A recreation of an 1860s murder sheds light on the workings of a conservative yet prurient society, not very unlike our own.
Comic-book writer Alan Moore once suggested that in order to solve a crime holistically, “one would need to solve the entire society in which it occurred”. The statement was made in the context of Moore and Eddie Campbell’s brilliant, multi-layered graphic novel From Hell, which used the Jack the Ripper murders in 1880s London to examine the deep-rooted misogyny and social inequality in Victorian England. But it applies more widely to both real-life crime and crime fiction.
Close to home, consider the infamous child-murders in Nithari three years ago: one of the reasons the crimes took so long to come to light was the mutual antipathy between the poor people of the area (whose children were mainly the victims) and the local police. The villagers were wary about going to the authorities to register missing-person reports, and, when they did, the police didn’t take them seriously, or harassed them. The killers continued their work unhindered.
The “crime and society” thesis is central to Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or The Murder at Road Hill House, which reconstructs a famous real-life murder that took place in an English country house in June 1860. A three-year-old boy — the youngest son of the large Kent family — was found brutally murdered, his little body stuffed into a makeshift outdoor “privy”. The killer was almost certainly one of the 12 people staying in the house at the time — three servants and nine family members (including a woman who had once belonged to the servant class but had, somewhat controversially, risen up the ranks to become the second wife of the family patriarch).
Summerscale’s book isn’t quite a whodunit — not because the reader knows the murderer’s identity from the beginning (you don’t, unless you’re already familiar with the Road Hill House case) but because there are far more interesting things going on in it. “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” L P Hartley wrote, and for those of us living in India, 1860s England might seem a foreign country twice removed. But some of the things about the case are chillingly easy to relate to, notably the public reaction, which combines moral highhandedness with fascinated voyeurism — and a massive public appetite for sleaze.
On the one hand, the society portrayed here is a conservative, even repressed one: much importance is attached to the idea that a man’s house is his castle, and there are those who see the violation of a “respectable” family’s privacy (necessitated by the investigation) as a crime equal to the actual murder. There is unease discussing sexual matters or personal hygiene: a woman’s discarded night-shift, which might have been important evidence, remains unmentioned by the police because they believe that the blood stains on it are menstrual and they don’t want to have to deal with the garment or enter it into the official record. But at the same time this is a world that enjoys peeping into others’ private lives, gossiping about them, deriving vicarious thrills. Little wonder that tabloid journalism was in its infancy, holding up a mirror to the hidden prurience of this society. (Does any of this sound familiar?)
In other ways too, it was an exciting time. Scotland Yard had come into existence only a couple of decades earlier and the plainclothes detective was a new type of beast whose methods people didn’t always approve of. (In some circles there was a distrust of detectives as lower-class men who had been given official sanction to pry into the personal affairs of the middle and upper classes.) Sherlock Holmes hadn’t been created yet but fictional detectives — beginning with Poe’s Auguste Dupin — were just beginning to stir the public imagination; Jonathan Whicher, who headed the Road Hill House murder investigation, was the inspiration for Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s bestselling The Moonstone, possibly the first English detective novel. Charles Dickens showed a strong interest in the Road Hill House case and used elements from it in his last, unfinished book The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Many of the modern investigative methods we take for granted today weren’t available at the time, but physiognomy — the idea that a person’s inner life could be “read” by studying his features — was popular, as was the theory that madness was genetically passed down from a mother to her female children. The Origin of Species had just been published, and it’s briefly hinted that the Road Hill House murderer might have been influenced enough by Darwin’s theory of evolution to have abjured God (thereby presumably becoming an instrument for Satan!).
The best thing about Summerscale’s book is how lightly it wears its erudition. Almost in passing, she gives us tidbits of information: about the origins of words like “clue”, “sleuth” and “bobbie”, or about the “sensation novels” of the 1860s, widely denounced for corrupting the public and “calling forth brutish sensations in their readers”. There’s a restraint in her writing, which must have been difficult to accomplish give the huge wealth of material she has drawn on and strung together (some of the endnotes — more expansive than your regular footnotes — are just as interesting as the main body of the book).
And despite all this, she never loses sight of the human side of the case. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a record of a specific murder case all right — and a comprehensive record at that, written in an accessible, novelistic style — but it’s also a portrait of a period, complete with its mores, attitudes and idiosyncracies.
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