The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders

Murder was a rare treat in the 19th century. In 1810, in England and Wales, with a population of ten million, only 15 people were convicted of murder. I say ‘treat’, because the Victorians and their precursors lapped up information about murders — the more grisly and gruesome, the better. Posters were designed, plays written, puppets carved, waxworks sculpted, and scenes of crime became tourist attractions, dead bodies and all.

Flanders gives a scholarly, well-researched yet eminently readable account of ‘How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime’ (as the subtitle puts it).

The brutal murder of a hosier, his wife, baby and apprentice one December night in 1811 in London sets the scene. As the bodies were left in situ until the jury had seen them, there was plenty of opportunity for ‘murder sightseeing’ of the gore-splattered rooms, not to mention the bodies.

After three more murders a suspect was arrested, but evaded justice by committing suicide in prison. Crowds lined the streets to see his dead body paraded on a cart, right leg manacled, and then watched as a stake was driven through his heart before the body was tipped into a grave.

Victorian murders not only had a ready audience; they also provided literary stimulation. The murder of Maria Marten, a Suffolk mole-catcher’s daughter killed by her lover at the Red Barn, was taken up by the newspapers, by preachers for their sermons, by strolling players at fairs, and became a staple for travelling theatre.

The ‘resurrection’ men gave rise to equally compulsive reading for the Victorians. They dug up fresh corpses for Edinburgh medical school to dissect. Burke and Hare took this a step further by creating the corpses themselves, paid £8-10 per body.

When caught, Hare turned King’s evidence and Burke was sentenced to be hanged, dissected and anatomised. There was a public dissection for grandees and medical students; the next day, 30,000 or so people filed through the anatomy theatre to look. The papers had a field day, describing apparent eyewitness accounts of the murders, and the pair even became immortalised in a children’s skipping rhyme.

Flanders’s light-heartedly macabre and hugely informative book makes fascinating reading. It’s not only a romp through the grisly details of Victorian murders, factual and fictional, but a well-chronicled study of Victorian social attitudes and life. It’s peppered with blood and guts, dismembered bodies and murdered toddlers in privies, but also with wonderful snippets like the Rugeley poisoner, Dr William Palmer, on his way to the scaffold in heavy rain, mincing along ‘like a delicate schoolgirl’ to avoid wetting his feet in puddles. The local paper reported that his hanging attracted 100,000 spectators.

And we learn that, for contemporary readers, the title of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist would have signified that this was a book about crime and criminals – for ‘to twist’ was slang for ‘to hang’.

In 1853, a German traveller was told by an Englishwoman that if he wanted to see ‘our popular festivals’, then ‘Go to Newgate on a hanging day’. Attitudes to capital punishment may have changed (the last UK public execution was in 1964), but murder and murderers still make riveting reading.

Judith Flanders will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 5 with Kate Colquhoun, whose book Mr Brigg’s Hat is about a Victorian murder. See www. oxfordliteraryfestival.com, box office 0870 343 1001.