The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

The horse and gig were easy for the Surrey to get hold of: they had only been hired by the murderers. Other, more personal, items were also available. Probert had owed rent on the cottage, and an auction quickly sold off most ordinary household goods at ordinary household prices.* While purchasers were not plentiful, many came for a day out as murder tourists, wandering through the grounds and, for a shilling, even the cottage itself. One publication claimed that five hundred people had paid the entrance fee. Soon a little sightseeing route was worked out: ‘At Elstree the curious made their first halt. Here the grave of Mr. Weare, in Elstree Church-yard, was visited, and the pond, about a quarter of a mile out of the village … The Artichoke Inn, to which the corpse was carried, and where the Coroner’s Inquest was held. Mr. Field, the landlord, being one of the Jury, was therefore fully competent to the task of answering the numerous questions put to him by his customers. Here the sack, in which the remains of the victim had been carried from Probert’s cottage, was shown. The marks of blood which it bears gave it peculiar interest.’

Just as with a sightseeing trip today, the circuit could be finished off with a souvenir: a lucky few managed to buy a bit of the sack; for others, a Staffordshire pottery figure was soon available; those with less money could buy a book at the cottage, complete with a map of Weare’s posthumous journeys. Those with no money at all could still take away a memento: the Caledonian Mercury reported that by mid-November the hedge outside the cottage was vanishing, filched ‘by those curious people, who consider a twig from the hedge, through which the remains of a murdered man had been dragged, must furnish a treat to their equally curious friends’.

Murder tourists came from all walks of life. As late as 1828, Walter Scott recorded in his journal that he and his companions travelled out of their way to visit Gill’s Hill Lane and do the circuit. After taking in the lane and the ponds, they went on to the cottage itself, now partially dismantled, and were shown around by a ‘truculent looking hag’ for 2s.6d. Five years after the event, the ‘hag’ could ask, and receive, nearly a week’s pay for a workman.

Private entrepreneurship was one thing. Theatre was another. After the Surrey’s first night, the Lord Chamberlain stepped in and ordered the play to be withdrawn. Furthermore, Thurtell’s solicitor swore out an affidavit for an attempt to pervert the course of justice by showing Thurtell and Hunt committing murder onstage before they were tried, much less convicted. The management attempted to claim that there was no resemblance at all between the play and the murder of William Weare, but the purchase of the gig and the white-faced horse made this impossible to sustain.

When the Hertfordshire Assizes, at which Thurtell and Hunt were to be tried, opened on 4 December, Thurtell’s lawyer immediately applied for a postponement because of pre-trial prejudice, claiming that the press had caused ‘the grossest injustice towards his client’. As if to prove his case, his affidavit was immediately reprinted in The Times, despite a judicial ban on its publication, as it contained a compilation of all the worst articles that had appeared. The papers followed every twist and turn of these legal arguments. The Morning Chronicle gave thirteen of its daily twenty columns to the subject, and it also produced snappy summaries: the judge, for example, ‘loves the Press, but wishes it had fewer readers’. The crusading liberal paper the Examiner, which had been founded in 1808 by Leigh Hunt and his brother as a Radical voice to counter both the Tory government and the (then) Prince Regent’s Whig cronies, agreed: the judge ‘has been guided throughout by that keen and constant hatred of the press which is the mainspring of two-thirds of the political sentiments of his party … And why is all this? Because the press is the great organ of knowledge. To keep the body of the people in the dark, is the dear and leading aim of many …’ The leader-writer added that the law as it stood did not permit the accused to know what the prosecution’s case would be: ‘A pretty law, then, truly!’ which forbids a man to know what he will have to refute. The newspapers’ job, as he saw it, was to supply that lack.

The trial was postponed for a month, to January 1824, although the press excitement then was no less. The Chronicle printed a supplementary sheet after the first day, and also doubled its normal four pages to eight for a full report; on the second day it returned to four pages, but devoted three of them, plus a leader, to the trial. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle devoted five of its six pages to the trial. The Chronicle calculated that over the two days of the trial there were a hundred horses reserved to carry the reports from Hertford by express, to feed the insatiable demand. Even local papers had expresses: the Ipswich Journal finished its report of the opening of the assizes with a triumphant, ‘BY EXPRESS. HERTFORD. FRIDAY, ONE O’CLOCK’.

The Observer printed five pictures in its report – a great novelty, as technology was just beginning to permit the use of engravings in newspapers, instead of the clumsier, and slower-to-produce, woodblocks. Another paper included illustrations of the court, maps of Gill’s Hill, and views of Probert’s cottage. Pictures could also be purchased separately. A journalist returned to London after the adjournment in company with ‘a tradesman from Oxford-street, who had been frightened out of his wits. by hearing that pictures of Gill’s Hill Cottage were actionable, for he had brought “some very good likenesses of the Pond to sell”, and had been obliged to take them out of the window of [his shop], almost the very moment they were placed there!’

The trial itself almost reads as an anti-climax. At this period, prisoners accused of a felony could have legal counsel, but only for advice and to deal with points of law. How rigorously this was applied varied from circuit to circuit, but the theory was that it was up to the prosecution to prove its case so well that no defence could be mounted. And in this particular case there was no defence: publicans and stablemen between London and Gill’s Hill all testified to seeing Thurtell with Weare in the gig. Then Weare vanished, while the pistol with human remains on it was found just where Thurtell had been seen searching. Items belonging to Weare were in the possession of the three men, and Hunt knew where the body was to be found. Thurtell spoke in his own defence, as the law permitted. He read out a list he had compiled of wrongful convictions throughout history, but one journalist thought it was so long that it was counterproductive: everyone stopped listening.*He blamed everybody except himself for his misfortunes: his creditors, his solicitor, fellow merchants, the insurance office – all had betrayed him. As to the murder itself, Hunt and Probert had done it, he said. Hunt tried to read his defence, but was so overcome he managed to read only a bit of it ‘in a poor dejected voice, and then leant his wretched head upon his hand’ while someone else read the rest.

The law required that trials were held continuously, unless the jury demanded a break. Thurtell and Hunt’s trial began at eight o’clock on the morning of 6 January, and ran without pause until after nine o’clock that night, when the jury called a halt. The two defence speeches and the summing-up were heard the next day, after which the jury may not even have retired to consider their verdict: the journals merely say the members ‘conferred’ for twenty minutes. Hunt was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to transportation; Thurtell was found guilty of murder, and the only sentence for that was death.*

Immediately, the horse expresses set off for the printers. For some, even that wasn’t fast enough. The artist William Mulready, having attended the trial, quickly sent a long account to his patron in Northumberland – the trial finished on a Wednesday, and this way he would receive the news long before the Sunday newspapers’ account.† By then, the execution would have taken place – forty-eight hours from verdict to gallows was the rule, unless a Sunday intervened.

This compression was a godsend to the newspapers, the weeklies in particular: they could print the trial, verdict and execution, all in one. The Observer advertised that its execution special would be double its usual length (which was only two pages), and would cost 14d., instead of 7d. Bell’s advertised the same: a double issue, at double the price, and, for its sporting readership, ‘The same publication will contain an account of the Great Fight for Six Hundred Sovereigns between SPRING and LANGAN, for the rival Champions of England and Ireland. written by the celebrated PIERCE EGAN.’ Thurtell’s supporters loved a good fight, and ‘among the sporting circles bets are still offered on the result of the trial, and in many cases these are connected with the fight between Spring and Langan’, noted the Chronicle. § The connection continued to be made. An anti-capital-punishment essay from the 1860s reported on Thurtell’s execution: ‘It is said that the championship of England was to be decided. on the morning of the day on which Thurtell was executed, and that, when he came out on the scaffold, he inquired privily of the executioner if the result had yet become known. Jack Ketch*was not aware, and Thurtell expressed his regret that the ceremony in which he was chief actor should take place so inconveniently early in the day.’

For those who could not afford newspapers, Thurtell broadsides had been pouring out over the past months. Many provided updates and trial reports, while others had songs and poetic effusions. One had an ‘action’ picture, with Thurtell dragging Weare’s body into the bushes (this cost double the normal price, 2d.). ‘The Hertfordshire Tragedy; or, the Fatal Effects of Gambling. Exemplified in the Murder of Mr. Weare and the Execution of John Thurtell’, a particularly long example, can stand here for many. It opened with a description of Thurtell’s idyllic childhood, and his poor, loving mother. But then he sets off for that fatal city, London, and

Like many a gay young man,

He mix’d with thoughtless company,

Which thousands has trepan’d [sic].

He soon forgot his mother dear,

And all his friends behind …

From bad to worse he did proceed,

‘mid scenes of guilt and vice,

Until he learn’d the cursed art,

To play with cards and dice.

And from that fatal, fatal day,

His ruin we may date,

Nor were his eyes e’er open’d,

Until it was too late.

The story of his being fleeced by Weare is rehearsed, and then the unsuspecting gambler heads for Hertfordshire.

When they had reached Gill’s Hill Lane,

That dark and dismal place,

Thurtell drew a pistol forth,

And fir’d it in Weare’s face.

The helpless man sprung from the gig,

And strove the road to gain,

But Thurtell pounc’d on him, and dash’d

His pistol through his brains.

Then pulling out his murderous knife,

As over him he stood,

He cut his throat, and, tiger-like,

Did drink his reeking blood.

This was accompanied by what were claimed to be portraits of Thurtell and Hunt, and eight illustrations.

Yet after the verdict was handed down, strangely, Thurtell the monster, Thurtell the drinker of blood, began to disappear, to be replaced by Thurtell the gallant, Thurtell the debonair. One broadside respectfully reported his considerate behaviour on the day of his execution, when he stood under the scaffold: ‘he looked at the crowd, and made a slight bow, instantly every head was uncovered, and many muttered “what a Gentleman”. His appearance at that moment was affecting beyond description.’ In the 1920s the historian G.M. Trevelyan claimed that, a hundred years before, children wrote the sentence ‘Thurtell was a murdered man’ as an exercise in penmanship.

In 1857 George Borrow drew for his middle-class audience a picture entirely in keeping with this debonair post-trial image. In his novel The Romany Rye, the narrator is in money difficulties. ‘A person I had occasionally met at sporting-dinners’ comes to hear of his trouble and lends him £200.

I begged him to tell me how I could requite him for his kindness, whereupon, with the most dreadful oath I ever heard, he bade me come and see him hanged when his time was come. I wrung his hand, and told him I would, and I kept my word. The night before the day he was hanged at H—, I harnessed a Suffolk Punch to my light gig … and … in eleven hours I drove that Punch one hundred and ten miles. I arrived at H—just in the nick of time. There was the ugly jail – the scaffold – and there upon it stood the only friend I ever had in the world. Driving my Punch, which was all in a foam, into the midst of the crowd, which made way for me as if it knew what I came for, I stood up in my gig, took off my hat, and shouted, ‘God Almighty bless you, Jack!’ The dying man turned his pale grim face towards me – for his face was always somewhat grim, do you see – nodded and said, or I thought I heard him say, ‘All right, old chap.’ The next moment – my eyes water.

He concludes philosophically, ‘Well, some are born to be hanged, and some are not; and many of those who are not hanged are much worse than those who are.’

It was said that 40,000 people attended Thurtell’s execution, and afterwards his body was sent to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection by the faculty of medicine and its students, as was standard for felons. In theory, the anatomization process was a matter for the faculty alone, but on the day crowds of people descended on the anatomy theatre. For those who couldn’t be there, The Times reported on the appearance of the body in the dissecting room, and Pierce Egan’s Account of the Trial of John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt carried a notice from the publisher: ‘SPECIAL PERMISSION having been given to the Editor of the MEDICAL ADVISER to examine the body of Thurtell after the execution, a full account of the PECULIAR CRANIOLOGICAL Appearances, with illustrative engravings, will appear in the next Number.’ Rowlandson produced a watercolour of the scene, ‘The Lancett Club at a Thurtell Feast’. (The surgeon doing the dissection is grotesquely caricatured, while the corpse of Thurtell is entirely realistic.)

Despite the finality of death, some found it hard to let go of such a money-spinner. ‘Light be the stones on Thurtell’s bones,’ Thackeray wrote satirically; ‘he was the best friend the penny-a-line men had for many a day. and when he was turned off [hanged], their lamentation was sincere. There are few windfalls like him.’ It was later claimed that James Catnach, the most successful broadside printer of the day, had sold 250,000 Thurtell broadsides, and after his execution he produced yet another, headlined ‘WE ARE ALIVE’, with the space between ‘we’ and ‘are’ so reduced that the unwary read ‘WEARE ALIVE’. Another was less tricksy, and simply lied. ‘The Hoax Discovered; or, Mr. Weare Alive’ claimed that Thurtell had bet Weare that he could be arrested, tried and then, ‘at the very crisis of their fate, the supposed murdered man should appear, stagger the belief of the world, and make John Bull confess his being hoaxed’.

The theatres returned to this profitable subject. At the Coburg, The Hertfordshire Tragedy, or, The Victims of Gaming was back onstage the day after the execution. The Surrey re-offered The Gamblers three days later, and as well as the ‘identical Horse and Gig’, it also promised an eager public that the set now contained the ‘TABLE AT WHICH THE PARTY SUPPED, The SOFA as DESCRIBED to having been SLEPT on, with Other Household Furniture, AS PURCHASED AT THE LATE AUCTION’. In January, the theatre combined two items of popular interest by adding a ‘new scene of Jackson’s Rooms [Jackson was a prize-fighter who taught the gentry], for the purpose of introducing the celebrated Irish Champion’, Langan himself.

The selling of Thurtell went on. A novel, The Gamblers; or, The Treacherous Friend: A Moral Tale, Founded on Recent Facts, by Hannah Maria Jones, appeared, borrowing elements from the play (both have characters named Woodville). The novel also acquiesced in the growing legend of Thurtell’s nobility of spirit. Here Arthur Townley is purely ‘a victim to his own lawless passions’, a noble dupe brought down by ‘hardened villains’. The novel, by one of only two women known to have successfully produced penny-bloods (her speciality was gypsies and gothic subjects), is unimportant except insofar as it may have influenced Edward Bulwer-Lytton. *Bulwer has been called one of the forefathers of the detective novel, and he popularized the outlaw-as-hero in Paul Clifford (1830), a novel with a good-hearted highwayman, and Eugene Aram (1832), this time with a self-sacrificing scholar-murderer (see pp.99–123). In Pelham (1828) his hero is Lord Pelham, who steps in to save a friend from a false accusation of murder. Thornton, the real murderer, is a fairly straightforward portrait of Thurtell. Unlike the prevailing attitudes to Thurtell, Thornton here is not a good-hearted naíf, but has coldly murdered his victim in a botched robbery.

Everything to do with Thurtell had a commercial value. In February 1824 an advertisement in The Times offered for sale the model of the cottage and outbuildings that had been used in court to explain the details of the crime to the jury. The advertisement appeared only once, so presumably the model sold quite quickly. This would hardly be surprising, for the Thurtell legend was growing with every day that separated him from his brutal crime. The most unlikely people were fascinated. The Radical journalist William Cobbett claimed that his son Richard had learned to read ‘to find out what was said about THURTELL, when all the world was talking and reading about THURTELL’. Richard was born in 1804, and was therefore nineteen or twenty when Thurtell came to notoriety, yet the legend made it worth building stories around him. The philosopher Thomas Carlyle also followed the case closely, complaining that, ‘Thurtell being hanged last week, we grew duller than ever.’ He soon cheered himself up, however, with one of his longest-running jokes. An (erroneous) trial report claimed that a witness had considered Thurtell to be respectable ‘because he kept a gig’. Carlyle found this immensely comic, and coined the words ‘Gigmania’ and ‘Gigmanity’ to describe those who judged character by the value of a person’s possessions. George Eliot later expanded this, writing of ‘conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish. proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build’. And in 1848, towards the end of his novel Vanity Fair, Thackeray gave the dangerous Becky Sharpe a law firm named Burke, Thurtell and Hayes – the reader is entirely expected to recognize the three murderers’ names.* And the joke ran and ran. In 1867, in Miss Jane, the Bishop’s Daughter, a novel that used elements of the Constance Kent case (see pp.362–79), the Bishop is advised to put his case ‘into the hands of Bedloe [a seventeenth-century fraudster], Wade and Weare of Thurtell’s Inn … Very respectable solicitors in, ahem! their own line.’

In 1862, this kind of post-mortem approval made Thurtell, Probert and Hunt names to give authority pause. The Marylebone Theatre, a melodrama house, applied for a licence for a play to be called The Gipsey [sic] of Edgware. On the manuscript submitted for approval, in handwriting that appears to be that of the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays himself, notations marking the resemblances between the play and the murders appear in red ink throughout. At the end of the script ‘Turtle’s’ half-sister dies, crying out, ‘You are innocent, I know it.’ Next to this, the censor simply added a large red exclamation point, and the licence was refused.

Another quarter of a century later, the poet Robert Browning remembered a bit of doggerel he had learned as a child:

His throat they cut from ear to ear,

His brains they battered in,

His name was Mr William Weare,

Wot lived in Lyons Inn.*

* * *

When the next great murder to capture the public’s imagination rolled around only four years later, Thurtell was the reference point to which people naturally returned. Maria Marten was the daughter of a mole-catcher in Polstead, a small Suffolk village. She was no better than she should be, having had two illegitimate children by two different men. A third man, a farmer named William Corder, was her current companion, by whom she had a third child. This time she was pressing for marriage. She was last seen in May 1827, heading to meet Corder at his barn on her way to Ipswich to be married. Corder returned to Polstead several times that year, telling her father and stepmother that he and ‘Mrs Corder’ had settled in the Isle of Wight. At first he said she had hurt her hand, and so couldn’t write; then that she had written and her letters must have gone astray. After the harvest, he left Polstead for good. Eleven months after the supposed marriage, her father found his daughter’s remains buried in a shallow grave in the Red Barn (barns in the area were traditionally painted red, but this one quickly became the Red Barn). The local magistrates sent for a Runner to trace Corder, and he was soon arrested in the London suburb of Ealing, where he was now married and the proud co-proprietor of a girls’ school.

Seducer-murders were not unknown, but the details of this one were a newspaper’s dream. First Miss Marten was tidied up, while opprobrium was spread over Corder. From a modestly prosperous tenant farmer, he was transformed into the rich squire of melodrama, preying on the innocent village maiden: one broadside called him the ‘son of an opulent farmer’, ‘living in great splendour’. Miss Marten, by contrast, was ‘a fine young woman’ who had merely formed an ‘imprudent connexion’. George IV, the erstwhile Prince Regent whose numerous affairs had been daily fodder for prints and satire, had come to the throne in 1820; Victorian mores were some time in the future, and the broadsides do not deny her two illegitimate children, they just don’t think they mattered. In one, Miss Marten was ‘of docile disposition’, inculcated with ‘moral precepts’, and her behaviour aroused ‘the esteem and admiration of all’; her little missteps (the children) were caused entirely by a ‘playful and vivacious disposition’; although ‘her conduct cannot be justified, much might be said in palliation’. The Times even commended the father of her second child, for sending financial support; and his letters to his discarded mistress ‘express the goodness of his heart … his conduct throughout has been that of a man and a Christian’.

Corder was condemned untried. He was ‘unfeeling and wretched’, said The Times, adding that he had also attempted to kill his mistress’s second child. The Observer picked up this story, which it elaborated. Corder had offered the child a fig, but – ‘as if by Divine interference’ – it was refused. Miss Marten’s stepmother, the story went on, cut open the fig, to find ‘something in the shape of a pill. in it’. Oddly enough, Mrs Marten did not trouble to question Corder about this, and he next gave the child a pear. Mrs Marten, fruit-examiner-extraordinary, again found a pill in it, and again did nothing – from which we may safely conclude, unlike the newspapers at the time, that the incident never took place. But the newspapers were in full cry: Corder had murdered his child by Miss Marten, they reported; Corder had been involved in forgery; Corder had been engaged with ‘the convict Smith’ in ‘transactions of a felonious nature. such as pig and horse-stealing’. Another report stated that Miss Marten’s first child was by Corder’s own brother.

But the real excitement for the readers was the facts of the murder and its discovery. Corder had persuaded Miss Marten to wear men’s clothes for her trip to the barn: he claimed, falsely, that the village constable was going to arrest her for having no visible support for her surviving child. (A later broadside gives an alternative explanation, that she was dressed this way to throw his disapproving relatives off the track.) Then there was the legend of the discovery of the body. Broadsides and even sermons recounted how Miss Marten’s stepmother had had a dream, three nights running, as in a fairy tale, in which she saw Miss Marten dead and buried in the barn. At these supernatural promptings, she persuaded her husband to go and search the Red Barn. The story of the dream was put in evidence at the inquest, although it is noticeable by its absence at the trial itself, being replaced with a more pragmatic explanation: as Miss Marten’s continuing silence became more worrying, a neighbour remembered that Corder had borrowed a spade on the day of her disappearance, and another person had seen him leaving the barn with a pickaxe. More cynically, the Observer suggested that the Martens had not worried unduly until Corder stopped sending money; then ‘the old people. began to dream about the murder of their child’. Most print outlets, however, were happy to give credence to the dream: ‘For many a long month or more, her mind being sorely oppress’d … she dream’d three nights o’er, Her daughter she lay murdered, under the Red Barn floor.’ Theatres loved it too: W.T. Moncrieff, in an 1842 version of the Red Barn story, The Red Farm, or, The Well of St Marie, noted in his foreword to the printed edition that ‘The extraordinary discovery of a murder … through the agency of a dream, might reasonably be doubted, did not the Judicial Records of our own Criminal History place it beyond all reach of scepticism.’ As late as 1865–66, the dream in particular continued to be a perennial favourite.