In the 1950s the popular historian Elizabeth Jenkins wrote an essay on the ways in which the Kent family story influenced Charlotte Yonge's novel The Young Step-Mother; Or, A Chronicle of Mistakes (1861). The stepmother of the title marries into the Kendal family, and faces resistance from a sulky adolescent stepdaughter, four of whose siblings have died in childhood. The stepdaughter accidentally knocks unconscious her half-brother, a three-year-old who is 'a marvel of fair stateliness, size and intelligence'. Jenkins subsequently discovered that most of the novel was published in serial form in the first half of 1860, before the Road Hill murder. Her mistake serves as a caution against seeing the influence of Road Hill everywhere; though Jenkins pointed out that the fact that the novel preceded the murder could make the similarities seem stranger still.
222 The novelist Margaret Oliphant . . . taste or morals.' From 'Sensation Novels', an unsigned review in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine of May 1862.
222 A year later she complained . . . modern fiction'. In the Quarterly Review of April 1863.
222 bestsellers in 1861. Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh and The Sliding Scale of Life, both published in 18 61 – the first sold 20,000 copies in three months, according to an article in The Times in July that year.
223 'The modern detective is generally at fault . . . low and mean.' From 'Crime and its Detection', an unsigned article by Thomas Donnelly in the Dublin Review of May 1861.
223 The word 'clueless' . . . in 1862. The phrase was 'clueless wanderings in the labyrinth of scepticism', according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
223 'a cowardly and clumsy giant. . . who comes in his way'. Published on 25 October 1863 and quoted in Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (1999) by Wilbur R. Miller.
223 In the Saturday Review . . . middle-class crimes. In 'Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life', Saturday Review, June 1864.
224 This establishment . . . Anglican Church. See Wagner of Brighton: The Centenary Book of St Paul's Church, Brighton (1949) by H. Hamilton Maughan.
224 His friend Detective-Inspector . . . in charge of the department. From the census of 18 61, Thornton's death certificate, MEPO 4/2 (a register of deaths in the Metropolitan Police) and MEPO 4/333 (a register of admissions and promotions). The detective division had expanded a little but was still only about twelve men strong, in a force that now boasted some seven thousand officers.
224 In September 1862 . . . the Tsar's family. See MEPO 2/23, the Metropolitan Police file of 1862 on aid given to the Russian government to reorganise the Warsaw police. Joseph Conrad's father, Apollo, had been a leader of this insurgency until 1861, when he was arrested and exiled to Russia.
224 Superintendent Walker. Walker was with the detectives when they met Dickens in 1850 – Dickens dubbed him 'Stalker'. He was not himself a detective but a member of the Commissioner's office.
225 On 18 March 1864 . . . 'congestion of the brain. See MEPO 21/7, Metropolitan Police retirement papers.
225 'protracted mental tension.' From A Practical Treatise on Apoplexy (with essay on congestion of the brain) (1866) by William Boyd Mushet.
CHAPTERS 16 & 17
The account in the next two chapters of the events of 18 65 is drawn mainly from the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, the Observer, the Western Daily Press, the Somerset and Wilts Journal, the Penny Illustrated Paper, the News of the World and the Bath Chronicle, and from the files MEPO 3/ 61, HO 144/20/49113 and ASSI 25/46/8. Additional sources are listed below.
CHAPTER 16
227 On Tuesday, 25 April 1865 . . . Covent Garden. Weather conditions from reports on the Spring Derby at Epsom, seventeen miles from London, which fell on 25 April that year. After the coldest March since 1845, the Derby was the hottest in years, according to The Times, the temperatures higher than the July average.
227 The Bow Street office . . . discoloured walls. The Builder of April 1860 reported that conditions in the court were bad in winter, abominable in summer. Magistrates had been trying to secure new premises since the 1840s. Details of courtroom from Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens and Survey of London Volume 36 (1970), general editor F.H.W. Sheppard.
229 Wagner was a well-known figure. . . danger to the English Church. See Wagner of Brighton: The Centenary Book of St Paul's Church, Brighton (1949) by H. Hamilton Maughan and Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis.
231 In the course of this examination . . . summoned from Scotland Yard. Dolly Williamson had married since his return from Road, and now had a daughter, Emma, aged two. Durkin had been in charge of a notorious case of July 18 61 that inspired one of the essays in William Makepeace Thackeray's Roundabout Papers. A money-lender in Northumberland Street, off the Strand, had opened fire on a new client, Major William Murray of the 10th Hussars, a veteran of the Crimea. Murray fought back and eventually killed his assailant by smashing him over the head with a bottle. It emerged that the money-lender's rage sprang from a secret obsession with Murray's wife.
'After this,' wrote Thackeray, 'what is the use of being squeamish about the probabilities and possibilities in the writing of fiction? . . . After this, what is not possible? It is possible Hungerford Market is mined, and will explode some day.' The eruption of irrational violence could arouse excitement, wonder, even awe – the safety of the world was suddenly blown apart and anything at all could follow. The Northumberland Street crime, which also features in The Moonstone, is one of the cases explored in Deadly Encounters: Two Victorian Sensations (1986) by Richard D. Altick.
232 (John Foley had died . . . aged sixty-nine). His death certificate states that he died of a hydrothorax at St George's Terrace, Trowbridge, on 5 September 1864.
233 'angel in the house'. The term is from a poem published by Coventry Patmore in 1854, which describes the self-sacrificial purity and devotion of his wife, Emily.
233 'Constance Kent, it is said . . . other agency than their own.' In The Times, 26 April 1865. The Bath Express was similarly cynical about women's instincts. It argued on 29 April that this crime had a 'finesse of cruelty' of which only a woman was capable. The Saturday Review said it hoped that Constance was a 'psychological monster' rather than the embodiment of female adolescence. For attitudes to female killers, see Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (1998) by Judith Knelman.
235 Detective-Inspector Tanner . . . a week at a time. Tanner retired from the force due to ill-health in 1869 and opened a hotel in Winchester. He died in 1873, aged forty-two. See Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders: Scotland Yard's First Detectives (1990) by Joan Lock.