The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (43 page)

CHAPTER 13

181
A week afterwards . . . unrestrained crying.'
Account of Young-man's execution from the
News of the World
of 9 September 1860.

183
On Monday, 24 September . . . quite innocent.
A year later the Home Office, after prolonged wranglings, paid Slack's firm PS700 for its work on the case. See HO 144/20/49113.

187
Mrs Dallimore was a real-life version
. . . The Female Detective
(1864).
Amateur female detectives also appear in Wilkie Collins' 'The Diary of Anne Rodway' (1856) and in
Revelations of a Lady Detective
(1864) by 'Anonyma' (W. Stephens Hayward). This book's jacket shows the lady detective as a dangerously emancipated, sensual creature. She wears a plump red-and-white ribbon round her throat, a hat piled high with flowers, a fur stole and velvet cuffs. She gives the prospective reader a sidelong gaze while lifting her full black coat to reveal the hem of a red dress.

188
'the late Edgar Poe'.
Poe had died, aged forty, in 1849. In life, he suffered from alcoholism, depression and episodes of delirium. The critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that Poe 'invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad'.
Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926),
quoted in Peter Lehman's
The Perfect Murder
(1989).

190
'Mr Kent, intriguing . . . disposes of same.'
See
The Letters of Charles Dickens 1859-61 (1997),
edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey.

190
The
Saturday Review . . .
beyond their routine'.
In the
Saturday Review
of 22 September 1860.

191
The idea took hold . . . minds of our countrymen.'
In
Once a Week,
13 October 1860. The author pointed out that, by this argument, few murders should take place in sunny southern Europe, which in fact had many violent deaths.

191
A freak storm had hit Wiltshire . . . Saville Kent had died.
The natural historian and meteorologist George Augustus Rowell gave a lecture on the storm on 21 March 1860 and subsequently published it as a pamphlet,
A Lecture on the Storm in Wiltshire.

CHAPTER 14

197
Saunders asked Foley . . . he did not!'
In a letter to
The Times,
Stapleton claimed that a microscope would not have helped determine the nature of the blood on the nightdress he saw. 'I had no hesitation in advising the authorities that the nightdress shown to me . . . furnished no clue to this crime . . . I hoped that this nightdress was withdrawn for ever from public observation. However, Mr Saunders has dragged it from its obscurity again, and, as it seems to me, in wanton and useless violation of public decency and private feeling.' The nightdresses had become the emblem of the Kent family's decency and privacy; to speculate about them was to repeat the violation of their home.

200
The persistent feeling . . . of the nightdress?').
In
The Road Murder: Being a Complete Report and Analysis of the Various Examinations and Opinions of the Press on this Mysterious Tragedy
(1860) by A Barrister-at-Law.

200
His colleagues had to conduct . . . leave of absence.
From correspondence in HO 45/6970.

201
In the last days of November . . . compact of secrecy'.
This letter was not made public until 24 July 1865, when it was published in
The Times,
but it was dated 23 November 1860. A letter Constance wrote that day has also survived, a note in which she thanks Peter Edlin, her lawyer, for 'the pretty pair of mittens and the scarf that he had given her: they 'will remind me whenever I look at them', she writes, 'of how much I am indebted to the giver'.

CHAPTER 15

207
At the beginning of 1861 . . . failing to examine Samuel.
Nor was any importance attached to allegations that the jury had been 'packed' in Samuel's favour. Before the inquest opened James Morgan, the parish constable, and Charles Happerfield, the postmaster, had replaced two of the randomly selected jurors with 'men of judgement'. The two discharged were a tailor (whose wife had asked that he be excused) and William Nutt's father, a shoemaker who lived in the cottages next to Road Hill House. Their replacements were the Reverend Peacock and a prosperous farmer called William Dew, who - like Happerfield - was an activist in the temperance movement.

207
'You talk of the Road murder . . . may be never discovered now.'
Letter to W.W.F. de Cerjat in
The Letters of Charles Dickens 1859-61
(1997), edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey.

208
Later that month, Samuel applied . . . cannot be acceded to'.
From correspondence in HO 45/6970.

209
The Kents instructed . . . dispose of their belongings.
Account of the auction from the
Somerset and Wilts Journal
and the
Trow-bridge and North Wilts Advertiser.

211
Over the summer the factory commissioners . . . in the Dee valley.
From HO 45/6970. William may have visited Constance in Brittany that summer - according to the Passport Office files, a William Kent was issued with a passport for travel on the Continent on 10 August.

211
For several months . . . unlikely to attract attention.
Whicher's name appeared in
The Times
of 2 March 18 61 when he testified against a man accused of stealing a crate of opium worth PS1,000 from the London Dock Company, but this was a case that had been assigned to him a year earlier. The man he arrested was acquitted. Perhaps the jurors were suspicious of the prosecution witnesses - a convict and an opium dealer. Or perhaps, after the Road Hill case, it was Whicher they mistrusted.

211
Just one was covered in any depth . . . his uncle's will.
Whicher obtained the vicar's address by pretending to be a lawyer - the adoption of a false identity was a common if unpopular detective practice. From reports in
The Times
and a transcript of the trial of James Roe at the Old Court, 21 & 22 August 1861.

212
In the summer of 1861
. . .
since Road Hill.
Account of the Kingswood murder from MEPO 3/63, the Metropolitan Police file on the case; and reports in
The Times,
the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Annual Register
of 1861.

215
The Kingswood investigation had unfolded . . . a mockery of a detective's skills.
Franz's solicitor offered Dickens an article on the mindboggling coincidences of the case (see Dickens' letter to W.H. Wills of 31 August 1861, in
The Letters of Charles Dickens).
The solicitor's article was published anonymously in
All the Year Round
the next January.

216
'If I was not the cleverest . . . of their own accord.'
From 'Bigamy and Child-Stealing' in
Experiences of a Real Detective
by Inspector 'F', edited by Waters.

216
'I believe that a chain . . . corrupt testimony.'
From 'Circumstantial Evidence' in
Experiences of a Real Detective.

216
'The value of the detective . . . what they mean.'
In
The Female Detective
(1864) by Andrew Forrester.

217
This novel, a huge bestseller . . . terrified of exposure.
It went into eight editions in three months.

219
'those most mysterious of mysteries . . . London lodgings'.
From 'Miss Braddon', an unsigned review in
The Nation,
9 November 1865.

219
In 1863 the philosopher Henry Mansel . . . conjured at Road.
Sensation literature was 'moulding the minds and forming the tastes and habits of its generation', wrote Mansel, 'by preaching to the nerves'. From an unsigned review in the
Quarterly Review
of April 1863. For discussions of the sensation novel, see especially
Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism
(1988) by Thomas Boyle;
Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel
(1989) by Anthea Trodd;
From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection and Narrative
(1992) by Martin A. Kayman;
The Novel and the Police
(1988) by D.A. Miller;
In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology
(1988) by Jenny Bourne Taylor; 'What is "Sensational" About the Sensation Novel?' by Patrick Brantlinger in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
37 (1982).

220
Joseph Stapleton's book . . . Rowland Rodway.
It cost
7s.6d.
a copy.

220
It was as if the domestic angel . . . bloodthirsty ghoul.
Other writers had noticed women's enthusiasm for brutal crimes. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for instance, argued in
England and the English
(1833) that it was women who showed 'the deepest interest over a tale or a play of tragic or gloomy interest . . . If you observed a balladvender hawking his wares, it is the bloodiest murders that the women purchase.'

221
Stapleton suggested that . . . corrupting sins'.
As a physician, Stapleton would have been familiar with essays like Benedict Morel's
Treatise on the Degeneration of the Human Species,
serialised in the
Medical Circular
in 18 57, which argued that the sins of parents were visited on their children in the form of physical weaknesses.

221
Mansel, too, cited the Road Hill murder . . . and adultery.
In 'Manners & Morals',
Fraser's
magazine, September 1861.

221
Its influence was evident . . .
Aurora Floyd
(1863).
'I think of a quiet Somersetshire house-hold in which a dreadful deed was done,' says the narrator of
Aurora Floyd,
'the secret of which has never yet been brought to light, and perhaps never will be revealed until the Day of Judgement. What must have been suffered by each member of that family? What slow agonies, what everincreasing tortures, while that cruel mystery was the "sensation" topic of conversation in a thousand happy home-circles, in a thousand tavern-parlours and pleasant club-rooms.'

In the 1950s the popular historian Elizabeth Jenkins wrote an essay on the ways in which the Kent family story influenced Charlotte Yonge's novel
The Young Step-Mother; Or, A Chronicle of Mistakes
(1861). The stepmother of the title marries into the Kendal family, and faces resistance from a sulky adolescent stepdaughter, four of whose siblings have died in childhood. The stepdaughter accidentally knocks unconscious her half-brother, a three-year-old who is 'a marvel of fair stateliness, size and intelligence'. Jenkins subsequently discovered that most of the novel was published in serial form in the first half of 1860, before the Road Hill murder. Her mistake serves as a caution against seeing the influence of Road Hill everywhere; though Jenkins pointed out that the fact that the novel preceded the murder could make the similarities seem stranger still.

222
The novelist Margaret Oliphant . . . taste or morals.'
From 'Sensation Novels', an unsigned review in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
of May 1862.

222
A year later she complained . . . modern fiction'.
In the
Quarterly Review
of April 1863.

222
bestsellers in 1861. Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh
and
The Sliding Scale of Life,
both published in 18 61 - the first sold 20,000 copies in three months, according to an article in
The Times
in July that year.

223
'The modern detective is generally at fault . . . low and mean.'
From 'Crime and its Detection', an unsigned article by Thomas Donnelly in the
Dublin Review
of May 1861.

223
The word 'clueless' . . . in 1862.
The phrase was 'clueless wanderings in the labyrinth of scepticism', according to the
Oxford English Dictionary.

223
'a cowardly and clumsy giant. . . who comes in his way'.
Published on 25 October 1863 and quoted in
Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (1999)
by Wilbur R. Miller.

223
In the
Saturday Review . . .
middle-class crimes.
In 'Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life',
Saturday Review,
June 1864.

224
This establishment . . . Anglican Church.
See
Wagner of Brighton: The Centenary Book of St Paul's Church, Brighton
(1949) by H. Hamilton Maughan.

224
His friend Detective-Inspector . . . in charge of the department.
From the census of 18 61, Thornton's death certificate, MEPO 4/2 (a register of deaths in the Metropolitan Police) and MEPO 4/333 (a register of admissions and promotions). The detective division had expanded a little but was still only about twelve men strong, in a force that now boasted some seven thousand officers.