If I’m not in a reading slump this year, I seem to be in a reviewing slump. This one hasn’t been helped by not really having much of substance to say about it almost a month after reading it, a surprise to me given how much I enjoyed what Summerscale I’d previously read (The Suspicions of Mr Whicher).
The Wicked Boy takes a look at another Victorian murder case which the newspapers were fond of writing about, in which 13 year old Robert Coombes and his younger brother Nattie set off on a little adventure, taking in the cricket at Lords, visiting the seaside and treating themselves to whatever their pawned possessions could buy, all while their mother’s body decomposed in her bedroom at the family home.
The Wicked Boy takes us through the brother’s jaunts, Robert’s confession once concerned relatives managed to force their way into the home, the ensuing court case, and the depiction of Robert in the press as a cold hearted psychopath. This takes up surprisingly little of the book, and so the rest is then spent sharing a picture of what Broadmoor was like at the time – I must admit I was pleasantly surprised to hear of its treatment regime at the time, but then must remember that this was only dealing with the gentleman’s ward where people were obviously treated far better than the common people in the wards Robert would have ended up in had he not been a child – and then going on to detail what life would have been like for a stretcher bearer at Gallipolli, a position Robert held after emigrating to Australia on being discharged from Broadmoor.
There’s surprisingly little on record about Robert himself, so lots of these sections (and particularly in the Broadmoor bit) spend quite a lot of time recounting anecdotes about other inmates and soldiers. Which was interesting, but did absolutely nothing to illuminate the little known about Robert.
If there had been even a little more meat on the bones of this book I’d have enjoyed it a lot more, but given the dearth of information really available on Robert it felt like it would have been far better served as a magazine article rather than being padded out to fill a book.