A Very British Murder (11 page)

From a hundred foul lanes and alleys have debouched … unheard-of human horrors. Gibbering forms of men and women in filthy rags … hang around your feet like reptiles, and crawl round you like loathsome vermin, and in a demoniac whine beg charity from you. One can bear the men; ferocious and repulsive as they are, a penny and a threat will send them cowering and cursing to their noisome dens again. One cannot bear the women without a shudder and a feeling of infinite sorrow and humiliation. They are so horrible to look upon, so thoroughly unsexed, shameless.

Eventually, like the lancing of a boil, New Oxford Street was cut through the depths of the slum.
^fn1

Dickens’s tour of St Giles with Inspector Field begins with the clock of St Giles church striking nine, and his arrival at the Police Station House nearby. There he discovers a host of lost souls: a boy who can’t find his way home to Newgate Street, an inebriated woman, a quiet woman imprisoned for begging, a watercress seller, a pickpocket and a drunken male pauper.

Dickens and Field then set off on Field’s nightly round of the area. Dickens is amazed and impressed by Inspector Field’s lack of fear, his knowledge of his beat and his knack of getting what he wants. ‘I should like to know where Inspector Field was born,’ he muses. ‘In Ratcliffe Highway, I would have answered with confidence, but for his being equally at home wherever we go.’ Inspector Field invades lodging houses and slums, brutally turning out nests of thieves from their beds in search of malefactors.

Saint Giles’s church strikes half-past ten. We stoop low, and creep down a precipitous flight of stairs into a dark close cellar. There is a fire. There is a long deal table. There are benches. The cellar is full of company, chiefly very young men in various conditions of dirt and raggedness. Some are eating supper. There are no women or girls present. Welcome to Rats’ Castle, gentlemen, and to this company of noted thieves!

Inspector Field searches the cellar, and soon has the young men standing up and respectfully taking off their caps. He knows each and every occupant. His is the hand ‘that has collared half the people here, and motioned their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, male and female friends, inexorably to New South Wales … Inspector Field stands in this den, the Sultan of the place’.

The year following their night-time jaunt through the slums of St Giles, Dickens would fictionalize his friend, placing him, as ‘Inspector Bucket’, into the novel
Bleak House
(1852). Inspector Bucket captures the murderous maid, Hortense, who is herself based on Maria Manning.

Although the overarching theme of the novel is the condemnation of the ponderous, slow and therefore unjust Court of Chancery, and although the murderess and the policeman are minor characters, Dickens is nevertheless often credited with writing, in
Bleak House
, what may be described as the first detective novel. His character Hortense murders a lawyer and frames her employer, Lady Dedlock, for the crime. Inspector Bucket, originally employed to investigate Lady Dedlock, follows the clues and catches the murderess.

Dickens himself would deny the link between the real-life Inspector Field and the fictional Inspector Bucket. After all, a novelist wishes to be known for his or her imagination, not for journalistic observation. But the link of the lifted finger points to the connection. Like Field’s, Bucket’s ‘fat forefinger seems to rise to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears, and it whispers information … he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent.’

Just as John Williams, in the mind of De Quincey, became literature’s first glamorous murderer, Inspector Field has a good claim for providing, in Dickens’s work, the model for the first fully formed professional detective in fiction.

^fn1
St Giles is also the location of the opening scene, where we meet one of the book’s many prostitutes, in Michel Faber’s magnificent homage to Victorian fiction,
The Crimson Petal and the White
(2002).

‘There’s nothing beats a stunning good murder, after all.’

Ballad-seller commenting on his profession’s most profitable moments

FAR DISTANT FROM
the noisome slums of St Giles, the peaceful Suffolk village of Polstead is a quiet and picturesque place amid fields and woods.

The village has a lovely medieval church on a knoll grazed by sheep, an idyllic pond and a green with a comfortable pub called the Cock Tavern. In 1828, however, a particularly brutish and nasty crime took place here. In the graveyard of the church, a wooden sign tells the visitor that the body of Maria Marten is buried somewhere close by. Poor Maria, the victim of the celebrated Murder at the Red Barn, was only 25 years old. The wooden sign is necessary because her actual gravestone has disappeared (more on this shortly).

The people who live in Polstead today aren’t particularly interested in this local murder, and would rather forget about it. Indeed, when I was there, a passing local family told me that the village doesn’t like
to talk about Maria. ‘You won’t find we’re keen,’ the father said. Yet her presence is still clearly felt: in the plaque in the churchyard, at her cottage (clearly signposted as ‘Maria Marten’s’) and in the prominent signpost marking ‘Corder’s House’, the home of her killer, William Corder. That same afternoon, others tweeted that I might as well give up looking as I wouldn’t find the remains of the Red Barn. Indeed, I was already well aware that they had vanished.

Maria was the daughter of a mole-catcher and had two illegitimate children with different fathers. In time, as Maria’s tale became embroidered in the retelling, this somewhat disreputable back-story would be glossed over. Many later accounts make her out to have been an innocent, pure and virginal young maid of the village. In 1827, though, she gave birth to a third baby, fathered by William Corder, who lived in a much bigger and grander Elizabethan house over near the pond. The son of a prosperous yeoman farmer, Corder had a slightly dodgy reputation and criminal contacts in London. But, again, in order to make a better story, he would later be elevated into the more straightforward and recognizable role of village squire.

Corder seems to have promised Maria that they would marry, or at least elope together, and an assignation was made at the ‘Red Barn’, a structure on the hill behind Maria’s house. This barn, later so illustrious in fact and fiction, took its name from its partially red-pantiled roof. But also, it was said, its position allowed it to catch the rays of the setting sun, which nightly turned it a bloody and ominous red.

After leaving for her assignation – some said dressed in men’s clothes as a disguise – Maria was never seen alive again. William Corder likewise left the village. Letters arrived at intervals for
Maria’s family, claiming that the happy couple were now settled on the Isle of Wight. Maria had hurt her hand, the letters stated, which was why she had not written herself.

Next, contemporaries believed, a providential or supernatural intervention worked its beneficent magic. Maria’s stepmother had a dream in which it was mysteriously revealed to her that Maria was not, after all, in the Isle of Wight. This dream or vision would feature heavily in retellings of this particular tale, and provided a key part of its popularity. The stepmother woke up believing that Maria was in fact still very close to home, buried in the barn behind the house. Maria’s father, convinced by his wife, went to have a look, and there indeed he discovered his daughter’s body. There were enough identifying marks to confirm that it was her, and around her neck was a green handkerchief that had belonged to William Corder.

It proved quite easy to catch Maria’s killer, who had by now settled down in London with a wife he had acquired since leaving Polstead. (In a bizarre twist, Corder had found this wife through advertising for a spouse in
The Times
.) William Corder was brought back to Suffolk for his trial, which took place, amid enormous publicity, at the Shire Hall of Bury St Edmunds. Corder’s defence claimed that the media had massively prejudiced his trial by assuming his guilt. Whether this was true or not, they ultimately failed to protect him. After all, his rather unconvincing line of defence was simply that he hadn’t done it. Once condemned to death, he did finally come out with a confession of sorts, but even then he claimed that it had been an accident: he had threatened his lover with a gun, and fired it only because of a trembling in his fingers.

Corder’s sentence decreed that he should not only be hanged – a process that took a good ten minutes, even with the hangman pulling down upon his legs – but also that his body should be dissected and ‘anatomized’. Despite the requests of his new wife for the return of her husband’s corpse, it was taken back to the Shire Hall, opened up by the slitting and peeling back of the skin and laid out upon a table. According to the papers, no fewer than 5,000 local people came trooping through the building to see the body.

The next day, science took precedence over spectacle and the body was carefully dissected for the edification of a group of young medical students from Cambridge. They were particularly interested in studying it in the light of the new ‘science’ of phrenology then in vogue, so a careful cast was taken of Corder’s head, for future reference. That cast is now in Moyse’s Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, where the curator, Alex McWhirter, showed it to me. It’s rather a distressing sight. The nose and lips are horribly swollen, as the blood vessels in these organs had burst during the process of hanging.

The murder in the Red Barn created an enormous sensation in contemporary East Anglia, and cast an unusually long shadow over what historians call ‘material culture’: everyday things like knickknacks, pictures, song-sheets and artefacts. Almost immediately, this rather sordid, rural tale of betrayal and violence struck a chord with the British public, each of whom seemed to want a tangible keepsake to remind them of the story.

For the broadside and ballad-sellers at the execution itself, William Corder would be long remembered as a great boon to their trade. The most popular item for sale was Corder’s ‘last confession’, a detailed screed reportedly taken down by witnesses the night
before he died. One ‘patterer’ retained fond memories of the sales frenzy that swept through Bury St Edmunds: ‘I got a whole hatful of halfpence at that … a gentleman’s servant come out, and wanted half a dozen for his master, and one for himself.’

William Corder’s head modelled just after death, and showing the swollen lips and nose that were the effects of his hanging.

Corder’s ‘Last Dying Speech and Full Confession’ was published alongside a song called ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’, which became one of the most popular ballads of 1828. It wasn’t just a local sensation, as copies of this particular ballad still survive from named printing presses in London, Wales and even Scotland. Such was its reach and popularity that it must have been the contemporary equivalent of a number one single.

At least four different ballads about William Corder are known to have been written and printed at the time of his trial but ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’ is the best known. People purchased the printed words on a piece of paper, and learned the tune either from listening to the ballad-seller or from their friends who already knew how the music went. ‘Our servants are constantly loitering in the street,’ complained a late Georgian journalist, ‘to learn the last new song … You would be surprised, sir, could I enumerate the number of women-servants whose money has been squandered in the purchase of our Grub-street harmony.’

Or, alternatively, people may well have sung ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’ to any handy tune that they knew already. Tunes were constantly recycled with different words (just as, conversely, words could be sung to different tunes).

When I met Vic Gammon, a historian of folk music, to learn this particular ballad, I was pretty sure that the tune to a song about a murder in 1828 would be unknown to me. I was astonished to learn, though, that I was already perfectly familiar with it, and could start singing it right away, for one of the best-known tunes to which ‘Maria Marten’ was sung pops up in one of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s fantasias on English folk songs, ‘Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus’, for harp and string orchestra. The composer was an avid collector of folk songs and ballad tunes who travelled the countryside collecting music and writing down old tunes which might otherwise have been lost. He wrote his fantasia on folk songs as a commission for the British Council, and it was first performed in the Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1939. The occasion was a century distant in time, and three and a half thousand miles distant in space,
from Polstead and the Red Barn. But the piece opens with the best-known of the melodies to which ‘Maria Marten’ could be sung.