The Invention of Murder (32 page)

The cholera broke out at Drouet’s asylum, concluded the
Examiner,
‘because it was brutally conducted, vilely kept, preposterously inspected, dishonestly defended, a disgrace to a Christian community, and a stain upon a civilized land’. The rhythm and swing of this should identify its author: yet again, Charles Dickens in the thick of a murder. Dickens’ friend Forster had written reviews for the paper (and would later be its editor). It was a logical place for him to publish his passionate views on Drouet, and he reported from the early deaths to the trial verdict.

The trial, sadly, was a farce, and Dickens’ third piece, ‘A Recorder’s Charge’, was written specifically to counter the opening speech of Baron Platt, the Recorder. Wakley, as pioneers will, had made many enemies; he was also a Chartist, which no doubt offended the Tory Recorder. The charge against Drouet was not for neglect, but for ‘felonious killing’, and the Recorder was very obviously on Drouet’s side: he refused to hear evidence on the treatment of the other children who had died, and rejected questions about what had happened to the children’s warm clothes when they arrived (the implication was that Drouet sold them). When a poor-law inspector said he had seen no ventilation holes in the children’s rooms, the Recorder said he would allow the comment to go on the record only if the inspector was ready to swear absolutely that there were none, not just that he had seen none. He rejected ancillary evidence about the condition of the wards, because no one could say which ward the dead child had been in. The defence was simple: the prosecution could not prove that the child would not have died by disease alone, and in truth the absence of any care at the asylum ensured that there were no witnesses to testify to contributing factors. Drouet was therefore acquitted.

General opinion was that he had, literally, got away with murder. (Not for long: he died three months after the verdict.) The working classes cynically understood what respectability could buy.
The Times
reported that a woman charged with being part of a gang of robbers had ‘with much impudence’ said that ‘Had I committed as many murders as Mr. Drouet I should have been acquitted.’ Schools and other establishments that looked after children long remained bywords for suspicion. As late as 1902, in
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
Conan Doyle strongly indicated that a character was going to turn out to be the villain by making him the proprietor of a school where ‘a serious epidemic broke out. and three of the boys died’, a school which had come ‘to grief under atrocious circumstances’.

Dickens did his best to ensure that these small hostages to fortune were not forgotten. He had long written about the lack of care for orphaned or unwanted children –
Nicholas Nickleby
(1838–39), with its depiction of the infamous Dotheboys Hall, was the most memorable. Now he was perhaps impelled by his own memories, writing the articles for the
Examiner
just three months before the serialization of
David Copperfield
began, in which he wrote for the first time, albeit in fictional form, about his miserable, lonely childhood months working in the blacking factory after his father’s imprisonment for debt. In non-fiction, in the
Examiner,
he berated ‘Mr Baron Platt … [who] took the very first opportunity of siding with the stronger. Witnesses that required encouragement. he brow-beated [sic]; and witnesses that could do without it, he insulted or ridiculed.’ (On the contrary, stoutly riposted the ultra-High Tory
John Bull
– its motto: ‘For God, the Sovereign, and the People’ – Platt was a ‘fearless and determined lover of justice, and one specially anxious to prove himself such on behalf of the poor and oppressed’.) He returned to the subject three times in
Household Words
in 1850, and once more in 1853. Finally, and most enduringly, he created Jo the crossing-sweeper in
Bleak House.
After a case in Lewes in 1852, where a child was not permitted to testify because he was said not to understand the meaning of swearing an oath, Jo, similarly, at the ‘inkwich’ [inquest] in
Bleak House
can only say, too, that he does not know what an oath is, although he knows ‘a broom’s a broom, and. it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both.’ In the same novel, Guster, the little maid-of-all-work, was partly drawn from Mary Anne Parsons, but was also given Drouet as her fictional guardian, having been ‘farmed or contracted for, during her growing time, by an amiable benefactor. resident at Tooting’. In one of Dickens’ most delicate moments of grace, when she meets Jo, the starving crossing-sweeper, ‘this orphan charge of the Christian saint whose shrine was at Tooting’ gives him a piece of bread and pats him on the shoulder, ‘the first time in his life that any decent hand has been so laid upon him’. Thus the offscouring of the parish, flushed out to Tooting as waste, was raised above her parish masters in her understanding of the meaning of faith, hope and charity.

The death of children was one thing: children held down jobs and earned money. The death of infants was something else. Perhaps unexpectedly Punch and Judy best reflect the attitude to the murder of babies for much of the nineteenth century. An 1854 Punch and Judy script has Punch holding the baby, who begins to cry.

Mr Punch is arrested and charged with murder when he kills Judy. No one mentions, then or later, the murder of the baby. This was not simply comedy. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen said to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1866, ‘The crime [of infanticide] is less serious than other kinds of murder.’
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In 1870, the
Pall Mall Gazette
indicated that public opinion was in accord: ‘Juries … have never regarded infanticide quite as murder.’ For the act to be ‘not quite’ murder, a particular set of social circumstances had to obtain: the baby had to be newborn; it had to be killed by its own mother; and usually the mother had to be unmarried. If these conditions were not met – if an older child were killed, or a woman killed someone else’s child, or her own legitimate child – then popular opinion regarded the act as murder.

Public opinion aside, legally there was no crime called infanticide: murder was murder, said the 1803 Offences Against the Person Act. If it could be proved that a child had been born alive, then killing it was murder; if a live birth could not be proved, then from 1828 a charge of ‘concealment of birth’ could be brought against the mother. The law, however, failed to define what constituted a live birth: if the baby cried? breathed? While it was generally accepted that the laws governing infanticide were not clear, no effort was made to clarify them: their fuzziness permitted leeway in handing down verdicts on women who had few options.

And for many women, all their options were as desperate as murder. Children taken into the workhouse were separated from their parents and raised as institutionalized waifs, constantly told what a burden they were, or farmed out to Drouet clones to survive as best they could. Servants could not have children living with them. If there were no relatives to care for a child, then a quick death for the child might seem a better solution than slow starvation for both the mother and child.

Thus the sudden death of an infant frequently suited everyone: it cost the parish nothing; the mother could go back to work; and employers did not lose their servants. The Church, too, sometimes appeared to agree that it was better all round if these children died. A clergyman preaching after the death of Maria Marten in the Red Barn told his congregation that, although she was a fallen woman, ‘a forbearing Providence still dealt kindly with her. The child she bore was taken from her by death – leaving her in a situation, in which. she might very easily have returned to the path of honest industry.’ It is easy to see from this why women might think the death of a baby would be ignored if possible. If a death was brought to official attention, then the woman was frequently charged with concealment, which carried a light sentence, if any: at the Old Bailey between 1840 and 1860, sixty concealment charges saw not one guilty verdict. This was the pattern everywhere. In Kent, no woman was convicted of murder of a newborn between 1859 and 1880; and while 62 per cent of those charged with concealment were found guilty, of these, 86 per cent received a sentence of less than six months.

Wherever possible, judges and juries tried to acquit. In one example of many, Mary Weston, a nineteen-year-old servant in Staffordshire, was charged with murdering her baby in 1842. She had gone into labour in her employers’ house, and asked a fellow maidservant for help, but the girl was frightened and left her to give birth alone. She put the baby in an ‘earthenware vessel’ (presumably a euphemism for a chamberpot) and tried to bury it, but the ground was frozen, she was discovered and charged with murder or concealment. Her fellow servant said she had heard the baby cry, so it had been born alive, but the judge disagreed: even if the child had been born alive, the mother might not have known, and therefore malice, a necessary part of a murder conviction, could not be proved; at the same time, she could not be convicted of concealing the birth because she had asked for help – the very opposite of concealment. Thus she was acquitted. Even when convictions were unavoidable, sentences could be light. Julia Moss, a servant in south London, gave birth secretly at work (this is a recurring motif in infanticide cases: 83 per cent of women charged with concealment were servants). She put the baby in a box and threw it out of the window onto a neighbour’s roof, where it was found. The baby’s skull was fractured, which possibly contributed to the guilty verdict. The sentence: three months’ hard labour.

Yet while the crime was, in general, both sympathetically understood – these women were not killing out of viciousness, but in order to survive – and hardly ever prosecuted with full rigour, at the same time two opposing forces were attempting to have infanticide treated with more seriousness. Thomas Wakley was one of the leaders of this campaign. Police records were more comprehensive after 1829, and together with the growing number of newspapers, this produced an increasing number of stories of babies ‘found dead’. Wakley estimated that there was probably one additional undiscovered death for every death brought to official notice, giving an estimated three hundred suspicious infant deaths a year in London. Others were less measured: twenty years later, Wakley’s successor as coroner, Edwin Lankester, suggested that in London the number hovered around 12,000 suspicious infant deaths a year.
*

Part of the problem of ascertaining the true quantity was that the magistrates of each district controlled the expenses of inquests. Thus doctors were frequently told that there was no money to pay for postmortems. In 1845, after Sarah Freeman’s illegitimate child had died (see p.237), the local surgeon was told by the coroner that ‘the magistrates were particular as regarded the expenses’, and would refuse to pay for a post-mortem.

The press, naturally, followed their own sensationalist agenda, anxious to interpret any unexplained death as suspicious. In this they were aided by men like Lankester, and the Revd Henry Humble, who reported in 1866: ‘Bundles are left lying about the streets, which people will not touch, lest the too familiar object – a dead body – should be revealed, perchance with a. woman’s garter around its throat.’ He then repeated Lankester’s figure of 12,000 suspicious infant deaths in London every year, which, he clarified, meant that ‘one in every thirty women. is a murderess’.

Instead of considering how unlikely this was, the newspapers produced ever more elaborate tales of wanton infant murder. Whichever way you looked at infanticide, there was a possible – or probable – overreaction. Infant mortality rates in some parts of the country were as high as one in every two children born; illegitimate children had even less chance, with 60 to 90 per cent dying before the age of five. But did this indicate murder, or simply poverty and its inseparable friends, crowded housing, poor food, contaminated water, failing hygiene and rampant disease? Were the low conviction rates for concealment, and the almost non-existent conviction rates for murder, an indication that juries were anxious not to convict guilty women, or an indication that over-zealous inquest juries were committing innocent women for trial? In 1857 Thomas Laycock, a professor of clinical medicine, published a series of introductory lectures for medical students: ‘You have to collect evidence,’ he told them, ‘… penetrate disguises. sift conflicting statements. reconcile impossibilities.’ Just as the police needed to be more rigorously scientific, so the scientists had to detect better. The question remains: was there anything to detect? Evil people perpetrating evil deeds were more comfortable to contemplate than the reality of poverty, chronically low wages, and lack of a structure to support the children of working women. These things would be hard to solve; accusing a wicked parent was easy. This may have been the precipitating factor in the creation of the idea of infant-murder for gain – the burial-society murder, which soon became almost completely unquestioned.