The Invention of Murder (25 page)

On 11 November, those without seats began to crowd the front of the gaol, where the scaffold was to be erected;
The Times
estimated that by noon on the 12th there were possibly 10,000 people waiting. On the day itself, estimates of the numbers present ranged widely, from 30,000 to 50,000, with five hundred police in attendance,
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the crowds sustained by perambulating food-and drink-sellers and ‘hundreds’ (claimed the
Examiner)
of basketmen selling ‘Manning’s biscuits’ and ‘Maria Manning’s peppermints’.

Among a group who had taken ‘the whole of [a] roof. for the extremely moderate sum of Ten Guineas’ was Charles Dickens, who after havering for some time, finally decided to attend together with four friends, one of whom was the
Punch
illustrator John Leech, who quickly produced ‘The Great Moral Lesson at Horsemonger Lane Gaol’ for the magazine. Dickens and his friends were well up in all the details of the case, real and imaginary. Dickens reported that Manning had said of O’Connor, ‘I never liked him and I beat in his skull with the ripping chisel’ (a curious flashback to the Ratcliffe Highway murders), while John Forster, the literary critic and later Dickens’ biographer, wrote to Bulwer that ‘Lord Carlisle (she lived in his sister’s family, you may remember) says she was
always singing
in the house – and that all the ladies adored her, while her fellow servants detested her’.

Many were similarly fascinated. The wife of the art and social critic John Ruskin wrote to her mother from Venice to thank her for her letter ‘telling me about the Mannings. We were all much interested.’ Forster was greatly caught up in the events, seemingly entranced by the attractive appearance and formidable character of Maria, as many were.
†
He had earlier attended at least one of the police examinations, for Thomas Carlyle wrote enviously in early October that ‘Fuz [Forster] … had
seen
Manning, happy Fuz.’ After the execution Forster was in ecstasies, even noting that Maria had worn ‘gloves on her manicured hands’ on the scaffold. It would obviously have been impossible for a spectator on a rooftop to have seen her hands, bare or gloved, yet the excitement was such that this passed as a worthwhile comment. Maria was, Forster went on,
‘beautifully dressed,
every part of her noble figure finely and fully expressed by close fitting black satin’.
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He was only one of many to note her impressive figure: her sexuality was a constant under-refrain. More than half a century later, Thomas Hardy, recollecting the 1856 execution which was an early trigger for
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
(see pp.361–2), wrote, ‘I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, & how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’ This was supposedly a memory of Elizabeth Martha Brown, a labourer’s wife, who was unlikely to own a silk gown. Hardy was only nine when the Mannings died, but his description is much closer to Maria than to a poverty-stricken farmhand’s wife.

As with Hardy, much of the extended coverage stressed Maria’s fashionable dress, so much so that
Punch
found it worth parodying: ‘At the elegant
réunion
on the occasion of the late
Matinée Criminelle
at the Old Bailey, the lovely and accomplished LADY B—carried off
“les honneurs”,
by her lovely
Manteau à la
MANNING …
Corsage, à la condamnée
. has a very tight body [that is, a bodice], which pinions the arms to the sides, giving that interesting air to the wearer which is so much admired on the scaffold.’

Dickens was more concerned with the mental state of the spectators. He had been to executions before,
*
and he now wrote, for publication, a letter on what he saw outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol. He was not, he said, going to discuss capital punishment – he believed that murderers should receive the death penalty, but their deaths should be ‘a private solemnity’. What disturbed him was that the crowds found entertainment, not moral lessons, at the scaffold:

For the hundreds of thousands who would not have dreamt of going to an execution, there was still plenty of Manning entertainment. In Manchester, J. Springthorpe, ‘Artist’, displayed waxwork figures of the couple in an exhibition to ‘highly amuse, delight and highly instruct’. And Madame Tussaud’s, which had set up a permanent exhibition space in London in 1836, was creating a whole new arena for murder – a ‘Chamber of Horrors’. From Madame Tussaud’s earliest days there had been a ‘Separate Room’ which initially displayed replica heads of those executed in the French Revolution, together with a model of the guillotine and the Bastille, but it was not until 1820, in Leeds, that a criminal addition to her show was advertised: ‘the celebrated notorious ARTHUR THISTLEWOOD’ (one of the Cato Street conspirators, who had just been hanged). Then Corder was added, his face supposedly taken from a death mask made by Madame Tussaud. In 1829 ‘BURKE THE MURDERER’ went on display, heralded in a very apologetic advertisement: ‘some’, it feared, might consider the exhibition ‘improper’. By the 1840s Madame Tussaud’s was well on the way to becoming an institution – more than 30,000 catalogues a year were being sold, which might indicate an attendance of ten times that level. Now the Separate Room was renamed the Chamber of Horrors, and Madame Tussaud’s apologized no longer. Less than three weeks after the Mannings’ execution it advertised: ‘Maria MANNING, George Manning, Bloomfield [sic] Rush, taken from life at their trials, a cast in plaster of Mr. O’Connor, with a plan of the kitchen where he was murdered.’ It was this type of opportunism, and the buying up of ‘relics’ to go with the displays, that produced the public perception of Madame Tussaud’s, whether it was condemned as a social evil, or admired for its good commercial sense, as with the patterer who complained that ‘that there Madam Toosow’ had damaged his sales of Daniel Good broadsides: ‘You see, she … guv
2l.
for the werry clogs as he used to wash his master’s carriage in; so, in course, when the harristocracy could go and see … the werry identical clogs … why the people wouldn’t look at our authentic portraits of the fiend in human form.’

Two years later the notorious French detective Vidocq, now in his seventies, took this to a logical conclusion, opening a ‘curious museum’ which included the ‘costumes’ of ‘swindlers, rogues, thieves, and plunderers’, Vidocq’s own disguises and a host of fearsome weapons. The poet Robert Browning went along, and reported to his soon-to-be wife Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Vidocq … did the honours of his museum of knives & nails & hooks that have helped great murderers to their purposes – he scarcely admits, I observed, an implement with only one attestation to its efficacy; but the one or two exceptions rather justify his latitude … – thus one little sort of dessert-knife
did
only take
one
life … “but then” says Vidocq, “it was the man’s own mother’s life, with fifty-two blows and all for” (I think) “15 francs …” So prattles good-naturedly Vidocq …’

This was too much for
Punch.
Six weeks before the Mannings’ trial it worried that ‘The rag-pickers of crime are at work … London reeks with the foulness of the Bermondsey Murder. There, in words of ink-black blood, it stains the walls; there it is gibbetted in placards, and is carried shouting, in the highway … Good MADAME TUSSAUD, devoting art to homicide, turns to the pleasantness of profit the abomination of blood. With her so much murder is so much counted money.’

Madame Tussaud’s knew its market, however: Maria Manning’s model remained on display for a record 122 years. She became a figure of legend, of fear – and sometimes of comedy. In 1851, only two years after the events in Minver Place, the Kingston Assizes heard a case of two feuding neighbours: one ‘had caused a number of scaffolds to be erected upon his piece of land, from which were suspended tea-kettles, tea-boards, watering-pots, horse-collars, horses’ and bullocks’ heads, and also a figure representing Maria Manning. some of the witnesses said they were. afraid to pass by the spot unless they were accompanied by a policeman’. During the hearing, a model of the alleged nuisance was revealed to the court, ‘and the sight of it convulsed the court with laughter’. From the Lady Macbeth of the Bermondsey stage to convulsions of laughter in only eighteen months.

Mrs Manning the building-site bogey was unusual. More common were Staffordshire figures of the couple – at least two sets were produced. There was also a greyhound named Maria Manning, whose offspring – surely a joke – were named Hero and Peace. This was middle-class whimsy, but there was also hard commercial gain to be found in the Mannings. G.A. Sala, the ex-penny-blood-author-turned-respectable-journalist, wrote of one of his old colleagues: ‘He had been a man all tattered and torn, but so soon as the remains of poor Patrick O’Connor had been identified. the lucky reporter blossomed into a brand-new coat … New plaid pantaloons followed, a glossy silk hat shone upon his head, Wellington boots adorned his lower extremities, and the bows of a satin necktie floated on his chest. The only thing he lacked was a waistcoat; but alas! The Mannings were hanged ere [he] had secured that much-coveted vest, and afterwards, murders being rare, he drifted gradually into his old and normal condition of dismal seediness.’

Sala implied that the indigent author was James Malcolm Rymer, but Rymer left an estate worth more than £7,500 on his death. It seems more likely that the penny-a-liner was Robert Huish. His Manning volume,
The Progress of Crime, or, The Authentic Memoirs of Maria Manning,
all 832 pages of it, appeared in twenty-four 6d. parts, and then in a single volume, in 1849. The early sections gave the heroine an imaginary Swiss background, in which a traditional melodrama Marie succumbs to temptation, but from weakness rather than evil nature.
The Progress of Crime
linked up with reality only after she was employed as a lady’s maid in Devonshire, and even then the story continued with the standard fictional portrait of a seduced and betrayed innocent, rather than a woman who murdered for money. The main point of interest in retrospect is Huish’s admiration for the police. The detectives here are no longer villainous thief-takers or rustic boobies, but efficient and professional, presented for the reader’s admiration in both text and stylish illustrations.

Dickens wrote several articles for
Household Words
in the early 1850s eulogizing the new detective force. In ‘A Detective Police Party’ he reminded his readers of that exciting moment the previous year when the police had pursued the
Victoria
looking for the absconding Mrs Manning: a detective ‘went below, with the captain, lamp in hand – it being dark, and the whole steerage abed and sea-sick – and engaged the Mrs. Manning who
was
on board. Satisfied that she was not the object of his search, he quietly re-embarked in the Government steamer alongside, and steamed home again with the intelligence.’ Dickens’ admiration for the police was such that even this blind alley was presented as a coup.
*

Shortly afterwards, in
Bleak House
(1852–53), Dickens created Mr Bucket, who has been described as the first fictional detective. It was in this novel that Dickens also immortalized Maria Manning, as Hortense, Lady Dedlock’s maid. Dickens gave her all of Maria’s characteristics (although she is French, not Swiss): she is dark, ‘handsome’, with ‘good taste’ in her dress, and she abuses Bucket at the end in a similar manner to the abuse Maria hurled in court, ‘With a stamp of her foot, and a menace’, and a ‘tigerish expression … her black eyes darting fire’.

Dickens had been progressively feeling his way towards detective-story elements from his early Newgate novel days. In
Oliver Twist
Mr Brownlow uncovers a mysterious plot against Oliver as detectives would do later on: he examines clues, produces witnesses, confronts the villain and explains the mystery to the listening characters and the reader. Yet Mr Brownlow was pre-modern: he had no intention of entering the legal forum of the police or the courtroom, or of exposing the child under his protection to the public gaze. The law was permitted to deal with Fagin, a lower-class, outsider villain;
*
Monks, Oliver’s half-brother and therefore an upper-middle-class villain, is dealt with privately. The police, in the guise of the Bow Street Runners, have only a comedy role, and detect nothing. In
Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843–44), begun four years later, there are once more amateur detectives, John Westlock and Martin Chuzzlewit himself, who follow up clues in order to expose the perpetrator of a murder. Again, they solve their own problems, and never contemplate turning their information over to the police. Instead it is Nadgett who comes close to the prototype of the professional detective. At first he seems like an old-fashioned, Vidocq-ian informer, but slowly the reader learns that the ostensible spy is really on the side of the heroes.

In 1849, ‘Recollections of a Police-Officer’ by the pseudonymous ‘Thomas Waters’ (William Russell) had begun to appear in
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.
These stories were perhaps the first to have a policeman protagonist, although in spirit they remain close to melodrama. In ‘The Gamblers’, for example, the narrator is a gentleman who turns policeman after being bankrupted by swindlers. He is assigned to break up a gambling ring, whose leader providentially turns out to be the ‘glittering reptile in whose poisonous folds I had been involved and crushed’. No detection is involved.
*
The main difference between these stories and melodrama is that now the police are professional, doing a job ‘which can scarcely be dispensed with’.