‘Old and young, pray take a warning
Females, lead a virtuous life.
Think upon the fateful morning
Frederick Manning and his wife’.
Ballad sold and sung at the execution of Frederick and Maria Manning
The culmination of this earliest phase in the history of murder came in 1849. A case known as ‘The Bermondsey Horror’, it had all the trappings of a ‘stunning good’ murder. And it was also one of the final few to end with an old-fashioned hanging in public before a vast crowd.
You would think that a sordid death involving a love triangle in Bermondsey would cause far less of a stir than the terrible cholera epidemic sweeping through London that hot summer. By September, the epidemic had claimed more than 10,000 Londoners’ lives, including two of the witnesses who had been due to give evidence at the trial of Frederick and Maria Manning.
Following the story of the Mannings, though, was a welcome alternative to worrying about one’s health. It became a national obsession. ‘At this moment,’ suggested Punch in September 1849, ‘refined, civilized, philanthropic London reeks with the foulness of the Bermondsey murder.’ The cholera, a far more frightening ‘Bermondsey Horror’, might come and grab anybody at all. Yet it was comforting to think that only the immoral and unworthy were likely to be discovered buried, as the Mannings’ victim was, beneath a kitchen floor.
The case also had a very attractive cast of criminals: two for the price of one, husband and wife, apparently working as a team (although the husband tried to blame it all on his wife). Maria in particular was a wonderful villainess, with a few quirks that caused her quickly to be forced into the mould of Lady Macbeth.
She was born in Switzerland as Marie, and later Anglicized her name to Maria. She had lived the high life as a lady’s maid, travelling abroad and staying with her mistress in grand country houses. This association with high society caused a frisson. The cast-off clothes from her mistresses allowed Maria to amass rather a spectacular wardrobe: after her capture, she was discovered to possess 11 petticoats, 9 gowns, 28 pairs of stockings, 7 pairs of drawers and 19 pairs of kid gloves. She dressed far above her station as a former servant, and most striking of all was her figure-hugging, black satin gown.
Maria had hoped to marry one Joseph O’Connor, a man rather older than herself and considerably richer. O’Connor had amassed his wealth through lending money, and various dodgy dealings down in the docks where he worked for the Customs and Excise Department. But he dallied and toyed with Maria and failed to make her his wife. She fell back instead upon Frederick Manning, not a particularly prepossessing choice of husband. He had been a guard on a railway train before losing his job, and had then failed in business as a publican. Maria supported them both, working as a dressmaker, and probably regretted her marriage. The couple were clinging on to the lowest levels of respectable, middle-class life, and their grip was very tenuous indeed.
But the wealthy Joseph O’Connor was still on the scene. The two men competed for Maria’s attentions, and O’Connor was often to be found at the Mannings’ home, No. 3, Miniver Place, Bermondsey. Passions ran high, and on 9 August O’Connor failed to return home to his lodgings after a roast chicken dinner at Miniver Place. The Mannings had shot him and finished him off by bashing in his head. The police surgeon later calculated that O’Connor had been hit 17 times with a crowbar. The couple had then put his body in quicklime in an attempt to make it decompose speedily, and buried him beneath the slabs near their kitchen fireplace. Once the body was discovered, O’Connor’s identity would be confirmed by the dentist who had made his false teeth, which had been left in his mouth. The Mannings were rather inept criminals, it has to be admitted.
And now, perhaps realizing this, dissention broke out between them. The two of them ran, and in opposite directions. With considerable coolness, Maria made the first move. She went to O’Connor’s house and stole his share certificates. She also made off with the joint wealth of herself and her husband and took a train to Edinburgh. Frederick, meanwhile, fled to the Channel Islands.
The Metropolitan Police were on the case, and their speedy solution would greatly boost their prestige. After O’Connor’s disappearance, two constables were sent round to No. 3, Miniver Place. PC Barnes, number 256 from K division, and PC Burton, number 272 from M division, found the house empty: ‘the nest was there but the birds had flown’. But they noticed something odd about the kitchen floor. Further investigation revealed the body of O’Connor, now blue and in a state of some decomposition.
The constables’ superiors were quickly on to the trail of the killers. Maria Manning had sent her luggage off separately for storage, but the police were not distracted by this red herring. They were able to track down the cab driver who had taken the lady herself to Euston. Travelling under the name of Mrs Smith, she had departed by the 6.15 a.m. train for Edinburgh. The Metropolitan Police sent a telegraph message to their counterparts in Scotland, asking them to be on the lookout for their suspect.
When Maria tried to cash in the stolen shares in Edinburgh, she aroused suspicion at the stockbroker’s office. Although she claimed that she lived in Glasgow, she had a foreign accent. A wire to London confirmed in no time that she matched the description of the suspected killer, and she was apprehended. It all unfolded with a smoothness and efficiency – a modernity – that provides an extreme contrast to the Ratcliffe Highway case nearly 40 years before.
While all this was happening, Maria’s hapless husband had been drinking himself into a sorry state in Jersey. He, too, was captured and brought back to London. His first words after his arrest were aimed at the wife who had outwitted him: ‘Is the wretch taken? … She is the guilty party, I am as innocent as a lamb.’ (At least, that’s how the respectable papers reported it. It’s possible that he used a word worse than ‘wretch’.) During the journey back to London, he had to be taken off the train at Vauxhall, one stop before the terminus, to avoid the enormous crowd that had gathered to see him at Waterloo.
The Times ran no fewer than 72 different stories about the case, and, during the trial, Maria in particular gave wonderful entertainment through her unusual, unwomanly behaviour. As well as the murder, she had stolen money and double-crossed her husband. She had also committed a further series of ‘crimes’, not against the law, but against propriety. She was unattractively cold and composed in court – ‘almost as motionless as a statue, and was never seen, throughout the day, to turn her eyes towards her husband’ – and people were affronted by her manner. ‘She does not exhibit the slightest emotion,’ onlookers recorded.
And then the verdict was announced. Frederick Manning turned down the customary offer for the accused to address the court. But Maria seized it, and let loose with a violent harangue against the legal system, the judge and the British people. Her impressive clothes – ‘a black or dark dress, fitting closely up to the throat’ – only added to the impression of a frightening, powerful and dominating woman. ‘Jezebel’, she was called, or ‘The Lady Macbeth of Bermondsey’. In a final blow to her reputation, Maria was a sexually active woman who had lived with two men – even, apparently, with two men at the same time. She seemed somehow to be even worse than a male murderer. As her husband’s barrister summed it up at her trial: ‘History teaches us that the female is capable of reaching higher in point of virtue than the male, but that when once she gives way to vice, she sinks far lower than our sex.’
Under Queen Victoria, respectability, propriety and chastity were values on the rise, and Maria Manning transgressed them all.
The joint execution of the Mannings upon the roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol was one of the most hotly anticipated of the nineteenth century. A whole three days before the set date, the nearby streets were cleared and barricaded off, in expectation of a crowd that was estimated to number 30,000. Five hundred policemen were present to keep order.
Going to a public hanging had many of the same qualities as a trip to see a tragedy at the theatre. There were the crowds, the food-and drink-sellers, and better seats for those rich enough to afford them. The owners of houses near the gaol not only sold seats in any window with a view, but even erected scaffolding against their frontages to accommodate many more. Contemporary descriptions of the crowds at hangings often stressed their disreputable and lower-class character. But in fact respectable commentators omitted the fact that many middle-class and even aristocratic people were also present.
Salesmen at a hanging would now hawk about broadsides as if they were programmes for a play.* Once the expectant spectators were gathered, programmes in hand, the hanging followed an inexorable narrative arc. It began with the solemn ascension of the condemned to the scaffold, followed by his or her moving last words and lamentations. Then came a period of growing suspense, as the end drew near, and the crowd speculated upon whether or not the drop would work successfully the first time. The final denouement was the horrific jerking of the body.
Maria Manning did not disappoint in the semi-theatrical role she now assumed, displaying her unwomanly self-confidence and scorn to the end. It was reported (whether true or not) that she had insisted upon having an unworn pair of silk stockings for her final costume, and, in a last moment of role reversal, she ‘walked to her doom with a firm, unfaltering step’. Meanwhile, her husband had to be carried by two gaolers as he was so ‘feeble and tottering’.
The sight of Maria’s death left a lasting impression on many in the crowd. Charles Dickens described her body as ‘a fine shape, so elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite unchanged in its trim appearance as it swung slowly from side to side’. She would live on in popular imagination, transformed into the character of Hortense, the murderous maid in Bleak House. Like Maria, Hortense is an uncomfortable, edgy character, who helps the lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn to uncover the secrets of her employer, Lady Dedlock. ‘I don’t know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless she is mad,’ Tulkinghorn says. When Tulkinghorn dismisses Hortense and fails to find her another job, she shoots him, and attempts to frame Lady Dedlock herself for the murder.
Like Manning, Hortense came to stand for fear, social disorder and the unknown. Bleak House’s narrator, Esther Summerson, thought Hortense ‘seemed to bring visibly before me some woman from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror’. Even more disturbingly, it’s hinted that Hortense is a lesbian, and thereby even outside the sexual control of men. Dickens shows her as a wild beast, with a ‘feline mouth’. She pants, like a tigress, or else paces about, ‘a very near She-Wolf imperfectly tamed’. (‘You are a vixen, a vixen!’ says her victim.) Hortense is one of Dickens’s few effective grown-up female characters, and perfectly captures the middle-class fear that even the trusted servant living beneath one’s own roof could in fact be a murderer.
Maria Manning also achieved lasting fame at the Waxworks. In Madame Tussaud’s gallery, Punch noted, she stood ‘in silk attire, a beauteous thing to be daily rained upon by a shower of sixpences’. The moral poison of this display, the writer thought, seeped out ‘from the Chamber of Horrors, contaminating not only Baker Street, but all London’. Despite – or, perhaps, because of– the immorality she represented, her effigy became one of the ‘immortals’ of the gallery, remaining on display for well over a century. She was still there, on my very own first visit to the Chamber of Horrors, in the 1970s. And in a final, brilliantly weird detail, the gallery also displayed a model of Manning’s notorious Bermondsey kitchen.
As we have seen, Dickens took a good deal of trouble to enjoy the Mannings’ execution, hiring a room, inviting friends, organizing refreshments. But in the end he found the occasion distressing and it caused him to become a vociferous opponent of public hangings. In his opinion, the crowd, baying for blood, was uncouth, frightening and uncivilized, and displayed tremendous ‘wickedness and levity’. In a letter to The Times, Dickens described how:
Thieves, lowprostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment.
The figure of Maria Manning displayed in Madame Tussaud’s gallery, dressed in her celebrated black satin dress.
All in all, Dickens thought that:
When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, no more restraint … than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world.
Dickens soon started up a campaign against the practice of public hangings. But it was a form of spectacle that was already on the decline. The Mannings’ execution had drawn such a great deal of attention in part for the very reason that hangings had become something of a rarity.
The change had been inevitable since 1823 and the repeal of the set of laws known today as ‘The Bloody Code’. By 1800, there were more than 200 different crimes punishable by death. Many of these had been added to the statute book over the course of the eighteenth century, and were crimes against property: crimes carried out, essentially, by the poor, against the rich. You only had to steal goods worth twelve pence to run the risk of death by hanging.
The year 1823 had seen the passing of the ‘Judgement of Death Act’, which greatly reduced the number of capital crimes. From now on, the only criminals who would be punished by death were those guilty of treason or murder. Those convicted of property crimes were to be transported instead. It has long been traditional among historians to ascribe the change to a humanitarian and tolerant spirit among law-makers. But V. A. C. Gatrell finds our ancestors less sentimental than that, claiming that the legal system simply couldn’t cope with the huge number of hangings. The penalties were reduced simply to get justice moving again.
Either way, the reduction in the number of hangings was accompanied by a change in the nature of the criminals hanged. The eighteenth-century hanged man or woman was very often an Everyman or Everywoman, someone who had perhaps stolen goods worth a few pence and had the bad luck to be caught. There was a sense that anybody could accidentally become a criminal; that culpable weakness lurked in every human being. That is why the ‘loveable rogue’, the ‘Robin Hood’ figure and the gallant highwayman are stock figures in Georgian culture.
From 1823 onwards, though, only really bad men and women would be hanged. These people were seen as profoundly flawed, and fundamentally different from the spectators of their deaths. This essential otherness, this difference from the rest of us, is an essential angle of the glamorous murderer created by Thomas De Quincey.
Dickens in 1849 was acting, as he so often did, as a barometer of popular public opinion. If he thought that the spectacle of a hanging had grown distasteful, then so too would his enormous number of readers. People who believed themselves to be civilized no longer felt the need to experience the punishment dealt out to the guilty. They began to trust the proper authorities to see that done.
The law took a little time to catch up, but change it did, and the last public hanging took place in 1868. Capital punishment continued, but invisibly, behind the walls of prisons. And this was a vital precondition for the classic detective story to emerge. Detective fiction, unlike melodrama, or ‘Penny Blood’ fiction, didn’t care about retribution. Its concern was more the solution of crime.
Murderers themselves, the detectives who hunted them down, and the authors who processed real life into fiction: all were about to reach a new level of sophistication.
* An inspector in the Metropolitan Police in 1866 made the parallel explicitly. It was his duty to mix ‘frequently with crowds, at theatre and different places […] it appears to me that they look upon a theatrical scene precisely in the same way as upon an execution’.