"The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher"

[fiefoe]

I didn't hold out much hope, but Kate Summerscale did provide a pretty satisfying solution to this historical mystery in the last chapters. (BEWARE OF TEENAGERS.) Well-researched and well-explained.

• An officer had to wear his uniform even when he was not at work, so that he could never be accused of concealing his identity. He put a band around his wrist to show when he was on duty. Beards and moustaches were banned. Many men grew sideburns instead. At a time when all clothes were a uniform of sorts, the police kit had its merits:
• 'Sagacity' was a quality frequently attributed to detectives, in newspapers and in books. The Times referred to Jack Whicher's 'wonted sagacity'. Dickens praised Charley Field's 'horrible sharpness . . . knowledge and sagacity'. A detective story by Waters alluded to the hero's 'vulpine sagacity'. The word then denoted intuition rather than wisdom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a 'sagacious' beast had a keen sense of smell: the early detectives were being compared, in their quickness and sharpness, to wolves and dogs.
• who had conned a London saddler out of a gun case, an artist out of two enamel paintings, and an ornithologist out of eighteen hummingbird skins.
• Strange doubts, vague distrusts will arise in her mind . . . A deed that sends a shudder through every English home, acquires a social importance which justifies any amount of attention to the subject... The case undermined the very idea that a locked house-hold was safe.
• According to this hypothesis, the eye was a kind of daguerreotype plate, registering impressions that could be exposed like a photograph in a darkroom – even the secrets locked up in a dead eye might be within the reach of the new technologies. This took to an extreme the way the eye had been turned into the symbol of detection: it was not only the 'great detector' but also the great giveaway, the telltale organ.
• Juries showed compassion to women such as Sarah Drake and Sarah Gough, preferring to find them deranged than depraved. They were helped in this by new legal and medical ideas. In the law courts the 'McNaghten rule' had since 1843 allowed 'temporary insanity' to be used as a defence.
• I am of opinion that the night dress she wore when the murder was committed was afterwards burnt or concealed by her, but still she would be apprehensive that the Police might ask her how many night dresses she had when she came from school and to prepare for that contingency, she I believe, resorted to a very artful stratagem to make it appear that the one she was deficient of was lost by the washerwoman, the week after the murder,
• This paper's reporter seemed to see the female suspects in the case diminishing before his eyes, as if slowly consumed by the public's hunger for the sight of them.
• This was the largest gallows crowd since Frederick and Maria Manning had been hanged on the same spot in 1849. On the day of his death Youngman breakfasted on cocoa, bread and butter. Outside, boys played leapfrog beneath the gallows, and the public house facing the 'drop' did a roaring trade.
• Mrs Dallimore was a real-life version of a nineteenth-century fictional heroine: the amateur female detective, as featured in W.S. Hayward's The Experiences of a Lady Detective (1861) and Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective (1864). Her investigations, like those of Mrs Bucket in Bleak House, were as spirited and probing as the inquiries made by her policeman husband and his fellow officers. Inspector Bucket, though, refers to his wife, respectfully, as 'a lady of natural detective genius', while Mrs Dallimore was treated as a gossip and a fool. In theory, detection was understood as a distinctly feminine talent – women had the opportunities for 'intimate watching',
• When Gough was accused in the Wiltshire magistrates' court, Samuel Kent was indirectly accused too: 'If Mr Kent has not yet been put formally upon his trial,' noted Joseph Stapleton, 'he has not the less been subjected to its infamy by the convenient proxy of Elizabeth Gough.'
• Dickens thought that Gough and her employer were the killers. The novelist had lost faith in the detectives' powers of deduction.
• The next two weeks in Road resembled a comic interlude in a tragic play, with Saunders as the buffoon who stumbled onstage to mangle and misunderstand all that had preceded him. He opened and closed the proceedings at whim, forgot the witnesses' names and puffed himself up with mysterious allusions to 'the secrets within my breast', while wandering in and out of the Temperance Hall with a bottle of liquid that according to the Bristol Daily Post 'had very much the appearance of brandy'.
• The reporter from the Morning Star, astounded at the 'absurd proceedings' of the 'crackbrained boggler', said he was caught between 'wonder at [Saunders'] audacity and contempt for his folly'. The Bristol Mercury described the magistrate as 'monomaniacal'. Saunders was an unintentional satirist, a caricature of the amateur detective who saw meaning in every banality, every trivial circumstance, who believed that he alone could unravel a mystery that had foxed the professionals. He felt a right to spy, a duty to speculate. He had a keen 'sense of the profound importance of immaterial statements',
• Foley immediately set to concealing the discovery of the shift. He 'shuddered', he explained to the court, 'to think the man who found it was so foolish as to expose it'. He was sure that the stains were innocent, and that the shift had been hidden, in shame, by a servant. A medical man – Stapleton – had confirmed his own view that the stains had 'natural causes' (that is, they were marks of menstrual blood).
• If the distinction between types of shift was bewildering territory for the police officers, so were the distinctions between types of blood. The ways of identifying menstrual blood and female underwear were hazy, all the more so when the items to be examined were whisked away so quickly. Much of the confusion about the underclothes and their stains was caused by embarrassment.
• evidence was never proof of anything: 'it is only an hypothesis binding together certain facts, though it is at the same time an hypothesis which, by a law of nature, we cannot in certain cases help believing to be the right one'. The Kingswood investigation had unfolded like a nasty joke, a mockery of a detective's skills. It was a reminder that detective work relied on good fortune as well as acuity.
• In the early 1860s the emotions aroused by the Road Hill murder went underground, leaving the pages of the press to reappear, disguised and intensified, in the pages of fiction. On 6 July 1861, almost exactly a year after the murder, the first instalment of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret appeared in Robin Goodfellow magazine. This novel, a huge bestseller when it was published in full in 1862, featured a wicked stepmother (a governess who married a gentleman), a brutal, mysterious murder at an elegant country house, a body thrust into a well; its characters were fascinated with madness and with detective work, and terrified of exposure.
• In prose as heated as that of the sensation novelists, Stapleton urged his readers to 'think of the human hearts that pulsate'
• in the homes of the new middle classes, 'of the human passions that riot there . . . of family wrongs, of family conflicts, of family disgraces, covered over only by the miserable tinsel of gentility; flashing out here and there, fitfully, into a sudden, devouring, and inextinguishable flame'. He likened such families to volcanoes: 'in many an English house-hold, the amenities of social life are found to clothe with grace a rugged and a shallow crust. The tempest . . . gathers strength in those deep recesses where the crater is instinct with fire; and . . . it bursts out, in its fully fury, to hurl parents, children, servants, into one common, inevitable, and promiscuous destruction.'
• He was subscribing here to the theory of racial degeneration: if human beings could evolve, as Darwin argued, they could surely regress as well. A family's decadent past could tell on its children, dragging the race backwards.
• 'Nothing in the world is hidden for ever,' wrote Wilkie Collins in No Name (1862). 'Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned . . . Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes . . . Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.'
• Wagner was a well-known figure, an Eton-and Oxford-educated curate who had used his inherited riches to build five churches in Brighton, for which he commissioned ornate windows and altar-pieces from artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Augustus Pugin and William Morris. He established the seaside town as a centre of the Anglo-Catholic movement.
• The press greeted Constance's confession with astonishment. Several newspapers were reluctant to accept the validity of her statement. After all, some disturbed people committed crimes; others, like the troubled bricklayer who had claimed to have killed Saville Kent, pretended to have done so, perhaps in the hope that confession to a crime might bring relief from a morbid, unfocused sense of guilt and misery.
• 'From twelve or fourteen to eighteen or twenty is that period of life in which the tide of natural affection runs the lowest, leaving the body and the intellect unfettered and unweakened in the work of development, and leaving the heart itself open for the strong passions and overwhelming preferences that will then seize it . . . sad to say, it is the softer sex especially which is said to go through a period of almost utter heartlessness.' Girls were 'harder and more selfish' than boys; in preparation for the sexual passion to come, their hearts were emptied of all tenderness.
• Whicher's account of his investigation at Road Hill in 1860 rehearsed, almost word for word, what he had told the magistrates then. It was as if the story had become an incantation. He expressed no emotion at the turn events had taken – no rancour, no triumph, no relief. Ludlow gave him the opportunity to make clear that the local police had concealed from him their discovery of a bloodstained shift in the boiler hole.
• The Road Hill case had become a battleground for the great religious controversy of the century, the fight between the High and Low elements in the Anglican Church. The Reverend James Davies argued in a pamphlet that Constance Kent's confession proved the value of monastic, Anglo-Catholic institutions.
• Children, he wrote elsewhere, were 'diamond editions of remote ancestors, full of savage whims and impulses'. Many doctors emphasised the madness, disorder, even devilishness that could flourish in young breasts – not all Victorians were set on sweetening or sanctifying the figure of the child.
• the Tichbornes, hired Whicher to unmask the Claimant. The detective was told that he would be paid handsomely if he gave the matter his unceasing attention. Over the next seven years the case claimed not only Whicher's unceasing attention but the attention of the whole country. It was a puzzle so confounding that it brought on a kind of national paralysis. 'It has weighed upon the public mind like an incubus,'
• a house-hold that shudders at his invasion; the indelicacy of a lower-class man accusing a middle-class girl. Most significantly, it translated Whicher into the prototypical detective hero, 'the celebrated Cuff'.
• At the Manchester Aquarium, William discovered that seahorses used sound to communicate:... from the mouth of the usually regarded dumb little fish, and closer inspection elicited that the sound was produced by a complex muscular contraction and sudden expansion of the lower jaw.
• William Saville-Kent's The Great Barrier Reef was published in London in 1893. This beautifully produced volume made the reef famous, and served as the standard reference work for decades. William's silvery photographic plates were reproduced next to written descriptions of the live corals' colours: lemon, myrtle, shrimp pink, apple, crimson, electric blue.
• They joined William and his wife in Hobart. The closeness of these brothers and sisters, who might have been divided by murder, was a reminder of how private, and odd, the emotional life of the family remained. Constance and William kept a constant and delicate connection for as long as both lived.
• Syphilis could have accounted for the several miscarriages that Mrs Kent suffered, as well as the four infants in succession that she saw die.
• But if we hypothesise backwards from the Hutchinsonian teeth, the beginning of the story of the Kent family's tragedy may have been a sexual encounter between Saville's father and a London prostitute in the early 1830s. The clue may have ended in the almost invisible world by which William Saville-Kent was so enthralled, in a thread-like, silvery, twisting creature so tiny that it could be seen only through the glass of a microscope.
• When he publicised the insanity of the first Mrs Kent, or the paralysis and blindness of the second, Samuel Kent had no idea that he might be leaving clues to the corruptions of his own body.
• Throughout the investigation into Saville's murder many had argued that two people must have participated in the crime.
• The letter from Sydney avoided any reference to the murder itself; perhaps this was because there was no explanation that could fail to implicate her accomplice.
• Constance gave herself up in the year before William's twenty-first birthday, when he was due to inherit a £1,000 bequest from their mother.
• Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional – to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.