Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners

Three English Women Who Used Arsenic to Kill

V. Nagy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137359308
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners investigates the Essex poisoning trials of 1846 to 1851 where three women were charged with using arsenic to kill children, their husbands and brothers. Using newspapers, archival sources (including petitions and witness depositions), and records from parliamentary debates, the focus is not on whether the women were guilty or innocent, but rather on what English society during this period made of their trials and what stereotypes and stock-stories were used to describe women who used arsenic to kill. All three women were initially presented as 'bad' women but as the book illustrates there was no clear consensus on what exactly constituted bad womanhood.

1

Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: Decline, Causes and Concerns

The decline of crime: Changes in crime reporting, knowledge and enforcement

In the mid-nineteenth century, British society was experiencing a significant degree of upheaval and social instability. Increasing urbanisation had led to squalid conditions in the cities and a series of poor harvests resulted in an increase in food prices, the worst-affected region being Ireland, which experienced the Great Famine between 1845 and 1852. The poverty in urban centres also grew because of the influx of rural workers seeking employment. The Chartist movement for voting and property rights for all men, although short-lived, drove a wedge between the affluent and those who had little, threatening the sense of security among the middle and upper classes. The state’s domination over individuals was becoming stronger and more centralised: for example, the education of children was now state run, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 resulted in benefits being cut to the needy if they refused to enter a workhouse, and the Rural Constabularies Act of 1839 required counties to establish their own local police forces. Imprisonment and transportation to the colonies were among attempts to reduce criminal behaviour, although the end of the policy of transportation to many Australian colonies in the 1840s and 1850s led to one avenue of prisoner control drying up.¹

Studies of crime show that in fact there was a steady decline in the number of men, women and children being indicted throughout the nineteenth century, and there is broad agreement among scholars that this flowed from the decline in criminality around the end of the eighteenth century.² In particular, there was a sharp (43 per cent) decline in trials for indictable offences between 1860 and 1900.³ Although the overall trend was down, there were individual years throughout the century in which larger numbers were charged with all varieties of crime – from theft through to murder. The return of men from the Napoleonic Wars after 1815, food riots, especially during the 1840s, and political protests throughout 1815–45 all resulted in temporary rises in the number of prosecutions. There was also a noticeable drop in instances of homicide and theft in England over the course of the century, though the former had been gradually decreasing prior to this period; indeed, if one only focuses on homicide statistics then one might argue that Britain was becoming a more civil society. Although official crime statistics did not begin to be compiled and recorded until 1857, it is estimated that there were around 1.5 homicides per 100,000 population, peaking at a figure of 2 per 100,000 in 1865.⁴ By the end of the 1880s this figure had dropped to 1 per 100,000, and it remained broadly the same through the twentieth century, an average of around 400 homicides per annum.⁵ By contrast, theft increased during the second half of the eighteenth century, rose steeply between 1800 and 1820 and only began to drop slowly after 1840.⁶ Crime was thus primarily committed against property rather than the person. Only approximately 10 per cent of crimes were against an individual⁷ and these usually involved violent behaviour between men. As D’Cruze has noted, ‘working class violence was constructed as a social problem highly visible to contemporaries and well documented’.⁸ Thus, despite a consistent fall in the number of recorded crimes during this period, there was still growing concern about the ‘barbarity’ of the working class, with sexual desire and aggression both regarded as major contributors to criminal behaviour.

The decline in crime has been linked to a range of factors: social order,⁹ self-policing within neighbourhoods and communities,¹⁰ the establishment of the police force¹¹ and the ‘civilising’ of society, in particular the working class.¹² The increasing economic and political strength of the middle class as they became leaders of society following the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution led to a move towards more restricted social, moral and gender mores, whether through campaigning for the abolition of brutal sports,¹³ changes in the courtroom¹⁴ or the expansion of the British Empire.¹⁵ Such restrictions were seen as necessary in order to preserve decency and exalt the virtues of femininity, appropriate masculinity and upright citizenship. Indeed, the ‘acceptable’ behaviour championed by the expanding middle class was considered applicable not only to the working but also to the upper classes. There was a push for all members of society to turn away from behaviour considered either base or animalistic, including violent sports, coupled with greater policing of violent behaviour, especially of males against women and children. This process went hand in hand with moves to restrict women to the private sphere because the public realm was believed to be full of dangers to their gentle nature. Nevertheless, the push for a domestic ideal where women remained confined to the home while men worked did not benefit all women. As Clark notes, it ‘promised protection only to those women seen as “obedient, submissive and incapable of defending herself” ... if a woman asserted her own rights, magistrates would stigmatise her as a shrew who did not deserve protection’.¹⁶

Informal disciplines were at work to discourage crime, especially for women. Rather than family, factory, the congregation or the great estate operating as checks on the individual, Zedner¹⁷ and Feeley and Little¹⁸ identify direct neighbours and the fear of social stigma as factors that could curb the desire to commit crime. The individual’s principal motivation was to keep their reputation untarnished, which meant doing what was right and being in good standing with one’s peers and with God.

The creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 was therefore not the sole explanation for the decline in crime, even though its presence clearly did act as a deterrent for many. Prior to the establishment of the police force in its most rudimentary form, prosecutions were generally by one individual against another. Thus, the apprehension of criminals and the initiation of criminal proceedings were not at the sole discretion of the state, but could be undertaken by an individual who believed they had been either wronged or harmed. Even as late as 1845 the police were lax in initiating criminal proceedings, as ‘criminal law commissioners were complaining of the “loose and unsatisfactory manner” in which prosecutions were brought’.¹⁹ Furthermore, Clive Emsley attributes the low incidence of crime reporting on the part of individuals to the ‘social, economic and political context that changed from decade to decade, even from year to year. In some years the context may have provoked a ferocious response to a particular offence, in others the response could have been far more lenient’.²⁰

The middle classes were generally in favour of this new crime-fighting force because, as Bailey argues, ‘in the 1830s and 1840s, urban disorder was thought to presage an upsurge of the “dangerous classes” against which the old techniques of policing would be inadequate’.²¹ The reorganisation of power in the community, its centralising in a police force and the changes in the legal establishment were driven by a belief that ‘a professional and bureaucratic control of urban and industrial society would ... insulate the powers that be from popular animosity, at the same time as effectively combating crime and disorder’.²² Novelist and journalist Charles Dickens was a particularly prominent advocate of the changes. As Tulloch observes, ‘Dickens himself played a significant role in the rise of the British police, and his enthusiastic promotion of the Metropolitan Police …, and the creation of the Detective Department in 1842, directly parallels the creation of the modern popular press’.²³ Dickens often presented the police, and especially detectives, in a favourable light, contrasting their upright conduct with the behaviour of the despicable poor: ‘against the amiable, alert affability of the off-duty detective is juxtaposed a bullying, … threatening impresario of the lower orders’.²⁴ In their turn, the lower classes exhibited a general distrust of the police, perhaps not unfounded as the force was ‘renowned for inefficiency, indiscipline (notably drunkenness) and a massive turn-over of constables’.²⁵ Barrett and Harrison explain that ‘the new police were poorly trained and up to a third of the early recruits left their respective forces within a year. A symptom of this was the accusation of over-zealous behaviour almost as soon as the first officers set foot on the streets of London.’²⁶

Although this characterisation of the force was more pronounced early in its development, criticism did not dissipate until much later. While some commentators agreed that a police force was necessary to stem the immoral practices of the working class, there was also considerable outrage at injustices committed against the poor by the police and, by extension, the courts. Newspaper reports featured many occasions on which the police were considered to have greatly overstepped the mark. The Times reported ‘a most disgraceful occurrence’ regarding a ‘most respectable gentleman’ who was ‘literally dragged along the street until his arm was nearly dislocated’.²⁷ Following the case of a poor man killed in an unprovoked attack by a constable on Coronation Day in 1831, and the PC’s subsequent acquittal because of the jury’s lack of interest, a newspaper asked: ‘what is there in us that property alone can make our lives either dear or valueless?’²⁸ The reporter wondered whether ‘had his [PC William Kinsman] poor victim been a “lord” would these jurymen have been so satisfied without further medical advice and investigation?’²⁹

Other changes also occurred within the criminal justice system. As Bailey notes, the link between policing and punishment was ‘derived from the conviction that an effective system of criminal justice required both a mitigation in the severity of penalties and a reformed and efficient police’.³⁰ Such thinking led to the repeal of the ‘Bloody Code’, encompassing over two hundred crimes that were punishable by death, from minor infractions such as cutting down a tree, pickpocketing, poaching or the theft of anything over the value of five shillings, right up to forgery, petty treason (which included a wife murdering her husband) and murder. Neither judges nor juries were particularly keen on sentencing criminals to hang for low-level theft and the existence of the Bloody Code often led to judges directing juries to undervalue the worth of stolen property so that the accused, if found guilty, could not be sentenced to death.³¹ Reformers believed that prison time could be as effective as a death sentence in reducing the number of crimes. Clive Emsley explains:

Reformers such as John Howard paved the way for improvements in the prison system which, it was believed, would give offenders the opportunity and the time to reflect upon their evil ways, and in consequence, reform themselves.³²

Moreover, by the middle of the nineteenth century inquests into suspicious deaths were more frequent and more professional, as coroners grew in experience and medical experts were sought to give evidence in relation to a multitude of crimes. The police force, so vehemently opposed at its inception, had also become an accepted part of English life.³³ Increased state control over the prosecution and conviction of offenders led to a reappraisal of crime and of individual actions, including what was acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.³⁴

There has been a great deal of scholarly interest in crime in nineteenth- century England, primarily focusing on offences committed in the urban centres, including London,³⁵ York,³⁶ Liverpool³⁷ and Manchester.³⁸ These cities afford a greater sample of crimes for investigation because of the spectacular growth in their populations throughout the century. It has been estimated that in one year alone in the 1860s, over 113,000 children under the age of one died. Of these deaths, 1170 were linked to violence and 192 were classified as homicides.³⁹ In the longer period between 1863 and 1887, of the 5314 homicide cases, 3355 involved infant victims.⁴⁰ The majority of these deaths occurred in London, where infanticide and finding dead infants in the streets were so commonplace that, as one Victorian commentator noted, the police ‘think no more of finding the dead body of a child in the street than picking up a dead cat or dog’.⁴¹ There has been less research into rural England and the various reactions to crime committed there, a gap that this book seeks to fill by examining representations of femininity and crime. In doing so, it illuminates a particular area of England and English life that has been largely overlooked by traditional history.

Gender and crime in the nineteenth century

Although, as noted earlier, statistics illustrate a downward trend in levels of crime during the nineteenth century, there was simultaneously an increase in anxiety surrounding the perceived threat posed by women who broke the law. The incidence of criminality among women was a conundrum for Victorian social commentators. They were surprised by the number of female offenders,⁴² their perceived lack of morality,⁴³ and also the fact that these women appeared to be every bit as capable as men of committing murder.⁴⁴ The underlying expectation of the justice system and society as a whole was that women should be the victims rather than the perpetrators of homicide, so newspapers would often write in shocked and disgusted tones about women accused of murdering family members...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: Decline, Causes and Concerns
• 2 Broadening the Scope: Moving beyond Simple Sources
• 3 Poisoning Crimes in the United Kingdom, 1839–51
• 4 The Archetypical Poisoning Woman: The Cases of Sarah Chesham
• 5 Death Clubs, Secret Poisonings and an Execution: The Case of Mary May
• 6 Fallen Woman or Bad Witnesses? The Case of Hannah Southgate
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index