Judith Flanders: The Invention of Murder: Howthe Victorians Revelled in Death and Detectionand Created Modern Crime

Harper Collins, 2011. Xvii &556 pp., £20 Hardback.ISBN 978-0-00-724888-9

Ian Ward

Published online: 2 December 2011

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Murder, as Judith Flanders observes in The Invention of Murder, was comparatively

rare in nineteenth century England. But it did not seem that way. Victorians in

particular were fascinated by murder, thrilled and terrified in similar measure. As

George Orwell famously observed, Victorian Englishmen and women liked nothing

better than a ‘good murder’. The Invention of Murder tells the story of this

fascination, weaving around accounts of myriad cases a larger and thoroughly

convincing narrative about its essentially aesthetic and imaginary nature. As

Thomas de Quincey alleged, and only partly tongue in cheek, murder became one of

the ‘fine arts’ of the age; an ‘experience’ forged in the creative imagination of

novelists, dramatists and news editors, and then devoured by generations of readers

and theatre-goers. It is a thesis which chimes, very obviously, with those of us who

have long subscribed to the idea that modern law is best comprehended in an

historical and literary context.

The Invention of Murder proceeds in an essentially chronological fashion, each

chapter serving to develop the overarching historical narrative. Each chapter,

moreover, tends to move around a handful of cases that can be said to be representative

of a particular species of murder. As Flanders notes, public fascination, though

generally avid, was also fickle. The popularity of particular species waxed and waned

from generation to generation; in no small part due to the creative guile of particular

novelists, dramatists and newspaper editors. As the narrative of Victorian murder

develops, Flanders thus examines the constitutive role of newspaper ‘trials’ and

fictional accounts, campaigns first to limit the role of a ‘detective’ police, and then

later to enhance it, the similarly fluid public perception of the efficacy of legal

proceedings and the reliability of medical and scientific evidence, and the peculiar

‘panics’ that attached variously; to ‘servant’ murderers and to female ‘poison-

murderers’, both of whom were viewed as being particularly heinous insofar as they

I. Ward (&)

The Law School, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

e-mail: ian.ward@newcastle.ac.uk

123

Liverpool Law Rev (2011) 32:317–319

DOI 10.1007/s10991-011-9103-3

operated within the supposed sanctity of the Englishman’s ‘castle’; and then

conversely to ‘stranger’ murders, so many of which, or so it seemed to the anxious

commuter, took place within sealed railway carriages; infanticide and ‘burial club’

murders, where the assumption that multitudes of mothers were murdering their

children in order to cash in insurance policies imported a very obvious gender

pejorative; murders by the supposedly insane, or alternatively murders of the insane,

both of which, as readers of Mary Braddon and Wilkie Collins well knew were

rampant in so many secluded country homes; and perhaps most thrilling of all,

unsolved murders, the most famous of which were, of course, those of ‘Jack the

Ripper’.

Whilst the overarching narrative is indeed compelling, it is perhaps the

individual cases, and more particularly the individual anecdote which makes the

‘fascination’ of the Victorians still so fascinating a century or more on. There is,

for example, the case of John Williams, the notorious Ratcliffe Highway

murderer, whose case is discussed in the first chapter of The Invention of Murder.

There was nothing particularly peculiar about Williams or his victims or indeed

his trial and sentence. But the ritualistic process by which the authorities sought to

execute sentence on a man who had, to their chagrin, cheated the hangman by

committing suicide, is striking. Williams’s body was strapped to a cart and taken

through the streets of the borough to the place where he was alleged to have

committed his murders, where it was then parked outside, after which it was

driven onto a crossroads where a stake was hammered into its heart. The public

was not to be denied the spectacle of justice administered in all its gaudy majesty.

Much the same conclusion could be drawn from the events which followed the

execution of the similarly notorious murderer and body-snatcher William Burke.

Twenty-thousand attended his execution. Thirty thousand had already enjoyed the

peculiar irony of filing past his body as it lay displayed in the same anatomy

theatre of Edinburgh University Medical School to which he had despatched the

bodies of his victims. Prurience, it seems, is an historical constant. And so is

venality. The executioner who presided over the hanging of the ‘Red Barn’

murderer William Corder in 1827 made a small fortune selling bits of the rope and

noose. The same charge can be just as readily levelled at the enterprising

Staffordshire pottery companies that churned out thousands of ceramic models of

Corder, the Barn and his victim, Maria Marten.

And it might be surmised at the likes of Dickens and Braddon who made their

fortunes titillating their readers with cases such as those of Bill Sikes and Lucy

Audley. Queen Victoria, it transpires, was a particular fan of Oliver Twist, whilst the

murder of Nancy was the passage which audiences most commonly requested at

Dickens’s hugely successful public readings. The charge is perhaps sharper still

when levelled at Braddon who cheerfully admitted that she drew inspiration for her

‘sensation’ novels from real cases. She could suppose with reasonable confidence

that readers of Lady Audley’s Secret would recognise allusions to the contemporary

case of the alleged Glasgow poisoner Madeleine Smith. Elizabeth Gaskell, it might

be argued, was a rather different kind of novelist, far more the sober rationalist than

the calculating sensationalist. Perhaps so, but the acute reader of Mary Bartonwould have just as readily appreciated that the murder around which this novel

318 I. Ward

123

moved was likewise based on a real case, that of the Manchester mill owner Thomas

Ashton shot to death outside his factory in 1834.

Whilst much of The Invention of Murder moves around the more notorious cases,

those which captured the public imagination, Flanders also stops to consider the

forgotten victims, many of whom were murdered not by relatives or by strangers,

but by the state. It is only too apparent that the authorities in nineteenth century

England were as much concerned with appearing to enforce the majesty of the law

as they were ensuring justice. Miscarriages were common, competent defence

counsel rare, the prospect of a fair trial in most cases fanciful. And, as often as not, it

was women who suffered such miscarriages. Eliza Fleming was convicted and

executed for attempting to poison her employer’s family in 1815. There was nothing

in the scanty evidence presented which could not have been explained in terms of

acute food poisoning. No one had died, or even suffered stomach cramps for more

than a couple of hours. But Fleming was unfortunate enough to have found herself

accused at one of those moments when middle England was convulsed by the fear

that every house-servant was intent upon poisoning their employer. And so she was

hanged.

Conversely, of course, nothing titillated a Victorian more than the thought that a

murder, or better still a murderess, had evaded justice. Madeleine Smith secured her

freedom by way of a ‘not proven’ verdict, something which generated a predictably

chauvinistic denunciation of Scottish criminal law in the English presses. The acquit-

tal of Adelaide Bartlett generated vast interest and vast sales for the newspaper editors

who regaled their readers as to her cool demeanour and self-evident guilt. Gender

emerges as a significant theme in The Invention of Murder. Victorians were possessed

of a peculiar fascination for, and a peculiar fear of, female murderers. In reality their

number was slight. Yet it was the female murderer that the Victorian most liked to

read about, and so newspaper editor and novelist strove to nurture the impression that

the streets of England, and Scotland, Wales and Ireland, was teeming with female

murderers, putative and present, from the impoverished mother who murdered her

unwanted child in order to cash in an insurance policy, to the maid-servant who

coveted her mistresses jewellery, to the calculating adulteress who poisoned her

unwanted husband.

The close of The Invention of Murder revisits de Quincey’s observation, that

murder in nineteenth century England would become an ever more refined ‘fine art’.

It was, Flanders suggests, a prophetic statement. As the century progressed, whilst

the particular fetishes and particular ‘panics’ came and went, the generic Victorian

appetite for murder rarely diminished. And, as Flanders concludes, we live with the

consequences. Murder still sells copy, in a way that few other crimes do. The names

of John Williams and William Corder, Eliza Fleming and Adelaide Bartlett may be

largely forgotten today. In their place there is a new generation of bogeymen and

women, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred West and Ian Huntley. They too will

fade in time, to be replaced by a still newer generation. The Invention of Historymay be a study in legal and literary history, but the narrative it presents has an

enduring resonance; one that speaks not just to the history of murder itself, but to the

peculiar fantasies and fascinations with which modern society still likes to titillate

and terrify itself.

The Invention of Murder 319

123