The Wicked Boy (13 page)

‘Did you ask him not to kill her before the knife was put up the chimney in your bedroom?'

‘No, I said nothing to him.'

Detective Inspector Mellish showed the jury the suit that Fox had been wearing when arrested. Inspector Gilbert produced the boy's nightshirt that had been found hanging on a line in the kitchen. It was lightly spattered with blood.

Lewis addressed the twelve members of the jury before inviting them to reach a verdict. ‘This case is one of the most revolting, heartless and unnatural ever presented to a jury,' he said. He told them that their chief responsibility was to establish the cause of death, a matter on which Dr Kennedy had been very clear. ‘Not only was there one stab, which went through the heart,' said Lewis, ‘but two, and the knife produced was found on the bed.'

Yet, he reminded the jurymen, they also had the power to name the suspected perpetrator or perpetrators of Emily Coombes's murder and to commit him or them for trial. They would almost certainly name Robert, since he had made a confession; the question was whether they would also commit Fox or Nattie. Lewis acknowledged that the Treasury had withdrawn the case against Nattie, but told the jury that this should not prevent them from naming him if they thought he was implicated in the crime: ‘If the jury should be of opinion that he had knowledge of what was going to be done, and the purpose of it, he would be an accessory before the fact, and as such be liable with the principal.' If Nattie knew why the knife had been bought, Lewis explained, he was – according to the law – guilty along with the person who made the purchase.

He clarified the definition of an ‘accessory before the fact': this was someone who, even if he was not present at the crime, had ‘procured, counselled, commanded or abetted' another person to commit the felony. However, said Lewis, ‘he could not be an accessory if he had countermanded anything that had been said'. Lewis's keen questioning of Nattie on the matter of whether and when he had discouraged Robert from killing their mother was intended to untangle this issue: only if Nattie had tried to stop Robert after the purchase of the knife would he be in the clear.

The Coombes brothers were young, the coroner observed, but ‘the law says that between seven years and fourteen years an infant is liable, and can be charged with felony if the jury is thoroughly well-satisfied that he has the capacity to understand good from evil. Therefore if you are of opinion that one or both of these boys thoroughly understands right from wrong, then they are amenable to the law.'

The jury did not need to deal with the possibility that John Fox was an ‘accessory after the fact', Lewis said, and should commit him for trial only if they believed that he had been involved in the murder plot. His conduct after the killing fell outside the jurisdiction of the inquest, which dealt with just the death and not its aftermath.

The jury retired, and after an hour and ten minutes delivered the verdict towards which the coroner had been guiding them: ‘Wilful Murder against Robert Allen Coombes, and as an accessory before the fact against Nathaniel, inasmuch as he conspired with his brother Robert to murder his mother, and he never did anything to prevent his brother carrying out the dreadful deed.'

The foreman, Horlock, commended the police on the manner in which they had conducted the case and offered the jury's condolences to the husband and relatives of Emily Coombes. The jurors signed a document attesting to their verdict, and Lewis sent a certificate to the registrar at Somerset House, giving the cause of Emily Coombes's death as ‘wilful murder'.

The coroner issued a warrant for the re-arrest of Nathaniel George Coombes. Nattie was taken back into custody and delivered to Holloway by Detective Sergeant Don. He was to remain in gaol, with his brother and John Fox, until the September sessions of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey.

Horlock added a rider to the jury's verdict: ‘We consider that the Legislature should take some steps to put a stop to the inflammable and shocking literature that is sold, which in our opinion leads to many a dreadful crime being carried out.'

‘There can't be any difference of opinion about that,' said Lewis.

In the mid-1890s the prevalence of
penny dreadfuls
(as they were known in the press) or
penny bloods
(as they were known to shopkeepers and schoolboys) was a subject of great public concern. ‘
Tons of this trash
is vomited forth from Fleet Street every day,' observed the
Motherwell Times
in 1895, ‘and inwardly digested by those whose mental pabulum is on a level with the stuff for which it craves.' More than a million boys' periodicals were being sold a week, most of them to working-class lads who had been taught to read in the state-funded board schools set up over the previous two decades. An Act of Parliament of 1870 had given local authorities the power to enforce school attendance, and successive Acts made elementary education compulsory (in 1880) and then free (in 1891). Between 1870 and 1885, the number of children at elementary school trebled, and by 1892 four and a half million children were being educated in the board schools. The new wave of literate boys sought out penny fiction as a diversion from the rote-learning and drill of the school curriculum, and then from the repetitive tasks of the mechanised industries to which many of them progressed. Since cheap magazines were traded on street corners, in playgrounds and factory yards, each issue could have many readers. Penny fiction was Britain's first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young, and was often held responsible for the decay of literature and of morality.

The bloods sold for a halfpenny, a penny or tuppence, depending on the length of the story, while
proper novels for boys
 – whether
Robinson Crusoe
or
The Prisoner of Zenda
, the romances of Walter Scott or the adventures of Jules Verne – cost two or three shillings each. Most of Robert's novelettes were sixty-four-page pamphlets priced at tuppence, their titles picked out in scarlet and yellow on vividly illustrated covers. At eight and a half inches tall and six inches wide, they were small enough to slip inside a jacket pocket, or between the leaves of a textbook or a prayerbook. They were sold by newsagents, tobacconists, confectioners and chandlers.

A week after Robert and Nattie's arrest,
a
St James's Gazette
journalist
was assigned to analyse the contents of every cheap boys' weekly that he could lay his hands on. He read thirty-six different titles, some of which he said had a circulation of more than 300,000, and he reported on the results over several issues of the newspaper. The task was ‘repulsive and depressing', he said; the writing ‘brutalised my whole consciousness', reviving ‘the fundamental instinct of savagery inherent in us all. It disgusts, but it attracts; as one reads on the disgust lessens and the attraction increases.' The Coombes boys, he concluded, ‘with their intelligence scientifically developed at the expense of the ratepayers, had been wound up to regard murder as a highly superior kind of “lark” by a sedulous study of the worst kind of gory fiction and cut-throat newspaper'.

In fact, most of the books in Robert's collection, though slapdash and hackneyed in style, were not particularly gory. Earlier in the century, penny pamphlets had contained monstrous, Gothic tales – they were dubbed ‘dreadfuls' because they elicited terror – but they now consisted chiefly of detective mysteries, Westerns, futuristic fantasies, tales of pirates, highwaymen, hunters and explorers.
The adventure yarns
were strikingly manly productions, heavily influenced by Henry Rider Haggard's
King Solomon's Mines
(1885), whose hero boasts that ‘there is not a petticoat in the whole history', and Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
(1883), which according to Arthur Conan Doyle marked the beginning of the ‘modern masculine novel'.

Many of the stories that Robert read were English re-issues of
New York dime novels
, among them the Jack Wright submarine tale; the Buffalo Bill adventure; a fable about the medieval crusades; and a mystery featuring Joe Phoenix, a hard-boiled Manhattan detective with an astonishing capacity for impersonation and disguise. These stories had their share of alluring women (with full, red lips, lithe figures, bright golden hair floating behind them) and of exciting violence. The brave warrior in
The Secret of Castle Coucy
; or, a Legend of the Great Crusade
leaps on his French foe with an axe, ‘and with one tremendous thrust sent the spike between the two blades of the axe right into Gaston's breast, piercing mail-shirt and cuirass, and casting the proud knight to the earth, gasping for breath, and uttering groans of irrepressible agony'. The detective hero of
Cockney Bob's Big Bluff
feels ‘a tingling, burning, electric thrill all over his person' when he comes upon a crook. ‘The strange and subtile power he possessed was becoming aroused. In his soul there was a mad tumult of fury.'

The novelist James Joyce
, who was born in the same year as Robert Coombes, wrote in his short story ‘An Encounter' about the cheap adventure tales circulated secretly in Dublin schools. Joyce's narrator recalls how he used to be enthralled by Wild West stories and American detective fiction featuring ‘unkempt fierce and beautiful girls'. The boy's teacher reprimanded his pupils for reading such rubbish, but as soon as ‘the restraining influence of the school was at a distance', the narrator recalls, ‘I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which these chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me.' Though he and his friends played at Indians in the streets near his house, he longed for ‘real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home. They must be sought abroad.' The boy and a friend skipped school one day to visit the city quays, lured by the big ships and the wide sea. As they rested in a field after watching the commotion at the docks, they were approached by a well-spoken man in a shabby suit who talked to them of literature – Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer Lytton – and of the pleasure of administering warm whippings to boys. Unsettled by their encounter, a real adventure that they had not anticipated, the boys hurried home in time for tea.

The dreadfuls had their defenders.
In an article of 1888
, Robert Louis Stevenson recalled with rapture how he had been ‘mastered' by penny fiction as a boy: ‘I do not know that I ever enjoyed reading more.' Yet most commentators were alarmed by the rise of escapist stories for the young.
Every month, it seemed
, the newspapers reported on children led astray by such yarns. In 1889 two schoolboys aged eleven and thirteen absconded from West Ham with a pistol, an old dagger and a terrier dog, and their parents informed the magistrates that the boys' minds had been turned by reading penny dreadfuls. In 1892 two Dundee runaways aged twelve and fourteen were apprehended in Newport, Wales, in possession of a revolver, a hundred ball cartridges, a travelling rug and a handwritten document: ‘Directions for skedaddle: Steal the money; go to the station, and get to Glasgow. Get boat for America. On arriving there, go to the Black Hills and dig for gold, build huts, and kill buffalo; live there and make a fortune.' In 1893 a Yorkshire boy of fifteen stole £25 from his employer, a ship's chandler, and then took the train to London with the intention of sailing for Australia. When he was caught his father said he had found hidden in the boy's room a novelette entitled
The Adventures of the Brave Boy and the Bushrangers
.

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of ‘suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had ‘an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind. The jury was inclined to agree: ‘Deceased committed suicide whilst in an unsound condition of mind, probably produced by reading novelistic literature of a sensational character.'

Occasionally, penny dreadfuls were associated with murder.
In 1888 two eighteen-year-olds
were charged with killing the timekeeper at a sawmill in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. According to the
Daily News
, the ‘natural depravity' of the lads had ‘found a strong stimulus in the penny dreadfuls of one sort or another which were found in their lodgings'. One of the accused men, though, said that he had attacked the timekeeper because he had docked his pay by more than two shillings – the timekeeper was ‘a master's man', the lad said, and not a friend to the workers. The suspect wrote a letter to a local newspaper and signed it ‘Another Whitechapel Murderer', an allusion to the ongoing murder spree by ‘Jack the Ripper' in East London. When the case came to trial, the jury was faced with a tangle of possible causes for the crime, as they would be in the Coombes case: social discontent, financial need or greed, innate depravity, fantasies of violence inspired by fictional or real-life stories. The men were found guilty, and the judge ignored the jury's recommendation to mercy on account of their age; both were hanged.

Some cheap periodicals for boys tried to dissociate themselves from the dreadfuls. ‘No more penny dreadfuls!' proclaimed the new
Halfpenny Marvel
, founded by
the publishing magnate Alfred Harmsworth
in 1893. ‘These healthy stories of mystery adventure, etc, will kill them.' The next year Harmsworth produced another halfpenny paper, the jingoistic
Union Jack
, copies of which were found in the back parlour of 35 Cave Road: ‘Parents need not fear when they see their children reading the “Union Jack”,' the editor announced. ‘There will be nothing of the “dreadful” type in our stories. No tales of boys rifling their employers' cash-boxes and making off to foreign lands, or such-like highly immoral fiction products.'