165 In early August . . . employed as a Detective, or what?' These two letters are in the Home Office file on the case, HO 144/20/49113. Sir John Eardley Wilmot, a married man of fifty with eight children, was judge of the county court at Bristol. He went on to be Conservative MP for South Warwickshire from 1874 to 1885. He was not a very successful advocate, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, but in 1881 he helped to win compensation for Edmund Galley, who had been wrongly convicted of murder in 1835. Eardley Wilmot died in 1892.
168 The public was fascinated by murder . . . the investigation of murder, too. Punch magazine had satirised 'murder-worship' in 1849. See Victorian Studies in Scarlet (1972) by Richard D. Altick.
In an essay of 1856, George Eliot analysed the appeal of Wilkie Collins' stories: 'The great interest lies in the excitement either of curiosity or of terror . . . Instead of turning pale at a ghost we knit our brows and construct hypotheses to account for it. Edgar Poe's tales were an effort of genius to reconcile the two tendencies – to appal the imagination yet satisfy the intellect, and Mr Wilkie Collins in this respect often follows in Poe's tracks.' From a review of Collins' After Dark in the Westminster Review.
171 On Tuesday, 31 July . . . piece of pickled pork.' Account of the Walworth murders from The Times of 1, 8, 14, 16, 17 & 20 August 1860 and the News of the World of 2 September 1860.
175 dramatised for the London stage. In Vidocq, by Douglas Jerrold.
175 The Victorians saw in the detective . . . cast him out. Many learnt to find these thrills in detective fiction instead. 'Most traditional novels offer some of the pleasures of the keyhole,' observed Dennis Porter in The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (1981), 'but apart from various forms of erotica none does so more systematically than the fiction of detection. The secret of its power resides to a large degree in the trick that makes of voyeurism a duty.'
175 A few voices . . . Whicher's defence. The Law Times was sure that Whicher had identified the murderer and her motive. 'The child was his mother's pet, and malice against his mother – a fiendish desire to inflict a wound on her through him – would be a motive neither impossible nor improbable . . . Both of them, brother and sister [William and Constance], entertained very strong feelings of hostility, almost amounting to hatred towards the mother of the child . . . they knew that she had won the affections of their father while their mother was yet living. They had complained of neglect and illtreatment by her, and of her partiality for her own children.' Since Saville had been taken from his cot by 'a light, practised hand', the journal added, a woman must have been involved in his abduction.
CHAPTER 13
181 A week afterwards . . . unrestrained crying.' Account of Young-man's execution from the News of the World of 9 September 1860.
183 On Monday, 24 September . . . quite innocent. A year later the Home Office, after prolonged wranglings, paid Slack's firm ?700 for its work on the case. See HO 144/20/49113.
187 Mrs Dallimore was a real-life version . . . The Female Detective (1864). Amateur female detectives also appear in Wilkie Collins' 'The Diary of Anne Rodway' (1856) and in Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) by 'Anonyma' (W. Stephens Hayward). This book's jacket shows the lady detective as a dangerously emancipated, sensual creature. She wears a plump red- and-white ribbon round her throat, a hat piled high with flowers, a fur stole and velvet cuffs. She gives the prospective reader a sidelong gaze while lifting her full black coat to reveal the hem of a red dress.
188 'the late Edgar Poe'. Poe had died, aged forty, in 1849. In life, he suffered from alcoholism, depression and episodes of delirium. The critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that Poe 'invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad'. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926), quoted in Peter Lehman's The Perfect Murder (1989).
190 'Mr Kent, intriguing . . . disposes of same.' See The Letters of Charles Dickens 1859–61 (1997), edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey.
190 The Saturday Review . . . beyond their routine'. In the Saturday Review of 22 September 1860.
191 The idea took hold . . . minds of our countrymen.' In Once a Week, 13 October 1860. The author pointed out that, by this argument, few murders should take place in sunny southern Europe, which in fact had many violent deaths.
191 A freak storm had hit Wiltshire . . . Saville Kent had died. The natural historian and meteorologist George Augustus Rowell gave a lecture on the storm on 21 March 1860 and subsequently published it as a pamphlet, A Lecture on the Storm in Wiltshire.
CHAPTER 14
197 Saunders asked Foley . . . he did not!' In a letter to The Times, Stapleton claimed that a microscope would not have helped determine the nature of the blood on the nightdress he saw. 'I had no hesitation in advising the authorities that the nightdress shown to me . . . furnished no clue to this crime . . . I hoped that this nightdress was withdrawn for ever from public observation. However, Mr Saunders has dragged it from its obscurity again, and, as it seems to me, in wanton and useless violation of public decency and private feeling.' The nightdresses had become the emblem of the Kent family's decency and privacy; to speculate about them was to repeat the violation of their home.
