Murder and Hanging in Victorian times

• • Murder
• 
  Criminal statistics are notorious for their unreliability. How, for example, can we have statistics for perfect murders since, by definition, the perfect murder is never discovered. Yet if the statistics of Victorian crime can be taken as telling us (and the Victorians) anything, then the message was that homicide was not particularly serious, and that its incidence was declining from the middle of the century; in the 1860s the annual rate of homicides known to the police was 1.7 per 100,000 of the population, in the 1890s it was 1 per 100,000. Moreover, if we probe into the individual homicides in the criminal statistics, we find that a majority were committed within the family or amongst acquaintances. Serial killers, like Cream,

  Victorian perceptions

  Jack the Ripper was perceived as a gentleman, slumming it in the London's East End and seeking victims to butcher amongst unfortunate prostitutes. Part of this perception may have come from the publication, in 1886, of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which the mild-mannered, respectable doctor experiments and is gradually taken over by his dark side – Hyde's evil crimes were never precisely explained to the reader which, of course, permitted imaginations to run riot. But 'criminals' were rarely perceived as coming from amongst gentlemen in either Victorian fiction or non-fiction. Charles Dickens drew a vivid portrait of a burglar and murderer with the character of Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist. 'A stoutly-built fellow of about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab breeches, lace-up half-boots, and grey cotton stockings, which inclosed a bulky pair of legs, with large swelling calves; – the kind of legs, which in such costume always look in an unfinished and incomplete state without a set of fetters to garnish them. He had a brown hat on his head, and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck; with the long frayed ends of which he smeared the beer from his face as he spoke. He disclosed, when he had done so, a broad heavy countenance with a beard of three days' growth, and two scowling eyes; one of which displayed various parti-coloured symptoms of having been recently damaged by a blow.'
  The journalists like Dickens, and others, who explored the criminal classes for the vicarious delight of respectable readers, commonly set this group amongst the poorer sections of the working class. Such people were described in terms as exotic as those employed in travel literature discussing African or American 'savages'. Occasionally offences seemed to bear out the validity of such descriptions as when, for example, in the autumn of 1850 what appears to have been a gang of burglars murdered the vicar of Primley – a murder so shocking that it prompted the magistrates of the Surrey Quarter Sessions to establish a county police force under the enabling legislation of 1839 and 1840. But sometimes the perception of such offenders could colour the way offences were reported and provoke a panic as, most notably, with London's 'garotting panic' of 1862. Garotting was the popular term for street robbery – what is now called 'mugging'. The 1862 panic began when an MP was robbed on his way home from a. late sitting of the House of Commons; the press began to see garotters everywhere, and entrepreneurs with an eye for the main chance began marketing 'anti-garotte collars' and ferocious, lead-weighted 'life-preservers' for gentlemen out after dark. Yet the number of 'garottings' during the panic seems to have been relatively small – 2 in September, 12 in October, 32 in November, 14 in December and 2 in January – and probably tells us more about the pattern of the panic than any reality in the incidence of the crime. Indeed, much of the panic appears to have been generated and maintained by the press, notably the influential Times, which was seeking tougher punishment for offenders.

  Victorian realities

  Of course murderers and garotters made good copy for the press and, before the use of photography in newspapers, they enabled some of the popular and sensational journals to cover their front pages with imaginative representations of crimes. Yet the overwhelming majority of the individuals who appeared before the courts of Victorian England had committed neither murder nor robbery with violence. Most offenders were young men charged with petty theft. See for example the random cases from London's Old Bailey and the Quarter Sessions of the rural county of Bedfordshire for January 1866 – and note too that these were considered to be the more serious cases since, from the middle of the century, most petty offences were tried before magistrates usually sitting in pairs and deciding cases without recourse to a jury. Some offenders were probably driven to steal because of poverty, yet there is no reason to believe every such excuse made in court. Some probably stole for a lark, perhaps under pressure from their peers. A very few probably sought to make it their career; or may have found themselves forced into a criminal life-style once they had been stigmatised by the police and the courts and found it impossible to go straight. That said, however, the largest proportion of recidivists in Victorian England were women; the implication being that it was far more difficult for a woman to shake off the stigma of criminality during the Victorian period. Overall the proportion of women to men appearing in court on criminal charges was roughly one to four; and women were generally charged with offences relating to prostitution rather than to theft or assault.
  The steady flow of the poor through the courts helps to explain why the 'criminal class' was so readily perceived as being rooted in the poorer sections of the working classes. Moreover it was easy then to detect the causes of crime as relating to the problems and vices which different commentators saw as inherent among such people. Edwin Chadwick, the great Utilitarian reformer who played such a significant role in the creation of the New Poor Law and sanitary reform, believed that crime was the result of idleness; criminals were those feckless members of the working class who were tempted to a life of easy excitement rather than hard but honest labour. Temperance reformers blamed strong drink. Education reformers blamed a lack of education and poor parents. Evangelicals blamed the want of religion. The work of Charles Darwin encouraged some progressive thinkers to look to heredity; and by the encl of the century the notion that habitual criminality on the part of some individuals was a mental defect, rather than the result of evil or idleness, had gained considerable currency.
  But, of course, not all offenders came from the working classes. Crime was also committed by gentlemen with claims to respectability. The growth of capitalism and the processes of industrialisation provided the unscrupulous businessman with the opportunity for fleecing the gullible and innocent. It has been estimated that as many as one in six of the company promotions floated during the nineteenth century were fraudulent. George Hudson, 'the Railway King', made a dubious fortune during the railway mania of the 1840s; but the problems did not end with his exposure. In January 1856 the crash of the Tipperary Joint-Stock Bank exposed the frauds of its director, John Sadleir, who had embezzled around £200,000 as well as profiting from issues of fictitious shares and the forgery of title deeds. Dickens transformed Sadleir into a Mr. Merdle, the fraudulent banker of Little Dorrit. A decade after Sadleir's exposure Albert Grant, MP for Kidderminster from 1865 to 1874, busily promoted companies that were largely worthless but made him a fortune. In 1874 Grant was thrown out of Parliament for election bribery, and his empire began to crumble. In the following year Anthony Trollope seems to have taken Grant as the model for Augustus Melmotte, the central character of his bleak novel of the amoral City of London, The Way We Live Now.
  The periodic exposure of the frauds of men like Sadleir and Grant caused periodic outrage, but little was done to regulate or supervise behaviour in the City. A cynic could point to the fact that many politicians and civil servants were closely connected with the business community; indeed, many were company directors. But there were genuine fears that it was the freedom enjoyed by gentlemen in the City which had enabled it to become such a dominant force in the world, while stricter regulation would work to the advantage of international rivals. Also, there was simply the assumption that offenders in the City were isolated individuals, 'rotten apples', not 'real criminals'. The latter were the dangerous Bill Sikes-types. In an earlier novel, The Three Clerks, Trollope compared Sikes with Undecimus Scott, MP, son of a peer, but still a thief: '...poor Bill Sykes [sic], for whom here I would willingly say a word or two, could I, by so saying, mitigate the wrath against him, is always held as the more detestable scoundrel. Lady, you now know them both. Is it not the fact, that, knowing him as you do, you could spend a pleasant hour enough with Mr. Scott, sitting next to him at dinner; whereas your blood would creep within you, your hair would stand on end, your voice would stick in your throat, if you were suddenly told that Bill Sykes was in your presence?'
  Assumptions about who were, and who were not, criminals shaped the way in which society sought to deal with them. To this end the nineteenth century witnessed considerable developments in policing and penal policy.

  Policing and prisons

  The new, uniformed police developed during the nineteenth century were told that their first duty was 'the prevention of crime'. To this end police districts were divided into beats each of which was patrolled by an officer on foot. Given that thieves were assumed to be more active after dark, night-time beats in the towns were generally shorter and this meant that police constables carried out a high percentage of their patrolling by night. As they patrolled they were expected to check that doors and windows were locked, and to wake owners whose property was not secure. Any constable who failed to find an open window or door was likely to be severely reprimanded and punished by his superiors.
  But more than this, the new police were also charged with enforcing decorum on the streets. Street sellers could he moved on, as could the inhabitants of crowded tenements who congregated in the streets to find their entertainment. Such policing could have little or no impact on the middle class offender such as Sadleir or Grant; but then it was not designed for this. Once the assumption had been made that there was some sort of 'criminal class' amongst the lower reaches of the working class, and that drink, idleness and vice contributed to the criminality of this class, then the pattern of preventive policing was set.
  Of course, the working class resented police interference with their leisure pursuits. The police were condemned as 'blue locusts' and 'blue drones' – men who did little but spoil working-class pleasures. Assaults on the police continued in disproportionate numbers to other assaults throughout the century, even allowing for an overall decline. Yet, at the same time, the police were also increasingly accepted by many working-class communities. The material benefits of industry and empire meant that the working class also increasingly acquired moveable property, and working-class victims of theft were as resentful as those from the middle class. Moreover, increasingly policemen were called by working-class parents to 'discipline' unruly children, or by working-class neighbours who considered that a violent husband or father had overstepped the limit in beating wife and/or children.
  The nineteenth-century prison was also developed with the same view of the 'criminal class' in mind. The early prison reformers argued whether it was best for convicts to be separated from each other or to be forced to maintain silence, but they generally agreed that convicts should be taught the virtues of hard work, of religion, and of recognising their position in the natural order of society. The regime in Victorian prisons often swung from one in which the principal focus was on punishment to one in which the principal focus was on reform and rehabilitation. By the end of the century, however, the advocates of the latter processes appeared to have won the arguments. At the same time a shifting perception of the offender from one who was evil, feckless and/or idle to one who was, perhaps, the victim of heredity or mental illness, led to a shift in authority within the prison from the chaplain to the doctor and practitioners of the new science of psychiatry.
  This essay began with a serial murderer, the kind of individual that everyone could (and can) identify as a 'criminal.' But neither Thomas Neill Cream nor his offences were typical of Victorian criminals and crime. Most crime was petty, and was committed by people much further down the social scale than Cream. Murderers made good copy for the press, and may be said to have been an important ingredient in the popular perception of criminality, but murders were relatively few and therefore relatively exceptional in the catalogue of criminal statistics. Commentators and reformers who were rather more aware, recognising the social origins of the majority of the individuals processed through the criminal justice system, defined a criminal class in the lower reaches of the working class. This in turn helped to structure the policies of the new police and the prisons. However, this definition of a criminal class cannot be accepted as the explanation for crime in Victorian society; it was a construction with some basis in the reality of who was apprehended by the police, went before the courts and was sent to prison. Like other such definitions, it is most useful for what it tells us about the anxieties and perceptions of people who made it and accepted it. 
  Jack the Ripper was the most famous murderer on the 19thcentury, and of course, prostitutes were his chosen victims; however, there were hundreds more murders that went unreported and uninvestigated.  The Ripper gained notoriety due to his press coverage, but for the hundreds of nameless, faceless victims who came before and after him, there was no justice.
  • The Ripper murders did bring attention to the deplorable living conditions many of the poor survived in East End.  In the twenty years following the Ripper murders, many of the worst slums were demolished. 
  
• Murderers like Doctor Cream  appear to have been rare though, of course, when they did appear, the newspaper press exploited the horrors to the full, and readers lapped up the grisly details: the Ratcliffe Highway murders in December 1811; Mary Ann Cotton who was executed in Durham Gaol in March 1873 after allegedly murdering perhaps as many as twenty – husbands, lovers, children and step-children; and, of course, Jack the Ripper in 1888.The Lambeth Poisoner", Dr. Thomas Neill Cream is found guilty at the Old Bailey for the murder of Matilda Clover, one of his (at least) four prostitute victims. Glasgow-born, Cream had emigrated to Canada where he took his degree and embarked upon "a career of malpractice and murder."  When one of his patients died during an abortion, he fled to the U.S. In Chicago, he served time for helping to poison a woman's husband with strychnine for the insurance. 
  
  Upon his release, he sailed for London, where, in October, 1891, he opened a clinic in Lambeth for "girls of the town." Within two weeks of his arrival, two women were found dead of strychnine poisoning. Cream added blackmail to his sins by writing to prominent gynecologists, signing himself "M. Malone," and accusing the physician of poisoning the young women: "It is just this - £2500 sterling on one hand, and ruin, shame and disgrace on the other. I am not humbugging you." One doctor, William Broadbent forwarded the letter to Scotland Yard. 
  
  In early 1892, two more unfortunate women were found dead in a shabby room above a pub at Elephant & Castle; the inquest verdict -- they had been poisoned with nux vomica, a.k.a. strychnine. Three weeks later, aided by a young woman's description of a man who gave her some pills, which she wisely tossed into the Thames, police arrested Dr. Cream. 
  
  The London jury takes but a quarter-hour to convict and Judge Henry "Hanging" Hawkins condemned Cream to the gallows for his "unparalleled atrocity." The Times put Cream amongst that "certain number of moral monsters whom it is the first duty of society to hunt down and to destroy." 
  
  At his hanging, as the bolt was thrown, Cream reportedly shrieked, "I am Jack the …”  It is pretty certain, however, that Cream was in an Illinois prison at the time of the Whitechapel murders, but some "Ripperologists" think they've got their man.  They point to some handwriting samples that seem to match. For devotees of the bizarre, the eminent Sir Edward Marshal Hall, who defended Cream on an earlier bigamy charge, said the man claimed that he had an underworld double, whom he often used as an alibi. Not to ruin a very good theory, but Illinois officials do insist that Dr. Cream (Inmate 4274) remained their guest at the prison in Joliet until mid-1891.
• Suicide
  • Bodies were frequently found in the river Thames (frequently enough that Dickens created a character like our Gaffer).  Sometime the bodies were identified, but most times a prostitute would remain nameless. Prostitution was a transient business so no one would really miss her is she disappeared.  If she remained unclaimed, her body might have been turned over for medical study and further violated even in death.  No one would have known or cared whether the woman had jumped or been pushed, but either way, her pitiful existence had come to an end and no one really paid any attention to the death of another prostitute. 

Public hanging

Franz Müller (31 October 1840 – 14 November 1864), was a German tailor who hanged for the murder of Thomas Briggs, the first killing on a British train. The case caught the imagination of the public due to increasing safety fears about rail travel at the time, and the pursuit of Müller across the Atlantic Ocean to New York by Scotland Yard.

Crime

On 9 July 1864 Thomas Briggs, a 69-year-old City banker, was beaten and robbed while he travelled on the 9.50pm North London Railway train from Fenchurch Street to Chalk Farm via Hackney. The assailant took his gold watch and gold spectacles, but left £5 in Briggs's pockets, and threw his body from the compartment. Just after 10.00pm, the driver of a train travelling in the opposite direction spotted Briggs lying on the embankment next to the tracks between the old Bow and Victoria Park & Hackney Wick stations, described as "his foot towards London and his head towards Hackney, at a spot about two-thirds of the distance 1 mile 414 yards between Bow and Hackney stations" or approximately 51°32′23.08″N 0°1′36.21″W.
The banker died of his wounds shortly after being taken to the nearby Mitford Castle public house (now named Top o' the Morning) on Cadogan Terrace.

Investigation

When the train reached Hackney Wick, the guard was alerted by two bankers who discovered pools of blood in Briggs' compartment. Police later found a black beaver hat. Initially it was presumed to have belonged to the deceased but it subsequently turned out to have belonged to the murderer.
On 18 July, a cab driver called Matthews came forward with suspicions about a German called Franz Müller. He told police that the 24-year-old tailor had come to his house with a gold chain in a box. After he had attached his fob watch to the chain, Matthews gave the box to his daughter. The box had been sold by a jeweller named John Death from a shop in Cheapside.
Death identified Müller from a photograph and told investigators that the German had visited his shop on 11 July to exchange a gold chain. This was later identified as belonging to Briggs. With this evidence, a warrant for Müller's arrest was issued.

However by the time an arrest warrant was issued, Müller had boarded a sailing ship - the Victoria - to New York. On 20 July, a Scotland Yard inspector along with Matthews and Death sailed for New York from Liverpool on the Inman steamer City of Manchester in pursuit of Müller. The faster ship arrived in New York three weeks before Müller.
When Müller finally arrived in Manhattan on 25 August he was arrested. Among his possessions was Briggs's gold watch and a hat. Müller had altered the hat by cutting the crown by half its height and carefully sewing it to the brim. Although diplomatic relations between the United States and the United Kingdom remained severely strained due to British involvement in the American Civil War (such as the building of Confederate commerce raider the CSS Alabama), an American judge upheld the extradition request to return Müller to Britain.

Although most of the evidence against Müller was circumstantial, the prosecutor Mr Serjeant Ballantine made a strong case. Defence concerns that Matthews had only come forward to receive the reward were of little effect. Müller maintained his innocence throughout his three-day trial at the Old Bailey.
After he was found guilty, he was sentenced to death. King Wilhelm I of Prussia (subsequently the Kaiser of Germany) failed to get the British Government to postpone the execution.

The public hanging of Müller took place outside Newgate Prison in London on 14 November amid scenes of drunkenness and disorderly conduct by 50,000 spectators. Although this was one of the last public executions in England, they did not end until 1868.
Despite consistently claiming innocence at his trial and while awaiting sentence, Müller reportedly confessed to the crime immediately before being hanged. Dr Louis Cappel, the German-speaking Lutheran pastor appointed to attend the prisoner, claimed afterwards that Müller's last words (in German) were "Ich habe es getan" (English: I did it) in response to the question, was he responsible for the death of Briggs. This confession led to a large-scale public outcry over whether the chaplain had overstepped his authority by breaking the seal of the Confessional.

Briggs had been murdered in a closed compartment that had no corridor; when the train started there was no way to leave until the next station. Public reaction resulted in the establishment of the communication cord on trains that allowed passengers to contact members of the railway crew, required by the Regulation of Railways Act 1868. It also led to the creation of railway carriages that had corridors. The new coach/carriage designs would have side corridors that allowed passengers to move from their compartments while the train was in motion. Old compartment stock was modified by some companies to include circular peepholes in the partitions; these became known as "Muller's Lights".