Trials of Passion (10 page)

So intensive was the reporting of the fuss that Christiana made, that the governor at Lewes felt forced the next day to point out that Christiana Edmunds had been treated in all respects according to the regulations of that jail and had had no special indulgences. She hadn't lodged with the matron. Her rail transport from prison to prison had been with a second-class ticket in an ordinary railway carriage in the company of the chief warder. However, since Christiana was not a convicted prisoner and with all due regard for prison security, the ‘regulations do not require, neither does justice appear to demand the imposition of vexatious restraints or indignities upon persons who are committed to prison for safe custody only, but not for the infliction of penal correction'.

This was a gentle reminder that for all her time behind bars, Christiana had not yet been convicted. Her insistence on what we would now call her ‘rights', or at least her dignities, are in that sense remarkable and point to the thought that, at least in her own mind, she was innocent of the charge of murder. Papers like the
Pall Mall Gazette
mocked, while others reprimanded this uppity prisoner.

The trial of the Brighton Poisoner began on 15 January 1872. As ever, there was much else in the news to concern the public and the press. In the month around the trial there had been a total solar eclipse. Parents who neglected to send their children to elementary school – in accordance with the 1870 Education Act – were being fined. Differences had surfaced amongst the promoters of women's suffrage. Over in France there was a monetary crisis in the new Third Republic, while in Britain agitation was under way for a reform of the hereditary House, which was seen to be inconsistent with liberalism. In the United States, in the wake of the Civil War and continuing malaise between North and South, Federal and State authority, President Grant decided not to introduce martial law in Louisiana; while on 17 January a second African-American Congressman was sworn in.

But reporters and public poured into the Old Bailey. First of all, that January, they came to watch the unfurling of another rare middle- class trial, that of the so-called Stockwell murderer. The ageing and now feeble Reverend John Watson, having lost his post as master of Stockwell Grammar School in south London, had murdered his wife on 8 October the previous year in an act of brutal and uncharacteristic violence. Watson shared a defence counsel with Christiana Edmunds. In the cleric's case, Serjeant Parry argued that the Reverend was of ‘unsound mind' and had had no knowledge of the ‘difference between right and wrong' at the time he had carried out his act of ‘maniacal passion'. English law, Parry contended, had never attempted fully to define ‘what insanity was', but it was as much of a disease as ‘typhus, paralysis, or epilepsy'. Under ordinary circumstances, Watson was ‘a kind and humane man', ‘a man of learning and high character', who ‘led an ordinary and blameless life'. But at the time of the murder, his mind had been ‘perverted and overthrown' by his hopeless circumstances and he had committed a furious act utterly ‘inconsistent with the whole of his former life'.

The Reverend Watson and Christiana Edmunds, these two unusually bourgeois murderers, would over the next weeks often be considered together by the press. It will perhaps come as no surprise that the elderly Reverend was treated far more sympathetically, despite the brutality of his murder of a loyal wife, than the Borgia of Brighton.

Well dressed women made up a large number of those crowding into the galleries of the Old Bailey's New Court on 15 January. From their numbers it would seem that Christiana interested women in particular. Her unrequited, excessive and illicit love had allegedly led her to attempt something monstrous. But how many other women may not have secretly wished a legitimate partner dead so that the man of their dreams might be free for them? Her plight, as she attempted to exonerate herself from Dr Beard's accusation of attempting to poison his wife by distributing ever more poison chocolates, elicited both horror and pity. By acting on her desires, Christiana had entered the zone of the impermissible. In attempting to make wish enter the domain of the real, she was sailing into the terrain of madness. Whatever echoes of their own lives, emotions and fears the gathered women may have found in her drama, it was clear that there was something about Christiana, their ‘accused sister', that mesmerized.

As for the men who attended Christiana's trial or read about it in the press, their fascination may well have been edged with terror. Men, after all, were the most frequent victims of female poisoners, particularly if they happened to be married to them. Back in 1852, Charles Dickens's journal
Household Words
had run an article on poisoning which underscored its female nature, attesting that murder by poison ‘admits more readily of fiendish sophistication in the mind of the perpetrator than any other form by which murder is committed'.

The
Daily News
reporter at the Old Bailey presents an unsettling and ambivalent picture of Christiana. It is redolent both of the conflicts she lived and of the contradictions with which she confronted her viewers. On the one hand she is a delicate and poised innocent,
dainty in her gestures, a composed Everywoman. ‘Attired in sombre velvet, bare headed, with a certain self-possessed demureness in her bearing – at the first glance she seems as common-place a woman as the world might well contain.' There is ‘no perceptible blush or tremor' – which could suggest guilt or indeed a greater modesty than Christiana possesses – as she stands ‘in her solitude' in the dock and looks ‘straight to the front', or inspects the courtroom, ‘dwelling specially in her gaze' on the benches where the ‘lady spectators' sit and occasionally raising her brows with ‘a sudden quick flash of the dark eyes' as she perhaps recognizes someone she knows. Once more, Christiana, an ardent writer, ‘takes copious notes': ‘her daintily gloved hand pushed a quill pen again and again up to the inkholder bedded in the flat top of the front of the dock'. Smiling occasionally, perhaps at what she is writing, she listens with ‘attentive composure, watching every word' the prosecutor utters, occasionally darting a sharp glance at him.

On the other hand, Christiana is also a much more troubling creature than this would suggest. The reporter delves into animal imagery to conjure up a portrait reminiscent of the mad and prowling Bertha in Mr Rochester's attic, a creature of dangerous instinctual and criminal force all set to burn down the respectable edifice of bourgeois life. Marking the transition between the innocent and the madly bad is the figure of the governess. Aside from the teacher, the governess is the only other respectable working woman Victorian England permits. But this respectability itself is open to challenge. Not only does the governess have to work as something of a servant. She is also the outsider in the sanctuary of the home, the ‘other' woman. Christiana, this ‘rather careworn, hard-featured woman of 35', might have been a ‘day governess for years – might have acquired the patience and chilled self-control that prolonged teaching under precarious conditions is calculated to impart, and that half sullen resignation – with an only occasional flash of self assertion – which successive batches of children and successive exigeant lady mothers are apt to engender'.

And now the reporter, having pitied, is freed to move into the terrain of bestial ugliness:

The face is plain, decidedly plain; the complexion rather dark with some colour underlying the swarthiness. The forehead, and whole forefront of the head is large, and projects with somewhat exceptional prominence ... But the character of the face lies in the lower feature. The profile is irregular, but not unpleasing; the upper lip is long, and convex; mouth slightly projecting; chin straight, long and cruel; the lower jaw heavy, massive and animal in its development. The lips are loose – almost pendulous – the lower one being fullest and projecting, and the mouth is exceptionally large.

Like a good Victorian characterologist influenced by the ever popular ‘science' of phrenology – an invention of the Viennese Franz-Joseph Gall, who had begun his work with criminals and the insane and in his hypotheses on brain localization had linked particular skull areas and their exaggerated bumps with murder and destructiveness – the
Daily News
reporter sees physiognomy as speaking a person's essence. Just four years later, in 1876, he would have had the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso to hand to argue that criminality could be read from physiognomy and inherited facial features, and to confirm him in finding something sinister, a mark of the inborn female criminal, in the unsightly sensuality of Christiana's pendulous lips and the force of that large, primitive, animal jaw.

Whether or not this description of Christiana is accurate we have no way of knowing. But the unsettling clash of features the reporter gives her falls into the period's typology of potentially dangerous women: those whose intelligence or sexuality shows, arousing anxieties about their gender. According to popular phrenological lore, the lower part of the face – lips, chin, jaw – gave evidence of ‘appetite', the larger the first, the greater the second. Like Wilkie Collins when he first conjures up an uncannily double-gendered Marian Halcombe in
The Woman in White,
the reporter attributes both masculine intelligence and feminine weakness to Christiana:

From the configuration of the lips the mouth might be thought weak, but a glance at the chin removes any such impression; and Christiana Edmunds has a way of compressing the lips occasionally, when the left side of the mouth twists up with a sardonic, defiant determination, in which there is something of a weird comeliness, that gradually hardens, and passes into absolute grimness. Of perception and intelligence the prisoner has no lack.

Through most of the first day's proceedings Christiana is utterly composed, bar a certain weary lassitude which creeps in with the afternoon. But everything changes when her beloved Dr Beard comes to the witness stand at the end of the day. Then, ‘her bosom heaved convulsively, and her face flushed scarlet. But a moment after it had faded to a leaden pallor, and she had regained her composure.' The only other time that she manifests spontaneous feeling is when the last witness of the day is being examined, a woman who has lived in the same Brighton house as Christiana and her mother: the woman testifies to her ‘uniform kindliness and womanly demeanour'. Christiana yields for a moment and appears to be moved to tears. Reputation and passion are ever at war in her.

Christiana Edmunds folded into herself the tensions that characterized what it meant to be woman in her time: the desire for virtue and reputation collide with wayward desire; the need for feminine passivity abuts on the wish – perhaps inevitably unconscious or at least repressed through time – for freedom of movement and action. All this cohabits with a restless dissatisfaction with the dividing lines between the secret and the licit.

John Ruskin, one of the period's leading moralists and critics – a man who, from the evidence of his own unconsummated and annulled marriage to Effie Gray, was terrified of women's ‘living' as opposed to idealized bodies – underlines the forces that prey on
women and the taxing demands they must strive to meet. From 1 January 1871, just before Christiana's trial, Ruskin began to publish the widely quoted and argued pamphlets that became his multi-volumed
Fors Clavigera.
Addressed to ‘the workmen and labourers of Britain', these ‘letters' both analytic and didactic on how to be and behave so as to attain the good life, mark out Ruskin's social and moral mission. Britain had, he was convinced, become too materialistic, a land governed by the trains he so loathed and everything that came with them. Instead of food, England now produced only ‘infernal' goods: ‘iron guns, gunpowder, infernal machines, infernal fortresses floating about, infernal fortresses standing still, infernal means of mischievous locomotion, infernal law-suits, infernal parliamentary elocution, infernal beer, and infernal gazettes, magazines, statues, and pictures'.

Ruskin's catalogue makes an equivalence between infernal guns, lawsuits, magazines, statues and pictures, the products of material production and media. All these latter seem to be particularly hazardous to women. He pictures a mother who may not be able to feed her children but who can ‘get to London cheap', though she has no business to be there. Even though she has no concern for any of it, she can ‘buy all the morning's news for a half-penny'. For a shilling, she can see that risque Frenchman Gustave Dore's lowlife pictures – ‘and she had better see the devil'. ‘She can be carried through any quantity of filthy streets on a tramway for threepence; but it is as much as her life's worth to walk in them, or as her modesty's worth to look into a print shop in them.'

In Ruskin's vision women's very ability to walk around freely constitutes a danger to virtue: tempted by the depravity of the streets and led astray by cheap and seductive commodities, women are really only safe at home. Letter 33 in
Fors Clavigera
asserts:

The end of all right education for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place; that she should as seldom leave it as a queen her queendom; nor ever feel entirely at rest but within its threshold.

Christiana Edmunds had sinned against this ideal of womanhood in multifarious ways. She had dared to travel on her own: she had taken that smoky railway from Brighton to Margate and from there into the depravity of London; then came the two-hour journey back to Brighton on the same train as her poisoned sweetmeats. She had walked the streets on her own, an act that seems already to stand in for sexual activity, the euphemistic ‘street-walking' that it is feared it may lead to; and she had taken a room at a ‘hotel' on her own. This was transgression on a major scale, though to elicit Ruskin's heated warning it must have been shared by sufficient women.