The Invention of Murder (28 page)

There were other details Watkins missed that a twenty-first-century detective-fiction reader picks up automatically. Orlibar Turner went to the police office himself to fetch the police the day after the ‘poisoning’. So despite his being ill for the five days he claimed, he was well enough the next day to go out. Much was made of the fact that Mrs Fenning was alone in the kitchen during the time the dumplings were made, but in court Mrs Turner testified that she had been in and out herself; Sarah Peer, she said, had not been there at all, but Mrs Peer said she had taken the yeast into the kitchen. Roger Gadsdell, the apprentice who had claimed to have been among those poisoned after eating a dumpling, had also grabbed – ‘licked up’ was Mrs Turner’s phrase – ‘three parts of a boat of sauce’ and some bread. Having eaten his own dinner of beefsteak pie, he then went into the kitchen and illicitly gobbled down cold leftovers, including almost an entire sauce-boat of gravy. He was, he said, not as sick as Turner; he did not vomit. This appears to be a greedy boy who ate too much too quickly, and had a stomach ache.

In the aftermath of the trial several petitions were circulated, including at least two from the ministers and congregants at the chapel where Mrs Fenning worshipped (despite the
Observers
anti-Papist rhetoric, the Fennings were Dissenters). An unnamed man, whom Watkins identified as someone who had helped with the arsenic experiments, asked Orlibar Turner to sign a petition for mercy. Turner and his son both agreed to do so, until (here Watkins is the only source) Silvester warned them that if they did so,
‘it will throw suspicion on the rest of your family!’

Watkins was excoriated by many who saw danger in any questioning of authority. The
British Critic
began its review of the pamphlet: ‘Of all the wretched attempts which have ever been made to shake the confidence of the people in the administration of public justice, this is the most audacious.’ The review ended by rejecting reliance on physical evidence: whether arsenic turned knives black or prevented dough from rising was immaterial; what mattered was that it was ‘well known’ that Mrs Fenning was immoral, dissolute and untruthful, and, most tellingly, she had steadfastly refused to confess ‘any of those sins of which she had been notoriously guilty’.

Fear of the mob was a major component in why no pardon was forthcoming. Fear of servants might have been mixed in too. Eliza Fenning was twenty-one at the time of the incident, relatively old by the standards of servants for lower-middle-class families (most worked through their adolescence, saved up and married in their early to mid-twenties). She had been in service for a third of her life. Charlotte Turner was only a year older, and had been married for eight months – both women were uneasily aware that Mrs Fenning knew more than Mrs Turner about running a house. According to
Eliza Fenning’s own Narrative
(which was almost certainly not written by her), ‘Mrs. Turner told me not to leave the kitchen, but I did not pay any attention to her in that respect, knowing I must leave it to do the remaining part of my work.’ And as to Mrs Turner’s testimony to the ‘singular’ appearance of the dumplings, ‘it surprises me to think she pretends to know more about them than myself’.

Then there was the problem of her literacy. One of the newspapers cited by Watkins quoted a previous employer (the one whose water boiled so strangely) who said that he and his family had never trusted Mrs Fenning: there was nothing concrete against her except that she was ‘deep’ and she spent time
‘reading’
– she even owned some ‘handsome’ volumes, which she claimed a previous mistress had given her, but ‘was it
likely
that a
mistress
would give a SERVANT …
such books
as them?’ She was, in short, above herself. This was in tune with the general air of social menace. The day before the Turner family was taken ill, Napoleon had entered Paris after his escape from Elba. That same month, the House of Lords passed the hated Corn Laws: 42,000 residents in Westminster alone signed a petition in protest; the parish of St George’s, Bloomsbury (the Fennings’ vestry ward) sent another.In June, while Mrs Fenning was awaiting execution, the battle of Waterloo could be said to have marked the end of Revolution and the embracing of reaction. The Radical press’s linkage of Eliza Fenning with political disenfranchisement did not go unnoticed.

No one was going to step in to save this servant girl, who had no resources, financial or political. There was no mileage in it, and there was rather a lot of mileage in ensuring that ‘the mob’ saw what would happen to those who stepped out of line. The crowd outside Newgate on the day of Mrs Fenning’s execution was vast – some reports put the figure as high as 45,000. Unlike many other executions, here was no ribaldry, no fairground atmosphere. This was widely felt to be judicial murder, and the spectators saw their presence as a gesture of solidarity with the Fenning family. Mrs Fenning had her own sense of drama, and dressed entirely in white. (When she was told that she might pray before leaving the prison, she carefully removed her overskirt, so that it would not be dirtied when she knelt.)

Because she had been convicted of attempted murder, not murder, after the execution her body was given back to her parents. (Or rather sold back. In a piece of bureaucratic savagery, the Fennings were presented with a bill for
14s.6d
for ‘Executioner’s Fees, &c. Stripping [the body], use of Shell [a rough, temporary coffin]’.) Back at her parents’ house, people queued for four days to file past her body. The
Observer,
still harping on the Catholic theme, reported that the family was holding a wake, and furthermore was charging viewers. Some visitors did give money: after the expense of the trial the bill for the executioner’s fees was beyond her parents’ resources, and they had had to borrow the cash to buy back their child’s corpse.

Outside their house, the government forces – called the police by the newspapers, but probably a mixture of the watch and soldiers – blocked access, telling sympathizers that ‘The
magistrates
have ordered that
nobody
shall go into the house.’ When a few brave souls replied that ‘The magistrates have no
right
to give such an order: it is …
illegal,’
they were threatened with ‘much insulting language’. On 31 July Eliza Fenning’s body was taken on its last journey. Up to 10,000 people used this opportunity to express their views. ‘The streets were nearly impassable, every window was thronged, and in many places the tops of the houses were covered with spectators, most of whom appeared to sympathize in the feelings of her deeply afflicted parents.’
The Affecting Case of Eliza Fenning
gave the order of the funeral procession:

The procession travelled from the Fennings’ home in Red Lion Street, through Bloomsbury ‘in a steady and solemn pace, with great propriety and decorum’. Even at the cemetery Eliza Fenning’s parents were not allowed to mourn. Once more the papers reported police harassment, and ‘soon after the corpse was lowered into the grave, a man dressed in livery [a servant], without a hat,
*
in violation of all decency, made use of an expression which excited the indignation of the crowd’. What he said is nowhere recorded, but the response to it is. The crowd, very decently considering how high emotions were running, waited until the family had left the graveyard. Then ‘ “Shame! shame!” proceeded from every mouth, and many women followed him and spit several times in his face; the men shook him and pulled him by the ears; and all he could urge in extenuation of his offence was, that it was a
common saying
.’

Eliza Fenning was dead, but that did not mean she was forgotten. Many used her name for their own purposes. Anti-capital-punishment campaigners frequently referred to her case. So did a new campaign gathering force in the 1830s. Until this time, most coroners were either men of some social position, or legal professionals. Thomas Wakley, the crusading founder of the medical journal the
Lancet,
was the spearhead of a movement to install medically trained coroners on the bench (himself included). T.W. Wansbrough, who in 1815 had published
An Authentic Narrative of the Conduct of Eliza Fenning… By the Gentleman who Attended Her,
in 1830 was the signatory of an open letter endorsing Wakley in his attempt to become Coroner for West Middlesex (a key position, as it covered much of London). The letter was printed as a bill, for posting in public places, and it prominently cited Eliza Fenning’s well-known history, as ‘it bears importantly on the question.
Ought not a Coroner to possess
CONSIDERABLE MEDICAL INFORMATION?’

Only the previous year the details of Mrs Fenning’s story had been raked up again when Robert Turner died, supposedly making a deathbed confession to having poisoned the dumplings himself. Lurid details were now added, including a story that he had tried to buy arsenic, but was refused because he was showing obvious signs of insanity. (No one seems to have remembered the packet in his desk at home. It took a long time for John Watkins’ lessons to be learned.) Another supposed deathbed confession was bruited about in 1857, when newspapers printed reports that a minister at Finsbury Chapel, in London, who had ‘conversed and prayed’ with Mrs Fenning in 1815 in Newgate, told the credulous that a baker, dying in a workhouse, had confessed to the crime. This story has all the hallmarks of newspaper fiction: the workhouse was unnamed, no reason was given for the poisoning, and the baker and minister evidently thought someone in the Turners’ house had died as a result of the supposed crime. Finally, the report was at fourth hand – the baker told the matron who told a chapel elder who in turn told the minister who, by one of those providential coincidences that melodrama so loved, had prayed with Mrs Fenning forty years before. The appearance of this story in the summer of 1857 probably had more to do with the ongoing trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of her lover in Glasgow (see pp.281–6) than with Eliza Fenning, dead for nearly half a century. Yet for all that, Eliza Fenning was a name to conjure with. Unlike Eugene Aram or Jonathan Bradford, no greyhounds or racehorses that I can discover were named for her, but the shipping lists do note that in October 1855 the
Eliza Fenning
was sitting ‘off port Queenstown’, having arrived from ‘Caliao’, Peru (now Cobh and Callao, respectively).
*

Eliza Fenning the servant was vanishing, and a tidied-up, classed-up, version was appearing in her place to suit the entertainment market. In
The Affecting Case of Eliza Fenning,
the frontispiece of the dead woman was captioned ‘Engraved from an Original Miniature Painting in the Possession of her Friend’. The woman wearing a stylish bonnet, an elegantly trimmed dress and a pearl necklace, and with an elaborate hair-do, is no more a picture of Eliza Fenning, even one drawn after the event, than the images adorning the penny broadsides.

A similar transformation was taking place in the theatre. In 1815, the month after Mrs Fenning’s execution, Samuel James Arnold’s
The Maid and the Magpye, or, Which is the Thief? A Musical Entertainment,
was produced at the Lyceum, in London, an adaptation of
La Pie Voleuse, ou, La Servante de Palaiseau,
by Louis-Charles Caigniez. In Arnold’s version, Annette, a servant maid, is falsely accused by her mistress of stealing a silver spoon. Unable to explain that the spoon she has sold to a pedlar belonged to her father, an army deserter in hiding, she nobly says nothing, and only at the foot of the gallows is the thieving magpie’s nest found, with her mistress’s spoon still in it.
†
The play was a success, with many productions in various adaptations over the next four decades, but in the months following Mrs Fenning’s death this and two further adaptations were understood to have topical reference to the case. To ensure no opportunity was missed, William Hone published a script of
La Pie Voleuse. The Narrative of the Magpie; or, The Maid of Palaiseau … Founded upon the circumstance of an unfortunate female having been unjustly sentenced to death, on strong Presumptive Evidence.
In this version Hone added, ‘The sentiments principally applauded by the [theatre] audiences are printed in
italics
and CAPITALS.’

Soon, however, the play’s connection with Eliza Fenning vanished from the consciousness of audiences, and it was frequently staged as a Christmas pantomime, while Pollock’s added it to its toy-theatre productions. In this children’s version, the printed stage sets and characters were in standard melodrama styles: the set for the farm is a routine pastoral view, the gaol cell would do credit to the dungeons of the Bastille in size and gloom, complete with jug of water on the floor and enormous fetters scattered about; while the paper performers include men with flags and women with garlands, presumably for a dance interlude, and Annette swoons as she is led to the gallows, followed by weeping women and a row of soldiers tippytoeing behind.

By 1823, jokes about Mrs Fenning could be made, at least theatrically. The Olympic’s
Dolly and the Rat
was an anonymous burlesque set in a butcher’s household. Dolly is the servant, loved by ‘an amorous Tallow-Chandler’, but she has eyes only for Dick, an apprentice boy. Mrs Brisket’s white cap is stolen, appropriately for London, by a large rat rather than a magpie, and when she accuses Dolly of theft she is as unimpressed by notions of evidence and proof as the prosecutors of Mrs Fenning had been, saying: ‘If it’s no where [sic] to be found, it is as good as stolen to me.’ Dick: ‘That’s a rum way of making people
thieves
.’ As with
The Maid and the Magpye,
the animal thief is detected and everyone ends up happily ever after.

In 1837 there was an attempt to stage a version of the Fenning story at the Pavilion Theatre, but it was prevented by threats of legal action by the now-adult ex-apprentice Roger Gadsdell. ‘Nothing would satisfy Mr. Gadsden [sic] but the withdrawal of the piece, on pain of criminal information. How we marvel that so shrewd a manager as Farrell, seeing that the drama contained nothing in the slightest degree prejudicial to the character of Mr. Gadsden, and his name having been taken out altogether, did not laugh at his threat, and proceed quietly with the representation of the piece,’ wondered the
Satirist.