elegant country house, a body thrust into a well; its characters were fascinated with madness and with detective work, and terrified of exposure. Braddon's story gave expression to the disquiet and excitement that Saville Kent's murder had awakened.
Constance Kent was refracted into every woman in the book: the sweet-faced, possibly insane murderess Lady Audley; the tomboyish, spirited daughter of the house, Alicia Audley; the impassive lady's maid Phoebe Marks ('Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world . . . that is a woman who can keep a secret'); and the lonely, passionate Clara Talboys, sister to the murdered man: 'I have grown up in an atmosphere of suppression. . . . I have stifled and dwarfed the natural feelings of my heart, until they have become unnatural in their intensity; I have been allowed neither friends nor lovers. My mother died when I was very young . . . I have had no one but my brother.'
Jack Whicher surfaces in the figure of the tormented amateur detective Robert Audley, who conducts a 'backward investigation', a journey into his suspect's past. Where Inspector Bucket in
Whicher's chain of evidence at Road could be proof of his suspect's guilt or of his own delusions, just as his chain of evidence at Kingswood had proved. The uncertainty was torture: 'Am I never to get any nearer the truth,' asks Robert Audley, 'but am I to be tormented all my life by vague doubts, and wretched suspicions, which may grow upon me till I become a monomaniac?' Yet if he succeeds in solving the mystery it might only magnify the horror: 'why should I try to unravel the tangled skein, to fit the pieces of the terrible puzzle, and gather together the stray fragments which when collected may make such a hideous whole?'
In 1863 the philosopher Henry Mansel described such novels as 'indications of a widespread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause: called into existence to satisfy the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want they supply'. Mansel expressed himself with unusual force, but his views were widespread. Many feared that sensation novels were a 'virus' that might create the corruption they described, forming a circle of excitement – sexual and violent – that coursed through every stratum of society. These books, the original psychological thrillers, were seen as agents of social collapse, even in the way they were consumed – they were read in the scullery and the drawing room, by servants and mistresses alike. They alluded to real crimes, such as the Road Hill case, to add a frisson of authenticity. 'There is something unspeakably disgusting in this ravenous appetite for carrion,' wrote Mansel, 'this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome dainty before the scent has evaporated.' Sensation novels called forth their readers' brutish sensations, their animal appetites; they threatened religious belief and social order in a similar way to Darwinism. Mansel noted that the typical jacket illustration to one of these novels was of 'a pale young lady in a white dress, with a dagger in her hand' – the scene Whicher had conjured at Road.
Joseph Stapleton's book about the killing,
In prose as heated as that of the sensation novelists, Stapleton urged his readers to 'think of the human hearts that pulsate' in the homes of the new middle classes, 'of the human passions that riot there . . . of family wrongs, of family conflicts, of family disgraces, covered over only by the miserable tinsel of gentility; flashing out here and there, fitfully, into a sudden, devouring, and inextinguishable flame'. He likened such families to volcanoes: 'in many an English house-hold, the amenities of social life are found to clothe with grace a rugged and a shallow crust. The tempest . . . gathers strength in those deep recesses where the crater is instinct with fire; and . . . it bursts out, in its fully fury, to hurl parents, children, servants, into one common, inevitable, and promiscuous destruction.'
The public had been corrupted by the Road Hill murder, Stapleton suggested. 'As the mystery attached to the crime has been deepened and prolonged, suspicion has become a passion.' He gave a lurid account of the spectators at Saville's inquest, comparing them to the women at a Spanish bullfight. 'Women had crowded into the room to hear how a throat had been cut,' he wrote, 'and they held young children in their arms to gaze upon the bloody relic.' It was as if the domestic angel of Victorian fantasy momentarily gave way to a bloodthirsty ghoul: 'Her sympathies for suffering are suspended till her instincts have been indulged; and, when curiosity and the love of the horrible have been satiated, the Englishwoman recovers from her eclipse and comes forth among us in the brightness of her better attributes again.' In Stapleton's eyes, the observers of a murder investigation were themselves transformed, briefly mutated by the vision of violence. Though he was eager to assign all the appetite for gore to the working-class women of the village, and to liken them to foreigners for good measure, the greedy curiosity about this case extended to all the English social classes, and both sexes. He was himself hungry for the matter of the murder, as his book made clear.
Stapleton suggested that the murder was evidence of 'a national decay': 'An imputed degradation of race has become amongst ourselves a national reproach,' he wrote, 'just because we recognise in it the natural consequences and expression of a long ancestral series of debasing pleasures, grovelling occupations, and corrupting sins.' He was subscribing here to the theory of racial degeneration: if human beings could evolve, as Darwin argued, they could surely regress as well. A family's decadent past could tell on its children, dragging the race backwards. Mansel, too, cited the Road Hill murder as evidence of degeneration, along with the spread of alcoholism, consumerism, hysteria, pollution, prostitution and adultery. Stapleton, though eager to absolve Samuel of the murder, implied that his former colleague's corruptions and pretensions had undone his family. Dipsomania could mark a man's offspring, said the doctor, as could other kinds of intemperance, such as greed for money or an excess of sexual desire.
The unsolved murder at Road played out the sensation novelist's vision of Britain. The case didn't deliver meaning; only a jolt, like electricity. Its influence was evident in Charlotte Yonge's
