Victorian Female Murderers

Female murderers generally excited extra interest among the nineteenth centuty public, especially as one goes deeper into the reign of Queen Victoria, which introduced all sorts of new notions about the ideal women, her outlook, her attitudes and her place in society. As today the popular press took a prurient interest in these matters, tending to 'demonise' the perpetrators of murder, because only monsters could act in a way that was 'contrary to nature'. Readers were able to lap up in detail the story of Constance Kent, who is alleged to have slit her stepbrother's throat before disposing of his body in an outhouse; or Madeleine Smith, a Glasgow socialite who is alleged to have poisioned her French lover.

There was a definite set of double-standards in operation that made cases like this all the more sensational; for while deviant behaviour in men was deplorable, deviant behaviour by women was unacceptable, especially when it was directed against men, when it tended to be viewed as a hideous perversion. In a sense these women, mediated through the popular press, ceased to have all the qualities that made them women, or human at all. They were most often depicted as 'ugly', 'masculine', 'sub-human' with almost no attempts made to uncover motives. In many ways the press reports seem to hark back to an earlier age, with a murderess presented as a witch-like figure, who had outraged the orthodoxy of Victorian family values. After all, gentle, submissive, passive, self-sacrificing creatures do not strangle babies, no matter how desperate they are, nor do they poison friends and husbands to obtain a little extra income

I Met Murder on the Way

Here is some goon news for you. Did you know that the murder rate has declined, and declined significantly, since the Middle Ages? Well, it has, though you may have supposed the reverse! Anyway, Peter Spierenburg, a Dutch historian and specialist in violence and crime in the early modern period, takes pains to put the whole question in perspective.

A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present is a new, paperback edition of a work intended for a general as well as specialist audience. It was first published in hard cover last summer, at a price that would have frightened off all but the most determined-and affluent-generalist!

It’s certainly a book that should not be overlooked, if you have any interest in the subject at all, full of all sorts of intriguing details and revelations. For instance the murder rate in contemporary Europe is, according to the author, less than a tenth of that in the Medieval period. The decline is marked, falling from a high of 35 per 100,000 of the population each year in the fourteenth century to just 1.4 in the late twentieth century.

The reasons for this are simple enough: violence in the past most often arose in disputes over honour, which a weak state apparatus either condoned or ignored. But through time, with the development of ever more complex structures of coercion and control, the development of what the author refers to as ‘the civilizing process’, honour as a theory and a practice was gradually tamed. The elites to whom this was most applicable gradually accepted that the state had a monopoly of violence, a view that percolated downwards through the rest of society. Honour murder clearly still exists, but in a highly marginalized form.

The explanatory framework through which Spierenburg develops his argument is taken, of course, from the work of the German-born sociologist, Norbert Elias, author of The Civilizing Process. Yes, it’s all very beguiling, if a little top down. It has strengths, yes, but it also has clear limitations, reflected in Spierenburg’s book. Not nearly enough attention I paid to cultural changes, to the rise and development of the nuclear family and the impact this had on the more generalized patterns of violence. The explanatory model, moreover, falls down completely when dealing with serial or recreational murder, not an entirely modern phenomenon, I have to stress.

Still, it’s a good read, full of facts, figures and living examples of a crime as old as humanity itself.

Juvenile Crime in Greece and Rome

The Classical world never, of course, identified juvenile crime as a distinct issue, which makes the whole thing quite difficult to investigate, but it is possible to build up a limited and partial picture by sifting through the evidence. In Athens, for example, Demosthenes describes the case of a young man called Ariston, a victim of an unprovoked assault while walking home at night through the agora. He subsequently accused one Konon and his son Ktnesis, with whom he had served in the military. Ktnesis and his brother were seemingly in the habit of getting drunk at lunchtime, and then amusing themselves by pouring the contents of chamber pots over the heads of the personal slaves of their fellow soldiers!

The Athenians, and other Greek communities, had laws against 'the mistreatment of parents', which suggests that the practice was widespread. In Aristophanes' Clouds Pheidippides even argues that if fathers beat their sons then why should sons not be allowed to beat their fathers?

There is very little in the way of evidence to suggest that the casual public vandalism, a feature of contemporary youth crime, was a general problem, apart, that is, from one tantalising little detail concerning the actions of the Hermokopidal or 'Herm-mutilators' in 415BC. A Herm, from the God Hermes, was a stone pillar surmounted by a head. The only other feature was a prominent phallus. The Hermokopidal were those who went around removing these cocks! This crime, though, had a clear political purpose, intending to frustrate a planned Athenian expedition to Sicily. Hermes was the God of travelers, so the destruction of his statues would be taken as a bad omen. Sadly for Athens the message was not heeded.

In Sparta the 'hoodies' might be said to have been used in the service of the state. Youths between seventeen and nineteen were obliged to serve in an organisation known as the krupteia, which, among other things, was expected to terrorise the helots, thus ensuring that they were kept in place.

The Romans placed a particularly strict interpretation on notions of filial obedience, though again theatrical depictions suggest, perhaps, that all was not quite what it seems. Plautus makes use of the stereotype of the spendthrift young man in his plays. In Pseudolus there is the figure of Calidorus, who is prepared to cheat his father and mother in order to purchase the freedom of a prostitute called Phoenicium. When encouraged by the pimp Ballo to steal from his father he says that filial duty forbids this, to which Ballo responds "OK, then, just snuggle up to filial duty at night, instead of Phoenicium."

The nearest evidence we have to gang culture in the Roman world is with the circus factions, those who followed the four main chariot colours. These faction, most often made up of young men, were responsible on occasions for fairly serious public order incidents, including one notorious incident in Constantinople.

I should also mention that high-born Roman youths were more or less a law unto themselves, wandering the streets at night without restraint, beating up passers-by, assaulting women and smashing shops, Even the Emperor Nero was a member of one such gang in his youth. Perhaps even Saint Augustine himself was a hoodie, for in the Confessions he describes as a sixteen-year old how he stole some pears from a neighbours garden while he was part of a company of 'lewd young fellows';

And this we did, because we would go whither we should not...It was foul, yet I loved it, I loved to undo myself, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I committed the fault, but even the very fault itself...Alone, I would never have committed the theft...but even because when one cries: 'Let us go, let us do this or that', then 'tis a shame not to be shameless.

And he became a saint. :))

Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages

I begin with Johan Huizinga's classic study, The Waning of the Middle Ages, where he says that crime was "...a menace to order and society, as well as an insult to divine majesty. Thus it was natural that the late Middle Ages should become the special period of judicial cruelty."

One has to consider punishment in this context, not so much as retribution but as spectacle more than anything else. It should not be assumed, moreover, that this was simply a top-down process, a way of 'educating' the community in the severity of the law. There was also a considerable amount of popular pressure for criminals to receive forms of punishment that were both harsh and terrifying. In 1389 in England popular pressure persuaded Parliament to petition the king for the limiting of pardons granted for violent crimes.

The Middle Ages were violent for one reason or another. Legitimate and public violence was considered to be the only way of dealing with illegitimate and private violence. There was no prison, so all punishment had to carry some deterrent purpose; either the absolute deterrence of execution, or relative forms of deterrence implied in mutilation of one kind or other, which required the wrongdoer to live forever in the community carrying the stigma of his or her error. In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes;

The torture and punishments of civil justice customarily cut of hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls.

Yes, it was terror; but it was also about forms of reassurance: that justice was being served and society protected: the more extreme the crime, the more extreme the punishment. Even 'clemency', when it was exercised, was, if anything, even more barbarous. In England in 1221 one Thomas of Eldersfield was reprieved from hanging at the last moment. In a show of ‘mercy’ he was blinded and castrated instead! Robert Bartlett described the scene that followed, "...the eyes were thrown to the ground and the testicles used as footballs, the local lads kicking them playfully at the girls." It was all part of the salutary spectacle.

It would be wrong to assume, though, that the didactic purpose of punishment ended with the Middle Ages. In Discipline and Punish, Michael Foucault describes the Gothic intensity with which Robert-François Damiens was done to death in 1757 for the attempted assassination of Louis XV. It was the apotheosis, it might be said, of execution as public display; of natural and divinely-ordained retribution.

The Complete History of Jack the Ripper

The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden



· Paperback: 544 pages

· Publisher: Robinson Publishing; 2Rev Ed edition (21 Feb 2002)

· Language English

· ISBN-10: 1841193976

· ISBN-13: 978-1841193977

Is there anything new to say about Jack the Ripper and the infamous 1888 Whitechapel Murders? Well, yes, there is, and Philip Sugden has said it. Most Ripper books suffer from two principle weaknesses: first, they set out to make a case for a favoured and predetermined suspect, and second, they exist in a close, almost incestuous relationship one with the other. That is to say that they are secondary works based on secondary works, which means that when errors appear they are rarely questioned, repeated to the point where fiction becomes fact and legend truth.

Sugden is having none of this. He is an historian with the instincts of an historian. He is also, it might be said, a superb detective, sifting through the evidence in a careful and forensic manner. He takes nothing for granted, plowing through the mythology perpetuated by others and taking the source material as his point of departure. He sifts carefully through contemporary police reports and other primary documents, building up his case piece by piece. His arguments proceed on this basis and are mustered with considerable care.

The other virtue of this book, at least so far as I am concerned, is that the author manages to humanise the victims, people who in most other accounts are depicted in lurid detail or merely as passing shadows. He makes one sympathise even with these poor and wretched girls. Above all he brings to life a London of long ago and the desperation of so many lives in the impoverished east-end of the city.

Altogether it is a thorough, well-written and exhaustive account of the murders and the circumstances surrounding the murders rather than just another piece of vacuous speculation. Those coming to the subject for the first time will obtain no better guide. Even seasoned ‘Ripperologists’ are likely to uncover one or two surprises.

In the end there is no definite conclusion because the evidence will simply not allow such closure. It is a mystery that will remain a mystery but one can only hope that Sugden’s magisterial work will help arrest the wilder flights of fancy. If you like good history, if you like a good detective story or if you simply like a good read this book is most definitely for you.