The Invention of Murder (41 page)

Every bit as good as Miss Smith’s defence was the inadequacy of the prosecution (and the incompetence of the judge). The prosecution failed to prove that poison had been administered; failed even to enquire what type of arsenic was used – Miss Smith’s purchases had been coloured with indigo dye or soot (this was commonly done, precisely to prevent accidents or murder), and the analysts had not been asked to report on dye in L’Angelier’s viscera, which might have determined the source of the poison. Miss Smith’s letters were undated, and no particular care was taken by the prosecution to ensure that they were kept in the original envelopes, rendering the dates of the couple’s meetings even more uncertain. The judge added to this woeful display by permitting one witness to provide entirely hearsay testimony, relaying conversations she had not herself heard. The prosecutor had also had a preliminary meeting with her, with ‘no sheriff present to restrain improper interference’. The judge was aware of this, but made no attempt to prevent her evidence being heard. Most egregiously, the prosecution entirely failed to prove that Miss Smith had seen L’Angelier on the evenings before his gastric attacks. The best they could do was show that she had
hoped
to see him at those times: there were letters asking for meetings, but without the diary, there was no proof that these had taken place. The first meeting before the first gastric attack could be proved, but there was no evidence for the other two. The judge, notably prejudiced and even more notably muddled, summarized: ‘In the ordinary matters of life, when you find the man came to town for the purpose of getting a meeting, you may come to the conclusion that they did meet; but, observe, that it becomes a very serious inference … to draw. It may be a very natural inference,
looking at things morally.
None of you can doubt that she waited for him again, and if she waited the second night after her first letter, it was not surprising that she should look out for an interview on the second night after her second letter.’ As far as this can be untangled, he appeared to be suggesting that if a person has performed an action once, it can be taken as a given that they will repeat the action under similar circumstances another time; and that while therefore it could be taken as a given that Miss Smith had met L’Angelier on the second and third nights, it would be wrong to take it as a given that she therefore poisoned him; and yet the jury might assume that she had done so, not because it was proved, or even because it was logical, but because she was an immoral hussy.

Many agreed with the judge. George Eliot responded to John Blackwood: ‘it is a pity Palmer is not alive to marry her and be the victim of her second experiment in cosmetics – which is too likely to come one day or other’. Eliot’s partner, G.H. Lewes, agreed: ‘I see absolutely
no
trace of goodness in her. From first to last she is utterly bad.’ Bad or not, the verdict after the eight-day trial was the Scottish in-between one, ‘not proven’. As Lewes wrote to Blackwood, ‘it is very lucky for that miserable girl that her victim was a Frenchman and she a Scotchwoman. Under any other circumstances she must have been hanged … the evidence against her was overwhelming.’ The
Glasgow Herald
was only one of many voices reflecting this nationalistic, even xenophobic, view: L’Angelier, it reminded its readers, ‘was of French extraction, if not French by birth’, and ‘The French … are notoriously addicted to the use of cosmetics,’ therefore L’Angelier may have introduced ‘the Scottish girl’ to arsenic. In fact, the murder was altogether the victim’s fault, for ‘there were many circumstances. which gave the whole proceedings … an un-British character’. Class and gender also played their parts. L’Angelier was a foreigner, a seducer and a social climber, and it was frequently implicitly suggested that he was also a blackmailer. Scottish law accepted marriage by witnessed oath, and by sexual congress, and L’Angelier could thus have blackmailed Miss Smith, although there is no evidence that either was aware of this fact.

While the verdict was initially welcomed, opinion soon swung against Miss Smith. The
Glasgow Herald
blackened L’Angelier’s reputation during the trial, but by the end of the month reported that he had been ‘exemplary, amiable, and studious’, and had the ‘good opinion’ of his employers, his relationship with Madeleine Smith being ‘the only stain on his reputation’. In this ambivalent aftermath, various subscriptions were raised for the people involved in the case. From the days of Burke and Hare, monetary collections had been made for those who could not afford the necessary help when involved involuntarily in a legal situation, the amounts raised unwittingly reflecting public attitudes. After the discovery of Burke and Hare’s crimes, the
Caledonian Mercury
collected less than £10 for Mr and Mrs Gray, the couple who had discovered the body of Mrs Docherty (the same amount, ironically enough, that Knox had paid the burkers for a single body); when Gray died the following year, his widow had to beg money to bury him. In 1849, £3,361.8s. was subscribed to a fund for Eliza Chestney, the maid who had rushed to the aid of Mrs Jermy when Rush attacked, while Emily Sandford, who might have been complicit in Rush’s financial chicanery, if not in murder, had £2,101.10s. pledged to help her. In a later case, in 1874, the widow of the murderer Henry Wainwright (see pp.336–43) was the object of ‘A great deal of sympathy’, and £1,200 was raised for her, while the man who had unmasked the murderer, literally running halfway across London to alert the police, received £30. In Madeleine Smith’s case, a group of local tradesmen made a presentation to her father to demonstrate their ‘sympathy for his family under their present affliction’, circumstances which ‘reflect no discredit on him’.
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A subscription was also raised for ‘this unfortunate girl’, said to amount to £10,000, although this is probably newspaper hyperbole. Not everyone approved. The
Era
reminded its readers that Miss Smith’s ‘moral reputation’ was now ‘out of the pale of deserved commiseration’. But whatever pieties the newspapers preached, the subscription for L’Angelier’s widowed mother, who had relied financially on her son, amounted to a derisory £89.9s.3d. And ten days after the verdict Mr F. Bell of Thirsk named his bay filly Madeleine Smith, by Hermit out of La Femme Sage – ‘Wise Woman’ – a thumbed nose at morality if ever there was one.

Even more outrageous was ‘Madeline [sic] Smith’s Dream in Prison’, a long, wildly pro-Miss Smith poem that describes the accused woman imprisoned, and dreaming of her dead ‘dearest friend’, comparing herself to ‘Christ our Lord’, who was ‘crucified,/Yet innocent of blood’, while her ‘loved one’ is referred to as ‘He’, printed with a capital H, as Christ or God would be. The reunited couple share ‘ardent kisses’ and travel ‘The Sovereign Highway … That led to Paradise and God’, where they are met by welcoming angels, before the prisoner is rudely awoken: ‘For lo, it was a Dream’. Even to Miss Smith’s supporters, the poem must have appeared blasphemous – it still does.

More mainstream were the Madeleine-Smith-influenced novels. In the early 1860s, Emma Robinson, who had dropped a cameo of Mrs Manning into
The Gold-Worshippers,
now built an entire three-volume novel around the story of a respectably brought-up young poisoner. Her Madeleine Graham reads about arsenic-eaters in the Austro-Hungarian empire, at the Misses Sparx’s Finishing Educational Establishment for Young Ladies, and is befriended by the French mistress, who we know, because she is French, is a woman of loose morals. So it proves, and through her Madeleine meets a poor Frenchman named Camille LeTellier, while also keeping the rich Mr Behringbright dangling. The plot then closely follows the outlines of the Smith story, although much of it is set among landed estates in Ireland, with stag hunts and other upper-class joys unknown to a Glasgow architect’s daughter. When Madeleine attempts to end her relationship with LeTellier, he blackmails her, having ‘scores on scores of
letters
from you, which he could show to prove
everything’.
Madeleine immediately offers him a cup of coffee – ‘You seem fond of coffee,’ she purrs ominously. Ultimately her evil plot is foiled, and she is married off to the recovered LeTellier against her will and forced to live in Lyons, possibly considered by the novelist to be a fate worse than death.

This middle-class romance had been preceded by the anonymous 1857
Story of Minie L’Angelier, or Madeleine Hamilton Smith,
a book returning to the earlier style of fictionalized accounts of true crime, similar to those that had appeared with the Burke and Hare murders, and with Greenacre and Maria Manning. This was not quite fiction, but not quite trial reporting either; instead it is a dossier, with a narrator’s voice guiding the reader through each person’s story, and suggesting an appropriate response to each episode. The book is only important for the influence it may have had on another, far greater, writer.

Wilkie Collins’
The Woman in White
(serialized 1859–60) is frequently called the first sensation-novel, and it is possibly the one with the greatest pretensions to ‘literature’.
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Collins followed this in 1868 with
The Moonstone,
one of the starting points of detective fiction. To a degree, it can be said that these genres grew out of the heightened emotions surrounding the poison trials of the 1850s. Collins told a friend that the narrative structure of
The Woman in White
occurred to him after attending a trial in London in 1856, noticing how each witness held a single strand of the story, which when woven together formed a dense narrative. He did not name the trial, but it is unlikely that if he had been trial-going in London in 1856 he would have missed Palmer’s, the biggest of the decade.

Whichever it was,
The Woman in White
is shaped as a series of overlapping voices, with additional ‘voices’ from diaries, documents and depositions. ‘As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now,’ says the omniscient narrator in one of his few appearances. There is no evidence that Collins knew
The Story of Minie L’Angelier,
but this method of switching between reality and fiction in crime reporting was not the novelty he made out. In 1855 the author of
Paul Ferroll
had pasted trial transcripts in albums for reference, and the year after the publication of
The Story of Minie L’Angelier
she wrote of her readers as a jury who have ‘to answer Yes or No’. Even the popular press routinely moved between reportage and fiction. One journalist at Madeleine Smith’s trial saw a man leaning against the ledge of the courtroom gallery, who ‘recalled to mind irresistibly the picture of Rigaud sitting at an upper window in the concluding number of
Little Dorrit
(which had just ended its serial publication).

Similarly, the magazine serials had their preoccupations echoed in non-fiction articles in the same issues. As episodes of
The Woman in White
appeared in
All the Year Round,
articles in the rest of the magazine mirrored the preoccupations of the characters: when Marian Halcombe was stricken with a mystery illness in the novel, the magazine printed an article on nervous diseases; a chapter on the fictionally neurasthenic Mr Fairlie was mirrored by a non-fiction piece by a former resident of Bedlam. These shifting lines between form and function, fiction and non-fiction, were not unique to Collins. Mrs Braddon’s
The Trail of the Serpent
used the casebook formula pioneered in memoirs like Vidocq’s. Many other novels incorporated fictional trial transcripts, their style familiar to every newspaper reader.

Truth, the newspapers and journals constantly told their readers, is every bit as strange as, if not stranger than, fiction. Collins admitted to his friends – and flatly denied in print – that he used real crimes in his fiction.
The Law and the Lady
reversed the Madeleine Smith story, with a man, Eustace Macallan, receiving a verdict of ‘not proven’. Collins possibly also made use of J.H. Burton’s
Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland,
which dated from before the Smith trial (he is known to have owned a copy), but Madeleine Smith’s case was more obviously the moving force. Macallan’s revealing diary is read out in court, as Miss Smith’s letters had been; he buys arsenic, claiming he wants to kill rats, as Miss Smith had done; his wife’s schoolfriends testify that she had spoken of arsenic as a complexion-improver, as Miss Smith’s had. Another case, less well known in Britain, triggered
The Woman in White.
The book by Maurice-Méjan that Collins had used in his retelling of the Eliza Fenning story also included the story of the Marquise de Douhault, whose brother had defrauded her of her inheritance. When she attempted to take him to court, she was drugged and awoke to find herself incarcerated under a false name in the Salpetrière, the Parisian Bedlam, while her brother announced the sad news of his sister’s death. It was two years before she was able to smuggle out a letter which led to her being freed. This is in essence the plot that Collins’ villain, Count Fosco, conceives in
The Woman in White.
Even the detail of the white dress that marks out the Woman in White of the title had its source in the French case: when the Marquise was finally released from the Salpetrière, she was handed back the white dress she had been wearing on admission two years previously.

To his reading public, Collins continued to be disingenuous about these links to reality. In his 1866 novel
Armadale
there is perhaps the most teasing of his hall-of-mirrors ‘it was true’ formulations. Collins claimed that it was only after he had planned the novel’s denouement – when his villainess attempts to murder Allan Armadale by wafting poison gas into his bedroom – that he read of three nightwatchmen on a ship called the
Armadale,
berthed at Liverpool, who had died of ‘carbonic acid gas’. A modern scholar has noted, however, that
The Times
mistakenly printed ‘carbonic acid gas’, rather than carbon monoxide, and Collins replicated the mistake: he had copied the news report, whatever his protestations. Again, in 1871, in the dedication to
Poor Miss Finch
(which used, in the backstory, details from the Rush murders), he wrote that ‘one of these days, I may be able to make use of some of the many interesting stories of events that have really happened. Thus far I have not ventured to [do so]. The true incidents are so “far-fetched”; and the conduct of the real people is so “grossly improbable”.’ Yet to his friends he acknowledged that while the plot of
The Woman in White
had ‘been called outrageous’, ‘It was true.’