A Very British Murder (13 page)

Puppet performances continued throughout the nineteenth century, until finally brought to a halt by improvements to public transport – once people could travel to their nearest town with ease, they became less interested in having the travelling theatre come to them – as well as the growth of the cinema. The First World War proved the death blow to the old puppet show families. With the young men removed, there was no one to carve the puppets, perform the shows, or drive the van. When puppetry was revived after the war, it returned as much more of an entertainment for children.

The story of Maria Marten was so popular, though, that it remained prominent even in the dwindling repertoires of late nineteenth-century puppet troupes. It had all the characteristics of
melodrama
in the technical sense: an implausible, over-the-top, formulaic but extremely lively and participatory form of theatre which flourished with both mechanical and human actors, in both informal and formal settings.

In the London theatres the story of the Red Barn became the most celebrated work of the age that the genre of melodrama could offer. One of the defining features of melodrama is the role, in the story, of ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’. The doom-laden red sunset said to have given the Red Barn its original name seemed almost deliberately identical to a melodramatic lighting effect.

Victorian melodrama was ghoulish in the extreme: acts of violence, drawn out, prolonged and magnified so as completely to avoid any sense of realism or authenticity. Today it seems almost impossible that it would have been taken seriously. And yet, to its audience, it wasn’t a joke. Rosalind Crone explains how the reaction of the spectators was a very important part of the show. They would
hiss the villain, and shout out curses against the murderer when he was captured. Closure, the righting of wrongs and the healing of the wounds in the community were all important aspects of watching a murder on stage. Melodrama allowed people to let off steam.

Real-life murders formed the basis of only a small percentage of the plays that showed people dying or committing crimes, but the playbills telling people what was on at the theatre would be pasted upon London walls alongside the broadsheets recounting real-life crimes. The boundary between fiction and fact was blurred. The play called
Ruth Martin, the Fatal Dreamer
, performed in 1846, clearly drew on Maria Marten and her mother’s dream without being faithful to the facts, as did another spin-off called
The Red Farm
.

But real melodrama could only be seen in a specialized form of theatre. The Victorian theatrical business was divided in two. Firstly, there were the proper, authorized theatres of the West End, the so-called Theatres Royal. Only they were authorized to stage dramas, tragedy rather than melodrama, and did so with the approval of the Lord Chamberlain. Then, there was a thriving counter-culture in the form of the ‘minor’ or ‘illegitimate theatres’. Forbidden from performing canonical works, they turned instead to other forms of entertainment such as musicals, burlesque, pantomime or murder shows. The two types of theatre, so very different, ran alongside each other until 1843, when finally the Theatres Act decreed that any theatre could perform any kind of show, so long as it was licensed.

Theatres weren’t just for the well-off – indeed, until much later in the century, the Victorian middle classes often looked down on the theatre, considering it vulgar. And yet theatre managers wanted
their venues to be thought of as safe, well-regulated and respectable as well as cheap. In November 1846, the manager of the Victoria Theatre claimed his patrons included ‘the industrious Mechanic’. ‘HERE for a small amount saved from his earnings,’ the manager somewhat pompously declaimed, ‘He can witness an excellent and superior Entertainment and go cheerfully to his work on the morrow, with the consciousness that he has not purchased a too-dearly-bought gratification.’

Melodrama required a particular, stylized form of acting, intended to get the story out from the stage to a huge auditorium containing perhaps one thousand people. One nineteenth-century theatre handbook gives instructions for expressing despair. The actor: ‘Rolls the eyes and sometimes bites the lips and gnashes with the teeth … [the body] strained and violently agitated. Groans, expressive of inward torture, accompany the words.’

No wonder
Punch
satirized the melodramatic actor, who ‘is murdered at least twice a week, commits parricide several times in the course of the year, and is torn by remorse every night at about nine o’clock’.
^fn2

The writers of these plays had to keep churning out the stories, and, inevitably, many of the plots had similarities and overlaps. As with ‘Penny Bloods’, the main intention was to show ordinary people, just like members of the audience, caught up in dramatic events, and, ultimately, for good to triumph. Most importantly,
argues Rosalind Crone, a melodrama had to tell ‘a nostalgic story, its plots looking back to a perceived golden age in which the simplicities and innocence of rural or village life were preferred to the corrupting, anonymous city’.

Despite the cheap thrills, and the fact that it took place in ‘illegitimate’ theatres, melodrama was not a subversive form of entertainment. If a wicked master seduced an innocent girl, he was punished. In dramatic versions of
Maria Marten
, the facts were often simplified. Maria Marten’s illegitimate children are not mentioned, William Corder becomes an out-and-out cad with no motive apart from evil: he is a ‘nasty, mean, ugly, sulky fellow’. The dialogue is terrifyingly straightforward: when Maria begs for mercy, William replies: ‘Nay … ’tis in vain, for I am desperate in my thoughts, and thirst for blood.’

The stage directions next tell us that: ‘He again tries to stab her. She clings round his neck. He dashes her to the earth and stabs her. She shrieks and falls. He stands motionless till the curtain falls.’

The emotions would be heightened by the tremendous swellings and wailings of the orchestra. Another version of the text includes some specific directions for the music: as William Corder is seen digging the grave in preparation for Maria’s arrival at the barn, ‘villain’s music’ is played. While Maria begs for her life, ‘tremolo strings’ are to be heard. When finally he kills her, there is artificial ‘thunder and lightning’.

The actual moment of murder in a melodrama would sometimes even be repeated at the demand of the audience. One particular actor named ‘Bricks’ was a dab hand at death, as appears from an account of a performance published in 1867. Bricks portrayed a
particularly long-drawn-out expiration with great skill, so much so that the audience:

Applauded him most lustily, and when they had finished cheering, one of them, led away by his enthusiasm, stood upon his seat, and … roared out at the topmost pitch of a very strong voice, ‘Die again, my bold Bricks! Die again!’ The cry was answered by the rest of the gallery and Bricks enthusiastically rose to his feet and did ‘die again’.

This description of the absolute
involvement
of the audience is telling. A good melodrama drew theatregoers into a collective emotional response. The modern equivalent would be a football match, or a pop concert, where the performance itself is only part of what people pay for. They really buy tickets to experience – and to express – powerful emotion. When Bill Sikes killed Nancy in a performance of
Oliver Twist
, one spectator remembered how:

Nancy was always dragged round the stage by her hair, and after this effort Sikes always looked up defiantly to the gallery … He was always answered by one loud and fearful curse, yelled by the whole mass like a Handel Festival chorus … no expression of dynamite invented by the modern anarchist, no language ever dreamt of in Bedlam, could equal the outburst.

The Lord Chamberlain was very worried about murder appearing on stage, particularly when it was derived from real crime. ‘Representations of real murders on the stage appear to me to be very
undesirable,’ he wrote in 1862. ‘It only gives the Public a morbid feeling and encourages mischievous thoughts in their minds.’

But he was wrong. Far from celebrating crime, melodramatic performances gave their audiences an outlet for condemning it, and everyone must have left the theatre feeling happier and safer in the knowledge that the villain was dead.

However, the Lord Chamberlain was right in saying that melodrama was, by 1862, on the decline. Tastes were moving away from this bold, unsubtle form of acting, not least because the design of theatres themselves was changing. Stalls replaced the pit, the lights were dimmed during the performance (this hadn’t been done before) and the audience was expected to be quiet. The half-price show at 9 p.m., standard practice in melodrama days, was abolished, so people who couldn’t get away from work in time for the earlier performance, or who couldn’t afford a full-price ticket, found it impossible to attend.

The working people who had enjoyed melodrama so much began to desert the theatre at this point, and it became a more middle-class place of resort. In order for the audience to continue to smoke, drink and talk during the performance, a new form of entertainment – the music hall – sprang up to accommodate the former fans of melodrama. But here murder was no longer on the menu.

^fn1
To see this in action, it’s worth visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum’s website to see a wonderful performance of the climactic killing, featuring the historical marionette puppets and the voices of actors Bill Nighy and Diana Quick:
www.vam.ac.uk/content/videos/m/video-maria-marten-or-murder-in-the-red-barn
.

^fn2
Charles Dickens, a frequent theatregoer, captured the special style of delivering speech employed by the actors in a melodrama: ‘I ster-ruck him down and fel-ed in er’orror! … I have liveder as a beggar – a roadside vaigerant, but no ker-rime since then has stained these hands!’

Ballad sold and sung at the execution of Frederick and Maria Manning

THE CULMINATION OF
this earliest phase in the history of murder came in 1849. A case known as ‘The Bermondsey Horror’, it had all the trappings of a ‘stunning good’ murder. And it was also one of the final few to end with an old-fashioned hanging in public before a vast crowd.

You would think that a sordid death involving a love triangle in Bermondsey would cause far less of a stir than the terrible cholera epidemic sweeping through London that hot summer. By September, the epidemic had claimed more than 10,000 Londoners’ lives, including two of the witnesses who had been due to give evidence at the trial of Frederick and Maria Manning.

Following the story of the Mannings, though, was a welcome alternative to worrying about one’s health. It became a national obsession. ‘At this moment,’ suggested
Punch
in September 1849, ‘refined, civilized, philanthropic London reeks with the foulness of the Bermondsey murder.’ The cholera, a far more frightening ‘Bermondsey Horror’, might come and grab anybody at all. Yet it was comforting to think that only the immoral and unworthy were likely to be discovered buried, as the Mannings’ victim was, beneath a kitchen floor.

The case also had a very attractive cast of criminals: two for the price of one, husband and wife, apparently working as a team (although the husband tried to blame it all on his wife). Maria in particular was a wonderful villainess, with a few quirks that caused her quickly to be forced into the mould of Lady Macbeth.

She was born in Switzerland as Marie, and later Anglicized her name to Maria. She had lived the high life as a lady’s maid, travelling abroad and staying with her mistress in grand country houses. This association with high society caused a frisson. The cast-off clothes from her mistresses allowed Maria to amass rather a spectacular wardrobe: after her capture, she was discovered to possess 11 petticoats, 9 gowns, 28 pairs of stockings, 7 pairs of drawers and 19 pairs of kid gloves. She dressed far above her station as a former servant, and most striking of all was her figure-hugging, black satin gown.

Maria had hoped to marry one Joseph O’Connor, a man rather older than herself and considerably richer. O’Connor had amassed his wealth through lending money, and various dodgy dealings down in the docks where he worked for the Customs and Excise
Department. But he dallied and toyed with Maria and failed to make her his wife. She fell back instead upon Frederick Manning, not a particularly prepossessing choice of husband. He had been a guard on a railway train before losing his job, and had then failed in business as a publican. Maria supported them both, working as a dressmaker, and probably regretted her marriage. The couple were clinging on to the lowest levels of respectable, middle-class life, and their grip was very tenuous indeed.

But the wealthy Joseph O’Connor was still on the scene. The two men competed for Maria’s attentions, and O’Connor was often to be found at the Mannings’ home, No. 3, Miniver Place, Bermondsey. Passions ran high, and on 9 August O’Connor failed to return home to his lodgings after a roast chicken dinner at Miniver Place. The Mannings had shot him and finished him off by bashing in his head. The police surgeon later calculated that O’Connor had been hit 17 times with a crowbar. The couple had then put his body in quicklime in an attempt to make it decompose speedily, and buried him beneath the slabs near their kitchen fireplace. Once the body was discovered, O’Connor’s identity would be confirmed by the dentist who had made his false teeth, which had been left in his mouth. The Mannings were rather inept criminals, it has to be admitted.