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

Another piquant detail was found in Corder’s life after he left Polstead, for he had met his wife by placing advertisements in the Morning Herald and the Sunday Times:

MATRIMONY. – A Private Gentleman, aged 24, entirely independent, whose disposition is not to be exceeded … To any female of respectability. and willing to confide her future happiness in one every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable, as the advertiser is in affluence; the lady must have the power of some property, which may remain in her own possession. should this meet the eye of any agreeable lady, who feels desirous of meeting with a sociable, tender, kind and sympathising companion, they will find this advertisement worthy of notice. Honour and secrecy may be relied on.

Scandalized and thrilled, readers learned that Corder had received more than forty replies from the Herald alone; there had been another fifty-three from the Sunday Times, but by then he was fixed up, so he never bothered to collect them. After the murder the owner of the accommodation address where the replies to the newspaper advertisement had been sent published them in a pamphlet, to the delight of all. In Douglas Jerrold’s play Wives by Advertisement, a send-up of Corder’s love life, the Hon. Jenkins Cigar advertises: ‘To the fair sex possessed of ten thousand a-year! A desirable opportunity! The advertiser is a gentleman aged five-and-twenty … has been inoculated and had the measles. he wears his own hair, and his moustachios, though in the stubble at present, promise to be forward in the spring. The advertiser wishes to meet with an agreeable partner. No letters received unless brought in a carriage and four …’*

After a number of fairly standard farcical scenes, Cigar, ‘alias Tomkins, alias Winks, alias Puppylove’, is arrested, and the remaining characters, having learned their lesson, sing:

… oh, ye youths, the dame for ever scorn That’s advertised with horses, pigs, and corn! …

And, oh, ye maids, from husbands turn away, If advertized with razors, dogs, and hay! …

Jerrold’s farce was at least staged after the trial. The same could not be said for many others. A dramatic version of the murder was reported to have been presented at the Stoke-by-Nayland Fair in May 1828; in July, while Corder was still awaiting trial, two ‘theatrical representations’ of ‘The Late Murder of Maria Marten’ were staged at the Cherry Fair in Polstead itself, one of which included a scene in the Red Barn, ‘where the mutilated body was [seen] lying on … the floor, surrounded by the Coroner and the gentlemen of the jury as they appeared … after the fatal discovery’. Ballad-singers also cried their wares, selling broadsides that stated outright that Corder was a murderer.

The prosperous were as much absorbed as the masses. Staffordshire pottery figures were produced of Corder and Miss Marten, and, even more importantly, of the Red Barn, impossibly bucolic, and frequently with Maria Marten looking winsome in the doorway. These were big, expensive pieces, not for the working classes. There were further options for those who wanted to disguise their interest under the cover of morality: long before the trial began the Revd Mr Young preached an entire sermon on Corder’s evil deed, to a congregation said to number 5,000.

When Corder finally came to trial in August, the court spent some time on these affronts to justice.

DEFENCE: Pray had you not got a person preaching about this murder in the very barn itself?

THE LORD CHIEF BARON: What! what d’ye mean by preaching? – Is it a sermon?

DEFENCE: Yes, my Lord, and to a congregation of several thousand persons, specially brought together after regular notice in the parish, to hear this man described as the murderer of this unfortunate girl.

THE LORD CHIEF BARON: Scandalous! …

[Mr. W. Chaplin, the churchwarden is asked by the defence]: Did you hear the parson preach in the barn?

MR CHAPLIN: No, certainly not; but I heard of the occurrence.

DEFENCE: And you never interfered to prevent it?

MR CHAPLIN: I did not.

DEFENCE: Are there not exhibitions going round the neighbourhood, representing Corder as the murderer. And you’ve not interfered to prevent them? Is there not a camera obscura near this very hall at this moment, exhibiting him as the murderer?

MR CHAPLIN: There is a camera obscura, I believe about the streets, but I do not know the nature of the exhibition, neither am I aware that I have any power to prevent them in my own parish, much less in this town.

Technically, a camera obscura is a box with a lens, which projects an image of a place or a person onto a flat surface. They were frequently used by artists at the time for sketching from nature. It may be that here the term is used to describe some form of peepshow using projections. George Sanger, later the proprietor of one of Europe’s largest circuses (self-ennobled as ‘Lord’ George Sanger), as a boy in the late 1820s and 1830s toured fairgrounds with his father. Their peepshow ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ had pictures ‘pulled up and down by strings’, lit at night by candles.

I stood outside and asked the folks to ‘Walk up and see the only correct views of the terrible murder of Maria Martin. They are historically accurate and true to life … see how the ghost of Maria appeared to her mother on three successive nights at the bedside.’

When we had our row of spectators getting their pennyworths from the peep-holes I would describe the various pictures as they were pulled up into view. The arrest of Corder was always given special prominence, as follows: ‘The arrest of the murderer Corder as he was at breakfast. Observe the horrified faces, and note also, so true to life are these pictures, that even the saucepan is shown upon the fire and the minute glass upon the table timing the boiling of the eggs.’

None of this publicity was enough to halt the trial, any more than the irregularities of the inquest had been. Corder had been barred from attending by the coroner, who claimed that ‘he did not believe that the accused had any right to be present [at an inquest]; he never knew an instance of the kind’. It was explained to the coroner at the trial that, on the contrary, it was an obligation of the court that the accused should hear the depositions against him. Yet his abrogation of Corder’s rights did not appear to be any bar to him taking part in the trial itself, in which he acted as a prosecuting counsel.*

It probably made no difference. James Lee, the Bow Street Runner, had found Miss Marten’s reticule in Corder’s study, together with a pair of pistols and a sword, which was proved to have been sharpened at Corder’s request just before the murder. Furthermore, letters from Corder to Miss Marten’s parents, claiming his ‘wife’ was with him in ‘our lodgings, in the Isle of Wight’, were read out, in which he told them how they had married in Ipswich and that she ‘unites with me for your wellfare [sic]’, together with an ominous ‘P.S. I think you had better burn all my letters.’ Corder put up a miserable defence.† He claimed that Miss Marten had left Polstead to hide a new pregnancy from her family. (Why? She had already had three bastard children.) Then he asserted that she had had some unspecified relationship with an unnamed man in London, and that when she reached the barn, ‘she flew into a passion, upbraided me with not having so much regard for her as the gentleman before alluded to’, and shot herself. Terrified to find himself with a body on his hands, he buried her. The stab wounds noted at the autopsy must have been made by a spade when the body was exhumed, he claimed.

This last is not as implausible as it sounds today. Post-mortems were still rudimentary (the first use of the term had only appeared a decade before). An initial post-mortem had decided that the ‘chief cause of death’ was ‘a [bullet] wound in the orbit [eye-socket]’, but after the remains had been re-interred, ‘It has been regretted that for the ends of justice, more time was not given for the inspection of the body, or that the inspection had not been minutely made,’ as on reflection a bullet through the eye was ‘little likely to be chosen for the perpetration of a murder of this deliberate character’. The body was therefore re-exhumed, and two stab wounds were now found, one between the ribs and one in the heart, both entirely unnoticed at the first PM. By the time the trial was under way, yet further thought had suggested that the silk kerchief Miss Marten had worn had been pulled ‘so tight upon the neck as to have produced death by strangulation’.

Corder was found guilty and sentenced to death. The Times was not sure which was more important, the verdict itself, or the speed with which the newspaper had reported it. ‘We yesterday morning, by extraordinary exertion, published the proceedings of the court up to the adjournment on the previous day, – or, in other words, gave in six closely printed columns the report of a trial which took place on the previous day at a distance of 72 miles from London, and which was not adjourned till eight o’clock in the evening,’ it boasted.

More sermons were immediately preached. On 17 August, the Revd Charles Hyatt of the Ebenezer Chapel, Shadwell, travelled to the Red Barn to deliver a sermon to ‘about 2,000 persons’, taking his text from Numbers 32:23: ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’, and using it to recycle the type of newspaper rumour familiar from the Thurtell case. When Corder was at school, Mr Hyatt told his congregation, ‘the depravity of [his] nature often displayed itself, by his constant habit of telling falsehoods, and by the depredations he committed upon his companions’; he had later formed ‘an acquaintance with a girl of very loose character’ and, as ‘the wages of her iniquity’, had supplied her with ‘peas and other articles from his father’s farm’. The sermon ended by warning ‘the peasantry’ against poaching, which Mr Hyatt stressed would lead to greater vices (presumably murdering women and burying them in barns).

That same evening, the Revd J. Pilkington preached from the same text at the Baptists’ Meeting House in Rayleigh, Essex, and at Bury St Edmunds the Revd George Hughes took a different text, but also preached on Corder. ‘A Suffolk Clergyman’ published An Address to My Parishioners and Neighbours on the Subject of the Murder lately committed at Polstead, in Suffolk, in which a certain amount of space was given to how the wages of sin lead only to death, while a great deal more was devoted to the details of Miss Marten’s murder. Furthermore, the clergyman had attended Corder’s final church service in gaol before his execution, a regular stop on the route to the gallows. The condemned was placed in a special, black-painted pew, while the coffin that he or she was shortly to fill stood in the centre of the chapel. The Suffolk clergyman evidently paid little attention to divine service that day, for he was able to describe Corder’s every gesture for his readers.

A novel, published together with a transcript of the trial, quickly appeared. This was ‘founded on fact’, the reader is assured, although it is an absolutely standard melodrama: there is the pure maiden, with her virtuous father, a model of ‘industry and frugality’; a gypsy fortune-teller; some smugglers; a gambler who in a Thurtell-ish moment ‘plucks’, or cheats, the Corder character; and a rejected suitor who returns having made a fortune in India. The author was probably the penny-blood writer Robert Huish (possibly together with the journalist William Maginn), who later wrote similar ‘true’ crime novels about James Greenacre and Maria and Frederick Manning (see pp.92–8, 157–82).*

The Times reported that by nine o’clock on the morning of the execution a thousand people had gathered at the scaffold in Bury St Edmunds. Three hours later this had swelled to 7,000. Unlike Thurtell’s, Corder’s death could not be mythologized. At the scaffold, claimed one broadside, he was ‘so weak as to be unable to stand without support’, and ‘he looked somewhat wildly around’ while he waited for the rope to be adjusted. In 1824, technical changes had been made to the scaffold, allowing adjustable chains which reduced delays while the hangman corrected the length of the rope. Even so, prisoners were still assessed only by height, not by weight, and some, in the phrase of the day, ‘died hard’. Corder was one of them. The hangman had to perform the ‘disgusting but necessary task, of suspending his own weight around the body of the prisoner, to accelerate his death’. Even then, it took another eight minutes for him to die.

Not everyone was disturbed. Physical remains were treated with a pragmatism that has since vanished. During the trial, the surgeon had ‘produced the skull of the deceased’, which was handed round to the jury members so they could see the fracture for themselves. A broadside commemorated this moment: ‘They brought her heart, her scull [sic], and ribs,/And showed before his face …’ Mr Marten, testifying to the finding of his daughter’s body, merely said he had ‘put down a mole spike into the floor … and brought up something black, which I smelt and thought it smelt like decayed flesh’. For those who may have missed these details in the newspapers and broadsides, Corder’s body itself was soon on display. After the execution it was transported to the town’s Shire Hall, where ‘Two incisions were made in the breast, the skin taken of [sic], and the muscles exposed to view.’ Then the body was displayed on a table in the middle of the Court, ‘quite naked, with the exception of the trowsers, shoes, and stockings’. *‘Many thousands’ were admitted. For those who couldn’t be there, ‘two eminent artists, Mr. Mizotti of Cambridge and Mr. Child of Bungay’, made plaster casts. The following day the body was taken to the County Hospital and wired up to a battery to make it twitch in a demonstration of galvanic power, while the phrenologists, quack scientists who read character from the shape, or bumps, in the skull, competed for a cast of the head. Only after that did dissection proceed, for the benefit of the medical students. The bones ‘having been cleared of the flesh’, they were ‘re-united by Mr S. Dalton, and the skeleton is now placed in the Suffolk General Hospital’ (one visitor was reported to be Mr Marten himself). ‘A great portion of the skin has been tanned, and a gentleman connected with the hospital intends to have the Trial and Memoirs of Corder bound in it. The heart has been preserved in spirits.’ Many years later the pickled scalp was displayed by a leather-seller in Oxford Street.†

Other souvenirs, slightly less macabre, were also available. The executioner, as a matter of right, got the clothes Corder died in, and also the rope. Such was the excitement over this case that it was reported that he had sold off the rope sections at a guinea an inch, including among his purchasers, it was rumoured, a gentleman from Cambridge who came especially to add this trophy to the university collection. For the artistic, a miniature of Corder was on display at the following Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. (The journals claimed to be appalled that respectable people were interested: ‘we looked, paused, reconsulted our catalogue, looked again, rubbed our eyes. No, it is impossible!’ But they reported it all the same.) For those with less cash and more enterprise, there was the barn itself, which was taken apart and ‘sold in tooth-picks, tobacco-stoppers, and snuff-boxes’.

Kaleidoscope magazine mocked the entire circus, with a picture of Corder lying on a dissecting table under which are sacks labelled ‘Mr Corder’s clothes’ and ‘Relics for sale’. Standing on the table over the body is an auctioneer, who is calling out, ‘Now then, Ladies & Gentlemen – the Halter is going at a Guinea an inch,’ while a person in the crowd responds, ‘I want some of it for the University,’ and another cries, ‘Oh! how delightfully Horrible!’ To one side, a man is saying to another, ‘The Officer says, Mr Sheriff, that the Pistols belong to him,’ while the other replies, ‘Why I would not part with them man for 100 Guineas!’ A second picture shows Corder’s body twitching, naked, on the dissecting table. A man at the door says, ‘I came to take a cast of his head,’ only to be told, ‘You must wait till the galvanic operations are over.’ Outside, the crowd gathers around a sign advertising ‘Camera obscura of the murder’.

From the outset fairs loved the story of the doomed Maria Marten. The journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed a strolling player who performed the Red Barn murder at a fair ‘in cavalier costume’. Reality was not the key: excitement was. The whole country was getting younger: at the end of the eighteenth century, 17 per cent of the population was between five and fourteen years old; by the 1820s, it was 25 per cent, and almost half the population was under twenty. This was an audience worth catering to: even if, individually, they had almost no money, collectively they could create riches. For many children, however, even minor theatre was out of reach. A place in the gallery of somewhere like the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton appeared cheap to the middle classes, but it cost between 3 and 4d., a significant sum to the less fortunate. Instead many boys and girls frequented illegal, unlicensed penny-gaffs, housed in disused shops and turned into theatres by erecting a rough stage at one end, with the remaining space filled with benches.

In 1838 it was estimated that there were about a hundred gaffs in London, each with a capacity of one hundred to 150 per sitting, with up to nine daily sittings. Thus attendance in any twenty-four hours was, at the least, and in London alone, 50,000 people. The audiences, almost entirely under the age of sixteen, were given, for their penny, three-quarters of an hour of some abbreviated play, two further pieces of about twenty minutes each, and a song. Much of the material was a debased version of what the regular theatres showed, and a great deal of it was obscene.* There were no playbills, only a board with details of the evening’s entertainment outside. One example was:

On Thursday next will be performed

at

Smith’s Grand Theatre,

THE RED-NOSED MONSTER,

or,

THE TYRANT OF THE MOUNTAINS.

To conclude with

the BLOOD-STAINED HANDKERCHIEF,

or,

THE MURDER IN THE COTTAGE

Marionettes were frequently on the bill at the gaffs, and at fairs across the country. By the 1870s some marionette companies were substantial outfits, having five or six wagons touring in annual circuits, performing on stages set up at each stop for up to seven hundred people nightly. Thomas Holden, a later Victorian puppeteer, had a stage that was eight feet deep, and a proscenium arch fourteen feet across. Maria Marten was one of the touring staples, in the repertory of companies in the Midlands, Yorkshire, Wales and even into Europe. The Times report of a police raid on a penny-gaff in 1844 noted that the play being performed by ‘automaton figures. made to move with wires’ was Maria Martin, or, The Red Barn Murder. The police took into custody not only eighty-three audience members, but also ‘the wretch Corder, and his victim, Maria Martin; also the figure of death’.* Later Clunn Lewis, the proprietor of a long-lasting marionette company, claimed that Corder’s son came to see his family perform; Charles Middleton, another proprietor, countered by saying that in the 1860s his company had from delicacy refrained from performing in Colchester, where a surviving Corder lived.

The youth audience was avid, and penny-bloods quickly appeared. ‘Penny-bloods’ was the original name for what, in the 1860s, were renamed penny-dreadfuls. Each booklet, or ‘number’, consisted of eight (sometimes sixteen) pages, with a single black-and-white illustration on the top half of the front page. Double columns of text filled the remainder, breaking off wherever the final page finished, even in the middle of a sentence. The numbers appeared weekly, and could be bought as they were issued, or in monthly parts of four numbers bound together in a coloured wrapper. Bloods developed out of late-eighteenth-century gothic tales. G.A. Sala, in his youth a blood-writer, later a renowned journalist, described the bloods as ‘a world of dormant peerages, of murderous baronets, and ladies of title addicted to the study of toxicology, of gipsies and brigand-chiefs, men with masks and women with daggers, of stolen children, withered hags, heartless gamesters, nefarious roués, foreign princesses, Jesuit fathers, gravediggers, resurrection-men, lunatics and ghosts’.

The bloods’ astonishing success created a vast new readership for cheap fiction. Between 1830 and 1850 there were probably as many as a hundred publishers of penny fiction – ten for every one publisher of ‘respectable’ fiction. Many magazines, previously seen as improving reading for the working classes, now wholeheartedly gave themselves over to this type of tale. The first ever penny-blood, in 1836, was The Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c., in sixty numbers. Gentleman Jack followed, running for 205 parts over four years, without too much worry for historical accuracy or continuity. (The historical highwaymen Claude Duval, Dick Turpin and Jack Rann all appear as coevals, even though their lives actually spanned a century; Jack Rann is, rather carelessly, killed twice.) The main characteristics of the highwaymen conformed to melodrama type: they were upper-class, usually switched at birth, and yet despite being reared among thieves, they were noble and protected the poor and virtuous. The illustrations, crude to modern eyes, were an essential element. One publisher’s standing instruction to his illustrators was, ‘more blood – much more blood!’ The most successful penny-blood, and what might be the most successful series the world has ever seen, first appeared in 1844, written by G.W.M. Reynolds, politically a Radical, who two years later founded the journal Reynolds’s Miscellany. His Mysteries of London was based on a French series, Mysteries of Paris, by Eugène Sue, but it took on a life of its own, spanning twelve years, 624 numbers, nearly 4.5 million words and a title change to Mysteries of the Courts of London.

Henry Mayhew interviewed thousands of the working class in the 1840s and 1850s for his monumental study of street life, London Labour and the London Poor. These people were Reynolds’ prime market, and Mayhew reported that an ‘intelligent costermonger’, who regularly read bloods aloud to his less literate friends, told him: ‘You see’s an engraving of a man hung up, burning over a fire, and some costers would go mad if they couldn’t learn what he’d been doing, who he was, and all about him.’ The illiteracy of the auditors did not mean they had little vocabulary or understanding, however. The costermonger told Mayhew of ‘one of the passages that took their fancy wonderfully’: ‘With glowing cheeks, flashing eyes, and palpitating bosom, Venetia Trelawney rushed back into the refreshment-room, where she threw herself into one of the arm-chairs … scarcely had she thus sunk down upon the flocculent cushion, when a sharp click … met her ears; and. her wrists were caught in manacles which sprang out of the arms of the treacherous chair. ‘ Anyone who was happy to hear about flocculent cushions and palpitating bosoms could take most things in their stride.

In the1860s, after highwaymen and evil aristocrats, the next penny development was the remorseless policeman hunting down criminals. A Corder blood merged the two genres. The evil William Corder, hoping to marry ‘lady Amelia’, has first to ‘dispose’ of his illegitimate child by Maria, who stands between ‘Amelia, happiness and myself!’ Maria threatens to tell Amelia of her situation, and, ‘yelling in demoniac rage and ungovernable passion, the sinful man’ drives his knife ‘into her throbbing breast, from which the fell demon had torn the covering’, shoots her for good measure and buries her in the barn. Now Captain Dash, a notorious highwayman, appears at Corder’s ‘grand masked ball’ and reveals all, before taking up a siege position in the Red Barn. Dash turns out to be Maria’s rejected suitor, who loved her truly and became a highwayman from grief. There is no date on this publication, but it must be post-1860, as a detective appears to tidy away everything at the end, and a further title is advertised on the back cover: ‘Lightning Dick, the Young Detective’ – boy detectives first appeared in the 1860s.