Books: Review - The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. By Judith Flanders

Published: 23 December, 2010
by DAN CARRIER

HISTORIAN Judith Flanders tells how a burgeoning mass media in Victorian times spawned our modern fascination with gruesome crimes

She was spotted lying in the gutter in Ivor Street, Camden Town, by a clerk making his way home. The woman, respectably dressed, was still, and although at first he walked past her – in 1890 such a sight on the streets of the area could be ignored – something made the man turn back. 

He noticed her head was shrouded in a cardigan, and he pushed it with his toe. It fell away, to reveal the horrific sight of the blood-splattered face of a woman. 

The dead woman’s name was   Phoebe Hogg. Her throat had been cut – and the discovery of her murder kick-started a crime story that was to grip Victorian Britain.

It transpired the woman was not the only victim: she had set out the day before her death to visit her friend, Mary Eleanor Pearcey, at her Ivor Street home. She had taken her 18-month-old child with her. A bloodstained pram had been found in St John’s Wood, and the child’s body was discovered soon after on waste land along Finchley Road.

The story of this double murder and the subsequent execution of Mary Pearcey gripped the country. Gospel Oak-based historian Judith Flanders uses it to highlight the way murder became a Victorian invention: until then, with no mass media and low crime rates, murders simply didn’t happen in the contemporary sense of the word.

“Over the course of the 19th century, murder – a rarity in life – became ubiquitous,” says Judith. 

“It was transformed into novels, into broadsides and ballads, theatre, melodrama, and opera. Detective fiction and the new police force developed in parallel.”

In her book, she selects around 50 cases that made national headlines – and the love Victorians had for a horrible true crime story is well illustrated by the case of the double killing in Ivor Street. The facts, pieced together and sensationalised, made for gruesome reading... 

Phoebe’s sister-in-law Clara had grown worried when she heard of a body being found with clothes marked with the initials PH. 

She went to Kentish Town police station with Mary Pearcey and was shown a body. Reports from the time say Mary immediately claimed it wasn’t Phoebe and tried to drag Clara away before she could take a good look. 

Mary’s suspicious behaviour prompted the police to head to her home, where they found knives caked with blood, blood on the ceiling, floor, windows and rugs. There was also blood and hair on a poker and windows were cracked, as if there had been a struggle. 

They questioned Mary, who was reported to be sitting calmly playing the piano in the parlour while they searched her house. She said she had seen Phoebe the day before, and she had asked her to lend her two shillings and mind her child, which she declined to do. 

She claimed the blood was from a rather horrendous nose bleed she had suffered, and that scratches on her hands were from a session of killing mice that plagued the home. 

Later it emerged that Mary had been the lover of Frank Hogg before he married Phoebe, and that they had remained in touch, and the two women had become friends. 

She was arrested, and in court details came out that made for titillating reading. Mrs Pearcey’s statement that the victim had come to borrow money was contradicted by two letters that had been written by Mary to Phoebe asking her to visit with “our little darling”. 

A post mortem found that Phoebe had been smashed over the head and her throat cut with such force the windpipe and spinal cord were severed. 

There was more intrigue when an officer at Kentish Town, who was waiting to take Mrs Pearcey’s clothes for examination, said the defendant had said: “As we were having tea, Mrs Hogg made a remark that I did not like. One word brought up another” – at this point she stopped herself. “Perhaps I’d better say no more,” she concluded. 

Circumstantial evidence piled up – a half-burnt hat in the grate matched the victim’s – and the judge directed the jury towards a guilty verdict. 

Newspapers, not governed by the restrictions on crime reporting that apply today, speculated endlessly. Many accused Frank Hogg of being involved, as they did not believe a woman was capable of such violence. He was never tried and Mary went to the gallows alone.

The killing of Phoebe Hogg and her child still haunts the area, highlighting how the Victorian’s love of the macabre is with us today. The last occupant of the home spoke of finding blood stains on walls when she redecorated, and her family told the macabre tale on cold wintry nights, claiming they heard ghostly footsteps traipsing about.

Judith says her book sprung naturally from others she has written on the Victorians. Previous works include a study of domestic life and leisure time.

“I saw many theatre performances were based on real crime, and newspapers were full of it,” she says.

And the way violent crime was reported would make the modern reader wince. Forget the coverage of the Sunday red tops today – even respectable papers such as The Times and Telegraph were packed with gruesome tales.

“They didn’t just report a trial,” says Judith. “They printed pages and pages of transcripts. You got the full testimonies of witnesses, and the posher the paper, the more this was true.”

This is partly due to the fact that newspapers were the primary source of information – with no TV or internet, this was where the public got their stories from. And the appeal of gruesome crime writing in the Victorian era was coupled with a number of other factors, she says.

“Crime was incredibly rare, which meant people could read these stories and still feel safe and secure,” she says.

“Added to this was increasing means of communication to tell these stories, tallied with  urbanisation. In smaller communities, people felt safe – people knew each other. Usually if there was a crime the person was caught quite quickly. Cities are much more threatening – you do not always know who lives next door. This was coupled with the rise of the professional police force, and fictional characters such as Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.”

Her research took her into the depths of the archives held at the British Library – and she found a book of comic songs about Jack The Ripper, the best-known of Victorian murders, that still resonate today.

In the front of the book was an engraving, with the name of the person who had owned the book before it was handed to the Library: “It read ‘Alfred Harms­worth’, who happened to be the man who set up the Daily Mail. He knew what the public wanted: blood, and lots of it,” says Judith. 

After Mary Pearcey was found guilty of murdering her lover’s wife and child, pushing their bodies in the baby’s pram before abandoning them in the street, Madame Tussaud’s swooped in, buying up the furniture from her lodgings, and the vicims’ clothes and the pram from the bereaved husband. A toffee found in the pram, thought to have been in the child’s mouth at her death, takes pride of place under a glass dome on the mantelpiece in this photograph of the display. Madam Tussaud’s knew its audience: 75,000 people visited in the first three days. 

• The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. By Judith Flanders. HarperPress £20