The Invention of Murder (26 page)

In
Bleak House
Dickens laid out how that job was done, now elaborating some of Nadgett’s traits into the more rounded figure of Inspector Bucket ‘of the Detective’. Nadgett had been all-seeing – ‘every button on his coat might have been an eye; he saw so much’; he had been professional – the ‘man, at a pound a week’ who makes the ‘inquiries’; and, as the best fictional detectives were soon to do, he was perpetually whipping in and out of disguises – he was, in dizzying succession, a coal merchant, wine merchant, commission agent and accountant. Mr Bucket develops these traits further: he is ‘a sharp-eyed man – a quick, keen man – [who] takes in everybody’s look at him, all at once, individually and collectively, in a manner that stamps him a remarkable man’. He can materialize in an almost ghost-like fashion: ‘Time and place cannot bind Mr Bucket … he is here today and gone tomorrow. looking here and there, now from this side of the carriage, now from the other, now up at the house windows, now along the people’s heads, nothing escapes him.’

It is generally accepted that Inspector Bucket was drawn from the mannerisms and appearance of Inspector Charles Field of the Detective Department, or ‘Inspector Wield’ as Dickens had dubbed him in ‘A Detective Police Party’. ‘Wield’ was ‘a middle-aged man of portly presence, with a large, moist, knowing eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasizing his conversation by the aid of a corpulent forefinger, which is constantly in juxtaposition with his eyes or nose’. Mr Bucket, in turn, was a ‘stoutly-built, steady looking, sharp-eyed man’, whose ‘fat forefinger seems to rise to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears, and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins him to secresy [sic]; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent …’ Dickens denied any connection – in 1853, when
The Times
wrote that he had used Field as a model, he responded, ‘Allow me to assure you. I found nothing more entirely and completely new to me than [this fact].’ However, the letter is carefully worded: Dickens wrote that he did not ‘avail’ himself of ‘that officer’s experiences’; he did not say he had not availed himself of his person. The link was soon to be too well established in people’s minds to be broken by a simple denial. A decade later Mark Lemon, the editor of
Punch
and a friend of Dickens, was telling people that ‘Charley Field the detective, with his flabby hand and cool tongue. traced Mrs Manning to a lodging, and tapped at door [sic] “Only me – Charley Field – so just open the door quietly, Maria.” ‘ A fun story, even though Mrs Manning had actually been arrested by two Edinburgh officers, a Mr Moxey and his colleague.
*
Such was the fame of Dickens’ creation that ‘Inspector Field’ by now almost meant ‘detective’.

The most innovative use of Bucket was in the authorial voice Dickens used to tell of his investigation. For the most part, melodrama was driven by a plot that was deliberately laid out, and solved by coincidence, or the workings of providence. In
Bleak House,
at first the story has an omniscient narrator, so the reader has an overview of everyone’s actions, but by the end we discover that Mr Bucket had suspected Lady Dedlock’s maid Hortense all along. The trick ending, where all is revealed, soon a standard of detective literature, here appears for the first time: now the reader becomes fascinated not by the crime but by its solution, by the detection of crime.

As well as the novel’s middle-class readership,
Bleak House
found a wide audience as a popular fairground marionette play. Unusually, a script for one version has survived. In
Poor Joe
most of the plot has been thrown overboard, and the story focuses on Inspector Bucket and his tracking down of the murderer, with the subplot given over to the death of Jo the crossing-sweeper. The marionettes, like the penny-gaffs where they often performed, gave performances lasting only twenty minutes each. Old Wild, one of the larger touring proprietors, had a ten-minute version of
The Dogs of the Plantation, or, A British Sailor in His Glory
that included six duels and a set of performing dogs. Inspector Bucket would have had little time to detect in his outings.

Dickens was not the only writer – not even the first writer – to use Mrs Manning as fodder for fiction. In 1851, the year before
Bleak House, The Gold-Worshippers: or, The Days We Live in. A Future Historical Novel
appeared. Here the anonymous author (Emma Robinson),
*
in the midst of what is primarily a social satire, has her main character, Mrs Sparkleton, visited by her ex-lady’s maid. Mrs Redgold is ‘a French femme de chambre, who had married an English railway guard’, has ‘a figure … so tastefully and artistically dressed that it must have excited admiration in all’ and lives in ‘a little hovel of a residence in the Borough’ (which is in Bermondsey). Nothing more is heard of her for a few hundred pages, when Mrs Sparkleton recollects that ‘poor Mrs. Redgold is going to be hung to-day, and her husband with her. They murdered some sort of an exciseman, or customhouse-officer for – for his railway Scrip,’ having invited him to ‘a dinner – for which she made no other preparation than a grave and a loaded pistol’. Then she vanishes again – she is simply a piece of murder tourism, or at best a symbolic warning against greed.

Murderous lady’s maids with a physical resemblance to Mrs Manning had a small vogue around the mid-century, in both literature and penny fiction. George Eliot, in her novella
The Lifted Veil,
depicts a tall, dark lady’s maid, ‘with a face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry’, who buys poison in order to kill her mistress’s husband. In Mrs Braddon’s penny-blood
The Black Band, or, The Mysteries of Midnight,
Rosine Rousel, a mysterious French lady’s maid, previously in the employ of a titled family, ‘attired in a black silk dress, which fitted tightly’, attempts to murder her mistress. She is, like Mrs Manning, the brains of the operation, although as this is a penny-blood, it involves a pan-European criminal network. In other references the Mannings became shorthand for evil, or simply for a murderer. In Surtees’
Plain or Ringlets?,
a men’s club is described as ‘a place where they would very likely cut you up into quarters and drop you quietly over Blackfriars Bridge in the dead of the night,
*
or shoot you through the head and bury you in the back kitchen, as somebody did Mr. Manning, or Mr. Manning did somebody, I forget which way it was’.

In
The Woman in White
(1859–60), Wilkie Collins’ phenomenally successful sensation-novel, one of the narrators, Marian Halcombe, records in a diary entry dated 15 June 1850 (that is, seven months after the Mannings were executed), ‘I have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both unusually stout people.’ This may be a feint, to lead the reader to assume that the Mannings were only of passing interest to the novelist. But Collins used the now-familiar details of Maria Manning’s life for the back-history that is revealed when the fictional amateur detective approaches the ‘Woman in White’s’ mother: Mrs Catherick had been a lady’s maid in a grand family, involved with another man before she married and continuing in the relationship afterwards, and she used her husband as her dupe in her crime, while she was the controlling intelligence. Mrs Henry Wood, another sensation-novelist, used a similar character to Dickens’ Hortense in
Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles
(1862): Mlle Varsini, the governess in the family of a country solicitor, murders one of the sons in error after his brother has trifled with her affections. Like Mrs Manning and her fictional sisters, she is dark, passionate and vindictive, and murders for reasons that can safely be isolated as ‘foreign’.

Despite these frequent uses of Mrs Manning in fiction, she and her husband did not make good theatre. There were two versions of the story at the Britannia,
Marie de Roux, or, The Progress of Crime
in 1860, and
Hidden Guilt
in 1864. No copy of the latter seems to have survived, but
Marie de Roux
is a splendid farrago of melodramatic episodes, which keeps fairly closely to the story of the murder, apart from making Marie a young girl destined for a convent by her pious father, who manages (by accident, of course) to shoot him dead before she runs off with a vile seducer (‘She is mine! Ha! Ha!’), her avenging brother hot on her trail.

As newspapers elaborated the Mannings’ deeds, as broadsides gloated over the details, as theatres turned tragedy into melodrama, the perception became more pervasive that murder was ever-present, and in particular that female murderers were ready to kill on the slightest provocation. A series of panics swept the country – fear of poisoning being the most rampant, and the most fatal to the accused.

It was odd that public anxiety fixated on poison, because murder by that means was barely a reality. In 1849 there were over 20,000 deaths in England and Wales that were unexplained or suspicious. Of these, 415 were linked to poison. After suicide and accidental poisonings were removed, charges were brought in only eleven cases involving possible murder by poison, and not all of these resulted in guilty verdicts. Intentional poisoning was thus suspected in fewer than 0.003 per cent of cases of suspicious deaths.

But poisoning was frightening because it involved intimacy. A stranger might bludgeon a passer-by to death – that was bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. To poison someone, the poisoner had to be intimate enough to give the victim food or drink. Who more natural to give food and drink than those who nurtured you – your family, or your servants? The idea of servants with malevolent intent was particularly frightening: servants lived with a family, they prepared the family’s meals, washed the family’s clothes, knew everything about the family’s lives, but the family rarely knew much about their servants. A great deal could be projected onto this blank.