The Invention of Murder (9 page)

Kaleidoscope
magazine mocked the entire circus, with a picture of Corder lying on a dissecting table under which are sacks labelled ‘Mr Corder’s clothes’ and ‘Relics for sale’. Standing on the table over the body is an auctioneer, who is calling out, ‘Now then, Ladies & Gentlemen – the Halter is going at a Guinea an inch,’ while a person in the crowd responds, ‘I want some of it for the University,’ and another cries, ‘Oh! how delightfully Horrible!’ To one side, a man is saying to another, ‘The Officer says, Mr Sheriff, that the Pistols belong to him,’ while the other replies, ‘Why I would not part with them man for 100 Guineas!’ A second picture shows Corder’s body twitching, naked, on the dissecting table. A man at the door says, ‘I came to take a cast of his head,’ only to be told, ‘You must wait till the galvanic operations are over.’ Outside, the crowd gathers around a sign advertising ‘Camera obscura of the murder’.

From the outset fairs loved the story of the doomed Maria Marten. The journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed a strolling player who performed the Red Barn murder at a fair ‘in cavalier costume’. Reality was not the key: excitement was. The whole country was getting younger: at the end of the eighteenth century, 17 per cent of the population was between five and fourteen years old; by the 1820s, it was 25 per cent, and almost half the population was under twenty. This was an audience worth catering to: even if, individually, they had almost no money, collectively they could create riches. For many children, however, even minor theatre was out of reach. A place in the gallery of somewhere like the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton appeared cheap to the middle classes, but it cost between 3 and 4d., a significant sum to the less fortunate. Instead many boys and girls frequented illegal, unlicensed penny-gaffs, housed in disused shops and turned into theatres by erecting a rough stage at one end, with the remaining space filled with benches.

In 1838 it was estimated that there were about a hundred gaffs in London, each with a capacity of one hundred to 150 per sitting, with up to nine daily sittings. Thus attendance in any twenty-four hours was, at the least, and in London alone, 50,000 people. The audiences, almost entirely under the age of sixteen, were given, for their penny, three-quarters of an hour of some abbreviated play, two further pieces of about twenty minutes each, and a song. Much of the material was a debased version of what the regular theatres showed, and a great deal of it was obscene.
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There were no playbills, only a board with details of the evening’s entertainment outside. One example was:

Marionettes were frequently on the bill at the gaffs, and at fairs across the country. By the 1870s some marionette companies were substantial outfits, having five or six wagons touring in annual circuits, performing on stages set up at each stop for up to seven hundred people nightly. Thomas Holden, a later Victorian puppeteer, had a stage that was eight feet deep, and a proscenium arch fourteen feet across. Maria Marten was one of the touring staples, in the repertory of companies in the Midlands, Yorkshire, Wales and even into Europe.
The Times
report of a police raid on a penny-gaff in 1844 noted that the play being performed by ‘automaton figures. made to move with wires’ was
Maria Martin, or, The Red Barn Murder.
The police took into custody not only eighty-three audience members, but also ‘the wretch Corder, and his victim, Maria Martin; also the figure of death’.
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Later Clunn Lewis, the proprietor of a long-lasting marionette company, claimed that Corder’s son came to see his family perform; Charles Middleton, another proprietor, countered by saying that in the 1860s his company had from delicacy refrained from performing in Colchester, where a surviving Corder lived.

The youth audience was avid, and penny-bloods quickly appeared. ‘Penny-bloods’ was the original name for what, in the 1860s, were renamed penny-dreadfuls. Each booklet, or ‘number’, consisted of eight (sometimes sixteen) pages, with a single black-and-white illustration on the top half of the front page. Double columns of text filled the remainder, breaking off wherever the final page finished, even in the middle of a sentence. The numbers appeared weekly, and could be bought as they were issued, or in monthly parts of four numbers bound together in a coloured wrapper. Bloods developed out of late-eighteenth-century gothic tales. G.A. Sala, in his youth a blood-writer, later a renowned journalist, described the bloods as ‘a world of dormant peerages, of murderous baronets, and ladies of title addicted to the study of toxicology, of gipsies and brigand-chiefs, men with masks and women with daggers, of stolen children, withered hags, heartless gamesters, nefarious roués, foreign princesses, Jesuit fathers, gravediggers, resurrection-men, lunatics and ghosts’.

The bloods’ astonishing success created a vast new readership for cheap fiction. Between 1830 and 1850 there were probably as many as a hundred publishers of penny fiction – ten for every one publisher of ‘respectable’ fiction. Many magazines, previously seen as improving reading for the working classes, now wholeheartedly gave themselves over to this type of tale. The first ever penny-blood, in 1836, was
The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c.,
in sixty numbers.
Gentleman Jack
followed, running for 205 parts over four years, without too much worry for historical accuracy or continuity. (The historical highwaymen Claude Duval, Dick Turpin and Jack Rann all appear as coevals, even though their lives actually spanned a century; Jack Rann is, rather carelessly, killed twice.) The main characteristics of the highwaymen conformed to melodrama type: they were upper-class, usually switched at birth, and yet despite being reared among thieves, they were noble and protected the poor and virtuous. The illustrations, crude to modern eyes, were an essential element. One publisher’s standing instruction to his illustrators was, ‘more blood – much more blood!’ The most successful penny-blood, and what might be the most successful series the world has ever seen, first appeared in 1844, written by G.W.M. Reynolds, politically a Radical, who two years later founded the journal
Reynolds’s Miscellany.
His
Mysteries of London
was based on a French series,
Mysteries of Paris,
by Eugène Sue, but it took on a life of its own, spanning twelve years, 624 numbers, nearly 4.5 million words and a title change to
Mysteries of the Courts of London.

Henry Mayhew interviewed thousands of the working class in the 1840s and 1850s for his monumental study of street life,
London Labour and the London Poor.
These people were Reynolds’ prime market, and Mayhew reported that an ‘intelligent costermonger’, who regularly read bloods aloud to his less literate friends, told him: ‘You see’s an engraving of a man hung up, burning over a fire, and some costers would go mad if they couldn’t learn what he’d been doing, who he was, and all about him.’ The illiteracy of the auditors did not mean they had little vocabulary or understanding, however. The costermonger told Mayhew of ‘one of the passages that took their fancy wonderfully’: ‘With glowing cheeks, flashing eyes, and palpitating bosom, Venetia Trelawney rushed back into the refreshment-room, where she threw herself into one of the arm-chairs … scarcely had she thus sunk down upon the flocculent cushion, when a sharp click … met her ears; and. her wrists were caught in manacles which sprang out of the arms of the treacherous chair. ‘ Anyone who was happy to hear about flocculent cushions and palpitating bosoms could take most things in their stride.

In the1860s, after highwaymen and evil aristocrats, the next penny development was the remorseless policeman hunting down criminals. A Corder blood merged the two genres. The evil William Corder, hoping to marry ‘lady Amelia’, has first to ‘dispose’ of his illegitimate child by Maria, who stands between ‘Amelia, happiness and myself!’ Maria threatens to tell Amelia of her situation, and, ‘yelling in demoniac rage and ungovernable passion, the sinful man’ drives his knife ‘into her throbbing breast, from which the fell demon had torn the covering’, shoots her for good measure and buries her in the barn. Now Captain Dash, a notorious highwayman, appears at Corder’s ‘grand masked ball’ and reveals all, before taking up a siege position in the Red Barn. Dash turns out to be Maria’s rejected suitor, who loved her truly and became a highwayman from grief. There is no date on this publication, but it must be post-1860, as a detective appears to tidy away everything at the end, and a further title is advertised on the back cover: ‘Lightning Dick, the Young Detective’ – boy detectives first appeared in the 1860s.

Melodrama, too, took Maria Marten to its heart. The earliest stage version of the story was announced at the Pavilion Theatre, Mile End, shortly after the trial, and there is a brief outline of the scenes in the playbill. In Act I, Corder promises to marry Maria, but is already planning her betrayal: ‘The deed were bloody, sure, but I will do’t …’ After Maria’s murder, her mother wakes from a nightmare: ‘Help, help! My child! I saw her, sure, lifeless, smeared with blood! ‘Twas in the Red Barn! – and there stood Corder with a pickaxe digging out her grave.’ When Mr Marten discovers the body, there is an ‘affecting scene’: ‘she was the darling of my age, the prop of my existence’. In the final scene in Bury Gaol, Maria appears to Corder as a ghost. His last words are ‘Guilt, guilt … I am, I am her murderer!’

This story remained a favourite: a version in Cheltenham in 1828 had Miss Marten shot in front of the audience’s eyes; a production in Weymouth introduced gypsies into the plot (this element swiftly infiltrated most productions, usually in the guise of Pharos Lee, the renamed Runner); there was a Welsh version in 1829, in Monmouth and later in Cardiff; an undated production in Swansea; a production in Hull advertised ‘Maria Marlin [sic], the Pride of the Village’, who after death conducts her mother to her resting place ‘IN A FLAME OF FIRE’. In an early 1860s version, James Lee, the Bow Street Runner who had arrested Corder, now aged seventy-six, recreated his arrest onstage for a benefit performance.
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All of these productions conformed to the standard melodrama casting, with Corder played by the ‘heavy’; Mr Marten the ‘second heavy’, or ‘heavy father’; Tim Bobbin, the comic servant, by the ‘first low comedian’; Mrs Marten the ‘character old woman’; and Maria herself, the ‘leading lady’.

Despite the multiplicity of productions, only two Red Barn scripts survive from the nineteenth century, one from what may be the Swansea production, the second from an 1890s northern touring company. The Swansea production conforms to all the standard melodrama requirements: it has the aged father blessing his child’s forthcoming marriage, the comic servants, the villain resolved on murder, the beautiful heroine pleading for her life ‘For my aged parents’ sake’, ‘the voice of Heaven conveying to a mother’s heart the murder of her darling child’, and finally, forgiveness for the sinner, amidst scenic effects in the condemned cell:
‘Ghost music. Blue fire. The spirit of Maria Marten appears.’
Corder confesses, ‘Bell
tolls. Characters form picture
[that is, stand frozen in a tableau].
Blue fire.’

By the 1890s, melodrama was no longer treated entirely seriously. A Manchester revival had music-hall turns interpolated into the story: ‘Sometimes the actor brings in a sly sentence in a burlesque of a line in
Hamlet,
and sometimes the house is made to roar over an allusion to a great cabbage which is brought on the stage.’ There was also a role for the ‘intelligent donkey, Jerry’, who would ‘prove that all men are descended from donkeys’, not to mention an unexplained ‘statue song’ and some dancing.

Long before the intelligent donkey took over, more frightening murderers were to stalk the stage. These were two Irishmen living in Edinburgh: William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare were, if you will, pioneers of capitalism, meeting rising demand with a more efficient supply. Medical schools officially used only the corpses of executed criminals for dissection, but by the late 1820s demand far outstripped the number of criminals executed – in Surgeons’ Square, Edinburgh, alone there were six lecturers on anatomy, all of whom required bodies on which to demonstrate. Thus, most medical schools quietly dealt with resurrection men, men who stole recently buried corpses from cemeteries. This was semi-illegal (‘semi’ because dead bodies in law belonged to no one; resurrectionists could be charged only with stealing grave clothes), but for the most part the trade was winked at.

The resurrection market was, however, tightly controlled, and two good-for-nothings like Burke and Hare had no hope of entering this macabre profession. These two men, whose names became synonyms for brutal murder, stumbled into their occupation by chance. Burke had been a navvy on the Union Canal, and then a cobbler; Hare kept a poor man’s lodging house in Tanner’s Close, where a third-share in a bed could be purchased for 3d. a night. Sometime in 1827, Burke and his common-law wife Helen McDougal moved in with Hare and his wife Margaret, after their own lodgings had burned down. Together they drank and got through life as best they could until a pensioner named Dougal died owing Hare rent. Burke and Hare recouped the debt by selling his body to Dr Knox, who ran one of Edinburgh’s three anatomy schools. To their astonishment, they received £7.10s. for the body – easily six months’ pay for an unskilled labourer. They lived off this windfall for the entire winter, and it was only in the new year that they realized that even £7.10s. would not keep them for ever. But old, frail people with no family ties don’t die on command. Then they had their brainwave – old, frail people with no family ties died every day among Edinburgh’s underclass, and no one questioned the death of one pauper more or less. So Burke, the more personable character, lured the unwary to Hare’s lodgings, where the two men gave them a drink and, when they were pleasantly fuddled, asphyxiated them. Then there was another fresh corpse for Dr Knox, and another few months’ income for the Burke and Hare families. In February 1828 an old woman, name unknown, vanished from their lodgings; sometime later that winter so did ‘Joseph the miller’. There were possibly more before Mary Paterson, a local prostitute, was disposed of the same way in April. But the pair were getting reckless. Mary Paterson’s friend Janet Brown had accompanied her when Burke enticed them to his lodgings, offering to keep them in fine style. Mary became stupefied with drink, but Janet left before she reached that stage. There was now a witness to the fact that at least one person had visited the Tanner’s Close lodging house and then vanished. Mary Paterson had been dead only five or six hours when her body was purchased by Dr Knox’s attendant. Yet no questions were asked about her obviously recent death, nor the lack of any indication that she had ever been buried. In his confession, Burke said no questions ever were asked. The assistant who bought Mary Paterson’s corpse was one William Fergusson – later Sir William Fergusson Bart, FRS, Serjeant-Surgeon to Queen Victoria and President of the Royal College of Surgeons.