The Invention of Murder (40 page)

The
Daily News
encapsulated the public’s ambivalence over Smethurst. It reported that in ‘high quarters’ it was considered ‘a case for conviction, but not one in which the capital punishment should be carried out’. If half a grain of arsenic had been found in Isabella Bankes’ stool after constant diarrhoea for weeks, then she should have been riddled with the stuff, yet nothing was found in any of her organs. And despite Smethurst’s entire life being raked over, no one had found any debts, any need of money, or anything against him at all. Having printed this, the
Daily News
changed sides a couple of days later, suggesting now that Smethurst had an obviously guilty demeanour. He had been cool and calm at his trial; it would need cool and calm to poison a bigamous wife;
ergo,
the cool and calm man was a killer. The following day the paper swapped sides again, arguing that it was only circumstance that made Smethurst appear guilty: his calm made him look guilty in the dock, but had he been in the witness box, no one would have thought his behaviour at all suspicious.

In the normal course of events, if an appeal were made, the Home Secretary reviewed the case and made a decision. But with Smethurst he devolved responsibility, handing everything over to Sir Benjamin Brodie, a distinguished surgeon, first President of the General Medical Council, and Serjeant-Surgeon to the Queen (Brodie had also appeared as a prosecution witness against Palmer, so perhaps was not entirely objective). On 4 September, Brodie’s verdict was delivered, with fourteen reasons for and against Smethurst, of which only six were medical or scientific. So, although Brodie had been brought in as a sort of superior expert witness, his judgement was based not on his expertise at all, but simply on the fact that ‘the impression on my mind is that there is not absolute and complete evidence of Smethurst’s guilt’ – to determine which was legally the job of the jury.

Smethurt’s appeal was allowed, but he was immediately arrested, this time on a charge of bigamy. The
Morning Chronicle
pointed out the hypocrisy of the public, who wanted Smethurst to be punished, but only a little bit. The bigamy charge was ‘an expedient for repairing the failure’ of the first trial, ‘or as a means of satisfying a public moral feeling’. Smethurst, at this new trial, claimed that the first Mrs Smethurst had earlier been married to a man named Johnson, and therefore they had not been legally married, but he offered no proof. The jury refused to believe him, probably rightly: if his first marriage was invalid and he believed himself to be legally married to Isabella Bankes, why had her will been drawn up in her maiden name? Smethurst was found guilty of bigamy, and sentenced to a year in prison.

Dickens, a great popularizer but not a great populist, was appalled that public opinion could so sway a verdict, and satirically suggested some amendments to the law, to deal with likeable poisoners. The jury, he suggested, should be given second-or third-hand accounts of the evidence, and could then ‘constantly write letters about it to all the Papers’, while doctors who had neither treated the victim nor performed any analyses chipped in with their opinions. In private as well as public he fulminated against the reprieve: ‘I saw the beast of a prisoner (with my mind’s eye) delivering his cut-and-dried speech … no one but the murderer could have delivered or conceived it.’ The case ‘needed no medical evidence either way’, he was convinced; Smethurst, with his calm, collected demeanour, was a ‘black scoundrel’ and well deserved the gallows.

The very ordinariness of these medical poisoners disturbed him most. The year after Palmer’s execution he had written: ‘everywhere I see the late Mr. Palmer with his betting-book in his hands. Mr. Palmer sits next to me at the theatre; Mr. Palmer goes before me down the street. I look at the back of his bad head repeated in long long lines on the race course, and in the betting stand … and I vow to God I can see nothing but cruelty, covetousness, calculation … and low wickedness.’ The essential here, as with Smethurst, was that Palmer was a villain, and yet he looked no different from anyone else. Dickens wanted a villain in life who looked and sounded like a villain in melodrama or fiction, even as he recognized that ‘Cunning … secrecy, cold calculation, hard callousness and dire insensibility’ were the tools of a murderer – a killer who looked and sounded like Bill Sikes would have a short career. Many similarly wanted their murderers to resemble O. Smith, a melodrama actor best known for playing villains. Smith had, according to one historian of melodrama, the perfect collection of villainous mannerisms: ‘a half-crazed look and manner, a stealthy step, a hollow voice, and a piercing eye … His trump card … was his laugh, a taunting, deliberate basso-profundo effect in three syllables. That laugh. became a convention in the interpretation of villain roles.’

While most people continued to think of murderers as marked by such idiosyncrasies, in the last of these high-profile poison cases of the 1850s, the accused was not a man, not a thug, and also not a doctor, but something even more startling: a young woman from a good family. In contrast to the fears aroused by working-class poisoners, this middle-class female poisoner was, somehow, not frightening at all. Thousands of young ladies just like the one on trial could not get enough of the details. In the year of Smethurst, Emily Eden in her novel
The Semi-Detached House,
represented the attitude to middle-class domestic murder. Genteel, elderly Mrs Hopkinson tells her daughters: ‘there is such a grand murder in the paper. a whole family poisoned. It was really very interesting, and I like a good murder that can’t be found out; that is, of course, it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.’

Many middle-class ladies like Mrs Hopkinson were reading about murders, both fictional and real. From the 1840s a number of magazines for working-class women and their families had begun publication, with titles like the
Family Herald
and the
Family Library,
or
Home Circle.
They cost between ½d. and 1d., and as well as recipes, housekeeping advice and other similar matter they also carried serial fiction which, said the
British Mother’s Magazine,
a more upmarket publication, ‘if weighed in the balance of strict Christian principle, would be found miserably wanting’. Perhaps, but by 1859 Dickens, always attuned to the
zeitgeist,
had started his new magazine,
All the Year Round,
with a serialization of
A Tale of Two Cities,
a violently bloody melodrama. This was followed over the next few years by many more middle-class family magazines:
Once a Week, Macmillan’s, Cornhill
(edited by Thackeray),
Temple Bar, Argosy
(edited by Mrs Henry Wood, author of one of the most sensational of all sensation-fictions,
East Lynne), Belgravia
(edited by Mrs Braddon). All of them carried serial fiction, and, given the culture of the times, and their editors, much of that fiction was sensation-fiction.

Back in the real world, the many Mrs Hopkinsons followed every detail of the murder of Emile L’Angelier. Madeleine Smith, who was charged with his murder, was the daughter of a successful Glasgow architect. At seventeen, she had finished her education at Mrs Gorton’s Academy for Young Ladies, near London, and had returned to Glasgow to live the life of an upper-middle-class girl, paying social calls with her mother and sister, doing decorative needlework, and having a disturbingly exotic private life, unknown to any of her family. Miss Smith had met Emile L’Angelier, who had seen her on the street and forced a reluctant acquaintance to introduce them without her parents’ knowledge. L’Angelier was a twenty-six-year-old shipping clerk from Jersey, hard-working, if a little vain, steady, reliable, and a churchgoer. He was also earning £50 a year, which put him, to his great discontent, in the ranks of the very lowest middle class; he spent most of his income on fancy clothes, in order to look like a gentleman. He was no match socially for the Smith family, but a secret life appealed to the bored girl’s sense of the dramatic – she could play at having a great passion thwarted by bourgeois parents. In her more than two hundred surviving letters to him, found on his death, Miss Smith quoted poetry, claimed to carry his letters next to her heart, and coyly refused to give him a lock of her hair because she had once promised a person ‘now in the cold grave’ never to do so, and ‘a promise to the dead is sacred’. Not promises to the living, however. In early 1855 she told him that she had spoken to her father, and been forbidden to see him again; in 1856 this was repeated, with her mother now given the role of the heartless parent. Miss Smith blackmailed one of the family servants, who had an illicit follower of her own, to smuggle letters between the pair, and by 1856 they had become lovers. L’Angelier’s letters suggest that Miss Smith took the lead here, while he was more cautious: ‘I am sad it happened … We should indeed have waited till we were married.’ In January 1857 the imagined future evaporated when Miss Smith’s parents produced William Minnoch as a potential husband. Minnoch was a partner in a trading firm, prosperous, the equal of the Smiths in status and income. By February Miss Smith’s letters began to prepare L’Angelier for the break. But he refused to follow her script, and threatened to go to her father. Her letters hastily resumed their affectionate ‘one day’ fantasies.

On 19 February Miss Smith attended the opera with Minnoch. (In a nice touch, they went to see Donizetti’s
Lucrezia Borgia:
many would appreciate this later, including the eagle-eyed Mrs Braddon, who three years after the murder reproduced the episode in her novel
The Trail of the Serpent.
One of her characters condemns the opera as setting ‘a dangerous example. we don’t want our wives and daughters to learn how they may poison us without fear of detection’.) Later that night, L’Angelier talked to her through the kitchen window, their frequent assignation spot. She gave him a cup of hot chocolate and he later suffered a gastric attack, which passed; so did a second one after another meeting, three days later. On 12 March Miss Smith and her parents set a wedding date; on 21 March, she made another assignation with L’Angelier; on 23 March, he was dead.

On his death, Miss Smith’s letters were found; little detective work was needed to discover that she had made two purchases of arsenic, one ‘to send to the gardener’ at the Smiths’ house in the country, the other to ‘to kill rats’. Nearly ninety grains of arsenic were recovered from L’Angelier’s body. The story was initially reported far more discreetly than murder cases normally were. The
Glasgow Herald
headlined its article ‘Painful Event’, and almost apologized for having to report it at all. It had refrained from any mention of the case until the ‘names of the respective parties’ were ‘in the mouths of everyone’, and added that ‘We fervently trust that the cloud which at present obscures a most respectable and estimable household may be speedily and most effectively removed.’ A pamphlet struggled to find the appropriate idiom, reporting Miss Smith in prison awaiting trial, ‘her hours. spent in light reading, with occasional regrets at the want of a piano’. Her ‘equanimity’ under such a charge was praised, ‘and her demeanour is certainly not that of a guilty person’, wrote the
Daily News
– the paper that had thought Smethurst guilty precisely because of his coolness.
The Times,
too, was convinced that ‘a highly and virtuously bred young lady’ could not be a killer: that was ‘too appalling for belief’, and the report assured its equivalently middle-class readership that ‘the possession of arsenic’ was ‘compatible with entire innocence’ – probably the first time that newspaper had ever written those words in the same sentence. Others, privately, were less convinced that a middle-class demeanour meant virtue. Jane Carlyle reported that ‘Miss Madeleine Smith said to old Dr Simpson, who attended her during a short illness in Prison, and begged to use “the privilege of an old man, and speak to her seriously at parting” – “My dear Doctor! it is
so
good of you! But I wont [sic] let you trouble yourself … for I assure you I have quite made up my mind
to turn over a new
leaf!!![“] That is a fact!’ And whatever their opinions, everyone was reading about it: Henry James, then only fourteen, knew about it; Nathaniel Hawthorne said the reports were read out loud by guests in hotel lounges in the Highlands, where he was on holiday.

The trial rapidly altered perceptions of the young lady’s respectability. There were two big legal battles in court, one won by the defence, one by the prosecution. The defence’s win probably saved Miss Smith’s neck; the prosecution’s destroyed her reputation. L’Angelier had kept a diary, which the prosecution failed to have admitted in evidence. Miss Smith’s letters, however, were admitted, and her frank admissions of sexual pleasure were met with titillated fascination. The prosecution used the letters with discretion: they were read out when necessary, ensuring that no one could view the woman in the dock as a sweet young girl, but what were described as ‘gross and indelicate allusions’ and ‘particular words’ were censored to ensure that no one in court was offended – and even more, perhaps, to ensure that the jury’s imaginations were allowed to run luridly free.

Public opinion was as divided as it had been with Smethurst. John Blackwood, an Edinburgh publisher, wrote to George Eliot: ‘She is a nice young woman … I really doubt whether she did poison the beast and at all events he deserved anything. I wish the dog had died and made no sign. ‘ Many were encouraged to think like this by the defence, whose unspoken theme throughout the trial was that a vulgar, lower-class foreign clerk had tried to raise himself by despoiling a pure middle-class girl, a girl just like the jury’s and newspaper readers’ sisters and daughters. While all this was only suggested, Miss Smith’s barristers entered in evidence that L’Angelier had been rejected by women before, and had talked of suicide then; that he had a history of gastric attacks; that he took arsenic as medicine; that Miss Smith had spoken to friends about arsenic as a complexion-enhancer, on which subject articles had appeared in both
Blackwood’s
and
Chambers’s
magazines.
*