A Very British Murder (22 page)

She was parted as a child from her own mad mother to grow up with her alcoholic father. Once married, and with a young baby, she is deserted by her husband George Talboys, who goes off to Australia without a word. It is the action of a heartless villain, though contemporary readers found him a paragon of virtue. It may have been his intention to seek – and in fact he did succeed in finding – a fortune in Australia for the benefit of his wife and child, but Helen is abandoned to a life of poverty. I find it quite understandable that she should give him up as a bad lot, find work as a governess and then marry the aged and wealthy baronet Sir Michael Audley. But
then she has a stroke of bad luck: it turns out that Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew, was also a friend of her first husband. Robert grows increasingly suspicious about what might have happened to George Talboys, and who the new Lady Audley might really be.

Helen’s greater crime was the abandonment of her child to the not-so-tender mercies of her drunken father, although her husband George – held up as a hero – does exactly the same thing when he returns from Australia and the boy becomes his responsibility. Even Robert Audley, inheriting the problem of what to do with the child after his friend’s supposed murder, does nothing more than pack the poor boy off to school. I like to think that Lady Audley finally saves her own life by
pretending
to be mad, thereby persuading the stuffy Robert Audley that she should live, at his expense, in Belgium for the rest of her life rather than face trial for attempted murder.

Despite the resetting of our moral compasses, one of the enduring pleasures of the story of Lady Audley is working out who’s good and who’s bad, and changing one’s mind as new facts emerge. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was instinctively aware of what her readers would praise and blame, and managed to walk the tightrope between the two in a manner that kept people reading even if they didn’t approve. ‘It is worse than a crime, Violet, it is an impropriety’ is a celebrated line spoken by a character in one of her later works, which could only have been written by a clear-eyed observer of contemporary society.

Jennifer Carnell, Braddon’s biographer, points out that contemporaries would have judged many of Braddon’s characters more harshly than their creator did herself. Those who commit murders and other crimes (and there are many of them in her many books)
are often allowed to escape hanging or death, and Braddon sends them off instead to a long life of quiet repentance. This enraged her more moralistic readers, but, from a modern vantage point, it looks as if Braddon had more insight into human weakness than many of her male fellow writers. Life had not treated her kindly, and she therefore understood what circumstances could drive people to do.

Indeed, in the midst of her wealth and achievements, the past caught up with her. When John Maxwell’s legal wife eventually died in the psychiatric institution in Ireland, Braddon’s detractors made sure that the death was announced widely in the press. Letters of condolence began to arrive at Braddon and Maxwell’s house in Richmond, as everyone assumed that it was Braddon herself, his presumed wife, who was dead. When it became clear that she was still very much alive, the respectability of this apparently affluent couple living in Richmond was shredded, and all but one of their servants left. Yet, even if Braddon wasn’t immensely respectable, when she died in 1915, she was immensely successful and immensely rich, the reward of a career providing Victorian readers with exactly the stories they desired most.

‘Strong men shuddered and women fainted and were carried out of the theatre.’

Richard Mansfield’s obituary describes the effect of his performance as Mr Hyde

IN 1888, A
serial killer was terrorizing the East End of London. The few undisputed facts about him are rather grubby and shop-soiled from so much handling, and the identity of the murderer is still a complete mystery. Over the summer and autumn, several killings of prostitutes on the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields became linked – at least in the public’s imagination – with a single perpetrator. The removal of internal organs from three of the women led people to think that he must have had medical knowledge, and be experienced in dissection. The final touch came from a hoax letter, purporting to be from the killer but probably written by a journalist aiming to stir up the story. He signed it with the name that stands today as shorthand for a whole ragbag of half-facts and inferences: the assumption that there was a single
killer and mutilator, trained as a doctor, who called himself ‘Jack the Ripper’.
^fn1

The case was recreated in fiction almost immediately.
The Curse Upon Mitre Square
is a novelette inspired by one of the Ripper killings and published by John Francis Brewer as early as October 1888. And, of course, its influence is felt to this day, with TV dramas like
Whitechapel
and
Ripper Street
.

But historians have recently pointed out an extremely interesting relationship that goes in the other direction, from fiction to real life.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s story
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) was inspired by a nightmare – ‘I was dreaming a fine bogey tale’, as he put it – and he wrote it in three furious days. The short novel is about a respectable doctor with a split personality. By day, he is a fine, upstanding member of his profession and community. At night, though, he is transformed into a terrible, dark inversion of himself. Through the consumption of a magic medicine, he would ‘turn into’ the other, baser, half of his character: the monstrous killer Mr Hyde. The story opens with a description of Mr Hyde, rampaging down a London street at night, and in a blind fury trampling down and crushing a little girl who had been sent out by her family to run for a doctor for a sick relative. His evil actions are particularly terrifying because they appear to be random and without motive.

Accosted by spectators, Mr Hyde agrees to pay compensation to her family for hurting the child, but the cheque he makes out is in the name of the highly respectable Dr Jekyll. This is the first hint that the evil, deformed and violent Mr Hyde – he later bludgeons someone to death with a walking stick – has some sort of relationship with the virtuous doctor. It’s initially assumed that Mr Hyde is blackmailing Dr Jekyll, but the two of them are never to be seen in the same place at the same time. Eventually, when Hyde is suspected of having murdered Jekyll, the secret comes out that they are one and the same person. Along with it the source of the transformation is revealed: it lies in the potion and the special salt with which it must be mixed. Dr Jekyll had been performing chemical experiments to explore the ‘thorough and primitive duality of man’, and, through a batch of contaminated drugs, had stumbled upon unforeseen and tragic consequences.

Once again the Victorian love/fear of poisons raises its head, as does the idea that darkness lurks in the heart of the respectable doctor, like William Palmer. The theme of a man’s being able to present two very different faces to the world runs through Victorian literature: it would be seen again in
The Picture of Dorian Grey
by Oscar Wilde (1890).

Stevenson’s book was enormously successful and soon became a stage play, which opened at London’s Lyceum Theatre on 5 August 1888. The murder of Martha Tabram, a crime some people think is the first in the series committed by ‘Jack the Ripper’, took place just two days later. Other murders followed swiftly on.

Every night at the Lyceum, in front of a couple of thousand people, an actor named Richard Mansfield (1857–1907) played
both of the characters, the good Dr Jekyll and the evil Mr Hyde. The climax of the play came when he transformed himself, on stage, from Mr Hyde back into Dr Jekyll. The film versions of the story show the transformation going the other way, from good to bad, from Jekyll to Hyde. But the original stage version showed the monster turning into the man.

Stevenson’s story described the transformation as:

the most racking pangs … a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet.

This was what Richard Mansfield had to convey – and he was an extraordinarily skilled actor. His background had been in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and he would go on to be a hugely popular Shakespearian performer. When he died, the
New York Times
called him ‘the greatest actor of his hour, and one of the greatest of all times’.

Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde was the role that made Mansfield’s reputation. The
Daily Telegraph
claimed that ‘his nervous electricity caused silence throughout the house – the surest test of power’. (This also shows that audiences were not yet expected to sit in the well-mannered, attentive silence that we know today.) ‘Mr Mansfield,’ the reviewer continued, ‘has come, he has been seen, and he has conquered as an actor of remarkable power and intelligence.’

How did Mansfield achieve the changeover from Hyde to Jekyll? There was much speculation about his use of make-up, trap doors and secret lighting effects. ‘Every one speculated on the secret of the transformation which they saw yet could not believe’, Mansfield’s obituary would claim. ‘He was accused of using acids, phosphorus and all manner of chemicals.’ Indeed, one witness ‘declared it was “all perfectly simple. He uses a rubber suit which he inflates and exhausts with pleasure!”’

Mansfield was understandably reluctant to reveal the secrets of his craft, but it does seem that the transformation was achieved through the physical body alone. He did, however, receive help from the swelling music of the orchestra, and some nifty lighting. As Mr Hyde, he was lit from below, to darken and deepen the eye sockets. As Dr Jekyll, he was lit, flatteringly, from above, as the conventional, handsome, juvenile lead in any play would have been. (The critics generally preferred Mansfield as the twisted Mr Hyde rather than as the much more straightforward and run-of-the-mill hero, Dr Jekyll.) But most of the effect he achieved by himself. The moment Mr Hyde swallowed the magic potion, Mansfield would turn his back on the audience, writhing and grimacing as it went down his throat. Then, as he completed his circuit, he faced them once again as the smiling doctor. The
Evening Standard
described how: ‘It is the puny fiend that swallows the draught, then the figure straightens itself, actually seems to increase in stature, passes its hands upwards over its face, and Jekyll stands revealed. The change is amazing in its completeness and rapidity.’

Mansfield would have adopted the overblown, melodramatic acting style necessary for two thousand people to be able to see
clearly what he was doing, and they found it thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.

It was a remarkable performance, and people were amazed partly because they had simply never seen anything like it before. The effect on the audience’s nerves was so deep as to be almost dangerous. One newspaper reported:

I was attracted by a crowd in the Strand the other night, and on investigating the matter, found that they surrounded a well-dressed young man who had bolted out of a ’bus while it was going at a rapid rate, and then fallen down in a fit. It appeared that he had been to see Mr Mansfield as Dr Jekyll, and on getting into the ’bus found himself beside a most repulsive-looking man, whom he immediately concluded must either be the Doctor himself or the Whitechapel Murderer. In a fit of fearful nervousness, he jumped from his seat, and came to grief as mentioned.

The press were reporting that ‘Jack the Ripper’ had been removing internal organs from his victims with some skill, suggesting that he, too, had a medical training – and it wasn’t long before people began to mix up fact and fiction. In an article for
The Ripperologist
(the journal for historians of ‘Jack the Ripper’), Alan Sharp analyses the links the media made between the ‘Ripper’ and Mr Hyde during London’s fearful summer of 1888. He notes how the
Freeman’s Journal
began in a sober, comparative note, reflecting that ‘these atrocities and apparently causeless murders show that there is abroad at the present time in the East End a human monster even
more terrible than Hyde’. Meanwhile, another gentleman wrote to the
Telegraph
with a stronger connection, suggesting that ‘the perpetrator [of the ‘Ripper’ killings] is a being whose diseased brain has been inflamed by witnessing the performance of the drama of “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”’. Others went still further than the facts warranted. A correspondent to
The Star
insisted that: ‘You, and every one of the papers, have missed the obvious solution of the Whitechapel mystery. The murderer is a Mr Hyde, who seeks in the repose and comparative respectability of Dr Jekyll security from the crimes he commits in his baser shape.’

There were even those who insisted that the actor Richard Mansfield was himself the killer. After all, every night, on stage, he showed that he had the capacity to be both a healer and a killer: ‘I do not think there is a man living so well able to disguise himself in a moment as he does in front of the public,’ claimed the
Pall Mall Gazette
under the headline ‘Mr Hyde at large in Whitechapel’.