Bingo: Rage
Someone recommended The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher to me and, as someone who likes a good mystery and who started watching the tv show but then dropped it because of all the muttonchops, it seemed right up my alley. In theory I should love Kate Summerscale’s portrait of a middle class Victorian era family tragedy. In practice I think it could have used some editing and perhaps not every stone needed to be unturned (or turned?); however, I can be in the mood for exhaustive details about the broader milieu, so, on balance and given the mood I was in, this book satisfied me more than it did not. I learned, for example, why there were so many muttonchops in the tv series – police at the time were not allowed to have beards or mustaches, so they could not be accused of hiding their identities to snoop on the public, so vain policemen grew sideburns of various styles (if that exists) including muttonchops in order to have a little flair.
Ostensibly, this book describes the murder of a child and the efforts made by the authorities to investigate the murder and bring the culprit to justice. Saville Kent, the three year old son of a wool factory inspector, was taken from his bed, out from under the nose of his nursemaid, and murdered. While from the outside the Kent family looks like an ideal of the Victorian family, with ten children (five living) from the first Mrs. Kent and three, including poor Saville, from the second. They live in a fine country house with a few live-in servants; Mr. Kent is acquainted with Members of Parliament and magistrates. Saville is a “strong, well-built child with pale yellow curls” and is his parent’s favorite. The family is not well liked in the neighborhood and tend to keep to themselves, but this is not considered out of the ordinary. “The walls and fences that Samuel [Kent] had erected around the grounds indicated a liking for privacy,” and yet, “Perhaps privacy was a source of sin, the condition that enabled the sweet domestic scene to rot from its core.”
Summerscale layers on top of this framework an array of cultural, scientific, and political forces of the time in order to provide context for the rise of modern policing and detective work, within the context of the twin Victorian cults of privacy and the domesticity. She uses primary and secondary documents from the detective notes, the trial, and contemporary newspapers to present the, often luridly depicted, facts of the case. She also uses contemporary fiction and the works of Freud to explore what it was to unearth the hidden secrets of the English country house.
While early investigative efforts focused on the possibility of a stranger or, less ideally, a servant as the murderer, time passed and the local police were unable to identify a suspect. The Scotland Yard detective bureau was contacted after no arrests were made by the local constabulary, and Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher was dispatched. The Scotland Yard ‘detective police’ were formed in 1843, and this relatively new entity was controversial. Many viewed it with suspicion, as detectives wore plain clothes and were thought to seek to entrap citizens, but other viewed it with admiration, as they were portrayed by such noteworthy magazine writers as Charles Dickens as “‘of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence; with nothing lounging or slinking in their manners; with an air of keen observation and quick perception…'” Thus began a dynamic that we see to this day of local police feeling protective of their turf and national entities viewing the locals as complicit and foolish.
Mr. Whicher immediately honed in on the household as containing the probable murderer – a notion that, seemingly, put the detective at odds with prevailing cultural perspectives. It certainly created a press juggernaut, with breathless articles describing stained nightdresses and open windows on one page and decrying the decline of civilization and the invasion of privacy on the next. Further, editorials reflected the anxiety in society that such a crime could be commited by someone in the household: “The Road case…posed a tantalising riddle, and its solution seemed of urgent, personal concern to many middle-class families.”
Even more shocking was when Mr. Whicher arrested the youngest daughter of the first Mrs. Kent, Constance Emily Kent, a mere teenager at the time. The press and society wrestled with what any teenage girl was capable of – something that also seems like an extemely modern topic. Was she an angel or a ghoul? Did she need to be protected by the high walls and strict mores of Victorian country life? Was she full of murderous desires?
Along with the press, there was tremendous interest in crime and detective work in literature and in the conduct of the emerging scientific fields of psychotherapy and evolution. As Summerscale noted, “The real business of detection was the invention of a plot.” Contemporary authors like Poe, Dickens, Collins, and others developed plots that allowed detectives to unpeel the layers of the social onion and create a coherent(ish) story of hidden stories that birthed vicious, complex crimes. Commenting on Poe’s Dupin, Summerscale notes: “Unremarkable events were inscribed with hidden stories, if you knew how to read them.” And, of course, the detectives of fiction were adept at reading them. In turn, these novels created more social anxiety. Sensation novels ‘…the original psychological thrillers, were seen as agents of social collapse, even in the way they were consumed – they were read in the scullery and the drawing room, by servants and mistresses alike.” Further, it was noted that Constance became obsessed with the true crime Madeleine Smith case at the tender age of 13, perhaps, as now, seeing the “…new breed of chilly female criminal whose concealed passions had twisted into violence.”
I feel like I’ve written almost as much as Summerscale, and need to wrap up! As you can see, if you’ve come this far, there is a lot to this book and much of it is quite thought provoking. If you are looking for action-packed true crime from the Victorian era, you will likely be quite disappointed – This is no Devil in the White City. You will likely feel annoyed after a while by all of the references about what things cost (2 shillings for a hansome cab to Paddington Station, 1 s 6d for a train ride out to Trowbridge, etc.). You may grow tired of reading about how various writers or thinkers of the day depicted detectives or presented their research methods through the lens of detection (although it reminded me that I hadn’t read Bleak House, so that is now on my list!). You may want to know something about Mr. Whicher, but he is mostly lost to the sands of time. But if you really want to dig into middle class lives (and the lives that revolved around them) in the 1860s in the English countryside, you will have great mental imagery from this work.