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
Brown …
The crowd at Greenacre’s execution was large, vocal and perfectly good-humoured, purchasing ‘Greenacre tarts’ from a pie-seller while they waited. Seven weeks later, Princess Victoria became Queen Victoria, and public opinion began to change.
* A harmanbeck is a constable. A buffer might, as in our current use of the word, mean a doddery old man, or it might be one of two slang words in use at the time: a dog, or ‘A Rogue that kills good sound Horses only for their Skins’. Either way, Thurtell was not happy. I have been unable to discover why a green coat is a term of contempt. Perhaps they were old-fashioned, reinforcing the ‘old man’ element of the insult?
* One legal historian has suggested that this verdict had more to do with a private feud between the insurance company’s lawyer and the judge than with the merits of the case.
* This example of servant humour provided the middle classes with much merriment. Even forty years later, Dickens knew his readers would recognize the reference in Our Mutual Friend when he suggests that a Fat Lady at a fair kept up her weight ‘sustained upon postponed pork’.
* This meeting has been much disputed, and Egan may simply have worked from press reports and information supplied by sporting friends.
* The Coburg changed its name to the Royal Victoria (the Vic) in 1833. Later in the century it became known fi rst colloquially, then formally, as the Old Vic, which it remains today.
* All plays were subject to governmental oversight, and all theatres had to submit their scripts to the offi ce of the Lord Chamberlain before performances could be licensed. Historians have cause to be grateful for this censorship. The Lord Chamberlain’s offi ce kept the scripts, and they are frequently the only surviving copies, particularly for plays produced at the minor theatres. Much of the material that follows relies heavily on the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, now held in the British Library, and only slightly the worse for wear after being kept for a century or so in a coal cellar in St James’s Palace.
* The author of the Surrey’s play is always listed as ‘unknown’, but a seemingly hitherto unnoticed letter from the journalist Leman Blanchard, dated 23 April 1883, has survived in the British Library: ‘The piece called The Gamblers [was] hashed up by Milner if I remember rightly.’ Blanchard cannot actually have ‘remembered’ the production at all, as he was born only in 1820, but he was a professional playwright by 1839, and his father, William Blanchard, was a comic actor before him, so he may well have heard the play spoken of. Certainly its notoriety long outlived its run at the Surrey.
* Some of these items retained a posthumous glamour. In the twentieth century Norwich Public Record Offi ce was the proud owner of a pair of scissors said to have been Thurtell’s in his cloth-merchant days, and of his original certifi cate in bankruptcy.
* Almost every report agrees that Thurtell read his defence, and read it well. Yet a contemporary scholar thinks that Thurtell’s letters ‘show him to have been semi-literate’ at best, and suggests that Egan may have had a hand in his defence speech. Perhaps Thurtell, a lover of theatre, had memorized it.
* Probert’s escape via immunity was short-lived. In 1825 he was convicted of stealing a horse and hanged at Newgate. A broadside claimed that so many people attended his execution that ‘a boy actually walked from one side of the street to the other, on the heads of the people’.
† Mulready also sketched both Hunt and Probert. The drawings are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
§ Thurtell lived on among the sporting set. In 1868, at a dog show, a ‘champion stud’ included the pups Palmer, Probert and Williams. For Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, see below, pp.258ff. Williams may either be the Ratcliffe Highway murderer, or one of a trio of murderers in the Burke and Hare style, who was executed for the murder of an Italian beggar-boy in 1831.
* Jack Ketch was a seventeenth-century hangman, and his name was used colloquially to mean any executioner.
* Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) was born Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, and until 1838 he was known as Edward Lytton Bulwer. On his father’s death he became Sir Edward Bulwer, and in 1843 he added his mother’s maiden name, Lytton, to become Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Ultimately he became 1st Baron Lytton of Knebworth. For simplicity, I refer to him as Bulwer throughout. Unlike Bulwer, Hannah Jones’s success was one of scale, not fi nance or renown: she wrote and sold widely, but was, according to The Times, given a pauper’s burial. For more on penny-bloods, see pp.58–60.
* Catherine Hayes (1690–1726) murdered her coal-merchant husband by beating him to death with the help of two men, then dismembering the body. She was the last woman in England to be burned alive for petty treason.
† It perhaps suits the theatricality of Thurtell’s legend that Lyon’s Inn was later pulled down to build the New Globe Theatre.
* Jerrold (1803–57) was a prolifi c playwright, with over seventy plays to his name, including the smash hit Black-Ey’d Susan. He wrote for Punch, and from 1852 he was the editor of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. His son Blanchard Jerrold (1826–84) was also a journalist, and became editor of Lloyd’s on his father’s death. He was named for his father’s great friend, the journalist Laman Blanchard (1803–45), not to be confused with the playwright Leman [sic] Blanchard (1820–1889), who was no relation, but who also turns up in this book.
* In very simplifi ed form, until the 1880s, prosecutions in England and Wales were brought privately, by the victims or (in cases of murder) representatives of the victims. (Scottish law had slightly different procedures.) The most important cases were frequently taken over by the Home Offi ce, with the Treasury Solicitor overseeing the case for the prosecution. In 1879 the creation of the Department of Public Prosecutions gave the Attorney General an enhanced role, and improved coordination. The police, as hunters of criminals, gradually took over the preparation of the prosecutions through the century.
While the government was not necessarily involved in any prosecution, for much of the century there was a marked lack of separation of function. As late as 1877, in the case of a woman accused of murdering a child, the Chief Constable sat on the bench during the magistrates’ hearing, and a policeman who gave evidence at the same hearing served as a juror at the inquest on the child.
† Many newspapers claimed that Corder was planning to use Thurtell’s defence speech. He may have been planning it, although given the different circumstances of the two cases it would be hard to understand how, much less why. Ultimately he did not, and the story is probably more likely to be newspaper hype, a way of alluding to the previous