From 'The Victorian art of murder' by Jonathan Barnes in the 13 April
Times Literary Supplement -
Late one afternoon in the winter of 1836, a man boarded a London omnibus, carrying a soft, round object, approximately the size of a football, “wrapped up” under one arm. There was nothing about his appearance to excite suspicion. Indeed, he struck all those who saw him as placid and unremarkable. Taking his seat, he settled his luggage on his lap where it remained, held in place by its owner with perfect equanimity, for the rest of the journey. At Stepney, the passenger disembarked and walked the short distance to the canal where he disposed of his burden, hurling it, as discreetly as he was able, into the water. It floated for a second or two, as though struggling to remain in view of the world, before it sank at last beneath the surface, vanishing from sight.
The name of the traveller was James Greenacre and earlier that day he had committed murder. What he carried under his arm was the severed head of his victim – a washerwoman named Hannah Brown, who was his fiancée. Greenacre must have hoped that the canal would swallow the proof of his crime but the waters failed to keep their secret. On January 6, 1837, the head of Miss Brown was found by a lock-keeper when it came to obstruct the mechanism of which he was in charge. Brown’s torso was soon discovered, “in a horridly mutilated state”, dumped in a sack “tucked under a flagstone” on the Edgware Road, and in February “a pair of legs was dredged out of a bed of reeds near Coldharbour Lane, in Brixton”. Following the identification of the body by the victim’s brother, Greenacre was hunted down and arrested. Soon afterwards, he confessed and the crowd at his execution was apparently “large, vocal and perfectly good-humoured”. They purchased “Greenacre tarts” from a pie-seller while they waited to watch the killer swing.
In reviewing Judith Flanders'
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians revelled in death and detection and created modern crime (London: Harper Press 2011) Barnes goes on to comment that -
For all that society evolved in the Victorian century, what has become most apparent by the end of Flanders’s impressively thorough book (both bibliography and index are excellent) is how little things have changed. In these pages we seem to see reflections of our own time – in the statistics (then, as now, murders seem overwhelmingly to involve male violence against women: “throughout the sixty-three years of Victoria’s reign, 26 per cent of convicted murderers were men who killed their wives, while only 1 per cent were women who killed their husbands . . . eight out of every ten female homicide victims were killed by a husband, lover, or would-be husband or lover”), and in public concern over the corruption of the young (the “vibrant illustrated posters” of the time prompted the Police News to fret that “such pictures” might have the same effect on suggestible members of the public as “the taste of blood produces upon the tiger”).
Above all, the Victorians’ thirst for murder – their fascination with the details, their poring over and feasting on it – mirrors our own culture. Today, Britain remains obsessed with murder, as the most cursory look at the television guide or the bestseller charts will show. More than that, the urge persists to invent, to extrapolate, to replay terrible events over and over, embroidering them and fleshing them out. For all the pain and horror of these transgressive deeds, dramatization seems hard to resist – certain small details, for example, in the two paragraphs which opened this review were made up in order to render the scene more ghoulishly picturesque. As to why this practice might be almost inevitable, Flanders has an explanation. “Murder”, she writes, “is like hearing blustery rain on the windowpane when sitting indoors. It reinforces a sense of safety, even of pleasure, to know that murder is possible, just not here.”
