Marconi’s mother endorsed Marconi’s plans and persuaded her husband that the journey was necessary. In February 1896 mother and son left for London, Marconi carrying a locked box containing his apparatus. He wore a deerstalker cap of the kind that later would be identified with Sherlock Holmes.
On his arrival in England the alert agents of the customs house immediately confiscated his equipment, fearing it was a bomb or other device capable of placing the queen at risk.
In the course of their inspection they destroyed the apparatus.
AT MUNYON’S, CRIPPEN PROSPERED. His career advanced quickly. After a few months in New York he was transferred to Philadelphia, where he and Cora lived for about a year. Next Professor Munyon sent him to Toronto, to manage the company’s office there. He and Cora stayed for six months, then returned to Philadelphia.
All this was good for Crippen’s career, but Cora grew restive. She had spent the better part of a decade married to Crippen and still was no closer to her dream of becoming a diva. She told Crippen she wanted to renew her studies of opera. She wanted only the best and insisted on going to New York.
Ever indulgent, Crippen agreed to pay for an apartment and all her expenses. By this time Professor Munyon was paying him well. Patent medicine was a lucrative field, and money flowed into the company in a torrent. Crippen could afford the cost of Cora’s lessons and her life in New York. What made him uneasy was the prospect of her living alone, without his presence to keep her from associating with other men. Subsequent events suggest that for Cora such freedom may in fact have been as important as the caliber of her song masters.
In 1897 Munyon assigned Crippen his biggest responsibility yet, to take over management of the company’s London office. Munyon proposed to pay him $10,000 a year, an astonishing sum equivalent to about $220,000 in twenty-first-century dollars, and paid in an era when federal income tax did not exist. Crippen told Cora the news, expecting that she would find a move to London an irresistible prospect.
He was wrong. She complained that she could not give up her lessons and told him he would have to go alone, that she would join him later. On the question of when, she was disconcertingly vague.
As always he assented, though now an ocean would separate them and her freedom would be complete.
Full of sorrow and unease, the little doctor sailed to England. It was April 1897. Intent on establishing permanent residence, he brought all his belongings, including supplies of his favored poisons.
He arrived without challenge.
IN LONDON, CRIPPEN AND MARCONI both entered a realm of unaccustomed anxiety. Outwardly the stones of empire remained in place, snug and solid and suitably grimed, but there existed in certain quarters a perception that the world was growing unruly and that Britain and her increasingly frail queen had seen their best days.
London was still the biggest, most powerful city in the world. Its four and a half million people inhabited 8,000 streets, many only a block long, and did their drinking in 7,500 public houses and rode in 11,000 cabs pulled by 20,000 horses, the cab population divided among four-wheeled “growlers” and two-wheeled hansoms, named not for their appearance, which was indeed handsome, but rather for their inventor, Joseph Hansom. Crippen joined an estimated 15,000 of his countrymen already living in London, which number by coincidence equaled the total of known lunatics residing within the city’s five asylums. Most important, London formed the seat of an empire that controlled one-quarter of the world’s population and one-quarter of its land.
Cab whistles screamed for attention, one blast to summon a growler, two for a hansom. Horse-drawn omnibuses clotted the streets. The buses had two levels, with open-air “garden seating” on top, reached by a stairwell spiraling in a manner that allowed ladies to ascend without concern. Motorcars, or simply “motors,” added a fresh layer of noise and stench and danger. In 1896 their increasing use forced repeal of a law that had limited speed to a maximum of two miles per hour and required a footman to walk ahead carrying a red flag. The new Locomotives (on Highways) Act raised the speed limit to fourteen and, wisely, did away with the footmen. Underneath the city there was hell in motion. Passengers descending to the subterranean railways encountered a seismic roar produced by too much smoke, too much steam, and too much noise packed into too small an enclosure, the Tube, into which the trains fit as snugly as pistons in a cylinder.
There was fog, yes, often days of it on end, and with a depth so profound as to classify it as a species distinct from the fogs of elsewhere. Londoners nicknamed these fits of opacity “London particulars.” The fog came thick and sulfurous and squeezed the flare of gas lamps to cats’ eyes of amber that left the streets so dark and sinister that children of the poor hired themselves out as torchbearers to light the way for men and women bent on walking the city’s darker passages. The light formed around the walkers a shifting wall of gauze, through which other pedestrians appeared with the suddenness of ghosts. On some nights the eeriness was particularly acute, especially after an evening of engaging in what had become a common pastime, the holding of seances. The walk home afterward could be a long one, suffused with sorrow and grief and marked by the occasional glance behind.
This turn toward the veil was largely Darwin’s fault. By reducing the rise of man to a process that had more to do with accident than with God, his theories had caused a shock to the faith of late Victorian England. The yawning void of this new “Darwinian darkness,” as one writer put it, caused some to embrace science as their new religion but turned many others into the arms of Spiritualism and set them seeking concrete proof of an afterlife in the shifting planchettes of Ouija boards. In the mid-1890s Britain had 150 Spiritualist societies; by 1908 there would be nearly 400. Queen Victoria herself was rumored to have consulted often with a medium who claimed to be in touch with her dear dead husband, Albert, the prince consort.
There were other signs that the confidence and contentment that had suffused Britain under the queen were beginning ever so slightly to erode. Britain’s birthrate was falling rapidly. The Panic of ’93 had rattled the princes of industry. Britain and France seemed on the verge of war, though in fact events under way in Germany, as yet largely unnoticed by the public, soon would refocus the nation’s attention and bring an end to its long-standing policy of “splendid isolation,” rooted in the perception that because of its military and economic power the empire needed no alliances.
Unsettling, too, was the rising clamor from suffragists seeking the vote for women. The hostility that greeted the movement masked a deeper fear of an upwelling of sexual passion and power. It was kept quiet, but illicit sex occurred everywhere, at every level of society. It was on people’s minds and in their hearts; it took place in back alleys and in elegant canopied beds at country homes. The new scientists of the mind studied sex, and in keeping with the revolution ushered in by Darwin, they sought to reduce it to sequences of stimuli and adaptive needs. Starting in 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis devoted six volumes to it: his pioneering
There existed, too, a rising consciousness of poverty and of the widening difference between how the rich and the poor lived. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire owned an estate, Chatsworth, so large it could house more than four hundred weekend guests and the squads of servants that accompanied them. The wealthy served meals of extravagance, recalled J. B. Priestley, “probably including, if the chef were up to it, one of those quasi- Roman idiocies, in which birds of varying sizes were cooked one inside the other like nests of Oriental boxes.” Barbara Tuchman, in
With this new awareness of the great rift between rich and poor came the fear that extremists would seek to exploit class divisions and set Britain tumbling toward revolution. Anarchism had flamed into violence throughout Europe, often with an Italian holding the match. In late 1892 Scotland Yard arrested two Italians who confessed to planning to blow up the Royal Stock Exchange. The aptly named Errico Malatesta—literally, “evil headed”—preached revolution throughout Europe and found a willing audience. On June 24, 1894, a young Italian baker, Sante Caserio, attacked the president of France, Sadi Carnot, with a newly bought dagger and stabbed him to death. A bomb exploded in posh Mayfair but hurt no one. Many in England feared that worse was yet to come and blamed the
