The inquest into Emily Coombes’s death reopened at the Liverpool Arms on Monday 29 July. Mellish and Gilbert again watched on behalf of the police. Nattie, who was due to testify, was brought in by one of his uncles. He sat stolidly through the questioning of the other witnesses.
Much of the evidence repeated that which had been heard before Baggallay on Thursday, but Charles Carne Lewis called a few extra witnesses and adopted a different line of questioning. Despite the fact that the magistrates’ court had discharged Nattie, Lewis was particularly probing about his role in the crime.
First, Lewis had a few further questions for Robert and Nattie’s aunt Emily. She looked very worn, according to the Leytonstone Express, when she came in to the court. In answer to the coroner, she testified that she had never seen anything in either of the boys to indicate that they ‘did not know what they were about’.
‘They were rude boys,’ she said. ‘I thought them impertinent.’
‘No, sir, to their mother.’ In fact, said Aunt Emily, she believed that her sister-in-law had been generally ‘too fond of the children and too weak with them’.
‘You mean you think the mother spoilt them, being so fond of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘So as a sort of natural return they were very rude to her?’
‘Yes.’
Her sister-in-law, she said, had been ‘very proud and fond of Robert’.
One of the jurymen asked if it was within the scope of the inquiry to ask what kind of reading the lads indulged in.
‘The last book Robert had to read while his mother was alive was The Last Shot,’ said Emily.
Detective Inspector Mellish said that the books found in the house would be produced.
Joseph Horlock, the foreman of the jury, asked Emily whether Nattie had overheard her exchange with Robert on the Monday before their mother’s body was discovered.
She said that he had: ‘When I asked Robert where his mother was, Nathaniel must have heard what he said in reply.’ This confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that Nattie was privy to his brother’s lies about their mother’s whereabouts.
Asked about Nattie’s reactions on the day that the body was found, she said: ‘Directly I remarked, “Your mother is in the house”, Nathaniel made a dash and jumped out of the window.’
A jury member asked: ‘He was sensible enough to know that something was the matter?’
‘Yes,’ Aunt Emily replied.
Mary Jane Burrage then gave evidence for the first time. A ‘pale and sedate-looking person of middle age’, as the Sun described her, she told the court that she was an intimate friend of Robert and Nattie’s mother, whom she had known for three years. She had last visited her on the Saturday evening before her death. The Coombes brothers were ‘very intelligent but also very rude boys’, she said. ‘They knew well what they were about.’ Mrs Burrage confirmed that Emily Coombes had taken pride in Robert’s academic achievements. She said that she had been very kind to her sons in every way and had been exasperated by their behaviour.
Nattie was a particular problem, Mrs Burrage said. ‘She complained to me many times of Nathaniel being such a bad boy he would not obey her. Nathaniel has been present and heard her say so. I used to try to console her by saying he would improve as he grew older.’ Emily Coombes had described Nattie as being very cruel to her, said Mrs Burrage. ‘He “cheeked” her so habitually that she often declared she didn’t know what to do with him. When told to do anything, he openly defied her, and at dinner would snatch things off the table and help himself in spite of her remonstrance.’ Nattie, said Mrs Burrage ‘was addicted to pilfering food’. It was a theft of this kind for which he had been beaten shortly before his mother’s murder.
Mrs Burrage’s evidence cast a new light on the relationships within the family. According to her, Emily not only favoured Robert but was in constant conflict with Nattie. She saw him as the child most liable to antagonise and undermine her.
Rosina Robertson of 37 Cave Road testified that the Coombes brothers were ‘very sharp boys’ who ‘appeared to know thoroughly well what they were about’.
Harriet Hayward of number 39 agreed. ‘They always appeared to be sharp and intelligent lads,’ she said. ‘They appeared to know right from wrong.’ Mrs Hayward, thirty-three, had been married for eleven years to John Hayward, a carpenter, with whom she had several children. She had known the Coombes family since they moved to Cave Road early in 1892, and she told the coroner that she had seen John Fox calling at their house for the past three years. He had often been left in charge of the boys when their mother went out.
‘Is he a bright kind of fellow?’ asked Lewis.
‘Mrs Coombes used to say he was a very trustworthy man,’ replied Harriet Hayward.
‘You are a woman of the world,’ said the coroner. ‘You know what I mean. Did he seem to be a bright kind of fellow, or a simple one?’
‘A simple one,’ she conceded.
In reply to a question from a juror, Mrs Hayward said she had never heard that Fox had been banned from the house. On the contrary, she said, John Fox and Mr Coombes ‘seemed always to be on friendly terms, and Mrs Coombes seemed also to treat him well’.
The Brechts appeared again, and supplied a few more details about the knife that they had sold Robert. One of a lot of 140 sample knives that Mary Ann Brecht’s husband had bought second-hand, it was made of Sheffield steel, marked ‘Shenton & Co’, and had been damaged by water when doused during a fire. Mrs Brecht said she knew Robert well, having often seen him playing in the street outside her shop.
When John Hewson gave his evidence about the medical certificate that Robert had brought to the docks, the boy’s ingenuity and nerve provoked ‘grim laughter’ in the room. The atmosphere of the coroner’s court in the Liverpool Arms was more informal and less dramatic than that of the police court in Stratford, more conducive to dark humour than to gasps and faints.
The coroner, unlike the magistrate, allowed Hewson to describe what happened after Robert tricked him out of £2 in 1894. Two days later, said Hewson, Mrs Coombes had come to him at the docks and asked if he had seen the boys. She was very distressed. ‘I told her what I had done,’ said Hewson. ‘She said there was not the slightest occasion for her to send to me for money. She then said she had not seen them, for two days.’ A day or two after that Hewson heard that a detective had found the brothers in Liverpool.
Inspector Gilbert, as Mellish had promised, produced the gaudily coloured penny dreadfuls taken from the back parlour. Among the works that he laid on the coroner’s table were The Witch of Fermoyle, The Mesmerist Detective, Under a Floating Island, Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff, Buffalo Bill, A Fortune for £5 and The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower.
Nattie was called to give evidence after lunch. He wore a brown tweed suit with a band of black crape around the left arm. This was the first time that either of the boys had been seen with any item of mourning dress. The coroner reminded Nattie that he need not say anything that might incriminate himself. He was at first self-composed (‘calm almost to the degree of indifference’, said the Sun) as he stood at the coroner’s table, though his voice was very soft. The jurymen leaned forward to catch his replies as he answered some preliminary questions, and asked him to speak up. When the subject turned to his mother’s murder, he became upset.
A long time before his mother thrashed him that weekend, Nattie said, ‘something was said’ about her – when pressed as to what, he burst into tears, sobbing so desperately that it was difficult to get anything out of him.
Nattie slowly grew calmer, and pulled a black-edged mourning handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his face. Lewis asked him what he thought Robert had meant when he told him he was going to buy a knife to ‘do it’ with. In spite of Nattie’s distress, the coroner dealt with him more directly than the magistrate had done the previous week.
‘I did not know what he meant.’
‘But you have already told me that you thought he was going to kill your mother,’ said Lewis.
‘Please, sir,’ said Nattie, starting to cry again, ‘I thought he was going to kill Ma. He said he was going to do it whenever he could.’
The coroner asked why Robert had killed her.
‘Because he wanted some money to go to some places in India.’
‘But couldn’t he go without killing your mother?’
‘He wanted her money. I was to go with him and John Fox was to take us both. He said he knew his way there.’
‘Who put India into your brother’s head?’
Nattie gave no answer. Over the weekend he had told the reporter from the East London Advertiser that it was the penny dreadfuls that had inspired Robert’s dreams of India, but his brother might also have heard stories of the exotic Far East from his history and geography teachers at school, from his father’s seafaring friends, or even from his mother, who was born in India. The subcontinent was the glory of the British Empire, and the newspapers in the first week of July had been full of the wonders of ‘India in London’, the big summer show at Earl’s Court, which boasted snake-charmers, elephants, a six-legged sacred cow, swaying punkahs, stalls selling goat curry, and barges offering rides past palaces and flower gardens.
Lewis turned to the question of what Robert had done after showing Nattie their mother’s body, a matter that the magistrate had not addressed. Nattie said: ‘He stayed in mother’s bed all the same.’
‘What?’ asked Lewis incredulously. ‘After he murdered her?’
Nattie confirmed that Robert had gone back to bed with their mother.
‘How do you know this if you were in bed?’ asked Lewis.
‘He said he was going back to bed,’ said Nattie. Robert emerged from their mother’s room five minutes later, he explained, and came to the back bedroom.
Robert’s return to his mother’s bed struck the coroner with horror. It had an edge of erotic creepiness. More directly, it suggested a further act of violence. Robert had thought he had killed his mother but Emily Coombes had not been quite dead. When Nattie entered her room, she seemed to be stirring back into life, groaning into wakefulness, and Robert seems to have had to attack her again, whether with another thrust of the knife – two wounds were found in her heart – or by stifling her with the pillow that was found covering her face. The murder had been far less clean and swift, far more disturbing to both victim and perpetrator, than Dr Kennedy had indicated.
Nattie said that Robert emerged from their mother’s bedroom with her dress, from the pocket of which he pulled a purse. He had shaken out its coins on Nattie’s bed.
‘How much money was there?’ asked the coroner.
‘I don’t know. He counted it, but did not tell me.’
The purse was evidence of conquest, proof of a transfer of power. By killing his mother, Robert had freed himself from her clutches and released the treasures that she had hoarded in her lair.
The police showed the court a purse that they had retrieved from the house, but Nattie said that it was not the right one – the purse Robert had brought to his room had elastic round it. Inspector Gilbert produced another purse, which had been found on Fox when he was searched at the station, and Nattie identified it as the one that Robert had taken from their mother’s dress.
‘Now,’ said Lewis, ‘tell us about the arrangement as to coughing outside the bedroom door.’
‘My brother proposed it, and said I was to cough twice, but I did not do so.’ On the day that they were discovered, Robert had claimed that it was Nattie who suggested the cough signal; and that Nattie had coughed as promised. He had repeated this three times – to his aunt and to two police officers. Nattie had not been asked about this contradiction in the magistrates’ court, and nor did the coroner pursue it any further. Nattie’s simple denial seemed to satisfy him. In any case, as Lewis had noted, Robert had also said that his mother’s punch had prompted him to stab her.
‘Did Fox go up to your mother’s room?’ Lewis asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘Why was the key taken out of the door?’
‘Robert took it down so as no one should get in.’
‘Do you know why he did that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Was it not because your mother was there?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you know why the key was afterwards put under the couch in the front room? Who put it there?’
‘I did, on the Tuesday before we were found out. Before that it was on the clock.’
Robert had bought the knife, Nattie said, while their father was still in London.
‘When he bought it he hid it in the dustbin in the yard, and he left it there till Father went away. He brought it into the house on the Saturday, and put it up the chimney in my back room. He took it out on the Sunday night, and said he was going to put it under the pillow. He also said he was going to try to do it that night.’
On the Sunday, said Nattie, he and Robert and their mother had breakfast, dinner and tea together. He had gone to sleep in the back bedroom at 8.45 that night.
And on the day that they were discovered, the coroner asked, ‘You jumped out of the window?’
‘Yes, and that was all of it. We got found out, and was took to the police station.’
The carelessness of Nattie’s reply provoked some laughter from the jury – he might have been admitting to a prank or a petty theft. The boy laughed too.
Lewis told the jury that he thought a further adjournment was necessary, to give the police time to trace Fox’s movements in the days after the murder. The inquest would resume on Thursday. Sergeant Erry, the coroner’s officer, agreed to take care of Nattie in the meantime.
During the first adjournment of the inquest into Emily Coombes’s death, Charles Lewis had investigated the deaths from diphtheria of several children whose parents were Peculiar People, members of a Wesleyan sect formed in Essex in 1838. In accordance with their interpretation of a passage in St James’s Epistle, the parents had not called a doctor when their children fell ill, and instead tried to cure them through prayer and the anointment of oil.
The Children’s Act of 1889 enabled the state to prosecute a parent for the ill-treatment or culpable neglect of a child, and an amendment of 1894 specified that failure to obtain medical help could be an offence. Yet all that the coroner’s court was able to do in the Peculiar People cases was give a verdict of death from natural causes – it was hard to prove that a death from diphtheria could have been prevented or even delayed by medical intervention. Lewis announced that he was ‘sick and tired’ of having these cases reported to him when he was powerless to act, and demanded that the law be tightened up. When a Peculiar father explained to him, ‘I stand up for the Lord’, Lewis returned: ‘You can lie [down] and die, if you like, but it is cowardly, most cowardly, to allow helpless children to do so.’
On Wednesday 31 July, during the second adjournment of Emily Coombes’s inquest, the coroner dealt with the death of yet another Peculiar child who had not been attended by a doctor. Lewis berated the parents, saying that he was sure that they would have called in help if their pig or donkey had fallen ill. The parents did not disagree. They simply pointed out that the Bible said nothing about animals.
A few new witnesses were heard on Thursday 1 August, the final day of the Coombes inquest: two dock constables and a marine engineer who had seen Fox in the week after the murder; the keeper of the coffee house at the end of Cave Road; and the headmaster of Robert and Nattie’s school. The sightings of Fox at the docks proved confusing, two witnesses claiming they had noticed him wearing a smart suit on days before it could have been given to him by Robert. The coffee-house keeper, William Richards, also seemed muddled about dates, insisting that the trio came to his shop with fishing rods on Tuesday, which was the day before Fox had been collected from the Spain. He added that Fox and Robert had been in the habit of visiting his shop together for the past two years; usually Fox arrived first and waited for the boy. Richards claimed that he had often tried to hear what they said to one another but had been unable to do so. The headmaster of the Cave Road school testified to the intelligence of both brothers, and noted that Robert had been very attentive during his scripture lessons.
Nattie, who had been held in police custody since Monday, was then briefly examined again. He was not this time given a seat. He stood up to answer the questions.
‘When was the first talk about going to India?’ asked Lewis. ‘Was that before your mother was killed?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Joseph Horlock, the foreman of the jury, asked: ‘What day was it that you first talked about the coughing signal and killing your mother?’
‘It was on the Sunday,’ said Nattie.
‘Did you ever ask your brother not to kill your mother?’ asked Lewis.
‘Yes, once I asked him not to do it.’
‘When was that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it before the Saturday? Before your father went away?’
‘It was before he came home.’ The boys’ father had returned from his previous voyage on the SS France on Monday 24 June, the day before Robert gave in his notice at the Thames Iron Works. This suggested that the brothers had discussed the murder plan in the fortnight that Robert was employed at the iron yard.
‘Did you ask him not to kill her before the knife was put up the chimney in your bedroom?’
‘No, I said nothing to him.’
Detective Inspector Mellish showed the jury the suit that Fox had been wearing when arrested. Inspector Gilbert produced the boy’s nightshirt that had been found hanging on a line in the kitchen. It was lightly spattered with blood.
Lewis addressed the twelve members of the jury before inviting them to reach a verdict. ‘This case is one of the most revolting, heartless and unnatural ever presented to a jury,’ he said. He told them that their chief responsibility was to establish the cause of death, a matter on which Dr Kennedy had been very clear. ‘Not only was there one stab, which went through the heart,’ said Lewis, ‘but two, and the knife produced was found on the bed.’
Yet, he reminded the jurymen, they also had the power to name the suspected perpetrator or perpetrators of Emily Coombes’s murder and to commit him or them for trial. They would almost certainly name Robert, since he had made a confession; the question was whether they would also commit Fox or Nattie. Lewis acknowledged that the Treasury had withdrawn the case against Nattie, but told the jury that this should not prevent them from naming him if they thought he was implicated in the crime: ‘If the jury should be of opinion that he had knowledge of what was going to be done, and the purpose of it, he would be an accessory before the fact, and as such be liable with the principal.’ If Nattie knew why the knife had been bought, Lewis explained, he was – according to the law – guilty along with the person who made the purchase.
He clarified the definition of an ‘accessory before the fact’: this was someone who, even if he was not present at the crime, had ‘procured, counselled, commanded or abetted’ another person to commit the felony. However, said Lewis, ‘he could not be an accessory if he had countermanded anything that had been said’. Lewis’s keen questioning of Nattie on the matter of whether and when he had discouraged Robert from killing their mother was intended to untangle this issue: only if Nattie had tried to stop Robert after the purchase of the knife would he be in the clear.
The Coombes brothers were young, the coroner observed, but ‘the law says that between seven years and fourteen years an infant is liable, and can be charged with felony if the jury is thoroughly well-satisfied that he has the capacity to understand good from evil. Therefore if you are of opinion that one or both of these boys thoroughly understands right from wrong, then they are amenable to the law.’
The jury did not need to deal with the possibility that John Fox was an ‘accessory after the fact’, Lewis said, and should commit him for trial only if they believed that he had been involved in the murder plot. His conduct after the killing fell outside the jurisdiction of the inquest, which dealt with just the death and not its aftermath.
The jury retired, and after an hour and ten minutes delivered the verdict towards which the coroner had been guiding them: ‘Wilful Murder against Robert Allen Coombes, and as an accessory before the fact against Nathaniel, inasmuch as he conspired with his brother Robert to murder his mother, and he never did anything to prevent his brother carrying out the dreadful deed.’
The foreman, Horlock, commended the police on the manner in which they had conducted the case and offered the jury’s condolences to the husband and relatives of Emily Coombes. The jurors signed a document attesting to their verdict, and Lewis sent a certificate to the registrar at Somerset House, giving the cause of Emily Coombes’s death as ‘wilful murder’.
The coroner issued a warrant for the re-arrest of Nathaniel George Coombes. Nattie was taken back into custody and delivered to Holloway by Detective Sergeant Don. He was to remain in gaol, with his brother and John Fox, until the September sessions of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey.
Horlock added a rider to the jury’s verdict: ‘We consider that the Legislature should take some steps to put a stop to the inflammable and shocking literature that is sold, which in our opinion leads to many a dreadful crime being carried out.’
‘There can’t be any difference of opinion about that,’ said Lewis.
In the mid-1890s the prevalence of penny dreadfuls (as they were known in the press) or penny bloods (as they were known to shopkeepers and schoolboys) was a subject of great public concern. ‘Tons of this trash is vomited forth from Fleet Street every day,’ observed the Motherwell Times in 1895, ‘and inwardly digested by those whose mental pabulum is on a level with the stuff for which it craves.’ More than a million boys’ periodicals were being sold a week, most of them to working-class lads who had been taught to read in the state-funded board schools set up over the previous two decades. An Act of Parliament of 1870 had given local authorities the power to enforce school attendance, and successive Acts made elementary education compulsory (in 1880) and then free (in 1891). Between 1870 and 1885, the number of children at elementary school trebled, and by 1892 four and a half million children were being educated in the board schools. The new wave of literate boys sought out penny fiction as a diversion from the rote-learning and drill of the school curriculum, and then from the repetitive tasks of the mechanised industries to which many of them progressed. Since cheap magazines were traded on street corners, in playgrounds and factory yards, each issue could have many readers. Penny fiction was Britain’s first taste of mass-produced popular culture for the young, and was often held responsible for the decay of literature and of morality.
The bloods sold for a halfpenny, a penny or tuppence, depending on the length of the story, while proper novels for boys – whether Robinson Crusoe or The Prisoner of Zenda, the romances of Walter Scott or the adventures of Jules Verne – cost two or three shillings each. Most of Robert’s novelettes were sixty-four-page pamphlets priced at tuppence, their titles picked out in scarlet and yellow on vividly illustrated covers. At eight and a half inches tall and six inches wide, they were small enough to slip inside a jacket pocket, or between the leaves of a textbook or a prayerbook. They were sold by newsagents, tobacconists, confectioners and chandlers.
A week after Robert and Nattie’s arrest, a St James’s Gazette journalist was assigned to analyse the contents of every cheap boys’ weekly that he could lay his hands on. He read thirty-six different titles, some of which he said had a circulation of more than 300,000, and he reported on the results over several issues of the newspaper. The task was ‘repulsive and depressing’, he said; the writing ‘brutalised my whole consciousness’, reviving ‘the fundamental instinct of savagery inherent in us all. It disgusts, but it attracts; as one reads on the disgust lessens and the attraction increases.’ The Coombes boys, he concluded, ‘with their intelligence scientifically developed at the expense of the ratepayers, had been wound up to regard murder as a highly superior kind of “lark” by a sedulous study of the worst kind of gory fiction and cut-throat newspaper’.
In fact, most of the books in Robert’s collection, though slapdash and hackneyed in style, were not particularly gory. Earlier in the century, penny pamphlets had contained monstrous, Gothic tales – they were dubbed ‘dreadfuls’ because they elicited terror – but they now consisted chiefly of detective mysteries, Westerns, futuristic fantasies, tales of pirates, highwaymen, hunters and explorers. The adventure yarns were strikingly manly productions, heavily influenced by Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), whose hero boasts that ‘there is not a petticoat in the whole history’, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), which according to Arthur Conan Doyle marked the beginning of the ‘modern masculine novel’.
Many of the stories that Robert read were English re-issues of New York dime novels, among them the Jack Wright submarine tale; the Buffalo Bill adventure; a fable about the medieval crusades; and a mystery featuring Joe Phoenix, a hard-boiled Manhattan detective with an astonishing capacity for impersonation and disguise. These stories had their share of alluring women (with full, red lips, lithe figures, bright golden hair floating behind them) and of exciting violence. The brave warrior in The Secret of Castle Coucy; or, a Legend of the Great Crusade leaps on his French foe with an axe, ‘and with one tremendous thrust sent the spike between the two blades of the axe right into Gaston’s breast, piercing mail-shirt and cuirass, and casting the proud knight to the earth, gasping for breath, and uttering groans of irrepressible agony’. The detective hero of Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff feels ‘a tingling, burning, electric thrill all over his person’ when he comes upon a crook. ‘The strange and subtile power he possessed was becoming aroused. In his soul there was a mad tumult of fury.’
The novelist James Joyce, who was born in the same year as Robert Coombes, wrote in his short story ‘An Encounter’ about the cheap adventure tales circulated secretly in Dublin schools. Joyce’s narrator recalls how he used to be enthralled by Wild West stories and American detective fiction featuring ‘unkempt fierce and beautiful girls’. The boy’s teacher reprimanded his pupils for reading such rubbish, but as soon as ‘the restraining influence of the school was at a distance’, the narrator recalls, ‘I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which these chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me.’ Though he and his friends played at Indians in the streets near his house, he longed for ‘real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home. They must be sought abroad.’ The boy and a friend skipped school one day to visit the city quays, lured by the big ships and the wide sea. As they rested in a field after watching the commotion at the docks, they were approached by a well-spoken man in a shabby suit who talked to them of literature – Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer Lytton – and of the pleasure of administering warm whippings to boys. Unsettled by their encounter, a real adventure that they had not anticipated, the boys hurried home in time for tea.
The dreadfuls had their defenders. In an article of 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson recalled with rapture how he had been ‘mastered’ by penny fiction as a boy: ‘I do not know that I ever enjoyed reading more.’ Yet most commentators were alarmed by the rise of escapist stories for the young. Every month, it seemed, the newspapers reported on children led astray by such yarns. In 1889 two schoolboys aged eleven and thirteen absconded from West Ham with a pistol, an old dagger and a terrier dog, and their parents informed the magistrates that the boys’ minds had been turned by reading penny dreadfuls. In 1892 two Dundee runaways aged twelve and fourteen were apprehended in Newport, Wales, in possession of a revolver, a hundred ball cartridges, a travelling rug and a handwritten document: ‘Directions for skedaddle: Steal the money; go to the station, and get to Glasgow. Get boat for America. On arriving there, go to the Black Hills and dig for gold, build huts, and kill buffalo; live there and make a fortune.’ In 1893 a Yorkshire boy of fifteen stole £25 from his employer, a ship’s chandler, and then took the train to London with the intention of sailing for Australia. When he was caught his father said he had found hidden in the boy’s room a novelette entitled The Adventures of the Brave Boy and the Bushrangers.
Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of ‘suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels’. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had ‘an unhinging and mesmeric effect’ upon his mind. The jury was inclined to agree: ‘Deceased committed suicide whilst in an unsound condition of mind, probably produced by reading novelistic literature of a sensational character.’
Occasionally, penny dreadfuls were associated with murder. In 1888 two eighteen-year-olds were charged with killing the timekeeper at a sawmill in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. According to the Daily News, the ‘natural depravity’ of the lads had ‘found a strong stimulus in the penny dreadfuls of one sort or another which were found in their lodgings’. One of the accused men, though, said that he had attacked the timekeeper because he had docked his pay by more than two shillings – the timekeeper was ‘a master’s man’, the lad said, and not a friend to the workers. The suspect wrote a letter to a local newspaper and signed it ‘Another Whitechapel Murderer’, an allusion to the ongoing murder spree by ‘Jack the Ripper’ in East London. When the case came to trial, the jury was faced with a tangle of possible causes for the crime, as they would be in the Coombes case: social discontent, financial need or greed, innate depravity, fantasies of violence inspired by fictional or real-life stories. The men were found guilty, and the judge ignored the jury’s recommendation to mercy on account of their age; both were hanged.
Some cheap periodicals for boys tried to dissociate themselves from the dreadfuls. ‘No more penny dreadfuls!’ proclaimed the new Halfpenny Marvel, founded by the publishing magnate Alfred Harmsworth in 1893. ‘These healthy stories of mystery adventure, etc, will kill them.’ The next year Harmsworth produced another halfpenny paper, the jingoistic Union Jack, copies of which were found in the back parlour of 35 Cave Road: ‘Parents need not fear when they see their children reading the “Union Jack”,’ the editor announced. ‘There will be nothing of the “dreadful” type in our stories. No tales of boys rifling their employers’ cash-boxes and making off to foreign lands, or such-like highly immoral fiction products.’
Since 1884, when the vote had been extended to most British men, the press had often pointed out that children raised on penny dreadfuls would grow up to elect the rulers of the nation. Such pamphlets were ‘the poison which is threatening to destroy the manhood of the democracy’, announced the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886. The Quarterly Review went a step further, warning its readers in 1890 that ‘the class we have made our masters’ might be transformed by these publications into ‘agents for the overthrow of society’. The penny bloods gave a frightening intimation of the uses to which the labourers of Britain could put their literacy and newly won power: these fantasies of wealth and adventure might foster ambition, restlessness, defiance, a spirit of insurgency. There was no knowing the consequences of enlarging the minds and dreams of the lower orders.