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| Photo credit: Lou Abercrombie |
Our July guest is Anna Mazzola.
Anna lives in Camberwell, London, not far from where the murder at the heart of The Unseeing took place. The Unseeing is Anna's first novel. She is currently working on her second historical crime novel, which is about a collector of folk tales and fairy lore on the Isle of Skye in 1857 who realises that girls are going missing.
Anna studied English at Pembroke College, Oxford, before becoming a criminal justice solicitor. She divides her time between writing, reading, lawyering, and child-wrangling.
http://annamazzola.com
A Dark and Dreadful Interest: Crime as Entertainment in the 19th century
We often think of the Victorians as a moralistic and upright bunch, and of the 19th century as a time when things became more civilized. After all, over the course of the century, violent sports were mostly outlawed, the Bloody Code was dismantled, and capital punishment was hidden from public view. Yet it was also the era in which crime reporting and murder as entertainment flourished. While researching for my début novel, The Unseeing, I discovered that our current fixation with true crime is nothing compared with what Dickens referred to as the Victorians’ ‘dark and dreadful interest’ in murderers and their punishment.
The Making of Murderers
Since the late 17th century, the Ordinaries of Newgate prison had been making a tidy profit from publishing the ‘confessions’ of condemned prisoners. However, the Ordinaries lost their monopoly when, in 1773, the keeper of Newgate began publishing the Newgate Calendar: ‘interesting memoirs of the most notorious characters who have been convicted of outrages on the laws.’
Sales, however, were still fairly small. It was with the expansion of the press in the early 19th century (aided by increasing literacy and the lowering and later abolition of stamp duty) that things really kicked off. As Judith Flanders explains in ‘The Invention of Murder’, several early cases were key in establishing the whole industry of death. John Thurtell, who in 1823 bludgeoned William Weare to death, became the subject of the first ‘trial by newspaper’. William Catnatch printed 500,000 copies of an account of the trial, the story was the lead item in the London Chronicle, Times, Morning Herald and Observer, two melodramas were written for London theatres (one before the case had even been tried), tourists arrived in droves for a tour of the murder scene, and balladeers made a killing selling songs based on the crime. 40,000 people turned out to see Thurtell executed, and the marketing of his story continued long after his death, as did his influence on the press.
The same grisly pattern was followed in the later cases of Maria Marten and the Red Barn (where Marten was murdered by William Corder), Burke and Hare (who sold the corpses of their 16 victims to an Edinburgh doctor for his anatomy lectures), and the Edgware Road murder: the crime for which James Greenacre and Sarah Gale were convicted, and the case on which The Unseeing is based.
Crime news was now prime news.
Broadsides and Penny Bloods
More affordable than newspapers were murder broadsides – printed sheets with an account of the crime, a woodcut illustration of the murder or execution, and often a lamentation. At the 1849 execution of Maria and Frederick Manning for the murder of her lover, 2.5 million broadsides were sold. However, sales for James Greenacre broadsides were slower. A street seller explained to Henry Mayhew that this was because Greenacre’s execution came close after Pegsworth’s (who had murdered a draper) and ‘that took the beauty off him. Two murderers together is no good to nobody'.
Cheap weekly papers were also being established and there was a booming industry in ‘Penny Bloods’ that originally concentrated on highwaymen and evil aristocrats, but later on true crimes, especially murders. And if there were no decent real-life crimes to draw upon, the penny bloods invented them. The most successful of all was a penny blood entitled The String of Pearls, which began publication in 1846. We know it now as Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber.
The Blood-Stained Stage
It was not just the printing presses that ran on blood. Theatres (in particular, The Surrey and the Coburg) thrived on crime-based melodramas, to the extent that a commentator in 1840 noted of a Stepney theatre that, ‘the Newgate calendar and tales of terror stand in the same place as Homer did to the ancient dramatists.’
As Rosalind Crone explains in ‘Violent Victorians’, a host of bloody entertainments and representations saturated Victorian culture from the 1820s to the 1870s, including deeply violent Punch and Judy shows, and murderous peepshows: people would peer through the viewing-hole of a small box to see a painted murder scene in which the characters were pulled up and down by strings. The story of Maria Marten became a touring staple.
And then there was the greatest show of all: the gallows. Until 1868, felons were hanged outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol and outside the debtor’s door at Newgate prison, attracting enormous and excitable crowds of men, women and children. A huge number came to the hanging of James Greenacre, over a thousand waiting overnight outside Newgate to secure a place in the morning. Pie-men made their way through the throng selling Greenacre tarts while ballad-singers hawked the confession of the murderer: a fun day out for the whole family.
Scaffold Culture
If you couldn’t make it to the gallows, you could visit a moving waxworks display, many of which included relics of murderers or victims collected at the scenes of crime. Such shows ranged from the ‘respectable’ Madame Tussaud’s and her Separate Room (later the Chamber of Horrors) to itinerant waxworks displays, which travelled about between fairs.
You might also be able to purchase a memento: a splinter of wood from the Red Barn where William Corder killed Maria Marten, or perhaps a piece of the hedge through which her body had been dragged. Staffordshire pottery figurines of murderers and their victims were also available. Murderer John Thurtell’s face was crafted onto the side of mugs; the Red Barn murder was immortalised in figurines of Marten, Corder and also quaint models of the barn itself.
Also extremely popular were tours of the scene of the crime. After the murder of Hannah Brown, James Greenacre’s landlord gave guided tours of his house in Camberwell. These proved so popular that the police had to be brought in to stop visitors removing relics of the crime – tables, chairs, even the door.
The Common Attribute of Every Age
No such tours operate today, of course, but numerous guided walks continue to celebrate the most famous of Victorian murderers: Jack the Ripper. Our continuing fascination for violence and murder manifests itself in different ways: in the success of shows such as Serial, The Jinx and Making a Murderer, and in the prominence given to murders by the media. Rightly or wrongly, we continue to be enthralled by human tragedy – by what drives people to commit dreadful crimes, by what happens to the victims. ‘This appetite of the mind for particulars of great crimes and criminals has been stigmatized as vulgar,’ said the Daily Telegraph in 1881. ‘It is only vulgar in so far as it is universal, the common attribute of every age, people and clime.’
Anna Mazzola’s debut novel, The Unseeing, set in London in 1837, is now out from Tinder Press (Headline).
Fascinating, Anna. Good luck with your novel. One of mine is about Richard Dadd, another Victorian 'celebrity' murderer.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Miranda. I have your book! I bought it from you some time ago. Need to read it, as my next one features fairies and folklore...
DeleteAnna
Great to meet you here, Anna. I have read and admired, but mainly intrigued by the amazing twists and turns of 'The Unseeing' and wish it every success. What a stunning debut!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Sally. Delighted you enjoyed it.
DeleteFascinating stuff - such an era of moral contrasts and such an underbelly. It's all parodied brilliantly in the series Penny Dreadful. Just got your book, really looking forward to it!
ReplyDeleteThank you! Shamefully, I still haven't watched Penny Dreadful. And thanks for buying The Unseeing - hope you enjoy.
DeleteVery much enjoyed this - but I think this fascination with murder exists in every age. Cheaper printing techniques made it more obvious during the 19th Century.
ReplyDeleteMany of the Border Ballads, which date to at least the 16th Century, are about murder, blood-feud and execution. And Auden commented, on the Icelandic Sagas: "They're all about revenge." That is, blood-feud and murder. There are medieval texts and ballads about murder. The most famous, I think, is 'Little Sir Hugh' where what we would now recognise as a child sex-murder, is explained as a ritual killing.
The most illuminating comment I ever read on why the sagas are so obsessed with murder is: 'Societies write about what frightens them.' Icelanders of the 13th Century and earlier knew they lived in a semi-lawless society where, if they offended their neighbour, even accidentally, they could find themselves involved in a blood-feud. So they told stories about it, to try and understand it, to explain it, to contain it, to warn against it.
Of course, murder is very dramatic, but I think this fear also goes a long way to explain the number of books, films and tv series, both true and fiction, about murder, especially serial murder. It frightens us, and so it also fascinates us. We seek to contain and control it by explaining it in fiction.
Thank you, Susan. I clearly need to read more about the Border Ballads. I read about some Icelandic 'lullabies' a while ago and was suitably terrified:
Delete'Sleep, you black-eyed pig.
Fall into a deep pit of ghosts.'
And I think you're absolutely right about that being why crime drama and fiction are so popular - containing our fears by putting them into a form we can understand and control.