves. A broadside commemorated this moment: ‘They brought her heart, her scull [sic], and ribs,/And showed before his face …’ Mr Marten, testifying to the finding of his daughter’s body, merely said he had ‘put down a mole spike into the floor … and brought up something black, which I smelt and thought it smelt like decayed flesh’. For those who may have missed these details in the newspapers and broadsides, Corder’s body itself was soon on display. After the execution it was transported to the town’s Shire Hall, where ‘Two incisions were made in the breast, the skin taken of [sic], and the muscles exposed to view.’ Then the body was displayed on a table in the middle of the Court, ‘quite naked, with the exception of the trowsers, shoes, and stockings’. *‘Many thousands’ were admitted. For those who couldn’t be there, ‘two eminent artists, Mr. Mizotti of Cambridge and Mr. Child of Bungay’, made plaster casts. The following day the body was taken to the County Hospital and wired up to a battery to make it twitch in a demonstration of galvanic power, while the phrenologists, quack scientists who read character from the shape, or bumps, in the skull, competed for a cast of the head. Only after that did dissection proceed, for the benefit of the medical students. The bones ‘having been cleared of the flesh’, they were ‘re-united by Mr S. Dalton, and the skeleton is now placed in the Suffolk General Hospital’ (one visitor was reported to be Mr Marten himself). ‘A great portion of the skin has been tanned, and a gentleman connected with the hospital intends to have the Trial and Memoirs of Corder bound in it. The heart has been preserved in spirits.’ Many years later the pickled scalp was displayed by a leather-seller in Oxford Street.†
Other souvenirs, slightly less macabre, were also available. The executioner, as a matter of right, got the clothes Corder died in, and also the rope. Such was the excitement over this case that it was reported that he had sold off the rope sections at a guinea an inch, including among his purchasers, it was rumoured, a gentleman from Cambridge who came especially to add this trophy to the university collection. For the artistic, a miniature of Corder was on display at the following Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. (The journals claimed to be appalled that respectable people were interested: ‘we looked, paused, reconsulted our catalogue, looked again, rubbed our eyes. No, it is impossible!’ But they reported it all the same.) For those with less cash and more enterprise, there was the barn itself, which was taken apart and ‘sold in tooth-picks, tobacco-stoppers, and snuff-boxes’.
Kaleidoscope magazine mocked the entire circus, with a picture of Corder lying on a dissecting table under which are sacks labelled ‘Mr Corder’s clothes’ and ‘Relics for sale’. Standing on the table over the body is an auctioneer, who is calling out, ‘Now then, Ladies & Gentlemen – the Halter is going at a Guinea an inch,’ while a person in the crowd responds, ‘I want some of it for the University,’ and another cries, ‘Oh! how delightfully Horrible!’ To one side, a man is saying to another, ‘The Officer says, Mr Sheriff, that the Pistols belong to him,’ while the other replies, ‘Why I would not part with them man for 100 Guineas!’ A second picture shows Corder’s body twitching, naked, on the dissecting table. A man at the door says, ‘I came to take a cast of his head,’ only to be told, ‘You must wait till the galvanic operations are over.’ Outside, the crowd gathers around a sign advertising ‘Camera obscura of the murder’.
From the outset fairs loved the story of the doomed Maria Marten. The journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed a strolling player who performed the Red Barn murder at a fair ‘in cavalier costume’. Reality was not the key: excitement was. The whole country was getting younger: at the end of the eighteenth century, 17 per cent of the population was between five and fourteen years old; by the 1820s, it was 25 per cent, and almost half the population was under twenty. This was an audience worth catering to: even if, individually, they had almost no money, collectively they could create riches. For many children, however, even minor theatre was out of reach. A place in the gallery of somewhere like the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton appeared cheap to the middle classes, but it cost between 3 and 4d., a significant sum to the less fortunate. Instead many boys and girls frequented illegal, unlicensed penny-gaffs, housed in disused shops and turned into theatres by erecting a rough stage at one end, with the remaining space filled with benches.
In 1838 it was estimated that there were about a hundred gaffs in London, each with a capacity of one hundred to 150 per sitting, with up to nine daily sittings. Thus attendance in any twenty-four hours was, at the least, and in London alone, 50,000 people. The audiences, almost entirely under the age of sixteen, were given, for their penny, three-quarters of an hour of some abbreviated play, two further pieces of about twenty minutes each, and a song. Much of the material was a debased version of what the regular theatres showed, and a great deal of it was obscene.* There were no playbills, only a board with details of the evening’s entertainment outside. One example was:
On Thursday next will be performed
at
Smith’s Grand Theatre,
THE RED-NOSED MONSTER,
or,
THE TYRANT OF THE MOUNTAINS.
To conclude with
the BLOOD-STAINED HANDKERCHIEF,
or,
THE MURDER IN THE COTTAGE
Marionettes were frequently on the bill at the gaffs, and at fairs across the country. By the 1870s some marionette companies were substantial outfits, having five or six wagons touring in annual circuits, performing on stages set up at each stop for up to seven hundred people nightly. Thomas Holden, a later Victorian puppeteer, had a stage that was eight feet deep, and a proscenium arch fourteen feet across. Maria Marten was one of the touring staples, in the repertory of companies in the Midlands, Yorkshire, Wales and even into Europe. The Times report of a police raid on a penny-gaff in 1844 noted that the play being performed by ‘automaton figures. made to move with wires’ was Maria Martin, or, The Red Barn Murder. The police took into custody