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
Later Clunn Lewis, the proprietor of a long-lasting marionette company, claimed that Corder’s son came to see his family perform; Charles Middleton, another proprietor, countered by saying that in the 1860s his company had from delicacy refrained from performing in Colchester, where a surviving Corder lived.
The youth audience was avid, and penny-bloods quickly appeared. ‘Penny-bloods’ was the original name for what, in the 1860s, were renamed penny-dreadfuls. Each booklet, or ‘number’, consisted of eight (sometimes sixteen) pages, with a single black-and-white illustration on the top half of the front page. Double columns of text filled the remainder, breaking off wherever the final page finished, even in the middle of a sentence. The numbers appeared weekly, and could be bought as they were issued, or in monthly parts of four numbers bound together in a coloured wrapper. Bloods developed out of late-eighteenth-century gothic tales. G.A. Sala, in his youth a blood-writer, later a renowned journalist, described the bloods as ‘a world of dormant peerages, of murderous baronets, and ladies of title addicted to the study of toxicology, of gipsies and brigand-chiefs, men with masks and women with daggers, of stolen children, withered hags, heartless gamesters, nefarious roués, foreign princesses, Jesuit fathers, gravediggers, resurrection-men, lunatics and ghosts’.
The bloods’ astonishing success created a vast new readership for cheap fiction. Between 1830 and 1850 there were probably as many as a hundred publishers of penny fiction – ten for every one publisher of ‘respectable’ fiction. Many magazines, previously seen as improving reading for the working classes, now wholeheartedly gave themselves over to this type of tale. The first ever penny-blood, in 1836, was The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c., in sixty numbers. Gentleman Jack followed, running for 205 parts over four years, without too much worry for historical accuracy or continuity. (The historical highwaymen Claude Duval, Dick Turpin and Jack Rann all appear as coevals, even though their lives actually spanned a century; Jack Rann is, rather carelessly, killed twice.) The main characteristics of the highwaymen conformed to melodrama type: they were upper-class, usually switched at birth, and yet despite being reared among thieves, they were noble and protected the poor and virtuous. The illustrations, crude to modern eyes, were an essential element. One publisher’s standing instruction to his illustrators was, ‘more blood – much more blood!’ The most successful penny-blood, and what might be the most successful series the world has ever seen, first appeared in 1844, written by G.W.M. Reynolds, politically a Radical, who two years later founded the journal Reynolds’s Miscellany. His Mysteries of London was based on a French series, Mysteries of Paris, by Eugène Sue, but it took on a life of its own, spanning twelve years, 624 numbers, nearly 4.5 million words and a title change to Mysteries of the Courts of London.
Henry Mayhew interviewed thousands of the working class in the 1840s and 1850s for his monumental study of street life, London Labour and the London Poor. These people were Reynolds’ prime market, and Mayhew reported that an ‘intelligent costermonger’, who regularly read bloods aloud to his less literate friends, told him: ‘You see’s an engraving of a man hung up, burning over a fire, and some costers would go mad if they couldn’t learn what he’d been doing, who he was, and all about him.’ The illiteracy of the auditors did not mean they had little vocabulary or understanding, however. The costermonger told Mayhew of ‘one of the passages that took their fancy wonderfully’: ‘With glowing cheeks, flashing eyes, and palpitating bosom, Venetia Trelawney rushed back into the refreshment-room, where she threw herself into one of the arm-chairs … scarcely had she thus sunk down upon the flocculent cushion, when a sharp click … met her ears; and. her wrists were caught in manacles which sprang out of the arms of the treacherous chair. ‘ Anyone who was happy to hear about flocculent cushions and palpitating bosoms could take most things in their stride.
In the1860s, after highwaymen and evil aristocrats, the next penny development was the remorseless policeman hunting down criminals. A Corder blood merged the two genres. The evil William Corder, hoping to marry ‘lady Amelia’, has first to ‘dispose’ of his illegitimate child by Maria, who stands between ‘Amelia, happiness and myself!’ Maria threatens to tell Amelia of her situation, and, ‘yelling in demoniac rage and ungovernable passion, the sinful man’ drives his knife ‘into her throbbing breast, from which the fell demon had torn the covering’, shoots her for good measure and buries her in the barn. Now Captain Dash, a notorious highwayman, appears at Corder’s ‘grand masked ball’ and reveals all, before taking up a siege position in the Red Barn. Dash turns out to be Maria’s rejected suitor, who loved her truly and became a highwayman from grief. There is no date on this publication, but it must be post-1860, as a detective appears to tidy away everything at the end, and a further title is advertised on the back cover: ‘Lightning Dick, the Young Detective’ – boy detectives first appeared in the 1860s.
Melodrama, too, took Maria Marten to its heart. The earliest stage version of the story was announced at the Pavilion Theatre, Mile End, shortly after the trial, and there is a brief outline of the scenes in the playbill. In Act I, Corder promises to marry Maria, but is already planning her betrayal: ‘The deed were bloody, sure, but I will do’t …’ After Maria’s murder, her mother wakes from a nightmare: ‘Help, help! My child! I saw her, sure, lifeless, smeared with blood! ‘Twas in the Red Barn! – and there stood Corder with a pickaxe digging out her grave.’ When Mr Marten discovers the body, there is an ‘affecting scene’: ‘she was the darling of my age, the prop of my existence’. In the final scene in Bury Gaol, Maria appears to Corder as a ghost. His last words are ‘Guilt, guilt … I am, I am her murderer!’
This story remained a favourite: a version in Cheltenham in 1828 had Miss Marten shot in front of the audience’s eyes; a production in Weymouth introduced gypsies into the plot (this element swiftly infiltrated most productions, usually in the guise of Pharos Lee, the renamed Runner); there was a Welsh version in 1829, in Monmouth and later in Cardiff; an undated production in Swansea; a production in Hull advertised ‘Maria Marlin [sic], the Pride of the Village’, who after death conducts her mother to her resting place ‘IN A FLAME OF FIRE’. In an early 1860s version, James Lee, the Bow Street Runner who had arrested Corder, now aged seventy-six, recreated his arrest onstage for a benefit performance. *All of these productions conformed to the standard melodrama casting, with Corder played by the ‘heavy’; Mr Marten the ‘second heavy’, or ‘heavy father’; Tim Bobbin, the comic servant, by the ‘first low comedian’; Mrs Marten the ‘character old woman’; and Maria herself, the ‘leading lady’.
Despite the multiplicity of productions, only two Red Barn scripts survive from the nineteenth century, one from what may be the Swansea production, the second from an 1890s northern touring company. The Swansea production conforms to all the standard melodrama requirements: it has the aged father blessing his child’s forthcoming marriage, the comic servants, the villain resolved on murder, the beautiful heroine pleading for her life ‘For my aged parents’ sake’, ‘the voice of Heaven conveying to a mother’s heart the murder of her darling child’, and finally, forgiveness for the sinner, amidst scenic effects in the condemned cell: ‘Ghost music. Blue fire. The spirit of Maria Marten appears.’ Corder confesses, ‘Bell tolls. Characters form picture [that is, stand frozen in a tableau]. Blue fire.’
By the 1890s, melodrama was no longer treated entirely seriously. A Manchester revival had music-hall turns interpolated into the story: ‘Sometimes the actor brings in a sly sentence in a burlesque of a line in Hamlet, and sometimes the house is made to roar over an allusion to a great cabbage which is brought on the stage.’ There was also a role for the ‘intelligent donkey, Jerry’, who would ‘prove that all men are descended from donkeys’, not to mention an unexplained ‘statue song’ and some dancing.
Long before the intelligent donkey took over, more frightening murderers were to stalk the stage. These were two Irishmen living in Edinburgh: William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare were, if you will, pioneers of capitalism, meeting rising demand with a more efficient supply. Medical schools officially used only the corpses of executed criminals for dissection, but by the late 1820s demand far outstripped the number of criminals executed – in Surgeons’ Square, Edinburgh, alone there were six