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Samuel Kent c1863 |
Camden Book Reviews | The Suspicions of Mr Whicher – or The Murder at Road Hill House.
By Kate Summerscale. Bloomsbury £14.99.
In June 1870, three-year-old Saville Kent was found dead in an outhouse near his home. His throat had been slashed in a crime that sent shockwaves throughout the land, writes Piers Plowright
SOME time in the early hours of Saturday June 30, 1860, three-year-old Saville Kent disappeared from his cot in the heavily shuttered and barred Road Hill House, an elegant Georgian mansion on the Wiltshire-Somerset border where the A36 and the A361 now meet.
By nine o’clock that morning, the boy’s body had been found upside-down in an outside privy.
His throat had been cut so violently that his head almost fell off when Thomas Benger, a local farmer, and William Nutt, the village shoemaker, lifted him out.
Within hours the news had reached Trowbridge; within a day, London and beyond. It became a murder that changed Victorian England.
What is so brilliant about Kate Summerscale’s account of this crime and its aftermath is the way she uses it to throw light on the whole of British society.
Like an archaeologist shining a powerful torch into a tomb, she reveals, little by little, the tensions and terrors of a country on the brink of enormous change.
Her book is at once the story of an appalling murder, a history of the English detective, an anatomy of British middle-class life with all its secrets, and an examination of the political, religious, social and journalistic upheavals of the time.
The Mr Whicher of the title is Jack Whicher, London’s top sleuth in the recently formed Detective Police, sent down to help out the rather incompetent Wiltshire constabulary.
He was to inspire Charles Dickens (Inspector Bucket in Bleak House is partly based on him) and Wilkie Collins (Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone contains some “Whichery”).
He was also to set the cat of truth among the pigeons of local and national susceptibilities.
Murder was something the working class went in for so that when he pointed the finger at one of the members of little Saville’s family, there was “shock horror” all round.
Mind you, tongues had already been wagging: Saville’s father and the nurse caught in flagrante delicto by the child and murdered to keep him quiet – Dickens favoured this solution; Saville’s half-siblings, banished to the upper floor by the boy’s mother, the second Mrs Kent – herself a former governess; not to mention the servants inside and outside the house.
Jack Whicher’s solution hinged on a missing and presumably blood-stained nightdress which was never found, so his case collapsed and he went back to London under a cloud from which his reputation never recovered. But his suspicions turned out to be correct – probably.
An element of doubt still lingers, because although the “culprit” confessed some four years later and went to prison – the death sentence was commuted under rather special circumstances – the murderer may not, as Summerscale intriguingly shows, have told the whole truth.
But I’m not going to reveal any more. If you want to sit glued to your deckchair or take shelter from the summer rain immersed in a web of deception, this is the book for you. |
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