The Art of the English Murder

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This is a fascinating exploration into uncovering a lost world, but a world that existed not that long ago. For example, I had no idea that puppet shows were the way that people in the hinterlands experienced theater in the 19th century, until the advent of trains that could take visitors to London for the day, but they were, and a popular form of theater was staging famous murders for entertainment.

This is a throw-away fact, but in discussing the main topic of the book - the ability of people to draw entertainment value out of murder - one subject leads to another.

The book starts with famous murder cases that caught the attention of the public in the 1820s and 1830s. The author, Lucy Worsley - who I assume wrote this as a companion to a BBC documentary - discusses the murders in detail, along with the public fascination with the crimes, the criminal justice system, the songs that were made out of the crimes, and similarly details. We learn that broadsheets catered to a newly literate culture and were distributed by singing patterers or performing patterers, who drew the attention of the crowds with the busking entertainment. Again, we learn the rich, lived details of this society.

The first part of the book is mostly about the crimes, the criminals and the newly developing police forces, starting with the Thames Patrol, the Bow Street Runners, and, eventually, the Metropolitan police. I'd always known that Sir John Fielding had a hand in starting the Bowe Street Runners, but I was - I think - surprised to learn that the Runners were actually started by Sir Henry Fielding, who was the author of Tom Jones. The Metropolitan Police wore blue uniforms in order to assure Londoners that they were not being subjected to military supervision by the army, which would have worn red.

By the close of the 19th century, however, the focus turns to literary murder. We are introduced to precursors to “Detective Fiction,” including the “Penny Bloods” and the “sensation novels.” We also get an introduction to the writers who were turning out this literature in the 19th century, and, thereby, capitalizing on the public's taste for murder, as well as directing and shaping that taste.

Although Jack the Ripper is mentioned in the subtitle, there is not much on that subject. Nonetheless, Worsley has an interesting theory about Jack the Ripper. She implies that much of what we think we know about Jack the Ripper was concocted by the newspaper man who allegedly received the letter where Jack was given his nickname. Moreover, Worsley finds it significant that “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde” had premiered shortly before the Ripper murders, thereby whetting the public expectations about what a serial murder might look like.

I had to chuckle at one point at the differences between ourselves and our greatX4 grandparents. Worsley describes how the public reacted to a particularly brutal slaying of a family inside their home:

“From this point on, though, events became confused and, ultimately, mishandled. The Thames Police were called in, but these official visitors were accompanied by a whole swarm of unofficial sightseers who wished to see the murdered bodies laid out dead upon their beds. The crime scene was thoroughly contaminated. What forensic and material evidence there was they were not skilled in reading: it took 12 days before anyone noticed that the maul in the kitchen was marked with the initials JP.”

The idea of sightseers wanting to unofficially wander through the horrific murder scene tickled my funny bone for no particular reason, except that it suggests how different we are from them. But even this odd fact becomes a point of departure for a keen observation about how and why we are different from out ancestors. Worsley provides an explanation for that difference:

“To modern eyes, one of the more distasteful aspects of the Ratcliffe Highway Murder was the way that hundreds of people traipsed through the Marrs' house in the days following the crime. They came in order to ogle at the dead bodies of the victims, laid out upon their beds, and they came in huge numbers. The Times reported: ‘The sensation excited by these most ferocious murders has become so general, and the curiosity to see the place where they were committed so intense, that Ratcliffe Highway was rendered almost impassable by the throng of spectators.'
There were two good reasons why this ghoulish practice was much more acceptable then than now. Firstly, both birth and death were much more part of normal domestic life. Today both processes have been medicalized, and very often shuffled off into a hospital rather than a person's home. Regency people were much more used to relatives dying at home in their own beds, and most women gave birth at home. The laying-out of a corpse in the front room, so that friends and neighbours could come to pay their respects, was normal practice. There was also a strong Irish presence in east London, and the idea of the ‘wake' – visiting the home of a dead person in order to see them in their coffin, and contributing money so that the family could hold a gathering with drinking and partying – even now lingers on in Ireland after being forgotten on this side of the sea.”

The past is a different country; they do things differently there.

This description of the internment of the putative murderer in 1811 highlights that observation:

“The procession stopped for 15 minutes outside No. 29, the house where the Marrs died. Now a member of the crowd climbed up on to the cart and forcibly turned the dead man's head to look at the home of ‘his' victims, confronting him with what he had done. He was eventually taken to a crossroads, the conventional burying place for a suicide. At the junction of the new Commercial Road and Cannon Street, his body was ‘tumbled out of the cart', lowered into a grave and ‘someone hammered a stake through his heart'.
This last action was to ensure that an unquiet soul would not go wandering. The veracity of the report seemed to be confirmed in 1886, when gas pipes were being buried. At the same road junction, workmen digging a trench discovered a skeleton, buried at a depth of 6 feet, face down and with a stake through its heart.”

This book covers some of the same territory as [[ASIN:B00QO4CWMU Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre]], which is one of the reasons I wanted to read it. But Murder by Candlelight pretty solidly stays in the era prior to 1850. Thus, in both books, Thomas de Quincy and the Elstree Murder are covered. This book moves beyond the 1850s and well into modern literature, particularly the feminist detective fiction. If I have one criticism it is that the last section is taken over by a feminist approach to detective fiction where the interest is exclusively on mysteries written by women or about women detectives. There is nothing wrong with such an interest, of course, but, certainly, there was more to English detective writing than Sayers, Christie, Marsh and Allingham. There was G.K. Chesterton, for example, who gets mentioned but not discussed. It seems hardly fair to allow other great writers to become forgotten or ignored because of the obsession of the moment. There is a bit more about Arthur Conan Doyle, but, then, it is hard to ignore Sherlock Holmes.

That said, the discussions in this book are educational, insightful and interesting. The authorial voice often breaks in to share some particular experience she has had concerning her research, and those interludes are invariably interesting and on point.

Murder is not a bad way to learn about our recently forgotten ancestors.