No subject was more popular on stage than the Murder of Mariah Marten in the Red Barn, which took place in 1827. There were hundreds of these staging melodramas. This was nothing to the staging of the most famous murders, not just in local theatres but by touring companies who would set up a Penny Gaff, with a stage at one end of a shed or fairground tent and rows of benches. Some told the story in doggerel verse and sold copies by the millions. Illustrated pamphlets called Broadsides describing the murder, the suspects, the trial, confession and execution were sold for a penny to eager crowds who could not afford newspapers. Murder, de Quincey suggested satirically, was a form of theatre to be enjoyed by connoisseurs of sensation. He has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity.’ Lastly, a stake was driven through his heart and his body tossed into an open grave.ĭe Quincey made much of re-writing this crime as a drama: ‘Mr Williams has exulted the idea of murder. Thousands watched as his body, mounted on a platform on a cart, made a macabre procession to the scenes of the crimes. This was viewed as tantamount to a confession of guilt.īut justice was not to be thwarted. Unlike the Ripper case, the bodies were left in situ for the inquest jury to inspect, and no effort was made to stop sightseers tramping through as well.Ī murder weapon - a sharpened hammer - was traced to a lodger at a nearby house, John Williams. It seemed to be murder for its own sake of seven victims - half the total of murders recorded that year. Two families, a hosier’s and a publican’s, were brutally battered to death in their homes off the Ratcliffe Highway in London’s East End dockland within two weeks in December, 1811. But it opens with another equally gory multiple murder, the one that inspired de Quincey to write Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts - the Ratcliffe Highway murders. The words ‘Victorian’, ‘murder’ and ‘blood’ instantly conjure up the case of Jack the Ripper, with which this book ends. Thomas de Quincey thought the same: ‘The world in general are very bloody-minded all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood.’ It is enjoyable to be appalled by murder which is ‘very pleasant to think about in the abstract’, as Flanders dryly observes. With her expert knowledge and guidance we can shudder at the violence or the cold calculation of murderers, but also at the prejudice of hanging judges, the glaring miscarriages of justice and the barbaric spectacle of public executions to the baying of the crowd. In more than 400 blood-soaked pages Judith Flanders lovingly traces the progression of notorious Victorian murders and the public’s taste for them in song and story, in stage melodrama and waxwork, in newspaper report and, finally, detective fiction. Want to be appalled by a book? Then try this one. 'The Fine Art of Murder': Jack the Ripper is perhaps the best known of Victorian murder cases
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