A Very British Murder (23 page)

As Judith Flanders has pointed out, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has had a powerful effect upon people’s understanding of who ‘Jack the Ripper’ might have been. The killer is never assumed to be a local East Ender with a history as a ne’er-do-well. He’s always judged to be a man out of place, flipping between high society by day and the dark and dirty streets of Whitechapel by night. The suspects put forward include the artist Walter Sickert, the writer Lewis Carroll, and Edward VII’s eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, all of them embodying the idea that within a respectable man may lurk a monster.

Reality and fiction seem to become entangled even further when one considers the interrelationship between ‘Jack the Ripper’ and
another character who began walking London’s streets around the same time, the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes made his first appearance in a Christmas album in 1887, and the same story,
A Study in Scarlet
, was published as a novel in 1888, the same year that the ‘Ripper’ terrorized the nation.

The ‘Ripper’s’ crimes had not yet taken place at Holmes’s debut, but as his character developed during the numerous stories that followed, Holmes seems to become almost a mirror image of ‘Jack the Ripper’. Where ‘Jack’ is uncontrollable, mysterious and motiveless, a creature of the night, Sherlock is rational, reassuring and brilliant, shining a light into the darkest places. Where the police fail – both in the real-life Whitechapel murders and in the many fictional cases described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Holmes is always successful. And in a strange intertwining of our images of ‘Jack’ and Sherlock, one of the very few eyewitnesses thought to have actually seen the serial killer reported that he was wearing a deerstalker hat.

Fittingly, it is to Sherlock Holmes that government ministers, successful businessmen and the royal families of Europe turn for solutions to their knottiest problems. On the whole, though, Holmes’s clients aren’t the great and the good. They also include vicars, typists, engineers, landladies, governesses … the very sort of people who had to walk home along the streets at night, who read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in magazines and who were encouraged by them to imagine that ‘Jack the Ripper’ might yet be caught.

There is something solid and reassuring about both Sherlock Holmes and his world. At the same time, though – exactly in common with many people’s conception of the ‘Ripper’ – Holmes
is an oddball, somebody standing outside normal society. Lacking close family ties, subject to spells of deep depression, dependent on morphine and other drugs to carry him through periods of boredom and lassitude, he is so unfailingly devoted to what he sees as justice that it sometimes causes him to act thoughtlessly or even dangerously.

It makes for a thrilling, if occasionally unsettling, reading experience. Holmes is the hero of the story, taking hansom cabs and chasing criminals through the Pool of London by boat. But he also haunts opium dens, and the very first time we see Holmes, in
A Study in Scarlet
, he is indulging in a suitably ‘Ripper’-ish activity: beating a corpse with a stick.

This, of course, was part of his work as that latest of Victorian inventions: the forensic scientist.

^fn1
When I interviewed Judith Flanders about the ‘Ripper’, she pointed out that of the many hundreds of Victorian murders she investigated in her research, only four remained unsolved. Of these, three had a closed group of suspects of whom the guilty party must have been one. Only the ‘Jack the Ripper’ case remains completely open. More than one hundred different named suspects have been put forward during the course of the century that has followed.

‘A medical man, when he sees a dead body, should notice everything.’

Alfred Swaine Taylor
, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence
(1844)

WHAT WAS IT
like to enter a Victorian mortuary?

It was a room in a hospital likely to look out upon an internal courtyard, so that members of the public couldn’t see in. Its windows would be rubbed with soap or tallow to obscure the view, but natural light was preferred. In the centre of the room would stand a stone table, without a rim or drain: any fluids ran off it to be soaked up by the sawdust on the floor.

Sometimes there was a secret chamber above the fireplace, where a dubiously acquired corpse would be lifted, via hooks and pulleys, to evade any investigation. The notion that medical students needed to hone their skills by dissecting corpses caused great distress, and in previous centuries had been condemned by the Church.

Since the seventeenth century, doctors’ practice had been to use the bodies of condemned criminals, and, when the supply ran
short, to use the services of the ‘Resurrection Men’. These murky characters robbed fresh graves of their corpses, and sold them to medical schools for a profit. (It wasn’t illegal to steal a body, but body snatchers could be prosecuted for the theft of the clothes in which corpses had been buried.)

The 1832 ‘Anatomy’ Act was an attempt to make it easier for medical students to acquire the bodies they needed without breaking the law. From then on, corpses of the inmates of workhouses left unclaimed by their families for 48 hours or more could be sent on to the hospitals. But problems remained. Sometimes families were not told that the body released to them for burial had already been dissected at a hospital, and such was the authority and stature of the workhouse that some relatives did not dare claim their dead at all, and gave them up to dissection silently and unwillingly.

The cadavers required for dissection by medical students would arrive in barrels labelled ‘pork’ or ‘beef’, and preserved in alcohol. Firstly, any identifying features would be removed. Then a body would be arranged on its back on the table, a block of wood raising the head, the chest presenting itself for the initial cut down from the chin to the pubic bone. Before electric saws, it required extremely energetic work to cut open a ribcage. The oscillating surgical saw was only invented in 1947 by the Dr Homer Stryker who gives it its name.

In these smelly rooms, medics risked exposure to infectious diseases, working as they did with bare hands and faces, their bodies protected only by aprons. But they were gradually establishing the details of how a human being was made – and how it might have died.

They were learning how to read a body.

OVER THE COURSE
of the nineteenth century, the art of interpreting the medical evidence of a crime developed in two related but separate arenas. First, there was the reading of the body itself, in the mortuary, or through chemical analysis of the type used in the case of William Palmer. Second, there was the reading of the minute evidence left at the scene of the crime itself, which was slower to become established.

It is in both of these contexts that we first meet Sherlock Holmes, though his work in the latter field is much more innovative. In his very first appearance in print,
A Study in Scarlet
(1887), Dr John Watson hears that a friend of friend – ‘a fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital’ – is looking for a lodger. Dr Watson himself wants to rent a room, so is keen to meet the unknown chemist.

The mutual friend takes Dr Watson to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where the as-yet-unknown Sherlock Holmes spends much of his time. Dr Watson’s friend warns him that Holmes is a crank, ‘a little queer in his ideas’. He has been seen, for example, pounding a human corpse, apparently to establish how far bruises may be created post-mortem. We learn that Holmes is unnaturally interested in poison:

I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of enquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.

Dr Watson discovers Holmes at work in a chemistry laboratory, in high spirits because he has just discovered a new way of identifying bloodstains. ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!’ Holmes cries, as he comes running to meet his visitors ‘with a test-tube in his hand’.

Sherlock Holmes then shakes John Watson’s hand: ‘“How are you,” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”’

Dr Watson is astounded by this, and only some time later, after an appropriate build-up of suspense, do we learn about the thought process by which Holmes pulled off this feat of deduction:

‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan’. The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.

In the very first few pages, then, of Holmes’s life in print, we’re introduced not only to the character of the detective himself but to the business of applying science to detection. We see him at work in the laboratory, researching toxicology and inventing a new chemical
test for the identification of blood, ‘the most practical medico-legal discovery for years’, as Holmes himself puts it. And then we see his process of step-by-step, deductive reasoning at work when he flabbergasts Dr Watson by reading the evidence hidden in Watson’s own appearance to conclude that he has done military service in Afghanistan.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was himself trained as a doctor, and it was one of his own teachers, Dr Bell, whose methods inspired Holmes’s. In an audio recording made shortly before his death in 1930, he describes the process by which his detective was brought to life. Speaking slowly and clearly in his Scottish/Northumbrian accent, with his rolled ‘r’s providing the occasional flourish, Conan Doyle explains how he had been, at the time of writing
A Study in Scarlet
:

a young doctor … educated in a very severe and critical medical school of thought, especially coming under the influence of Dr Bell of Edinburgh, who had most remarkable powers of observation. He prided himself that when he looked at a patient he could tell not only their disease but very often their occupation and place of residence.

Bell was prominent among the younger generation of forensic medical scientists following on from Alfred Swaine Taylor and William Herapath. He had risen high in his field, was invited to attend upon Queen Victoria when she was in Scotland, and in later years would take considerable satisfaction in his reputation as the inspiration behind Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle’s genius was to combine Bell’s scientific approach with his own love of storytelling. His original plan had been to settle down happily into general practice as a doctor. Waiting in his surgery for the patients who failed to arrive, he started writing stories, and sent many of them off to magazines in a variety of genres: horror, mystery, ghost. But he struck gold only when he turned to detection.

‘I thought I would try my hand,’ he explains, in his audio recording, ‘at writing a story where the hero would treat crime in the way Dr Bell treated disease – and where science would take the place of chess. The result was Sherlock Holmes.’ A scene in
A Study in Scarlet
that swiftly follows the initial introductions shows Holmes as the heroic scientist, this time at work at the scene of a crime. The body itself had long been the site of study, but the location of the deed had only more recently come under scrutiny as a legitimate part of the work of a detective. Here Holmes was in his element, and ahead of his peers. He castigates the police detectives on site for trampling all over the muddy path outside the house and spoiling the evidence of the footprints of the murderer. ‘If a herd of buffaloes had passed along,’ he tells the policeman in charge, ‘there could not be a greater mess.’ It sets a pattern he would follow throughout the whole of his fictional career, railing against the blundering, ignorant, plodding professionals around whom he runs rings.