Detection Most Ingenious A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley

Murder is the darkest and most despicable of crimes,

and yet we are drawn to it in real life and in fiction,

and that is because a murder is always a good story.

In the Victorian age, people started to relish a new type of murder.

They were attracted to hypocrisy in a respectable home...

..to dark secrets, to mysterious compulsions and unhinged minds.

And the Victorians were also fascinated

by two new developments in the fight against crime.

There was forensic science...

and the coming of a new kind of hero, the detective.

In his essay called the Decline of the English Murder,

George Orwell lays out the characteristics

of an absolutely enjoyable crime.

First of all, he sets the scene -

the perfect situation for relishing the details.

"It is a Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war.

"You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose,

"and open the News of the World.

"The sofa cushions are soft underneath you,

"the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant.

"In these blissful circumstances,

"what is it that you want to read about?"

"Naturally," Orwell says, "We want to read about a murder."

But for him, the most elegant crimes -

the ones that defined the genre - didn't take place in the 1930s.

They were Victorian.

At the top of the list of Orwell's perfect crimes

were those committed in the 1850s by Dr William Palmer.

"For a really entertaining murder," said Orwell,

"The murderer should be a little man of the professional class

"living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs."

Well, it's not quite the suburbs,

but this humdrum street in Rugeley, Staffordshire,

is the rather unlikely setting for a despicable crime.

On the 20th of November 1855,

a man called John Parsons Cook died in the upstairs room of that pub.

It was then called the Talbot Arms.

He'd experienced vomiting and horrific convulsions.

At first it seemed Cook might have died of natural causes,

but William Palmer - the doctor who'd been treating him -

seemed to be in quite a hurry to get him buried.

And over the previous days, there'd been a suspicious run of events.

Picture the scene, the week before Cook's death.

It all starts with a big day out at the races.

John Cook has gone to enjoy himself with his friend William Palmer,

and Cook wins a lot of money on the horses.

He and Palmer toast each other with brandy,

but unfortunately the brandy doesn't do Cook any good - he falls ill.

He comes to stay here at the Talbot Arms

and luckily his friend William Palmer is on hand to look after him.

Palmer gives Cook a cup of coffee - he gets ill again.

Do you see a pattern?

If I were you, I wouldn't accept a drink from William Palmer.

Palmer next gives Cook a bowl of soup,

and within just a few days, Cook is dead.

The chambermaid described the violent arching of Cook's back,

and the frightening grimaces of his face as he died -

symptoms of tetanus, but also of poison.

The fascinating thing about William Palmer as a murderer

is that he was an upstanding member of the middle classes.

He didn't look like a villain at all.

These are the tools of his trade - he was a respectable family doctor.

Someone you hoped that you could trust with your life.

But as Sherlock Holmes would later say,

"When a doctor does go wrong, he's the first of criminals.

"He has the nerve and he has knowledge."

Dr Palmer became known as the Rugeley poisoner.

And his weapon of choice

would have been kept in this little powder drawer at the bottom -

it was Strychnine.

Or was it? It was extremely hard to detect this state-of-the-art poison.

Certainly, it looked like Palmer had a motive - money!

The dead man's betting book,

which allowed him to claim his big win on the horses,

had mysteriously disappeared.

Palmer was found to have huge debts.

His wife had died the year before,

just after he'd insured her life for £13,000.

And his brother Walter had died not long after,

yielding another big cash windfall.

All this juicy detail was lapped up by Victorian newspaper readers.

William Palmer's was the first big crime

to take place after the lifting of the newspaper tax in 1855.

This meant that newspapers suddenly got a whole lot cheaper.

Some that had cost four pence were now just a penny.

Combined with a brilliant murder story, circulation exploded.

What the newspapers particularly liked in the Palmer case

was the detail of the scientific investigation.

In Palmer's case it was compromised right from the start, actually.

Palmer himself was allowed to be present at the autopsy,

and during it he managed to jostle the person handling the stomach

so that its contents spilled out.

Later Palmer tried to bribe the courier taking the victim's stomach down to London to make it disappear.

The Illustrated Times

has got pictures here of the stars of trial -

the analytical chemists explaining exactly how poisoning worked -

and the Staffordshire Advertiser have included

a word-by-word transcript of all of their testimony.

The readers of all these newspapers

were getting a very detailed lesson in the science of chemistry

and in the absolute latest techniques of poisoning.

Palmer's trial featured 60 witnesses and lasted a record 12 days.

But eventually, he was sentenced to death.

The case gave the public a potent mix of science and murder.

And at St Bartholomew's hospital,

where William Palmer trained to be a doctor,

the Victorian pathology museum contains the fascinating gory stuff

the bottled stomachs and contaminated organs

around which the best murder trials now revolved.

Palmer's crime represented

a new kind of more sophisticated poisoning.

I'm meeting an expert in Victorian poison, Dr Ian Burney.

There are various new things going on in crime in the 1850s.

There's poisoning, there's toxicology, forensic science.

What was the significance of the William Palmer case?

Well, he marks the transition between the earlier poisoner

of the 1830s and 40s which was seen to be crude, unsophisticated.

The archetypal poisoning case

was arsenic, in copious doses, which were easy to detect.

As opposed to Palmer, as a medical practitioner

with knowledge of - and indeed access to -

more complex, more subtle poisons.

When William Palmer's on the scaffold, he's about to die,

he says, and this is very famous,

he says, "I am innocent of poisoning Cook by Strychnine."

What do you think he meant by that?

Well I think he meant to taunt a very large crowd which came to watch him die.

50,000 people came - this is a very, very controversial trial, very high profile.

And the main controversial thing was the agent that he was convicted of poisoning Cooke by - Strychnine.

Strychnine was not found by the toxicologists.

And so what he's saying, in effect, is, "I may or may not be a poisoner,

"but I'm certainly not a poisoner that used Strychnine."

So this is a complete tease, it's the opposite of a confession.

He's saying, "Maybe I did it, maybe I didn't do it, but I didn't use Strychnine."

It's a perfect tease.

So this case is so intriguing

because we've got these toxicologists

who weren't actually able to prove that strychnine was there.

It was quite finely balanced.

That's exactly right.

One of the things that the toxicologist is supposed to do,

or the key thing that the toxicologist is supposed to do,

is to make the poisonous substance actually present to the court,

to bring it to court to show it in a vial or on a slide.

Well, in this case, they couldn't do that.

I suppose if poison is getting more sophisticated,

then the people who catch the poisoners are having to run to catch up.

Oh, absolutely. They are locked in a self-reinforcing spiral.

As poisoners are getting more sophisticated,

so too do the means of detection

need to be more and more sophisticated in order to catch them.

Science helped to solve the ever-more refined crimes of the mid 19th century.

As scientific knowledge increased, murderers could be caught through the careful study of the corpse.

Collections like this one helped these magicians of the modern age -

the toxicologists and the forensic scientists -

to understand the human body.

They needed to see lots of different organs

so they could tell what was normal and what was abnormal.

This is somebody's stomach,

but it's been corroded away because they've swallowed a strong acid.

And as the scientists were becoming more rigorous

in their examination of the murder victim,

the police were also transforming themselves.

It all began in 1842,

with the establishment of the Metropolitan Police Detective Force at Scotland Yard,

formed from a handful of the cleverest police officers.

They aimed to make policing a science,

through observation of crime,

and intimate knowledge of the criminal world.

This new detective squad, which was very small at first,

would become the elite of the police force.

It wasn't their job to go out on the beat, preventing crime.

Their role was much more active than that.

They had to gather intelligence, look for patterns,

find the evidence, and go after the killers.

In other words, it was much more exciting!

These detectives often came from same streets

as the criminals they investigated,

so they understood the Victorian underworld.

Charles Dickens was very taken with the new detectives.

He loved following them around and spending time with them.

This is his magazine, Household Words,

and from 1850 he published a whole series of articles about the detectives.

He was doing something quite important.

He was making them look like they were respectable,

and even glamorous characters, to his middle-class readers.

Dickens loved the idea of these working-class heroes -

cerebral and brave at the same time, sweeping up crime all over the city.

This essay is called The Modern Science of Thief-Taking

and Dickens here is really bigging-up the detectives.

He says that, "These 42 individuals don't wear a uniform,

"but they perform the most difficult operations of their craft."

They're "connoisseurs of crime".

They can walk into a crime scene

and they can spot the hallmarks of a particular gang of criminals.

They can read tracks which are invisible to other eyes.

A few months later, Dickens invites the whole of the detective squad

into the offices of Household Words for a party -

the detective police party.

Over brandy-and-water and cigars, they chat together about crime.

The most impressive detective present is called Inspector Wield,

who's, "A middle aged man with a portly presence

"with a large, moist and knowing eye,

"a husky voice and a habit of emphasizing his conversation

"with the aid of a corpulent forefinger."

Now, these very distinctive tics

belong to a real detective called Inspector Field.

And Dickens uses his right name when he follows Inspector Field

on his rounds of the slums of St Giles by night.

This essay, called On Duty With Inspector Field, begins like this.

"How goes the night? St Giles's Clock is striking nine."

It's almost as if Dickens is stalking Inspector Field.

And his description is full of admiration.

"Inspector Field is, tonight, the guardian genius of the British Museum.

"He is bringing his shrewd eye to bear

"on every corner of its solitary galleries."

Soon Field emerges, and leads Dickens on a journey of discovery

into London's criminal underbelly.

What I love about this essay is the window it opens up

into the squalid, grimy, horrible world of the slums of Saint Giles,

where Inspector Field is completely at home and completely in charge.

He isn't different from these people, he's one of them.

He's risen up through his own abilities,

and this gives him the power to pass between worlds -

from the slums to the middle-class newspaper offices.

Just like Charles Dickens did himself.

Given Dickens's empathy for the police detectives,

it's no surprise that the real Inspector Field

soon got a fictional counterpart.

Inspector Bucket in Bleak House

bears a striking resemblance to Inspector Field,

right down to the plump, pointing forefinger.

He's one of our very first fictional police detectives.

But Dickens wasn't just taken with detection.

He also had a keen interest in crime and brutality more generally.

I've come to Dickens's own house to hear about the great writer from his biographer, Simon Callow.

He moved in parts of society that were unknown to most of his readers.

He specialised in the underbelly.

And it's very notable that whenever he went to any new town,

pretty well the first visit he made every time was to the police station.

When he went to America, he went to the New York precinct,

and they took him round the underworld, basically.

They took him to the brothels, to the gambling dens,

to the places where the criminals hung out.

He seemed to need to know about all of that.

Dickens's interest in the unvarnished detail of murder

was evident in his famous public readings from Oliver Twist.

Especially the killing by Bill Sikes of his girlfriend Nancy.

Dickens appeared in tails with a white starched shirt and bow tie.

He stood at a lectern, which he'd designed himself,

which had a metal rectangle over it,

through which gas flowed,

and which lit up, so he was gas lit within this frame.

And then he'd give himself, just like a musician,

he wrote a score for himself.

And, it's fascinating that you see he rewrote some of the scenes to make them tighter and more vivid.

And he gives himself notes all the way through.

So, for example in letters so marked, so heavily,

his pen almost breaking on the page is the word "TERROR" - underlined twice - "TO THE END."

And he maintained that atmosphere of extreme dread all the way through.

But the moment that people remembered most of all,

"It was a ghastly figure to look upon.

"The murderer, staggering backward to the wall,

"and shutting out the sight with his hand,

"seized a heavy club, and struck her down!"

And then Dickens just repeated this...

He did this. Sometimes he didn't seem to stop at all.

This was the thing that frightened his audiences so much.

He hammered her till they actually began to see her face disintegrating under his fist.

I mean, it was a sort of psychotic performance, really. Absolutely extraordinary.

Dickens brought these terrifying accounts of murder

and the criminal underworld to a new novel-reading audience,

who found they could now enjoy stories of violence with a clear conscience.

And they liked it even more when murder left the grimy back streets

and entered the country house.

In 1860, one real-life case seized Britain's attention.

Rode Hill House, in the Wiltshire village of Rode,

became the scene of a dreadful incident.

I've been given rare access to the very house

where a shocking murder took place.

On the night of 29th June 1860, the Kent family, one by one, went up to bed.

On the first floor, the man of the house -

mill inspector, Samuel Kent - joined his second wife Mary.

Their five-year-old daughter slept in their room.

Opposite, the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough shared the nursery

with one-year-old Eveline and three-year-old Francis Saville.

The second floor housed the cook and the housemaid...

..and the less favoured offspring of Samuel Kent's first marriage -

Mary Ann and Elizabeth, in their 20s.

Constance, aged 16.

And William, 14.

The house was completely secure.

There were high walls around the garden.

There was a guard dog on the prowl out there.

The doors were all locked and the shutters were barred.

By midnight, there were 12 people inside the house,

totally sealed off from the world.

But in the morning, one of the children was missing.

Three-year-old Francis Saville Kent was no longer in his cot.

The family and servants searched the house and then the gardens.

It seemed that someone inside the house

must have spirited the child away.

Finally, they searched the outdoor privy,

and down beneath the seat in the chamber

was the body of the little boy.

He'd been wrapped in a blanket,

and his throat was cut so deeply that his head was almost off.

Soon, as in all the best detective stories, a series of clues emerged.

The first clue was the clue of the blanket - from the boy's bed.

His body was discovered wrapped in this,

but now suspicion fell on his nursery maid Elizabeth.

She seems to have changed her story

about when she noticed that the blanket was missing.

The second clue was the clue of the breast cloth.

Victorian women wore these to pad out their corsets,

and one was discovered in the privy.

The police now tried to discover whose it was

by trying it on to the various female servants. Who did it fit?

It fitted Elizabeth the best.

It's notable that they didn't try it onto the young ladies of the household,

as if they were somehow above suspicion.

The next clue was the clue of the bloody newspaper.

At first, the police thought this came from the Morning Star,

which might have suggested a stranger.

The Kent family didn't read the Star.

But this was a red herring.

It turned out it was from the Times instead.

But the most exciting clue was something notable by its absence.

When the laundry came back, there was something missing.

What had happened to the nightdress of Constance Kent, the daughter?

This was a real mystery.

But at this stage, the finger of suspicion was pointed at Elizabeth, the nursery maid.

The local police, though,

failed to find enough evidence to prosecute her.

Enter a new investigator.

Two weeks after the murder, Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher was called in from London,

amidst huge public expectation and pressure from the press.

A leading figure at Scotland Yard,

he was described as the prince of detectives.

Whicher set to work conducting interviews and examining the evidence.

Soon, he came to a conclusion.

Mr Whicher believed that the missing nightdress was the key to the whole thing

and the nightdress's owner, Constance, who was only 16 years old became his prime suspect.

He was convinced that she sneaked down these servant's stairs,

got the body of her sleeping half-brother from the nursery

and then carried him down and out to slit his throat.

Constance was arrested, charged, and released on bail,

but without the still elusive nightdress, Whicher couldn't make a case.

The accusation by a working-class detective of a nice, middle-class girl caused public outrage.

Whicher was criticised for intruding on the family's grief, and tarnishing Constance's name.

The charges were dropped.

Kate Summerscale, author of a bestselling book on the murder,

has discovered that this story hooked the public.

Not content with reading about the crime, they were determined to find their own solution.

Kate is showing me some of the letters

members of the public wrote to the police.

This is from a woman in London and she says,

"I fancy that step-by-step I can trace the crime,

"and that the murderer is the brother of William Nutt

"and the son-in-law of Mrs Holly, the Laundress."

This is brilliant! It's like she's solving the crime herself from...

Westbourne Grove!

Yes, yes, exactly.

Well, this one is suggesting that the police check

whether any chloroform was purchased in the neighbourhood

because if the boy had been sedated with chloroform,

then that would explain why the parents didn't wake.

Surely the police thought of this themselves?

Well, yes, and Whicher had to give his responses

to all these letters, such as this one.

"I have read the annexed letter, offering suggestions relative to the murder at Rode,

"but there is nothing in them to assist in the enquiry."

So each time one of these letters came in,

he had to read it and respond to it.

As time went on then, what happened to Whicher's public status?

There was a great deal of sympathy for Constance and her family

and all the loathing that might have been reserved, actually,

for the murderer - if they had been found at that point -

was turned on Whicher.

He became a sort of scapegoat

for people's disquiet and upset about the murder itself.

I feel really sorry for him.

He's done a pretty good job really, but people are writing some terrible letters in to him.

This is a particularly sort of damning one, isn't it?

Yes, this is typical of the letters

that started to come in about Whicher himself.

The scorn for his lack of education

and his working-class background is apparent.

The writer ends,

"A policeman may be a good hand at discovering a criminal,

"but it requires intellect and a mind enlarged by observation

"to detect a crime and unravel a mystery."

Well, on one level, I agree. On another level, what a snob!

And where does that leave the professional police detective?

His status has been rocked by this?

The police detective, I would say, for about a century,

didn't regain the kind of kudos and integrity that they had enjoyed before the Rode Hill case.

Somehow the experience of doubting him and his self-doubt, I think,

sort of undid the idea

of this omniscient almost super-human police detective.

In fact, it turned out that Whicher was right all along.

In 1865, Constance Kent confessed to killing her little half-brother,

motivated by resentment of her stepmother.

But it came too late. The murder of Francis Saville Kent

spelled the end of the police detective as hero,

and the birth of what we'd call today the armchair detective.

This is the grave of the victim - Francis Saville Kent.

You can't make it out, but it says here he was cruelly murdered.

And one result of his death was this new appetite in the middle classes

for the intellectual rigours of detection.

His death made retired colonels and housewives

and all sorts of respectable people become amateur detectives

and largely without success!

The epitaph goes on to say that God must search out the solution to this crime

because only he knows the secrets of the heart.

The case at Rode Hill House -

with its dark desires hidden behind a genteel facade -

also inspired a great work of crime literature.

In 1868, Wilkie Collins published a book called The Moonstone.

TS Eliot described it as,

"The first, the longest, and the best of English detective novels."

Whether it's a true detective novel or not is a bit of a moot question,

but it'll definitely keep you turning the pages.

Basically, it's about a stolen diamond,

but I've come to a tobacconist, because Collins expert Matthew Sweet

promises me cigars hold the secret to the novel's plot.

Right then, shall we go for these ones?

Will you please show us what to do now that we've picked these two?

What you need to do is to cut... cut the little end off here.

Cut that, and now I'm just going to char the end for you.

-Turning it around slowly.

-Turning it, so you get it nice and evenly...

I think that's nearly there. Right.

-Thank you very much.

-Now draw, and then blow it out.

-That's really nasty!

-Yeah?

-I'm sorry!

You are going to explain in a minute why we're smoking cigars?

-I will, I will.

-It's all going to be revealed?

-If you'd like to take that and draw.

-Matthew's first puff.

-Yes.

Draw in, you're away!

-Good smoking!

-Terrific.

-Excellent. Like a pro.

So, what role do cigars play in the story of the Moonstone?

Well, the cigar, strangely, is the engine of the plot in the Moonstone.

Without the cigar, the moonstone diamond would never have been stolen.

Because the hero, Franklin Blake, is a cigar smoker who stops smoking.

And then, because he's sleepless, and because he's ratty

and because he gets into an argument with a doctor,

he finds that his drink has been spiked with opium,

so this puts him into a very strange psychological state,

during which he commits the robbery that he himself wants to see solved.

You make that sound really neat and orderly and sensible,

but it takes place over 800 pages

and there's so many twists and turns along the way.

Twists and turns and all with this strange kind of narcotic fug waiting for us at the end of the story.

The Moonstone is a highly original story,

but the detective element clearly draws on the Rode Hill House murder.

He takes, in a way, the detective character from the Rode Hill House story.

So, Mr Whicher becomes Sergeant Cuff, this detective who is called in when the local police fail,

and puts the finger of blame on the daughter of the household,

but then fails in his investigation,

you know, it comes to a dead end for him.

But there's also the detail of a clue in the story.

Whicher's suspicions were founded upon an anomaly in the laundry list at Rode Hill House.

This nightshirt that should have been there but wasn't.

Now, there's a nightshirt in this story too.

It's smeared with paint.

Franklin Blake has been sleepwalking through the house

and his body's rubbed against a wet architrave of one of the doors

and the paint has come off on the nightdress.

So what's the case for the Moonstone being the first proper detective fiction?

There are things in the Moonstone

that later become fixtures of the genre.

You've got the country house mystery,

you've got the questionable servants.

You've got the detective who comes into a kind of complacent household who resist him,

who don't want that kind of detective gaze directed upon them -

looking in their drawers, inspecting the business of their personal lives.

Another thing in the Moonstone

that really looks forwards to detective stories

is the planting of the clue, isn't it?

The way that if you're paying attention,

you know that this normal detail of daily life, the cigar,

is going to hold the secret of the whole plot.

Well, yes, I mean it's the classic clue, isn't it?

You can imagine something like this reproduced in a Cluedo set

along with the length of rope and the revolver.

And the classic idea is that this is an object that can be read.

It looks ordinary, the world is full of them,

and yet if you know how to look at this,

if you see how long it's been burning, where it comes from,

where it was bought, who might use a cigar like this,

then it becomes legible.

And it might perform some very important role in a story or a puzzle.

Well, in this particular story,

-it's the explanation for the whole of everything.

-Absolutely, yes!

The Moonstone was part of a new wave of writing in the 1860s

known at the time as "sensation fiction".

Novels designed to quicken the pulse of middle-class readers.

What could be more sensational than murder and detection?

The Queen of sensation fiction was Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

She really was one of the 19th centuries most prolific and successful novelists.

Her first smash hit novel, Lady Audley's Secret, was set here.

Ingatestone Hall became Audley Court -

a place of full of secrets, glamour and crime.

The book's plot revolves around bigamy and murder.

George Tallboys comes back from Australia after years away seeking his fortune.

He expects to find his wife at home waiting for him,

but instead hears that she's died.

He goes with a friend, Robert Audley, to visit Audley Court,

where he hears about the new, young Lady Audley.

It's George's supposedly dead wife, remarried.

With her shameful secret about to be exposed,

she arranges to meet George here.

This is the famous Lime Tree Walk from Lady Audley's Secret.

In the story, it leads to a well,

down which Lady Audley pushes her husband.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon said that the whole story was inspired by a walk that she took here.

She said this secluded spot, "Suggested something uncanny."

In the book, the mystery is investigated

by Robert Audley himself, who has turned amateur detective.

I'm really fascinated by Braddon,

whose own life seems to reflect her taste for sensation.

I've come to meet her biographer Jennifer Carnell.

So, this is a photograph of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and is that her hair?

That's her hair, probably from when she was a toddler.

She's not exactly the sort of glamorous, Lady Audley type character I was expecting!

No, she's much more of a slightly matronly look to her.

She was incredibly prolific.

It was nearly 80 different novels that she wrote and the early ones were published

with the support of...

I don't know how to describe him - John Maxwell - he was her sort of partner in life.

He was. He was a very pushy publisher, good at publicity - very different to her.

So she had the skill at writing and he had the salesmanship.

But there was a problem with Maxwell.

There was a slight problem - because he did already have a wife!

-And children, even.

-Wife and children.

His wife had become insane after the birth of her last child and had gone back to her family in Ireland.

For many years she's been living with John Maxwell,

they have children together, but then it all goes wrong.

Yes, his first wife died and Maxwell sent a telegram to Ireland

saying he wasn't going to go to the funeral, he didn't feel well.

The Irish family were so incensed that they put a notice -

a death notice - in the London newspapers,

saying that Mrs John Maxwell had sadly died.

And unfortunately, many people thought that this meant that Braddon had died,

and the letters and telegrams of condolence arrived at the house -

and then obviously, as she was very much alive, the cat was out of the bag!

-You couldn't make it up. It's like her own stories.

-It is.

Can you tell me how she targeted her work at different audiences?

She was quite clever in that and unusual, too.

She was writing for the middle classes.

And that's the big three-volume novel?

Yes, and she also wrote for poorer people - the working class.

This is a "penny dreadful", which is clearly aimed at people who are servants.

We've got an article here addressed to female servants.

What would the other readers have been like?

Shop girls, young clerks, and teenagers, as well, also read these kind of magazines.

This is clearly quite a cheap publication -

it's called the Halfpenny Journal -

and each weekly number starts with a story called the Black Band.

It's not signed, but this is by Braddon, isn't it?

It is. It ran for almost a year -

it was her longest book she ever wrote -

and it's got extraordinary number of murders, plots, poisonings, duels...

This is another female murderess, fainting away.

-That's another one.

-She's been discovered.

So this is even less plausible than Lady Audley. Sort of trash?

It is, it is - it's campy fun!

-But at the same time, people who haven't got much money are enjoying this?

-They're lapping it up, yes!

Tell me about the different types of detective we get

in the two types of writing?

You get a great difference in the detectives.

For example in The Black Band,

Braddon praises them as the friends of the people.

They're here to uphold justice.

They're magicians of modern life

with their incredible detective skills

and up-to-date ways of solving crimes,

but in the middle-class sensation novel

they're an intruder and they're not allowed to solve crimes.

And the amateur detective will always prevail over the professional.

Now everybody, at all levels in society,

wanted to read about murder and detection.

The middle classes had their expensive novels,

there were cheap magazine stories for the workers -

and authors rushed to meet this new demand,

producing a whole array of different types of story

and different types of detective to suit every taste.

And they included novelties such as boy detectives, and even...

-SHE GASPS IRONICALLY

-..the female detective.

"My friends suppose I am a dressmaker.

"I am aware that the female detective

"may be regarded with even more aversion

"than her brother in the profession.

"But criminals are both masculine and feminine.

"Indeed, my experience tells me that when a woman becomes a criminal

"she is far worse than the average of her male companions,

"and therefore it follows that the necessary detectives should be of both sexes."

All of a sudden, we get not one, but two, female detectives appearing in fiction.

Each of them is the heroine of her own book.

One book's called The Female Detective.

The other one's a bit more racy.

It's called the Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Each heroine - Miss Gladden and Mrs Paschal -

is a female first because she's a professional.

She makes her living through sleuthing.

It's pretty incredible

that the first girl detectives appeared in the 1860s.

This was a time when ladies' movements were restricted by the decade's impractical fashions.

Particularly the crinoline,

which ladies actually referred to as "the cage".

But in the book called The Revelations of a Lady Detective,

Mrs Paschal isn't going to let a giant skirt get in her way.

The heroine of the story is chasing a criminal.

He goes down a hole into a cellar.

She can't follow him because of her crinoline,

so - her words - she takes off the "obnoxious garment".

It's a brilliant little moment of female emancipation.

These two groundbreaking books were published within months of each other in 1864,

and since they're rather rare, I have come to see them

with curator Kathryn Johnson at the British Library.

Are these filling the gap between cheap and disposable magazines and the more expensive hardback novels?

Probably nearer to the cheap magazine.

At the time the original edition of this book came out,

a three-volume novel would have cost something in the region

of 10 and sixpence - per volume -

which was round about an average working man's wage -

so it was way out of his pocket.

This is priced at sixpence, as you can see at the top.

Looking at the cover of the Revelations of the Lady Detective,

what would a reader have seen looking at that image?

They might have been shocked. As you can see at the top, she's quite clearly smoking.

You can see the puff of smoke although she has correctly got gloves on.

She's lifting up a padded coat, a duster coat,

and at the bottom you can see she has a crinoline,

but it is rather daringly showing not only her ankles,

but a considerable amount of leg.

That cover image is not of a respectable woman.

-In 18th century prints, if you hold up your dress and show your ankle, you are a prostitute.

-Indeed!

What other unladylike things does the lady detective do?

She tells us that she has one of Mr Colt's revolvers,

although perhaps disappointingly, we never see her use it.

But perhaps she found a great comfort with the enormous weight of it in her pocket!

I like this about the female detectives - they're bursting through the boundaries.

They're out and about.

Yes, it's something different, though it's interesting at the beginning of this.

It's almost as if she has an excuse. She says that she had to undergo this career as a detective

because her husband died and left her very poorly off -

and so the implication is that she wouldn't undertake something so daring and unusual

if she hadn't been bereft of the support of a husband.

-She justifies herself quite hard, doesn't she?

-Yes.

I like the bit where she actually lists her qualities.

She says, "My brain is vigorous and subtle, I concentrate all my energies upon my duties,

"I have nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, resources unlimited"

Good on her!

Sadly, these two books were a bit or a false start,

because there wouldn't be any more fictional lady detectives for over 20 years.

But the British appetite for murder could not be satiated.

One brutal real-life crime even gave us an interesting addition to the English language.

The victim was an eight-year-old girl called Fanny Adams.

She was attacked and cut into little pieces by a solicitor's clerk who lured her away from her friends.

And although the crime was a fairly open-and-shut case,

little Fanny Adams lingered on.

In 1869, the sailors in the British Navy were issued with a new type of rations - tinned mutton.

They weren't very keen on this stuff - it was a bit disgusting

and they weren't sure what animal it came from.

They started calling it Fanny Adams

because it could have been the cut-up dead body of a murder victim.

This expression "Sweet Fanny Adams" passed into language more generally,

and you might still use the expression today

to describe something that was tiny, or negligible or worthless -

you could say it was "sweet FA".

Now FA doesn't stand for what you might immediately think it does -

it's actually a reference to Fanny Adams -

this poor little murdered girl.

Beyond a little dark humour,

the murders that really intrigued late 19th-century Britain

tended to be more complex than mere butchery.

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a book

called The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,

and introduced us to a new type of murderer.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde broke new ground because the violence in it was motiveless, it was animalistic.

It turned out that the killer, Mr Hyde,

was the alter ego of the virtuous Dr Jekyll.

The book was a huge success,

and it quickly became a stage play with an actor called Richard Mansfield in the lead.

It opened in 1888, here in London at the Lyceum theatre.

For the first time, Victorian audiences encountered the idea of the split personality.

The transformation scene was said to be so alarming

that women fainted and had to be carried from the theatre.

These days we're so familiar with the image of Jekyll drinking the potion and turning into Hyde

that it's hard to imagine the shock of seeing it for the first time.

But how did Richard Mansfield do it?

The Actor Michael Kirk

helped me to recreate the melodrama of his performance.

Michael, what actually happened in the transformation scene, the famous scene?

Well, he actually transformed himself in front of about 2,000 people

from a very hideous little man to a very upright doctor -

he transformed himself from Hyde to Jekyll.

-So it's not the nice man turning into the monster that we know from the films.

-No.

On the stage and in the book, it's the monster into the nice man.

Into the nice man, yes.

Now it couldn't have just been the acting.

Surely, there must have been more to it than that?

He actually said, "All I do is change physically."

That's all he did, and the lighting, the orchestra, the sound effects,

and everything that went with it did the rest.

There's a brilliant contemporary description of how he appears, isn't there?

Yes, there is. "With the howl of a wolf,

"the leap of a panther and the leer of a fiend!"

So there's just one actor, a massive theatre -

a bit of light, a bit of music -

but he's going to completely transform himself

from bad guy to good guy.

How does he do it? Will you show me?

Right, first of all physicality.

So we're going to go on our toes, put your weight on your toes and lean forward.

-This is Mr Hyde the murderer, walks on his toes.

-Walks on his toes.

So, got that. Now bend your body right over...

..and straighten your fingers. And go...

Feel the energy right to the end of those fingers.

And a slightly deformed shoulder. Put the shoulder up.

-Shoulder up. One shoulder up.

-OK?

So that's it. Leer!

Leer - the leer of a fiend!

-The leer of a fiend!

-The howl of a wolf - woo!

SHE LAUGHS

-Serious, serious.

-Now, over there is Dr Lanyon.

-Is Dr... who?

-Lanyon.

Dr Lanyon, he's my friend?

-He was your friend, he isn't your friend any more.

-He's my enemy!

-He's your enemy.

THEY SNARL

Down there is the potion

and you're going to prove to Dr Lanyon how you do it!

And you say to him, "Behold, man of disbelief."

-Behold, man of disbelief!

-Behold!

-Behold!

-Take the glass.

-Take the glass!

No! Don't take the glass.

Don't say that you're taking the glass, just take it.

With a sweep. 2,000 people are watching you!

Yes, I'll drink this down. Oh!

Place it on the table.

-Oh, the pain!

-The pain!

Turn away the agony into the stomach.

GROANING

And suddenly, amazing relief and totally strengthen you'll feel your whole body going upright

and it all relaxes

and there is your friend

-and you turn to him and you say, "Lanyon."

-Dr Lanyon.

-Lanyon.

-Lanyon!

The play Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

opened in what would turn out to be a particularly fearful summer.

In 1888, there was a series of brutal murders in Whitechapel.

These unsolved crimes would grip the nation,

and even a century later, we're still addicted.

The uncaptured killer would become the 19th century's most notorious murderer.

The image of this killer

is strangely intertwined with that of Mr Hyde.

The murder of the prostitute, Martha Tabram, in the East End,

which some considered to be the first of this group of crimes,

took place just two days after Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde began its West End run.

Over the next two months,

five more women were killed in truly horrifying ways.

As the victims were discovered, a pattern began to emerge.

They'd had various internal organs removed, rather skilfully.

This gave rise to the speculation that the killer

could have been a trained doctor.

People now began to confuse the real murderous doctor with the fictional one in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

One newspaper said that, "Mr Hyde is at large in Whitechapel."

Some people were even more confused than that.

They began to suggest that Richard Mansfield,

the actor who played Mr Hyde could be the killer himself.

After all, every night, he proved he could transform himself

from a respectable looking doctor to a murderous monster.

Behold, man of disbelief, behold!

HE GASPS FOR BREATH

And if even an honourable doctor could harbour the brutal instincts of the psychopath,

anybody walking the streets was in danger.

The serial killer could be anywhere.

The fear and excitement escalated when a letter arrived at the offices of the Central News Agency.

It began, "Dear Boss,"

and it went on to mock the police, who couldn't catch the murderer.

It was signed Jack the Ripper,

introducing, for the first time, an irresistibly catchy name.

In fact, the whole thing became something of a theatrical event for Victorian Londoners,

and an interactive one, too.

Once again, ordinary people started writing in to newspapers and the police.

But this time, they didn't just suggest solutions.

They sent letters purporting to be from the Ripper himself.

Now, why would you pretend to be Jack the Ripper?

Perhaps people wanted to just see their letter in the paper.

Perhaps they wanted to mock the police

for having failed to solve the crime.

Or perhaps they just did it for fun.

One of the people prosecuted

for sending hoax Jack the Ripper letters was Maria Coroner,

21 years old, worked for a mantle-maker.

When she appeared in court,

she was described as, "A pleasant-looking young woman,

"of greater intelligence than is common for one of her class."

When she was asked about her motive,

she said she, "Done it in a joke."

So, for some people,

Jack the Ripper seems to have been light entertainment right from the start,

even at the same time as the killer spread fear and panic in London.

Today, on a rainy Friday night,

the East End is seething with Ripper tours,

criss-crossing each other's paths.

I'm going to warn you now, this is the real story.

The Ripper's story is a massive subject, for all different types of reasons.

Therefore there's lots of questions, and the big question is, "Who done it?"

Before the murders took place, the impoverished East End

was already a tourist attraction -

where posh people might go "slumming",

to see how the poor lived.

So perhaps it's not surprising

that the Ripper's crimes were soon drawing in the crowds.

These tours have quite a history.

They've been going on for at least 100 years, possibly longer.

The first formal recorded tour took place in 1905

and it was led by Dr Frederick Brown,

the police surgeon who'd carried out the post-mortem

on one of the original victims.

His tour group consisted of members of an exclusive club,

a literary club called the Crimes Club.

One of the them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -

the inventor of Sherlock Holmes.

The legendary amateur detective

first appeared the year before Jack the Ripper.

But he wasn't an immediate hit.

Sherlock Holmes took off in an age scarred by the Ripper.

Perhaps the dismal failure of the police to find a culprit

created a desire for a fictional sleuth who was never wrong.

Sherlock Holmes was the perfect detective to comfort the nervous middle classes.

He was up against killers who were psychotic and ruthless,

but there was something of the machine about Sherlock himself.

He used his flawless logic

to solve crimes that had defeated the plodding members of the police.

He elevated detection into an elegant crossword puzzle.

The very first time we see Sherlock at work at a crime scene

was in an empty house on the Brixton Road.

In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes's distinctive

and rather novel approach is immediately seen.

"He whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket.

"With these two implements, he trotted noiselessly about the room.

"Sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling...

"and once lying flat upon his face.

"In one place he gathered up very carefully a little pile of grey dust from the floor,

"and packed it away in an envelope.

"Finally, he examined, with his glass, the word upon the wall,

"going over every letter of it with the most minute exactness."

Holmes uses the bloody finger-marks, which spell out the German word for "revenge",

to draw some clever conclusions

about the appearance of the murderer.

His scientific approach to the crime scene -

the idea of reading minute forensic clues -

was genuinely pioneering and would actually inspire real-life policing.

The next step towards more scientific police detection took place in 1901,

with the creation by the Met of the world's first fingerprint bureau.

Now, your job has been to teach police officers

how to do this, hasn't it?

Well, one of my jobs. We would take classes of police officers

and show them how to take fingerprints.

So, this is quite important that you do this properly

-because people could go to prison on the basis of this.

-That's right.

The ink is the same as they use for printing newspapers?

It is a printer's ink. You have to smear this now.

Spread this over...

This system isn't done nowadays, it's all done electronically.

I'm going to do the thumb first,

then the forefinger, mid-finger, ring and in that order.

-Ah!

-Right thumb first. Can you bend down a bit?

Ooh, ooh, why do we roll it like that?

We're trying to get all the information

from one side of the finger to the other because of the pattern area.

Some patterns are wider than others,

so you want to get as much information as possible.

You are, um, you're quite strict.

Ken's definitely in charge here.

What happens if people don't want their fingerprints taken?

Well, I think they can be persuaded to have their fingerprints taken.

Police do have the authority, I understand,

to take fingerprints by force if necessary,

but I don't think that often happens.

And how long have we been doing this in Britain, then?

We've been taking fingerprints since about...

1894.

Ooh! But not initially by the police, is that right?

No, it was done in prison.

When the fingerprint bureau is set up in 1901 they already have access, don't they, to this large databank?

They had about 18,000 - 20,000 sets of fingerprints on record

by the time they started to classify fingerprints.

They were able to build up a collection, then.

Of people who were already criminals - they'd been in prison?

That's right, so there's a mass reclassification of all these fingerprints

that they'd actually built up

from all the prints they'd received in prison.

So 1901 is the key date -

this is when the science of classifying people

by their fingerprints and uniquely identifying suspects begins?

Correct.

The idea that every criminal action leaves a print, or a trace -

a hair, a speck of dust -

gave a sense of discovery and excitement to the solving of crimes,

and the process of detection became ever more fascinating to the British people.

As Sherlock Holmes put it,

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life,

"and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."

By the end of the Victorian age,

the pieces were nearly all in place

for a new age of detection to begin -

in real life and in fiction too.

Crimes would be solved scientifically, methodically,

neatly, and to the complete satisfaction of the reader.

So, next on A Very British Murder, I meet a mild-mannered Edwardian killer,

investigate why the "whodunit" entered a golden age,

and how the best of these murder mysteries came to be written by new "queens of crime".