The Invention of Murder (53 page)

The guesses concerning the Road murder, however, were making a much greater sensation. One broadside warned that ‘On some there lies a great suspicion,/Examinations has [sic] took place,/And to persecute [sic] they are determined,/Into this mysterious case.’ No mention was made of Miss Kent, or her siblings, or of Mr and Mrs Kent, only: ‘The nursemaid in the room was sleeping,’ it noted tantalizingly. This was one of the very few broadsides on the case to appear, for by 1860 their day was past: despite its fame, the Road murder was said to have sold a scant 150,000 broadsides, compared to 2.5 million for the Mannings. (Although the
idea
of the broadside remained in people’s imaginations, and in their vocabularies. Only a few years later, Wilkie Collins had Allan Armadale’s prophetic dream taken down ‘from my own lips … as if it was my “last dying speech and confession” ‘.)

As a comedy coda to the botched inquest and stalled police investigation, a local magistrate set in motion what he called an independent hearing, which had no legal status. Anyone and everyone was invited to give ‘evidence’ at the local Temperance Hall. This, as
Blackwood’s
reported with scorn, produced only ‘absurd and irrelevant gossip’, with the magistrate ‘covering himself with contempt’. The single piece of new information was the story of the bloody shift, which up until now the police had managed to suppress. But nothing came of this, and the fevered press speculation continued. Four months after the murder, one magazine estimated that the upmarket newspapers were still printing twenty columns a day on ‘The Road Mystery’;
The Times
ran eight leaders alone on the subject by the end of the year. Even the
Lady’s Newspaper,
its pages filled with ladylike topics – the ‘Court Circular’, ‘Wedding Stationery’ and ‘The Opera’ – kept its readers updated on the murder.

The newspapers and the police files were filled with variants on Maria Marten’s stepmother’s dream, perhaps caused by the dearth of concrete information. One letter to the police helpfully supplied the details of ‘a dream which has given me a deal of uneasiness. I dreamed I saw 3 men making up the plot at a house near Finished Building, about half a mile from the sean [sic] of the murder … I can give a minute description of the men I saw in my dream.’ The press colluded in and encouraged this type of superstition, with the
Western Daily Press
reporting that, before Francis’s funeral, the bands supporting his coffin all simultaneously snapped at the precise moment the bearers passed the fatal privy.

Miss Kent, still under suspicion, was sent to a convent in Belgium to continue her education. The newspapers printed rumours that she had confessed, then more rumours that the previous rumours were incorrect. The rest of the family, meanwhile, moved away, as sightseers, many of them of the ‘respectable’ classes, continued to wander through the house’s grounds, and Mr and Mrs Kent were publicly jeered when they walked down the street in the nearest county town. Kent had a public sale of his possessions, like Louis Staunton before him, selling seven hundred catalogues and netting £1,000-odd. (The baby’s cot, however, was held back, to keep it out of Madame Tussaud’s hands.)

Pamphlets such as
The Road Murder,
by ‘A Barrister-at-Law’, showed great changes since Eliza Fenning’s death in 1815. The anonymous barrister opened his summary of the situation after the inquest with a range of questions, itemized as though for a detective to follow up. ‘Why did [Samuel Kent] … seek a policeman at a distance, when one lived nearer?’ Why was Miss Gough not suspected by the Kents? What was the story of locking the policemen in the kitchen? and more. But with no resolution in sight, the fiction market took the lead. This was the perfect meshing of subject (middle-class and prosperous) with readership and the new genre of sensation-fiction. The anonymous ‘Disciple of Edgar Poe’ turned to Dupin-like methods of deduction in
Who Committed the Road Murder? or, The Track of Blood Followed.
‘There are six theories,’ he wrote; ‘if five of them can be proved untenable, the remaining one may fairly become the subject of attention.’ (Compare this to Sherlock Holmes thirty years later: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable,
must be the truth.’) The pseudonymous Charles Martel cherry-picked from reality in
The Diary of an Ex-Detective,
where ‘The Murdered Judge’ took elements from the Road mystery: two men, one a ne’er-do-well, one the son-in-law of the judge’s sister, are under suspicion; the working-class suspect is taken into custody, but ‘the committee was exceedingly loath to move in the matter’ of the other, ‘on account of [his] respectable position’.

Many novelists turned to the shattered Kent family. Mrs Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford novels explored the domestic vicissitudes of a country town, and in the first instalment,
Salem Chapel
(186263), internalized many of the elements of sensation-novels, although Mrs Oliphant herself despised the genre, writing of the fictional detective, ‘He is not a collaborateur [sic] whom we welcome with any pleasure into the republic of letters. His appearance is neither favourable to taste nor morals.’ Yet in
Salem Chapel
the still unsolved Kent case is mirrored when Susan, the genteel daughter and sister of Dissenting ministers, is falsely accused of murdering her supposed seducer, and is tracked by a remorseless, Whicher-like policeman. Having followed her from the scene of the crime, the lower-middle-class man is bundled out of the house by one of the town’s tradesmen, who is shocked to find him physically present in a middle-class household. Susan’s brother Arthur finds that the newspapers turn ‘the whole terrible tale. into a romance of real life, in which his sister’s name, indeed, was withheld, but no other particular spared. all over the country by this time, newspaper readers were waking up into excitement about this new tale of love, revenge, and crime’.

A similarly non-sensation-novel,
The Trial,
by the High Church writer Charlotte M. Yonge, in 1864 described the fallout after an unsolved crime, with a country town overrun by newsboys crying the updates, and the ‘artists’ of the illustrated papers who arrive with their ‘three-legged cameras’ as the sightseers gawp at the mill where the murder has occurred, the housekeeper ‘making a fortune’ out of the decent middle-class family’s tragedy. Mrs Braddon’s narrator in
Aurora Floyd
(1863) similarly thinks of the Kents in that ‘quiet Somersetshire household in which a dreadful deed was done’, and wonders ‘what must have been suffered by each member of
that
family? What slow agonies, what ever-increasing tortures, while that cruel mystery was the “sensation” topic of conversation in a thousand happy home-circles, in a thousand tavern-parlours and pleasant club-rooms …’
*

No detail was too small to be turned into fiction. In Mrs Braddon’s
The Doctor’s Wife
(1864), a character slashes at himself with a paper-knife: ‘I’m only trying whether a man would cut his throat from right to left, or left to right,’ he offhandedly tells a horrified onlooker. He is, it turns out, a novelist trying to verify the details of a fictional suicide. The newspapers four years before had been filled with discussions about whether Francis Kent’s throat had been cut left to right, or right to left: fictional deaths now assumed their readers’ familiarity with true-crime minutiae. Later, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, the two would be considered as inextricably woven together: part of Holmes’s study of crime was his ‘immense’ knowledge of ‘Sensational Literature … He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.’ (Sherlock Holmes may even have owed his name to sensation-fiction. Conan Doyle credited a cricketer as the source of his unusual first name, but the traduced suspect of Le Fanu’s
A Lost Name
was Carmel Sherlock, a so-far overlooked source.)

Many disapproved of the predilection of sensation-writers for true crime. In the
Quarterly Review
the Oxford theologian Henry Mansell was shocked that ‘Sometimes the incident of real life is made the main plot of the story,’ highlighting a just-published novel entitled
Such Things Are
(published anonymously, but the first novel of Matilda Charlotte Houstoun). ‘By way of feeding this depraved taste’, he wrote, the novel ‘brought again to the light of recollection a shadowy vision of two past, but as yet undiscovered crimes’ – the Road murder and the Madeleine Smith case. There was ‘something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite for carrion, this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption’. Disapproving as he was, Mansell did not trouble to name either case: even the most respectable readers of this most respectable journal were expected to recognize the two crimes by their descriptions alone.

In
Such Things Are,
one of the characters reports hopefully that ‘there seems a chance at last of discovering the perpetrator’ of the long-unsolved murder. It was to be another two years, however, before that became reality. In 1860, Inspector Whicher had been assisted at Road by Sergeant Frederick Adolphus (‘Dolly’) Williamson. Five years later, the Bow Street magistrates summoned Williamson, now head of the Detective Department. On his arrival he found a veiled woman accompanied by a clergyman and an Anglican nun. The Revd Arthur Wagner, spiritual director of St Mary’s Anglo-Catholic retreat in Brighton, formally notified the magistrates that he had heard the confession of the young girl known in the convent as Emilie Kent; that she had given the confession of her own free will; and that she agreed to repeat it there, under oath, on the understanding that the police would take action based on what she was about to say. The veiled woman, now introduced as Constance Kent, produced a written confession affirming that she, and she alone, had murdered Francis Savile Kent.

The police arrested her, but publicly doubts were immediately raised. She claimed that she had cut her half-brother’s throat with a razor, and when he didn’t bleed, had slashed his chest with it. In reality, a cut artery would have pumped blood everywhere, while the chest wounds were punctures, not gashes, and were not made with a razor. Miss Kent was at pains to stress that ‘the guilt was hers alone, and that her father and others who have so long suffered most unjust and cruel suspicion are wholly and absolutely innocent’; she had definitely not been ‘driven to this act. by unkind treatment at home, as she met with nothing there but tender and forbearing love’. If anything, this strengthened the suspicion that had attached itself to Mr Kent. The
London Review
conceded only that ‘as far as we know’ there was no evidence for the Mr Kent/nursemaid scenario, but warned that ‘the mania for self-accusation which seizes upon some minds’ can lead them to make ‘the most unfounded charges’, suggesting that Miss Kent’s mind was unhinged by hereditary insanity, worked on by religious fervour, and the ‘manipulation to which her conscience was subjected’ by ‘those gentlemen who are playing at being Roman Catholic priests’. In conclusion, ‘It is quite conceivable that it may, after all, turn out to be true. But until we have much stronger reasons for believing it than exist at present, we shall continue to regard it with extreme scepticism.’

Newspapers relied on crime – the
Examiner
had a regular column headed ‘Murders and Murderous Crimes’, the
Manchester Times
too ran a ‘Murders’ column. But now a foreign murder took precedence. Constance Kent confessed on 25 April 1865. On 26 April,
The Times
received the news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln eleven days earlier, and the next day copies of the threepenny newspapers were changing hands for 2s.6d. The solution to this crime, so long awaited, now seemed insignificant. On 28 April an advertisement for
Lloyd’s Weekly
devoted a third of its space to Lincoln, while the Road murder took up less than a tenth. But politics never held sway for long, and by summer things had returned to normal. The
London Review
reported cartes-de-visite of Miss Kent on sale ‘in every petty print-shop’, and a few years later, at Townhead, near Penrith in Cumbria, in a happy event, ‘Mr W. Cowper’s red bitch Constance Kent’ had a litter of eight pups.

This second wave of attention to the Kents, however muted by current events, was followed by a parallel wave of fiction. Some was ephemeral. An anonymous three-volume novel,
Not Proven
(actually by Christina Broun Cameron), utilizes most of the elements of the Kent case in a wildly rambling plot: Rosetta Pierce, aged seventeen, is accused of abstracting her toddler half-brother from his nursery, stabbing him, cutting his throat and shoving him down a privy. Her dressing gown is missing; she has a stepmother she dislikes; her father is jeered later in town; she has an ‘unmanageable’, un-feminine past history. (The novel also contains the splendid line: ‘I am obliged to say now that I. cannot marry a person whom I believe guilty of a murder.’ A rule to live by.)

Not Proven
also mixed in some Madeleine Smith elements – blackmailing as a consequence of letters to a lover, a ‘not proven’ verdict – and several novelists were to follow suit. In John Harwood’s
*
Miss Jane, or, The Bishop’s Daughter
(1867), Jane, once a member of an Anglican sisterhood, is under the thumb of the fanatical Revd Austin Traxford. Her true love, the curate Edwy Mortimer, hears a confession from a dying parishioner that implicates Jane in murder. He asks her to deny it, and she arranges to meet him early one morning on the clifftop, where they can speak without being disturbed. There, by way of explanation, she pushes him over the cliff before gaily tripping back to the convent. A backstory tells of her illegitimate child, whom she had murdered; Traxford knew of it, and has blackmailed her ever since. The bishop’s daughter ultimately dies very beautifully of shame, claiming that she was insane when she killed her child. (The author appears to have forgotten that she also murdered a curate.)

Miss Jane
is a halfway house: the sensation-novel elements remain to the fore, but detection is assuming more importance. Many other novelists stuck to the classic sensation formula. In 1866 Mrs Henry Wood focused entirely on the domestic when she rewrote her 1853 short story ‘St Martin’s Eve’ as a novel, tightening earlier plot elements to make it resemble more closely Constance Kent’s story: there is the death of a small child, murdered as a result of passionate jealousy between a first and second family, and a dose of hereditary insanity for the female murderer. Dickens transferred Miss Kent’s attempt at running away dressed as a boy to Helena Landless in
Edwin Drood.
She too crops her hair (or rather, she fails to do so, and dramatically tries to gnaw it off), and she and her brother are also stepchildren, made ‘secret and vengeful’ by their unhappiness.