covered nearly ankle deep with filth and mire” and the air was filled with a “hideous and discordant din.” The new market covered thirty acres. Each year four million cattle, sheep, and pigs passed through its gates either for evisceration and dismemberment or to be sold on market days from its enclosed market stalls and “bullock lairs.” There was less filth than at Smithfield, but the din was no less hideous, and when the weather was right and the market at its peak, typically Mondays—especially the Monday before Christmas, always the single busiest day—the chorus of lowing and bleating could be heard many blocks away, audible even to the residents of Hilldrop Crescent. Charles Booth found that animals were driven to the market through neighborhood streets, occasionally with comic effect. “Some go astray,” he wrote. One bull remained loose for thirty-six hours. Another time a flock of sheep invaded a dress shop. “Loose pigs are about the worst to tackle,” Booth noted: “they will spread so: attract a crowd in no time: make the police look ridiculous.”
The market environs tended to draw a class of residents less savory than what the Crippens had encountered in Bloomsbury. “Very rough district,” Booth observed, “many of the men working at the cattle market as drovers, slaughter-men, porters, &c; great deal of casual work. Some old cottage property partly in bad repair.”
The two other institutions that tended to suppress the allure of Hilldrop Crescent were prisons. One was Holloway Gaol, also called City Prison, opened in 1852 to serve as the main prison for criminals accused or convicted of crimes within the City, London’s financial district. Until 1902 Holloway had housed both men and women, including, briefly, Oscar Wilde, but by the time the Crippens moved to Hilldrop, it incarcerated only women—and soon would receive its first police van full of suffragettes arrested for seeking the right to vote.
But even Holloway’s presence was benign compared to another prison, Pentonville, that fronted Caledonian Road, a short walk southeast of the Crippens’ house. Its facade was no more or less dreary, but the frequency of executions conducted within imparted a black solemnity to its high, blank walls. Upon its opening in 1842, reformers called Pentonville a “model prison” in recognition of both its innovative design—four clean and bright cellblocks jutting from a central hub where guards had a ready view of every level—and its regimen, “the separate system,” under which all of its initial 520 prisoners were kept in what later generations would call solitary confinement, each man alone in a cell and barred from ever speaking to his fellow inmates. The point was to compel prisoners to contemplate their behavior and—through solitary work, daily religious services, and the reading of soul-improving literature—to encourage them to shed their unhealthy behavior. In practice the separate system drove many insane and prompted a succession of suicides.
In 1902 the prison became a center for execution. This did not please the neighbors, although anyone with an appreciation of history would have seen this new role as a fitting return to the district’s roots. In the 1700s an inn stood in Camden Town by the name of Mother Red Cap, a common stop for omnibuses but also the end of the line for many condemned prisoners, who were hung at a public gallows across the street. Public executions became great picnics of malice and drew increasing criticism until Parliament required that they be conducted within prison walls. By the time the Crippens arrived in Hilldrop Crescent, one remnant of prior practice remained enshrined in law and served as a persistent and depressing reminder for families living near Pentonville that they had a prison in their midst and that there were men within its walls who knew precisely the moment at which they would die. The law required that prison authorities ring the bell in the prison chapel fifteen times upon the completion of each hanging. This became wearing for neighbors and certainly for prisoners next in line for the gallows; for Belle it became another marker of her own social decline.
One immediate neighbor of the prison, Thomas Cole, grew sufficiently concerned about how the executions were affecting adjacent streets that he complained to the home secretary, a youngish man named Winston Churchill. “The Building,” he wrote, “is surrounded by Houses occupied by respectable working people who find much difficulty in letting the apartments. It is also causing the Houses to remain empty and of course much loss to all concerned.” He closed by asking, nicely, whether these executions couldn’t take place elsewhere—in particular at a prison called Wormwood Scrubs, “which is, I believe in an isolated position?”
Cole’s complaint made its way through the Home Office to the governor of Pentonville Prison, who responded promptly, in equally civil language and with empathy. After noting that indeed one of the major streets bordering the prison, Market Street, now contained several empty houses, he stated, “I do not think that the carrying out of executions here causes the difficulty in letting apartments, at least to any appreciable extent. The fact of a prison in itself being in a particular spot is bound to cause the neighborhood to be looked on as undesirable—However this agitation has been going on ever since executions were commenced in 1902.”
But he argued that the prison was not the sole cause of neighborhood decay. Landlords were charging excessive rents, and “trams and tubes also tend to make the better class working people move farther away.” Another problem was “the numbers of rats which I am informed infest the houses there.” Decline clearly had occurred, he wrote. “I have observed that the people who reside in Market Street are not of as good a class as they were a few years ago. In fact every time places are to let they appear to be taken by people not so well off as those who lived there before them and so moves are more frequent.”
In closing, he offered a suggestion: “that the tolling of the bell after an execution should be stopped—there appears to be no reason for it and if it were stopped I think very few people in the neighborhood would be aware of anything unusual taking place.”
He was overruled. The bells had always rung. They would continue to ring. It was, after all, the law, and this was, after all, England.
BELLE DECORATED IN PINK. She wore pink dresses. She wore pink underclothes, including a pink silk ribbed undervest. She bought pink pillows with pink tassels, walled rooms with pink fabric, and hung pink velvet bows off the frames of paintings. She loathed green. It was unlucky, she believed. On seeing green wallpaper in the drawing room of a friend’s home, she exclaimed, “Gee. You have got a hoo-doo here. Green paper! You’ll have bad luck as sure as fate. When I have a house I won’t have green in the house. It shall be pink right away through for luck.” By that standard, she would now be very lucky indeed.
She exhibited an odd mix of frugality and extravagance, according to her friend Adeline Harrison. “Mrs. Crippen was strictly economical in small matters in connection with their private home living,” Harrison wrote. “In fact, to such an extent did she carry it that it suggested parsimony. She would search out the cheapest shops for meat, and go to the Caledonian Market and buy cheap fowls. She was always trying to save the pence, but scattering the pounds.”
She spent most heavily on clothing and jewelry for herself. For the house, she bought knickknacks and gewgaws and odd pieces of furniture. Given her passion for bargains, she no doubt frequented the famous Friday market of “miscellanies” at the Metropolitan Cattle Market. At first “miscellanies” was meant to describe livestock other than cattle, hogs, and sheep, such as donkeys and goats, but over the years the term had come to include anything that could be sold, whether animate or inanimate. On Fridays, as Charles Booth discovered when his survey of London took him to the cattle market, “nearly everything is sold & nearly everything finds a purchaser.” Anyone browsing the stalls could find books, clothes, toys, locks, chains, rusty nails, and an array of worn and beaten wares that Booth described as “rubbish that one wd. think wd. not pay to move a yard.” Another writer observed in 1891 that the “buyers and sellers are as miscellaneous, ragged and rusty as the articles in which they deal.”
Belle adorned the house with ostrich feathers and in one room installed a pair of elephants’ feet, a not uncommon decoration in middle-class homes. Her friends noted with cheery malignance that while Belle paid a lot of attention to how she looked and dressed, her housekeeping was haphazard, with the result that the atmosphere within the house was close and musty. “Mrs. Crippen disliked fresh air and open windows,” Harrison wrote. “There was no regular house cleaning. It was done in spasms. The windows in all the rooms, including the basement, were rarely opened.” Despite the size of the house—its three floors plus basement—Belle refused to spend money on a maid, even though servants could be hired for wages that later generations would consider laughably low. To reduce the amount of housework, she simply closed the top-floor bedrooms and regulated access to the rest of the house. “They lived practically in the kitchen, which was generally in a state of dirt and disorder,” Harrison wrote. “The basement, owing to want of ventilation, smelt earthy and unpleasant. A strange ‘creepy’ feeling always came
