248 John Duke Coleridge . . . getting up my speech.' Coleridge earned more than ?4,000 a year, according to the Dictionary of National Biography. Diary extract from Life and Correspondence of John Duke, Lord Coleridge (1904).
248 He composed a letter . . . my conviction.' Correspondence in Bernard Taylor's archive.
251 As soon as the death sentence was passed. . . A maiden die on the fatal tree.' Broadside ballads, in order of quotation: 'The Road Hill Murder Confession of the Murderess', published by Disley, 1865; unnamed ballad quoted in the North Wilts Herald of 1 o September 1865; 'Trial and Sentence of Constance Kent', also printed by Disley, 1865, and reprinted in Charles Hindley's Curiosities of Street Literature (1966). See Roly Brown's article on Constance Kent and the Road Murder, no. 15 in his series on the nineteenth-century broadside ballad trade in Musical Traditions magazine (mustrad.org.uk).
252 A Devonshire magistrate . . . lunacy in the 1840s. See affidavit from Gustavus Smith, dated 24 July 1865, in HO 1144/20/49113.
253 On the morning of Thursday . . . slightest emotion.' Pritchard was hanged on Friday.
253 (in fact, Willes had decided . . . passed in confession'). Letter from Coleridge to W.E. Gladstone, 6 April 1890, quoted in Saint – with Red Hands? (1954) by Yseult Bridges.
258 Bucknill finished his letter . . . could succumb to insanity. In a lecture on 'Insanity in its Legal Relations' delivered before the Royal College of Physicians thirteen years later – in April 1878 – Bucknill said more about Constance's motive. The girl had stored up a 'fund of rage and revengeful feeling' against her 'high- spirited' stepmother, on account of the disparaging comments the second Mrs Kent made about Constance's 'partially demented' mother. Constance tried to run away from the stepmother's 'hated presence', but when she was caught and brought home resolved to take vengeance. She thought poison would be 'no real punishment' and decided instead to kill Saville. 'A dreadful story this,' remarked Bucknill, 'but who can fail to pity the depths of house-hold misery which it denotes?' Quoted in Celebrated Crimes and Criminals (1890) by Willoughby Maycock.
259 Forty years later . . . at every pore.' From 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' (1905) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1953–74), edited by James Strachey, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. This essay concerned one of Freud's first patients, the eighteen-year-old 'Dora'.
CHAPTER 18
261 In October 1865 . . . behind Millbank's high walls. Information on Millbank gaol from The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life (1862) by Henry Mayhew and John Binny; The Princess Casamassima (1886) by Henry James; and the Penny Illustrated Paper of 14 October 1865.
262 In 1866 he married his landlady . . . sheep grazed on the green. From Whicher's marriage certificate, on which he described himself as a bachelor, not a widower. Hippolyte Taine referred to sheep grazing outside Westminster Abbey in his Notes on England (1872).
263 Private inquiry agents . . . Ignatius Pollaky. Pollaky had become a successful private detective with offices at 13 Paddington Green, near the railway station. In 18 66, according to The Times, he broke a ring of white slave traders who were kidnapping young women in Hull and selling them in Germany. A song in Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera Patience, which opened in London in 1881, praised 'the keen penetration of Paddington Pollaky'. He died in Brighton in 1918, aged ninety.
263 The work was well-paid . . . to divorce her. From a report in The Times of 9 December 1858.
263 In his new role Whicher took part . . . the Tichborne Claimant. Account of the case of the Tichborne Claimant from: Famous Trials of the Century (1899) by J.B. Atlay; The Tichborne Tragedy: Being the Secret and Authentic History of the Extraordinary Facts and Circumstances Connected with the Claims, Personality, Identification, Conviction and Last Days of the Tichborne Claimant (1913) by Maurice Edward Kenealy; The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Mystery (1957) by Douglas Woodruff; The Man Who Lost Himself (2003) by Robyn Annear; and reports in The Times.
264 'It has weighed upon the public mind like an incubus.' From The Tichborne Romance (1872) by A Barrister At Large (A. Steinmedz), quoted in Victorian Sensation (2003) by Michael Diamond.
266 'I daresay you hear me frequently abused . . . Your Old Friend, Jack Whicher.' Quoted in Scotland Yard: Its History and Organisation 1829–1929 (1929) by George Dilnot.
267 Jack Whicher was still living . . . until death. From census returns of 1861, 1871, 1881, marriage certificate of Sarah Whicher and James Holliwell, and Holliwell's citation for the Victoria Cross.
267 'It is a very curious story . . . the detective prime?' Dickens quote from a letter to W.H. Wills – see The Letters of Charles Dickens 1868–870 (2002), edited by Graham Storey, Margaret Brown and Kathleen Tillotson. Robert Louis Stevenson letter of 5 September 1868 quoted in
