The Invention of Murder (29 page)

In 1844, the Britannia produced
Charlotte Hayden, the Victim of Circumstance, or, The Maid, the Master and the Murderer,
a melodrama by George Dibdin Pitt. This is the story of a poor workhouse girl who is threatened by Enoch Grifford, the son of the workhouse master (there is also a dig at Marshall in the character of the workhouse doctor, whose patients
‘obstinately recovered
despite his treatments). Grifford senior, we learn, was bailiff to Charlotte’s grandfather, and ruined him financially before driving him to suicide, after which he produced a forged will leaving everything to him. Now Charlotte’s grandmother, also a workhouse inmate, has found the real will, and Enoch plans to murder her, leaving clues pointing to Charlotte. Charlotte flees to London, where she finds work as a servant. Enoch tracks her down and threatens her with exposure if she doesn’t assist him in robbing her new employers. Charlotte, fleeing once more, is taken in by a kind publican. When Enoch rolls up looking for a drink, conveniently not only are the police hot on his trail, having captured his burglarious confederates, but he has foolishly neglected to destroy the will he murdered Charlotte’s grandmother to obtain, and is now carrying it with him. Through a long concatenation of circumstances, a confession is forced from Enoch, the London employers show up to testify to Charlotte’s goodness, all the other characters tumble back onstage to mutual cries of joy, horror or teeth-gnashing rage, as appropriate, and Charlotte makes a curtain speech to the audience, warning them not to judge by appearances.
*

In the mid-1850s, another wave of interest in Eliza Fenning drew theatregoers. A playbill for
The Life and Death of Eliza Fenning! The Persecuted Servant Girl
at the Pavilion Theatre in 1854 stressed the innocence and goodness of ‘the persecuted Servant’. ‘The weeping Audience nightly testified by their tears and approval, their appreciation of this beautiful Drama of Real Life!’ In the centre of the playbill was a picture of Mrs Fenning, with her arms pinioned, and a caption that read, ‘I am innocent innocent.’

Eliza Fenning, The Victim of Circumstances
picked up the phrase ‘the victim of circumstances’ from
Charlotte Hayden,
which was now closely linked to the Eliza Fenning story, particularly in the minor theatres, where much of the audience must have frequently felt themselves the victims of circumstances. This version is far more formulaic, opening in a rustic idyll, where the beautiful Eliza is the daughter of a retired sailor, while Squire Gordon, a villain and libertine, tells his steward to ‘hire some ruffians, set fire to [their] cottage and hurl them all to destruction’. There follows a standard melodrama plot, until Eliza is found working as a servant, and the Eliza Fenning story is replayed. The trial and conviction are perfunctory, taking far less time than the scenes of rustic happiness or the comic interludes. In 1857 the Victoria produced another version, there was yet another at the Standard, in Shoreditch, and at least one more, at the Royal Colosseum in Leeds. The Victoria version is today perhaps most notable for Eliza muttering ominously, ‘I never lived in a family where they had so many dumplings.’

These plays were all much of a muchness. After the initial
Maid and the Magpye
productions in the West End, Eliza Fenning’s story became an entirely working-class subject. All the plays were melodramas, moving from expulsion from rural idyll to the evil city, where the virtuous girl is adrift and alone. Then, just as this rash of melodramas began to fade, Wilkie Collins produced a story for Dickens’ decidedly middle-class
Household Words.
‘The Poisoned Meal’, headed ‘from the records of the French Courts’, appeared in September-October 1858, and was later republished in
My Miscellanies
in a slightly abridged version. Collins told friends that he found the idea in Maurice-Méjan’s
Receuil des Causes célèbres,
‘a sort of French
Newgate Calendar
… In [which] I found some of my best plots.
The Woman in White
was one.’

Collins was, however, being disingenuous. Firstly, he claimed he found ‘the’ volume on a French bookstall, although the edition with the
Woman in White
source is in twenty-one volumes. While major plot lines of
The Woman in White
did indeed derive from this source (see pp.289–93), Collins was using it as a distraction: the main source throughout ‘The Poisoned Meal’ is Eliza Fenning’s story. Marie-Françoise-Victoire Salmon works as a servant for the Duparc family and Madame Duparc’s parents, Monsieur and Madame de Beaulieu. She makes a hasty-pudding, Madame de Beaulieu dies after eating it, and the Duparc family claim to have been poisoned. Then the plot follows the original Fenning story much more closely than many of the British plays. There is bogus or tainted scientific evidence – the accuser claims to smell burning arsenic in the kitchen, although, ‘When. subsequently questioned on the subject. he was quite unable to say what burnt arsenic smelt like’ – and the ‘white and shining’ substance found in Marie’s pockets is cavalierly handed around among all comers, as the blackened knives were. A maliciously prejudiced solicitor echoes Silvester, and the fear that reprieves bring justice into disrepute is repeated. This may have been the story of Marie-Françoise-Victoire Salmon, as Collins claimed – but it is impossible not also to see the story of Eliza Fenning.

There were, of course, servants who, unlike Eliza Fenning, did murder their employers. In 1840 the whole of upper-class London was convulsed when, in a small street off Park Lane, the body of the seventy-three-year-old Lord William Russell was found with his throat slit. Russell was the younger brother of the Duke of Bedford, and had had a fairly typical aristocratic life, representing the borough of Tavistock (a Bedford stronghold) in Parliament, and also living abroad for many years.

Russell, a widower, kept, by his family’s standards, a small household: himself, a cook, a housemaid and his Swiss valet, Benjamin-François Courvoisier. Courvoisier had only worked for him for a little over a month when the murder occurred. On the day of the crime, Courvoisier told the housemaid that ‘His Lordship is too fussy,’ and that he was going to look for another position; later, he offered to go and buy the two women’s evening beer, something he had never done previously. On the morning of 6 May 1840, the housemaid, always the first downstairs, found a warming pan lying in the hall outside Russell’s bedroom door; the drawing room had been ransacked, and a trinket box lay by the front door, which was unlocked and unbolted. She roused the household, and Russell was found dead in his bed. Courvoisier, to his auditors’ horror, exclaimed, ‘My God, what shall I do?. I will never get a place again!’
*

Lord William’s status demanded a response from the top, and Richard Mayne himself arrived when the local constable sent for a more senior policeman. Mayne appointed a detective from his Reserve division – those unofficial detectives who operated under his supervision. It was to be another two years before the Detective Department was established, but detective brains were already operating. The back door of the house had been forced, and initially it was thought that the front door had been used as the exit route. But the back was sheltered, while the front was overlooked – why had the thieves not left the way they had arrived? The intruders had been into the drawing room – the desk there had been ransacked – so why had none of the valuables in that room been taken? There were bloodstains on a carving knife, but it was found in its proper place on the sideboard: would an outsider have remembered the precise location, or was it more likely to have been replaced by someone who habitually put it there?

The police quickly decided that the marks on the back door had been made from the inside. The three servants were therefore separated and put under surveillance, while the house was searched for the stolen goods. Nothing was found, so Mayne went through lists he kept of policemen with special skills, and identified two who were particularly good at searches. It was, however, three days before a cavity behind a pantry skirting board was discovered, stuffed with medals, rings, gold and £10; then another cache, with more jewellery, was located above a pipe. Courvoisier’s room was searched twice, and nothing – no stolen items, no bloodstained clothing – was found. After the discovery in the pantry, a third search was made of his room, and this time the police found a pair of bloodstained gloves in a box under his bed. The box was examined a fourth time the next day, and a bloodstained handkerchief and dicky (detachable shirt front) were now discovered.

Courvoisier’s guilt was by no means a given. The goods and the bloody clothes were found in his room, but his very able defence counsel
*
pointed out that it would be just as easy to believe that the housemaid had committed the murder and then in the intervening days had moved the items; or possibly the repeated searches only slowly revealed incriminating items because the police, frustrated at the lack of evidence, had planted them. Courvoisier’s character was vouched for in court by irreproachable sources, all of whom had employed him over a period of time: a titled lady, an MP and the impeccably prosperous owner of a hotel. The view was that he may have been a thief, but it was not at all clear that he was a murderer. Then, on the last day of the trial, a Madame Piolaine, who managed a French hotel in Soho, identified Courvoisier as the man who had left a sealed parcel with her the day after the murder. Inside this parcel was Lord William’s missing plate. This still proved only that Courvoisier was a thief. But the new evidence shifted the emotional weight of the trial. Courvoisier’s cunning was extrapolated from his trip to buy beer for his fellow servants – people speculated that he had drugged it, to give him a free hand. A guilty verdict followed swiftly.

Legal discussions continued for some time after the trial, because after Madame Piolaine testified, Courvoisier may have admitted to his barrister, Charles Phillips, that he was guilty – or he may simply have admitted to the theft. Then as now, if he had admitted to murder, his barrister had a legal obligation to report this to the court. If, however, he had admitted only to theft, his counsel had no such obligation, as the charge was murder, not theft. We will never know, because Phillips at different times said that Courvoisier had confessed only to theft, or that he had confessed to murder, but not until the judges were ready to enter the court, when it was too late to notify them. Phillips was also criticized for asking one of the judges for advice on Courvoisier’s confession. He agreed that he had asked for advice, but only from one of the judges who was sitting as an adviser. (This cannot be true: at the time of the case, but not of Phillips’ later claim, all the judges sat together.) Phillips also complained that he had not been warned beforehand, as defence counsel was legally obliged to be, of Madame Piolaine’s evidence; he was justifiably aggrieved that it was nonetheless allowed. After this trial Phillips moved into legal administration, abandoning his role as ‘the prisoners’ counsel’, but his reputation was immortalized by Dickens as Mr Jaggers in
Great Expectations:
as a character Jaggers is hardly attractive, but in his unswerving commitment to his clients he could be said, ambiguously, to be heroic.

Despite Courvoisier’s speedy arrest and conviction, the public response was critical of the police: ‘The prevailing opinion seems to be that they [the police] have been very remiss in doing the things that they ought to have done, and there is much suspicion that they have been rather zealous in doing things that they ought not to have done.’ This, in the
Satirist,
was a roundabout way of saying that in its view the police had planted the evidence. But then, as it noted, ‘It doesn’t follow, because Courvoisier is guilty, that the police might not have taken undue means to prove him so’ – that is, just because the police acted illegally, it did not mean that Courvoisier was innocent. This was a popular take on the case, although Dickens was horrified by this slur, which ‘stigmatis[ed] the men who, in the discharge of their duty, had been actively and vigilantly employed’. But the police were not blameless: after the trial one inspector was reprimanded for negligence, and two constables were sacked.

This might have been for poor searching, rather than corruption or evidence-planting. But the system of paying rewards for information leading to arrests and conviction to police as well as to disinterested citizens was seen as a problem. The rewards paid by the police to their own men on the satisfactory winding-up of a case tended to be small sums, as in the case of the Edinburgh officers who arrested Maria Manning. The public perception, however, came from fiction and the theatre, where the police not only received, but expected to receive, large sums by way of reward. As late as 1890, in the second outing for Sherlock Holmes, when the fleeing villains dump their stolen treasure overboard into the Thames, the police inspector says, ‘There goes the reward!’

Throughout Courvoisier’s case, interest was widespread, the more so because of the aristocratic background of the victim. The trial had been graced by a royal duke, an ambassador and countless upper-class ladies and gentlemen. Many more went sightseeing: ‘Numbers of nobility,’ reported the
Morning Chronicle,
‘have called at the house, in the hope of being allowed to see the room in which the murder was committed.’
*
A story circulated that Landseer had been commissioned by the Duchess of Bedford to paint a posthumous portrait of Russell, and that after ‘he and the Duchess only were shut up with the murdered man’, he was so overwhelmed that he ‘went mad at his task and has never recovered his mind from that dreary date’.
†
For less aristocratic patrons, images of both Russell and Courvoisier were also readily available. One could purchase portraits of Courvoisier, Edward Oxford, one of the attempted assassins of Queen Victoria, ‘Bailey’ and ‘R. Gould’.
*
‘Order the “SKETCHES IN NEWGATE!’” encouraged the advertisement.

Courvoisier’s execution was socially dazzling. Noblemen, foreign aristocrats, including the Russian diplomat Count Nesselrode, a number of MPs, and the famous actor Edmund Kean all applied to watch it from the prison. Seats in nearby windows were going for five guineas each. Both Dickens and Thackeray were among the spectators. This was Dickens’ first execution, and as with the Mannings nine years later he was revolted by it, describing it as ‘a ghastly night in Hades with the demons’, and writing four letters to the
Daily News
giving his reaction. Thackeray too transformed the experience into journalism, publishing ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’ in
Fraser’s Magazine
a fortnight after the event. He had spent much of the night watching the crowd, particularly a rooftop full of ‘tipsy, dissolute-looking young men’. He was thoughtful about how repeated horrors could numb the viewers’ emotions: when the Cato Street conspirators had been executed in 1820, they were decapitated after death, and each head was held up to the crowd in turn, to display in timehonoured fashion the fate that awaited all traitors. Thackeray reported that the first head had produced a shudder of horror among the spectators; the second, interest; by the time the executioner fumbled the third, a wag in the crowd yelled ‘Butter-fingers!’ (Other accounts report the fumble, but not the joke, which is probably better interpreted as Thackeray’s one-word distillation of the crowd’s emotional temperature.)