The Invention of Murder (13 page)

The resolution of this three-year-old crime caused a sensation among all classes and types. The
Stockport Advertiser
couldn’t keep up with demand, and was driven to produce single sheets of the trial transcript. It was anti-climactic, therefore, when the executions were delayed into the following year, after legal wranglings over jurisdiction. Thus, while the
Manchester Guardian
dedicated nearly 27,000 words to the trial, by the time the two men were finally executed it was no longer topical, and the paper did not cover it at all.

This sad little case would merit no more than a mention in a history of labour unrest, were it not for two works of literature that it spawned. As a preliminary, however, in 1842 came a novel that in no way qualifies as literature.
William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord
was written by the daughter of the owner of the
Manchester Chronicle,
whose previous work, the title page advertised, was
The Art of Needlework.
The book reads pretty much as one would expect from the authoress of
The Art of Needlework.
Although set among the cotton mills,
William Langshawe
has a heroine who dresses in ‘a gossamer robe of spotless white’, a hermit with a secret sorrow (of the sort so often seen in the industrial heartlands) and the occasional outbreak of Italian banditti. The important thing about the book for our purposes is that there is a millhand named Jem, who loves another millworker, Nancy, who has ideas above her station and is conducting a flirtation with the son of a factory owner. Jem, in his anguish, turns to ‘The Union’, a fearful organization that plans turn-outs in order to reduce ‘beneficent and liberal masters. to the very edge of ruin’. Twenty pages before the end a factory owner’s son sets off for his mill, shortly after which ‘a sudden knock was heard at the hall door’, and, just as with Thomas Ashton, a messenger comes in to say, ‘I’m afeard he is down in the loan [sic], much hurt.’ The young man is ‘borne in by the men – a corpse’, while ‘not a clue, not the remotest trace of the villains remained’. There is a footnote: ‘Let not my readers image [sic] that this awful incident has been invented. A few years ago a young cotton manufacturer of the highest respectability, and most excellent character, was murdered even so, and as suddenly, as we have described, by order of the Spinners’ Union.’

That readers could have forgotten the Ashton case was confirmed in 1848, with the publication of one of the great works of nineteenth-century fiction. Mrs Gaskell’s
Mary Barton
used the incidents of the case, but while many reviewers commented on her fictional interweaving of the realities of industrial unrest and the battles between the owners and the workers, none seems to have recognized the origin of her story. In
Mary Barton,
Mary, a milliner’s assistant, is loved by Jem Wilson, a factory mechanic. She initially rejects him in favour of Harry Carson, the son of the local mill owner, although she soon realizes she loves Jem and breaks off with Carson. He and Jem fight, and are stopped by a policeman, in whose hearing Jem threatens Carson. Meanwhile, the millworkers are striking. Mary’s father, John Barton, takes part in a plan to murder one of the owners, for which lots are drawn. John Barton goes to Glasgow to talk to the workers there; Jem simultaneously agrees to accompany his cousin Will Wilson on the walk back to his ship in Liverpool. That night, Harry Carson is found shot dead in the lane. The gun is identified as Jem’s, and he is arrested. The wadding from the gun is found by Mary’s aunt. It is part of a valentine Jem sent Mary, but Mary alone knows this is evidence of his innocence, and her father’s guilt – she had given the paper to her father.
*
She sets out for Liverpool to get Will to return and testify to Jem’s alibi, the only way to save Jem without endangering her father. Will’s ship has left, and Mary goes out in a small boat, shouting up to him that he is needed. His captain refuses to give him leave, but Will arrives to give his evidence in the nick of time, Jem is saved and Mary declares her love for him. John Barton, now dying, confesses to Carson’s father, who forgives him.

The novel was quickly acclaimed as being by an ‘author in the very front rank of modern novelists’, but it was not recognized that the author had used reality as the basis for her (or, as this reviewer thought, his) art. Even the
Manchester Guardian
failed to recognize the case it had reported so thoroughly a decade earlier. Instead, it says that while
Mary Barton
is well written and well constructed, ‘the authoress has [?erred – semi-illegible] against truth, in matters of fact’. Her tale of murder was a libel on the workers, it went on, because ‘they never committed a murder under any such circumstances’, and a libel on the owners, ‘who have never been exceeded … in acts of benevolence and charity’.

While Thomas Ashton may have been forgotten, Mary Barton’s story became hugely popular among the working classes. Three plays, all at minor theatres, were based on Mrs Gaskell’s novel, and two scripts survive. In the script of the 1850 version, the Examiner of Plays has scored through all the political references – gone is the workers’ delegation to Parliament, and no longer is Barton a Chartist delegate. Gone too is the scene where the workers conspire to kill Carson (which must have made the plot difficult to follow), and in the final courtroom scene, respect for sacred personages meant that the swearing-in of witnesses takes place in dumbshow. After the acquittal of James (not Jem in this version), the dying Barton begs Carson: ‘Oh sir, say you forgive me the anguish I have caused you. I care not for death, but oh man forgive me the trespass I have done thee. I die, oh. The world fades from me, a new one opens to you, James and Mary,’ and the play ends with a final tableau.

For many theatres, spectacle was the essential ingredient, with various types of lighting and stage effects used to create the required ‘sensation-scene’, the high point of the evening, full of special effects and new technology. The stage manager at the Britannia reminded himself of what was needed for one scene:

Quite how realistic these effects were is difficult to judge. In 1871, a melodrama at the same theatre had a scene in which the heroine, trapped on an ice floe with the villain, is rescued by a passing steamer. This sounds technically astonishing, until one reads the stage manager’s diary entries:

In
Mary Barton, or, The Weavers’ Distress
at the Grecian Saloon in Shoreditch in 1861, the high point was the sensation-scene in which the workers set Carson’s mill alight, and Jem roars in to rescue the trapped Henry. Then Mary has a dramatic speech – ‘I see naught but Jem, a dying man on the gallows. I hear naught but his groans ringing in my ears’ – Will arrives in the courtroom on cue and the drama ends with a rousing speech from the judge – ‘I tell you, that you are bound to give the Prisoner the full Benefit of the slightest doubts you may have on your minds, such is the Law of England, such is the Law of humanity.’ – and Barton’s revelation that it was not he who killed Carson after all, but another character who never appears in the play, and is anyway dead: a murder where no one is to blame.

It was Dion Boucicault (1820–1890) who returned Mrs Gaskell’s story to the middle classes.
The Long Strike
(1866) followed Boucicault’s great success,
The Colleen Bawn,
another play based on a murder (see pp.130–33), and he went back to the elements that had worked for him in the past. The fire that had thrilled the Grecian audiences is gone, but Boucicault knew better than to deprive his audience of a sensation-scene. He himself played Johnny Reilly, the renamed Will. When his captain refuses him permission to go ashore, Reilly cries, ‘Jane [the Mary character in this play] has called me back, and back I’ll go,’ and ‘goes to the window, throws out coat and hat, takes stage to foot lights, runs up, springs through window, disappears’. In Act IV comes the great innovation. Jane no longer walks to Liverpool – that is far too old-fashioned. Instead, she and the lawyer Mr Moneypenny plan to send a telegram from the ‘Telegraph Office – Messages sent to all parts of the United Kingdom’. They arrive, only to find that the line is closed for the night. Much still needed to be explained to the audience about this miracle of the modern world, so the clerk laboriously spells it out: ‘The telegraph is a private enterprise, and maintained for profit. The business coming in after nine o’clock would not pay, except on the main lines.’ Moneypenny ratchets up the drama: ‘. that wire was the thread on which the lad’s life was suspended, and it fails her’. The operator is sympathetic and says maybe, just maybe, they can get through. The tension is heightened by the slow relaying of and replying to the messages coming and going, but then – miraculously – a signal!

Boucicault, a great admirer of French theatre (or, as his many enemies had it, a frequent plagiarizer of French plays), may have known of a play Dickens had seen in Paris ten years before.
La Rentrée à Paris
was, said Dickens, barely a play at all, but while ‘There is nothing in the piece. it was impossible not to be moved and excited by the telegraph part,’ where, in a Paris railway station, the crowds wait for the soldiers returning from the Crimea. There is an electric telegraph office to one side, and a ‘marquis’ offers:

Boucicault’s version was similarly effective, so much so that at the end of the century some variety bills were still running the scene on its own, amputated from the rest of the play.

‘Amputate’ is the key word for the next horror that titillated the reading public. On 28 December 1836, a labourer walking past a building site on London’s Edgware Road saw a sack tucked under a flagstone propped at the side of the road. Upon investigation it proved to contain the body of a woman ‘in a horridly mutilated state’. When the report said ‘body’, it meant ‘body’: it was a torso (complete with arms), packed in with some towelling, a child’s dress and a piece of shawl. No identification could be made, and nothing further happened until 6 January 1837, when a lock-keeper at Regent’s Canal lock in Stepney, in the East End of the city, found his gates blocked. He felt around with his boat-hook and, to his horror, pulled up a human head. One of the eyes ‘was quite cut out, by means of a blunt instrument’, and the earlobes were slit, as though earrings had been torn out. The head was taken to Paddington workhouse, where it was judged to be a match for the torso. Both were preserved in spirits, and kept for viewing by those who were searching for missing friends or relatives. On 2 February, a pair of legs was dredged out of a bed of reeds near Coldharbour Lane, in Brixton, south of the river, wrapped in a sack on which the letters ‘eley’ and ‘erwell’ could be read.

Although the police force’s role was officially only preventative, detective work, and forensic science, were beginning to develop. The constable on the beat at Edgware Road, PC Pegler, traced the sacking to a Mr Moseley, a corn chandler in Camberwell. The parish surgeon added his information: the torso was that of a woman, about five feet six inches; her skull had been fractured, and he thought that most probably her eye had been knocked out before death, but the decapitation had been performed after. He judged that the head had been in the water for four or five days. (The parish surgeon in Paddington was less helpful: he reported that the torso had been dead only twenty-four hours, and then added, confusingly, that that meant three or four days.)

Even with this information, nothing further transpired until 20 March, when a man named William Gay provisionally identified the head as that of his sister, Hannah Brown, a washerwoman. Mrs Brown had been engaged to a cabinetmaker named James Greenacre, and they were to marry on Christmas Day, with another cabinetmaker, named Davis, to give her away. Mrs Brown sold off her mangle and laundry equipment, and on Christmas Eve she moved out of her lodgings. Late that night, Greenacre appeared at Davis’s house to tell the family the wedding was off: ‘He had discovered that she was without property, which she had led him to believe she possessed,’ they had ‘had some slight words’, and she had left him. He was ‘much agitated’, but given the circumstances there was nothing odd in that, nor in ‘his having a bundle under his arm. as he might have been providing for his Christmas dinner’. When Mrs Brown failed to appear at the Davises’ that night as expected, they assumed she was embarrassed.