As
they searched the thick shrubbery
to the left of the front drive,
Nutt remarked that they would
find a dead child if the living one was not found. He then struck off to the right, towards a servants' privy hidden in the bushes, and Benger followed. They came to the privy and looked in: a small pool of clotted blood lay on the floor.
"See, William," said Benger, "what we have got to see."
"Oh, Benger," said Nutt. "It is as I predicted."
I don't have enough time for a proper post just now, but I wanted to talk briefly about Kate Summerscale's very enjoyable true-crime popular history, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which I powered through in about a day and a half over the festive break. The murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in June 1860 was a sensation in its day, and proves ghoulishly fascinating in the retelling. Copious amounts of material about the case survives; there are extensive notes from the police investigation, including witness statements and detailed descriptions of the look and layout of Road Hill House (the scene of the crime). Contemporary newspapers, too, provide plenty of cultural detail on the events were received: speculations on the culprit and his or her motive, and commentary on the wider implications (you won't be surprised to learn that, much like with similar cases today, Saville's murder was seized upon as a symbol of all that was wrong with modern society). The lure of the unsolved drew in the contemporary reporting and reading public, just as it does many of us today:
The breast flannel was one of several loose ends in the case that the investigators - police, reporters, newspaper readers - tried to endow with meaning, to turn into a clue. While a murder went unsolved, everything was potentially significant, packed with secrets. The observers, like paranoiacs, saw messages everywhere. Objects could regain their innocence only when the killer was caught.
The newspapers also showcased much excited discussion of the lead figure in the investigation, Detective Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard. Scotland Yard was founded in 1842, and the idea of a detective was still a novelty in 1860; popular discourse about crime, criminals and the people whose job it was to catch them was in the process of being reshaped, and Whicher was right at the heart of that process.
Summerscale retells the saga chronologically, through novelistic snapshots of the investigation in the order it unfolded - as in the passage quoted at the top of this post - interspersed with chapters exploring the historical and cultural background to the events: the life of the Kent family prior to June 1860, the development of detective characters in popular fiction (Whicher is compared to Wilkie Collins' characters on several occasions), discussions of how other similar criminal cases were investigated, reported, and tried, and - when it becomes a possible factor in the Kent case - the contemporary treatment of mental illness:
Nineteenth-century physicians who specialised in mental illness, known as mad-doctors or alienists, believed that most madness was hereditary: the mother was the strongest source, and the daughter the most likely recipient. The first Mrs Kent was said to have undergone a bout of insanity while pregnant with Constance, and a child born in such circumstances was thought all the more liable to go mad herself: in 1881 George Henry Savage wrote that two babies he encountered at Bethlehem asylum "were saturated with insanity while still in the womb . . . these infants seemed to be perfect little devils from birth". Another theory - psychological rather than physiological - was that brooding on one's hereditary taint of madness could itself bring it on (this idea drove the plot of Wilkie Collins' 'Mad Monkton', a short story of 1852). The result was the same.
I'm not sure the structure quite worked all the way through; I got the feeling that the case's resolution was being unnecessarily dragged out for the length of the book, the drama played up through cliffhangers and deliberate withholding of information, perhaps because it was assumed a popular audience wouldn't want to read cultural history without the juicy promise of a whodunnit revelation to keep them turning the pages. Nonetheless, the depth and richness of the picture Summerscale is able to build of this well-to-do family is consistently compelling.
The family at Road Hill House was divided. At the head of the family was Samuel Kent. His first wife, Mary Ann, had died in 1852, leaving him with four children: two unmarried daughters, in their late 20s by the time of the murder, and a daughter (Constance) and a son (William), who were teenagers in 1860 and spent much of the year away at boarding school. The year after Mary Ann's death, Samuel remarried, and by 1860 the pair had three new children, one of whom was three-year-old Saville. A clear hierarchy developed within the household, inscribed by the division of space in the building: Samuel and his new wife Mary and their children slept on the first floor, while the children of the first marriage shared three bedrooms on the top floor, next to the live-in servants' quarters. Resentments abound between the new wife and the old children.
As the investigation unfolds, all manner of rumours and lies emerge. Was Samuel having an affair with the nurse? Was Saville really his child, or the son of his own recently-deceased black-sheep elder son? Why did Constance and William attempt to run away from home four years before? Had Mary Ann been mentally ill, and why might Samuel want to imply that it might have passed down to Constance? Were the elder children facing the prospect of being shut out of their inheritance - particularly frightening to the unmarried daughters, who had limited means of supporting themselves - as they had been shut out of the family space of the first floor?
The process of learning about the family's dynamics proves inseparable from Whicher's work of trying to identify the killer and the motive. As Summerscale puts it, "Whicher's job was not just to find things out, but to put them in order. The real business of detection was the invention of a plot."
Given my own interests, I found the sections that shone a light on how gender assumptions shaped and were expressed, by both the investigation and its media commentary, particularly intriguing. This is marked from early on, as the first questions the members of the household were asked - and the first things they themselves thought it important to mention - included gendered judgements of their behaviour. Here, for example, is what was said about the nurse, Elizabeth Gough:
All the Misses Kent came to kiss the boy's body, as did Elizabeth Gough. Afterwards the nursemaid told Mrs Kent that she had kissed "the poor little child". According to one report, Mrs Kent said that Gough "appeared very sorry and cried because he was dead"; but according to another, she said that Gough "frequently spoke of him with sorrow and affection, but I did not see her cry". The female suspects in the case were constantly scrutinised for kisses and tears, the tokens of innocence.
[NB: 'spoilers' in the next bit, so don't read the rest if you'd like to be kept in suspense for the book.]
Particularly striking is the rationale advanced in some quarters when Constance, at length, confessed to the boy's murder. Many sources did not believe it; of those who did, many attributed her actions to the putative madness she was thought to have inherited from her mother. (The London Review, even hinted darkly that the papacy was somehow behind her confession!) But one newspaper bravely struck out in what can only be described as an idiosyncratic direction:
The Times, though, took Constance at her word, and offered an explanation for the crime that assigned feelings of violent hatred to half of the English population. "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. And when a girl happened also to have a "peculiar brooding, imaginative, inventive tendency ... the dream seems to grow and become an inner life, unchecked by social feeling and by outward occupation, till a mere idea, equally causeless and wicked, fills the soul. [...] Constance Kent, it is said, only did what myriads of her age and sex only wish should come to pass by other agency than their own."
Not for the Times writer the idea - that we tend to assume everyone back then assumed - of femininity as something weak and gentle and passive. No! Boys are the sensitive ones, whereas girls - especially ones who have, like, imaginations and stuff - are all sex-crazed would-be killers.
The Victorians: always more complicated than you think they were!
~~Nic