Modern Murders: The Turn-of-the-Century's Backlash Against Melodramatic and Sensational Representations of Murder, 1880–1914 9781032120218, 9781032120225, 9781003222668

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Modern Murders

Modern Murders is the first comprehensive study of murder representations during the turn of the century, drawing on previously neglected archival material to explore the intellectual, cultural, and artistic contexts of the period. Most studies view the abundance of murder representations throughout the nineteenth century as an indicator of a supposedly typical Victorian appetite for sensation and melodrama. Modern Murders, however, demonstrates the turn of the century’s backlash against melodramatic and sensational representations of murder and reads them as an important component in the struggles for better aesthetic standards in art and entertainment, and as a dominant feature in the debates on mass culture. Through a plethora of visual and written texts, representations of fictional and actual “real life” murders, and “high” and “popular” forms of writing, the volume considers the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of plebian taste, in the context of the democratization of culture. This book will be of value to scholars and graduate students in a variety of research areas, as well as general readers interested in the role of murder as a central trope in modern art and culture. Lee Michael-Berger is Head of the History Department at Beit-Berl College. Her research interests include modern British cultural history, theatre, and fin-de-siècle studies.

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125 Landscape and Identity in the Modern Basque Country, 1800 to 1936 Maitane Ostolaza 126 Academia and Trade The Numismatic World in the Long Nineteenth Century, Volume 1 Edited by Stefan Krmnicek and Hadrien Rambach 127 Institutions and Individuals The Numismatic World in the Long Nineteenth Century, Volume 2 Edited by Stefan Krmnicek and Hadrien Rambach 128 Cultural Representations of Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean Travelers, Traders, and Traitors, 1570 to 1604 Mariana Cecilia Velázquez 129 Sport and the Pursuit of War and Peace from the Nineteenth Century to the Present War Minus the Shooting? Edited by Martin Hurcombe and Philip Dine 130 Staging Slavery Performances of Colonial Slavery and Race from International Perspectives, 1770–1850 Edited by Sarah J. Adams, Jenna M. Gibbs, and Wendy Sutherland 131 Honor and Shame in Western History Edited by Jörg Wettlaufer, David Nash and Jan Frode Hatlen 132 Modern Murders The Turn-of-the-Century's Backlash Against Melodramatic and Sensational Representations of Murder, 1880–1914 Lee Michael-Berger For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Cultural-History/book-series/SE0367

Modern Murders The Turn-of-the-Century's Backlash Against Melodramatic and Sensational Representations of Murder, 1880–1914

Lee Michael-Berger

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Lee Michael-Berger The right of Lee Michael-Berger to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-12021-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-12022-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22266-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668 Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Prologue: Knocking at the Gate of Turn-of-the-Century Modernity

vi vii

1

1

Murder Overkill

15

2

Hilarious Homicides: Satirizing Sensational Murders

36

3

“Craving for Everything that is Impossible in London”

68

4

“The Actual Catastrophe”: Representing Murder on the London Stage

83

5

A Working Class (Tragic) Hero Is Something to Be

103

6

The Many Murders of Stephen Phillips, the Outdated Modernist

123

Epilogue: The Big Bloodless Brawl Prior to the Big Blood Letting

145

Bibliography Index

153 171

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 4.1

6.1 7.1

“The Revolver Murder: Picturing the Various Modes of Melodramatic Murder”, Punch, 31 December 1892, 309. “The Dagger Murder”, Punch, 17 September 1892, 125. “The Over-the-Cliff Murder”, Punch, 18 February 1893, 73. “False Alarm: Some ‘Mystery’ Crimes and their Solution”, The Daily Mirror, 9 November 1911. “Another Sensation”, Moonshine, 14 March 1891. “The Series of Six Diabolical Murders Satisfactory Explained”, Fun, 29 May 1894. “The Latest Murder, or: Making the Most of it”, Moonshine, 15 November 1890. “Murder Made Easy”, Punch, 14 January 1882. The Murder of Agamemnon, from Alfred J. Church, Stories from the Greek Tragedians (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1880), 156. Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Herod in Herod: A Tragedy (1900). By Stephen Phillips. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Bird Swallowing a Fish, c.1913–14, cast 1964, Tate, purchased 1964.

39 41 42 44 46 47 50 59

88 129 147

Acknowledgements

This has been a labour of love. And as labour often is, it was also painful, and exhausting, and there were moments when I thought it would never end. But finally, my manuscript was ready. I was so exhilarated I immediately came down with a particularly nasty case of Covid-19. There is something very fitting, I thought, lying in bed with my kind-hearted, dim-witted Bichon Frise, “Happy”, happily snuggling next to me, in becoming so ill after finishing such a significant project. All of my drive and purpose were put into this book for such a long time, and now, after completing it, there was a void. What now? The shiver, the headache, the temperature of 103, I toyed with the idea, were reflections of my tortured inner psyche – “what now?”. Being ill forced me into a hiatus from work and, indeed, from life. For a couple of weeks, I cocooned and patiently waited to re-emerge (hopefully as a butterfly and not as a monstrous vermin), and search for new fields to explore. In many ways, I think, this book is about metamorphosis. By this, I do not necessarily mean to suggest that the fin de siècle was a time of cultural metamorphosis, but that many contemporaries imagined it to be so. And for many reasons, as will be elaborated on throughout the following pages, in the emergence of modernism out of Victorianism, murder became a central trope in the construction of that idea. Later, and elsewhere in Europe, in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), a central text of high modernism, illness was the central trope in the construction of the idea of metamorphosis. And since I am a modernist at heart, and very fond of Mann’s works, I readily embraced this metaphor and thought that in my current (ill) state of hermetic isolation, it was only natural to look back and reflect on the last several years of my research life. This book is based on my doctoral dissertation, which I started as a carefree, single young woman, and finished as a married mother of a toddler. I vividly remember my first meetings with Prof. Billie Melman, my supervisor, in her office, where I sat in awe, trying to pick a subject for my project. Hers was very much a “hands-on” supervision, and throughout the years we met regularly to discuss my work. I will always fondly remember our conversations, which I truly miss now. And I will always be indebted to her for her extraordinary dedication. Eitan Bar-Yosef, Adrian Bingham,

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Nicholas Daly, Galia Benziman, Leona Toker, Dror Wahrman, and Shimon Levy read and commented on early versions of this manuscript, and I thank them warmly and dearly for their wise remarks. I am also very grateful to Moshe Elhanati for helping me navigate through the world of Victorian archives and databases during the first stages of my research, and to the staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, the Rare Books and Special Collections, the University of Adelaide, Australia, the British Library in London, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford, for their kind assistance. Special and heartfelt thanks to Ishay Landa, without whose advice and encouragement this book probably wouldn't have existed, to my dear friend and colleague Assaf Mond (Spoosyfletzet), and to David Mayer, whose kindness I will never forget. I am also very grateful to Shai Biderman and Pazit Entin from the research authority at Beit Berl College, for supporting this publication. Finally, I wish to express my love and gratitude for my family – to my parents, whose house became in the last few months my writing sanctuary, to which I was always warmly welcomed, to my husband, Itay, whose love of birding seemed to pour into my own work and made me add some fin de siècle gulls, larks, and nightingales to the manuscript, but most of all to the apple of my eye, the baby-faced, chubby-handed, sweet despot of my heart, Alma. August 2022

Prologue Knocking at the Gate of Turn-of-the-Century Modernity

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, to that faint, blurred crack between times, the liminal interspace of the turn of the century, the infamously ambiguous English fin de siècle. It’s murder, I tell you, this uncanny threshold between Victorianism and modernism, immersed with shadows and fog. It resists definition, this identity-crisis-ridden, adolescent-like, tempestuous, volatile transition period from daydreams of progress and vigorous optimism to lingering ennui and philosophical pessimism. A day, an hour, a mere second divide the nineteenth century from the twentieth. But then again, an abyss lies between them. What, wondered people, awaits us on the other side of this metamorphosis? What rough age, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Europe to be born? Surely, some revelation is at hand. It’s murder, I tell you. It resists description. Nevertheless, as Thomas De Quincey once mused, for a new world to step in, this world must disappear for a time. “The earth shall rise on new foundations”, some mouths chanted, but these were not just social-political visions – many dreamt dreams of aesthetic and cultural revolutions as well. In England, many social and political activists, of various inclinations, were also important agents in elitist enterprises to radically reform the turn of the century art and culture. Some of whom, although self-declared socialists, often spoke with an undeniable trace of contempt for the uneducated, unrefined hoi polloi that wreaked havoc on literature in an everexpanding world of mass culture. It’s murder, I tell you. It resists classification. But it was always murder, wasn’t it? Regicide, parricide, fratricide, you decide. A good deal of fin de siècle thinkers read the act of murder as what gave birth to civilization. In his seminal Totem and Taboo (1912–1913, first translated to English in 1918), Freud developed a theory of the origin of society, culture, and religion, through the question of the murder of the father, owing much to British thinkers, such as Charles Darwin, William Robertson Smith, and James Frazer.1 At the turn of the century, British anthropology and religious studies saw the murder of the father as a metaphor for the beginning of the cultural life of the human being, and the murder of men outside the horde as a metaphor for the beginning of social life. Others, as this book suggests, read murder as a metaphor for conscious cultural transformations: “It is your business”, wrote Arthur Symons in 1904, “if you are bringing a new force into the world, to DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-1

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begin by killing … a tradition …”2 Isn’t this such stuff as dreams of radical revolutions and conservative nightmares are made on? Here, in this book, it is our business to answer three core questions: first, why was murder such a central trope in the turn of the century discourse on modern art and culture, and what cultural purposes did this image serve? After the French Revolution, the image of murder, specifically Regicide, became central in modern political thought. Following the beheading of King Louis XVI, French revolutionists inaugurated the republican calendar in October 1793, marking a new beginning for mankind that preceded the bloody reign of terror. Edmund Burke’s conservatism constructed murder as what gave birth to modern radicalism: “out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre”.3 Karl Marx, some fifty years later, while in London, and perhaps with Burke’s spectre in mind, represented his dialectical materialism through the metaphor of murder: The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.4 Already in 1827, Thomas De Quincey used murder to represent and examine the relationship between literature, taste, and morality in a post-1789 society in which popular fiction and popular newspaper reportage were supposedly spoiling the mass public’s intellectual development and artistic appreciation.5 In that sense, he anticipated the fin de siècle discussion of decline and can perhaps be described, as some have argued, as a proto-modernist as much as a Romantic writer.6 De Quincey’s three essays On Murder inspired other mid and late-nineteenth-century writers, and the image of murder increasingly played an important part in thinking about society and culture during the turn of the century.7 Nietzsche’s ideas about murder, namely the murder of God,8 and Dionysian violence,9 became influential in England in the early twentieth century through the works of Anthony Mario Ludovici, who wrote extensively about his philosophy, as well as by other prominent British thinkers such as John Davidson, who has been labelled a “prophet of Nietzsche” and wrote profusely for London newspapers and journals between 1890 and his death in 1909,10 and Havelock Ellis, who deeply influenced British opinion of Nietzsche through his Savoy articles on the German philosopher, published in 1896. All of Nietzsche’s works had been translated to English by 1913, and his ideas attracted marginal, extremist intellectuals, such as Ludovici, but also liberals, as well as progressives, such as George Bernard Shaw. At the time, murder became a central concern in turn of the century politics and society. In the 1880s, significant targets in London, such as the

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Times offices, Local Government Board Offices, Nelson’s Column, the Palace of Westminster, the Tower of London, several railway stations, London Bridge, and Scotland Yard were attacked with explosives by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, calling for the withdrawal of England from Ireland, which hampered contemporaries’ sense of security. Anarchism also became a source of anxiety and was perceived, however erroneously,11 as a dangerous threat. Anarchists were often perceived as murderous criminals who wished to destroy humanity with bombs. In the continent, anarchist assassins murdered leading politicians and heads of state throughout the turn of the century, including Empress Elizabeth, Czar Alexander II, King George of Greece, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. These highly publicized assassinations came to inform turn of the century fiction inscribing anarchist terror, such as Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886), Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911), and G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), as well as numerous newspaper and journal representations.12 The campaign for women’s suffrage, too, employed violent guerrilla tactics in the years leading to the Great War, such as window-smashing, arson, and bombing. Activists who were arrested and jailed often used hunger strikes as a means of resistance, and the state often used forced feeding in prisons, which sometimes resulted in death. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) was the bloodiest Britain had fought since the Crimean War, with a death toll of around 22,000 troops. This war, which in many ways was very much modern,13 fostered anxieties about the decline of the national “stock” due to the so-called degenerative effect of modern life. During the war, the British herded civilians into concentration camps where 26,000 Boer women and children perished from starvation and disease. British social activists, such as Emily Hobhouse, collected testimonies and documented the dire conditions in the camps, and did their best to publicize it to the public, which soon created a scandal. Murderous violence, then, was at the core of many of the era’s angsts, and its discussion was evident in various ideologically inclined thinkers. But murder also became a dominant metaphor for the assumed solutions for social maladies. Some, under the auspice of eugenic thought, such as Ludovici and Havelock Ellis,14 advocated infanticide for the good of society and the nation,15 and members of the Aesthetic movement, with their alleged step away from the politics of the day, turned to literary murder as an inevitable outcome of extreme overindulgence in decadent pleasures. Finally, we must not forget Jack the Ripper. How can we? The 1888 murders shocked and fascinated London. The murders further contributed to the sensationalization of the East End by the London press and soon became national news, and consequently, a national event. Scholars such as Judith R. Walkowitz and Perry L. Curtis have deciphered the late Victorian obsession with the 1888 murders as a key to understanding contemporary cultural fantasies and anxieties, regarding the female body, the modern city, “professional” men, class conflict, social disintegration, poverty, and

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prostitution, as well as ethnic relations. These multiple, and often conflicting concerns, were channelled to fill the gaps in the Ripper story, and their representation was very much contingent on the political agendas of the writers and editors.16 The second question we must ask ourselves is what alleged traditional murder depictions contemporaries sought to kill, or believed others strove to kill? The nineteenth century is rightly regarded as an era when sensation and melodrama, in which murder was a central and essential theme, reigned supreme. Many studies view the modern thriving of murder representations as an indicator of a supposedly typical Victorian appetite for sensation and melodrama. It is, however, vital to keep in mind that the 1880s marked an important watershed in the Victorian world of perceptions and ideas: notwithstanding the objective economic and political reality of the era, or that during the turn of the century, British Imperialism may have been at its most successful, contemporaries experienced an epistemological crisis, in which many of their traditional certainties and values were shattered. The consensus on classical liberalism was increasingly challenged by new theories on the organization of society and a moral crisis, resulting from the growing awareness of the suffering of the poor. New ideas about the ways in which wealth should be distributed became prevalent, even among those who perceived themselves as antagonistic to socialist ideas, which spread and flourished out of the crisis of liberalism. Whereas conservative anxieties regarding class conflict and “degenerate”, “dangerous”, working-class people were associated with fears of revolution and socialism,17 there were many popular contemporary texts that criticized the estrangement and suspicion between classes. In 1883, Andrew Mearns’s pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor dramatically transformed the way in which crime was perceived in turn of the century England. The pamphlet, which was heavily promoted by W.T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette and had a massive impact on the setting up of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, 1884–1885, as well as on subsequent legislation, reshaped ideas on urbanization, poverty, and class tensions and modified, to an extent, middle-class attitudes towards the working classes. Together with Charles Booth’s influential Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886–1903), these ethnographies solicited social and political reform. Radicalism also thrived in the last few years before the outbreak of the Great War as a result of the crisis of liberalism, fusing ideas about individualism and private enterprise with government intervention, marking a significant turning point in modern England. Another factor that contributed to the sense of change and undermined Victorians’ sense of security were the cyclic depressions that plagued England in 1879, 1885, 1894, and 1904, and although they did not jeopardize the national economy in general, which remained fairly prosperous, they did have an effect, at the time, on all layers of society.18 The Bourgeoisie suffered a drop in profits and dividends, and the consequences of the recession were

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dealt with quite extensively in the news media. And as to the Victorians’ sense of security about the Empire, while it may have entered an era of accelerated expansion, driven by political ambitions, international rivalries, financial interests, and popular support, resulting in the bind between empire building and nationalism, anxieties about Imperial decay and the colonized “other” soared. These political, social, and economic crises were joined by significant transformations in patterns of thought regarding progress, degeneration, urbanization, poverty, and criminality, shaped by the emergence of new fields of knowledge such as psychology, psychiatry, and criminology, and changes in anthropology, and sociology.19 In regard to murder, these transformations were deciphered in many, and sometimes conflicting, manners. One of the hallmarks of this discussion was a Whiggish assumption regarding crime, maintaining that violence and bloodshed were becoming obsolete in an age of progress. To many commentators, physical brutality was an atavism in such an age. W.C. Sullivan, for instance, a physician and deputy medical officer20 claimed in 1904 that progress altered the conception of homicide and that under modern social conditions the impulses of aggression were not supposed to go beyond their rudimentary stage. Murder, therefore, he argued, became a pathological element and the monopoly of the insane: The change in manners that the progress of civilization brings about in a community has a necessary reaction on the character of its crime … A clear instance of this truism is the modern decadence of murder. … Murder, in short, under modern social conditions … is becoming obsolete as a sane act.21 Rev. J.E.C. Welldom, the headmaster of Harrow, referred in 1882 to the contemporary belief that the spread of education had diminished the number of violent crimes and dubbed that belief a common platitude.22 The very idea of progress, so central to Victorian thought, was interpreted, among other things, as a process of constant decline in brutality. But the idea of progress was significantly challenged during the turn of the century, and although, evidently, it did not cease to exist, contesting ideas about decline became central and widespread and helped shape deterministic, pessimistic views on murder – ideas about “latent” criminality loomed large at the time.23 Beliefs in a hierarchical, layered human nature, deriving from the science of neurology and diffusing into popular culture, transformed ideas on criminality and suggested that inside every human being lurked a potential murderer. The notion of such a “regression” was explored in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which gained immense popularity following its publication in 1886, and was constantly readapted (as well as parodied) both in the theatre and in literature. The notion of a duality of the mind or a dual personality fascinated contemporaries and gained extensive notice throughout the turn of the century, in England as well as on the continent,24 especially with respect to the nature of the crime. An 1897

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article25 outlined recent cases in which people committed violent crimes while allegedly under the influence of double consciousness, referring to the altered state of perception as a “Hyde abnormal state” or “Hyde condition”, and seeking to explain it by using a scientific theory that was known then as the double brain theory.26 The article dubbed “morality” and “ethical developments” as the hallmarks of western civilization and human progress, but declared that despite all advances, whenever the “primordial” right-side brain awakens, it soon eliminates reason and decency and descends into murderous brutality.27 But most importantly, late Victorians perceived their age as an epoch of turbulent transformations. A defining characteristic of the turn of the century was the consciousness of accelerated and life-altering change. This sense of change was sometimes channelled into conscious attempts to break away from the past and revolt against Victorian cultural orthodoxies.28 Many turnof-the-century texts, as this book shows, called for substantial changes in the representation of murder. Furthermore, the description and imagining of murder often became a measure of modernity itself. Thus, finally, we shall ask ourselves what new force(s) contemporaries attempted to bring into the world? What were the quintessentially modern depictions of murder those self-proclaimed, late-century dragon slayers (most of whom were well bred and well read) longed to create and consume? Again, I intentionally write this in the plural, since there were many and varied contemporary interpretations for this. To that end, we must extricate the study of murder representations from the traditional historical perspective of the long nineteenth century, and look at it, at least for a while, separately, as an idiosyncratic fin de siècle phenomenon.

Historiographical Traditions Many studies on the culture of violence and on murder representations, in particular, tend to examine them within the frameworks of melodrama and sensation and focus on the mid-Victorian era, which marked their zenith. Others may perhaps explore the entire nineteenth century, and indeed detect changes in the representation of murder during the late Victorian period, but only fleetingly discuss them. By and large, the preoccupation of contemporaries in turn-of-the-century England with representations of murder has not yet been systematically studied as a distinctive cultural phenomenon. This book, as far as I know, is the first to be wholly devoted to this time stretch and to look at a wide-ranging array of sources (fictional and dramatic renditions of murder, as well as representations of actual murders, written and visual sources, “high” and “popular” forms of writing, as well as humorous and tragic genres). Here, I endeavour not merely to recover a corpus of materials that have yet to be explored and to reframe a scholarly research subject. The examination of representations of murder is certainly valuable in and for itself, but it is also a means for interpreting experiences of

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modernity and awareness of temporality, which were especially accentuated during the period. Hence the focus on London, both as an actual arena, in which the representations were produced, circulated, and consumed, and as an imagined place of murder. London, the imperial capital, the enormous metropolis that functioned as the commercial, financial, political, and economic centre and cultural hub of the world’s largest modern empire, whose population grew by more than two million between the 1880s and the outbreak of the Great War,29 shaped and fashioned experiences of modernity and was perceived as its epitome at the same time. London was often imagined as an intimidating urban terrain, where crime and violence flourished and overflowed. The relationship between representations of murder and notions about modernity shall receive special attention throughout this book. Here, I demonstrate that the distinctive feature of the turn of the century’s representation and discussion of murder was the backlash against melodramatic and sensational cultural representations of murder, which I read as an important component in the period’s struggles for presumably better aesthetic standards in art and entertainment, as well as a dominant feature in the debates on mass society and mass culture. The book examines the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of vulgar tastes, in the context of the democratization of culture, and discusses the turn of the century’s resistance to seeing murder onstage or reading graphic depictions of it, which is interpreted here as a confrontation with the democratization of culture, and as potentially functioning as a mark of good taste. My purpose, then, is not to write a history of murder itself. No doubt, the discussion of murder as a crime offers a fascinating glimpse into the relationship between the criminal justice system and society. This project, however, is a cultural historian’s attempt to trace the history of murder representations and their wider cultural implications and contexts. Thus, the social manifestations of murder, as well as the judicial aspects of its definition, are less relevant. It is vital, however, to shed some light on the complexity of the legal definition of murder during the nineteenth century, and to explain the relationship between its definition and the ways in which my sources were selected and analysed. By the end of the nineteenth century, murder was still broadly defined in Sir Edward Cock’s terms as “when a man of sound memory and of the age of discretion, unlawfully killeth within any county of the realm any reasonable creature in rerum natura under the king’s peace, with malice aforethought, either expressed by the party or implied by law”.30 In Victorian courts, the question of intent (malice aforethought, mens rea) was crucial in making the distinction between murder and manslaughter, the former being a capital offense, the latter – not. If the possibility of the killer having a “guilty mind” was viable, a murder charge would be brought. But the definition of intent, as well as other decisive terms such as “provocation” and “immediate”, was left to judges and juries. The very definition of murder, then, was to a great extent a matter of interpretation. Methodologically, I have decided to avoid any categorical, external definition of murder

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and to leave the term as fluid and dynamic as possible. Rather, I intend to rely on the “internal” definitions of the texts themselves (sources were picked according to their “treatment” of an act of killing as a major cultural/social transgression, or according to the act being dubbed as “murder”). As will be elaborated later, many of the murder narratives explored here originated in different historical times and cultures, which inevitably had different legal classifications and diverse social contexts. Avoiding a rigid definition of murder, as well as avoiding picking out sources that are compatible with that definition, will allow me to trace the polyphonic contemporary discussion on the subject, and evade anachronism. My use of the term “modernity” also calls for clarification about the ways in which its meanings shall be utilized, as well as the manner in which the sources have been selected. There are several helpful and valuable definitions and interpretations of European Modernity and its periodization, which are often hotly debated by historians, sociologists, and theorists. While many point to a shift from traditional societies to the political, cultural, and economic forms that characterize western, industrialized societies, some identify modernity as a temporal and cultural category, marked by a sense of intense change and historical distinction. Yet others emphasize the social and political dimensions of modernity, such as the rise of secularization, bureaucratization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and democratization, while many adhere to a more materialistic definition, which highlights industrialization, urbanization, the transformation of technologies, and the subsequent change in contemporaries’ sense of time and space. However, and in particular, concerning London, modernity has also been defined as a much more complex and often conflicted experience, in which history and the past are coeval with the present, and debated. While this model of modernity certainly fits well with this book’s conclusions, I have chosen, when addressing the issue of modern representations of murder, to concentrate primarily on texts that in effect employ the word “modern” or its contemporary synonyms (such as “up to date”), in order to avoid an essentialist, perhaps even anachronistic interpretation. In other words, similarly to the treatment of the definition of “murder” discussed earlier, I do not pre-define what is a modern depiction of murder and select sources that coincide with this definition. Rather, I attempt to reconstruct the multifaceted discussion on modern murder. This will enable as open and as flexible as possible an examination of the boundaries of the contemporary discourse and shall prevent the need to force rigid definitions on these notions. The core interest of this book is what contemporaries thought about their age, how prevalent and important they believed murder narratives were in their culture, and what sort of cultural trends they detected, rather than how prevalent these narratives may have really been and what sort of cultural trends may have really existed. As will be shown throughout the book, what is especially palpable in the turn-of-the-century discourse of murder in the metropolitan cultural grid is the sense of change and transformation from

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what was perceived as “older” and allegedly less effective representations of murder to what was then perceived as newer, “modern” representations, as well as the aspiration and strive to create such a change. Furthermore, this book demonstrates how turn-of-the-century notions of modernity itself, which were crystalized through the discussion of murder, were classed and gendered. As Stuart Hall famously observed, the debate on mass culture was closely connected to views and fears of the allegedly impulsive, primitive, irrational, and violent masses, as represented, perhaps most paradigmatically, in Gustave le Bon’s influential The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (published in English in 1896). Here I will explore how in turn-of-the-century England, as anxieties about the decline of art, culture, and society mounted, murder served as a central tool in a mechanism similar to Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, where the discussion of murder representations was utilized to draw a distinction between high and low entertainment. The description of murder became a measure of cultural capital and facilitated the reconstruction of cultural power relations. In addition to the class aspects, the fin de siècle discourse on mass culture and the masses was also gendered. Le Bon wholly identified the crowd with feminine characteristics, as did other contemporary thinkers. In the late nineteenth century, mass culture was increasingly perceived as associated with women and femininity, while high art and real creativity were linked to masculinity and men. Modern Murders demonstrates and explores the association between class, gender, and poor taste in many diverse turn-of-the-century sources. But the English31 turn of the century discussion on the representation of modern murder cannot be properly understood merely as the product of national culture and as a local phenomenon. Many of the contemporary commentators this book looks into were passionate internationalists living in a rapidly expanding metropolitan and Imperial centre, who felt themselves members of a movement that knew no national boundaries. Others feared the infiltration of so-called foreign influences, but both celebrants and detractors responded to the continental fin de siècle and attempted to shape English modern murders through some sort of correspondence with the continent. In many ways, then, this book is also about the construction of modern English identities, through the discussion of murder. Chapter 1 provides the framework for the turn of the century’s resistance to melodramatic, sensational, and graphic depictions of murder. First, it presents their overwhelming prevalence in nineteenth-century England and explores various sites and mediums of entertainment where murder representations were circulated and consumed. It then moves on to sketch turn-of-the-century transformations in society, politics, and culture, and their contribution to the rise in anxieties about popular culture and decline. It demonstrates how, as the commercialization and standardization of the culture of violence intensified, and people of all social backgrounds were able to read, see, and consume the same representations of murder, social distinctions became increasingly undermined, and anxieties about them mounted. The question of how murder should

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be represented became central in the process in which dominant social groups displayed cultural signs of superiority to signal their upper social position. The chapter concludes with a discussion of notable contemporary individual and collaborative endeavours to improve art and culture and to cultivate serious, intellectual literature and drama. Chapter 2 considers the relationship between class, gender, taste, and modernity in a diverse corpus of humorous murder representations. It examines what were some of the most prevalent views on the culture of violence. The chapter offers an in-depth exploration of hundreds of comical texts and images and argues that what was perceived as inflation in sensational and melodramatic depictions of murders throughout the nineteenth century, resulted in a reverse cultural process, where murder representations were believed to be losing their effectiveness and presented as outdated. Melodramatic and sensational murders were presented as manifestations of a distinctively modern, as well as plebeian, and feminine mass culture, which was increasingly perceived as becoming outdated. After establishing the wide and general backlash against melodramatic and sensational murders, Chapter 3 explores what sort of “new” and supposedly modern murder depiction turn of the century commentators, and in particular the cultural elite, seemed to aspire for. It demonstrates the increase in the contemporary equation of a typically “English” representation of murder with being “outdated”. To show this, I move from the comic to the tragic and examine the reception and appropriation of Greek and Shakespearean drama and reveal how Shakespearean murder was viewed in contrast to modern culture. I demonstrate how Shakespeare’s bloody murder scenes were understood as old-fashioned, and how contemporary commentators linked Elizabethan times, and their alleged savouring of bloody entertainment, to Victorian sensationalism and spectacle, thus constructing the nineteenth century itself as outdated. Greek tragedy, however, was perceived as having the potential of receiving, for the first time in history, the “proper” interpretation thanks to modern notions of heredity. And yet, as shown in Chapter 4, there was an apparent gap between the critical discussion on the subject and actual appropriations of Greek tragedy, which were much more conservative in their reliance on traditional conventions and interpretations, and did not include references to modern heredity, evolution, and science. Real-life murders are at the centre of Chapter 5, which demonstrates that the turn of the century backlash against melodrama also had manifestations in the press, especially in the undermining of the polarized outlook that embodied a rigid and simplistic dichotomy of good versus evil. The spatial aspect of contemporary discussions of the murder case is of particular interest here. I explore how melodramatic conventions were resisted and complicated in newspaper accounts of a murder case, due to typically fin de siècle perceptions of society, criminality, medicine, and science, which sometimes resulted in a tragic trope. Drawing on diverse archival materials, as well as transcripts of the Old Bailey and various and diverse newspapers,

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I offer a reconstruction of the particular environment and circumstances of the murder suspect and how these circumstances were related and performed in court and were represented in the press. In Chapter 6, I focus on the works of an individual writer: playwright and poet Stephen Phillips (1864–1915). Phillips perceived himself and was perceived by others as the great redeemer of English drama, but more importantly, he was perceived as English and modern at the same time. He was highly popular during much of the turn of the century. Nowadays, however, he is rather obscure and largely unknown to scholars and the general reading public. His oeuvre reveals a modern writer, constantly at work to readapt ancient and classical murder narratives. His works, and specifically his descriptions of murder, offer a glimpse into a unique and early brand of “modernism”. While this kind of modernism was hailed during the late 1890s and early 1900s, it was later forsaken. I offer an analysis of Phillips’s plays to demonstrate that his interpretation of the idea of fate in tragedy as an internal and subjective force, facilitated the breakup of his protagonists’ accountability, which became the hallmark of his tragic perception. The chapter examines how Phillips sought to transform the representation of murder on the turn-of-the-century stage, by challenging, but also preserving, melodramatic conventions. His last play, Armageddon (1915), written during the first year of the war, emphasized its epic, mythological dimensions, and represented it as Moloch, the Canaanite deity, to whom children were sacrificed. The production was an outstanding box office failure and received horrible reviews. Not long afterward Phillips died. A few months following Phillips’s death, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a French sculptor who moved to London in 1910 and became one of the founding members of the Vorticist movement, wrote home to his friend, Mrs. Shakespeare. He described the “endless inferno”, the “lurid death dance” that was the war with a hint of delight, and dubbed it as a “murderer hunt” for “boche”, in which he gives them “nice gas to breath”. “To-day is magnificent,” he wrote. “A fresh wind, clear sun and larks singing cheerfully … the nightingales took no notice of the fight either”. A few days later, at the age of twenty-three, he was slain in battle at Neuville St. Vaast. These violent delights have violent ends, indeed. The war brought an abrupt end not only to Gaudier, but also to Blast, the movement’s magazine, which was the official mouthpiece of its revolutionary aesthetics – and, in a sense, to Vorticism itself.32 I find it hard to believe that the well-read Gaudier wrote, in the trenches, of larks and nightingales, especially when addressing the letter to a Mrs. Shakespeare, without having in mind Romeo’s anxiety. Which is it, then? The fin de siècle, I mean, culminating in a war that seemed to spring right out of the vilest nightmares and deepest wishes of contemporaries. A lark, a herald of a new age in art and culture, or a nightingale? Is the fin de siècle the beginning of an era, or an end? Perhaps it’s a threshold, a betwixt and between, and the war, a rite of passage?33 In sooth, I know not. It’s murder, I tell you.

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Notes 1 Cyril Levitt, Cyril “Freud, Smith, and Feuerbach on Sacrifice”, Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis 18, no. 1, 2010, 20–42. 2 Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse (London: J.M. Dent & co.; E.P. Dutton & co. 1904), 242. 3 Edmund Burke, “Regicide Peace”, in: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume 4 (London: Wells and Lilly, 1826), 301. 4 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto, 1848”, Trans. Samuel Moore, London: Penguin 15, no. 10.1215 (1967): 5. 5 Susan Oliver, “De Quincey’s ‘On Murder’: The Generic Conflict”, The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 44, No. 1, Wordsworth Summer Conference Papers, A Selection: 2012 (Winter 2013), 44–51. 6 E. S. Burt, “Hospitality in Autobiography: Levinas Chez De Quincey”, ELH 71, no. 4, 2004, 867–897. 7 See Leslie Stephen, “The Decay of Murder”, Cornhill Magazine 20, no. 120, 1869, 722–733; Oscar Wilde, Oscar, “Pen, Pencil, and Poison: A Study”, Fortnightly 45, no. 265, 1889, 41–54. 8 Christopher Hamilton argues that murder is a central metaphor in Nietzsche’s discussion on the death of God. See Christopher Hamilton, “Nietzsche and the Murder of God”, Religious Studies 43, no. 2 (2007), 165–182. 9 René Girard, “Dionysus versus the Crucified” MLN 99, no. 4, 1984, 816–835. 10 John A. Lester, “Friedrich Nietzsche and John Davidson: A Study in Influence”, Journal of the History of Ideas 18, no. 3, 1957, 411–429. 11 In Britain, the anarchist movement had limited ideological influence but seized the literary and media imagination with much force. See Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880–1914”, Victorian Studies 31, no. 4, 1988, 487–516. 12 Anxieties about anarchy were prevalent in Victorian culture and were denoted with a wider connotation. In 1866, Mathew Arnold witnessed, from his home in Chester Square, the infamous Hyde Park incident, in which a large crowd gathered for the Reform League was confronted by the police, broke down the railings, and violence erupted, resulting in the death of a policeman. This inspired Arnold to write Culture and Anarchy, where he contrasted culture, in its ideal, elitist form which should promote art and beauty (“the best that is known and thought in the world”) with anarchy, represented by the violent incident in Hyde Park. Arnold believed that England’s process of democratization intensified the danger of a divided society that lacks standards and a sense of direction. In the first edition, Arnold referred to the Hyde Park event and argued that “as for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian rock”, suggesting, if only in metaphor, that the rioters should be executed (this was omitted from subsequent editions). Opinions of Arnold are ambivalent in recent years and he is oftentimes denounced as a symbol of elitism, a rigid tradition, and a hegemonic literary canon, although things are, obviously, much more complicated and nuanced (Arnold intended to combat anarchy with state-sponsored education for all, for instance, and his views were optimistic in essence). See Chapter 1 here for a short discussion of Arnold’s ideas on “philistinism”. 13 With the use of railways, trench warfare, the involvement of the civilian population, and its impact on the media, see Kenneth O. Morgan, “The Boer War and the Media (1899–1902)”, Twentieth-Century British History 13, no. 1, 2002, 1–16. 14 Ivan Crozier, “Havelock Ellis, Eugenicist”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39, no. 2, 2008, 187–194.

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15 Dan Stone, “Race in British Eugenics”, European History Quarterly 31, no. 3, 2001, 397–425. 16 Perry Lee Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Judith R. Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence”, Feminist Studies 8, no. 3, Autumn 1982, 546. 17 Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence”, 545. 18 See Francois Bedarida, A Social History of England 1851–1990 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 103–109. 19 See, for instance: Bernard Lightman, “The Creed of Science and its Critics”, The Victorian World, (London: Routledge, 2012). 20 W. C. Sullivan, “A Note on the Influence of Maternal Inebriety on the Offspring”, The British Journal of Psychiatry 45, no. 190, 1899, 489–503. 21 W.C. Sullivan, “The Psychology of Murder in Modern Fiction”, Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1904, 487. 22 “Some Aspects of Modern Crime”, Pall Mall Gazette, 23 September 1882, 4. 23 Bridget Walsh, Domestic Murder in Nineteenth-century England: Literary and Cultural Representations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 123–159. Walsh focuses solely on women murderesses, claiming that one of the greatest transformations at the time was the shifting attitudes towards women and femininity arguing that there was not a complete transformation in the portrayal of murderesses but rather a move towards a more complex, ambivalent rendering of them, due to developments in criminology and psychology. Whereas during the early nineteenth century women who killed were presented as demons, in late Victorian times they were often presented in a much more multifaceted, sometimes sympathetic manner. 24 Michael Davis, “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and LateVictorian Psychology”, Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 2, 2006, 207–225. 25 Andrew Wilson, “Our Double Selves”, Longman’s Magazine, December 1897, 151–162. 26 The theory, which was first suggested by Austrian physiologist Franz Joseph Gall in the early 1800s, introduced to England in the 1840s, and by the 1870s and 1880s had gained increased popularity among late Victorian scientists, maintained that each hemisphere of the brain not only predominated different physical and cognitive functions but also embodied moral, ethical and aesthetical qualities. The left side was generally perceived as the “civilized”, “logical” part as the right side was often perceived as “primitive. See Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 34–38. 27 Wilson, “Our Double Selves”, 161. 28 Michael Hewitt, ed., The Victorian World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 36; Michael Saler, ed., The Fin-de-Siècle World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 1. 29 C.R. Morrey, The Changing Population of the London Boroughs, Greater London Council, 1978, 20. 30 Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Concerning High Treason, and other Pleas of the Crown, and Criminal Causes, 6th edition (London: W. Rawlins for Thomas Basset, 1680), 47. 31 I use the term “English” rather than “British” here and throughout the book, for several reasons. First, Scotland, Ireland, or British colonial territories are not referred to in this study. This is not merely because of the differences in definitions of murder in these territories and in their representations, but also since considering such a variety is beyond the scope of this book. Second, although London is considered here as a metropolitan locus, in which identities can be dynamic, fluid, and multidimensional, the discourse on murder representations is typified, as will be shown later, by the consideration of an “English” culture, an

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“English” character, or an “English” decorum, which are often loosely and differently defined but juxtaposed with alleged “other” ethnicities and nationalities. For further discussion, see: Laurence Brockliss, A Union of Multiple Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1–9; Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), in particular pp. 1–18. 32 Laura Cowan, “Henri Gaudier-Brzeska”, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 46, no. 3, spring 1985, 315. 33 See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989).

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Murder Overkill

In Holywell Street and in Belgravia, by hole-in-the-wall publishers and by Chapman and Hall, on the Lyceum stage and on the Pavilion Theatre stage, in street ballads and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, everywhere in the metropolis, people of all social classes and of all ages gulped murder representations. This chapter looks at their overflow in the art and entertainment world of nineteenth-century London, in a broad range of “high” and “low” forms, genres, modes, and venues, which ultimately, as will be shown in the following chapters, resulted in a backlash against them. It demonstrates how, as the commercialization and standardization of the culture of violence intensified, social distinctions became increasingly undermined, and anxieties about them, as well as about the decline of culture, climbed. Increasingly, people of all classes and social backgrounds were able to read, see, and consume the same representations of murder. At Seven Dials, print shops produced broadside murder ballads, which were written hastily, printed cheaply on thin sheets of paper, and sold on street corners by peddlers for a penny or half-penny. Following the murder trial and execution of Maria Manning, in 1849, more than 2.5 million broadsides were distributed. Wrestling with the question of the possibility of resistance to power, many studies on street literature have deciphered them as being conservative moral fables designed to reaffirm the social order while conforming with the law and confirming the lesson of the gallows.1 Others, however, undermine this prevailing stance and claim that street ballads were cultural products that resisted and defied the official power of the state and of morality, and challenged completely the stabilizing effect of the execution spectacle,2 thus identifying their potential transgressive significance. Whichever the case may be, broadsides were written in a set formula, and very often gruesomely described the details of the murder, sometimes even including testimonies of witnesses. But so did The Morning Post, The Daily News, and many other respectable newspapers, sometimes including lurid descriptions of the amount of “muscular action” displayed by the bodies following the hanging. Broadside murder ballads were sold and sang at public executions, which drew large audiences of mostly lower-class men, women, and children, who thought of it as a means of a pleasurable pastime, a spectacular theatre. But middle and upper-class people also participated in public executions and DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-2

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although some may have witnessed these spectacles with a “moral horror”,3 many went for the sake of the thrill. Charles Dickens, accompanied by his friends, art critic John Forster and Punch cartoonist John Leech,4 alongside thirty thousand other people, went to see the Manning execution, and wrote a dismayed letter to the editor of The Times (which was reprinted in numerous other newspapers in the following days) in which he denounced the “wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution”.5 Whether Maria Manning inspired Dickens’s Hortense in Bleak House is a matter for speculation, but a few years later he nuancedly described the manner in which Manning’s “trim appearance … slowly swung from side to side”.6 Those who did not attend public executions read about it in the newspapers and in books, such as Dickens’s, in the comfort of their homes. In the mid-nineteenth century, print became a commercial industry, publishers became increasingly profitoriented, and advertisement became for the first time the major source of revenue in periodical publishing. Print communications burgeoned, following urban population growth and technological developments such as railroads and the telegraph,7 and with the government’s abandonment of taxation of paper and stamp duties, papers not only became cheaper but also longer and more graphically detailed, thus making crime reporting the emblem of the printed media industry. Their style, character, and plot helped shape the emergence of mystery and thriller fiction, and authors such as Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Reade often modelled their murderous narratives on newspaper reporting of real-life crimes. “Novels are in the hands of all of us, from the Prime Minister, down to the last appointed scullery maid”,8 wrote Anthony Trollope in 1870, describing an unprecedented era in which more than 50.000 novels were published, and a widening circle of literate audiences consumed them in affordable prices. The popularity of murder representations soared among the educated and among the “great unwashed”, as Bulwer-Lytton, the author of sensational crime fiction based on the Newgate Calendar, called the workers who read cheap(er) biographies of celebrated criminals. Working-Class people read, mostly, weekly fiction papers and “novelettes”, produced by publishing houses that stood outside the established publishing world.9 But almost everybody read the Newgate Calendar that described crimes, testimonies, and executions of criminals and combined gory facts with sensational fiction. Published around 1773 in five volumes, it had similar collections that were published until the midnineteenth century, under varying titles. Whereas earlier versions, with quality engravings, were most likely aimed at a relatively affluent readership, later versions that were produced by competing editors and publishers and had much cruder woodcuts, were aimed at a more popular crowd. The latter part of the nineteenth century saw an increase in the number of books published and a boost in new publishing houses founded, which was a result, and of course at the same time also a stimulant, for a growing domestic market. By 1863, the Newgate Calendar was issued in a weekly periodical format, costing 1d per issue,10 and became extremely popular,

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with all classes. Henry Mayhew, in his London Labour and the London Poor, describes how vagrant children, many of whom thieves, read it to each other, aloud, in groups. Indeed, children were also regularly consuming murder narratives. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, juvenile literature grew remarkably. Based on the Newgate Calendar and the gothic novel, penny dreadfuls, which described gorily violent adventure or crime, were read chiefly by working-class boys, but also by middle-class youths. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of Victorian boys’ adventure magazines were published and often included bleeding crime stories. The Boys of England was the first boys’ periodical of its kind and the leading one throughout the nineteenth century. The paper was sixteen pages long, cost one penny, and within a few short weeks of its debut achieved a weekly sale of 150,000, which increased to around 250,000 during the 1870s. The Boy’s Own Magazine (1855) and the Magazine for Boys (1859) were aimed at a middle-class audience and were predominantly preoccupied with empire and the description of desirable British character traits via harrowing, sometimes murderous adventures.11 The most renowned, respectable, and established authors such as Ainsworth, Fielding, and Godwin, who wrote for an adult and educated audience, based their plots on the Newgate Calendar. Ironically, perhaps, Thackeray, whose 1839–1840 novel Catherine was based on the Newgate account of Catherine Hayes’s case, who murdered her husband and dismembered his body, derogatorily labelled Dickens’s Oliver Twist as “Newgate fiction”, and was a harsh critic of the style and excesses of Newgate novels.12 This seemed to offend Dickens, although the Calendar does appear twice in Oliver Twist, noting how its “terrible descriptions were so real and vivid, that the sallow pages seemed to turn red with gore” as well as “soiled and thumbed with use”.13 Dickens’s villains were often thought of by his contemporaries as melodramatic and “stagy”, and his writing as having a strong aspect of theatricality. This may be well tethered with his populism, and his stern belief that “dramatic entertainment” is the most effective instrument of cultural cohesion and an outlet for the “common people”.14 Although even queen Victoria read and liked Dickens’s Oliver Twist, especially the description of “squalid vice in it”.15 Intellectual, more exclusive nineteenth-century writers, such as George Eliot, also wrote abundantly about murder. Think about Adam Bede (1859), Romola (1863), or Felix Holt (1866).16 Eliot may have criticized fiction in which “tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder”,17 but think how melodramatic that scene in The Lifted Veil was, where Mrs. Archer is “raised from the dead” after a blood transfusion and accuses Bertha of a murderous plot to poison Latimer.18 Or think about Robert Browning’s 1868 The Ring and the Book, a poem about grisly murder, that was hailed a true masterpiece, and quickly launched Browning right to the summit of Victorian poetry, alongside Lord Tennyson. Sales for The Ring and the Book were also very good indeed,19 and some quite convincingly argue that Browning’s work can and must be read in the literary context of the 1860s sensation novel. The poem, it is argued, shares some fundamental characteristics of the sensation novel – namely the

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writing about the human body and the focus on somatic effects.20 The terms “sensation” and “sensationalism” meant at the time spectacular entertainments that aroused the senses of viewers or readers and excited their emotions. Sensationalism was prevalent in the theatre as well as in journalism, and in the 1860s, which saw the sensation boom in fiction, it became a buzzword and a pervasive mode of coming to terms with contemporary anxieties and obsessions. Here, too, murder was a central component: “a book without a murder … is not apparently considered worth writing or reading”.21 Others located Browning’s poem within the Gothic tradition,22 whose narrative, writing, and representation, with its excessive, grotesque mode, flourished from the 1760s to the first decades of the nineteenth century. Mathew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre was one of the first Gothic Melodramas to be written in England and enjoyed overwhelming popularity. Premiering at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1797, it was very much the play to establish the tradition of sensation theatre, with its gruesome, shocking, and spectacular representation of murder. Many of its features, however, persisted throughout the nineteenth century, and murder was one of its central hallmarks. Towards the mid-nineteenth century, London itself began to be represented as a site of urban gothic terror, a trend which persisted in late nineteenth-century gothic representations of murder, through the somatic horrors of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). Back to Browning’s The Ring and the Book – some read the piece in light of melodramatic conventions and decipher Guido’s confession in Book XI as a classic melodramatic case of unmasking the villain. No doubt, then, throughout nineteenth-century England, genres, themes, conventions, and styles were inextricably linked in regard to the representation of murder, as commercialization and standardization of culture intensified. And no less than any of these genres and sub-genres, probably even more so, the melodramatic mode was omnipresent in nineteenth-century culture, thus shaping the ways in which murder was represented.

Murder, Modernity, and Melodrama For years now, scholars have readily accepted melodrama as crucial for understanding nineteenth-century life and culture. It has been defined as both a genre and a cultural mode. Its typical conventions – the binary opposition between good and evil, its moralistic stance, the storyline of villainy victimizing virtue, and the inevitable, deterministic, triumph of the righteous, as well as the poetic retribution against their malevolent persecutors, became throughout the nineteenth century an overarching style that pervaded speech, manner, and emotion.23 These components manifested in a variety of popular amusement venues such as fiction, theatre, journalism, and early film. There is an abundance of scholarly work on the different ways in which the melodramatic paradigm became a vehicle through which nineteenth-century society came to comprehend itself, ranging from E. Ann Kaplan’s conception of Freud’s

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encounters with patients as being structured by melodrama, to Richard Sennett’s interpretation of Émile Zola’s J’accuse as employing melodramatic literary techniques,25 to Ruth Harris’s Murder and Madness, where she argues that both murderesses and professional men adhered to the conventions of melodrama while giving legal testimonies on so-called crimes of passion.26 In Britain, too, melodrama became to be perceived as the “dominant modality of all nineteenth-century British life and thought”.27 As a genre, melodrama flourished in almost all entertainment and literary fields, and became especially popular on the English stage, during the mid-Victorian era. But it also had a massive social and political impact – James Vernon suggests that the rituals of English elections were informed by a melodramatic meta-narrative,28 and Elain Hadley suggests that the melodramatic mode existed in the public culture of communal insurgencies and social movements,29 demonstrating how the melodramatic imagination facilitated in constructing modern British identities and experiences. Melodrama emerged during the late eighteenth century in the metropolitan centres of Europe and has two myths of origin30 – the first proceeds from philosophy, and has its genesis traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion (written in 1762, first performed in 1770), characterized by frequent alterations of speech and music. Rousseau sought to frame a new form of theatrical expression, both ancient and modern at the same time, which would suit extreme emotions and serious subject matters. For some thirty years, this type of melodrama had a considerable following, mainly in the German-speaking world. The second myth of origin, which proceeds from politics, has its roots in the extreme violence of the French revolution. Following the reign of terror, representations of murderous acts became especially popular in Parisian theatres. A former aristocrat, RenéCharles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, started writing melodramas for stage, often adapting the plots of gothic novels, and incorporating spectacular scenery and extremely bloody acts of violence. Pixérécourt’s popularity soared, in France as well as in other parts of Europe, and he had an immense influence on melodrama writing throughout the first part of the nineteenth century. The development of melodrama in England was heavily influenced by French writers and conventions. The first English play to be called melodrama was Thomas Holcroft’s 1802 A Tale of Mystery, which was, really, an unacknowledged translation of Pixérécourt’s Coelina; ou, L’Enfant du mystère (1800). Holcroft (1745–1809), a self-educated son of peddlers, with a coherent social agenda, believed firmly that the theatre should be institutionalized by the state so it can educate the masses. Following the French Revolution, he travelled to France and searched for plays to bring back with him to England in the hope of making English audiences more sympathetic to the Revolutionary cause. Since then, and although it soon became the staple of London theatre, many of the melodramas that were performed were translations or adaptations of French plays.31

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Many wondered why did melodrama appeal so much to early and mid-Victorian readers and audiences, and what made its binary worldview a prevailing perspective of its time. Some concluded that melodrama strongly corresponded with the swift economic and social transformations of industrialization and urban growth, thus offering its consumers ways to come to terms with the new social order, its values, and its perils. Domestic melodrama, in particular, seemed to provide audiences with the means for exploring contemporary concerns about class, politics, working life, and gender in personal terms. The Rent-Day, for instance, staged in 1832 at Drury Lane, a large patent theatre in London that had a respectable clientele but also attracted a large working-class gallery audience,32 had scenes of eviction and foreclosure which many of its proletarian audience could relate to.33 Although most of these popular melodramas functioned to soothe social tensions rather than to agitate them and were conservative, some were more radical and combined “rhetoric of reality and social engagement”,34 and appealed to the working-class and those who felt themselves to be powerless.35 While the West End play was the mainstream of dramatic writing, and middle-class audiences flocked in to see melodramas such The Corsican Brothers (1852) and The Ticket of Leave Man (1863), contributing to their considerable box office success,36 working-class and lower-middle-class audiences constituted a majority of the theatre-going population in London. Through the processes of industrialization, urbanization, democratization, and mass consumerism, the lust for blood upsurged in Victorian culture. It is conceivable that violence, as Rosalind Crone argues, appeared then in a “more extreme manner” than in previous centuries, not only in the ubiquity of depictions but also in their intensity. Crone defies the idea that as British culture became more “civilized” it became less violent. She identifies a collective taste for “graphic interpersonal violence”, witnessed, in particular, in the “tidal wave” of Victorian sensational melodramas in which murder featured prominently.37 Although her study stops at turn of the century, she suggests that there is a continuity between the graphic violence in our current day and age and the Victorian culture of violence. Perhaps, but during the turn of the century, as this book demonstrates, many revealed a passionate antipathy towards, and often boredom from bloody, explicit depictions of murder, and sensational melodramas were regularly presented as less effective than they were earlier in the century, sometimes even as downright outdated. It is exactly that overwhelming overflow of melodramatic and sensational gory representations of murder, so very prevalent in Victorian culture, coupled with the particular context of turn of the century England, a culture that went through profound political, social, and ideological transformations, where liberal values were called into question, and concerns regarding self-sovereignty were reconceptualized, that created a “murder overkill”, a backlash against such representations.

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The Masses Carry the “Superior Person with it and in it, Like a Mote of Dust” Already in the 1860s, many looked at sensational literature disparately, as dangerous overexertion of nerves already pathologically exhausted by urban modernity. Sensationalism was believed to have caused physiological reactions and was often discussed by contemporaries using the language of pathology, as a “disease” or a “mania”.38 The strong somatic response to sensational literature and sensational plays had a close affinity to how the railway, which also became a significant focal point in the mid-Victorian era, was discussed in the press, as well as in medical writings, as having a traumatic influence on the physiology of the human body and arousing fear, anxiety, nervousness, and even madness. Nicholas Daly reads the contribution of sensational literature and drama to the “mechanization of everyday life,” and identifies the railway, which featured prominently in mid-Victorian sensational texts, especially in scenes of last-minute rescues of heroes from villainous murderous plots, as both an agent and an icon of modernization, utilized to “put modernity on stage in an attempt to localize it and thus escape it”.39 But the late nineteenth century saw the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, with its “marriage” of science and industry, and with its new generation of technological advancements which dramatically transformed the urban and industrial landscape, such as electrical power, telephones, internal combustion engines, and ultimately cinema and aviation. Thus, while the railway may have been the emblem of the first industrial revolution, by the end of the nineteenth century, steam power gave way to electricity and chemicals, which were perceived as “newer” and more exciting. Similarly, while in the 1860s, the influential drama critic William Archer wrote favourably about Dion Boucicault’s spectacular melodramas, whose plays drew their “lifeblood from the modern”, as Nicholas Daly convincingly argues, in 1882 he already referred to him as a “dramatist(s) of yesterday”.40 Archer, who was labelled as the “prophet of Modern Drama”,41 stated in his “Are We Advancing” essay, “I cannot quite lose faith in the ultimate evolution of a form of drama which shall soberly and simply reproduce the everyday aspect of modern life, without having recourse to lost will, and mysterious murders”,42 thus constructing the melodramatic pattern itself as obsolete. Also, while during the Sensation vogue of the 1860s, Victorian domesticity itself was penetrated by mysterious murderous violence, by the early twentieth century, there was a growing belief that murder was not really a part of domestic life43 and that this sort of sensational, melodramatic representation of murder was outdated: “[Nowadays there is a] diminution of the crimes which used to afford exciting and picturesque themes for the melodrama of the past”.44 A sense of weariness with longstanding, pervasive literary forms was increasingly manifested during the turn of the century, and melodramatic and sensational murders were presented as both tediously outmoded, as well as vulgar.

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Why vulgar? Trains can also be read as a cultural metaphor,45 and in that sense, they embodied another important significance in the latter half of the nineteenth century – as a wider, more efficient net of railways enabled the mobilization of the masses, trains were perceived as crude, violent46 means of transportation that blurred the social boundary lines by providing the poor urban crowd with new mobility and independence. Trains became increasingly problematic to social elites, as Peter Bailey so aptly put it: “the human cargo of the cheap excursion train was not simply deposited at the station, it was ‘vomited forth’ and proceeded everywhere in drunken swarms”.47 Just as the railway with its cheap human cargo spread across the country, so did the obsession with sensational murders which were prevalent everywhere, and even “penetrated” high culture, and threatened to ruin and vulgarize it. Ideas about social emulation already existed at the turn of the century, theorizing how people seek to imitate their socially superior by adopting their cultural tastes. In the fine art world, for instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, a new type of wealthy middle-class patron rose.48 Shops selling art among other items of home décor emerged in the 1850s and became a dominant force in the art market.49 In response to social emulation, elites often engage in what economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) coined as “invidious distinction”, a process of differentiating by continually developing ever-more elaborate tastes to guard their position. Another model of elite distinction centres on their ability to produce a widespread acceptance of the inherent prestige of their own tastes. This is achieved, according to Bourdieu, by elites occupying influential positions as tastemakers in the media, thus demarcating themselves from other groups.50 Just as the mode of distinction of the aristocratic elite in England was threatened in the latter half of the nineteenth century by “nouveau riche” industrialists that “penetrated” high society, processes of democratization, the spread of education, mass culture, and capitalism threatened to blur distinctions between cultural and intellectual elites and their alleged subordinates. Ideas about literary liberalism may have prevailed in mid-Victorian England, but towards the end of the century, suffered a massive blow. The belief that reading nurtures democracy, and cultivates social and political cohesion, which was very much embedded in the doctrine of self-improvement, was fading in the fin de siècle culture that was plagued by anxieties about self-sovereignty, and the relationship between freedom and necessity, and experienced a profound loss of confidence in the values of liberalism. Of course, as Linda Dowling convincingly argues, there was an inherent paradox within “aesthetic liberalism” to begin with, as it carried within in “the lingering trace of an older world of divine right, natural law, and preordained rank or status wholly inconsistent with newer ideas of equality and popular sovereignty”.51 But at the turn of century, the commitment to socially transformative, democratic aesthetic values faltered. Art was no longer perceived as a central component of civic and cultural renewal, but rather as the last stronghold that must be protected from vulgarization. The question of how murder should be represented, I argue, became central in the

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process in which dominant social groups displayed cultural signs of superiority to signal their upper social position,52 whether it was the respectable middle classes differentiating themselves from the masses, or the intellectual and artistic elites differentiating themselves from the alleged narrow mindedness of “philistines”. Railroads, then, just like melodrama and sensationalism, may have signalled progress – industrialization, capitalism, and the expansion of democracy, but they were often perceived as doing it at the expense of the “superior” individual. Author and critic Edmund Gosse wrote in his 1891 piece “The Influence of Democracy on Literature” that “the masses carry the superior person with it and in it, like a mote of dust”.53 Thus, for instance, sacrificial murder became vivid under William Archer’s pen when discussing the poor state of English drama, which was ruined, in his opinion, by the crude taste of the multitudes. Archer longed for the moment when English playwrights could stop “sacrificing artistic considerations to the necessity of conciliating to the masses”.54 The masses throughout the turn of the century were perceived as a symbol of murderous, irrational (oftentimes feminine) culture, and the fear of an increased blurring of social boundaries as well as of an increased blurring of differences between individuals seemed to dominate the discourse of sensational murder representations.

Queen Mob Edmund Burke’s labelling of the rioting masses as a “swinish multitude” became a standard conservative image of prolétarien anarchy. Radicals who were outraged by Burke’s derogatory term started to use it in titles of pamphlets, which defended the French revolution and its sympathizers in England. Percy Bysshe Shelley used the term satirically in his 1820 Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, by including in his dramatis personae “a chorus of the Swinish Multitude,” which throughout the satire expressed the hardships and insults of the English working classes.55 The play’s heroine, Iona Taurina, is represented by Shelley as a revolutionary icon of the womanin-public, whose “very presence threatens to feminize the public sphere, and thus to hasten the collapse … of masculine, patriarchal order”.56 During the turn of the century, anxieties about murderous masses were heightened and reconceptualized through the idiosyncratic contexts of the times. The Paris Commune of 1871 triggered a panic of disproportionate impact on the political imaginary of the middle classes in England, which was augmented by a profusion of alarming reports of murderous acts in the daily press.57 In A Young Girl’s Adventures in Paris During the Commune (1881), the heroine describes her ordeal in France as “a troubled and horrible dream”, during which members of her family were brutally murdered by a group of Communards.58 This anti-communist imaginary was persistent throughout the 1880s and 1890s, as agricultural, trade, and industry difficulties created an economic crisis, resulting in a rise in unemployment in the cities, followed by

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demonstrations and rioting. The working class and the socialists were increasingly perceived as threatening insurrection. In 1886, troops were sent against Welsh quarrymen, riots broke in Birmingham and Leicester as well as a great Socialist demonstration in Manchester. In London, demonstrations and rioting took place in Trafalgar Square, and spread to surrounding areas of the West End, as the London United Workers Committee decided to hold a rally, and the Social Democratic Federation – a counter-rally, an event that spiralled out of control and was dubbed as “Black Monday”.59 In November 1887, protestors amounting to around 10,000 in number, demonstrated in Trafalgar Square against the management of the political situation in Ireland. The police attempted to violently disperse the crowd, which caused some injuries. The event was dubbed “Bloody Sunday” and became an emblem of the social unrest of the time. In many ways, however, police constables saw themselves as members of the exploited working class and following the London Dock Strike of 1889 were marked by many as contributors to the strike’s success,60 which led to the unitization of unskilled workers. During these years the Trade Union movement grew remarkably, with an overwhelming rise in membership from 750,000 in 1888 to over two million in 1900 and over four million in 1913. The expansion and democratization of the electorate in Britain in 1884, and the emergence and rise of Labour and socialist movements in the 1880s and 1890s fostered anxieties about mass politics, and the working classes alleged violent “dangerousness” was increasingly shaped by contemporary ideas about degeneration, which flourished in particular at the turn of the century. Degeneration theories inhabited a rather wide spectrum of scientific and humanistic disciplines and had no fixed meaning. From the 1880s onwards, it “served to provide a continuum between biological and social thought … and … could explain persuasively all the pathologies from which the nation suffered”.61 It was utilized in discourses of “deviation” in many and varied fields, from the decline of literary form and taste, through the development of socialist and anarchist philosophies, to the growth of mass culture and the behaviour of the crowd.62 Social scientists focused on the “problem” of group interaction and explored its cultural and political implications. In his 1895 book (translated to English in 1896), the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, who had profoundly undemocratic theories, argued that crowds can only think in images and that is why theatrical representations have the most effect on them. Moreover, Le Bon argued that the entire audience experiences at the same time the same emotions, which makes them prone to violent actions. Many and varied contemporary English thinkers adhered to Le Bon’s influential interpretation. Although Graham Wallas, a Fabian socialist, in his Human Nature in Politics (1908) emphasized the differences between London in the early twentieth century and Paris in the late eighteenth century, as well as between the temperaments of “Latin” and “Northern” races, he did state that, even in England, “a crowd in a narrow street is more likely to get ‘out of hand’, and one may see a few thousand men in a large hall reach a state approaching genuine pathological exaltation on an

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exciting occasion”. Wilfred Trotter, a famed surgeon and social psychologist who was inclined toward individualistic Radicalism, popularized in England the psychological concept of the “herd instinct” through his publications in the Sociological Review (1908, 1909). While his treatment of the crowd does not seem to be as elitist (and certainly not as conservative) as Le Bon’s writing and Trotter does not necessarily construct a negative image of mass culture (the extensive acceptance of Trotter’s ideas may have formed the basis of an egalitarian approach to governance64), Trotter did emphasize in his writings the contribution of herd thinking to violent impulses. Social psychologist William McDougall’s An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908), which was received with immediate acclaim, also appropriated many of Le Bon’s ideas,65 and the liberal democrat Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman, who was a noted political commentator, wrote on crowd psychology and anxieties about the rapid urbanization in his The Condition of England (1909). The idea of the urban space as a setting that promoted degeneracy and criminality gained increased popularity among social theorists, psychiatrists, and physicians throughout the nineteenth century and rapidly diffused among novelists and writers, as well as in the general public. Whereas some saw urban deprivation as the cause of degeneration, others blamed the uncontrolled reproduction of hereditarily “flawed” individuals, or a “hereditary pauper class”, facilitated by their inevitable flocking into the cities. Just like Le Bon, Masterman believed that crowds became dangerously susceptible to emotional, irrational appeals, that might render them murderously violent,66 and argued that the masses were irrational, credulous, and capricious, and were especially susceptible to “pictorial presentation”.67 Even economist and social scientist J.A. Hobson, who was a social democrat, came to believe, following the Boer War and the Jingoism of Mafeking night, that the masses could easily be reverted “to a savage type of nature”.68 During the labour unrest of 1910–1914, which precipitated an unprecedented wave of dispute, strikes, and disorder in urban public spaces, crowds were increasingly understood along the lines of Le Bon’s influential interpretation69 and presented as violent and hazardous. But the crowd was perceived as not merely threatening the boundaries between the individual and the masses, or between classes, it was also perceived as threatening the boundaries of gender. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of women into the public sphere, and some contemporary social battles had a distinctive female agency. Women’s rights campaigner and Fabian socialist Annie Beasant, who also helped to organize the London dock workers’ strike in 1889, was a leading force in the 1888 match girls’ strike for decent pay and better working conditions in the Bryant and May factory, which became an iconic event in the resurgence of trade unionism in the late nineteenth century. In this case, murder was used as a trope by different social agents with different agendas. The socialist and anarchist press used it to denounce the crimes of capitalism. Thus, many media accounts of the strike and its aftermath constructed the dire working

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conditions of the girls as “murderous”, especially with regard to the “phossy jaw”, a horrible bone disease that was caused by the use of a cheap type of phosphorous in the matches. An 1898 article in the anarchist newspaper Freedom dubbed the situation at the factory as “murder for profit”, and stated that this murder was as “black and as fowl as was ever committed”.70 The socialist Clarion ran a piece about poisonous trades that focused much on the “phossy jaw” and dubbed factory owners as “murderers” and “cannibals”,71 as did the Social Democratic Federation’s Justice. 72 Others saw women’s organized presence in the public sphere as dangerous and potentially murderous. In the case of the Match Girls strike, there was a general public sympathy and support for the women strikers, but in other cases where female agency and social causes married, and crowds of women were demonstrating in the streets, there was not. Many activists in the Anti-Vivisection movement were women. Here, too, both sides, anti-vivisectionists, and pro-vivisectionists employed the trope of murder to further their agendas. Activists constructed vivisection as murder, especially women activists, who often saw themselves, much like the animals, as victims of medical violence. This idea was, of course, augmented by the 1888 Jack the Ripper homicides, after which an Evening News piece, signed by an “Ex-Medico’s daughter”, dubbed the Whitechapel murderer as a “medical maniac … human vivisectionist”,73 and in the anti-vivisection rhetoric, the animals were described as being murdered by doctors and scientists. In 1875, Frances Power Cobbe founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society, and later, in 1898, she founded the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection. In 1903, two antivivisection women activists and medical students from the London School of Medicine for Women, a vivisection-free college, infiltrated an experimental demonstration in which a stray, brown, terrier dog, who was probably found wandering the streets of London, was vivisected by brothers-in-law Ernest Starling and William Bayliss, who studied pancreatic secretions. In 1906, activists commissioned a statue to commemorate the dog in Battersea Park, and soon riots broke out, between pro-vivisectionists, mostly male medical students, and anti-vivisectionists, made up mostly of feminists, and socialists. Many pro-vivisectionists viewed the demonstrating crowds as murderously violent, irrational, and impulsive,74 and blamed the activists for carrying out their campaign by means of falsehood and misrepresentation,75 thus hampering the progress of science and the possibility to save human lives. But perhaps the most vivid example of the anxiety about women in the public sphere was manifested in the discourse around the actions of the women’s suffrage movement between 1903 and 1914. In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, the most “militant” of the suffrage groups, of which many of the members were also members of Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party. They employed violent tactics in the public sphere, from interrupting Liberal Party meetings and heckling political speakers, to large-scale demonstrations, and destruction of property.

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Many viewed this performative political activism as a murderous spectacle, and as a sign of degenerate, irrational, hysterical violent feminine behaviour. A correspondent of the London Evening Standard stated in 1913: the proceedings of the militant suffragists forcibly bring back to my memory the horrible months I spent in Paris in 1871 during the Commune. One of the greatest terrors of that period was caused by the unsexed females, called Pétroleuses, who shrank from no crime from arson to murder.76 Another commentator dubbed a demonstration as “clashing with lunatics.77 The political and social organization and performance of groups of women in the public sphere were alarming for some, as we have seen, but there was also the contemporary association between the behaviour of the crowd and femininity, that was already prevalent in Le Bon’s writings, who argued that “crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics”. These ideas were also evident in the writings of other influential continental turnof-the-century thinkers, such as Émile Zola, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, and Cesare Lombroso, who described women and crowds as being mentally unstable, unreasonable, and prone to suggestibility. This type of myogenic anxiety about the masses must be looked at with nuance, since some of the elitists were worried about the alleged corrupting influence of mass culture and politics on the public sphere and society, whereas others were much more concerned about the alleged decline and corruption of art and of artistic taste. Nietzsche, for instance, claimed that “in the theater, one becomes people, herd, female”, and that “in declining civilizations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavorable”.78

Elitist Upheavals Various elitist reactions against mass culture were increasingly vibrant at the turn of the century. Many individuals and groups endeavoured to rehabilitate modern English culture and art by safeguarding it from the masses, as well as from “philistines”, and rebuilding it as more refined, sophisticated, exclusive, and in some cases, more masculine. In Europe, the years leading to the great war saw a surge of avant-garde artistic activities. Young artists and writers who saw themselves as social and artistic revolutionists initiated experimental rebellious art movements in many European metropolises that aimed at transforming art and life. This trend was also evident in England, where the likes of Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, T.E. Hulme, Alfred Orage, Walter Sickert, and Wyndham Lewis, to name but a few, were active actors in an attempt for deep cultural change, and published their elitist critical commentary in modernist magazines, such as The English Review, and The New Age. 79 Lewis and Sickert aimed to construct for themselves a masculine public identity80 that

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might help represent them as authentic, creative forces in the world of art, in contrast to the “feminine” world of mass culture. The last decades of the nineteenth century also saw a surge of small-scale radical periodicals that were deliberately aimed at opposing literary and journalistic mass production. These papers were directed to a “small scale audience, a political and aesthetic counterculture, a public that defied itself against a mass-oriented, mainstream print culture”.81 There was also a significant endeavour at the time to achieve a reformation in the theatre that would ultimately help cultivate “serious”, “intellectual” drama rather than adaptations of French melodramas. Here, in most cases, misogyny was not par for the course. In fact, feminism and a complex, nuanced and thoughtful representation of women in the drama were advocated by many. Through the initiation and participation in literary societies, and the organization of private readings, many elitist contemporaries, men and women alike, protested that London theatres did not cater to intellectual people and called for an artistic revolution.82 In the late 1880s, a group of intellectuals, including Edmond Gosse, William Archer, George Bernard Shaw, and Eleanor Marx, fiercely advocated for the introduction of Ibsen and his plays, which very often represented women and their social problems in a complex and multifaced manner, in England. Influential critic James Agate claimed that the Renaissance of British Drama commenced with Ibsen’s translation to English, and Shaw coined the term “Ibsenism” as opposed to Victorianism and proclaimed: “Think of Schopenhauer and Shelley, Lassalle and Karl Marx, Ruskin and Carlyle, Morris and Wagner and Ibsen. How fiercely they rent the bosom that bore them! How they detested all the orthodoxies, respectabilities, and ideals …”83

Chaste Parricides These various attempts constituted, no doubt, a battle for cultural authority in a reality where popular demand was perceived by many as debasing superior art and culture. An illuminating showcase of a way in which murder, specifically parricide, functioned as a trope for the defiance against the alleged oppression of “philistinism” and of mass culture, is the story of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci’s first production in London, by the Shelley Society. Based on the true story of a sixteenth-century Roman family in which the daughter reluctantly murders her tyrannical father, the play was originally published in 1819 but was denied a license by theatres for many years. The Shelley Society, which was formed by intellectual luminaries such as William Archer, Alfred Forman, George Bernard Shaw, F.J. Furnivall, and William Michael Rossetti, finally presented it in 1886, although it was vetoed by the Lord Chamberlain, and to avoid censorship it had to be proclaimed as a private event. The initiative to put on a production of the play was coupled with the decision to form the Society itself and was one of its chief objectives.84 The Society’s founders and organizers regarded it and the

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production as virtually one and the same, and readily acknowledged the major role that The Cenci played in the establishment of the group and the expansion of its cultural creed.85 The first Cenci performance was a major challenge to the Lord Chamberlain’s authority and an important precedent86 of an organized attempt to circumvent the licensing law, which soon inspired other literary societies into the breach. Thus, the Independent Theatre followed in the footsteps of the Shelley Society and staged Ibsen’s Ghosts unlicensed at the Royalty Theatre in 1891, to an audience of “invited” members and guests, and the London Maeterlinck Society was formed to perform the censored Monna Vanna. 87 Historically, censorship legislation operated under the royal prerogative until Robert Walpole, Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, facilitated the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737. The Act, designed to curb and regulate the arts and, to some extent, in particular, playwright Henry Fielding’s satirical arrows directed at Walpole’s political corruptions,88 required that to perform plays one must obtain a license from the Lord Chamberlain and that a copy of the text must be submitted to him for approval before the performance. The Theatres Act of 1843 extended the Lord Chamberlain’s authority as licenser and as censor of plays which seriously hampered freedom of expression and any attempt to perform politically subversive texts. The Lord Chamberlain’s power to withdraw a license was absolute and he was under no legal obligation to reveal the calculations leading to such a decision.89 An examination of the Society’s records reveals the literary and ideological rationale behind the staging of The Cenci. Although somewhat intertwined, the literary rationale is of secondary importance here90 but the ideological reasons suggest that the act of parricide in Shelley’s drama was constantly debated and interpreted by commentators on the 1886 performance in different ways as a symbol of subversion of authority, aimed at reclaiming artistic elitism from tyrannical censorship, the prudence and narrow mindedness of “philistines” as well as from the vulgar taste of mass audiences. When addressing the subject of English censorship, George Bernard Shaw, in a piece written in 1899 and discussing the 1886 Cenci performance, called the Examiner of Plays a despot, with unlimited power and claimed that, due to the performance, “for the moment the defeat of the Censor was complete”.91 Significantly, his discussion of the Examiner of Plays was marked with an undertone of contempt for the uneducated and unsophisticated: It will be inferred that no pains are spared to secure the services of a very highly qualified and distinguished person to wield this astonishing power, say the- holder of a university chair of Literature or Dramaturgy. The inference is erroneous. You are not allowed to sell stamps in an English post office without previously passing an examination, but you may become Examiner of Plays without necessarily knowing how to read or write.92

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It was not only the despotism of the Lord Chamberlain, then, that enraged some of the Society members but also the alleged despotism of the masses, and their unrefined artistic taste, that they wished to overthrow. Although many members were more concerned about the “philistine point of view”93 which allegedly brought Victorians to dislike Shelley in the first place. Many a time during society meetings the term “philistinism” was used to describe the essence of what the society fought against, and at one point Dr Furnivall dubbed anyone who dared to write against Shelley and The Cenci as a “Philistine of the Philistines”.94 Philistinism was a derogatory term popularized in England by Thomas Carlyle and especially Matthew Arnold, in his highly influential Culture and Anarchy. It describes the materialistic, pleasure-seeking “crowd,” that is incapable of appreciating high art, hostile to intellectual thought, trapped in moralistic prudency, and content with commonplace entertainment. “Of all abominations … this tragedy appears to us to be the most abominable … we sincerely hope [that] should we continue our literary pursuits for fifty years, we shall never need again to look into one so stamped with pollution, impiousness and infamy”,95 read an 1820 review of the play. Society members, aimed at combating such alleged “philistinism” articulated the need to mediate some of Shelley’s subversive conceptions and to integrate them into late Victorian society. The text elucidated a coherent historical perspective in which, through Shelley’s words, members aimed to impact and change Victorian society: “[Shelley] was a bold innovator, a stout challenger of much that passed current in his day – much that has continued current into our own day … Herein then we find an adequate ground for the existence of a Shelley Society.”96 In the introduction to the special edition of The Cenci playbook, printed for the occasion of the first performance and distributed gratis to Society members, Henry Buxton Forman and Alfred Forman stressed Shelley’s view of Beatrice, the parricide, as a victim of oppressive power.97 Their analysis explicitly deemed Beatrice as being righteous and chaste, and her act of parricide as just. Count Cenci was regularly presented by society members as the embodiment of oppressive rule, against which it was imperative to revolt. B.L. Mosley, Barrister at Law, argued in a paper read before the Shelley Society in March 1887 that Shelley has breathed into Beatrice the spirit of chastity and that she was “compelled” to murder her father98. This, in many ways, contradicted Shelley’s ideas, who in the preface to the play, had blatantly stated that “revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes” and implicitly warned his readers against viewing Beatrice as completely faultless.99 In rendering Beatrice innocent, society members were also commenting on themselves and their cultural ambition – the play, as well as the social event of the private performance, was charged with radical meanings in which parricide was seen as an almost legitimate act, certainly a necessary evil. However, since the audience was socially homogeneous and comprised primarily of the upper strata of London intellectual and artistic elite, with no admission for the general public, the performance was very

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much an exclusive, elitist event. The private performance, then, allowed Society members to (momentarily) operate independently, outside the influence of statutory theatre censorship, and to gain some artistic autonomy, with a play that had very little to no potential for commercial success. The performance itself became an act of defiance against institutionalized power, but at the same time, it was an act of defiance against the alleged despotism of mass culture and so-called anti-intellectual “philistinism”.100 As we shall see in the following chapters, the question of how murder is to be represented became central in the assessment and construction of prestige and cultural distinctions in the late nineteenth century. But different appropriations of the murder trope and its discourse were employed in various ways by different individuals and groups with a somewhat diverse agenda, which requires a nuanced, multi-layered examination. The next chapter, dedicated entirely to humorous representations of murder, will examine the more conventional, wide shared, respectable middle-class discourse that constructed an association between class, gender, criminality, and poor taste. This was mostly shaped by the reaction to the inflation of sensational and melodramatic murder representation throughout the nineteenth century, coupled with contemporary anxieties about the degenerate influence of the working class on society and culture.

Notes 1 David D. Cooper, The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in Victorian England (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974); Vic A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English people 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Beth Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Research, 1986); Victor Neuburg, “The Literature of the Streets”, The Victorian City: Images and Realities, (London: Routledge, 1973), 191–210. 2 Ellen L. O’Brien, Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (Athens, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2008); Ellen L. O’Brien, “The Most Beautiful Murder”: The Transgressive Aesthetics of Murder in Victorian Street Ballads, Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1, 2000, 15–37. 3 Susan Schuyler, “Gallows Drama: Public Execution, Crowds, and Victorian Theater”, Nineteenth-Century Studies 22, 2008, 15. 4 James Atterbury Davies, “John Forster at the Mannings’ Execution”, Dickensian 67, no. 363, 1971, 12. 5 Charles Dickens, “Letter to the Editor of The Times”, The Times, 14 November 1849. 6 As cited in Clare M. Loughlin, “Revisions to ‘A Visit to Newgate’ and Dickens’s Experience of the Mannings’ Execution”, Dickensian 93, no. 442, 1997, 92. 7 See: Raymond Williams, Communications (London: Penguin, 1977), 131–133. 8 As cited in: Deirdre David, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 9 Christopher Hilliard, “Publishing”, in: Fin de Siècle World (New York: Routledge, 2015), 377. 10 Bridget Walsh, Domestic Murder in Nineteenth-century England: Literary and Cultural Representations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 67.

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11 Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing, eds, A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 233. 12 Frederick C. Cabot, “The Two Voices in Thackeray’s Catherine”, NineteenthCentury Fiction 28, no. 4, 1974, 408. 13 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 2008), 159. 14 Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15 Brantlinger and Thesing, A Companion to the Victorian Novel, 227. 16 Henry Alley, “George Eliot and the Ambiguity of Murder”, Studies in the Novel 25, no. 1, 1993, 59–75. 17 George Eliot, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton (London: Blackwood, 1858), 81. 18 Kate Flint, “Blood, Bodies, and The Lifted Veil”, Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 4, March 1997, 455–473. 19 Richard Daniel Altick, and James F. Loucks Browning’s Roman Murder Story: A Reading of The Ring and the Book (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 20 Mary Ellis Gibson, “The Criminal Body in Victorian Britain: The Case of ‘The Ring and the Book’”, Browning Institute Studies 18, 1990, 73–93. 21 As cited in: Winifred Hughes, “The Sensational Novel”, in: A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 260. 22 Michael Ackerman, “Monstrous Men: Violence and Masculinity in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book”, Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2007), 122–134. 23 Rohan McWilliam, “Melodrama and the Historians”, Radical History Review, no. 78, 2000, 57–84. 24 Ann E. Kaplan, “Trauma, Aging, and Melodrama”, in: Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice (New-Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 25 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992). 26 Ruth Harris, Murder and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the fin de siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 27 As cited in: Louis James, “Taking Melodrama Seriously: Theatre, and Nineteenth-Century Studies”, History Workshop 3, 1977, 152. 28 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 80–102. 29 Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 30 Katherine G. Hambridge and Jonathan Hicks, “The Melodramatic Moment”, in: The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 3. 31 See: Diego Saglia, “Continental Trouble”, in: The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820 (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 32 Christopher Worth, “From Picture to Stage: Douglas Jerrold’s The Rent Day”, in: Page to Stage (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 156. 33 Lynn M. Voskuil, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere”, Victorian Studies, 44, 2002, 245–274. 34 Katherine Newey, “Climbing Boys and Factory Girls: Popular Melodramas of Working Life”, Journal of Victorian Culture 5, no. 1, 2000, 28–44. 35 See, for instance: Martha Vicinus, “‘Helpless and Unfriended’: NineteenthCentury Domestic Melodrama”, New Literary History, vol. 13, no. 1, 1981, pp. 127–143.

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36 Michael R. Booth, “Melodrama and the Working Class”, in: Dramatic Dickens (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 96–109. 37 Rosalind Crone, “Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in NineteenthCentury London”, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 38 Winifred Hughes, “The Sensational Novel”, in: A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 260. 39 Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49. 40 William Archer, English Dramatists of To-day (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Revington, 1882), 38. 41 Homer E. Woodbridge, “William Archer: Prophet of Modern Drama” The Sewanee Review 44, no. 2, 1936, 207–221. 42 William Archer, “Are We Advancing”, in: About the Theatre: Essays and Studies (London: T.F. Unwin, 1886), 19. 43 While murder, as quite a few historians have pointed out, was in decline in England throughout the turn of the century, domestic violence probably did not decline. See V.A.C. Gatrell, “The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England and Wales”, Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (New York: Europa, 1980); Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2–8. 44 Daily Telegraph & Courier, 17 March 1909, p. 13. 45 Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 46 Amy Milne-Smith, “Shattered Minds: Madmen on the Railways, 1860–80”, Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 1, 2016, 21–39. 47 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18. 48 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. 49 Pamela Fletcher, and Anne Helmreich, “The Periodical and the Art Market: Investigating the ‘Dealer-Critic System’ in Victorian England”, Victorian Periodicals Review 41, no. 4, 2008, 324. 50 Sam Friedman, and Aaron Reeves, “From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction”, American Sociological Review 85, no. 2, 2020, 324–327. 51 Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996), xiii. 52 Sam Friedman, and Aaron Reeves, “From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction”, American Sociological Review 85, no. 2, 2020, 325. 53 Edmund Gosse, “The Influence of Democracy on Literature”, The Contemporary Review 59, April 1891, 524. 54 As cited in: James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 1881–1914 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984), 15. In 1883, Émile Durkheim used a similar image and warned that society must not “sacrifice” genius to the “masses”. See Émile Durkheim, “Address to the Lyceens of Sens”, in: On Morality and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 30. 55 Roland Bartel, “Shelley and Burke’s Swinish Multitude”, Keats-Shelley Journal, 18, 1969, 4–9. 56 Samuel Gladden, “Shelley’s Agenda Writ Large: Reconsidering Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant”, retrieved from https://romantic-circles.org/p raxis/interventionist/gladden/gladden.html. 57 Matthew Beaumont, “Cacotopianism, the Paris Commune, and England’s Anti-Communist Imaginary, 1870–1900”, ELH 73, no. 2, summer 2006, 477;

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84

Murder Overkill Owen Holland, Literature and Revolution: British Responses to the Paris Commune of 1871 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022). Mrs. John Waters, A Young Girl’s Adventures in Paris (London: Remington, 1881), 224. See Clive Bloom, Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts (New York: Springer, 2010), 218–220. See: Joan Ballhatchet, “The Police and the London Dock Strike of 1889”, History Workshop Journal 32, no. 1, autumn 1991, 54–68. Robert A. Nye, “Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France”, in: Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 119. Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, 3rd edition (London: Constable, 1921), 77. See: Swanson G. Collectivity, “Human Fulfilment and the ‘Force of Life’: Wilfred Trotter’s Concept of the Herd Instinct in Early 20th-century Britain”, History of the Human Sciences, 27, no. 1, 2004, 21–50. John Allett, “Crowd Psychology and the Theory of Democratic Elitism: The Contribution of William McDougall”, Political Psychology 17, no. 2 (1996), 213–227. French writer Guy de Maupassant described once how a crowd can massacre a man without reason, almost without pretext. Guy de Maupassant, “Les Foules”, Le Gaulois, 23 March 1882. C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen & Co, 1909), 108. John A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 20. See Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Archibald Constance & Co., 1908), who specifically mentions Le Bon on p. 75. Freedom, 1 August 1898, 1. Clarion, 21 May 1898, 3. Justice, 25 April 1896, 1. The Evening News, 17 September 1888. The Globe, 21 October 1907, 4. Westminster Gazette, 4 April 1913, 8. London Evening Standard, 5 March 1912, 11. Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. by Anthony M. Ludovici (London: T.N. Foulis, 1911), 43. See: Paul Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Jonathan Charles Shirland, The Construction of Artistic Masculinity in James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, and Wyndham Lewis C. 1880–1914 (London: University of London, 2002). Elizabeth Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism in Late Victorian Print Culture (London: Reswood, 2013), 3. For a comprehensive discussion on this see: Lynne Walhout Hinojosa, The Renaissance, English Cultural Nationalism, and Modernism, 1860–1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 1881–1914 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984). George Bernard Shaw, Plays and Players: Essays in the Theatre (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 259. “The Shelley Society First Annual Report”, The Shelley Society’s Papers (London: Shelley Society, 1888), p. 197.

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85 Notebook of the Shelley Society (London: Shelley Society, 1888), 8, 11. 86 John Russell Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama 1824–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 140–142. 87 James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 1881–1914 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984), 117–118. 88 Steven Dedalus Burch, “When Satire More Than Closed on Saturday Night: Henry Fielding and the Licensing Act of 1737”, Theatre Symposium 16, no. 1, 2008, 75–88; Emmett L. Avery and A.H. Scouten, “The opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, 1737–1739”, The English Historical Review 83, no. 127, 1968, 331. 89 John Russell Stephens, The censorship of English Drama 1824–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9–12. 90 One of the central motivations to put on a production of the piece was to finally determine whether indeed it had acting qualities. See Newman I. White, “The Shelley Society Again”, Modern Language Notes 39, no. 1, January 1924, 19. 91 George Bernard Shaw, “The Censorship of the Stage in England”, The North American Review 169, no. 513, 1899, 252–256. 92 Ibid., 252. 93 Notebook of the Shelley Society (London: The Shelley Society, 1888), 7–8. 94 Ibid., 19, 35. 95 “Review of New Books”, London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Letters, Arts, Sciences, Etc, 1 April 1820, 209. 96 The Shelley Society First Annual Report, 196. 97 Shelley, The Cenci, IX–X. 98 B.L. Mosely, “Miss Alma Murray as Beatrice Cenci”, (London: The Shelley Society, 1887), 6–7, 10–11. 99 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci (London: Reeves and Turner for the Shelley Society, 1886), 4. 100 For a more elaborate discussion of the production and its cultural and social implications see: Lee Michael-Berger, “The Chaste Parricide: Murder, Femininity and the Subversion of Authority in the Reception of the First Performance of Shelley’s The Cenci, 1886,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44, no. 2, 2017, 192–211.

2

Hilarious Homicides Satirizing Sensational Murders1

In 1861, the London-based magazine of humour and satire, Punch, published a poem that presented sensational murders as one of the newest and most exciting elements of modern culture, indeed, as the epitome of modernity: Some would have it an age of Sensation … all’s in the high-pressure way, In life just in locomotion, … The last horrid murder down south … Every here and there, on the rise This pois’nous [sic], exotic, Sensation2 In 1901, at the threshold of a new century, Punch published another poem that also reflected humorously on the meaning of modernity. There, however, it was proclaimed that as long as murder is presented in a sensational manner, “we [do not] deserve the epithet ‘Twencent’ [‘Twentieth Century’]”.3 Sensational murders, then, that were compared in 1861 to the stunning speed of the locomotive in their innovation,4 were described four decades later as a sign of an outdated era. Both pieces were published in what late Victorian editor, art critic and scholar, Marion Harry Spielmann dubbed as the magazine “truthfully representative of the best prevailing feeling of the nation”.5 Evidently, the two represented radically different understandings of murder and modernity. How can this shift be accounted for? What explains this dramatic change of perspective? I argue that in order to understand this transition, we need to step outside the realm of the purely aesthetic evolution of genres and take into consideration much broader social and political processes. In particular, we must pay attention to transformations in the urban middle- and upper-class views on the culture of violence, and its importance in the construction of cultural identities. In this chapter, I closely examine how “modern” understandings of murder were informed by changing cultural preoccupations. My analysis focuses on humorous sources, an invaluable and unique lens to expose the widespread reflective, critical discussions of murder representations and to uncover contemporaries’ attitudes towards the culture of violence. DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-3

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“Man’s laughter to manslaughter’s oft akin; it all depends on where the stop comes in”,6 were the whimsical musings of a character in an 1893 London burlesque. And similar were the views of Northrop Frye, nearly a century later, when he pointed to the inherently comic facet of murder narratives in his Anatomy of Criticism. 7 Many studies have acknowledged the major significance of comical representations as cultural commentary. Humour is a reflective, introspective mode, which deliberately presents itself in relation to its social and cultural backdrop. It inevitably lies in-between text and context and requires the sustaining of perpetual tension between the two. Remarkably, however, to this day, humorous representations of homicide have been broadly overlooked. In late-Victorian studies, this lacuna is especially surprising since – just like murder – laughter, parody and wit were ubiquitous in nineteenthcentury culture and pervaded most forms of writing and entertainment.8 And throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, in England, in particular, the bulk of comical writing was becoming much more socially referential.9 No doubt, the significance of comical representations as cultural commentary must not be ignored, and here, I offer the first comprehensive study of late-nineteenth-century comical representations of murder. Through close readings of hundreds of music hall songs, cartoons, comical magazines, and theatrical burlesques, I expose and survey a much-neglected corpus. In the first and second parts of this chapter, I explore the localized context of comical commentaries on the representation of murder. I examine how the affective and aesthetic value of sensational murders was discussed and demonstrate how they were regularly presented as unexciting, ridiculous, vulgar, and old-fashioned. Furthermore, I look into the rationalizations made by contemporaries to explain the shift in attitudes towards sensational murders. The humorous onslaught on sensational murders also had a broad context, relating to taste, class, gender, and modernity. In late nineteenth-century England, as anxieties about the decline of art, culture, and society mounted, the discussion of murder representations was not merely an aesthetic problem, but rather a cultural practice with social implications. The discussion of murder representations drew a distinction between high and low culture, as well as between sophisticated and uncultured readers and audiences, in an age of mass culture. The third part of the chapter explores the role of class as a dominant characteristic in many humorous texts on sensational murders and examines the relationship between so-called bad taste, class, and prevalent literary modes. It argues that this discourse functioned as an attempt to resume cultural domination, in an era that was perceived as increasingly commanded by popular demand. Through the exploration of different views that were expressed about the sensational culture of violence, the resistance to graphic, bloody depictions of murder is read here as a confrontation with the democratization of culture, and as a correct sign of good taste. But the fin de siècle discourse on mass culture and the masses was also gendered. The fourth and final part of the chapter is dedicated to exploring the relationship between class, gender, taste, and the representation of murder. In the late nineteenth

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century, mass culture was increasingly associated with women and femininity, while high art and real creativity were linked to masculinity and men.10 Here I examine how contemporary perceptions of femininity informed the discussion of sensational murders and their modernity. Finally, whereas sensationalism was prevalent in many and varied cultural arenas, such as the novel, poetry, broadsides (which were more popular earlier in the century), and crime fiction, this chapter chiefly focuses on sensation in the theatre and in journalism. My concern here is with the construction of cultural identities as a means to redefine cultural power relations in an age of mass culture. Theatre and journalism are particularly important to an examination of the discussion of the style and cultural importance of representing murder – the former, because it is experienced and consumed in large public groups, and the latter because it was especially influential on how “society” and the “nation” were perceived.

Stodgy Sensational Murders on Stage As we have seen in the previous chapter, throughout the nineteenth century, murder was an essential and recurring theme on stage. Sensational melodramas gained immense popularity throughout the early and mid-nineteenth century and became the most widespread mode of the Victorian era.11 The small, intimate playhouses that characterized the Georgian era were replaced by enormous theatre halls, designed to accommodate the mass audiences that flocked in to see the shows.12 The physical transformation of the theatre refashioned traditions of acting and stage settings that were exaggerated to fit the vast size of the houses.13 Sensation drama, which relied heavily on stage spectacles and shocking visual effects designed to rouse excitement, was very popular, and throughout the mid-Victorian era, it was not uncommon to witness train explosions, smouldering ships, and gruesome murders occurring on stage.14 But perhaps more importantly, the traumatic and shocking effects of contemporaries’ recent history shaped early sensational melodrama. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and later the liberal and national revolutions, as well as the social movements and mass campaigns formed for the democratization of society, created a dramatic necessity for the intensity of effect in European theatre. As Matthew S. Buckley argues, melodrama spectators, some of whom had just enacted in the public sphere, or had witnessed, the grandiose and bloody drama of modern history unfold, required extreme emotions and sensational violence to match their traumatized sensibilities.15 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a shift had occurred in the English theatre. Melodrama lost its attractive feature of spectacle to the newly evolving medium of cinema and lost its attractive theme of crime to the rising form of detective fiction.16 Theatre owners increasingly sought to regain their establishments’ respectability by darkening houses completely during performances, selling tea and coffee instead of alcoholic beverages, and offering detailed programs instead of short playbills. These changes, as well as reserved seating, the improvement of the status of playwrights through the international copyright

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act of 1887, and the emergence of the “actor-manager”, facilitated transformations in theatrical style. Gradually, the problem play and the New Drama became the dominant theatrical forms.18 No less important were the conscious efforts, made by different cultural agents in various strands, to reform the English theatre.19 As older melodrama shifted, particular styles of representing murder were increasingly perceived as unfashionable. Alongside these transformations in theatrical style and perception, there evolved humorous attitudes which targeted the exaggerated theatricality of sensational murder depictions. No doubt, “blood and thunder” melodrama and sensation melodrama were already the targets of stage burlesque mockery in the 1850s and 1860s.20 But the systematic humorous onslaught on sensation became increasingly significant and much more widespread in the late nineteenth century, manifesting in many and various popular entertainment settings. In 1892, Punch published a series of four sketches, ridiculing the different methods of performing a melodramatic murder onstage, entitled “PhantasmaGore-IA! Picturing the Various Modes of Melodramatic Murder”. The title refers to the Phantasmagoria, a form of spectacle that was very popular in the early nineteenth century and capitalized on innovative use of the magic lantern, as well as on pyrotechnics, to create sensations among audiences. The sketches convey a sense of weariness with the over-the-top components of theatrical murders. The first piece, “The Revolver Murder” (Figure 2.1), shows a blackmoustached gentleman shooting at a dubious-looking man. The caption reads: 17

Figure 2.1 “The Revolver Murder: Picturing the Various Modes of Melodramatic Murder”, Punch, 31 December 1892, 309. Source: Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto

40

Hilarious Homicides Oh! how will the woes of Virtue end? ’Tis late in the Five-Act play; And Fortune still is dark Vice’s friend, And villainy holds its sway … ’Twould scarce be the thing for Vice to crow, And Virtue to sink and die; The end must arrive some time, we know – So bring on your Russian Spy.21

The characters do not have names and are referred to as abstract generalizations or moral prototypes such as “virtue” and “villainy”. Furthermore, the text acknowledges that there was no prospect for villainy to prevail; this is impossible according to the genre’s rules. The fact that the scene takes place in the fifth act indicates that a solution to the predicament must come soon, and so it does, with the help of a Russian spy, who saves the day and kills the villain. The death of the villain, then, is described in deterministic terms, as was usual in melodrama, except that the moral structure is comically substituted with a stylistic convention. It is not retribution that eliminates villainy, but form; it is late in the five-act play and the fiend has to die before the curtain falls. The superficiality and style of sensational melodrama are exaggerated to a point where the genre collapses into itself and all meaning is eradicated from it. Oftentimes, in mid-Victorian sensational dramas, the spectacle itself became the most important part of the production, and the narrative seemed to be shaped mainly for the purpose of showcasing spectacular special effects.22 In The Red Scarf (1869), for instance, the villain ties the hero to a log in a saw-mill, sets the saw going, and then sets fire to the mill.23 In the Punch sketch, the description of the way in which the Russian spy kills the villain emphasizes the theatricality and artificiality of the performed murder. Not only does the killer bother to come all the way up to centre stage, but he also aims his revolver at the sky instead of at the villain. Still, the latter falls dead. This type of theatricality is mocked in the other parts of the series too. In “The Dagger Murder” (Figure 2.2), the illustration clearly shows the villain safely inserting the blade under the victim’s armpit,24 and in “The Over-theCliff Murder” (Figure 2.3) the illustration shows the victim being thrown from a cliff onto a soft mattress backstage.25 Other pieces also poked fun at the genre’s banal stylistic conventions, which served as successful indicators of approaching catastrophes. The sensational melodramatic murder was depicted in these humorous pieces as a tedious chronicle of a homicide foretold. Punch, of course, appealed mostly to middle- and upper-class readers,26 and cost 3d. The view, however, was also evident in other, more affordable, comic periodicals, especially in Judy, which cost 2d. and was politically conservative, and also to a lesser extent, in Fun, which cost 1d., bore a liberal political stance, and appealed mostly to working- and lower-middle-class readers.27 In these instances, the formulaic rendition of murder obliterates any sense of suspense, shock, or real excitement, since even the extravagant stage spectacles were perceived as preposterous theatricality that was nothing more than a caricature. Looking

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Figure 2.2 “The Dagger Murder”, Punch, 17 September 1892, 125. Source: Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto

at Punch’s pieces from the 1840s to the 1870s reveals that this approach to murder representation was new – many mid-Victorian pieces systematically mocked and criticized the utilization of murder as a “commodity” in an age of mass consumerism,28 but very rarely, if at all, were sensational representations of murder depicted as ineffective, or archaic. Quite the opposite – murder representations were presented as effectual and profitable. At the turn of the century, however, the focal point of the criticism implied by many comical pieces was the impotence of sensational murder depictions. It was not merely the performance of the act of murder that was represented as exaggerated and therefore insipid. The villain, traditionally the main perpetrator of the murder, was often ridiculed as a crude caricature that could be identified from a mile off by his signature outfit and absurd stage mannerisms.

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Figure 2.3 “The Over-the-Cliff Murder”, Punch, 18 February 1893, 73. Source: Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto

An 1893 Judy magazine piece described a sophisticated London bachelor taking his adolescent cousin to see her first sensational melodrama. Whereas he, an urbane young gentleman, remains blasé about the series of unfortunate events taking place on the stage, his young protégée is horrified. The actor’s stock mannerisms fail to generate in the sophisticated Londoner any sense of shock or excitement. On the contrary – he seems bored by it. It is the “ingenuous” girl, introduced for the first time to the world of London theatre, who is susceptible to the villain’s performance.29 The description of the villain as a preposterous stock character was very common in humorous pieces targeting melodrama. A 1914 burlesque described one of the characters as: “The naughty villain: The gentleman who does naughty things, who talks through his teeth, smokes endless cigarettes and possesses a dark moustache and silk hat – Ha! Ha!30 Remarkably, a very similar tongue in cheek depiction of a villain is

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evident in a 1910 Playgoer and Society Illustrated piece. There, he is described as having a “cigarette, black coat, moustache, cruel eyes, and all the usual trademarks of the villain”,31 suggesting that the sense of weariness and boredom with “brand” villains and their murderous acts was not restricted just to comical texts. But they certainly flourished and overflowed there, as was the case in the 1882 burlesque, “More Than Ever”, which was produced at The Gaiety Theatre. The Gaiety Theatre, alongside The Adelphi, the Olympic, and the Strand, were the principal places that burlesques were performed in London. Located in the Strand and seating a crowd of over a thousand, the Gaiety was very successful. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, burlesques acquired a more respectable, middle-class audience, as the genre became more and more prevalent, although many of the spectators remained working-class men and women. In “More than Ever”, the two villains are discussing their annoyance with their designated dramatic function and protest that they can think of no new style of murder. A new crime, they conclude, must be invented: I am tired of explosions, of setting fire to houses, and I can think of no new style of murder! LADY AQUA: Poisoning no longer interests me! And forgery has also lost its charm! 32 SIR CRIMSON: We must have a new crime! SIR CRIMSON:

These villains are presented as stock characters who have reached the limit of their effective potential and therefore must transform. As David Mayer demonstrates, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the character of the murderous villain was somewhat transformed, and traditions of theatrical genres were redefined. Henry Irving’s performance of Mathias in The Bells (1871) was the first of a series of representations of more nuanced, complex, even ambiguous villains. In Irving’s late nineteenth-century Lyceum, claims Mayer, “seriousness blended with spectacle”, and crude representations of stage scoundrels, perpetrating sensational slaughters, were replaced by self-aware, pain-filled, and guilt-ridden villains.33 Humorous pieces often presented the melodramatic villain as a vanishing prototype. In 1893, a music hall number entitled “The Villains at the Vic” mockingly lamented the gradual disappearance of the sensational fiend from the English stage, and the days when one could see no less than six murders in one play. The song, written by the famous Albert Chevalier, was most probably a reference to a Henry S. Leigh poem: “A Villanous [sic] Ambition”, published in 1871. In Leigh’s poem, the actor playing the villains at the Vic arouses “awe” and admiration in the narrator, who desperately wants to play them,34 but in Chevalier’s song, the soon-to-be-retired actor reminisces about the “happy bygone day” when he “murdered babes by dozens, slew innumerable cousins”.35 Many humorous texts, then, conveyed a keen awareness of transformations in theatrical conventions that were taking place at the time. Looking at a 1911 Daily Mirror cartoon (see Figure 2.4)

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Figure 2.4 “False Alarm: Some ‘Mystery’ Crimes and their Solution”, The Daily Mirror, 9 November 1911. Source: W.K. Haselden/Mirrorpix

validates and highlights how much genre and form were central in the discussion on the modernity of murder representations. The piece concerns the representation of murder in the cinema, an innovative medium that was introduced to Britain in the late nineteenth century. Here, what at first

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seems to be murder, turns out to be nothing more than an over-the-top illusion. The relatively new technology of cinematography is presented as the successor of the theatre rather than as a groundbreaking, original medium. The “modern” invention is treated as a traditional one, which maintains longstanding melodramatic and sensational conventions.36 These humorous texts may be indicative of much more than a contemporary understanding of shifting theatrical traditions. They may have actively functioned as catalysts for the same transformations they joked about, by ridiculing sensational murders. They helped form and strengthen the conception of such murders as outdated and tedious.

The Explanation Is an Inflation in Sensation and Assassination But what were the explanations given by contemporaries for this shift in attitudes towards sensational representations of murder? Often, it was that inflation in sensational murders throughout the mid-Victorian era made audiences and readers grow tired of them and immune to their effect. In reality, murder was in decline during the late nineteenth century.37 From the 1860s onwards, however, and although contemporary statistics indicated otherwise, there was a widespread belief that crime was on the rise.38 This discrepancy between statistical data and prevalent concepts about the rates of violence is to be attributed, some scholars argue, to the increased access to tales of crime in all forms of the printed media, especially the periodical press.39 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the new journalism, represented in Britain by newspapers such as the Pall Mall Gazette and others, was on the rise and gaining increasing popularity. It regularly provided readers with gruesome, sensational accounts of murder, for the purposes of entertainment and shock. In late nineteenth-century humorous pieces, sensationalist writing in the newspapers was often parodied. Here, too, a sense of weariness with exaggeration was evident. An 1891 illustrated comic from Moonshine magazine (Figure 2.5) shows a painter, holding a dripping red paint bucket, going about his day’s work. A woman, seeing the trail of red stains, immediately assumes it is blood and that murder has occurred. Terrified, she approaches a policeman and soon a flock of worried passers-by, including an eager evening paper journalist, are following the “bloody” trail to find the murderer. Eventually, it leads them to the unsuspecting painter, and the mystery is solved.40 The title of the piece, “Another Sensation”, captures the critique implied by the text. There is an inherent contradiction in the phrase “another sensation”, since a sensation is, by definition, something unique and rare, whereas the word “another” implies excess, even redundancy. The sensationalist state of mind is represented here as so ubiquitous that a reverse cultural process has started to take place. When everything is a sensation, nothing is a sensation. When every red paint drizzle suggests a horrific murder, no murder can be horrific.

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Figure 2.5 “Another Sensation”, Moonshine, 14 March 1891. Source: © British Library Board

This theme – sensational murders that are either not sensational or are not murders – recurs in many humorous pieces. Many of them, such as the 1883 burlesque “The Silver Guilt”, performed at the Strand Theatre, and subtitled “A do About Noting”,41 and the 1903 music hall number “The End of the Chapter”, where a policeman rushes to save a man from being brutally slain only to discover that the latter cried out: “she’s murdering me” since his wife blew his nose too hard, derives humour from the gap between the notion of murder as a tantalizing, exceptional experience, and the everyday banalization of it by the sensationalist press and the sensationhungry public. An 1884 poem published in Judy utilizes press jargon and comically accompanies it with a mundane occurrence that can be mistaken for murder only by the exceptionally imaginative (or paranoid) reader. Its title is “S-CANDLE-OUS MURDER!”. The poem, as suggested by the pun in the headline, describes a man putting out a candle before going to bed, whereas the verse treats the candle as a victim of homicide and the somnolent man as the murderer.42 The preoccupation with murder and its renditions was perceived to be so great that murder had become devoid of meaning. And yet, an additional implication of the poem somewhat contradicts this and is not as nearly so comical. Sensationalist jargon seems to have diffused into and to be dominating the late nineteenth-century state of mind to such a degree that everything, including mundane occurrences, has the

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potential to be perceived as violent and murderous. This created a ubiquitous sense of menace. An 1894 Fun magazine illustration captioned “The Series of Six Diabolical Murders Satisfactory Explained” reiterates this argument (see Figure 2.6). The illustration includes six scenes of people engaged in peaceful, everyday activities such as playing the piano together,

Figure 2.6 “The Series of Six Diabolical Murders Satisfactory Explained”, Fun, 29 May 1894. Source: © British Library Board

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or hanging a picture on the wall. Sensational captions interpret the images as extremely violent by either utilizing the double meaning of certain idioms (such as to “murder” a song), or by employing misleading descriptions that can be easily misconstrued (“He hung up his father in the hall”). The jokes lie in the gap between the ambiguity of the text and the conclusiveness of the images. This creates a humorous, if somewhat disturbing, dissonance between the visual information given to readers and its textual interpretation. The graphic separation between word and image helps create the sense of terror, since the illustrated people are so clearly innocent, yet the text undermines what the eye perceives. In most humorous representations, however, especially those satirizing sensational slaughters on stage, jokes implied that the inflation in sensational violence transformed the representation of murder into ineffective entertainment. Interestingly, this was true for older, “cruder” sensational pieces, as well as for new and supposedly “modern” ones. Maria Marten’s death at the hand of her lover, William Corder, in 1828, was one of the most celebrated murder cases of the century and was adapted to popular sensational melodramas throughout.43 In the 1890s, many texts parodied the sensational appearance of the murdered Maria’s ghost onstage.44 But at least equally parodied was André de Lorde’s45 famous and supposedly innovative Au Téléphone, a sensational stage murder that presented a new and exciting technology as a prophetic artifact. The play, which was translated to English and produced at the Wyndham’s Theatre in 1902, tells the story of a man who hears his wife being murdered over the telephone. The telephone serves as a dramatic instrument designed to enhance the sense of horror. It is presented as an intimidating example of progress that intensifies the anxieties of modern society as it allows the terror of violent crime to penetrate everywhere via the device’s wires. Such accounts acknowledged their audiences’ anxieties about living in the “age of the machine”. In fact, at the time, telephone operators became subjects of special fascination to scientific psychologists, industrial hygienists, and physicians, who feared that new technological workspaces might cause overload and dysfunction that will eventually lead to nervous breakdowns. The possibility of an ever-expanding network of communication aroused fears about a future fusion of human and technical resources in an increasingly rationalized world.46 Most of the play’s parodies, however, mocked the histrionic performance of the lead actor, Charles Warner, which was deemed ridiculous and old-fashioned: Warner’s method of using the telephone was highly improper. Telephone clerks had already begun to imitate his stentorian tones and even his gestures, to the utter disorganization of the exchanges and the fracture of several diaphragms. Many of the wires had corkscrewed under the stress.47 This brings us to the question of what made certain murder representations to be perceived as more ridiculous than others? Many stage productions,

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although often dubbed as “new”, “exciting”, or “original”, were perceived by late nineteenth-century commentators as dull, “hence the cuckoo-cry, ‘it has been all done before’”.48 The more sensational a murder depiction was, the more it seemed to be ridiculed and presented as outmoded. This explanation is chiefly aesthetical and has to do with audiences’ and readers’ alleged acquired resistance to graphic murder depictions, regardless of class and cultural differences. But further exploration reveals that many middle-class and elite commentators have explained this resistance in a political context, to promote an agenda that would restore their supposedly challenged hegemony in an age of mass culture and democratization.

Sensational Murders and Class: The Cultural Ramifications of a Challenged Hegemony Throughout the second half of the century, and in particular from the 1880s onwards, middle-class anxieties about the blurring of class boundaries culminated. The Third Reform Act of 1884, which expanded the electorate to twothirds of English and Welsh men, two-fifths of Scottish men, and half of Irish men, together with the 1883 Political Corruption Act and the 1885 Redistribution Act, were perceived by many contemporaries as a huge (and, for some, daunting) step towards an age of mass democracy in Britain.49 Although in reality, the franchise was still quite restricted, social mobility for the working class was extremely limited, and many traditional political elements still remained, the process of the extension of the vote was often perceived by contemporaries as increasingly influential.50 The latter part of the nineteenth century was also marked by dramatic shifts in the fields of entertainment and leisure: by 1900, about 90% of the population in England was literate, which resulted in the expanded production of increasingly cheaper reading materials. After 1870 there was a substantial improvement in the living conditions of the working class, and a growth of the home market, as real wages increased.51 The working class had become potential consumers of leisure activities and various goods. This, together with the emergence of mass consumerism, was closely related to the “standardization” of culture. The expansion of popular leisure in the mid-Victorian era, as Peter Bailey has shown, cultivated concerns about a new social reality in which the patrician/plebeian dichotomy might be undermined.52 Furthermore, since the 1880s, Britain’s hegemony as a global economic power was increasingly undermined, and the period of the late nineteenth century is often described by historians as one of instability, and growing anxiety about degeneration and apocalypse.53 Political and economic stress erupted periodically from the 1886 Trafalgar Riots and Hyde Park Riots, and ethnic tensions intensified following the influx of Jewish migrants from eastern Europe to the east of London,54 which, in a climate of antisemitism, contributed to the perception of the area as a filthy, gloomy locus and its orientalist representation as atavistic, alien and murderous. The allegedly “degenerate” working classes were feared and often perceived as a threat to the virtues and morality of the

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“respectable” classes. Anxieties about social and cultural distinction, then, were particularly prominent in the period. Remember author and critic Edmund Gosse, who in his 1891 “The Influence of Democracy on Literature” articulated these anxieties so aptly, describing in horror how the masses carry the “superior person with it and in it, like a mote of dust”?55 No doubt, “superior” and “inferior” literary tastes became a focus of interest in the period and were manifest in the discussion of the representation of murder. An 1890 Moonshine cartoon (Figure 2.7) shows a monstrous-looking paper boy advertising the latest murder story while a middle-class elderly couple stands nearby. The woman is visibly shaken and her husband is trying to console her, while scolding the paper boy for his “barbarity”. The boy is deliberately drawn as a lower-class “degenerate” prototype, brutally threatening the middleclass couple. His right leg, positioned in the far front of the composition, is in a menacing position, as if he is about to trample the startled couple. He seems to represent the personification of murder itself. His face resembles a hideous skull – his eyes look like bony sockets, his nose like a nasal bone and his mouth is wide open, revealing a set of crooked teeth. Sensationalist journalism is equated with violent crime, with the act of homicide itself.56 Yet, in this case, it is not middle-class journalists or editors who embody the homicidal brutality of the news industry, but the working-class paper boy, who intimidates respectable society.

Figure 2.7 “The Latest Murder, or: Making the Most of it”, Moonshine, 15 November 1890. Source: © British Library Board

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In reality, of course, most newspaper editors and journalists, as well as the playwrights who wrote sensation dramas, were middle-class men. Moonshine, which was published between 1879 and 1902 and cost 1d.,57 especially emphasized the relationship between class and violence. In “Another Sensation” discussed earlier, the innocent painter “accused” of murder is also illustrated as an archetypical “degenerate” working-class man. This may indicate stereotypical notions prevalent in a conservative magazine with a wide circulation. Both cartoons were published in the early 1890s, in the aftermath of the Jack the Ripper murders, at a time when great anxiety about urban violence promoted acute social awareness. As Peter Ackroyd argues, there grew a close epistemological association between the Ripper murders and the “East End”,58 and by the late 1880s it became a quasi-mythological cultural construct signifying a dreadful urban space of devastating poverty, ruin, and criminality. Conservative anxieties regarding class conflict and “degenerate”, “dangerous”, working-class people were accentuated by the 1888 murders, and were associated with fears of revolution and socialism.59 There were, however, popular contemporary texts that criticized the growing estrangement and suspicion between classes. An 1893 play written by Charles H.E. Brookfield and produced at the Haymarket Theatre, implied that violent crime was the outcome of social injustice. Brookfield was the epitome of an opulent, privileged theatre man, who came from a high-born family and enjoyed a network of literary elite friends.60 The play, evidently, gained immense popularity and was well-liked by London’s late-nineteenth-century society. Rachel Beer61 née Sassoon, the editor of the Observer and subsequently of The Times, invited Brookfield to perform the play privately at her house in Chesterfield Gardens,62 although it presented her social rank in a very bad light as callous, vindictive, and extremely prejudiced against their social inferiors.63 More than often, however, contemporary commentators attributed the lust to consume violent murder stories to a degenerate state of mind. “It is almost an axiom among the cultured”, proclaimed a 1904 piece in The Monthly Review, “that a keen interest in crime and criminals is a token of a defective intellectual development”.64 Often, violent bloodshed was blatantly constructed as the repellent manifestation of a “plebeian”, “degenerate” culture. Many contemporary critical commentaries on theatrical sensations dubbed the “popular” audience as having a vulgar, “omnivorous appetite”,65 and described them as being ever-hungry for sensational incidents. Lynn Voskuil argues that audiences’ strong and shared somatic reaction to sensational theatre “massed them to each other”.66 Taking this reading into consideration, the resistance to seeing murder onstage can be interpreted as a resistance to being massed, and as a resistance to the democratization of culture. As Joanna Hofer-Robinson and Beth Palmer argue, theatrical sensations addressed “audiences’ instincts rather than their intellect”, and such “involuntary somatic responses cut across boundaries of class and education”.67 The subject of late-nineteenth-century theatre audiences’ social composition is extremely complex and has been

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much debated by scholars. Some argue that both music halls and West End theatres catered for mixed-class audiences and that most houses, whether more “prestigious” or perceived as more “plebian”, were socially heterogeneous. Others maintain that there was indeed spatial class segregation, whether by city district or by sitting (or standing) areas in the theatre itself.68 In the late nineteenth century, not wanting to see murder represented may have functioned as a sign of good taste that distinguished between sophisticated and uncultured readers and audiences in an age of increasingly standardized popular entertainment – whether they sat next to each other in the theatre, or not. But anxieties about the degenerate masses and their allegedly dire influence on society and culture, which flourished in the modern era of democratization and socialism, were very much gendered. Like working-class men and youth, women were often represented as sensation-mongers and, at the same time, as especially susceptible to sensational journalism and its most ardent adherents. Comical periodicals, in particular, tended to ridicule women as the prime consumers of murder news, and the principal engine behind the industry of sensationalism.

Mocking Murderous Women Perceptions of Victorian women as consumers and producers of sensational, murder-filled texts, as well as representations of “sensational” female murderesses received much scholarly attention in the 1980s and 1990s, which demonstrated how important the image of the “dangerous” woman was throughout the late nineteenth century.69 Already in the 1860s, Victorian women writers of sensation novels were depicted with disdain by literary critics.70 Their writing was perceived as literary poison that was inappropriate for respectable women to read or produce. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued, female characters were mostly depicted as either chaste or monstrous, since Victorian patriarchal culture fostered a view of femininity that combined images of the “angel in the house”71 – nourishing, delicate, passive and subordinate to male dominance – with notions of subversive and sometimes malevolent femininity. By the late nineteenth century, however, such binary images were being challenged, and in the 1890s, at a time of cultural, social, and economic crises, the resurgence of women’s movements occurred.72 In the 1890s gender perceptions and ideologies underwent dramatic transformations, and more complex representations of women appeared. The multiple identities, as well as fictional constructions, of the New Woman, emerged and became a distinctively fin de siècle phenomenon,73 cultivating a change in gender politics, calling for equal educational opportunities, political activism, sexual independence, and dress reform. The movements for women’s suffrage undermined traditional notions of domesticity and the borderlines of the public sphere.74 Humorous texts on women as consumers of sensationalism are complex: the allegedly opposing concepts of murder and femininity change and redefine one

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another. Homicide was feminized, due to the supposition that women were much more enthusiastic about murder stories than men. The labelling of this type of sensationalism as a distinctively feminine genre for a female audience supposedly mitigated the appeal of murder and made it seem less violent, less brutal, less anti-social, and perhaps even less perilous. Rather, the domestication of murder emphasized its amusing, enjoyable aspects as mass entertainment. In the satirical poem “Oh What Shall I Do Now My Murderer’s Gone?” a woman is depicted eagerly reading every little detail of her beloved murderer: “With what gust would I read how his time he employed, how he relished his egg, how his chop he enjoyed” as if he were her favourite melodrama actor. Readers and audiences who were passively participating in the mocking of violent, sensational murders had to decide to which group they belonged: whether they were laughing at themselves, and thus acknowledging their own “faults” – their poor taste and cultural inferiority (perhaps even their “femininity”) – or whether they were laughing at “others”. This process of self-identification, through humour, may have facilitated the construction of late-nineteenth-century cultural identities that were not necessarily based solely on class, but rather on taste, gender, and cultural prestige. In 1902, a verse targeting the popular French writer Xavier de Montepin (1823–1902), who published a great deal on crime and mystery, appeared in Punch. It represented sensational murder stories as specially tailored for working-class women: Till on my tales of curdling crime Shall every poor grisette Spend all her little leisure time And in their charm forget The golden chips that used to be The joy of dinner hours What time my penny dreadful she More greedily devours.75 In French urban and literary repertoire, grisette stood both for a worker (milliner or seller) and prostitute. Here, murder stories are associated with cheap food, the most common, fundamental commodity. The young girl devours them as she did the potato on her lunch break; the sensation is her fuel. Amusement is just as vital as nourishment, perhaps even more so. And the writer knows how to craft a sensational murder that could easily be digested by an uneducated, working-class woman. Gender and class are intertwined. The bourgeois man makes his fortune by feeding the multitudes on blood and gore – yet, since his target audience is women, the blood and gore are neither gruesome nor brutal. They have “charm”, they are a “joy”, and they are something young girls can be “fond” of. Punch readers had to decide at whom they were laughing, and with whom they identified themselves. Arguably, most Punch readers were not able to identify themselves,

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socially, with a young grisette. Although circulating widely, and throughout the British Empire, Punch was aimed primarily at a metropolitan, middleclass audience, and it spoke from and to their interests.76 But if readers were avid consumers of murder stories, as the grisette was, their alignment with her may have forced them to wonder, although not in so many words: “am I, in my obsession with violent entertainments, as grotesque as this poor working girl? What might this imply for my cultural prestige?” Indeed, the structure of binary oppositions constructed by the sketch goes beyond class. It also involves gender, and ideas about production and consumption. On the surface, in this piece, the bourgeois man is constructed as a producer and the working-class woman as a passive consumer. Although, if they identified with de Montepin, readers became themselves the subject of harsh satirical mockery, which may bring to our post-twentieth-century minds the much later Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture. In any case, whether the piece is read as a social critique on the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist bourgeoisie, or as ridiculing plebeian tastes, popular murder depictions are represented here as inferior, feminine, and unproductive. Such notions are prevalent in serious theatre criticisms of the period, as in the case of a 1883 piece about “A Sailor and his Lass”, which was produced at Drury Lane. The anonymous commentator attacks playwright, theatrical impresario and actor Augustus Harris, accusing him of prostituting himself for the enjoyment of the uncultured masses: he felt the pulse of the public, and pretty accurately diagnosed the very low state of the public taste requiring sensation, outrage, and noisy nonsense … in a series of bombastic pantomimes that he is pleased to call plays, and the public liked the horrors, and meekly, indeed cheerfully, swallowed them.77 Just as the grisette greedily “devours” violent stories, here too, the ignorant, bloodthirsty masses are depicted as “swallowing” whatever “monstrosity” Harris prepares for them at Drury Lane. In both cases, the manufacturers of sensation are presented as active producers of (inferior) cultural products and the masses as passive consumers of them. In the 1883 Theatre piece, the masses are depicted as “meek” and “cheerful”, and therefore arguably as feminine. As in many other instances, however, the violent scenes in the play are described by the critic as tedious and unimpressive: “an explosion … [that] kills nobody, and may be safely used by the young of both sexes”.78 Again, gender is highlighted. The impotence of the violent scene makes it, according to the critic, suitable for young women. On the other hand, women, particularly working-class women, were often “masculinized” because they were sometimes assumed to be more attracted than men to murder stories. In an 1887 Fun magazine piece entitled: “On the Horrible”, a fictional gentleman named Diogenes Tubbs declares that women were “naturally born for cruelty” and that they especially adore

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murder stories. Reading or hearing an especially “good” one is said in this text to have the same effect on them as a week at the sanatorium: “It’s meat and drink to them, and a healthy liver into the bargain … It’s a digestive, and a tonic, and a stimulant.” Here too, sensational murder narratives are compared to food women nourish on. Yet, in this instance, murder is also compared to an elixir that makes women healthier and stronger. Tubbs claims that his old aunt, who was very ill once, got well after hearing about George Mullins, the murderer who killed a woman with a hammer in 1860. The notion that murder stories have the ability to physically make women stronger and fitter leads Mr Tubbs to the conclusion that women are much more violent and cruel than men: 79

I never knew a boy who stuck a hairpin into a cat’s tail, but don’t your dear little girls do it. I should think they did – the little wretches! … Go and watch a little girl who is told off to look after her younger sisters. Doesn’t she slap them, just? Should think she does. Women and a love of murder go hand in hand.80 The fictional character of Diogenes Tubbs was a recurring figure in Fun magazine throughout the 1880s.81 He was portrayed as an ill-tempered gentleman, who always had something wicked to say about every subject. He complained about Christmas, about the weather, about traveling, the outdoors, the seaside, going abroad, bank holidays, Lord Randolph Churchill, and so on and so forth.82 Naturally, he complained about women too. His notions are clearly parodied and ridiculed in these pieces and yet, they are a valuable source, since they were designed to represent and satirize widespread beliefs on women and murder. In fact, many contemporary experts in psychology and psychiatry attempted to explain women’s alleged fascination with murder stories and murder trials, and contributed it to the phenomenon of sadism, which was thought of as atavistic and degenerate.83 Women who loved murder stories were sometimes represented as physiologically different from other women, as well as from men. Their nourishment was unusual and even their body functioned differently since sensation cured and revitalized them. These images are evident not only in humorous pieces representing women who loved sensation but also in comical representations of women who committed homicide themselves. The image of the femme fatale emerged in the nineteenth century as a powerful icon and became especially ubiquitous in the latter part of the century. A few studies have deciphered her as the “signifier of patriarchal anxieties about the rise of the ‘new woman’”,84 a symbol of a dangerous sensuality that often leads to (male) doom.85 This image is ridiculed in many humorous pieces, which are built around the mismatch between the description of the femme fatale as a dangerous woman and the not-so-impressive outcome of her alleged crimes. A 1906 piece comically dubbed the strikingly attractive villainess as the “worst woman in the world”86 (obviously, a spoof on Walter

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Melville’s “The Worst Woman in London”, produced at the Standard in 1899), although her murderous plot fails miserably, and in an 1898 piece published in Judy magazine, the alleged murderess is portrayed as a beautiful woman who charms a chemist with her magnificent eyes and mesmerizes him into selling her some deadly poison: “She threw back her cloak, revealing a figure of the most exquisite symmetry, and raised her veil. The chemist gasped for air. He had never seen a woman half so lovely. Her deep, snake-like, violet eyes seemed to repel and fascinate him; and he slowly measured out a quantity of the poison”.87 Female beauty and sexuality are associated here, as elsewhere, with witchcraft. In an 1886 burlesque by William Clarck, travestying the life and times of King Henry VIII, Ann Boleyn is portrayed as a bloodthirsty fornicator who plots to murder the king and is accused of being a witch: “No witchcraft, Annie! Sorceress, beware!”88 In these examples, the murderesses are portrayed as sensuous women who possess magical powers over men. These powers are deliberately exaggerated to the point in which the women are no longer portrayed as flesh and blood human beings. Rather, they are depicted as supernatural, fantastic, fatal creatures. It is exactly the gap between the mystical aura of the murderess and the mundane circumstances surrounding her crime that is comical. In the Judy piece mentioned above, for instance, the beautiful woman who allegedly hypnotizes the chemist with her snake-like violet eyes uses the poison to get rid of a mad dog rampaging in her neighbourhood. The poor chemist, however, is convinced that since she is so strikingly beautiful, she must be a murderess: “merciful powers … I am ruined! There will be murder done before morning!” And yet, there are many humorous representations of murderesses that portray them as ordinary women, who committed homicide for practical reasons, oftentimes to retain or to restore their respectability. This is especially evident in music hall numbers, where domestic themes were typically emphasized.89 Music hall90 emerged in the 1830s and became the most prominent form of commercialized popular culture of the late nineteenth century.91 The London music hall reached the pinnacle of its popularity somewhere between the 1880s and the outbreak of the Great War,92 with approximately 35 large music halls, seating 45,000 spectators nightly.93 Whereas in the earlier Victorian period, the halls and variety theatres catered mainly for lower-middle and working-class audiences, this was not the case in the the1890s, when the music hall began to spread to London’s more affluent suburbs and to the West End,94 and a more “respectable” middle-class audience started to attend the shows.95 Music halls, then, moved up the social scale and became more and more bourgeois, and although it was the most significant form of working-class culture,96 many scholars argue that they in fact reflected the style and values of the middle classes.97 In many music hall numbers, the murderess is either an unattractive woman hunting for a husband, an exasperated wife, or a young woman whose good name was tarnished.98 An 1881 song by W.H. Philips titled “Benjamin Buff”99 tells the story of a wealthy old man who has trouble

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finding a wife and when he finally does, she poisons him, takes all his money, and marries another man. In Wincoott’s 1896 song “I’m Still Alive” a husband tells the audience the story of how his wife tried to murder him and poison his tea. Eventually, he outwitted her, put the cup on the shelf “and she drank it herself”.100 In other Music Hall numbers, unwedded spinsters try to violently force men to marry them by threatening them with revolvers. Charles Osborne’s 1898 number, for example, tells the story of how an old maid, who kept a ladies’ school, found a man hiding in the dormitory. She forcibly pulled him out and then threatened to “blow out [his] brains”101 unless he married her. A similar incident is described in Hasting and Potter’s 1888 song “She Stood behind the Parlor Door”, in which a woman threatens a man that unless he marries her, she will shoot and kill him. The speaker in the song, the startled man, describes her as a wild, dangerous savage: She stood behind the parlor Glared at me, looked at the Held a pistol near my nose, And swore unless I married

door, then began to lock it key, and placed it in her pocket and jumped just like a ni**er her that she would pull the trigger.102

There is an apparent disparity between the way in which the woman is described in the song, and her portrayal in the illustration. Whereas the text clearly depicts her physical motions as uncultivated and savage, in a racist way indeed, in the drawing this is disregarded and the comical situation the song describes is independently interpreted. Although textually, there is a clear difference between the way in which the poisoning wife and the armed unwedded woman are portrayed, the drawings blur the discrepancies and present a rather similar visual image of the murder scene. In both illustrations,103 the women are drawn with their back facing the front of the picture, whereas the murdered (or threatened to be murdered) men are facing the front. The male victims are the focal point of the scene, while the murderesses are less significant. This is especially interesting since in both cases the lyrics describe in great detail the physical appearance and behaviour of the women. Furthermore, whereas Benjamin Buff’s wife is seen passing through the threshold of the door on her way with her new lover, while her husband is lying dead on a sofa, the spinster stands by the door while her victim is begging for his life near a sofa. The illustrations create a clear graphic distinction between the domestic sphere and the public sphere. The women are represented as transgressors of the boundaries of the private realm, and are drawn, either on their way “outside” or standing near the doorstep. The men, on the other hand, are represented as reluctantly domesticated. Benjamin Buff’s corpse becomes an object that is a part of the domestic scene, while the threatened man who has a gun pointed to his head is forced against the wall. Finally, while the social status of each of the women is implied in the lyrics, the illustrations blur class differences and

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portray both culprits in a similar way. Buff’s wife is depicted as an attractive, dignified young lady: “She’d lovely light hair, complexion quite fair gold chain, and a splendid bright eye; A grand stately walk and a fine tongue to talk, which of course made old Benjamin sigh”.104 The spinster, however, is depicted in the verse as much less respectable. The text has ethnic and racial connotations that help classify her as someone who lacks respectability and is not English. Her surname, “Maloney”, is Irish and this categorized her as violent, temperamental, and unrestrained since this was the traditional image of the Irish in popular culture and in the music hall in particular. She also “jumped just like a ni**er”, which instantly categorizes her as being allegedly savage. Humorous and often degrading representations of black people were also very prevalent in music hall at the time. The Irishman and the black man were both popular stage figures that were perceived and represented as socially inferior.105 Maloney’s characterization fits the colonial frame of mind that saw ethnicity as a basis for social hierarchy, as well as social “danger”. Gender, class, and ethnicity were perceived as intertwined in the discourse on criminality as certain groups were labelled as more inclined to perpetrate crime than others and therefore required more supervision.

Punishment and Crime Deterrence A lenient criminal justice system believed to have induced violent crime was often presented as a modern malady. Quite a few humorous representations convey a sense of disappointment with the law’s inability to prevent violent crime and murder in particular, in “modern” times. A reform in the criminal justice system was one of the most pressing topics of late Victorian times. The gradual transformation in the criminal law began in the 1820s and 1830s with the establishment of London’s Metropolitan Police in 1829, as well as similar police forces throughout Britain, and the repeal of the death penalty for many offenses.106 By the 1840s, capital punishment was limited to four offenses107 and by the 1850s, an abolition movement seemed to be gaining momentum towards the complete termination of the death penalty.108 Corporal punishment seemed to be waning – in 1848, the Criminal Law Commission, endeavouring to facilitate a full legal codification, recommended that it should be retained only for the felony of treason,109 a recommendation that was finally approved by parliament in 1859.110 But in the 1860s and 1870s, the inclination towards subtler punishments shifted and harsher penalties were administered.111 Advocacy of stricter regulation and control in comical writing is in keeping with the general trend, which was also supported in the sensational press, which had a major role in the shifting discourse on crime policies. The new journalism provided readers with gruesome accounts of murder tales, and played a key role in cultivating the fear of violent crime and in forming a stricter punitive agenda.112

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Concern about leniency was continuously tapped in the comical periodicals. An 1882 Punch illustration entitled “Murder Made Easy” (Figure 2.8) ridiculed the alleged easiness with which “Dangerous men” could obtain weapons. The joke relied on the comparison between the strict restrictions on selling poison and the leniency about selling firearms.

Figure 2.8 “Murder Made Easy”, Punch, 14 January 1882. Source: Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto

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The written text humorously exposes the double standard towards selling poison, whereas the drawing seems to be more intimidating than funny. The buyer is drawn like a prototype of the “degenerative” criminal. In fact, his appearance is similar to Charles Dickens’s Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, as he is portrayed in the novel as well as in Cruikshank’s and Fred Barnard’s famous illustrations.113 The Punch illustration, whether deliberately or unintentionally, alluded to one of the most well-known and hated murderers in English popular culture, a character that symbolized brutality and ruthlessness. The vilelooking man is drawn leaning forward towards the retailer in a menacing gesture, a revolver laid on the counter, within his reach and in a straight line from his fist. A massive barrel of petroleum is located in front of the counter, by his side and in a straight line from his body. This particular visual setting created an ominous sensation, familiar to contemporaries, since it was very clear that it was just a matter of time until the new “Bill Sikes” would get his hands on these weapons and murder someone.114 The notion of modern society as too lenient and humane is very dominant in comical pieces that target punishment and crime deterrence. An 1887 Fun segment entitled: “Euphemisms; or, The Advantages of Civilization”115 satirized what was perceived as a contemporary inclination to be too merciful and compassionate with criminals. A ten-year-old boy is brought to justice after murdering a hundred people. The magistrate asks the father of the child if he can prevent him from murdering more people in the future. The latter admits that he has no control over his boy and that he cannot prevent this from happening again. The magistrate, who is “stultified by public opinion, the Home Secretary, and mistaken conception of humaneness”, concludes that the child is discharged, and “may go and repeat the offense”, which is referred to as nothing more than a “mischief”. “The Murderer and Many Friends”, a satirical piece that was published in Fun magazine in 1889, exhibits a somewhat different, perhaps slightly sinister sense of murderous crime and modernity. It presents the biblical first murderer, Cain, as an archetype of all subsequent murderers throughout the ages. Cain is depicted as a mythical, immortal being who slaughters time and again, in different historical eras and different cultural contexts, thus symbolizing the ever-transforming social essence of the crime. At first, Cain appears to be an outcast of society. There is a price set on his head and he admits he feels as if he is being hunted like a tiger. Centuries pass, and he is presented as Jack the Ripper, amiably fondling a long surgical knife and drinking himself into a state of homicidal frenzy. He is still an outcast but, according to his own admission, there are so many murderers in the world that he can safely hide within the crowd. In the last scene, Cain is presented as an extremely wealthy man, who happily lives in an extravagant mansion with his family. Evidently, he is now a contractor, and he had just finished

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building a boarding school. To save money, he used clay instead of bricks, a decision that resulted in the death of some two hundred little boys. No criminal charges, however, are to be held against him. He is no longer an outcast but a respectable, civilized member of society.116 One of the text’s most important significances concerns the ever-growing presence of murderers throughout history. At the beginning of time, there was only one murderer: Cain. As centuries passed, the world became full and murderers were many, although they were still considered criminals. Finally, the spirit of “mawkish civilization”, as the text coins it, enabled murderers to become respected members of society. The text offers its own interpretation of the late nineteenth-century growing belief, in the inherent criminal nature of every human being. Modernity meant here a process of constant refinement that is hazardous to society and has a corrupting effect on all walks of it. The piece, published only 13 months after the final “Jack the Ripper” murder, considered the Whitechapel murders to be “old-fashioned” and presented them as a remnant of bygone historical days. Indeed, physical brutality was constructed here as antiquated and as being less and less prominent in modern society. Murder in general, however, was certainly not presented as a declining social phenomenon. It merely seemed to have changed its form. In fact, judicial leniency was presented both as a sign of progress and as the cause for the surge in non-violent homicides. This train of thought is also evident in an 1882 Fun skit that satirized what must have been perceived then as a contemporary weakness of “punishment of crime”. Civilization and progress are represented as the forces responsible for the waning of the deterrence effect. Punishment of crime is portrayed in this piece as an elderly, feeble, half-witted gentleman and the doctor who was treating him was portrayed as the hallmark of modern, humane, civilized society. Although, in fact, rather than curing him he was doing him much harm, or as Fun puts it, “murdering” him.117 The text employs the concept of murder ambivalently. Homicide is referred to as a flourishing crime induced by a lenient, weakening, “modern” justice system. Then, the modernization and alleged humanization of criminal law are referred to as murderers. Punishment of crime is portrayed as their victim. This particular comical scheme generates political implications, as the piece’s finale stirs an overwhelming sense of urgency to stop “Overdose civilization” from murdering poor “Punishment of crime”.

Modernity and Murder Modernity and its many meanings were often debated and considered in comical representations of murder. Some pieces acknowledged that major transformations were taking place at the time and were radically altering the face of civilization as well as the future of England, although most pieces conveyed a rather conservative approach and tended to dub modernity as

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“more of the same”. New technologies, for instance, were either represented as facilitating novel methods of homicide and innovative means to prevent it, or as fancy gadgets that changed nothing, but helped maintain traditional practices and customs. In a 1906 Judy piece titled “My Modern Sensational Melodrama”, the hero uses wireless telegraphy to save the day after the villainess attempted to murder her old invalid husband and himself. By means of innovative technology, he is able to charter another sea vessel and safely sail back to England. In a 1905 pantomime entitled “Harlequin Jack and the Scarlet Runners”, Jack’s mother, after watching her son mercilessly slay the giant, rings the telephone and sends for an airship to get them safely home.118 A 1911 piece from the Daily Mirror draws heavily on the comical conventions tailored for melodrama and sensationalism when representing murder in the cinema, an innovative medium that was introduced to Britain in the late nineteenth century. Here, too, the violent crimes perpetrated by villains are portrayed as over- the-top illusions that in fact have nothing to do with reality. What at first seemed to be murder, turns out to be nothing more than the illusion of mass entertainment. The relatively new technology of cinematography is presented as the successor of the theatre rather than as a groundbreaking, original medium. The “modern” inventions (the telephone and cinematography) are treated as a traditional apparatus that maintained longstanding practices. In almost all texts examined here, fin de siècle anxieties about cultural decline resulted in a discourse in which murder depictions had a somewhat ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, violent, sensational, and melodramatic representations of murder signified an allegedly distinctive modern, plebian, and feminine mass culture, which, on the other hand, was increasingly perceived as outdated. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, these ideas were not limited just to comical, widely circulated, middle-class texts. Here is a serious piece, written in 1887 by art critic Harry Quilter and published in the intellectual Contemporary Review, which clearly constructs melodrama as outdated: the drama itself seems to languish – nay, almost to die … the most successful plays of the last dozen years [were] adaptations of foreign works, melodramas of the crudest and most unnatural kind, farcical comedies built upon the line of Palais-Royal farces, and so-called comic operas … dramas which were not new even in the time of our grandfathers.119 The Contemporary Review was aimed at an upper-middle-class, highly educated readership, and had a much more limited circulation, compared to the comical magazines.120 Humour and literary criticism may be seen as complementary categories, as they are both highly reflective forms. While in humorous texts, the process of manipulating the audience into a “comical gap” is also the process of social and cultural commentary, literary criticism

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offers interpretations and commentaries based on a comparative analysis of the designated text and its literary and cultural settings. The next chapter will be dedicated to examining literary criticism written, largely, by contemporary intellectuals. It will explore what cultural elite commentators thought about the representation of murder, or rather, what they claimed they thought, since, as many sociologists argue, a crucial factor of elite distinction is “display”121 – the manner in which one presents one’s cultural self.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as an article in Journal of Victorian Culture. See: Lee Michael-Berger, “Hilarious Homicides: Satirizing Sensational Murders in Turn of the Century London”, Journal of Victorian Culture 26, no. 2 (2021), pp. 227–243. 2 [Anon.] “Sense vs. Sensation”, Punch, 20 July 1861, 31. In fact, it may be argued that the piece constructed sensational murders and the railway as synonymous (see discussion in Chapter 1). 3 [Anon.], “Twencent”, Punch, 6 March 1901, 185. 4 See discussion on trains and modernity in the previous chapter. 5 Marion Harry Spielmann, Cartoons from Punch (London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1906), v. 6 Cranstoun Metcalfe, Hecuba a la mode (London: Crystal Palace Press, 1893), 21. 7 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 46–47. 8 Earl F. Bargainnier, Comic Crime (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987) is one of the few exceptions, as well as Rosalind Crone, “Mr. and Mrs. Punch in Nineteenth-Century England”, The Historical Journal, 49, 2006, 1055–1082. 9 Roger B. Henkle, Comedy and Culture: England 1820–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 349. 10 Huyssen, “Mass-Culture as Woman”, 43–53. 11 Joseph Donohue, “Introduction: The Theatre from 1660 to 1800”, The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Volume 2 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), 45–49. 12 Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 61. 13 George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1. 14 Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 62; Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 11. 15 See Matthew S. Buckley, “Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity’s Loss”, Theatre Journal 61, no. 2, 2009, 176–188. 16 See Beatrice Hesse, The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 21. 17 Rowell, The Victorian Theatre, 91–106. 18 Michael R. Booth, Prefaces to English Nineteenth-century Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), xi; 53. 19 Lee Michael-Berger, “The Chaste Parricide: Murder, Femininity and the Subversion of Authority in the Reception of the First Performance of Shelley’s The Cenci, 1886”, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 44, no. 2, 2018, 192–211. 20 Richard Schoch, Victorian Theatrical Burlesques (London: Routledge, 2013), xiv–xv.

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21 [Anon.], “The Revolver Murder: Picturing the Various Modes of Melodramatic Murder”, Punch, 31 December 1892, 309. 22 Nicholas Daly, “Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face of Modernity”, Victorian Studies 42, no. 1, 1998–1999, 47–76. 23 Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), 169. 24 [Anon.], “The Dagger Murder”, Punch, 17 September 1892, 125. 25 [Anon.], “The Over-the-Cliff Murder”, Punch, 18 February 1893, 73. 26 Alvar Ellegard, “The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain”, Victorian Periodical Newsletter 4, no. 3, 1971, 20–22. 27 Ibid., 20–21. 28 See, to name but a few: “Blood”, Punch, Vol. 2 (London, 1842), 190; “The Commodity of Murder”, Punch Vol. 17, (London, 1849), 83; “Murder Models”, Punch Vol. 17 (London, 1849), 171; “Homicide Fair”, Punch Vol 17 (London, 1849), 155; “Murder Worship”, Punch Vol 17 (London, 1849), 201; “Profitable Criminals”, Punch, 16 February 1856, 62; “Sensation Scribbling”, Punch,31 May 1862, 215; “Millenary and Murder”, Punch, 17 November, 1866, 207; “Improved Penny – a – Lining”, Punch, 14 January, 1871, 18. 29 [Anon], “Isabel the ingenuous”, Judy, 9 August 1893, 62. 30 Leslie Crossley, Burlesque Melodrama (London, 1914). 31 “The Sins of London”, Playgoer and Society Illustrated (London, 1910), 4 32 Arthur Matthison, More than Ever (London: Samuel French,1882), 10. 33 David Mayer, “The Bells: A Case Study; A ‘Bare-Ribbed Skeleton’ in a Chest”, in: The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 2, 1660–1895 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 34 Henry S. Leigh, Gillott and Goosequill (London: British & Colonial Publishing Co. 1871), 60–62. 35 Albert Chevalier, The Villains at the Vic (London, 1893). 36 The Daily Mirror, 1911. 37 Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750–1900 (London: Longman, 1996), 41–43. Although domestic violence probably did not decline. See V.A.C. Gatrell, “The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England and Wales”, Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa Publications, 1980). 38 Although Criminal Statistics’s reliability is somewhat dubious. See Robert M. Morris, “Lies, Damned Lies and Criminal Statistics: Reinterpreting the Criminal Statistics of England and Wales”, Crime, History and Societies 5, no. 1, 2001, 111–127. Christopher A. Casey, “Common Misperception: The Press and Victorian Views of Crimes”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 3, 2011, 368–369. 39 Drew Gray, “Gang Crime and the Media in Late Nineteenth-Century London: The Regent’s Park Murder of 1888”, Cultural and Social History 10, 2015, 565–572. Of course, it may also be attributed to the fact that more crimes have been reported to the police, as it improved and spread throughout England. 40 [Anon.], “Another Sensation”, Moonshine, 14 March 1891. 41 W. Warham, The Silver Guilt (London: W. Aubert, 1883), was obviously, a spoof of Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman’s popular melodrama “The Silver King” (1882), which, although hailed as an effective melodrama, was often parodied. 42 [Anon.], “Tallowing Details! S(n)ufferings of the Wick-Tim!” Judy, 25 June 1884, 306. 43 See Erin Rebecca Bone Steele, “Murder and Melodrama: The Red Barn Story on Stage” (Unpublished MA dissertation), University of Maryland, 2008. 44 See, for instance: Charles Osborne, Maria Marin’s Bogie (London: Francis, Day & Hunter, 1891); [Anon.], “In a Ghost Show”, Punch, 22 October 1892, 184.

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45 de Lorde, dubbed as the “Prince de la Terreur”, played a key role in the tradition of violent entertainment as a prominent writer in the theatre of horror, the Grand Guignol. 46 Michael Saler, ed., The Fin-de-Siècle World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 54. 47 [Anon.], “Actors at Bow Street”, Punch, 16 April 1902, 283. 48 [Anon.], “In the Ranks”, Theatre (London, 1883), 255. 49 Susie L. Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2012), 51. 50 Eric J. Evans, Parliamentary Reform in Britain c. 1770–1918 (London: Longman, 2014), 70–74. 51 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 121. 52 Peter Bailey, “The Victorian Middle Class and the Problem of Leisure”, in: Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13–30. 53 Sally Ledger, “In Darkest England: The Terror of Degeneration in Fin-de-Siècle Britain”, Literature & History 4, no. 2, 1995, 71. 54 David Englander, “Booth’s Jews: The Presentation of Jews and Judaism in ‘Life and Labour of the People in London’”, Victorian Studies 32, no. 4, 1989, 551–571. 55 See Chapter 1. 56 [Anon.], “The Latest Murder, or: Making the Most of it”, Moonshine, 15 November 1890. 57 Donald J. Gray, “A List of Comic Periodicals Published in Great Britain”, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 5, no. 1, 1972, 26. 58 Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (New York: Random House, 2001), 678. 59 Judith R. Walkowitz, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence”, Feminist Studies 8, no. 3, Autumn 1982, 545. 60 Charles Hallam Elton Brookfield, “Sally Beales”, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 2008, retrieved from www.oxforddnb.com/view/a rticle/40231 61 Rachel Beer, (1858–1927)”, Vanessa Curney in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, retrieved from www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/48270. 62 Maude Cyril, The Haymarket Theatre: Some Records and Reminiscences (London, 1903), 200–203. 63 See: F.C. Philips and Charles H.E. Brookfield, The Burglar and the Judge (London, 1893). Although Beer’s social position was more complex since she was both an outsider (Jewish) and an insider (married De Beer, who had converted to Christianity before) as well as a newswoman. In any case, Brookfield’s play is a relatively rare example a humorous text manifesting such attitudes. 64 Roberts J. Slingby, “Elizabethan Crime-Plays”, The Monthly Review, December 1904, 79. 65 See, for instance: [Anon.], “The Duchess of Coolgardie”, Theatre, 28 October 1896, 215. 66 Lynn M. Voskuil, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture, and the Victorian Public Sphere”, Victorian Studies 44, no. 2, 2002, 245. 67 Joanna Hofer-Robinson and Beth Palmer, Sensation Drama, 1860–1880 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), xiii. 68 Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2005). 69 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic: A Study of Women and the Literary Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 70 Ellen Miller Casey, “Edging Women Out? Reviews of Women Novelists in the Athenaeum, 1860–1900”, Victorian Studies, 39, no. 2, 1996, 151–171.

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71 Jeanne M. Peterson, “No Angels in the House: The Victorian Myth and the Paget Women”, The American Historical Review, 89, 1984, 677–708. 72 Ledger, “In Darkest England”, 71. 73 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1. 74 June Purvis, “Deeds, not Words: The Daily Lives of Militant Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain”, Women’s Studies International Forum 18, no. 2, 1995, 91–101. 75 [Anon.], “A Fatal Gift”, Punch, 21 May 1902, 367. 76 See: Henry Miller, “The Problem with Punch”, Historical Research 82, no. 216, 2009, 285–302; Richard Scully, “A Comic Empire: The Global Expansion of Punch as a Model Publication, 1841–1936”, International Journal of Comic Art 15, no. 2, 2013, 8. 77 “A Sailor and his Lass”, Theatre (London, 1883), 252. 78 Ibid. 79 “On the Horrible”, Fun, 23 February 1887, 83. 80 Ibid. 81 Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, who allegedly carried about with him a tub as his house, was often represented in late Victorian historical painting and elsewhere in popular culture. 82 See: “Getting Ready”, Fun, 8 December 1886, p. 235; “First Frost”, Fun, 1 December 1886, 230. 83 Thomas Claye Shaw, “A Prominent Motive in Murder”, The Lancet, 19 June 1909, 1737. 84 Stevie Simkin, Cultural Constructions of the Femme Fatale: From Pandora’s Box to Amanda Knox (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 30. 85 See, for instance, Jennifer Hedgecock, The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature: The Danger and the Sexual Threat (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008). 86 “Judy Anti-Sensational Story”, Judy, 21 December 1898, 602; “My Modern Sensational Melodrama”, Judy, 3 February 1906, 52. 87 “Judy Anti-Sensational Story”, Judy, 21 December 1898, 602. 88 John William Clarck, Harry the Eighth (London: Milton Smith & Co, 1886). 89 Peter Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture”, Past and Present, 144, 1994, 139. 90 See, for instance: Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kerry Powell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), 164–183. 91 Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning”, 138. 92 Barry J. Faulk, Music Hall, and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004). 93 As cited in Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991), 11. 94 Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity, 4. 95 Kift, The Victorian Music Hall, 21–23. 96 Although Gareth Stedman-Jones suggested that it is vital to distinguish between the “plebeian” Music Halls and their West End variant, and to view them as two distinct phenomena. See: “Working Class Culture and WorkingClass Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” Journal of Social History, VII, 1974, 490. 97 See, for instance, Clive Barker, “The Chartists, Theatre, Reform and Research”, Theatre Quarterly 1, 1971, 4–8. See also: Laurence Senelick, “Politics as Entertainment: Victorian Music-Hall Songs”, 149–180. The Music Hall’s creators as well as their theatrical managers, who were allied to moneyed interests, were,

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99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

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after all, less concerned with the working man’s predicaments and much more concerned with their own aspirations for social mobility (ibid., 150). This was particularly true for songs that were more sentimental than funny. See, for instance: John Harrington and Geo le Brunn, As in a Looking Glass (London: Francis Bros. and Day, 1889); Chas Osborne and W. Skerry, The End of the Chapter (London: Francis, Day and Hunter, 1903); E.W. Rogers, Rivals (London: Francis, Day and Hunter, 1895). W.H. Philips, Benjamin Buff (London: Willey & Co., 1881). H. Wincoott, I’m Still Alive (London: Francis, Day & Hunter, 1896). Charles Osborne, How’s that for a Snap Shot? (London: Francis, Day & Hunter, 1898). Walter Hastings and S. Potter, She Stood Behind the Parlor Door (London: Francis Bros. & Day, 1898). It is worth noting that the illustrations were drawn by two different artists: T. Packer and H.G. Banks. Philips, Benjamin Buff. Kift, The Victorian Music Hall, 45–46. For a fuller discussion on this see: Clive Emsley, Hard Men: The English and Violence since 1750 (New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2005); V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); David Phillips, “‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’: The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcing in England 1780–1830”, Crime and the Law, 152; Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 46–52. Christopher A. Casey, “Common Misperception: The Press and Victorian Views of Crimes”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 3, winter 2011, 372. James Gregory, Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). Leon Radzinowicz and Roger G. Hood, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 (London: Stevens & sons, 1948), 689–691. Casey, “Common Misperception”, 372. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 389–390. Here is Dickens’s description of Sikes: “a stoutly-built fellow of about five-andthirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab breeches, lace-up half boots, and grey cotton stockings which enclosed a bulky pair of legs, with large swelling calves – the kind of legs, which in such costume, always look in an unfinished and incomplete state without a set of fetters to garnish them. He had a brown hat on his head and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck: with the long frayed ends of which he smeared the beer from his face as he spoke. He disclosed when he had done so, a broad heavy countenance with a beard of three weeks’ growth.” Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Vol. 1, 2nd edition (London: Richard Bentley, 1838), 198–199. Bill Sikes, of course, does not murder Nancy with a gun but rather with a knife. “Euphemisms; or, the Advantages of Civilization”, Fun, 4 May 1887, 188. “The Murderer and Many Friends”, Fun, 4 December 1889, 244. “Dying Out”, Fun, 31 May 1882, 222. A.J. Mills and Bennett Scott, Harlequin Jack and the Scarlet Runners (London, 1905). Harry Quilter, “The Decline of Drama”, Contemporary Review, 1887, 548. Alvar Ellegard, “The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain”, Victorian Periodical Newsletter 4, no. 3, 1971, 13. Jean-Pascal Daloz, The Sociology of Elite Distinction: From Theoretical to Comparative Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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In 1906, a young Norman Bentwich, who would later become a prominent legal expert and professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lamented the loss of spiritual and intellectual force in modern British drama. Choosing murder onstage as an illustration for his argument, he maintained that: “in Euripides’s plays, the actual catastrophe … either takes place behind the scenes or is reported by a messenger. And this is right for the dramatic crisis is not the actual murder … which cannot be adequately represented, but the determination of the will, which can be”.1 Bentwich, of course, was right – as a Trinity College man who studied classics, he knew well the Greek tragedians’ reluctance to represent murder or even the moment of death on stage. Throughout the nineteenth century, elite education was dominated by the classics and was closely connected to access to Imperial administration. That is why, towards the end of the century, more middle-class parents wanted their sons to become part of that “cultural privileged mode of intellectual activity”,2 and the number of secondary schools that trained students in the classics grew. Bentwich went on to become the inspector of Native Courts in the Egyptian Ministry of Justice, after which he was appointed commissioner of courts in Egypt, and ultimately the senior judicial officer in the British military administration in Palestine, and following the establishment of a civil administration in 1920, the Attorney General. But back then, in 1906 London, he was articulating his longing for “other” representations of murder, more intellectual and exclusive, less graphic, sensational, and popular. “We are all Greeks”, Bentwich quoted Sir Henry Maine, a former professor of civil law at the University of Cambridge, and then added, gloomily: “would that we were”. In early twentieth-century England, the desire of the playwright to “tickle the senses” and to “please the audience with spectacle” had ruined drama. Similar were the thoughts of twenty-nine-year-old Desmond MacCarthy, also a Trinity College alumnus (and a member of The Apostles) who, a few months earlier, went to see a production of Euripides’s Electra at the Court Theatre. Reflecting on the play, (in which murder, of course, is a central theme), MacCarthy admitted that when going to the theatre he is often “craving for everything that is impossible in London”. The two young commentators seemed to be longing for murder representations that supposedly broke with their homegrown DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-4

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cultural traditions and constructed in their texts (at least) two English “modernities”: an existing one, which is dominated by the masses, and their crude tastes, whose entertainment is “a diversion for the jaded mind”, and a supposedly ideal, elitist modernity, which will perhaps be achieved in the future. Both men separated between what was perceived by them as “English”, and what was perceived by them as “foreign”, craving for the latter. Both Bentwich and MacCarthy occupied throughout their lives, even at their relatively young age then, in 1906, key positions in society as cultural intermediaries, as tastemakers in the media, which allowed them to impose the legitimacy of certain forms of culture.3 How did they, as well as other tastemakers, imagine the ideal modern murder depiction? We already know, to some extent, what was the widespread conception of a crude murder depiction. In this chapter, we will further explore what murder representations contemporaries, this time, the intellectual and cultural elite, disliked, but also what they aspired for, and thought was “modern” and befitting to their day and age. To this end, we shall explore the critical reception of murder representations in Shakespearean and Greek tragedies, which were deeply ingrained in Victorian culture, and functioned as cultural capital among elites. By the end of the century, both became canonized and were perceived as the summit of human art. Here, I will show that Shakespearean murder representations were often perceived as both typically “English” as well as “outdated”, while Greek tragedy was perceived as not merely “modern”, but also as bearing the potential for receiving, for the first time in history, and thanks to modern scientific notions, a “proper” interpretation. William Shakespeare has long been regarded as the most celebrated English poet and playwright. It has been shown that throughout the nineteenth century, his works were increasingly canonized and achieved a status similar to that of scripture.4 He himself was perceived as a national icon, an epitome of English national character, and his words had been often ascribed with divinity, expressing a transcendental truth. This bardolatry, especially typical of the late Victorian era, reinforced Shakespeare’s cultural authority5. But during the turn of the century, Shakespearean performance became an increasingly contested territory between supporters and opponents of the spectacle style, which was especially dominant throughout the nineteenth century and manifested itself in Shakespearean tragic performances as well.6 Furthermore, throughout the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s plays reached wider and more socially mixed audiences. In 1902, for instance, at the Lyric Theatre, on the modernized Shaftsbury Avenue, Hamlet was played by Forbes-Robertson. Opened in 1888 and seating about 800, the Lyric drew mostly local viewers to see melodramas and pantomimes.7 As Judith Walkowitz has shown, certain areas in the West End, particularly areas such as Shaftesbury Avenue, attracted audiences from mixed neighbourhoods and the area itself became a venue for entertainment. Increasingly, Shakespeare was made accessible not just to theatregoers but to the public at large. 1912 saw the popular Shakespeare’s England exhibition at Earl’s Court, a popular exhibitions venue, easily

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reachable by public transport.8 Also, throughout the nineteenth century Shakespeare’s plays were often mediated to children, through special publications,9 and, as Jonathan Rose has shown,10 Shakespeare dominated popular culture and had a proletarian following. Burlesques, as well, mediated between the national bard and wider audiences and gained them access to so-called highbrow materials. Between 1880 and 1891 no less than five different Hamlet travesties were published in England. Hamlet Improved by G. H. Colomb in 1880; Hamlet; or, Not such a Fool as He Looks, by A.C. Hilton, and A Fireside Hamlet, by J. Comyns Carr and Very Little Hamlet William Yardley, in 1884. In 1891, Sir W. S. Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was published and in 1892 Hamlet Up to Date was performed at the Strand.11 The democratization of Shakespeare, and his increased presence in popular culture, became problematic for some. In a 1905 book, illustrated by George Morrow, and dubbed “Change for a Halfpenny”,12 the sensation-seeking masses are blamed for transforming tragic (highbrow) Shakespearean murders, into light, silly entertainment – a production of Hamlet is shown to be employing revolving stages, trapeze artists and dancers. Morrow’s illustration shows the play’s murderous final scene, where the queen gets poisoned, Laertes is stabbed to death in a duel, and Claudius, at long last, is murdered by Hamlet. The bloody, tragic occurrence seems to be overshadowed by the merry stage spectacle, aimed to cheer the hearts of the audience and lure the pleasureseeking multitudes into the theatre. This is also very well evident in the 1909 piece “The Mania for Happy Endings”, which depicts four alternative finals to famous tragedies: Othello, Tosca, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Here, Desdemona, after being strangled by Othello, somehow regains consciousness and the couple merrily prances off stage. But interestingly, what typified the discourse of Shakespearean murder in literary periodicals and books, is that they regularly turned to concepts that were broadly inspired by the contemporary discourse of evolution and progress, and presented a hodgepodge of ideas on a so-called cultural development to explain the bard’s alleged out-of-datedness. Evolution diffused to literature and the popular imagination and was often miscomprehended and misrepresented.13 Before Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, the idea of evolution was primarily associated with the work of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and with the idea that living organisms develop into more complex forms through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lamarckian ideas fell in line with the progressive view of human development and remained dominant even when Darwin’s natural selection was suggested as the mechanism by which evolution occurs, suggesting bleaker, less progressive implications.14 In fact, throughout the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, there were a few threads in the discourse of evolution, including Spencer’s social evolutionism, in which society was seen as a living, growing organism which becomes more complex.15 Thus, for instance, the author of an 1896 piece published in the London Society16 suggested that

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human culture was constantly and linearly progressing towards refinement. The violent instinct to kill was construed as a remnant of “pre-historic” animalism. Different races and cultures represented different stages of that linear progression, so “primitive” societies and people required the latter’s constant supervision and control. The London Society, of course, was mostly aimed at the metropolitan middle-classes, and more specifically, at the wealthy “leisured bourgeoisie”.17 It was one of the most popular journals of the late nineteenth century and was very much conservative in nature. The idea that “primitive” people were necessarily more murderous than “advanced” ones was regularly manifested in commentaries about Othello and Macbeth, who were often perceived as men who were led to murder by their alleged “natural” barbarity and superstition: “Macbeth was, like Othello, a simple savage”.18 While Othello was perceived as a “moor”, Macbeth’s position was more complex and murkier. As many scholars argue, the play’s Scottishness is its defining characteristic, and in David Garrick’s seminal performance of the part, he played Macbeth dressed in contemporary breeches, stockings, waistcoats, and over-jacket.19 In the nineteenth century, the English and the Scots were united under one parliament in Westminster, and while in some ways, the Scots were subjugated to a greater identity as Britons, a dual identity persisted and was accepted for the most part. Since they were perceived as having given up their nationality, the Scots were usually presented in the English press as progressive, well-mannered, highly civilized, and happily assimilated.20 But Shakespeare’s Macbeth was a medieval king, and while in England in the nineteenth century there was an embrace of medievalism, Macbeth’s unEnglish ethnicity was presented as uncivilized. A Graphic review of a 1911 production of the play sustained that such “means as murder … have ceased to interest civilized people” and that “Macbeth is built up almost solely on such primitive emotions”.21 The Graphic, a weekly illustrated newspaper, was aimed at a rather exclusive, intellectual audience. Its writers included Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and it regularly explored social subjects, such as poverty. Other texts constructed the play as unfit for modern times – Macbeth’s reliance on the witches’ prophecy in his decision to murder Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff was dubbed as “superstition” and was closely linked to brutality, which, it was argued, may have been acceptable in the distanced past, the “Dark Ages”, but it is no longer in the nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, modernity was often understood as a linear course of development toward a more rational society that implements science, rather than religion, mythology, or fancy, as the main perspective through which to explore reality. “Telegraphs and Education Acts are in a fair way of exorcising our ghosts”,22 read an 1880 Graphic piece. These views were also well evident in commentaries on Othello, such as a review of the 1891 production, in which Wilson Barret played the title role. Here, the author put great emphasis on Othello’s alleged “ruggedness” and his “deeply rooted superstition”.23 This piece,

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written by literary and theatrical agent Addison Bright, who, as it turned out later, used to systematically embezzle his clients, including James Matthew Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle,24 presents Othello as a man whose true innate savage “nature” emerges throughout the tragedy until he finally succumbs to his murderous impulses: “in the first act he is the noblest Venetian of them all”, but ultimately the “dark resistless flood of boiling passion in his nature surges within sight”. This reading of Othello as having a double identity, an external “civilized” one which underneath it lurks a murderous barbarity, was prevalent in other contemporary commentaries, which associated Othello’s tragedy, culminating in the murder of his beloved Desdemona, with his “primitive”, “animal-like”, violent nature. Famous scholar and lexicographer Frederick James Furnivall, a Christian socialist and one of the founders of the Working Men’s College, described Othello as someone who “behind the nobleness of his nature were yet the jealousy, the suspicion, the mean cunning of the savage. Death to the adulteress was but the practice of his race”.25 Othello was often comprehended as being merely partially “civilized”, and his “true” nature was exposed throughout the play, culminating in the murder scene. These views can be traced back to Thomas Rymer in the seventeenth century,26 but at the turn of the century, following the Berlin Conference of 1884 and the launch of the “scramble for Africa”, the British increasingly saw Africa as an evil site of barbarism, and sensationalist journalism often described “savage” costumes such as human sacrifice and cannibalism. “The African-Negro, if left to himself, even under a so-called civilized government with an elaborate republican constitution, degenerates with astonishing rapidity into the lowest depth of barbarism”, read an 1896 piece, and a review of H.B. Tree’s Othello at His Majesty’s Theatre stated that: “in Sir Herbert Tree’s rendering of the dusky Moor there is no attempt to soften the primitive passions of the man. His Othello was essentially an animal … He lives only for war and revenge. Even his love for Desdemona was cruel …”.27 It seems, however, that it was not Tree’s intention to represent Othello in such a manner. Evidently, the idea of a marital union between a black man and a white woman was becoming unacceptable to audiences and readers and onstage Othello was increasingly “orientalized” rather than being presented as black.28 Tree himself declared in a letter that: “Othello … [was an] Oriental, not a negro: a stately Arab of the best caste”,29 and his portrayal of Othello is regarded as the culmination of that tendency.30 Indeed, other reviewers painted an entirely different picture of his performance,31 accentuating how delicate and gracious he was. In many cases, then, superstition leading to murder was constructed as a tendency of allegedly “primitive” societies, races, or individuals, due to atavism. But in the case of Wilson Barret’s 1897 adaptation of Othello, his rendition of the part was often criticized as being too melodramatic in style, and therefore, “of doubtful propriety”. Evidently, Barret, who typically played romantic roles in melodramas, with a deeply moralistic undertone,32 introduced a new mise-en-scène in one of the parts in which Iago excites

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Othello’s jealousy. There, Othello runs in rage to stab a large portrait of Desdemona that was placed on centre stage. This excessive violence was described by a Graphic critic as too melodramatic.33 In the murder scene, Barret seized Desdemona by her throat, whirled her up to his arms, dashed her upon the bed, which was dubbed by The Echo a “perilous innovation”,34 and behind a closed drawn curtain strangled her, which must have suggested an erotic impulse to the deed. Some in the psychiatric field argued that the Whitechapel murders in 1888 had a profound sexual element to them, and during the turn of the century, many experts addressed the psychosexual aspects of murder, with an emphasis on sadistic behaviour, stressing the degenerate, atavistic aspects of homicide. In 1909 Thomas Claye Shaw, for instance, emeritus lecturer on psychological medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital argued that a “prominent motive in murder” was a blood lust, or as he coined it “haemothymia”.35 Many texts attributed the lust to consume murder stories to a degenerate state of mind. A 1904 article published in The Monthly Review stated that it was widely believed at the time that such a fixation on violence indicated degeneracy: “It is almost an axiom among the cultured that a keen interest in crime and criminals is a token of a defective intellectual development”.36 The allegedly related tendencies of brutality and superstition, displayed by Macbeth, so one of the authors claimed, implant in modern audiences a sense of “repugnance and contempt”.37 Other critics blatantly contrasted reason, which was identified with “modern” culture, and superstition, identified with the distanced past and even with Elizabethan times. Thus, a July 1889 review in the Theatre contrasted modern times, precipitated by the enlightenment, to ancient myths and perceptions, allegedly constituting a “farrago of witchcraft and demonology”, which were, according to the author, “strangely acceptable to the most accomplished minds”38 of Elizabethan times. The taste of audiences was presented as something that had evolved throughout time and made them less inclined to savour bloody scenes. Thus, an anonymous writer of a 1904 piece in the Academy and Literature,39 aptly titled “The Past and Future of Our Drama”, utilized the concept of evolution to discuss contemporary spectators’ reactions to murder scenes in the theatre and to establish a sense of what was distinctively “modern” about it, compared to older times. The crux of the writer’s argument is that a rapid process of transformation occurred between Elizabethan times and Edwardian times, as audiences were becoming less inclined to tolerate such spectacles of “wholesale slaughter” as presented, for instance, in the finale scene of Hamlet. This, according to the text, was not necessarily due to a growing sense of squeamishness and sensibility, but rather to the public’s growing exposure to psychological notions. Audiences had learned to expect a “reasonable” motive for murder to be constructed so that an extravagant, gory, mass murder scene would have been considered absurd. This change in taste is regarded as a process of cultural advancement towards sophistication. The Elizabethans, Shakespeare included, are described here as belonging to a much earlier stage of cultural evolution:

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“Craving for Everything that is Impossible in London” The Elizabethan audience differed very greatly from the audience of today – as greatly as do children differ from men – and they were provided with the meat dressed to suit their palate … To-day the average lad in the gallery of a theatre knows more of life and the world than did the critical gallant who smoked his pipe on the Elizabethan stage …40

Havelock Ellis, the great iconoclast of Victorian sexual taboos, argued in the pages of The Savoy that “one is inclined to question altogether the fitness of bloodshed for the novelist’s purpose at the present period of history”.41 Ellis, a physician who was one of the founding fathers of sexology in Britain, and also a prolific essayist on art and culture, had a complex and somewhat ambivalent role in shaping the turn of the century discourse on murder and murder representations. As editor of the wide-selling Contemporary Science Series, he played an important part in the popularization of science and was an avid exponent of radical secularism. In his discussion of algophilia, for instance, which was very much alive at the time in the context of murder, Ellis maintained that traces of sadism are a part of a natural, normal sex impulse, and therefore society’s definitions of so-called “normal” sexualities must transform and include algophiliacs, rather than stigmatize them. This view did not conform, in many ways, with the views of other contemporary influential experts in psychology and nervous and mental disease, who understood sadism as a degenerate, atavistic development. As to homosexuality, which he also preached to accept as a normal part of society, Ellis linked the social reaction against “inversion” and against infanticide, arguing that in societies in which the enlargement of the population becomes a strong felt need, both were regarded as crimes.42 As an ardent eugenicist, he argued that all of the “highly developed peoples of the world” in history had practiced infanticide.43 Moreover, he was one of the few English supporters of criminal anthropology, which was very influential in the continent, but not so much in England. Ellis’s book The Criminal (1890) was entirely devoted to the theories of Cesare Lombroso, and a significant part of it discussed physiognomy, in an attempt to infer what were the physical characteristics of murderers. For someone deeply interested in murder as Ellis was, who was friends with “decadent” artistic figures including Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley, murder being a central motif in their works, such a “Victorian”, “whiggish” proclamation, that bloodshed is not fitting for the novelist’s purpose at the present period of history, may seem odd, especially when published in The Savoy, a periodical that was perceived as a revolt against Victorianism. Ellis’s further proclamations in the Savoy text are no less striking, for he, too, constructs an image of civilized and uncivilized cultures and identifies English culture as so cultivated and sophisticated to the point that its people are no longer interested in murder representations: Our great sixteenth-century dramatists could use it [bloodshed] securely as their commonest resource because it was then a deeply-rooted fact

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both of artistic convention and of real life. In this century bloodshed can only be made humanly interesting by a great psychologist, living on the barbarous outskirts of civilization, a Dostoieffsky [sic].44 But in the same year, and in the same magazine, Ellis also published his musings on Nietzsche, stating that the German philosopher was not very flattering to English thought, and believed that modern democracy and modern utilitarianism were primarily of English “manufacture”, and have reduced the “whole spiritual currency of Europe to a dull plebeian level, and they are the chief causes of European vulgarity”.45 Things are, of course, a little more complicated. Ellis, in the text questioning the fitness of bloodshed for the novelist’s purpose in the present period of history, was commenting on Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, and specifically, on the infamous murder scene in which little father time kills his half-siblings and then hangs himself to death. Ellis admits that while he was a great admirer of Hardy at the beginning, since the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which Ellis disparagingly describes as a “fashionable sentimental moral” that led Hardy to become more popular and his “crowd thickened”, he had ceased to read his novels. But Jude created controversy, which evidently lured Ellis into reading it. He admired the “strength and sobriety of the narrative”, up until the moment in which there was a “serious lapse in the art of the book”. That moment, for Ellis, was the moment when “the door of the bedroom closet is sprung open on us to reveal the row of childish corpses”, which was evidently too melodramatic for him. The element of bloodshed in “Tess” and in “Jude” seemed to him of “dubious value”, rather than of artistic value. It is not the ethical aspect of the murder scene that bothered him, but the aesthetic. Ellis’s text is in many ways a comprehensive commentary on the English novel, where he denounces Walter Scott as a writer who debased the intellectual and moral currency in English literature for popularity: “The commercial instinct in our British breasts is so highly developed that we glory in the sight of a great man prostituting his fame to make money”. And Hardy is accused of being “distressingly” melodramatic. It is not murder representation per se that Ellis is against, but rather, he denounces melodramatic, graphic, and “popular” representations of murder. Graphic murder may have been acceptable in Shakespeare’s time, but it is not anymore in modern times. Just as the humorous sources presented in the previous chapter described bloody representations of murder as ineffective, boring, and outdated, here Ellis describes them as having a dubious artistic value. But what murder representations were perceived at the time as sophisticated, artistic, and modern? Many critics seemed to be mesmerized by what they perceived as an unprecedented historical moment, in which, thanks to scientific progress, it was possible to redefine certain tragic concepts, such as ate,46 in a “modern” manner. Inspired by the concepts of the newly emerging scientific field of heredity and the dominant notion of evolution, these commentators believed that ancient Greek tragic narratives could be charged with contemporary meanings, and that tragedy can be reinvented, more effectively, as a

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“modern” art form. From this point onwards in this book, we shall further delve into the relationship between the concept of murder and the concept of modernity and examine whether a notion of a quintessentially “up-to-date” depiction of murder developed throughout the turn of the century and if so, what were its characteristics.

“Heredity Becomes Once More the Ancient Atte” [sic] Ancient Greece has long since been perceived as the cradle of western civilization and Greek tragedy as the cradle of western dramaturgy. Numerous studies have stressed the immense importance of the classics in Victorian culture47 and have shown that in thinking about the Greek past and about ancient Greek art and culture, the Victorians were thinking about their own present. The construction of antiquity functioned as a battleground for contesting notions about some of the most pressing topics of the day. Greek tragedy, in particular, was perceived as especially relevant to nineteenthcentury English readers who were preoccupied with questions concerning religion, political thought, and aesthetics.48 The texts of Greek tragedies were very well known (some passages memorized by heart) among public school pupils, college students, and the cultural and intellectual elite, although, as Edith Hall has shown, they were also very popular among middle- and working-class audiences of stage burlesques, which frequently parodied Greek tragedy, in particular during the mid-Victorian era.49 Greek Tragedy was often perceived, then, not merely as the paragon of tragic writing but also as bearing much relevance to late Victorian culture. Ibsen, who was believed at the time by many to be the finest playwright in Europe and his work to be the epitome of modernist dramaturgy was often paralleled with Euripides. Here is William Leonard Courtney, famous philosopher, author, and journalist, in a lecture given at the Royal Institution in London: There is a very general analogy between the historical conditions of Athens when Euripides was the popular dramatist and the historical conditions of our modern age. There is the same break-up of old ideas owing to the solvents applied to them by philosophy and science. There is the same substitution of a purely aesthetic aim in works of art for the older religious and ethical aims. In many senses, although he keeps to the ancient framework, Euripides is quite a modern … Perhaps I should not be altogether wrong if I called Euripides an ancient Ibsen, or Ibsen a modern Euripides.50 In the same lecture Courtney explains why Shakespeare was not modern: the whole of that modern thought which speaks of the growth of a social organism, and which makes the fate of individuals subordinate to

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it, is, for the most part, wholly unrepresented in Shakespeare … I need not say how small a place in Shakespeare’s theory of existence the people held. … No modern dramatist can afford to put the social organism, with its laws, and its slow, methodical, and irresistible progress, on one side so completely as Shakespeare does, … the doctrine of heredity, as understood in a modern age, has little or nothing to do with Shakespeare’s problems. It is a doctrine, right or wrong, born of contemporary science, and although it has a very definite influence upon the sphere of tragedy, we must not seek to read it into an Elizabethan age, or into the mind even of the greatest poet in the world.51 The same ideas can be found in an 1888 Athenaeum piece: Fate herself, who after having played such an important part in Greek poetry, was humiliated and dethroned by Shakespeare’s drama of circumstances, seems to be again emerging, but under another name. That heredity is fate is taught by Aeschylus and Sophocles, but not more emphatically than it is now taught by our nineteenth-century evolutionists of England, France, and Germany, who discourse of “reversion”, “pas-en-arriere” or “Ruckschlag” as dominating all character … This being so, has the tragic mischief of the Shakespearean drama become somewhat antiquated? Are we verging on the birth of a new fate-drama based on the new psychology of the evolutionists?52 This piece constructs the Shakespearean tragedy as antiquated since it lacks the concept of heredity. Greek tragedy, however, is perceived as “modern”, although what the text is implying is that only through contemporary latenineteenth-century interpretation, founded on science, the concept of fate may be adequately comprehended in a manner that enables tragedy to realize its poetic potential to the fullest. Thus, a new type of drama, a quintessentially modern one, may emerge. This is a radical idea indeed: some literary critics seemed to look further away, to the future, and anticipate a revolution in art, through science. The modern notion of heredity was first introduced in the early nineteenth century by French physicians such as Étienne Esquirol, Emmanuel Fodéré, Pierre-Adolphe Piorry, and Michel Lévy, who all started to think about the concept as the cause for the formation of the human shape, body, characteristics, temperament, and morals. By the 1830s, the term became widespread and by mid-century, the concept of heredity was not merely well known but increasingly served as the main explanatory model for the individual’s physical and moral constitution. Scholars believe that the emergence of heredity as a general theory is closely associated with a particular epistemology of “modern” societies and cultures, in which people were perceived as being removed from their “natural” habitats as a result of urbanization, industrialization, and colonialism. Distinguishing between inherited and environmentally induced

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traits became a feasible possibility as well as an objective53 and by the 1890s, heredity became a branch of biology.54 Writers in the periodical press often expressed a desire for heredity to become a vital component in drama, that would transform how murder narratives were represented and comprehended. The focus of the discussion was less on the nature of crime and criminals than on the reconstruction of the concept of fate. Whereas the words that are typically associated with fate or destiny in Greek tragedy (moira, aisa)55 do not indicate any systematic determinism,56 they do tend to describe the occurrences that unavoidably strike one by forces outside oneself. Many turn-of-the-century commentators were preoccupied with the meaning and relevance of fate in tragedy and believed that instead of external forces “outside”, fate can be reconstructed as a force within. Some writers dealing with the act of murder in tragedies reflected on how popular conceptions of heredity functioned as an explanatory model for the characters’ course of actions. A 1904 piece on the famous seventeenth-century play “A Yorkshire Tragedy” discusses the circumstances that may have led the protagonist to atrociously murder his children, recognizing the cultural gap between the early Jacobean era and the early twentieth century. “Modern” tragic writers, according to the text, tend to deterministically establish their heroes’ flaws on heredity: A modern author would probably answer that there was a hereditary taint of insanity in his family and take some opportunity of informing the reader that one of his great-uncles had shown unmistakably homicidal tendencies. We are here, on the contrary, informed … that nothing by that kind had been known in the family before.57 Similarly, in a 1909 piece discussing Thomas Hardy’s novels, Wilfred Durrant compares Jude the Obscure to The Oresteia and claims that it is no longer the Furies, Pallas Athene, or Apollo, who are the motivating spirits of the tragedy, but rather the influence of heredity and environment,58 and in a 1914 piece in the Fortnightly Review, comparing Dostoyevsky and Greek tragedy, the author declares that under the great Russian writer’s touch “heredity becomes once more the ancient Atté” [sic].59 Commentators who were professionally acquainted with Greek and Shakespearean drama were, evidently, much more cautious with these juxtapositions, although the contemporary discourse of heredity reverberated in their academic texts as well. Arthur Elam Haigh, in his The Tragic Drama of the Greeks, as well as Maud M. Daniel, in an 1890 piece in The Classical Review mentions a similarity between the concept of fate or notions of ancestral curses and the “modern” theory of the transmission of hereditary qualities.60 While Richard Green Moulton, in his Shakespeare as a Dramatic Thinker, acknowledges that the “force of heredity does not seem to be prominent in Shakespeare’s world”,61 he does, when tackling the question of character

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and the sway of circumstance, present his readers with an interpretation that is immersed with contemporary ideas on how heredity determines the character of descendants, according to their parents’ traits. Moulton suggests that Hamlet’s “divided character” is a result of the strength inherited from his father, which was modified by the alleged weakness inherited from his mother.62 He then goes on to demonstrate how many other Shakespearean characters do not coincide with the contemporary concept of heredity and finally concludes that he is unable to see that any element of dramatic form is associated with the expression of heredity, as the term was contemporarily understood. His point of reference, however, is “modern” heredity, as he continually and systematically compares Shakespearean drama to turn-of-the-century scientific notions. One of the most striking examples, however, is Andrew Cecil Bradley’s 1905 Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, in which he, while alluding to the concept of fate in Greek tragedy, implies that it constitutes exactly “what we now call heredity”,63 an idea which was also manifested in more popular venues, such as the provincial morning daily newspaper the Leamington, Warwick, Kenilworth & District Daily Circular – “What the Greeks called destiny we call inherited character”64 – thus constructing the ancient notion and the modern scientific concept as virtually synonymous. Why, we should ask ourselves, were these elite cultural intermediaries, these tastemakers so keen on interpreting Greek tragedy within the context of scientific and (and sometimes pseudo-scientific) ideas, using concepts and terminologies from modern fields of knowledge, such as evolution, and heredity? The turn of the century marked a dramatic rise in scientific authority, as a process of divorce between science and other forms of knowledge occurred. Scientific and non-scientific disciplines became more specialized and separated, by professional accreditation, from the generally educated public. The employment of scientific lingo and ideas may have served as a means for excluding people who were not “properly” informed, “properly” educated, or had access to exclusive knowledge. Yet, intriguingly, in the dramatic adaptations of Greek tragedies, which we shall examine in the next chapter, there is not a hint of such inclinations. The discussion of heredity and evolution seems to stay entirely in the realm of literary criticism, while most contemporary adaptations are constructed around more traditional themes such as gender relations and femininity. Most modifications revolved around the introduction of so-called psychological explanations of motives, the influence of melodrama, and the elimination of divine intervention. Looking at works that adapt the original, canonical texts steers us to a realm where much attention is lavished on the differences and similarities between the source text and its adaptation,65 since “differences … generate meaning”.66 The search for meaning through difference shall lead the course of the first part of the chapter by attempting to distinguish which components were preserved and which were revised, which may help recover the ideological and aesthetic constructions that promoted these alterations, and advance our understanding of what was perceived as a modern murder depiction.

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Notes 1 Norman Bentwich, “Euripides in London”, The Nineteenth Century, June 1906, 969–969. 2 Frank M. Turner, “Victorian Classics: Sustaining the Study of the Ancient World”, in: The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 159. 3 Sam Friedman, and Aaron Reeves, “From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction”, American Sociological Review 85, no. 2 (2020): 325–326. 4 Richard Foulkes, “William Shakespeare: The Model Victorian Protestant”, Shakespeare 5, no. 1, 2009, 68–81; Charles Laporte, “The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question”, ELH 74, no. 3, 2007, 610–611. 5 Travis DeCook and Alan Galey, eds, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures. Vol. 5. (London: Routledge, 2011), 1–25. 6 Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (London: Routledge, 2015), 30–60. 7 Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found, “Lyric Theatre”, The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 8 See Marion F. O’Connor, “Theatre of the Empire: Shakespeare’s England at Earl’s Court, 1912”, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London: Routledge, 2013). 9 Kathryn Prince, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals (London: Routledge, 2011), 16–37. 10 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 122–125. 11 J.P. Wearing, The London Stage 1890–1899: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 129. 12 Charles Larcom Graves and Edward Verrall Lucas, George Morrow, Change for a Halfpenny (London: A. Rivers, 1905), 36. 13 John Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 14 David Carroll, and Michael Wheeler, eds. The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830–1890 (London: Routledge, 2014), 121. 15 See: Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (London: Routledge, 2014); Robert M. Young, “Herbert Spencer and ‘inevitable ’Progress”, Victorian Values (London: Longman, 1990); Robert M. Young, “The Development of Herbert Spencer’s Concept of Evolution”, Herbert Spencer: Critical Assessments 2, 2000, 378. 16 “Undetected Crime”, London Society: A Monthly Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation 69, no. 411, 1896, 248. 17 Simon Cooke, Illustrated Periodicals of the 1860s (London: The British Library; 2010). 18 The Westminster Gazette, 17 January 1907, 2. 19 Colin McArthur, “Caledonianising Macbeth, or How Scottish is ‘The Scottish Play’?”, Scottish Affairs 36, no. 1, 2001, 12–39. 20 Carolyn A. Conley, “Wars among Savages: Homicide and Ethnicity in the Victorian United Kingdom”, Journal of British Studies 44, no. 4, 2005, 781. 21 The Graphic, 9 September 1911, 368. 22 The Graphic, 6 March 1880, 21. 23 Addison Bright, “Mr. Wilson Barret’s Revival of Othello”, Theatre, December 1891, 250. 24 Jonathan Rose, “Modernity and Print I: Britain 1890–1970”, in: A Companion to the History of the Book (Chichester: Wiley, 2019), 529–542. 25 F.J. Furnivall, The Leopold Shakespeare (London: Cassell, Peter, Galpin, 1883), lxxvii.

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26 Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (London: Scolar Press, 1693). 27 Playgoer and Society Illustrated, May 1912, 53. 28 See: Julie Hankey, ed., Othello, Plays in Performance Series (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), 65–67; Maynard Mack, “Othello”, William Shakespeare’s Othello (New York, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2010), 87–88. 29 Max Beerbohm, Herbert Beerbohm Tree; Some Memories of Him and of His Art (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1920), 148. 30 Mack, “Othello”, 87–88. 31 For instance, a review from the Daily Telegraph, as cited in Beerbohm, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, 147: “a performance of rare dignity and beauty, Sir Herbert Tree portrays. This Othello speaks having authority, and not as the scribes. He has the habit of command and great affairs. He is past the passions of youth, as, indeed, he says. He has not much of the days of gallantry. He speaks of Desdemona with great tenderness. He treats her with the gentlest affection. He is plainly all in love with her, but not after a young man’s fashion of love. Through the long battle with Iago, the slow, irresistible onset of doubt was finely played. The whole is a performance of great nobility and a beautiful humanity and tenderness.” 32 David Haldane Lawrence, “Masculine Appearances: Male Physicality on the Late-Victorian Stage”, Critical Survey 20, no. 3, 2008, 51. 33 The Graphic, 29 May 1897, 23. 34 As cited in: James Thomas, “Wilson Barrett’s New-School ‘Othello’”, Library Chronicle, new series vol. 22, 1983, 83. 35 See, for instance: Claye Shaw, “A Prominent Motive in Murder”, Lancet 10 June 1909, 1735–1738. See also: Ivan Crozier, “Philosophy in the English boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexological Discourses on Algophilia”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 3, 2004, 275–305. 36 Roberts J. Slingby, “Elizabethan Crime-Plays”, The Monthly Review, December 1904, 79. 37 H.V.M., “Macbeth”, Playgoer and Society Illustrated, September 1911, 1. 38 Godfrey Turner, “Morals and Metaphysics of Macbeth”, Theatre, July 1889, 1. 39 “The Past and Future of Our Drama”, ii, Academy and Literature, 30 July 1904, 85. 40 Ibid. 41 Havelock Ellis, “Concerning Jude the Obscure”, Savoy, October 1896, 42. 42 Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Relation to Society and the Law”, Medico-Legal Journal 14, 1896, 279. 43 Havelock Ellis, Little Essays of Love and Virtue (London: A. & C. Black, 1922), 136. 44 Ellis, “Concerning Jude the Obscure”. 45 Havelock Ellis, “Friedrich Nietzsche”, The Savoy 2, 1896, 70. 46 In Greek myth, Ate often means a mental deviation, brought about through psychic intervention by a divine agency, which disrupts the victim’s ability to distinguish between right and wrong and leads them to disaster. See: Roger D. Dawe, “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, 1968, 89–123. 47 See, for instance, Duncan Bell, “From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought”, The Historical Journal 49, no. 3, September 2006, 735–759; Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 48 See, for instance, Richard Dowgun, “Some Victorian Perceptions of Greek Tragedy”, Browning Institute Studies 10, 1982, 71–90; Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially 201–249. 49 See: Edith Hall, “Classical Mythology in the Victorian Popular Theatre”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 5, no. 3, 1998, 336–366.

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50 W. L. Courtney, The Idea of Tragedy in Ancient and Modern Drama (New York: Brentano’s, 1900), 37. 51 Ibid., 61–63. 52 “The Sentence: A Drama”, Athenaeum, 8 September 1888, 313. 53 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille, Heredity, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2003, 4. 54 Daniel J. Kevles, “Heredity”, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 55 Andrew Brown, A New Companion to Greek Tragedy (London: Routledge, 2014), 88. 56 On the concept of Fate in Greek tragedy see: Walter R Agard, “Fate and Freedom in Greek Tragedy”, The Classical Journal 29, no. 2, 1933; Richard E. Doyle, “Fate in Greek Tragedy” Thought 47, no. 1,1972, 90–100. 57 Slingsby J. Roberts, “Elizabethan Crime Plays”, Monthly Review, December 1904, 91. 58 Wilfred Durrant, “The Disciple of Destiny”, Fortnightly Review, June 1909, 1119. 59 J.A.T. Lloyd, “Feodor Dostoieffsky”, Fortnightly Review, February 1914, 322. In Greek myth, ate often means a mental deviation, a strong infatuation, brought about through psychic intervention by a divine agency, which disrupts the victim’s ability to distinguish between right and wrong and leads them to disaster. For a fuller discussion of ate see: Roger D. Dawe, “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, 1968, 89–123; Eric Robertson Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1957). 60 Arthur Elam Haigh, The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 93. 61 Richard Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Thinker (London: Macmillan, 1907), 242. Moulton (1849–1924) was an English academic and a professor at the University of Chicago who wrote on the history of world literature and on literary theory. 62 Ibid. 63 Andrew Cecil Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1904), 30. Bradley (1851–1935), a literary scholar born in Surrey, entered Cheltenham College in 1864 and a year later entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he would, in 1874, be elected to a fellowship and in 1901 was elected to the Oxford professorship of poetry. 64 Leamington, Warwick, Kenilworth & District Daily Circular, 9 September 1901, 2. 65 Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984),.9. 66 Dennis Cutchins, Bakhtin, Translation and Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2013), 37.

4

“The Actual Catastrophe” Representing Murder on the London Stage

Representing the House of Atreus The story of the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and Orestes’s (and Electra’s) revenge, culminating in matricide was depicted by all three great Greek tragedians1 and was well known to English readers and theatregoers. Many productions of the original tragedies were performed between 1880 and 1914 – Euripides’s Orestes was produced twice, first as an adaptation of the original Greek play, The Story of Orestes, in 1886. This was a charity performance designed to raise money for the London University Endowment Fund and was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales. In 1893 the play was performed at Her Majesty’s Theatre at Haymarket. The house, which had been rebuilt following the fire of 1867, was influenced by the design of Covent Garden and fitted an audience of about 1,800 for opera and 2,500 for plays.2 Both productions, then, played in the west of London. The first production was played in front of a small, select crowd and the second in front of a large house. Different parts of Aeschylus’s trilogy3 were performed, either separately or together, three times between 1880 and 1914: in 1880 a stage production of Agamemnon was performed at Harrow School, in Greek, directed by Francis Robert Benson. A few months earlier, while still a student at Oxford, he produced it there and appeared as Clytemnestra. The production was very successful and Benson was invited to tour London,4 where he performed at St George’s Hall in Regent Street as well.5 In 1898, the Agamemnon was again performed in London, in English, using Lewis Campbell’s translation. The entire Oresteia was performed in 1904–1905 by Benson’s6 Dramatic Company at Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill and at Camden Theatre, using George Charles Winter Warr’s translation. Perhaps aptly, Benson played the part of Orestes and his wife, Constance, the role of Clytemnestra. In this case, then, the plays were performed within a much more extensive and more diverse area of London, including the socially diverse Camden Town, which by the end of the nineteenth century was transformed from a middle-class suburb to a “middling” district (Charles Booth’s term) with a population that was substantially working class in composition. This change was due to the DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-5

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development of industry in the mid-Victorian era, and an influx from Somers Town of large numbers of the poor displaced in the construction of the Midland Railways.7 Sophocles’s Elektra was performed five times between 1880 and 1914. In 1904 at the Royal Court Theatre,8 in 1907 Arthur Symons’s translation of von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Elektra was performed in an unknown venue in London and in 1909 Granville Bantock’s incidental music to the play was performed, again, at The Court Theatre. In 1910 Strauss’s opera9 was performed at Covent Garden and in 1914 the play was performed, in English, at Scala theatre. Scala was situated in Tottenham Street, Tottenham Court Road, and was first opened in 1772 as the King’s Concert Rooms, although by the early twentieth century it fell into decline and often stood empty or was used for amateur productions.10 Many of the productions were performed in Colleges or Public Schools, some in Ancient Greek. The audiences of these performances were designed for and consisted of university teachers and students who were very well acquainted with the primary sources. Two of the performances were private readings, taking place in London drawing rooms and intended for even smaller groups of cognoscenti. Furthermore, the majority of theatres in which the plays were performed were situated in the commercial, modernized theatres in centres of entertainment in or around the West of London, within a relatively small vicinity. It may be argued, then, that the performance of Greek Tragedies between 1880 and was predominantly designed for the well-educated, well-to-do theatre goers. As for translations to English of the original texts – different parts of Aeschylus’s trilogy were translated more than twenty-five times between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Great War, Sophocles’s Electra more than five times, Euripides’s Electra at least once, and his Orestes more than twice,11 and visual representations depicting the murderous plots were painted by renowned artists such as Frederic Leighton (Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos Watches for the Beacon Fires, 1874) and John Collier (Clytemnestra, 1882 and 1914). Furthermore, as Isobel Hurst has noted, the character of Clytemnestra catered to the public fascination with female murderers which was to emerge in sensation novels such as Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).12 In what follows I will focus on some late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century adaptations by contemporary English dramatists, some of which were performed onstage and others were published as plays, but never produced. Considering them alongside English translations of the Greek texts would make it possible to trace discrepancies in the adaptations of the murder narratives that may imply what was perceived by the authors as too archaic or foreign to contemporary English culture and therefore incomprehensible to modern audiences. In 1910, Richard Le Gallienne created an adaptation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Le Gallienne, who was born in Liverpool, arrived in London

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where he became Wilson Barrett’s private secretary and biographer and met Swinburne, Meredith, and Wilde. In 1891 he became a book critic for The Star and in 1897 achieved literary success with the publication of The Quest of the Golden Girl. His early works were influenced by Keats and Rossetti, but Pater was also a huge influence on Le Gallienne, who in many ways was part of the decadent movement. At the request of actor and producer William Faversham, who discovered that French composer Massenet had written music to accompany a tragedy founded on the story of Orestes, Le Gallienne wrote Orestes. In an article written for the American journal The Green Book Magazine, Faversham argued that the reason he approached Le Gallienne was that the translation of the “old Greek play”13 was too stilted and that its construction was “not in keeping with modern stage-craft”.14 The aim was, then, to “modernize” the text. The play was first produced in the US and then, in 1912, at the Boudoir theatre in London, by the Drama Society, with Edyth Olive as Clytemnestra.15 Le Gallienne’s version, however, was rather close to the original, as to earlier adaptations of the tragedy, and much like John Galt in 1812 and Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (pseudonymed “Owen Meredith”) in 1855,16 he too highlighted the theme of socio-cultural conflicts stirred by gender tensions as what dictated the plot and motivated characters to murder each other. Clytemnestra could not forgive Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia. Although this motif was of critical importance in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the 1910 text put a greater emphasis on the subject and constantly repeat it. Furthermore, whereas in Aeschylus’s drama Clytemnestra sees herself as an agent of justice, designated by the Gods to purge the blood that stained her house, in Le Gallienne’s adaptation she perceives the murder as a much more personal quest of a mother who simply could not forgive her husband for murdering their child. In a short soliloquy Orestes aptly summarizes the unbridgeable differences between men and women and their social roles, on which Le Gallienne’s main argument about the play seems to lie: The tasks of men so stern and terrible and all the stormy terror of the fate of him who holds a nation in his hands. How can a woman know what we must do? The dreadful duties that belong to kings; She has one little baby on her breast, and that to her is all the singing world: But God put in our hearts the sound of war, And the wild love of fighting for our land … [I] hear you say, “Orestes, in that hour you are a man, return to Argos, and avenge your sire”.17 Men and women are represented as having entirely different social roles that cannot but lead to dire conflicts. Men are obligated to their nation, their land, their army, and their city’s rules. Women are obligated to their families and especially to their children. Orestes, as he admits in this passage, was required by the Gods and by Agamemnon to avenge his father’s blood, whereas Clytemnestra avenged Iphigenia’s blood chiefly out of motherly

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love. Clytemnestra’s dialogue with Orestes prior to her being murdered by him further reinforces this concept: My sister died for Argos ’twas the gods, Not Agamemnon, snatched her from your side. ’Twas but the fearful office of a king, who more than wife or child or sister dear, or father or mother, must hold dear his land. CLYTEMNESTRA: Argos and Agamemnon and the gods! What are all these but hollow boom of words, that have no meaning in a woman’s ear that holds her human blossom in her hands. Better a land forswear such Gods as crave a mother’s heart-break and a maiden’s blood. Let Argos die for Argos, not my child!18 ORESTES:

Fiona Macintosh argues that one of the main reasons that made Aeschylus’s Agamemnon so popular during that period was that, at the time, there were important advances in women’s emancipation, and the image of the New Woman emerged, which made the character of Clytemnestra especially intriguing for contemporaries.19 Indeed, Le Gallienne’s main emphasis is exactly that. Although Clytemnestra claimed to have acted on a personal level, regardless of any formal obligations to her city-state or the Gods, her words seem to bear a political message as well: Men run the state through violence, oblivious to human needs. It is possible that it was precisely through this constructed gap between gender-oriented perceptions that Le Gallienne intended to convey an implicit critique of male power, violence, and politics.20 Le Gallienne was known for his personal antipathy to war, which was evident in many of his poems and writings.21 The second AngloBoer War which ended in 1902 played a key role in the construction of gender, class, and racial politics, as well as in shaping notions of Empire, and the nation.22 The controversy over concentration camps, in particular, where Boer women and children were herded and had lived in deplorable conditions, resulting in the death of more than 28,000 of them by the end of the war,23 stirred a heated public debate in Britain and precipitated a discussion of British morals. It was chiefly through the social work of women, such as Emily Hobhouse, who founded the South African Women and Children Distress Fund, or Millicent Fawcett’s “Ladies Commission”(founded by the government) that the story of the Boer women and children was brought home, to the British public, and an investigation, as well as reform, was initiated.24 The discourse of War and Empire, then, as well as that on nationalism, was embedded within gender ideologies throughout and in the aftermath of the Boer War, and it was through British women’s social work that the predicament of Boer women and their children was brought out. In the play, Le Gallienne links gender and national identity by constructing the tragedy around the unbridgeable gulf between a woman’s alleged obligation to the family and a man’s commitment to his country. In this interpretation, the motivation for murder is gendered and results in a

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somewhat conservative dichotomy between men and women that echoes the separate sphere ideology,25 Although Le Gallienne’s Clytemnestra utters some very blatant anti-war statements, the fundamental assumption is that women have no interest in the public sphere. Women’s pacifist perspective, in Le Gallienne’s play, does not originate from a social or moral viewpoint but mostly out of domestic sentiments. The interpretation of Clytemnestra in tandem with perceptions of femininity, or rather, allegedly flawed femininity, is evident in Arthur Elam Haigh’s 1896 The Tragic Drama of the Greeks as well, in which the author links what he refers to as Clytemnestra’s adultery and her allegedly criminal nature, enabling her to murder her own husband.26 Haigh’s interpretation draws heavily on Victorian domestic ideology, seeing female adultery as the most severe sexual sin and harshly condemning it.27 The “angel in the house” ideal,28 which constructed women as nourishing, delicate, tender, passive, and subordinate to male dominance yet as morally superior to men, put much emphasis on women’s importance within the household. “Feminine” influence was perceived as crucial for the moral strength of the family and any transgression of the “proper” feminine decorum was seen as menacing to the social order29. Haigh’s underlying rationale is that the same failings, which led Clytemnestra to being an adulteress, also led her to murder Agamemnon: “The passions and infirmities of an adulteress are replaced, in her case, by relentless hate and cold and calculating energy. She feels no touch of remorse for her crimes …”30 However, when Haigh further depicts Clytemnestra’s course of actions, he seems to forsake the image of the “flawed woman” in favour of an allegedly “appropriate” “masculine” conduct – bold, aggressive, unfaltering, sensible, and hard-headed: … she meets her doom without fear. When she hears of the murder of her lover, her first impulse is to seize an axe, and to rush to confront her foes; but finding that all is over, she wastes no words in piteous lamentations; after a few questions and replies – short, stern, and decisive – between herself and Orestes, she submits without a murmur to the inevitable.31 The image of a masculine Clytemnestra was prevailing in contemporary paintings, the most famous being, perhaps, John Collier’s 1882 and 1914 works (both titled “Clytemnestra”), as well as Frederic Leighton’s 1874 Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos Watches for the Beacon Fires. An 1880 adaptation for children of the Greek tragedies, written by Rev. Alfred J. Church,32 presented twenty-four illustrations, some based on John Flaxman’s designs. The illustration depicting Agamemnon’s murder, made by an unaccredited artist, shows a severe-looking Clytemnestra, confidently holding the axe over her shoulder, standing above the covered body of Agamemnon. The two mourning men crouched by the body appear effeminate, their bodies painted in a curved manner, bending over the dead Agamemnon in a “closed” position, in profile, whereas Clytemnestra is painted enface, standing erect at the centre of the frame.

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Figure 4.1 The Murder of Agamemnon, from Alfred J. Church, Stories from the Greek Tragedians (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1880), 156. Source: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 29214 e.110

Correspondingly, in the 1882 play Orestes, written by Isabella Harwood33 under the male pseudonym Ross Neil, Clytemnestra is described as a person who underwent a metamorphosis. Her “womanly” heart was changed and turned from its feminine “nature” until it grew hard like a stone.34 The themes of separate gendered spheres, then, as well as their reversal and transgression by “masculinized women”, which were dominant in Aeschylus’s text,35 seem to be especially emphasized in turn of the century adaptations. Whereas Clytemnestra was often depicted as masculine or at least as a woman who betrayed (not only her husband but also) her feminine “nature”, Orestes’s “soft” qualities were often accentuated. A 1903 play by an obscure playwright named William T. Saward, which was very much a hodgepodge of Euripidean and Aeschylean influences, seemed to mould the character of Orestes into the image of Hamlet and utilize the Shakespearean form to represent to modern English readers the story of Orestes. This fusion was popular at the time since both Orestes and Hamlet became then the subjects of several very influential texts, which had a huge impact on how murder and murderous wishes were perceived and on how modernity was understood. Scholars and literary critics, such as Gilbert Murray in his 1914 Hamlet and Orestes, A Study in Traditional Types, 36 would interpret both of them later as mythical characters and asserted a similarity between the two, based, inter alia, upon the structure of the murder stories. In both

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narratives, argued Murray, the heroes are the sons of kings who have been murdered. The dead king’s wife married the murderer, who in a sense usurped the son as ruler, and the son is driven by supernatural commands to take vengeance.37 In Saward’s 1903 play, it is not only noted that Orestes enters the stage “moodily”, but he also utters at some point the lines: “Words, idle words, that never grow to deeds”.38 explicitly alluding to Hamlet’s famous reply to Polonius in act two, scene two: “Words, words, words”; as well as Saward’s Orestes: “Oh, let me sleep, if but to wake no more”,39 alluding to the quote from the celebrated soliloquy in act three, scene one: “To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream”. Moreover, Orestes decides at some point to play mad while waiting for the opportune moment to avenge his father’s death. Finally, it is Aegisthus rather than Clytemnestra who is presented as the true villain of the drama, tempting her to plot with him against her husband. Saward has him utter his sinister schemes in front of the audience in long soliloquies and goes as far as to let him be the one who kills Cassandra, onstage, although at the moment of truth he falters and Clytemnestra has to stab Agamemnon to death by herself. The adaptation had many melodramatic features that were well known to nineteenth-century English theatregoers. Towards the play’s finale, for instance, it is discovered that Iphigenia is not dead but very much alive and well, Clytemnestra attempts to commit suicide by stabbing herself onstage after Orestes confronts her, but a surgeon sent by Electra saves her life, and Iphigenia, who made it back to the family palace just before curtain-fall, announces that justice has at long last been restored and that now Orestes can happily marry Hermione, and become king. There is a possibility that in this overly “happy” ending Saward was mocking Euripides’s finale, where, while Orestes threatens to kill Hermione and gives orders to set fire to the palace, Apollo arrives onstage and announces that he should marry her.40 Indeed, eight of Euripides’s surviving tragedies end with a deus ex machina 41 and it was during the turn of the century that a passionate debate over the elements of divine intervention in Euripidean drama was precipitated in England. Rationalist critics (A.W. Verall in particular) argued that such endings are nothing more than a concession to popular prejudice and that Euripides himself did not believe in the traditional Greek gods.42 In any case, in Saward’s play it is a mortal, not a God, that suggests the marriage between Orestes and Hermione.43 Clytemnestra, a tragedy by Irish poet and novelist Arnold Felix Graves, was published in London in 1903, also seemed to underplay divine intervention. As pointed out in the original preface by scholar Robert Y. Tyrrell, the play was not intended to be a Greek drama in English, but rather a modern version of an ancient Greek story.44 Graves’s adaptation differs from the three Greek tragedians’ versions in a few fundamental aspects. First, Orestes is initially portrayed as a loving and devoted son, who desperately seeks his mother’s affection and finds it hard to believe that she is being unfaithful to his father,

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Agamemnon. In fact, Orestes erroneously supposes that Clytemnestra would not hesitate to kill Aegisthus if he attempted to pursue her. Orestes’s love for his mother is represented as semi-erotic as if he were jealous of her and wished to be the only man in her life: Have we not always been her heart’s desire? Are we not ever bedded in her thoughts? We fill her heart so full, there is no room for an intruder.45 The description of the mother’s lover as an “intruder”, by the son, brings to mind Freud’s discussion on the affectionate love children often feel for one parent, while feeling a sense of competition with the other. There is no information on whether Graves had actually read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), which was not translated to English until 1913. Nineteenth-century British psychiatry was very much dominated by the materialist concept of mind at that time,46 and while Freud was discussed in Britain since the 1890s, it was only later that his ideas became more influential, especially through the efforts of Ernest Jones.47 And yet, in Graves’s play, the setting for the matricide is undoubtedly Orestes’s sense of betrayal and dismay when he eventually finds out his mother does have an affair with Aegisthus, rather than his religious and social obligation to avenge his father’s murder or his political incentive to take what had been usurped from him.48 This discrepancy may perhaps be explained by Graves’s deliberate decision to “modernize” the ancient narrative by suggesting inner, emotional motives (such that were, perhaps, more popular at the time in central Europe than in England) for the actions of the characters rather than allegedly anachronistic socio-religious customs. An additional discrepancy between Graves’s text and the three tragedians’ versions is an absolute rejection of the concept of fate, as expressed in the words of Clytemnestra: He sacrificed my child to speed his going. What can I do to stay his swift return? AEGISTHUS: We’ll sacrifice. CLYTEMNESTRA: A fig for sacrifice! We’re masters of our fate, say what they will.49 CLYTEMNESTRA:

Graves suppressed to a minimum the traditional elements of divine intervention and fate. The move away from a tragedy of destiny to a conflict between father and son over the mother is central in Freud’s discussion of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams, although Graves also interprets the curse of the house of Atreus within the human framework of political intrigue. This is evident in a few brief soliloquies of some of the characters, which shed light on their dilemmas and afford the readers the opportunity to get acquainted with the calculations that

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eventually lead to their actions. Here is Clytemnestra, trying to make up her mind whether she should kill Agamemnon or not: Shall I go back to Agamemnon’s bed? To which I have been false, and live a lie? His wife, his plaything, slave; or shall I be Queen of Mycenae, ruler of the Isles, And mistress of the man I love so well?50 Eventually, what tipped the scale was Agamemnon’s intolerable behaviour after his triumph on Troy. He treated Clytemnestra in a disrespectful manner, and she soon realized her political influence might deteriorate if she let him live: How openly he flouts me! While he lives I shall be powerless as a chamber-wench.51 Furthermore, a group of city conspirators band against Agamemnon and help Aegisthus plan an insurrection. It was neither the curse of the house of Atreus, nor the will of the Gods that made Clytemnestra murder her husband, but a political intrigue. When she attempts to explain her deed to the city elders, however, Graves has her restored to her original motive of avenging the sacrifice of her daughter, Iphigenia. In this Dialogue, she expresses the traditional, deterministic explanations for the murder, although Graves still allows for the political rationale to underlie her speech: He was my husband, father of my children; But, driven by the curse upon his house, He slew my child CITY ELDER: Nay, nay! … He sacrificed your child to save the State. ’Twas not for that stale injury you took His life; some sharper spur has driven you on. CLYTEMNESTRA: … Yes, the man was false – … he brings this Trojan baggage back To Argos as his mistress … Had I not struck he would have strangled me.52 CLYTEMNESTRA:

Finally, the murder scene of Clytemnestra takes place on stage, while Orestes attempts to strike Aegisthus but inadvertently kills his mother, much like in Italian tragic poet Vittorio Alfieri’s 1783 tragedy Oreste, where Orestes unwittingly slays his mother while trying to kill Aegisthus.53 In his preface, Tyrrell argues that although he thinks this was a poetic error, the English audience probably would not have tolerated a matricide “at the order of a pagan God”.54 A constructed dichotomy between “moral” Christianity and “immoral paganism” is evident in this instance, as it will be in the next sub-chapter as well.

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None of the adaptations we surveyed here became a literary success, and all were quickly doomed to oblivion. An illuminating example, however, of a stage adaptation of a Greek tragedy that was generally perceived by many literary critics as “modern” (and by fewer as also “successful”) was Max Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex, performed at Covent Garden. This adaptation was also lacking any references to modern science and heredity, but its alleged “foreign” aesthetics were perceived as modern. Following his triumphant debut of The Miracle at the Olympia Exhibition and Oedipus Rex in Munich and in Berlin,55 Reinhardt, the famed Austrian actor and director was invited to restage in 1912 his adaptation of the Sophoclean tragedy at Covent Garden. By then, Reinhardt was already one of the most esteemed and influential theatrical figures in the German-speaking world. Using Gilbert Murray’s translation of Hofmannsthal’s version, and with John Martin Harvey and Lillah McCarthy in the leading roles, Reinhardt developed in this production his novel aesthetic model, staging extravagant scenic effects with hundreds of actors56 and making the audience a part of the play.57

“The Old Gods Have it”: A German (Jewish) Oedipus in Covent Garden What characterizes most the debate that took place in the periodical press about the production was the use of a set of binary oppositions, which constructed a demarcation between “English culture” and “Continental culture”. The performance was received with mixed reviews, as many critics argued that Reinhardt’s interpretation and stage aesthetics were “not Greek” but rather “pagan” and “savage”.58 Many writers established a polarized model of ancient Greek religion that was aligned with “respectable” English style, which was then posited against a pre-Hellenic “paganism”, equated with what was perceived to be Reinhardt’s brutal, “German” theatricality. The Telegraph, for instance, concluded that “After all, we do not want pageantry intruding into Sophocles” and the Nation mocked the “well-schooled zeal of a Prussian regiment” that was allegedly evident in some of the mass scenes. During the turn of the century, at a time when Britain reigned supreme on vast tracts of the globe, some feared that it might be eclipsed by other rising nations, and in particular, Germany, which made significant progress in its economy, industry, and military. Anxieties about a possible invasion by hostile continental powers also rose, resulting in a tidal wave of “invasion literature”, from Sir George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking; Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871) through Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), to H.G. Wells’s famous The War of the Worlds (1898), which was a curious amalgamation between invasion literature and science fiction. This trend was cultivated by anti-German propaganda of journalist, novelist, and self-appointed “spy-hunter” William Le Queux, author of such volumes as The Invasion of 1910, serialized in the Daily Mail in 1906, and Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England (1909).59

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Even Gilbert Murray, who wrote favourably about the play and admired Reinhardt’s directorial work, espoused and employed the same rhetoric of ideal “Greekness” and “Englishness” versus pre-Hellenic religion and German stage aesthetics: “Professor Reinhardt was frankly pre-Hellenic … partly Cretan and Mycenaean, partly Oriental, partly – to my great admiration – merely savage”.60 There were, however, reviews that perceived Greek religion itself as an archaic, pagan, immoral creed, and contrasted it with the essence of Christianity. This view is evident in a Review of Reviews piece entitled: “The pagan and Christian conception of God”, commenting on the Covent Garden production. The writer emphasized Reinhardt’s foreignness to English thought, culture, religion, and aesthetics by noting in the opening line that the famed director was not only an Austrian working in Germany, but also Jewish: “Reinhardt the Jew has made the Christian world of London his debtor by compelling the multitude to see and wonder at two marvelous scenic representations of two of the vanished faiths of mankind.”61 Thus, a direct juxtaposition of the familiar “Christian world of London” and the foreign “Jew” was constructed. Furthermore, the use of the word “debtor” in the context of a Jewish-Christian relationship, inevitably alluded to Shakespeare’s Shylock and Antonio, thus establishing a sense of peril to the Christian religion.62 Christianity, dubbed as modern and progressive, was contrasted with ancient, non-Christian creeds (Druids, the worship of Moloch, the rites of Isis, and so on and so forth) that were described as superstitious, horrifying, “grim and weird”, “obscene”, etc. The text clearly established an evolutionary view of religion, through a teleological scheme in which religious practices gradually advanced throughout history into their most mature, sophisticated, and refined form of Christianity, the quintessence of morality. The tragedy of Oedipus represented an “immoral” relationship between God and man, where avenging, pitiless deities tormented the protagonist for crimes he attempted so hard to avoid. The writer deliberately emphasized the unbridgeable distinctions between ancient Greek perception and modern Christian (as well as English) perception: From our point of view, Oedipus had done no wrong and deserved no punishment. He deserved indeed our profoundest pity, our loving compassion; but from the point of view of the drama not only was this not the view of his contemporaries, it was not even his own view. He was terribly punished, but he makes no railing protest against the divine fiends who had ordained his destruction. It is all very strange and abhorrent to us, an outrage upon what we now regard as the elementary ideas of justice.63 Oedipus, then, under Christian ideas of justice, is rendered completely unaccountable for unwittingly killing his father. The personification, however, of Reinhardt as a Jew was utilized in the text in a twofold manner: whereas he was initially represented as a symbol of foreignness and religious disparity (in a parallel way to which the ancient Greek

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religion was characterized) his image also functioned as a mediator between the unfamiliar, archaic concept of God and justice and “the Christian world of London”. In his conclusion, the writer employed the principally Judaic interpretation of sin and punishment, (as expressed in Ezekiel 18:2 and Jeremiah 31:29: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge”, as well as in Exodus 34:7 and Deuteronomy 5:9: “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children”) to reconcile the two allegedly opposing conceptions of justice.64 The polarized discourse on religions facilitated and structured the discussion on the murder element in the play, and especially so on moral accountability. Here, according to the Judeo-Christian view, as it was established in the text, Oedipus was not perceived as a sinner for (unwittingly) murdering his father and defiling his mother’s bed. Rather, his parents were guilty of attempting to kill him and defy the Gods, and he was subsequently punished for their sins. Yet, some reviewers admired what they perceived to be the Greek principle of beauty and saw Reinhardt’s stage aesthetics as a means to represent it. They did not present German theatricality as brutal or menacing to English decorum, but rather as an idealized embodiment of ancient Greek splendour. An exceedingly favourable English Review piece hailed Reinhardt’s production and contrasted it with the all too familiar, dreary world of London. Greekness and German theatricality were intertwined and exalted as a supreme form of art: Consider how unavoidably imperfect atmospherically this performance of Oedipus is there in Covent Garden – without the sun of ancient Thebes, the gleaming marble … All that is necessary is lacking – the pagan soul, the Grecian love of beauty, the spirit of solemnity and Theistic awe. We went (as usual) rather tired after our day’s work; bored with the weather … we came back enthralled, almost pagan … From the first moment of that waving forestry of naked arms and swell of pagan supplication our modern soul takes flight. The old Gods have it.65 The theatrical style of Reinhardt that was presented here as entirely foreign to the stage conventions of London was considered to be what enabled the Greek “theistic awe” to shine. The writer even went so far as to inquire whether it was the genius of Reinhardt or of Sophocles that inspired the actors to such a sublime performance. The piece concluded with what seemed to have the characteristics of a religious conversion and yet was at the same time very much an artistic one: Oh Apollo, bring us back to this art that you and your Gods invoked. Stay with us. Help and teach us to love and render such beauty that man gave to you long centuries ago, seeing that we Britons have at last come to worship at your shrine.66

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Is this what Bentwich and MacCarthy longed for? It seems that Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex was generally presented as “modern”, whether approvingly or not, in tandem with its alleged foreignness. Next, we will explore another example of a popular fin de siècle murder depiction, where the demarcation between “England” and the “continent” was evident in numerous texts that criticized it. In 1908, Canadian-born dancer and choreographer Maud Allan swept the London stage and mesmerized theatre audiences with her sensuous rendition of Salome’s dance. The piece, loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play,67 culminated with Allan’s kissing John the Baptist’s severed head on a plate. Although controversial, the show was highly popular and ran for an astonishing 250 performances at the Palace Theatre. Between 1893 and 1910 various depictions of Salome’s story were produced, circulated, and consumed in England; be it Oscar Wilde’s drama in French, its English translation coupled with Aubrey Beardsley’s (in)famous illustrations, Maud Allan’s dance, or Strauss’s opera. During this time, a vigorous public debate broke out over the morality and alleged unwholesomeness of these artistic works and specifically over the portrayal of Salome as a bloodthirsty woman who was overtaken by an urge to kill John the Baptist and relish in his death.

No Salomes in Brixton? In the correspondence section of The Musical Standard, D. Donaldson expressed his discontent with an editorial published earlier that week, criticizing Wilde’s drama. In his letter, he denounced the editor’s proclamation stating that “What the intelligent spectator feels is that Salome should have been placed in the care of a reliable medical practitioner”,68 on the grounds that theatre viewers shouldn’t expect the characters to behave “as though they had been born and reared in Brixton”.69 Donaldson’s letter adopted and employed the rhetoric of contrast between “reason” (personified by the “intelligent spectator”) and “madness” (personified by Salome, allegedly, in dire need of medical attention) in order to differentiate between the ethe, ideologies, and etiquette of the English middle classes (personified by the good people of Brixton) and art (Wilde’s play). Theatre, according to Donaldson’s letter, transcended class, nation, and even common sense. It deals with the universal; it is “an expression of personality in terms of life”. Donaldson articulated in his letter a notion of ideal art that must be appreciated by aesthetic criteria, regardless of local particularities concerning ethics or decorum. This, of course, tapped into the contemporary discourse of aestheticism, whose supporters strove to represent murder and crime as a purely aesthetic experience detached from morality. Walter Pater, for instance, an English essayist and critic, who advocated “art for art’s sake” and highly influenced aestheticism in England, weaved into his aesthetics instances of grotesque torture, violence, and murder, and linked sadism and aestheticism, to illustrate the way in which the grotesque may manifest through beautiful

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form.70 Some of Oscar Wilde’s decadent characters end up committing murder, such as Dorian’s murder of Basil in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), or the murderer’s slaying of his love in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1896), who become themselves “victims” of overindulgence in beauty, art, pleasure, and love: He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed71 As Karen Alkalay-Gut argues: the order and rhythm of the last two lines describing “The poor dead woman whom he loved,” with its emphasis on love and the expectation that the development and consequences of love will continue in the next line, which then begins “And murdered,” make murder a virtually natural outgrowth of love … the murder takes place in bed as if the result of an excess of passion and wine. Even the refined “wine” – inserted by Wilde – is as responsible as the blood in its calling up of primal needs and instinctive human behavior.72 Salome, as Sylvia C. Ellis claims, “was a heroine of Decadence”,73 a fin de siècle symbol of female brutality and lustfulness, “desire and destruction uncontrollably united”.74 In a letter to the editor published in The Academy, a reader responded in a similar fashion as the former instance to allegations made by a columnist against Maud Allan’s dance. He sardonically remarked that the critic found “fault with her presenting such a display of unwholesomeness passion to the astonished stockbrokers of England”,75 and thus constructed an opposition between art and metropolitan middle-class philistinism. Although in this case, the letter went on to conclude that whereas in England the piece was dubbed as “notorious”, it was greeted with much greater enthusiasm in “Berlin, Munich, and Paris at least two years before it was witnessed in this country”. The Academy published alongside the above note a letter by another reader, who seemed to endorse wholeheartedly the harsh criticism of the dance: the unsuitability of attempting to depict in dance the emotions of Salome on obtaining the ghastly fulfillment of her heart’s desire, and can only explain the toleration of the British public for such a disagreeable spectacle by attributing it to the affection of approval for anything exotic or unfamiliar which of recent years has been so marked a characteristic of a certain section of the race.76

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The references to the exotic and unfamiliar, I maintain, are ambiguous in this case – they allude to the alluring appeal of all that was thought of as “oriental”, but at the same time they allude to fin de siècle continental culture, that was perceived as being alien and strange and also much more receptive to “Eastern” influence. Five months before these letters were published in The Academy, an editorial glorifying Allan’s dance appeared in the same journal. The author concluded that she was in fact educating the London public “in a branch of art which we have persistently neglected”.77 Although Allan was born in Canada and spent some of her early years in the US, she received much of her artistic training in Berlin, and more importantly, she was perceived by many in England as a disciple of aesthetic modernism.78 The editorial described a cultural triangle, in which England was the reluctant recipient of “eastern” aesthetics through Maud Allan’s art, which functioned as a mediator: We have the largest eastern empire the world has ever seen, and yet we not only neglect to study eastern thought and costume, we even shrink with horror … which we like to believe virtuous, from anything eastern … Racial instinct, Island prejudice, and national conceit have kept our eyes closed to a whole garden of beauties … Did Miss Allan realize when she came to London how bold a thing she was doing? It was nothing less than beginning our education in a branch of art which we have persistently neglected, and mainly through our uncomfortable suspicion of its “propriety”.79 A sense of propriety was often perceived as the context for resisting continental representations of Salome and condemning them as immoral. Advocates of these works launched a whimsical assault on English respectability. The constructed dichotomy of England versus the continent served the purpose. An anonymous author discussed Strauss’s Salome opera and its fantastic reception in the continent, while describing the music in terms that contradicted the essence of respectability in English culture, such as “savage”, “brutal”, “violent”, “turbulent”, “fierce”, “cataclysmal” and so on. The piece was concluded with the following words: “We shall never see the opera in England; but, after all, it is not very far to, say, Munich, where it is played as often as ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’80 is played in London. Instructive contrast!”81 Although the meanings, styles, and aesthetics of the Salome representations were considered by some to be foreign or even insulting to English thought and conduct, the image of her as a murderous lustful woman did penetrate, through processes of adjustments and familiarization, the literary repertoire and manifested itself in both high and popular culture. A music hall number, entitled “Salome: The Sheep’s Head and the Tin-Tack”,82 written by Robert P. Weston, a famous music hall songwriter and composer, utilized interesting rhetoric of contrast to allow for the assimilation of elements of alleged “continental” aestheticism that were regarded by some as foreign to English

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thought and decorum. Mockingly remarking on the “Salome-mania” that took the city by storm, the song told the story of a man whose wife drags him to see “the rage of the town”: the barefoot and barely dressed Maud Allan, performing “The Vision of Salome”. Impressed by the performance, the wife starts mimicking Allan’s dance, using a sheep’s head instead of that of St John the Baptist’s. While it proved a huge success with the neighbours, who clapped enthusiastically, the unfortunate husband feared for his life, as his spouse threatened him that “[his] head she’ll have instead”. When the wife warned her husband that his “head she’ll have instead”, the audience is given a sensible, functional, and, to an extent, utilitarian explanation as to her threat: “so that she can save a tanner”. The mystery concerning Wilde’s Salome’s unrestrained urge to relish in the head of John the Baptist was converted here to a common-sense cui bono argument. This implicit comparison between the wife’s practical motivation for murder and Wilde’s Salome’s abstract, aesthetic, almost symbolic determination to have the head of St John was intended to create a comical effect; one could not expect that Salome’s lust for slaughter was due to economic considerations amounting to sixpence. This contradiction, however, was at the same time utilized to process, adjust, and familiarize elements that were perceived as being detached from English music hall culture; the wife was given a pragmatic and comprehensible reason to behead her husband. At the time, humorous songs that depicted relationships between husband and wife typically represented men as being reckless with money and spending too much on drinks and races, while their tyrannical wives were likely to retaliate.83 A 1908 humorous illustration published in the Daily Mirror indicated the extent of the infiltration of the Salome aesthetics into a shared conceptual terminology. The cartoon showed a bewildered little girl leaning down over her decapitated doll, while the culprit escapes with a knife in his hand. An elderly man looks upon the scene and says to the child: “You there, clear off! We don’t want any of the Salome business round here.”84 The comical effect of the joke derived from the unbreachable gulf between the icon of Salome and an image of a small, innocent little child. An additional humorous meaning of the cartoon was a more contextual one, which possibly commented on an alleged process of inflation and banalization of the image of Salome in contemporary English culture. The intense and widespread preoccupation with the figure of Salome was exaggerated in the cartoon to an extent where even little girls playing with dolls could be perceived as being her. By processes of eschewing and espousing aesthetic and thematic elements from contemporary fin de siècle continental culture, individuals and groups in turn of the century England were able to redefine to themselves what was, in their perception, foreign to English culture and what was familiar or inherent to it. To that end, a demarcation between “England” and “the Continent” was constructed. Indeed, as we have seen throughout the last two chapters, oftentimes, what was perceived as typically “English” was also dubbed as outdated. But in the

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next chapter, we shall see how ideas about modern science and heredity were incorporated into much more popular representations of murder, in the press, and presented as up to date without allegedly displaying characteristics of “everything that is impossible in London”. On the contrary, London, in these murder representations, was the chief and most important component, and class and poverty, shaped by modern ideas about heredity and the urban environment, functioned poetically as fate.

Notes 1 Aeschylus’s Oresteia depicted the entire story from the return of Agamemnon until after the murder of Clytemnestra while Sophocles and Euripides told the story of Orestes’s and Electra’s revenge. 2 “The Haymarket Opera House”, Survey of London: Volumes 29 and 30, St. James Westminster, Part 1, (London County Council, 1960), 223–250. 3 For a comprehensive review on the performance history of the Agamemnon in particular, see: Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, and Oliver Taplin, eds., Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and for nineteenth-century productions see, in particular: Fiona Macintosh, “Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 139–52. 4 “Benson, Sir Francis Robert (1858–1939),” J.P. Wearing in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2011. 5 Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, Oliver Taplin, Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), clxvi. 6 Francis Robert Benson was by then an esteemed actor and theatre manager who was famous for his Shakespearean roles. 7 David Hayes, “A History of Camden Town 1895–1914”, in: The Camden Town Group in Context (London: Tate Research Publication, 2012). 8 The Royal Court Theatre was a relatively small playhouse that was opened in 1888 on the east side of Sloane square and could fit an audience of around 640. The year of 1904 was important for the theatre, since at that time the “Vedrenne–Barker seasons”, a series of matinées and evening performances introducing some of the continent’s finest modern playwrights such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Maurice Maeterlinck, begun and lasted until 1907. See: “Shaw and The Court Theatre”, The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), as well as: “Royal Court Theatre”, The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Apparently, under Barker’s management, the theatre cultivated a small but “elitist” crowd. See: Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 30; Mick Wallis, “Social Commitment and Aesthetic Experiment, 1895–1946”, The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 3. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176. 9 On Strauss’s opera see: Simon Goldhill, “Cultural History and Aesthetics: Why Kant is No Place to Start Reception Studies”, Theorizing Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice (London: A. & C. Black, 2013); Derrick Puffett, Richard Strauss: Elektra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 10 Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found, “Scala Theatre”, The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 11 See: Finley Melville and Kendal Forster, English Translations from the Greek: A Bibliographical Survey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918.) For further

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“The Actual Catastrophe” discussion on English translations of Greek Drama see: Yopie Prins, “Violence Bridling Speech”: Browning’s Translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Victorian Poetry 27, no. 3/4, Centennial of Robert Browning: 1812–1889, 1989, 151–170; J. Michael Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Isobel Hurst, “Victorian Literature and the Reception of Greece and Rome”, Literature Compass, Volume 7, Issue 6, 2010, 484–495. Curiously, in The Green Book Magazine Faversham claims the adaptation is of Euripides’s play, whereas Le Gallienne himself, in the introduction to his play, claims it is an adaptation of Aeschylus’s. William Faversham, “The Poetic Drama in America”, The Green Book Magazine 3, 1910, 778. The Times, 7 May 1912, 10; The Stage Year Book (London: The Stage Offices, 1913), 107. Fiona Macintosh, “Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, in: Agamemnon in Performance: 458 BC to AD 2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 144–145; 152–153. Richard Le Gallienne, Orestes, (Whitefish, MO: Kessinger Publishing, 1910), 21–23. Ibid., 44–45. Macintosh, “Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, 141. This theme was not foreign to Greek drama and was well manifested in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, for instance. See, Benjamin Brawley, “Richard Le Gallienne and the Tradition of Beauty”, The Sewanee Review 26, no. 1, 1918, 55–56; see also: Richard Le Gallienne, “The Psychology of Gossip”, Munsey’s Magazine, Vol. 48, 1912, 123–127; and many of his poems, including “The Illusion of War”. Marouf Hasian, “The ‘Hysterical’ Emily Hobhouse and Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy” Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 2, 2003, 138–163; Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Paula M. Krebs, “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars: Women in the Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy”, History Workshop Journal 33, no. 1, 38–56. Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire, 32–33. For a comprehensive discussion on the significance of the “separate spheres” ideology in Victorian times see: Leonore Davidoff, “Gender and the Great Divide: Public and Private in British Gender History”, Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1, 2003, 11–27; Martin Francis, “The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity”, The Historical Journal 45, no. 3, 2002, 637–652; Amanda Vickery, “Golden age to separate spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History”, The Historical Journal 36, no. 2, 1993, 383–414. Haigh (1855–1905), a classical scholar, was born in Leeds and educated at Leeds grammar school. In 1874 he matriculated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he became a classical lecturer and pursued a career in teaching. See, for instance: Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). For a discussion on the Victorian myth of Women as angles of the house see: Jeanne M. Peterson, “No Angels in the House: The Victorian Myth and the Paget Women”, The American Historical Review, 1984, 677–708. See: Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (Hoboken, NJ: 1989). Arthur Elam Haigh, The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 77. Ibid.

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32 Alfred J. Church, Stories from the Greek Tragedians (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1880), 156. 33 Harwood, (circa 1837–1888), a novelist and playwright, was born in Dorset but the family soon moved to London. Her father, Philip Harwood, was a journalist and editor of the Saturday Review from 1868 to 1883. Harwood began her literary career as a reviewer and from 1864 to 1870 wrote a few successful novels, which she published anonymously. Harwood published several blank verse dramas under the masculine pseudonym, Ross Neil. 34 Ross Neil, “Orestes”, in: Andrea the Painter; Claudia’s Choice; Orestes; Pandora (London: Ellis and White, 1883), 190–191. 35 For a discussion on women in Greek Dramas see: Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama”, Representations 11, 1985, 63–94. 36 Gilbert Murray, “Hamlet and Orestes: A Study in Traditional Types”, British Academy, 1914. 37 Ibid., 6. 38 William T. Saward, Orestes (London: Grant Richards, 1903), 4. 39 Ibid., 78. 40 Although, evidently, in 1907 Saward wrote a play that fictionally depicted William Shakespeare’s life: William T. Saward, William Shakespeare, a Play in Four Acts (London: Elkin and Mathews, 1907), in which the ending was similar to that of Orestes and also employed a deus ex machina ending. See: Maurice J. O’Sullivan, Jr., ed., Shakespeare’s Other Lives: An Anthology of Fictional Depictions of the Bard (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 5. 41 Justina Gregory, A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 259. 42 See: Richard Dowgun, “Some Victorian Perceptions of Greek Tragedy”, Browning Institute Studies 10, 1982, 84; Stuart Lawrence, Moral Awareness in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46. 43 Early nineteenth-century commentators, such as Johann Adam Hartung, had suggested that Euripides’s play must be classified as a “tragi-comedy”, due, inter alia, to its happy ending. See John R. Porter, Studies in Euripides’ Orestes (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 291–297. 44 Arnold Felix Graves, Clytemnestra (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,1903), vi. 45 Ibid., 7. 46 See: Malcolm Pines, “An English Freud?”, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 5, 1990, 1–9. 47 Sally Alexander, “Psychoanalysis in Britain in the Early Twentieth Century: An Introductory Note”, History Workshop Journal 45, 135–143. 48 Although a demand to avenge Agamemnon’s death does come from Delphi as well. 49 Graves, Clytemnestra, 21. 50 Ibid., 29. 51 Ibid., 53. 52 Ibid., 75. 53 See: Vittorio Alfieri, “Orestes”, The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, Volume 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1815). 54 Graves, Clytemnestra, xv. 55 The original production travelled throughout Europe and played in Vienna, Budapest, Riga, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Prague, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Hague. See: J.L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 78–80. 56 See: David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 80.

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57 See: Felix Budelmann, The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication, and Involvement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 231. 58 Styan, Max Reinhardt, 80–85. 59 Nicholas Daly, “Britain”, in: The Fin de Siècle World, ed. Michael Saler (New York: Routledge, 2015), 119. 60 As cited in: Wiles and Dymkowski, The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, 81. 61 “The Pagan and Christian Conception of God”, Review of Reviews, February 1912, 147. 62 It is worth noting here that the author of the piece claimed to have previously written against what he referred to as the narrow-minded fanaticism of Protestantism and that his stance towards Christianity in this piece is not necessarily entirely favourable. 63 “The Pagan and Christian Conception of God”, 148. 64 Ibid., 150. 65 S.O., “Play of the Month”, English Review, February 1912, 539. 66 Ibid., 540. 67 Amy Koritz, “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan’s ‘The Vision of Salome’”, Theatre Journal 46, no. 1, March 1994, 67. 68 D. Donaldson, “Salome”, The Musical Standard, 17 December 1910, 395. 69 Brixton was, at the time, a middle-class residential enclave in south London. 70 Romana Byrne, “Sadistic Aestheticism: Walter Pater and Octave Mirbeau”, Criticism 57, no. 3, 2015, 403–429. See also Lisa Downing’s article on the concept of murder as an art form in French decadent literature of the fin de siècle, inspired, in part, by De Quincey, as well as Pater and, of course, Wilde: Lisa Downing, Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Aesthetic Violence and Motiveless Murder in French Decadent Fiction, French Studies 58, no. 2, April 2004, 189–203. 71 Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (London: Leonard Smithers, 1898), 1. 72 Karen Alkalay-Gut, “The Thing He Loves: Murder as Aesthetic Experience in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’”, Victorian Poetry 35, no. 3 (1997): 351. 73 Sylvia C. Ellis, The Plays of W.B. Yeats (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 9. 74 Udo Kultermann, “The ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, Salome and Erotic Culture around 1900”, Artibus et Historiae 27, no. 53 (2006): 200. 75 Fairplay, “To the Editor of The Academy”, The Academy, 15 August 1908, 165. 76 G.W. Hanson, “To the Editor of the Academy”, The Academy, 15 August 1908, 165 77 J.C.F., “Miss Maud Allen’s Salome Dance”, The Academy, 21 March, 1908, 598 78 Judith R. Walkowitz, “The Vision of Salome: Cosmopolitan and Erotic Dancing in Central London 1908–1918”, The American Historical Review 108, no. 2, April 2003. 79 J.C.F., “Miss Maud Allen’s Salome Dance”, 598. 80 An extremely melodramatic Opera in one act by Mascagni to a libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci. 81 “Salome, Strauss and Sathanas”, The Academy, 4 May 1907, 439. 82 R.P. Weston, F.J. Barnes and Harry Bedford, Salome: The Sheep’s Head and the Tin-Tack (London: The Star Music Publishing, 1908). 83 Gareth Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900; Notes on the Remaking of a Working-Class”, Journal of Social History 7, no. 4, summer 1974, 492. 84 Penny Illustrated Press, 25 July 1908.

5

A Working Class (Tragic) Hero Is Something to Be1

In ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, which were the focus of much of the two previous chapters, the protagonists were, typically, of noble origin. Towards the end of the century, the idea of a “working-class hero” started to flourish. A 1905 editorial piece published in Temple Bar, a monthly shilling magazine that was aimed at the metropolitan middle-class family, reflected on this trend: What is tragedy? It has been well defined as the overthrow of something great … ancient tragedy, classic and romantic always concerns itself with the fall of something great … But of late another conception of tragedy has gained ground: the tragedy of common things. This tragedy of common things is found more in novels than in plays … yet, if the fall of the humbly born is to be really tragic, there must be in them some element of greatness. The characters of this species of drama are great-souled, if not great on the world stage.2 Although the English novel did not embrace continental naturalism, unprivileged men and women were increasingly portrayed as struggling against their life circumstances and the ruthless forces that governed human society. Poverty, urban deprivation, alcoholism, and degeneration were perceived as deterministic forces that shaped the fate of working-class people, in particular. George Gissing, who wrote five novels that represented the hardships of working-class life, employed tragic components in his narrative and style.3 Thomas Hardy was quite preoccupied with the concept of tragic fate and the possibility of “translating” it into modern terms through the employment of contemporary scientific notions.4 Here, I will examine how the idea of fate, a central and essential component in tragedy, as well as in melodrama, was understood and presented. Throughout the nineteenth century, the boundaries between melodrama and tragedy were murky, as melodramatic and sensational components regularly infiltrated tragic performances and texts.5 For years, scholars have wrestled to assess the generic distinctions between these genres,6 and while in both the representation of suffering is a central component,7 melodrama is typically associated with a DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-6

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crude, exaggerated storyline and performance, in which, despite the victimizing of virtue by villainy, the triumph of the righteous is inevitable. The definitions of tragedy, however, are traditionally more dynamic and complex and may range from “extremely sad” to a nexus of poetic components.8 Many studies have stressed the dominance of the melodramatic mode in journalistic and court representations of murderers during the nineteenth century,9 and many argue that the press maintains existing power relations by utilizing crime stories to generate a sense of anxiety that ultimately reaffirms the hegemony of dominant groups.10 But the turn of the century backlash against melodrama also had manifestations in newspapers, especially in the undermining of the polarized outlook that embodied a rigid and simplistic dichotomy of good versus evil. Here I seek to explore how the discussion of space and the spatial shaped the manners in which traditional melodramatic features were challenged. This chapter offers a spatial history of a London murder by exploring the possible links between the area in London in which the murder occurred, the social background of the culprit, and the journalistic debate on her accountability, which resulted in a tragic trope. While previous chapters dealt with fictional representations and sampled a relatively extensive variety of sources, the following chapter focuses on representations of a real-life murder and aims to direct a spotlight on the violent, forgotten suffer-ridden life of a destitute woman in the hub of the Victorian East End, and to offer an intricate image of her social and cultural reality. The murder case that was chosen here as a showcase is that of Kate Marshall, who allegedly murdered her young sister, Eliza, in 1898. The incident took place in the Dorset Street room where the sisters had been residing with Eliza’s husband, Dave Roberts, a painter and decorator, and their three-year-old son. After standing trial at the Old Bailey, Marshall was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death. Eventually, capital punishment was reprieved. Questions of legal liability and moral responsibility were central in this case, and competing perceptions of the relationship between criminality and the urban setting outlined the discussion on accountability, thus marking the place of the alleged murder as an immensely important component in the press coverage. The case is, intentionally, not a cause célèbre, but rather, a story that attracted much public attention at the time, but was ultimately consigned to oblivion and received little if any, scholarly attention. This will, hopefully, help to fill the lacuna in research and mend the tendency to overlook stories that, for some reason, did not maintain their popularity in posterity, but were very influential at the time. In Kate’s case, I will argue, the construction of the tragic trope was closely associated with a sense of urban place, in which Spitalfields itself, as a corrupting urban locus, was presented as what caused her to murder. This facilitated the representation of a “tragic” reality that is not morally ruled, in which justice and the truth do not necessarily triumph, in which there are no rational

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explanations and human beings are incapable of defeating the forces beyond their control. Spitalfields, a parish in the East End of London, and the site in which the murder occurred was infamous for its poverty-stricken environment and believed to be infested with robbers, prostitutes, and homeless vagrants.11 Competing contemporary perceptions of the relationship between femininity, criminality and the urban setting outlined the discussion on Kate’s accountability. Whereas some contemporary thinkers and social commentators saw urban deprivation as the cause of degeneration, others blamed the uncontrolled reproduction of hereditarily “flawed” individuals, or a “hereditary pauper class”,12 facilitated by their inevitable flocking into the cities.13 Thus, a 1902 article titled: “Heredity and Crime”, for instance, introduced to the readers the findings of Dr F.J. Allan, Medical Officer of Health for the city of Westminster, who studied “hereditary crime” through the case of a woman of “evil habits” who died in 1827. According to Dr Allen’s study, 87 per cent of her descendants were criminals, out of which 37 were executed murderers. The family’s tragedy, the piece explained, was shaped by their living environment, which was the “most dangerously criminal in all London, the district which includes Seven Dials and the noisome lanes around Drury Lane and Clare Market”.14 The discourse on criminality, then, split between deterministic approaches and a belief in the impact of manmade, allegedly repairable social conditions, according to which far-reaching environmental changes could put a halt to mental and biological decline.15

A History of Violence: Kate’s Life Kate Marshall was sentenced to death and sent to Newgate to await her execution, which was due on Tuesday 31 January 1899. Only a few days earlier, the 44-year-old whip maker from Spitalfields was convicted of the wilful murder of her young sister, Eliza Roberts, who was stabbed to death in her Dorset Street room on 26 November 1898. Kate protested her innocence, claiming that it was her sister’s husband who delivered the fatal blow. Nobody seemed to believe her. She, by then, had a long history of violence, and was already labelled, in the justice system as well as in the press, as a “dangerous woman”. The fatal incident took place in the room where the sisters had been residing with Eliza’s husband, Dave Roberts, a painter and decorator, and their three-year-old son. The sisters, who earned their living by making and selling whips, supposedly argued about their day’s revenue while Roberts and the child were present in the room. Ultimately, Eliza was stabbed in the chest and died shortly afterwards. Kate was born in Dublin somewhere between 1855 and 1857. A massive Irish migration to London started after the great famine of the 1840s, although the Irish had constituted a vast part of London’s population since at least the seventeenth century. Many of them were impoverished and resided around the area of St Giles in the Fields during the eighteenth century. About a hundred thousand Irish arrived in London by 1851. Many of

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whom worked as costermongers, street sellers, and hawkers and also as building laborers and porters. Those arriving following the great famine were poorer and typically from rural areas, compared with the traditional migrants from Ireland.16 As Kate grew up, her behaviour seemed to spiral out of control. Throughout her twenties and thirties, she accumulated no fewer than twenty summary convictions for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. In addition, she had been many a times accused of physical assault, for attacking policemen, family members, and lovers. In 1879 she was found guilty of maliciously wounding a man and sent to eight months of imprisonment at Westminster Prison.17 In April 1888, she was sentenced to eighteen months for wounding a man, Christopher Hayes, who was apparently her lover, in Dorset Street, where she would, in a few years’ time, be arrested for the murder of her sister.18 In May 1895, she was again convicted of injuring Hayes, but this time, the assault resulted in grievous bodily harm and Kate, who was found guilty of unlawful wounding, was sent to five years’ penal servitude. The incident took place in the Britannia public house, in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, at the corner of Dorset Street. As many studies have shown, the public house was a vastly significant institution in urban working-class life. As Peter Bailey has put it, “the pub [was] a centre of warmth, light, and sociability for the urban poor”.19 But it also stirred an intense public debate over its alleged morally corrupting effect.20 In his paper on the spatial design of the pub and middle-class surveillance, James Kneale argues that throughout the nineteenth century and especially in late Victorian times, the social space of the pub was increasingly subjected to disciplinary techniques. Mutual interests of publicans and reformers, as well as the police, resulted in the constant attempts to cause customers to adhere to certain behavioural codes. The use of interior design features, such as mirrors, facilitated the monitoring of clients who were sitting with their backs turned to the bar staff. Casual conversations with customers and the presence of policemen regulating the circulation of drinkers were intended to deter and detect possible transgressors.21 In between convictions, Kate lived in different areas in London, as a lodger, and around 1895 she was residing with Hayes (who was born in Spitalfields22) in Dorset Street.23 It seems that she had spent almost her entire life within a relatively restricted, small vicinity. She was never married and throughout the years had always kept in close touch with her sister, Eliza. When asked by the press about the sisters’ relationship, Dave Roberts explained: “She was the only sister my wife had, and flesh and blood liked to be together.”24 Eliza Marshall and Dave Roberts were married on 26 November, 1888 at St Philip Church, Bethnal Green.25 The couple moved to room 1926 on the first floor of 26 Dorset Street, just a few months prior to the murder, with their three-year-old son. Four months later, Kate, out of prison after serving merely three years out of her sentence of total five for the stabbing of Hayes, came to live with the small family.27 The tiny room,

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six feet by six feet, was utilized as a living room and a bedroom at the same time28 and had cost ten pennies for a night.29 There were not enough beds to accommodate all four souls so sometimes Kate had to sleep on the floor in the corner30and at other times Roberts and Eliza had spent the night on a mattress that was laid on the floor.31 In the 1890s, Spitalfields went through a period of rapid transformation. Many courts and cottages were demolished to provide modern housing blocks, and rent soared beyond the reach of many people who earned casual wages. Dorset Street was comprised of low rent tenement houses, as well as lodging houses to accommodate the itinerant poor.32 At the time, Kate and Eliza had been making money as whip-makers, and from time to time Kate was working as a laundress,33 although she may have occasionally worked as a prostitute.34 When accused of stabbing Hayes in 1895, she said in her defence that he had led her astray at the age of fourteen and claimed that she was in the habit of prostituting for him.35 There is no way of knowing whether Kate’s account of her becoming a prostitute was exact or whether it was presented to create an effect that would better her chances of being found not guilty at court. Evidently, the theme of the helpless child prostitute forced into prostitution by adults was widespread and prevailed during the 1870s and 1880s. It was quite prominent in melodrama and in the visual arts. Notably, it was adopted by both the press and reformist and abolitionists circles, including the LNA.36 The subject became especially alive with the publication of the “Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” by the Pall Mall Gazette and the amendment of the Age of Consent in 1885.37 On the morning of 26 November 1898, Dave Roberts, Eliza’s husband, left the Dorset Street room, leaving his wife and three-year-old son with Kate. Upon his return, in the evening, Eliza left for work. Kate was already out. It seems that the parents changed “shifts” looking after the boy. After selling whips in the street, the sisters headed to the Britannia Public House, for some drinks. When they returned they found Dave in bed, with the child. According to Dave’s testimony at the Old Bailey, the sisters started quarrelling, either over their day’s profit or over Kate’s reluctance to pay her share of the living expenditure. Kate attempted to strike Eliza and Dave claimed to have then gotten out of bed and separated between the two. Seeing all this, the child was startled and Dave had to cuddle him to stop his crying. It was then that Kate allegedly jumped at Eliza and stabbed her with a knife. At that stage, the police arrived as well as a doctor, who took the unconscious Eliza to the neighbour’s room. A few moments afterwards she died. Kate was taken to the Commercial Street Police Station, where she appeared to the policemen to be extremely drunk. She was crying and trembling.38 Meanwhile, Roberts’s petrified three-year-old son kept asking those around him where his mother was and when was she coming back.39

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Space and Discourses of Criminality Most newspaper reports covering Kate’s story stressed her supposedly criminal character and presented it as the main cause leading to the murder. Nevertheless, the perceived source of her criminality differed, as some accounts implied that the deprived urban environment of Spitalfields had corrupted her, and others presented her flaws as immanent and individual. These distinctions shaped the moral, social, and political messages that were conveyed in the texts. In some instances, Kate was presented as a victim of external circumstances such as the destitute urban setting of Spitalfields as well as alcohol consumption and male violence and implied that she held no moral responsibility for her crime. Kate’s criminality is often attributed to her environment. In other instances, she is presented as a hazardous culprit and the authors imply that she alone was responsible for her offense. Thus, she is depicted as a corrupting agent with an extremely bad influence on her surroundings. The representation of Kate’s movement through different sites and locations, the organization of space and its relation to the human bodies occupying it, all of these determined the fine balance of power between Kate and her urban surroundings, which shaped and at the same time indicated perceptions on her accountability, as well as on criminality. A piece in the Illustrated Police News, allegedly quoting Dave Roberts, underplayed the significance of the story about the sisters’ quarrel which was presented in many reports as the setting for the murder, and described Kate as brutally attacking Eliza, seemingly out of the blue. Whereas Roberts’s deposition, taken during the night of the event, emphasized and described in great detail the alleged argument between the sisters, the Illustrated Police News report did not. This description of Kate’s senseless violence transformed completely what was generally presented in other newspaper reports as the stimulus for the crime: a work- and profit-related argument that ultimately led to bloodshed. In this case, however, Kate’s attack lacked a context that would provide the readers with an explanation as to why the crime had been committed. Moreover, the piece alluded to the murder of Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper’s final victim, whose body was found ten years previously at the same location. The title – “Another Whitechapel horror near the scene of a ‘Ripper’ crime” – blatantly tied the two homicides together. By using the adjective “another” at the beginning of the heading, and by labelling Kate’s deed as a “horror”, her violence against her sister was communicated to the readers as inexplicable and as dreadful as the Ripper’s murders. Just as the 1888 murders supposedly lacked a coherent motivation and were perceived as violence for the sake of violence, Kate’s motivation for murder in this piece is referred to as obscure and left unexplained. By comparing the two murders the author also defeminizes Kate: if she is implicitly compared to the Ripper whose murders were gender-crimes targeting women’s bodies, she is, by implication “endowed” with a dangerous masculinity. Furthermore, the Illustrated Police News text

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elaborated on the spatial layout of the streets in order to build a sense of mystery and horror: Dorset Street is a narrow thoroughfare leading out of Commercial Street, almost directly opposite Spitalfields parish council. On the righthand side, going from Commercial Street, is a covered passage, scarcely more than three feet wide, leading into a rather broader yard, known as Miller Court.40 Evidently, Millers Court, from which the entrance to room 19, where Kate, Eliza and Roberts resided in was accessed,41 was indeed a particularly narrow courtyard surrounded by two-story brick-built houses. Whereas in Dorset Street, there were only a handful of shops and public houses, in Commercial Street there were many workshops and tailoring establishments, which employed the skilled and semi-skilled workers of the area. This, in fact, was typical of the street layout of the time, which had many segregated back alleys juxtaposed with a local main street.42 Kate herself, in her deposition at the night of the event, described the room as “a dark place with no window in which people sleep off a night”.43 But the Illustrated Police News depiction of the complex network of alternating widths of city ways, progressing from the narrow to the broad and vice versa, from the open and the public (Commercial Street) to the concealed (the covered passage), went beyond the topographical sketching of the area and suggested the existence of a labyrinth in a criminal urban space that facilitated crime. The report implies that every street had a counter ally, hidden and thus perilous. This description of an urban labyrinth was a hallmark of Gothic writing, intended to enhance the sense of terror of the hazardous neighbourhood and its horrid crimes. In his study of Victorian Gothic fiction Robert Mighall focuses on the geographical aspects of the genre and exemplifies how traditional Gothic icons were appropriated into representations of the metropolitan space, which provided the premises of the urban Gothic. Horror was derived from situations distinctive to the modern city and the labyrinth became a trademark image for the representation of the dichotomous metropolis.44 Gothic fiction also shaped media accounts of the Whitechapel “Jack the Ripper” murders.45 Here, too, it seems that the Gothic was transferred to press representations. Furthermore, Dorset Street is described here as a road that was positioned “almost directly opposite” Spitalfields parish council, a symbol of local authority and civic order. This geographical layout presented the site of the murder as a subversive, uncontrolled enclave. Further on, the piece presents Kate as a ferocious, powerful opponent whom Roberts barely succeeded to subdue. Her physical strength seemed to be animal-like rather than human: This portrayal of Kate as a wild beast was rooted in the wider context of the physical, material, and topographical sketching of the space in which the murder occurred. The room on 26

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Dorset Street was situated at the back of the building, on the first floor. It was separated from a second room, occupied by other tenants; two women and a man, by a passage and an additional, spare room. The vacant room was occasionally used at nights to put lodgers with their children in.46 The press dwelt on indoor spaces as well as on the urban public labyrinth. In the Illustrated Police News text, for instance, the room was described in an almost anthropomorphic manner as it seemed to personify the mangled body of the victim: “The room … bespattered with blood, and in the quarrel the few articles of furniture it contained were scattered about in a state of confusion”. The Illustrated Police News, which cost 1d, chiefly catered for working-class and lower-middle-class readerships, and by the 1880s reached a circulation of about 300,000. The newspaper covered almost solely stories of crime and sensation – its front page was all illustrations, and it followed in the footsteps of other illustrated newspapers such as the middle-class Illustrated London News, the Penny Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette, the Illustrated News of the World, The Graphic, and The Illustrated Weekly News. It was one of the tabloids that most exploited the “Jack the Ripper” murders, devoting no less than 184 front pages to the story, in the four years following the last murder.47 No wonder, then, that the newspaper tied between Kate’s story and the Ripper’s murders, and provided its readers with a vivid, gruesome description of the blood-filled room. Whereas, given the nature of the wound, Eliza’s body remained in one piece, Kate’s homicidal rampage was presented as what caused the complete breakup of the domestic space. The depiction of the room turned into mayhem, was paralleled with Eliza’s injured body but in a much bolder, sensational and graphic in tone and detail, thus constructing a more brutal image of Kate. The metaphor of the disintegrating domestic space is further reinforced in a comment regarding the artificial division of the room between a more private and intimate area and a more public one. It is mentioned that the bedroom was separated from the living room by a thin partition which Roberts, when struggling with Kate, kicked. Kate’s transgression resulted in the total collapse of the material barriers separating the “exterior” from the “interior”, the communal from the personal and concealed. The transgression of such boundaries in late Victorian times reiterated middle-class anxieties over the breaking down of the “separate spheres”, an assertion that each gender has its “appropriate” sphere of duties, authority, and activities, according to its “natural”, “intrinsic” qualities. Women were assigned to the private, domestic realm whereas men were assigned to the public. Although didactic texts stressed the separation of spheres, the boundaries between them were not rigid and were much more negotiable. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the borderlines shifted to an even greater extent, notably in the East End itself. Poor working women were not bound to domestic spaces and were, by necessity, more mobile. And from at least the 1880s, the phenomenon of slumming, discussed by Seth Koven,48 brought middle-class educated women

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philanthropists, reporters, rent collectors and social workers to the streets of the East End. Some matched the image of the “new woman” that emerged in the 1890s and manifested a change in gender relations. The boundaries between masculine and feminine spaces seemed to be more and more blurred and women were seen as infiltrating the public space. Clearly, as already mentioned, such boundaries were significantly less clear cut for impoverished, urban working-class women, who were struggling to maintain subsistence and actively participated in the labour market.49 Kate’s transgression, then, signified an elaborate and intertwined array of meanings concerning class, gender, place and criminality. The murder of her sister was yet another manifestation, albeit a grave one, of a series of her violations of respectable Victorian society’s sense of order. A 15 January 1898 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper portrayed Kate as a brutal, monstrous creature, although in this instance her extraordinary physical power was attributed to lunacy.50 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper chiefly catered for a lower-middle-class readership and was somewhat radical. By 1848 it cost 3d, and in 1896 its circulation soared to a million. The association between Kate’s violent criminality and insanity may have relied on widespread Victorian assumptions regarding “female” madness. In her analysis of thousands of trials for violent crime in England and Wales between 1832 and 1901, Jill Newton Ainsley has shown that far more women than men received an insanity acquittal. The reason for that, she has argued, is that a strong conflation of female violence with insanity existed at the time and dominated the minds of the juries, who tended to think of women as being “naturally” mentally and emotionally unstable.51 Furthermore, financial difficulties were commonly thought of as a major factor leading to female insanity.52 Some medical experts linked the female reproductive system and in particular disorders in women’s reproductive systems to insanity.53 Kate was impoverished as well as unmarried and childless. Her literacy skills were impaired,54 and she was a recidivist criminal. Her representation as an insane woman denied her agency and rendered her non-accountable for her violent crime. In this piece, as in the 3 December 1898 Illustrated Police News, the motive for the murder is muted and Kate’s attack on her sister is represented out of context. In this instance, contrary to the 3 December piece, in which the sense of inexplicable violence was utilized to create the effect of Gothic horror, Kate’s impulsive assault is constructed as an indication of her insanity. Readers, then, were given a rationalization of Kate’s behaviour in the form of a medical condition. In his deposition taken on the night of the event, policeman Alfred Fry described Kate as “wriggling like a madwoman”.55 Later, during her life imprisonment at Aylesbury prison, she would regularly be referred to in medical reports as “weak minded”, “mentally abnormal”, suffering from “fits of screaming, cursing threatening and bursting out” as well as being in a state of “chronic, progressive depression”.56 Kate, then, was regularly pathologized by professional men, as well as newspaper reporters. It is particularly interesting, however, to see how

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the illustration that accompanied the piece in Lloyd’s Weekly challenged and revised, to an extent, the written message regarding Kate’s insanity. The image shows Kate gazing motionless into space, her shoulders covered with a working woman’s shawl. There is nothing in the illustration to suggest that she is either mad or violent, but rather, she is depicted as an unattractive, elderly, docile-looking woman. The visual representation creates an alternative interpretation of Kate’s that undermines her constructed image as a dangerous woman and as a murderess. And yet, since women criminals were often believed to be unattractive and masculine,57 and insanity was strongly linked to “abnormal” femininity, there is another potential meaning to the illustration that is much more radical than the original implication of the written word – every woman who does not conform to a “proper” stereotype of femininity may have a latent capability for violent criminality. Despite that, the Daily Telegraph emphasized that Kate’s physical appearance seemed “normal”: “Marshall is a woman of very ordinary appearance – short and thin, and of pale complexion.”58 This was also one of the few pieces that noted that Eliza too was acting violently during the sisters’ quarrel. But this was certainly an exception that blatantly contradicted Roberts’s deposition in which he claimed that he did not see his wife do anything to Kate just before she was stabbed.59 An additional exception in the description of Kate is a report in the East End Observer, from 21 January 1898. In it, she is described as being in a deteriorating physical state and as enthusiastically receiving Father Carvey, the Roman Catholic priest’s daily attendance on her. At no point is it mentioned in the piece that Kate expressed repentance or confessed on murdering her sister. But the report does note that “the unhappy woman has paid most respectful attention to priest’s kind ministrations”,60 thus diminishing Kate’s alleged criminal character, and offering the readers a more respectable image of her.

Space and Gender Elsewhere, Victorian perceptions of gender were utilized in a different manner. A 14 December report in the Daily News and an 18 December report in Reynold’s Newspaper cite segments of Kate’s testimony at the Worship Street police court. The two pieces, almost entirely identical, undermine completely the prevailing message regarding Kate’s culpability and seriously raise the possibility that it was Roberts who killed his wife. In both he is described as an abusive, drunken, and foul-mouthed husband who physically assaulted both women. The two pieces portray a very clear picture of a womanly alliance being formed between the two sisters against their male tormentor. Reynolds’s Newspaper maintained throughout its publication a political inclination to the left. Initially it cost 3d but the price was reduced to 1d by 1870. It held 16 pages and its police section allegedly highlighted crimes that were perpetrated by aristocrats. It was the most popular radical post-

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Chartist newspaper until at least the twentieth century and enjoyed a wide circulation (of over 200,000 by 187061 and at least 300,000 by 1881). The Daily News, a morning newspaper, was Liberal and advocated reform in many social fields. By 1868 its price was reduced to 1d.62 Both newspapers, then, were relatively affordable and had similar political inclinations. The representation of a womanly alliance against Roberts partly drew on the gendered relationship between the interior domestic space and the exterior public street. In these descriptions, Roberts occupies and dominates the domestic space while the women are sent outside to fetch food and to provide for money. This is a reversal of middle-class gender norms – the room is so soaked with Roberts’s presence from which the women sought refuge. His abusive behaviour drove them out to the streets. Whereas they kept coming in and out of the room, he was grounded to it and seemed to spend much of his time in bed, the most intimate, private locus. And yet, at no point is he feminized by the interior, domestic setting that surrounds him. Quite the opposite: it was the household that seemed to be identified with masculinity and male violence. Roberts, an epitome of the image of working-class idleness, was represented by a domestic artifact that symbolized his unproductiveness. The conception of indolent working-class men who depended on their wives for livelihood was prevalent in late nineteenth century newspapers. Ethnographic writing on poverty describes forced idleness that resulted from pauperization and the mechanization of industrial work (an early example being Engels’s description of husbands forced out of work, in the Condition of the Working Class in England). 63 Roberts’s portrayal as a languid drunk was well rooted in popular perceptions of male working-class criminality. One famous example is Cruikshank’s series of cartoons, “The Bottle”, published in 1847 and repeatedly reissued.64 The bed, then, not merely denoted the exploitive male-female relationship but also signified many class-oriented flaws that were popularly perceived as indicators of criminal character. These served as incriminating evidence of Roberts’s alleged murderous crime. When he finally did rise out of bed, it was only to strike his wife. According to the cited testimony, Kate tried to shield Eliza from her husband’s violence but was ultimately accused of the murder herself. She appeared, then, to be the victim of two violent male offenses: physical assault and an alleged false incrimination. The Times, corroborating this interpretation noted that a few weeks prior to the murder, Roberts had physically attacked Eliza.65 The Times, of course, catered for a wealthier audience. At the time, its price was 3d, and its circulation had declined to around 45,000 by 1890.66 Other, less elitist newspapers also accentuated Robert’s alleged brutality. Some cited segments of Kate’s deposition as well. In a report from 21 January in the Illustrated Police News it was mentioned that earlier on the day of the murder he attempted to strike Eliza with a poker but Kate interfered and prevented him from beating her. Here too the bed serves as the platform from which Roberts habitually attacked his wife. He insulted her while in bed and then

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“rushed out” of it to beat her. Eliza, frightened, allegedly murmured “Oh Jesus”, and ran out of the door. The exit from the domestic sphere to the public setting of the staircase served Eliza to flee for her life. But it was too late, as she already received the fatal blow.

Space and Literary Conventions A 3 December 1898 piece in the Illustrated Police News, associated between the poverty-stricken environment in which Kate lived and her crime. Her violent act was constantly referred to as a “tragedy” instead of a “murder”, whereas she was dubbed an “unfortunate woman” rather than a “prisoner”, the pronoun that was typically used in most journalistic accounts of the story. Here, Kate’s actions are detached from her sister’s death, and are described in passive sentences, resulting in an overall diminishing of Kate’s legal liability and moral responsibility: “It was in the poorest and most dilapidated … that the tragedy occurred,” as well as: “The room in which the tragedy took place … of the poorest description”. In both cases the physical and geographic space becomes the subject of the sentence, instead of a person, suggesting that the true agent of destruction in this story is the destitute urban environment that surrounded both the victim and the perpetrator of the crime and determined their fate. This notion has a massive impact on the concept of accountability, since the culprit thus becomes as much a victim (of her surroundings) as her prey. It is worth noting here that Victorian concepts on “feminine” violent criminality were well rooted within the moralistic discourse that typified the melodramatic paradigm and constructed clear gender boundaries to distinguish “normal” femininity from deviant femininity. Women criminals and murderesses in particular were perceived as women who betrayed their “natural” vocation as mothers and wives and were socially ostracized. An exception was women who were accused of killing their infants, who tended throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to be viewed by both the press and the criminal justice system with much sympathy. As Daniel Grey demonstrates, at the turn of the twentieth century, British newspapers frequently reported on cases of suspected infanticide. These accounts, however, typically conformed to the melodramatic scheme, in which “a formerly respectable young woman [is] driven to desperate measures after giving birth to an illegitimate child that she could barely support”.67 Grey reads these accounts as morality tales, designed to remind readers of the dangers that respectable women faced in the city, and claims that the key to this was the representation of the accused as “fitting into ‘appropriate’ standards of feminine behaviour”.68 No doubt, in these instances the tragic circumstances of the women were central to the defence and the press coverage. Nevertheless, they were utilized to emphasize and reaffirm a melodramatic moral structure. Kate was never represented as fitting into “appropriate” standards of feminine behaviour, and her tale was

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never represented as a morality tale. In most cases, the representation of Kate’s tale undermined the dichotomic, simplistic moral structure of melodrama and offered no moment of repent, no return of justice, no reason, and no logical explanation for her deed. As many scholars have demonstrated, the melodramatic formula “inspired” female defendants and solicitors to conduct themselves in court according to melodramatic conventions. Newspaper reports covering murder cases and murder trials and literary representations of those often accentuated melodramatic elements.69 This was also true for some male defendants, whose performativity in court was described in the press as melodramatic, and in many ways as “feminine”. Martin wiener, for instance, tells us about George Hall, who in 1863 murdered his wife. After delivering a moving speech at court, Hall was described by a reporter as fainting into the arms of his guards, while the “women who thronged the gallery sobbed aloud”.70 Hall was described, in the press and in court, as a respectable man. He himself, and his solicitors, adopted and employed melodramatic motifs as part of Hall’s ability to conform to respectable society. This was also due to the fact that his murdered wife was portrayed as a villainess and her behaviour prior to the murder was dubbed “provocation”. This was also true in Kitty Byron’s case, in which she killed an abusive, violent, and drunken lover. Kate was never a part of respectable society to begin with; she was regularly depicted in the press as alienated from middle class ethos. Her victim, a loving sister who offered her a home and a refuge after returning once again from prison, could by no means be depicted as a villainess who deserved her doom. A melodramatic approach, then, was problematic in Kate’s case. A tragic approach, in which determinism is believed to lead one to disaster, was more applicable in Kate’s instance. The late Victorian period was marked by a transformation in perceptions of criminality in general and of women criminals in particular. Criminality was perceived less as a moral violation and more as a medical or physiological “problem” of the criminal subject.71 Some accounts of Kate’s story, especially in the radical Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, the liberal Daily News and the Police Illustrated News, are remarkable examples of how these turn-of-the-century notions of criminality were weaved into the journalistic representations and transformed the message regarding Kate’s accountability, as well as the literary conventions they draw on. Although she had murdered her sister, she was not portrayed in these instances as malicious or as having a malicious state of mind, but rather as meeting a disaster wrought as a consequence of either the external social circumstances that shaped and governed her life or due to some force that either momentarily or permanently disrupted her senses and hampered her judgment. Some newspaper reports covering Kate’s story structured the narrative around the hypothesis that in murdering her sister she was acting involuntarily, due to some compulsion. The explanation as to the origin and nature of that compulsion drew from contemporary concepts of medicine

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and physiology. Quite a few authors stressed the alleged fact that Kate was intoxicated at the time of the murder and that she was an alcoholic. The term alcoholism was coined in 1852 by Swedish physician Magnus Huss, who first referred to it as a disease and as a physical addiction.72 Throughout the century, debate culminated in the English judicial system as to whether the revised notion of alcoholism as a malady of the body required a re-evaluation of the concept of mens rea, a pivotal principal of criminal law, designed to determine to what degree the offender acted upon a guilty state of mind, or in the case of murder, a malicious state of mind. The alcoholic was increasingly perceived throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century as a person who was not in command of his or her actions and therefore could not be held accountable.73 In tandem with the major emphasis on Kate’s intoxicated state, many reports quoted a sentence she had allegedly said while still at the murder scene, right before she was taken to the police station (although some reports attribute the sentence to her performance in the court room). Different newspapers cited different versions of the phrase, such as: “Is it me to stab my sister?”74 Or: “Oh God, what have I done?”75 Or: “Oh my God! If it had been anybody but my sister, I shouldn’t have cared.”76 Or: “Liz, Liz, what have I done to you?”77 Or: “Oh Lizzy, what have I done?”78 The source for these descriptions may very well be Worship Street policeman Alfred Fry’s deposition, in which he noted that after charging Kate with Eliza’s murder, she said: “My God, if it had been any other person but my sister I would have done it”. According to his deposition, when charged, Kate had also said: “I hear, but I am innocent of it.79“ Of course, some men who killed their wives also made somewhat similar statements as Marshall about their victims. Evidently, after being served with the summons, George Hall “wept like a child”80 and after hearing the verdict, he delivered an appeal for mercy in which he declared that “no man on the earth … loved a girl better … When I am dead and gone, there is no one here who will say that I harmed a hair of her head [until the murder]”.81 Succumbing to violence in the circumstances Hall encountered with his wife, Wiener suggests, was described in some newspapers as “almost a virtue”. His deed was described as a rational and almost befitting reaction to his wife’s misconduct, corresponding to ideas about respectability. Kate’s expressions, however, communicated to the readers through her own voice, reveal nothing as to the reason for murder, and articulate only her own sense of bewilderment. They cultivate the impression that she did not know who she was stabbing when attacking her sister. This may be attributed to the fact that she was intoxicated at the time of the murder and the alcohol momentarily disrupted her senses and hampered her judgment. This diminishes Kate’s accountability and presents her in a complex manner, which undermines completely and resists the melodramatic approach. Alcohol is presented as a destructive, external agency that inflicted Kate, in a similar way to the concept of ate in Greek myth and Greek tragedy, which often means a mental deviation, a strong infatuation, brought about through

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psychic intervention by a divine agency, which disrupts the victim’s ability to distinguish between right and wrong and leads them to disaster.82 When she finally came back to her senses, she realized her predicament and lamented her disaster. Clearly, Kate may have not spoken these words at all – they may have been invented by reader-seeking journalists or may have been said by Kate only to save her skin, in a “fleeting moment of negotiation with respectable society”.83 In any case, what is relevant here is the way in which Kate’s performativity was presented to newspaper readers – these phrases facilitated the construction of the moment of recognition or discovery by a character in a drama regarding some sort of truth to which they have been in ignorance or in error – anagnorisis.84 Although scenes of recognition are also a vital component in melodrama (an introduction of an illegitimate child, a surprising return from the dead and so on), Peter Brooks argues that since in melodrama the characters are so typological and the structure so conventional, there is no true, deep and transforming recognition. Also, as Brooks argues, anagnorisis scenes in melodrama are superficial, overt enactments of tragic anagnorisis, since they rely on external, material signs, such as birth marks or scars, and are constructed to reaffirm the moralistic, simplistic dichotomy of good versus evil, on which the melodramatic scheme is founded.85 In these representations, however, Kate’s realization undermines the dichotomy of good versus evil and constructs her image in a relatively complex, ambiguous manner. The recognition scene in Kate’s case, as it was presented in many newspaper reports, resists and complicates the structure of melodrama. The fact that she is depicted as saying these words while still at the murder scene is crucial, since it accentuates the alleged bewilderment, disorientation, and horror of the anagnorisis. Moreover, a 13 January 1899 report in the conservative St James Gazette – which greatly accentuated the possibility that it was not Kate who murdered her sister, but rather Roberts, the latter’s husband – printed an alleged quote of Kate’s, saying that “Down in our neighbourhood, if you only stagger or sit in a doorway you get locked up”.86 The quote appeared towards the end of the article, just before it was mentioned that the counsel said Kate was innocent, and that the jury found her guilty, but recommended her to mercy, since she was in a “drunken frenzy” while stabbing Eliza. The concluding words of the newspaper report were that Kate was sentenced to death. The association between the destitute urban locus, accountability, and tragedy was emphasized in the St James Gazette piece – Spitalfields was presented as a hazardous place, where innocent people can be charged, and executed, for crimes they may have not committed. The destitute urban locus was represented as what inevitably generated Kate’s criminality and misfortune. Indeed, as we have seen, the urban space and the spatial played a key role in the examined representations. The setting of the murder, both public and domestic settings, were evoked in extraordinary detail. Streets and alleys, and the indoors, were painstakingly described and directly related to the murder. Spitalfields itself was portrayed

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as actively participating in the story and shaping the narrative. Kate’s ambiguous (or diminished) accountability was chiefly constructed upon her allegedly corrupting surroundings, or her innate, physiological/medical faults. In fact, the agency of place somewhat denied Kate’s own agency. Although she was depicted as transgressing middle-class gender roles – she frequented pubs at all hours of the day, got into brawls, and diverted from familial gender roles – she was often portrayed as having almost no control over her life and destiny. The story follows in many ways the “tragic unities” of time and place. The events leading to the murder, as depicted by the press and in court, took place in a single day. Kate’s story took place within a very restricted, small vicinity. The distance between the Dorset Street house and the Britannia public house, where she went out for drinks with Eliza, was less than 500 ft. The distance between the Dorset Street house and the Commercial Street Police Station was also a few moments’ walk. Kate’s itinerary throughout the city space suggests that only when she was imprisoned for her crime she was distanced from her impoverished surroundings. In Charles Booth’s 1898 Poverty Map, Dorset Street, the location where the murder took place, is coloured in black, which denotes the “lowest class, vicious, criminal”. After the police arrived, Kate was taken to the Commercial Street Police Station for questioning, an area that is marked as “well to do” to “middle class”. Then she is taken to the Worship Street Police Court, which is further away west and in an area that is marked as either “fairly comfortable” or “middle class”. Finally, she is brought to the Old Bailey and to Newgate prison, locations that are completely “off” the area of Spitalfields. As Kate faces judicial inquiry and punishment for her crime, she is entirely removed from the East End. The relationship between murder, space and literary conventions in the representations of the Kate Marshall case had more than often constructed “feminine” criminality as completely subjected to external and internal predetermined forces. This is, in many ways, a tragic87 perspective, consistent with traditional perceptions of Victorian femininity, as being synonymous with passivity and dependency. Kate died in prison, after much agony, on 5 February 1918. She was about 62. During her last years, she suffered from an abdominal obstruction, which prevented her from eating solid foods and caused her attacks of vomiting. She had one living relative – her brother Patrick. After returning from his war service, he asked the Home Secretary for permission to take Kate home with him. He wanted her to die in peace. He was not allowed to do so. Kate, he was told, suffered from mental weakness, and could not be “safely” released except for an asylum, where she can be under “constant control”.88 The next chapter will demonstrate how murder was represented in a tragic manner, without the employment of ideas about heredity or science in general, and yet, these representations were perceived positively by critics and dubbed as both quintessentially “modern” and “English” at the same time. But first, let me ask you: have you ever heard of Stephen Phillips, one

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of the most highly esteemed English writers of the turn of the century, a prolific poet and playwright who consistently, almost obsessively, readapted ancient and classic murder narratives? If not, I suspect you are in very good company. Although renowned in his time, Phillips remains relatively obscure today, to both scholars and to the general reading public. The discrepancy between his reputation throughout the turn of the century and his status now is striking. He is the (tragic) hero of our next chapter.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as an article in Gender & History. See: Lee Michael-Berger, “Miserable Kate: Femininity, Space and Literary Conventions in Representations of a Late‐Victorian Murder”, Gender & History, 32, 2019, pp. 149–167. 2 M.A. Balliol, “Some Recent Tragedy”, Temple Bar, November 1905, 575–576. 3 Peter John Keating, The Working-Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge, 1971), ch. 3. 4 Hardy, it is known, was especially fascinated with heredity and evolution and read during the 1890s August Weismann’s Essays on Heredity. See: Roger Robinson, “Hardy and Darwin”, in: Thomas Hardy: The Writer and His Background (London: Bell & Hyman, 1980). 5 Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (London: Routledge, 2015), 30–60. 6 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (London: Blackwell’s, 1985); Jeffrey N. Cox, “The Death of Tragedy; or, the Birth of Melodrama”, The Performing Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 161–181. 7 See: Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: H. Jenkins 1965), 24–29; Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966). 8 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003), 1–23. 9 For instance: Ruth Harris, Murder and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and: Ginger Frost, “‘She Is but a Woman’: Kitty Byron and the English Edwardian Criminal Justice System”, Gender & History, 16, 2004, 538. 10 See, for instance, Steve Chibnall, “Chronicles of the Gallows: The Social History of Crime Reporting”, The Sociological Review, 29, 179–217; Steve Chibnall, Law-and-Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press, Vol. 2. (London: Routledge, 2013); Perry L. Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11 See, for instance: Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 27–78. 12 The study of human genetics was closely associated in its early years with Eugenics. See: Pauline Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its Sources and its Critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992). On eugenics in Britain see: D.J. Childs, Modernism, and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot and Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 13 Theories of degeneracy were profoundly linked to the publications of Darwin, such as Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). A good example would be Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan and Company 1880).

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14 Manchester Evening News, 19 August 1902, 2. 15 Piers Beirne, “Heredity Versus Environment: A Reconsideration of Charles Goring’s the English Convict (1913)”, The British Journal of Criminology 28, 1988, 315–339; Neil Davie, Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mark Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Bill Luckin, “Revisiting the Idea of Degeneration in Urban Britain”, Urban History 33, no. 2, August 2006, 239. 16 For a fuller discussion on the subject see: Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979); Roger Swift, “Heroes or Villains? The Irish, Crime, and Disorder in Victorian England”, Albion 29, no. 3, 1997, 399–421; Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, “The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fifth Series) 31, 1981, 149–173. 17 ID cpmMJ_CP_B_026_0151_0009 18 Pall Mall Gazette, 18 April 1888. 19 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge, 2014), 10. 20 Peter Bailey, “Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype,” Gender & History 2, no. 2, 1990, 148–172; Steven Earnshaw, The Pub in Literature: England’s Altered State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); James Kneale, “The Place of Drink: Temperance and the Public, 1856–1914”, Social & Cultural Geography 2, no. 1, 2001, 43–59. 21 James Kneale, “A Problem of Supervision: Moral Geographies of the NineteenthCentury British Public House”, Journal of Historical Geography 25, no. 3, 1999, 333–348. 22 Class: RG10; piece: 506; folio: 18; page: 32; GSU roll: 823379. 23 Pall Mall Gazette, 27 May 1895. 24 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 4 December 1898, 18. 25 London Metropolitan Archives, Saint Philip, Bethnal Green, Register of Marriages, P72/PHI, Item 028. 26 CRIM 1/54/6. 27 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 11 December 1898. 28 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 27 November 1898. 29 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, January 1899, trial of Kate Marshall (44) (t18990109–124), 23 July 2015. 30 Pall Mall Gazette, 30 November, 1898. 31 Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 4 December, 1898. 32 Nadia Valman, “Walking Victorian Spitalfields with Israel Zangwill”, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 21, 2015, doi:10.16995/ntn.755. 33 A Calendar of Prisoners Tried at Assizes & Quarter Sessions – Her Majesty’s Prison Clerkenwell, HO140, 74, England & Wales, Crime, Prisons & Punishment, 1770–1935. 34 Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, 26 May 1895; Old Bailey Proceedings Online, (www. oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 22 July 2015), May 1895, trial of Kate Marshall (38) (t18950520–465). 35 Ibid. 36 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 13. 37 Deborah Gorham, “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England”, Victorian Studies 21, no. 3, 1978, 353–379. 38 Lloyds’ Weekly Newspaper, 4 December 1898.

A Working Class (Tragic) Hero Is Something to Be 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

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The Morning Post, 28 November 1898. The Illustrated Police News, 3 December 1898. CRIM 1/54/6. Valman, “Walking Victorian Spitalfields with Israel Zangwill”. CRIM 1/54/6. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, 27. See: Michael Plater, “‘The Mr. Hyde of Humanity’: Gothic Representations of the Whitechapel Crimes in the Victorian Periodical Press”, Gothic Studies 23, no. 3 (2021), 245–262. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 1899, trial of Kate Marshall (44) (t18990109–124), 22 July 2015. Nadia Valman, “Walking Victorian Spitalfields with Israel Zangwill”, retrieved from https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1690; Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Academia Press, 2009), 303. Seth Koven, Slumming (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Andrew August, Poor Women’s Lives: Gender, Work, and Poverty in Late-Victorian London (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999). See, for instance: Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 15 January 1898. Jill Newton Ainsley, “‘Some Mysterious Agency’: Women, Violent Crime, and the Insanity Acquittal in the Victorian Courtroom”, Canadian Journal of History, 35 (2000), 37–55. Ibid, 44–45. Ibid. Middlesex House of Detention Calendars 1836–1889, cpmMJ_CP_B_026_0151_0009. CRIM 1/54/6. HO 144/934/A57916. The stereotype of the unattractive, masculine woman criminal was prevalent in Victorian England. See, for instance: Judith Knelman, “Women Murderers in Victorian Britain”, History Today, 48, 1998, 9, as well as her Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). The Daily Telegraph, 12 January 1899, p. 5. CRIM 1/54/6. East End Observer, 21 January 1898, 2. Brake and Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, 541. Ibid, p. 158; Paul Schlicke, The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens: Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 149. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). “The Bottle”, in eight plates, designed and etched by G. Cruikshank – see www.bl. uk/collection-items/the-bottle–a-series-of-temperance-themed-illustrations-by-georgecruikshank-with-poetry-by-charles-mackay#sthash.nZR2X6gf.dpuf The Times, 12 January 1898. Dinah Birch and Katy Hooper, “The Times”, The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); John Cannon and Robert Crowcroft, “The Times”, A Dictionary of British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); R.C. Terry “The Times”, Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Daniel Grey, “Agonised Weeping: Representing Femininity, Emotion, and Infanticide in Edwardian Newspapers”, Media History 21, no. 4, 2015, 475. Ibid., 475–476. Harris, Murders and Madness, 508–511; Alison Moulds, “The Female Witness and the Melodramatic Mode in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton”, Victorian Network 5, 2013, 67–88.

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70 As cited in: Martin Wiener, “The Sad Story of George Hall: Adultery, Murder and the Politics of Mercy in mid-Victorian England”, Social History 24, no. 2, 1999, 180. 71 Bridget Walsh, Domestic Murder in Nineteenth-Century England: Literary and Cultural Representations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 123–159. 72 William F. Bynum, “Alcoholism and Degeneration in 19th Century European Medicine and Psychiatry”, British Journal of Addiction 79, 1984, 59–70. 73 James Kneale, “A Problem of Supervision: Moral Geographies of the NineteenthCentury British Public House”, Journal of Historical Geography, 25, 1999, 338–339. 74 London Evening Standard, 13 January 1899. 75 The Daily News, 7 December 1898. 76 The Daily News, 29 November 1898; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 4 December 1898. 77 The Illustrated Police News, 21 January 1899. 78 London St James Gazette, 13 January 1899, 7. 79 CRIM 1/54/6. 80 Wiener, “The Sad Story of George Hall”, 178. 81 Ibid., 179. 82 Roger D. Dawe, “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, 1968, 89–123. 83 Heather Shore, London’s Criminal Underworlds, c.1720–c.1930: A Social and Cultural History (New York: Springer, 2015), 2. 84 John MacFarlane, “Aristotle’s Definition of Anagnorisis”, American Journal of Philology 121, 2000, 367–383; Patchen Markell, “Tragic Recognition: Action and Identity in Antigone and Aristotle”, Political Theory 31, 2003, 6–38. 85 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 53. 86 London St James Gazette, 13 January 1899, 7. 87 George Steiner argues that an “authentic” tragic vision is that of suffering which is unavoidable, a plight that cannot be solved. 88 HO 144/934/A57916.

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The Many Murders of Stephen Phillips, the Outdated Modernist

During much of his lifetime, Stephen Phillips was lavished with praise that destined him to be one of the most memorable and influential English writers of his era: “The year 1897 a new star appeared in the firmament of English poetry and was greeted with an applause perhaps as universal as, certainly more unanimous than, was that which hailed Tennyson.”1 As well as: “[Phillips enjoyed] a popularity greater than that of any other living English poet of our day save Mr. Kipling …”.2 It was, perhaps, his fixation with mythological themes, and his desire to rewrite them rather than formulate original materials, that won him praise and acclaim during his lifetime, but resulted in his posthumous descent into oblivion. This discrepancy is of special interest to us, since it may indicate what was (at least one of the) contemporary concept(s) of “modern” murder depictions, which did not endure. Whereas most Victorian writers whose fame persisted into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are frequently and thoroughly studied, many of those who for some reason were forgotten, are usually not. This lacuna needs rectifying. It seems that Phillips managed to create works that were perceived by many of his contemporary critics as the exceptional and much-desired amalgamation of “English” (“Mr. Stephen Phillips is a poet as typically English as Tennyson”3) and “Modern”. William Leonard Courtney went as far as to state that Phillips “redeems our age from its comparative barrenness”, and William Archer said of him that he had “achieved the impossible”.4 A reviewer of his first published play: Paolo and Francesca, an adaptation of a thirteenth-century true story that was later recounted by Dante, noted: It is English and modern, and the better for being English and modern; for the world is now abler to feel all the exquisite implications and extenuations of such a story than ever before.5 Remarkably, Phillips managed to be perceived by many critics as a writer who rejuvenated English dramaturgy although he represented murder in a manner that was very far away from what most tastemakers in the media declared they aspired for. His construction of tragic fate, leading to murder, DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-7

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was not based on heredity or evolution. In almost all of Phillips’s plays, murder is an act perpetrated within the family, and almost always with no malevolence, that is, unwittingly or unwillingly. This is, in fact, one of the most fundamental and important characteristics of Phillips’s dramaturgy: the perpetrators of murder themselves become the tragic heroes, whose sufferings come as a result of their deed. In an 1899 piece, published in Dome magazine and titled “A Field for Modern Verse”,6 Phillips articulated his philosophy on the afterlife in poetry, from which there is a lot to infer about his concepts of “modern” crime and punishment. According to him, contrary to Dante’s medieval perception of theological retribution, manifested in the image of the inferno, the “modern” afterlife is that which the soul creates for itself: The soul creates its own atmosphere … for where a soul is living in night, he is residing in a darkness emitted from himself, … the murderer or the fanatic the kindler of his own flame.7 The murderer as the kindler of his or her own flames in the afterlife is a radical aesthetic and, to an extent, theological or spiritual notion, which undermines traditional perceptions of crime and punishment. Moral (and legal) accountability does not translate at all, according to this view, to any kind of objective penalty or justice, whether by a divine force or through human agency. This notion of subjectivity and internalization of retribution is central in Phillips’s construction of tragedy8 as well as in his depiction of murderers, as will be further discussed below, in his plays and poems that revolve around murder.

The Kindler of His Own Flame Born in 1864 in Oxford, Phillips, a distant relative of Woodsworth’s, released his first poetry collection in 18849 and entered Queen’s College, Cambridge, but stayed only one term, leaving after watching Frank Benson’s troupe of Shakespeare perform made him fall in love with the theatre. He left Cambridge to join Benson’s company and although he apparently did not excel as an actor, he managed to play Hamlet’s father’s ghost in such a manner that he was called before the curtain,10 a remarkable accomplishment for such an ungrateful role. While acting, Phillips began writing for the stage and throughout the subsequent thirty years, until his death in 1915, published many poems and plays. At least eleven of his plays were acted, six of which in major, prominent West End London theatres (Her Majesty’s Theatre, The Savoy, St. James’s, The Adelphi), with some of the most prestigious actors of the day, such as H.B. Tree, George Alexander, John Martin Harvey and H.B. Irving (who chose Paolo and Francesca for his American debut11). Two of his plays were published but never acted and at least one partially written play was never published. Four of his plays were adaptations of historical characters and events: Herod (produced in 1900 at

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Her Majesty’s Theatre, published in 1901), depicting the story of Herod the Great, King of Judaea, c.73–4 BC, who executed three of his sons as well as his wife, Nero (produced in 1906 at His Majesty’s Theatre and published in the same year), depicting the story of the infamous Roman emperor (54–68 AD), responsible for the murders of his half-brother, his mother, and his first wife), Armageddon (produced at the New Theatre in 1915, published in the same year) on the Great War, and Harold, (never staged, first published in 1916, depicting the story of Harold II Godwinson, (c.1020–1066), killed at the Battle of Hastings). Five of Phillips’s plays were adaptations of poems or novels, which were often considered to be some of the greatest works of world literature. Paolo and Francesca (produced in 1902 at the St. James’s Theatre, published in 1900), depicted the story of Francesca Da Rimini, Paolo and Giovanni Malatesta, told in Dante’s Inferno canto 5 (from the fourteenth century). Although all the characters were historical figures, whose story, revolving around adultery and murder, was first told by the chronicler Marco Battagli.12 Ulysses (produced at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1902, published in the same year) was based on Homer’s Odyssey, and Faust (produced at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1908, published in the same year) on Goethe’s Faust. The Last Heir (produced in 1908 by the Martin Harvey Company, although never published) was an adaptation of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, and Alymer’s Secret (produced in 1905 at the Adelphi Theatre) was an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Two plays, The Sin of David (first produced at the Stadttheater in Düsseldorf in 1904 and in 1914 at The Savoy, published in 1904) and Iole (produced at the Cosmopolis in 1913 and published in 1908), were adaptations of the biblical stories of Uriah being sent to death by king David and of Jephthah’s daughter being sacrificed by her father, respectively.

Fate and Retribution Phillips’s first published play, Paolo and Francesca was an adaptation of the true story of Francesca Da Rimini, a thirteenth-century Italian noblewoman who was murdered alongside her lover by his brother, Gianciotto Malatesta, who was also Da Rimini’s betrayed husband. Ever since Dante, in canto 5, lines 73–142 of his Inferno, had recounted her story13 and especially throughout the nineteenth century, it became a popular subject with poets, playwrights, and painters,14 such as Charles Edward Halle (whose painting was exhibited in the New Gallery, London, in 1888), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1855), George Frederick Watts (1872–1875), Frank Dicksee (1894),15 and, of course, Gustave Dore’s illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Whereas Dante’s portrayal of the lovers is sympathetic, Leigh Hunt’s 1816 poem “The story of Rimini”, which introduced the story for the first time to English-reading audiences, went as far as to blatantly condemn the murdering husband.16 George Henry Boker’s 1853 rendition presented the husband very much as a villain, or rather, as a Shakespearean Richard the Third:

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hunchbacked, lame, vengeful, and violent.17 Phillips’s play was first published in print in 1900, and then produced at St James’s Theatre with actor-manager George Alexander in the role of Giovanni, Grace Lane as Francesca and Henry Ainley, making his debut on the London stage, as Paolo. The play enjoyed relative success,18 running for 137 performances between March 1903 and July 1903.19 In 1906, it was produced and performed at the New Amsterdam Theatre, in New York, with H.B. Irving.20 Phillips’s portrayal of Giovanni, the husband, however, was unusual in the sense that he was presented as a tragic hero, who was reluctantly compelled by catastrophic circumstances to kill whom he loved most: his brother and his wife. Giovanni, the husband, elaborates this notion in a soliloquy delivered right before he kills Paolo and Francesca: No longer I postpone or fight this doom: I see that it must be, and I am grown the accomplice and the instrument of Fate, A blade! a knife! – no more.21 He, then, has evidently attempted to wrestle with circumstances and to prevent calamity but to no avail. Fate, as Phillips constructs it, is a crushing force. What is especially interesting here is the echoing of Hamlet’s famous words from the “to be or not to be” soliloquy: “To die, to sleep, no more”22 in Giovanni’s lines: “A blade! A knife! – no more”, which indicates that in deciding to murder the couple he decides his own ruin too. Later, following the murder, Giovanni refers to himself as being cursed and connects himself to a “lineage” of fratricides going back to the biblical origin: The curse, the curse of Cain! A restlessness has come into my blood, And I begin to wander from this hour Alone for evermore.23 Giovanni’s suffering is more accentuated than his crime, which is presented as an externally induced evil. All three, the murderer and the murdered, are depicted as the victims of a terrible fate: We three who now are dead. Unwillingly They loved, unwillingly I slew them. Now I kiss them on the forehead quietly.24 The finale of the play signifies the internal, subjective quality of Giovanni’s retribution. Upon kissing the dead forehead of his murdered wife, he shatters. When asked what ails him now (now, that is, after he had allegedly revenged his wife’s and brother’s betrayal) he answers, referring to Francesca’s body: “She takes away my strength. I did not know the dead could

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25

have such hair. Hide them. They look like children fast asleep”. It is not Francesca’s hair that troubles Giovanni, but rather her entire image that will continue to haunt and agonize him until his dying day. His love for her is his retribution. Contemporary reviewers also identified Giovanni, the husband, as the tragic hero of Phillips’s play and destiny as the leading force of the tragedy: We find the tragedy lifted from the outset into the high region of things predestined, and the atmosphere charged from the first lines with a sense of fatality … Giovanni … who now hopes to bring peace into his house, but really brings ruin and murder … Each [character in the play] playing into the hands of fate unconsciously at first and afterwards with those vain efforts of reluctance and resistance which are the essence of tragedy.26 The theme of fate as a crushing force runs through much of Phillips’s dramatic work, and especially so in his much-acclaimed play: Herod. More than thirty dramatic adaptations did the story of Herod, King of Judea, receive throughout the years,27 and in 1900 Phillips’s tragedy was produced at Her Majesty’s Theatre. It ran for a total of 79 performances between October 1900 and January 1901 with Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the leading role and Maud Jeffries and Lily Brayton in the role of Mariamne.28 Here, Phillips seems to have further developed and crystallized his tragic concepts of fate and inner retribution, as he skilfully unravels the less known story of Herod’s resolution to murder his wife’s beloved brother, Aristobulus: I have struck him down, and fear is come on me; … Dimly I dread lest having struck this blow Of my free-will, I by this very act Have signed and pledged me to a second blow against my will … The first step is with us; then all the road, The long road is with Fate. The total lack of human control is manifested in this text, Herod’s anxiety stemming from the possibility that a mortal’s decision may prompt an unrestrained chain of predestined occurrences on which one has no power whatsoever. And indeed, Herod’s decision to murder Aristobulus ultimately and inevitably leads him to murder his beloved wife, Mariamne. A very similar idea is presented in Phillips’s later and much lesser-known play The King, which was published in 1913 but never produced on stage. It tells the story of Phillip, King of Spain, whose son, Don Carlos, unwittingly falls in love with his father’s illegitimate child, Christina. When the couple finally realize their predicament, Christina is already pregnant and they decide to die together. When the king learns about the dual suicide of his children, he sorrowfully declares:

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The Many Murders of Stephen Phillips, the Outdated Modernist They say that when a thing is done ’tis done. It is a lie; our lightest act takes wings, and is made free of space for evermore”,

meaning that he, years ago, in his seemingly insignificant act of fornication, had sealed their doom and now perceives himself as no less than their murderer: “I with a far-off kiss have slain them both”.29 This tragic notion resembles the drasanta pathein, the doer suffers, or suffering to the doer, represented in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers 313. The idea of seemingly insignificant decisions with long-term tragic consequences has a dual impact on the concept of accountability for murder: on the one hand, it implies that every action one takes is potentially murderous, and on the other hand it suggests that men have very little control over their lives, which is a coincidental chain of reactions. Returning to Herod, at the end of the play, maddened with grief over what he has done to the one he loved the most, Herod deludes himself to believe that Mariamne is still alive and sends for her. Her corpse is placed in front of him and shocked, he sinks into a catalepsy bound. Just then, a trumpet is heard and Messengers arrive from Rome, announcing that Cesar had conferred on him the Kingdom of Arabia. The court cries “O, hail Herod”, but he remains motionless. The concluding monologue, spoken by Herod’s physician, articulates the tragic irony this dramatic sequence symbolizes, where at the moment of his greatest political victory, he is ruined from the inside: Atoning unto God for a brief brightness, And ever ransom, like this rigid king, the outward victory with inward loss.30 Herod’s retribution, then, is entirely internal and subjective. Before he succumbs to his sister’s and mother’s plea to murder Marriamne, he describes in detail what would such retribution be: To kill her! And I, if she were dead, I too would die, or linger in the sunlight without life. O, terrible to live but in remembering … I dare not bring upon myself such woe.31 Unlike other renditions of Herod as a murderer, Phillips positioned him at the centre, elevating him to a tragic hero. In Waterhouse’s image of the king and his wife in his popular 1887 painting Mariamne Leaving the Judgment Seat of Herod, which became the subject of a discussion,32 the focal point of the composition is Mariamne, descending on a white marble staircase, wearing a white robe, and Herod is seen only in profile. In Phillips’s play, Herod is undoubtedly the centre of the drama as well as its tragic hero. In Phillips’s stage directions in the text, it is explicitly noted that the curtain falls on Herod, while alone on stage, near the stretcher on which Mariamne’s body is laid, in a cataplectic trance, which accentuates his position

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Figure 6.1 Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Herod in Herod: A Tragedy (1900). By Stephen Phillips. Source: Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo

as the sole tragic hero of the drama and as its single focal point. This centre position is undermined in some of the visual illustrations of the stage production of the play, which suggest that Mariamne was the true tragic heroine of the story.33 A picture drawn by Bernard Partridge, for instance, and

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published in The Sphere, depicts the final scene of the play, showing Mariamne’s dead body at the centre of the composition, en face, while Herod is situated on the right side of the composition, in profile. Here, Mariamne becomes at least as important as Herod, perhaps even more so, since all of the people and objects in the drawing are facing her (Herod himself as well as the women, the lion sculptors, Herod’s throne, and so on). Similarly, in the overpainted photograph postcard of actress Maud Jeffries portraying Mariamne in the stage production, she stands in a crucified position, her long hair painted in fierce red, an agonized expression on her face and the very light, almost radiant background above her head resembles an aura of a saint, whereas on her shoulders rests what seems to be a Jewish prayer shawl. This image, a hodgepodge of Christian and Jewish elements, fits well with Mariamne’s representation as a martyr, mentioned earlier. The photograph postcard of H.B. Tree as Herod, however, is well in accordance with Phillips’s interpretation of the character: Herod’s fists are clenched, he casts an intimidating shadow on the wall behind him, a shadow that appears to be larger than he is. His beard is painted in fierce red, almost identical to the colour of Mariamne’s hair, and so is his robe, resting on his throne and the decorations on the base of the column behind him, which gives the impression of a trail of blood following him. His eyes are wide open in terror, and he is covered with jewellery, in compliance with the prevalent stereotype of an “oriental” king. The obviously staged photograph displays an eclectic orientalism that is a mixture of Indian, Assyrian, and Roman motifs, which contemporary viewers could recognize (the columns, the king’s Assyrian beard and his dress respectively).

The Breakup of Accountability Indeed, in Phillips’s play, Herod the murderer was the kindler of his own flame. As was the Roman Emperor Nero, in the 1906 play that was produced at His Majesty’s Theatre, running for 127 performances, from 25 January to 26 May, with Tree in the title role. Here, the question of accountability, or rather, the absence of accountability, came forth even more forcefully than it did in Herod and in Paolo and Francesca. The prospect of “great men” who, due to their augustness, are not or should not be accountable for their murderous crimes is implied. At the beginning of the play, chronicling the ascendance to power of the Roman emperor Nero, up until his burning of Rome, one of the characters says: “they who stand so high can falter not but live beyond the reaches of our blame”,34 and towards the end of the play, Nero himself, while contriving his mother’s murder, says: “Be the crime vast enough it seems not crime”.35 The theme of moral accountability with regards to fate as a crushing force is accentuated by the poetic irony of Nero’s mother, Agrippina’s wish that her son should become an emperor without sinning, that she would take all of the moral blame on herself: “My child should climb all virgin to the throne of the

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earth not conscious of split blood: and I meantime will sway the deep heart of the mighty world”.36 Agrippina does sway the deep heart of the mighty world and murders without hesitance so that Nero may become emperor, and although she is prophesized that whereas Nero shall reign, he shall also kill his mother, she continues to toil for her son’s political ascendance. Her wish to make him emperor and to render him innocent leads to his becoming a matricide. A matricide, Nero does not wish to be. When, for a moment, it seems that Agrippina managed to escape the doom that he himself prescribed for her, Nero cries joyfully, with relief: “I am no murderer then! … To Rome I go, freesouled and guiltless of a mother’s blood.”37 Waterhouse’s 1878 painting The Remorse of Nero, in which The Roman emperor is sorrowfully contemplating his murdered mother, surrounded by the opulence and luxury of his room, was well known to contemporaries. Photographs from the stage production show that H.B. Tree’s depiction of Nero accentuated his effeminate, allegedly decadent and degenerate qualities. American critic Montgomery Schuyler referred to Phillips’s Nero as “a late Roman Oscar Wilde” and described him as a degenerate aesthete,38 relating to his murderous nature. The association between Oscar Wilde and Nero was contemporarily prevalent and cultivated by Wilde himself. Evidently, in the early 1880s, Wilde went to get his hair cut, in Paris, where the busts of Nero were preserved in the Louvre. He wanted his haircut to resemble that of the infamous Roman emperor, who had been condemned by the church, and had it specially curled. Following his trial, when referring to his profligate, lustful lifestyle he called it his “Neronian hours”,39 associating between aestheticism and alleged decadence and what was perceived as moral depravity. But in Phillips’s play, Nero is not mesmerized and lured by violent crime due to his being an aesthete. On the contrary, he seems to be doing his best to avoid his murderous fate. In this play, too, retribution does not manifest itself as an external occurrence but rather as an internal catastrophe of the psyche, in a manner that brings to mind the famous “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad” proverb. Much like Herod, Nero is maddened by his act of Matricide and that madness compels him to burn down Rome. Phillips himself may have suffered from mental health issues, as well as from health problems. Around 1896, he wrote to his close friend Sydney Colvin: “[I] am in dread of a nervous collapse which I and all my family are subject to”40 and during rehearsals to Herod he further wrote to Colvin that he was afraid of depression. While writing Nero, however, he unsuccessfully attempted to quit drinking and suffered a severe attack of bronchitis.41 Whereas Herod the Great was portrayed by Phillips as a husband who was compelled to kill his wife as a result of suspicion and ambition, his son, Herod Antipas, was depicted by him in a similar manner, as a man whose determination and drive for power results in his ruin: evidently, at some point Phillips was considering writing his own version of the story of Salome. Already mentioned in the New Testament as the daughter of Herodias who danced before Herod, and asked for the head of John the

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Baptist,42 Salome was continuously represented and her image circulated on the Continent and in England. It became especially popular throughout the fin de siècle, when many depictions of her were produced including Gustave Flaubert’s short story, Jules Massenet’s opera, Oscar Wilde’s drama in French, its English translation coupled with Aubrey Beardsley’s (in)famous illustrations, Antoine Mariotte’s opera, Maud Allan’s dance and Strauss’s opera.43 During that time, a vigorous public debate broke out in England, especially following Wilde’s drama, over the morality and alleged unwholesomeness of these artistic works and specifically over the portrayal of Salome as a bloodthirsty, murderous woman who was overtaken by an urge to kill John the Baptist and to relish in his death. Many commentators regarded this as entirely foreign to what was perceived as “English” decorum. During the course of this polemic, which lingered until the first years of the twentieth century, when Strauss’s opera was produced, contesting attitudes towards fin de siècle continental culture were clarified and articulated.44 At this point, it is impossible to know when exactly Phillips intended to write the play since the only indication for this plan exists in the form of a few short notes and a general scenario of the drama, titled “Herodias”, which unfortunately does not include a date.45 It would be reasonable to assume that he had started planning it before Wilde’s drama was published in 1891 (in French) or at least before the publication of its English translation (in 1894), since it is hard to believe that an English playwright would attempt to write another version of Salome shortly after that of Wilde’s (considering that Phillips died in 1915). Nevertheless, since Phillips himself mentions in a letter dated 1896 that he had never written a play before and that he felt daunted by the task (“I should much like to try my hand at it, but am very diffident”46), it seems that he may have indeed entertained the thought of writing another version of Salome sometime between 1896 and his death. Phillips’s notes on the play draw much from the version told in the Gospel of Matthew, where Herod believes that Jesus is the reincarnation of the murdered John the Baptist. Jesus, then, becomes in Phillips’s play Herod’s retribution: In the final scene Herod with his assembled ministers is told of the wonders and miracles brought by a young Galilean whom the people are now following even more ardently than they did John, and the king exclaims: “This is John risen from the dead and therefore these wonders are brought by him. The man whom I have slain still lives, and he is greater than I.”47 Whereas in many of the other fin de siècle adaptations, Salome was depicted as the woman whose lust for John the Baptist made her desire his death, Phillips’s notes indicate that in his version it is Herodias that lusts for John. Moreover, when seeing John’s decapitated head in front of her, Salome swoons. Herodias, after being left alone with the corpse, “taunts the dead

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face until it appears to her that his lips move and the curtain descends on her doubt and terror”.48 Phillips, then, does not mention a kiss but rather a general “taunting”. In any case, it was exactly that sexual desire mixed with cruelty that seems to have puzzled and enraged many of the English critics of the other Salome adaptations who saw this image as foreign and insulting to English thought and conduct and constructed a dichotomy between that and the alleged savagery and profanity of the “continental” representations of Salome. But more importantly, in Phillips’s notes it is Herod, rather than Salome or Herodias, who appears to be the central character of the play, John the Baptist’s antagonist and seemingly having the potential of developing to a tragic hero.

The Violation of Philia In 1904, Phillips attempted an adaptation of a biblical drama, based on King David’s liaison with Bathsheba, culminating in his resolution to murder Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband. This was censored and Phillips had to convert the story to Cromwellian times.49 The Sin of David was not produced on stage in London until 1914, when it was played at the Savoy theatre.50 It tells the story of the Puritan General, Sir Herbert Lisle, played in the stage adaptation by H.B. Irving, who falls in love with his old host’s wife and sends him to his certain death in battle. The couple’s retribution manifests itself five years later, with their child’s death. In most cases, however, retribution in Phillips’s plays is the outcome of the fact that the characters are compelled (whether unwittingly or not) to murder their most beloved – close family members (parents and children) and lovers. Indeed, almost all of Phillips’s murders follow the allegedly Greek principle of violation of philia, in which kin murder one another.51 The theme and idea of murder as a family affair is especially put forward in what was perhaps his first attempt at drama-writing, at the age of eighteen52 or nineteen,53 in a curious and very loose adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Interestingly, except for his last play, Armageddon, which will be later discussed, this is the only instance in which a Phillips’s play takes place in the “present” and is set in London. Although written in 1883,54 the play, Alymer’s Secret, was only produced in 1905 at The Adelphi as a prelude to Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors and ran for fifteen performances, between 4 July and 15 July. F.R. Benson played the title role, while Henry Ainley played the “creature” who is brought to life by Alymer, the scientist.55 It tells the story of an inventor who dreams of fulfilling his greatest achievement, which he perceives as equal in importance to the scientific discoveries of Newton and Galileo, to endow life on a dead creature’s body. He succeeds in doing so, but the creature soon escapes to wander the streets of London. Finally, it returns to meet its maker but instead encounters Alymer’s daughter, Miranda, who is the only soul in the world to show him some mercy, compassion and warmth. When Alymer learns that the

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creature loves his daughter he desperately wants to get rid of it, contemplating murder. He weighs the moral implications of the deed, in a soliloquy during which his presumed act is compared to the relationship between God and Men: It is no sin for these my hands to strangle What these my hands created. God himself Slays every day what he himself created Haunted, perchance, as I, even in his Heavens, By cries and wild upbraidings of his creatures Which follow him and will not let him rest. He takes the life he gave: then, why not I?56 When the creature does finally die, not as a result of murder, Alymer and Miranda hang over its body. Miranda asks her father what was the creature to him and he replies: “He was – my child!”57 The violation of Philia which was to become such a trademark of Phillips’s dramaturgy is paralleled in his first play with the acts of God. Although Alymer, while entertaining the thought of murdering the creature, employs this metaphor to acquit himself from sin, it ultimately comes to denote the tragedy of mankind, which is dragged into existence, with no apparent end, only to be murdered by its creator. By implication, God is represented in this text as a murderer, or rather, as an infanticide. In 1904, a year before Alymer’s Secret was performed, poet and critic Arthur Symons, discussing Phillips’s poetics, described writers’ creativity and their writing as a violent force which was bound to destroy earlier traditions to make possible the production of new literary styles: The principal of destruction is the principal of life. It is your business, if you are bringing a new force into the world, to begin by killing, or at least wounding, a tradition … there was never a dragon that Perseus or St. George killed who had not been a centre of conservatism and a moral support.58 While Phillips himself represented God as a murderer, Symons, his contemporary and his critic, constructed poets as murderous demiurges. The theme of parents murdering their children, however, was presented in a much less philosophical manner in Phillips’s poem The Midnight Guest in which an elderly, pauper couple kill a young seaman for his gold, only to later find out that he was actually their son. The parents are starving; they have no food and no money left for rent. They are hoping that their son, who left a few months before to sea, would return and help them. In the middle of the night there is a knock at the door and a young, bearded seaman asks them if he could spend the night there. He has food and wine which he offers them to share with him. It is their son, who wants to surprise them and is in disguise. The three dine and drink and then, when the young guest goes to bed, the

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elderly couple notice he has a lot of gold in his pockets. They decide to murder him and take it: “who is he that we should respect his life?”59 Phillips elaborates the couple’s inner rationale, in which they do not dim themselves as guilty. Poverty and misery have led them to commit the crime: “If we had sinned to sin we were hard-driven. The golden opportunity so well presented itself to these famine-hunted eyes … I repent no golden piece that lifts not me alone but also you above the grinding wheel of penury.”60 Finally, after the father stabs the sleeping seaman to death, the mother, seeing the ancient chain she gave her son before he left, twined around the dead guest’s neck, understands who he is. In this instance, too, there is no external retribution. The police do not arrive, and the parents’ crime remains unknown. In fact, while they speak of their awful tragedy there is a knock on the door – the landlord arrives to collect the rent. The father goes out and pays it with his murdered son’s gold. In the evening, he throws the rusted blade into the sea, “which cleansed it of that blood for evermore”.61 The poem, published in 1915, has a very similar plot to that of a music hall song, from 1897, sung by Charles Godfrey and written by Albert Hall and Orlando Powel, entitled The Miser. 62 It tells the story of an old man, living in an inn, whose son went to sea. He hoards money to give to his son when he returns, murdering random guests and taking their lots. One day he discovers that he had just murdered his son. The theme of parents unwittingly or unwillingly slaying their children, then, was of particular interest to Phillips, who again and again retold such stories. In the introductory note to The King, where the father perceives himself as the murderer of his children, Phillips states that the play was constructed after the Greek model, thus identifying this theme with Greek tragedy.

Murder as Sacrifice Correspondingly, the setting he chose for his drama Iole, depicting the story of a father slaying his daughter for sacrifice, was Greek, although it was much more of an adaptation of the biblical story of Jephthah’s daughter in the book of Judges. The play, first published in 1908 but produced on stage only in 1913, tells the story of Pelias, king of Corinth, who is compelled to sacrifice his beloved daughter to save his city. Although the eighteenth century thrived with adaptations of the story of Jephthah’s daughter, with no less than one hundred and four representations, many of them musical,63 the subject was much less popular throughout the nineteenth century and there are relatively few literary and dramatic adaptations of it. There was, of course, Lord Byron’s poem (1815) and in 1904 Edward Henry Pember64 published a tragedy65 on the subject, and there were a few operas.66 Visual images of the theme abounded throughout the nineteenth century, and included Walter Duncan’s (“Jephthah’s Daughter”, year unknown), James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s and Edwin Longsden Long’s (Jephthah’s Vow: The

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Martyr, 1885), and of course William Blake’s drawings (Jephthah Met by His Daughter, The Sacrifice of Jephthah’s Daughter, c.1803). Phillips’s play brings forward the theme of murder as a sacrifice, which sometimes appears in his other works. Phillips’s personal life and career were a roller coaster of short-lived triumphs and devastating failures, manifested in recurring bouts of alcoholism and financial troubles.67 In 1909, following the box office failures of both Faust, an adaptation of Goethe’s text, in which he collaborated with J. Comyns Carr and The Last Heir, an adaptation of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, Phillips lost all his money and got into debt. Earlier, in 1908, he had to sell all his furniture and belongings under execution for rent.68 He was supposed to attend the London Bankruptcy Court but failed to appear, allegedly because he had no means for travelling from Brighton to London.69 His experiences influenced his sardonic view of his literary vocation, maintaining that he had “sacrificed” his poetry for “pounds and pence”,70 although the agreement between him and H.B. Tree, the producer of many of his plays, was rather draconic. Apparently, Phillips’s only consideration in Herod, Ulysses, Nero and Faust was a five percent royalty on the gross takings if the plays were revived and when they were originally produced, Phillips got a five per cent.71 Financial difficulties would pester Phillips throughout his life, who used to spend whatever he earned. It seems as if he was his own worst enemy: an alcoholic, he would often indulge in long and dangerous drinking bouts, and go slumming in the East End. Many of his friends and colleagues commented on his self-destructive habits, noting that over time, the intervals of “sheer debauchery” became so frequent, that he became increasingly morbid and that he finally sunk lower and lower72. In The Adversary, a one act drama published in 1913,73 two years before his death, and which was never produced on stage, Fernando, the protagonist, an impoverished middle-aged man, is haunted by a mysterious figure, wearing a mask, which continually ruins his life. When he finally comes to confront it, he reveals that the figure looks exactly like himself, and collapses dead at its feet as the curtain falls. In this case, self-murder becomes the vehicle for the complete internalization of retribution and fate. Phillips himself claimed that he had lost the poetry of life shortly after finishing writing Paolo and Francesca, one of his earliest plays.74 In Phillips’s own perception of his personal story, then, he tragically constructs himself as sacrificing and consequently losing what he loved most – his poetry, in a similar way to how Pelias sacrificed his beloved daughter Iole. But something else happened in Phillips’s life, around the time Paolo and Francesca was first published, which may also explain why he had “lost the poetry of life.” In 1897, Phillips’s and May Lidyard’s infant daughter, Persephone, died. Phillips named her after the Greek Goddess, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, who was carried off by Hades and made queen of the underworld, presumably with the verse of his cousin, Laurence Binyon, in mind.75 In Phillips’s poem, A Gleam, relating to her death, he obliquely ties between the name he has chosen for his child and her fate: “We but named her, and lost her”76, while at the same time referring to the

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short time span that had passed between birth and grave. The construction of a fateful name giving, which is, in a sense, also an act of poetry, as what brings forth disaster and ruin, is well in accordance with Phillips’s poetics and sense of tragic irony. Phillips may have perceived himself as the prescriber of doom for his baby daughter and consequently, for himself. In a 1914 interview with the Pall Mall Gazette about the production of his play The Sin of David, which represents the tragic death of a child, Phillips admitted that the point of his play is “not the mere murder of Uriah the Hittite, but to raise the question of whether … heaven exacts a punishment here on earth for a sin which has been committed … whether the death of the child of Lisle and Miriam is to be regarded as merely incidental in the course of nature or retribution on the part of Providence”.77 Whereas fate and retribution, in Herod as well as in The king, are constructed upon the principal in which a human decision or act precipitates an unrestrained chain of predestined occurrences, in Iole, Phillips further develops this idea and suggests that a murder of a person inevitably causes the spiritual death of his or her loved ones, as well as their future together. Thus, attempts Iole’s fiancé, Laomedon, to persuade her father, Pelias, to spare his daughter’s life: In slaying her, shalt slay me too with her. And this shall kill my mother in her halls … And thou shalt dash that fair futurity Built by us two adream in a cold world … Wilt thou destroy this fair imagined life …?78 Pelias’s tragedy, in particular, is based upon this idea: he never wanted to go to war for Corinth in the first place, he wanted to stay home with his daughter. He was only persuaded to do that when he was reminded of how much his deceased wife, whom he loved dearly, cared for her city. In a soliloquy near the end of the play, Pelias elaborates on how much his soon to be slaughtered daughter reminds him of his dead wife and concludes: “If I shall slay her, I slay two in one!”79 The metaphor of slaying two in one was suggested, although in a much more sublimated manner, in yet another dramatic work of Phillips’s – while Nero was produced on stage in 1906, an omitted scene was published in 1913 as a one act play titled Nero’s Mother which presented the murder of Agrippina. When Nero’s minions arrive to slaughter her, and draw their swords behind her back, she screams: “Not in the back! In front this wound should be! Nero, strike here, here strike where thou wast born!”80 The insinuation as to the place where she wanted to be stabbed is both sexual and intimidating, suggesting, among other things, that in murdering his mother Nero was also harming himself. Since the end of the scene is supposed to be played in complete darkness, as Agrippina hurls the lamp at the floor, the readers/prospective audiences were meant to be left to imagine her moment of death for themselves, which would have probably left her blood stained, much like a woman during childbirth or after abortion.

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The ambivalent and murderous relationship between mother and son was at the centre of one of Phillips’s earlier poems, Orestes, written around 1884.81 Here, Phillips describes how the young prince is resolute to kill his mother, Clytemnestra. He is guided by a stern voice that compels him to do his duty and leaves him emotionally detached: “[I] Struck[ed] my father’s murderess, not my mother”82. After the deed is done, however, Orestes is flooded with sentiment, nostalgia, and remorse: “My mother! Ay, my mother now; O hair that once I play’d with in these halls! O eyes that for a moment knew me as I came, and lightened up and trembled into love; the next were darkened by my hand! Ah me!”83

Mythologizing Murder Phillips’s last play, Armageddon, written during the Great War, is one of his strangest and least successful dramatic endeavours. The play, dubbed as a modern epic drama, commences in hell, where Satan sends the shade of Attila the Hun to earth to start a war. Armageddon, which was very patriotic and presented the Germans, as was accustomed in war plays written at the time, as especially brutal,84 premiered at the New Theatre on 1 June, with John Martin Harvey in multiple roles, including Satan’s. This is the only instance, except for Alymer’s Secret mentioned earlier, in which a Phillips’s play is set in the present. It seems that what was perceived by him as the epic dimensions of the war, provided him with the mythological or historical setting he usually needed in his plays. This was noticed by a contemporary critic, who noted that: “Now the present is just as great a subject as the Trojan, and although it is too near to be in focus, no really big poet could ask for a better. But it comes empty handed – it has not been endowed by generations of literary benefactors.”85 Notwithstanding the play’s association to the Great War, it drew on an arsenal of biblical images and utilized the mythic framework to further develop the idea that was introduced in Iole, of murder as sacrifice. Phillips presents Moloch, the Canaanite idol, to whom children were sacrificed as burnt offerings, as the chief diabolic architect of the war, who, in a speech at the beginning of the play, summons forces of destruction and murder unto earth: Rise, Madness, Mother that didst bring me forth In Pangs before the making of the world, While Famine, like a midwife, eased thy throes. Arise, now, massacre! Thou favourite daughter, Got in adultery ’neath a moody moon; Awaken to the smell of infant blood!86 This last line is, of course, an allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), in which witches celebrate the sacrifice of a child:

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In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon Eclipses at their charms.87 The play presents a forceful condemnation of the war which it depicted as mass murder. Murder, thus, is constructed here as a symbolic icon and as one of the corrupt forces in the war between evil and good, which, in the play is presented in a religious, apocalyptic light. Besides the title Armageddon and the prologue set in hell, Phillips quotes, in the play’s epigraph, Robert Bridges (then poet laureate) saying: “This war is a war of Christ against the Devil.”88 The representation of murder as a mythic icon was suggested by Phillips, however, long before the war began, in 1902, in his play Ulysses. Here, too, murder, madness, and famine (hunger, in this case), all, by the way, written with the first letter capitalized, were aestheticized and presented as supernatural forces: Right in the threshold Hunger stands, and Hate, And gliding Murder with his lighted face, And Madness howling fear, and neighing lust And Melancholy with her moony smile And Beauty with blood dripping from her lips.89 Throughout his entire career, Phillips had attempted to create a mythological, multi-layered poetic platform in which murder, as a universal, cross-cultural and powerful motif was the axis, and thus to form modern tragedies that transcend time and utilize the entire western literary history. The idea of the “immortality of mortal acts”, as one critic put it,90 represented by murder, was perhaps best articulated in Phillips’s poem Cities of Hell, published in 1899 in The Century Magazine. In it, the spirit of the poet, in trance, ventures beyond the boundaries of earth and sees, simultaneously, historical and modern cities, rebuilt one upon the other – London, Paris, Rome and Babylon. In a chamber in “another” London he sees a newly murdered woman, upon whom a man, her murderer, gazes with rage: Then said I to the woman: “Being dead, why in this tragic London chamber still Linger you?” She made answer: “He who stares with everlasting fury in my face Within this room in frenzy murdered me. Such power hath passion upon stones that he Transported into space the very walls. The hour, the room, this bed where still I droop … We, murderer and murdered, private live. Millions have hither hurled the hour, the place. The scenery of their sins: so rises here Another London and a second Rome.”91

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The dissolve of time and space into a single, perpetual, mythic moment would later become an emblem, or rather, an objective of modernist writing in the eyes of some 1920s critics, long after Phillips’s death. T.S. Eliot, commenting on James Joyce’s Ulysses, claimed that using myth and linking between contemporary times and ancient times is the only possible way to create art in the modern world.92 However, whereas Phillips’s works were at first hailed as pioneering and modern, as early as 1912, perhaps even earlier, they came to be increasingly perceived as old-fashioned. A headline in The Evening Post called his drama The King an “out of date tragedy”, stating that contemporaries had very little patience with “the hypothetical exploring of extremes of passion in rare predicaments”.93 In 1925, in the introduction to the volume Contemporary Plays, the editors described Phillips as a great promise that was not fulfilled. Phillips had no “immediate followers”, they claimed, “founded no school of poetic drama” and “instead of being a first of a new race of dramatist, he was the last of the Romantic dramatists of the Victorian age”.94 Peter Frost suggests that what made Phillips so popular and well-received in the first place was contemporarily erroneously perceived as a novelty, but in fact was very conventional. Phillips, according to Frost, merely continued the nineteenth-century tradition of spectacular and near melodramatic productions, but “added” to that poetry, or lyrical drama, which flattered the audiences and satisfied the critics. As the naturalistic theatre invaded the stage, Phillips lost his prominence95. In this chapter I suggest instead that we think of Phillips as a writer who combined the nineteenth-century penchant for historical fiction, and a precursor of popular modernism. In his numerous plays, he attempted to revive historic dramatic representations of murder for modern audiences. His attempt was shortly perceived as an innovative endeavour that would produce more followers, but having failed to do so, this course of possible literary development was forsaken and forgotten. The modern aspect of his project is apparent in its eclecticism, which itself is one of the features of modernism. His vast repertoire includes revivals and adaptations of classical, biblical, medieval, and mythical texts. Considering his representations of murder, Phillips had offered an intriguing and unique alternative to prevalent Victorian literary frameworks such as the melodrama or the Gothic crime narrative. As was shown in this chapter, he cast his plays and heroes in a tragic mould. His murderers themselves, Herod for instance, are tragic heroes, instead of villains, and fate in his plays is constructed as an internal and subjective force. One critic observed, that while “older dramatists”, “long ago”, have presented the meaning of tragic overthrow as death, namely by murder, Phillips understood that “to-day”, death had ceased to be the tragedy it was. Rather, the slaying of the soul became the real tragic overthrow in Phillips’s plays.96 That is why his heroes are never the slain, but rather the tormented slayers. Thus, a more complex image of murderers and their reality was constructed and a “new” interpretation of tragedy was suggested, which was exceptional, and fundamentally different from many of the tragic adaptations during the turn of the century. Phillips’s representation of modern murder was, in many ways, the road not taken.

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Notes 1 Charles Forster Smith, “Stephen Phillips”, The Sewanee Review 9, no. 4, 1901, 385. A young Rebecca West also compared Phillips to Tennyson as well as to Blake. See: Rebecca West, “Imagisme”, The New Freewoman 1, no. 15, 1913, 86–87. 2 Cornelius Weygandt, “The Poetry of Mr. Stephen Phillips”, The Sewanee Review 17, no. 1, 1909, 76. 3 Ibid., 67. 4 Harriet Monroe, “The Death of Stephen Phillips”, Poetry 7, no. 5, 1916, 260. 5 W. D. Howells, “The New Poetic Drama”, The North American Review 172, no. 534, 1901, 798. 6 Stephen Phillips, “A Field for Modern Verse”, The Dome: A Quarterly Containing Examples of All the Arts, 1899. 7 As cited in: Weygandt, “The Poetry of Mr. Stephen Phillips”, 69. 8 It is especially interesting to take into account in this regard Schelling’s notions of tragedy as an internal drama. See Simon Goldhill’s discussion on the subject in: Simon Goldhill, “Antigone: An Interruption Between Feminism and Christianity”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2014, 310–312. 9 “Phillips, Stephen (1864–1915)”, J.P. Wearing in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online edition, ed. Lawrence Goldman. 10 Charles Forster Smith, “Stephen Phillips”, The Sewanee Review 9, no. 4, 1901, 386. 11 Thomas H. Dickinson and Jack R. Crawford, Contemporary Plays (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2009), 642. 12 See: Margaret Schaus, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 191. 13 Teodolinda Barolini, “Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender”, Speculum 75, no. 1, 2000, 1–28; Peter Levine, “Why Dante Damned Francesca da Rimini”, Philosophy and Literature 23, no. 2, 1999, 334–350. 14 For a discussion on representations of Francesca in Victorian culture see: Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 150–164. For a list of stage productions of the story see: H.C. Gross, Francesca Da Rimini on Stage: an Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, Florida State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1974. As well as: Claude R. Flory, Rimini Revisited: “The Francesca Theme in Drama”, Comparative Literature Studies 13, no. 1, 1976, 22–30, listing more than 70 plays. 15 All paintings were titled Paolo and Francesca. 16 Jules Zanger, “Boker’s ‘Francesca da Rimini’: The Brothers’ Tragedy”, Educational Theatre 25, no. 4, 1973, 411. 17 Ibid., 412. 18 Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè, eds, Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 32. 19 J.P. Wearing, The London Stage 1900–1909: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 92. 20 Thomas H. Dickinson and Jack R. Crawford, eds, Contemporary Plays (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2009), 642. 21 Stephen Phillips, Paolo and Francesca (London: John Lane, 1911), 94. 22 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1. For an exhaustive analysis of the possible interpretations of these lines according to discrepancies in spelling and punctuation of different versions of the text, see: Jesús Tronch, William Shakespeare, A Synoptic Hamlet: A Critical-Synoptic Edition of the Second Quarto and First Folio Texts of Hamlet (Universitat de València, 2002), 202. 23 Phillips, Paolo and Francesca, 118.

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24 Ibid., 119. 25 Ibid. 26 Sidney Colvin, “Mr. Stephen Phillips’s Tragedy of Paolo and Francesca”, Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, December 1899, 923. 27 See: Claude Abraham, South Atlantic Bulletin 33, no. 3, 1968, 1–4; J. B. Fletcher, “Herod in the Drama”, Studies in Philology 19, no. 3, 1922, 292–307. 28 Wearing, The London Stage 1900–1909, 33. 29 Stephen Phillips, “The King”, Lyrics and Dramas (London: John Lane, 1913), 156. 30 Stephen Phillips, Herod: A Tragedy (London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 126. 31 Ibid., 86–87. 32 Simon Goldhill, “See Josephus: Viewing First-Century Sexual Drama with Victorian Eyes”, Victorian Studies 51, no. 3, 2009, 470. See this essay also for the interpretation of the painting, 470–472. 33 Simon Goldhill notes that what typified the contemporary reception of Waterhouse’s painting was the image of Mariamne as an alleged martyr, although this image does not coincide with Josephus’s two versions of the story from The Jewish War (i.432–44), in which Mariamne is presented as an aggressive, powerful and malicious woman and Herod is presented as someone whose unrestrained eros for his wife brought him to ruin, and in Jewish Antiquities (xv.218– 46) in which she is depicted as someone who expresses contempt for her husband and sexually manipulates him. See: Goldhill, “See Josephus”, 474–476. 34 Stephen Phillips, Nero: A Drama (London: Macmillan, 1906), 8. 35 Ibid., 137. 36 Ibid., 11. 37 Ibid., 167. 38 Montgomery Schuyler, “Stephen Phillips, The English Poetical Dramatist’s New Play ‘Nero’”, The New York Times, 24 March 1906, 172. 39 Frank M. Turner, “Christians and Pagans in Victorian Novels”, Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 123–124. Also see: Ellen Crowell, “Scarlet Carsons, Men in Masks: The Wildean Contexts of V for Vendetta”, Neo-Victorian Studies 2, no. 1, 2008, which briefly discusses Phillips’s Nero as evidence for Wilde’s contemporary posthumous image as a public enemy. 40 To Colvin, Sidney, 1895 or 1896, Stephen Phillips Collection of Papers 1895–1916, The New York Public Library Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. 41 Ibid. 42 The dancing woman referred to in the Gospels was not, however, mentioned by name (see: Matt. 14:1–12 par). In Antiquities of the Jews 18.5.137–138 Josephus identifies her by the name of Salome. See: Michael D. Coogan, “Salome”, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 43 For a comprehensive discussion on the different representations of Salome throughout the nineteenth century and of its major importance and significance in fin de siècle culture, see: Amanda Fernbach, “Wilde’s Salomé and the Ambiguous Fetish”, Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 1 2001, 195–218; Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “‘Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid’: The Empowering Gaze in Salome”, Profession, 1998, 11–22; Amy Koritz, “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan’s” The Vision of Salome”, Theatre Journal, 1994, 63–78; Udo Kultermann, “The Dance of the Seven Veils: Salome and Erotic Culture around 1900”, Artibus et Historiae, 2006, 187–215; Anthony Pym, “The Importance of Salome: Approaches to a fin-de-siècle Theme”, French Forum 14, 1989, 312–313; Mathew Lewsadder, “Removing the Veils: Censorship, Female Sexuality, and Oscar Wilde’s Salome”, Modern Drama 45, no. 4, 2002, 519–544; Jodie Medd, “The Cult of the Clitoris”: Anatomy of a National Scandal”,

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

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Modernism/modernity 9, no. 1, 2002, 21–49; Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Judith R. Walkowitz, “The Vision of Salome: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908–1918”, The American Historical Review 108, no. 2, 2003, 337–376. See, for instance: A.B. Clifton, “Salome”, Saturday Review, 17 June, 1905, 807; Paul Colberg, “First Performance of Richard Strauss’ Opera ‘Salome’”, The Musical Standard, 16 December, 1905, 384–385; D. Donaldson, “Salome”, The Musical Standard, 17 December, 1910, 395; Fairplay, “The Salome Dance”, Academy, 15 August, 1905, 167; Robert Ross, “Salome”, Saturday Review, 27 May, 1905, 703– 704; Robert Ross, “Salome”, The Speaker, 14 July, 1906, 337; John F. Runicman, “The Fuss about Salome”, The Saturday Review, 3 December, 1910, 711–712; “Salome”, Saturday Review, 24 March, 1894, 317; Richard Saville, “Salome and E. A. Baughan, The Musical Standard, 2 March 1907, 142–143; “Strauss’ Salome”, Musical Opinion and Musical Trade Review, January 1906, 261–262; “Richard Strauss’ Salome at Dresden”, Musical Times, January 1906, 42–43; “Salome, Strauss and Sathanas”, The Academy, 4 May, 1907, 438–439; “Salome at the Court”, Playgoer and Society Illustrated, February 1911, 166, to name but a few. Stephen Phillips, Herodias, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Stephen Phillips to Sidney Colvin, correspondence, 1896, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. Stephen Phillips, Herodias, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library. Compare with Matt. 14:1–2. Ibid. Cornelius Weygandt, “The Poetry of Mr. Stephen Phillips”, The Sewanee Review 17, no. 1 1909, 81. Frederick Wilse Bateson, ed., The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 627. Elizabeth Belifiore, Murder Among Friends: Violations of Philia in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The Evening Post, volume LXX, issue 55, 2 September 1905, 13. The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, volume 100, 1905, 80. The fact that Alymer’s Secret was written in 1883 contradicts Phillips’ claim that he had never written a play prior to 1896, discussed earlier. Wearing, The London Stage 1900–1909, 250. Stephen Phillips, “Alymer’s Secret”, Collected Plays, (London: Macmillan, 1921), 42. Ibid., 56. Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1904), 242. Stephen Phillips, “The Midnight Guest”, Panama: and Other Poems, Narrative and Occasional (London: John Lane Company, 1915), 17. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 23. Albert Hall and Orlando Powell, The Miser (London: Charles Sheard and co., 1897). Efrat Buchris, “The Biblical Story of ‘Jephthah’s Daughter’ in Western Music: Interpretations, Conceptions and Styles” ((PhD diss., Bar Ilan University (In Hebrew), 2008), 10–24. Pember (1833–1911) was a barrister and a prominent figure in the social and literary life of London. He was educated at Harrow School and at Christ Church, Oxford. Edward Henry Pember, Jephthah’s Daughter, and Other Poems (London: Chiswick Press, 1904).

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66 Efrat Buchris, “Jephthah’s Daughter: A History of Alternating Musical Endings”, The European Legacy, Vol. 17, No. 5, 2012, 652. 67 J. Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (New York: Springer, 2009), 184. 68 The West Gippsalnd Gazette, 11 January 1910, 4. 69 The Auckland Star, 23 October 1909, 15. 70 As cited in: Hesketh Pearson, Modern Men and Murmurers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922), 145 and in: Richard Whittington-Egan, Stephen Phillips, A Biography (Buckinghamshire: Rivendale Press, 2006), 195. 71 The West Gippsalnd Gazette, 11 January 1910, 4. 72 Jeffrey Richards, The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 184. 73 Stephen Phillips, “The Adversary”, Lyrics and Dramas (London: John Lane, 1913). 74 Ibid. 75 Whittington-Egan, Stephen Phillips, 92. 76 Stephen Phillips, “A Gleam”, New Poems (London: Lane Company, 1907), 50. 77 Pall Mall Gazette, 7 July 1914, 7. 78 Phillips, “The Glean”, 144–145. 79 Ibid., 147. 80 Stephen Phillips, “Nero’s Mother”, Lyrics and Dramas (London: John Lane, 1913), 115. 81 Stephen Phillips, “Orestes”, New Poems (London: Lane Company, 1907). 82 Ibid., 103. 83 Ibid., 104. 84 L. Collins, Theatre at War, 1914–18 (New York: Springer, 1997), 186. 85 The New York Times, 20 June 1915. 86 Stephen Phillips, Armageddon; A Modern Epic Drama in a Prologue Series of Scenes and an Epilogue Written Partly in Prose and Partly in Verse (London: John Lane Company, 1915), 14. 87 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, ll.623–626. 88 Phillips, Armageddon, iv. 89 Stephen Phillips, Ulysses (London: Macmillan, 1902), 81. 90 The Evening Post, 20 May 1899, 2 (supplement). 91 Stephen Phillips, “Cities of Hell”, The Century Magazine, April 1899, 864–865. 92 T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, in: Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). 93 The Evening Post, Issue 48, 24 August 1912, 13. 94 Contemporary Plays: Sixteen Plays from the Recent Drama of England and America, Thomas Herbert Dickinson, Jack Randall Crawford eds., (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925), v. 95 Peter Frost, “The Rise and Fall of Stephen Phillips”, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 25, no. 4, 1982, 229. 96 M.A. Balliol, “Some Recent Tragedy”, Temple Bar, November 1905, 575–576.

Epilogue The Big Bloodless Brawl Prior to the Big Blood Letting

Just before the great war erupted, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a French sculptor who moved to London in 1910 and became one of the founding members of the Vorticist movement, took his sketchbook and went to stroll in one of the metropolis’s parks. There, he saw a bird, probably a gull, struggling to swallow a fish. Inspired by the aesthetic violence of the event, Gaudier-Brzeska made some preparatory drawings and in the spring of 1914, it was carved in plastic and unveiled at Kettles Yard, Cambridge. A few months later, at the age of twenty-three, he was slain in battle at Neuville St Vaast, and the avant-garde movement in Britain would lose one of “the best of the young sculptors and the most promising”.1 Vorticism was a radical avant-garde movement, aimed at eradicating the alleged effeteness of British art and culture by portraying the dynamism of the modern world. One of its primary tenets was to revitalize modern art through a break with convention and naturalism. The movement’s rhetoric and imagery were intense and millenarian, and employed murder as a central trope. Artist, writer, and critic Wyndham Lewis, the group’s founder, whose commitment to violence led him to advocate angular forms in art, described himself as someone who “might have been at the head of a social revolution, instead of merely being the prophet of a new fashion in art … ‘Kill John Bull with Art!’ [he] shouted”.2 Poet, critic, and impresario Ezra Pound, who was born in the US but settled in London and became an important member of the Vorticism movement, proclaimed that “the artist has at last been aroused to the fact that the war between him and the world is a war without truce. That his only remedy is slaughter.”3 The movement’s manifesto declared: “We are primitive mercenaries in the modern world.”4 Indeed, as Lewis described in retrospect, the months preceding the great war were “full of sound and fury” (yes, even the most radical modernists turn to Shakespeare in want of a metaphor) and typified by the Vorticist conscious attempt to annihilate the “sins and infections” of English culture. The movement rose against mass culture, bourgeoise philistinism, and traditional art forms at the same time. Although some of the members also criticized harshly other avant-garde art movements such as Cubism and Futurism.5 Individualism, it seems, was one of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003222668-8

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movement’s primary ethe: “The vorticist movement is a movement of individuals, for individuals, for the protection of individuality”.6 But at the same time, many of the movement’s members were also harsh critiques of Britain’s liberal, parliamentary government, and later, in the interwar period, some would support radical right-wing parties.7 Primitivism was adapted by Vorticists to the modern machine age, culminating with Gaudier-Brzeska’s “Bird Swallowing a Fish”,8 which has a distinct air of violence. But unlike what traditionally exemplified the culture of violence in nineteenth-century England, chiefly the crude conclusiveness and graphicality of murder images, Gaudier-Brzeska’s work is ambiguous. The outcome of the battle is left abstruse, as both animals are portrayed in a perpetual murderous struggle in which the torpedo-like fish, lodged in the predator’s gullet, threatens to choke it. Is it, perhaps, the bird that is really being swallowed?9 In a letter Gaudier-Brzeska sent to friend and colleague Ezra Pound from the front, two days before his death, he complained about not being able to read anything of real artistic value and claimed that “a desert in the head a very inviting place for a boche bullet or a shell”.10 Back in Paris, years before the 1914 conflict started, he had told his sister that he would die in war. Gaudier-Brzeska’s attitude towards slaying German soldiers, however, seemed to be impish. In one of his letters, he stated: “I threw a bomb also in a very black night into the German line: all great fun”.11 In the Bird Swallowing Fish sculpture, we see a shift in the representation of murder itself, and not just in the critical discussion on the depiction of slaughter. Murder here is not a conclusive act, which abruptly and violently transforms altogether the status quo, but rather, an obscure and complex one, which sustains the tensions which initiated it in the first place. Similar is the case in painter and printmaker Walter Sickert’s “The Camden Town Murder”. Between 1907 and 1909, Sickert, one of the most influential avant-garde artists in turn of the century Britain, and the founder of the Camden Town Group, known for its depictions of the brutality of modern working-class urban life, created a series of works collectively entitled “The Camden Town Murder”. The inspiration for the paintings came from the murder case of Emily Dimmock, a part-time prostitute, who was found dead in her bedroom in 1907 Camden Town, a working-class section of north London. The paintings, which were shown at the first Camden Town Group exhibition in June 1911, and at a later exhibition in December 1912, may be seen as the pinnacle of Sickert’s campaign for modern realism, in an attempt to establish the “shock of the real” as a legitimate subject in English art. They show a desperate-looking man sitting beside what appears to be a lifeless, middle-aged, naked woman, lying on a bed. The paintings are ambiguous – while a murderous act of violence is only implied by the title, there is definitely an air of menace to the images. Lisa Tickner locates the series in the site of the contemporary fascination with the Ripper’s crimes. In 1906–1907, Sickert12 painted with thick brooding dark colours Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. The Manchester Art Gallery site, where the painting now hangs, describes it as:

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Figure 7.1. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Bird Swallowing a Fish, c.1913–14, cast 1964, Tate, purchased 1964. Source: Tate

[A] dark, shadowy view of a bedroom seen through an open doorway. A wooden chair is in the foreground, in what is probably the hallway, to the left of the open door. A dressing table and chair are just distinguishable beneath the filtered pink half-light coming through the horizontal slats of the blind that covers the window at the back of the room. The items of furniture are so indistinct as to make it conceivable that there is a person sitting on the chair, although there is no one there.13 To my shame, perhaps, my lay eyes do recognize an ominous figure of a man leaning towards the window, his back turned to the viewers. But in any case, the image is ambivalent, and its violence is implied, and not directly represented, thus subverting the sensational mode. At the time, although much more radical than the post-impressionist Sickert and most of the other Camden Group artists, Wyndham Lewis also became a member of the group, and whereas his artistic tendencies and doctrine were different, the turn toward ambivalence and complexity in modern murder representations is also very apparent in Lewis’s work, in particular in his experimental Vorticist play, The Enemy of the Stars (1914), which he himself described in a later autobiography as an “abstractist culde-sac”.14 The setting of the play, which in many ways is a precursor of the

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theatre of the absurd, and especially of Becket’s Waiting for Godot, is described as “some bleak circus”, suggesting, simultaneously, a ring in which clowns perform as well as an arena where gladiators fight each other to death. The play’s action culminates in the death of both characters, Arghol and Hanp, in the last scene, where the former is murdered by the latter, who then commits suicide. The murder scene is bloody and grotesque, but also comic and ambiguous: [Hanp’s knife] sliced heavily the impious meat. The blood burst out after the knife. Arghol rose as though on a spring, his eyes glaring down on Hanp, and with an action of the head, as though he were about to sneeze. Hanp shrank back, on his haunches. He over-balanced, and fell on his back. He scrambled up, and Arghol lay now in the position in which he had been sleeping. There was something incredible in the dead figure, the blood sinking down, a moist shaft, into the ground. Hanp felt friendly towards it. There was only flesh there, and all our flesh is the same. Something distant, terrible and eccentric, bathing in that milky snore, had been struck and banished from matter.15 The malaise of mankind, it is suggested in the play, is that one can never know his “true” self, his pre-civilized identity. Arghol and Hanp both function as symbols of the irreconcilable conflict between the primitive self and the social self, which is perpetual. As Arghol explains earlier in the play, suicide is the only way to cure the malady of “social excrescence”, and towards the end, Hanp throws himself from a bridge, and sinks “like lead, his heart a sagging weight of stagnant hatred”. The play, it seems, concludes with a stalemate. Notice how “alive” seems Arghol in his death, and how defeated seems Hanp is his suicide. Arghol remains elegant throughout the murder scene, his final moment marked by a rising movement upwards, rather than a dying fall. Hanp, on the other hand, kills himself in a classic buffoonish pratfall.16 The turn to suicide in literature and drama, as a means of overcoming social and emotional deadlocks and as an alternative for murder, became increasingly typical in the late nineteenth century. This trend was noticeable in radical avant-garde representations, such as Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars, and of course, in contemporary continental modernist plays, such as Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888), Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890), Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1890), and Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895).17 But it was also manifested in much more bourgeoisie texts, such as Arthur Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1892), which became a box office success, as well as in his earlier The Profligate (1887), which originally was intended to present the suicide of the protagonist, although Pinero was ultimately persuaded to alter the ending. The published version of the play, however, did include the original suicide conclusion.18 Both plays helped in establishing Pinero as an influential playwright in England. The idea that suicide became a modern

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alternative for murder on the fin de siècle stage is also well evident in much more popular, wide-circulating texts – a 1906 Judy piece that was written, allegedly, for the aspiring English dramatist, stated that “murder belongs to the realm of melodrama”, and hence must not be presented on the modern stage. “The only exception to this rule”, so it was claimed in the piece, “is suicide”.20 And an 1895 article in The Era expressed the same idea, this time in a serious tone, as it discussed the influence of Ibsen on English theatre. The text constructed graphic murder as melodramatic and outdated, and offstage suicide as modern and sophisticated: “it is not a mere patch of cheap sensationalism, dragged in by the ears to tickle the gaping crowd and bring down the curtain with a ‘bang’. We are taught now to sneer at the ‘merely melodramatic element’”.21 This is the way, I suppose, many believed a play should end, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Some, however, regarded any violence, including off-stage suicide, as vulgar and outdated, as Bernard Shaw commented in his criticism of Ibsen: 19

Perhaps the most plausible reproach levelled at Ibsen by modern critics of his own school is just that survival of the old school in him which makes the death rate so high in his last acts … The post-Ibsen playwrights apparently think that Ibsen’s homicides and suicides were forced.22 The Quintessence of Ibsenism was originally read in front of the Fabian Society in the summer of 1890. Later, in 1891, it was published as a book, and in 1913, a few years following Ibsen’s death, an extended version came out. There, Shaw attempted to demonstrate how Ibsen prepared and conditioned audiences for future developments in drama, that will go beyond his own time and accomplishments. This construction of an imagined future modernity resembles, in many ways, Bentwich’s and MacCarthy’s longings for murder depictions that encompass “everything that is impossible in London” at the time, as well as many of the commentators who believed modern science will create a new type of drama and that “heredity becomes once more the ancient Atte”.23 Just as Lewis’s radical drama anticipated Becket and the theatre of absurd, Gaudier-Brzeska’s “Bird Swallowing a Fish” anticipated ideas that would become current later in the future,24 and Stephen Phillips was a precursor of popular modernism, although his ideas about modern murder depictions did not establish a new school of representation. No doubt, these people had different social, cultural, and artistic agendas, but for all, the representation of murder became central in the cultural battleground of the fin de siècle. Throughout this book, I explored the multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings that were ascribed to the representation of murder in the turn of the century discourse on the culture of violence, and demonstrated they circulated not only in overarching representational themes, modes and genres, but were distributed by individuals. In other words, murder was interpreted, performed, represented, and debated by individuals. These included playwrights,

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authors, journalists, translators, poets, illustrators, painters, photographers, literary critics, and members of literary societies, who appropriated, adapted, experimented with, and represented a variety of texts on murder. They acted as agents of change who modified and altered notions of murder, working within a cultural grid. Many of these agents knew each other and collaborated on mutual projects, sometimes even forming circles or webs of connections. Robert Browning, who was deeply involved in the Shelley Society and particularly in The Cenci production discussed in Chapter 1, translated in 1877 Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, whose adaptations were examined in Chapter 3. The translation was inspired by Schliemann’s excavations in Mycenae and Browning originally planned to publish an edition of Greek plays accompanied by photographs of the archeological finds of the city.25 John Martin Harvey, who played Oedipus in Reinhardt’s 1912 production, (discussed in Chapter 4), closely collaborated, in several productions, with Stephen Phillips (discussed in Chapter 6), who appeared as the ghost in Harvey’s 1905 production of Hamlet, while writing his play Nero. Gilbert Murray, whose translation of Oedipus Rex was used in Reinhardt’s 1912 production, (starring Martin Harvey) also translated many other Greek plays, including Euripides’s Medea, Elektra, and Iphigenia in Tauris, and some of the dramatic and literary critics discussed in Chapter 3, including William Leonard Courtney and William Archer, hailed Stephen Phillips’s works and helped establish him as one of the greatest literary promises of his day. To make things even more complicated, it is important to keep in mind that many of the individuals who acted as agents of change and strived to transform the ways in which murder was represented, were at the same time active participants in producing, performing, and circulating melodramatic and sensational murders in the nineteenth century. Browning published in 1875 his The Inn Album, which was described by contemporary critics as a melodrama, or a sensational novel, “the raw material of a penny dreadful”.26 One of the earlier roles of Alma Murray, who played Beatrice, the Chaste Parricide, in The Shelley Society’s rendition of The Cenci, included Boucicault’s melodrama The Corsican Brothers and George Colman the younger’s The Iron Chest, an adaptation of Godwin’s Gothic novel Caleb Williams, in both, murder was central. John Martin Harvey’s greatest success as an actor and producer was in the melodramatic The Only Way (1899), an adaptation of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which inspired him to further produce a string of melodramatic productions, including Eugene Aram (1902), telling the story of the infamous murderer who was immortalized in many literary adaptations throughout the nineteenth century. The endeavour to transform representations of murder, then, was not merely a manifestation of a secluded, artistic and intellectual elite, but also a reaction taking place within the cultural circles producing the same dominant literary modalities they were revolting against, throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. No doubt, this intricate network of artistic and cultural connections between agents of change, which was briefly and only partially discussed

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here, was mainly restricted to the literary and theatrical worlds and especially to its well-educated members. Nevertheless, as was shown throughout the book and especially in Chapters 2 and 5, the aspiration to move away from melodrama and sensation is evident in other, less elitist mediums, such as comical magazines and the daily press. This does not necessarily imply that there was a top to bottom diffusion of ideas about murder and its modernity (or vice versa). Rather, it may be that for various reasons, namely a sense of weariness with longstanding, pervasive literary forms coupled with acute temporal awareness, anticipating cultural transformations, and a need to signal cultural distinction in a rapidly changing society, the aspiration to represent murder in different, more complex, manners was manifest in several cultural networks. And yet, the overarching narrative deriving from the texts examined throughout this book fits very well the typically fin de siècle structure of decline and rebirth.27 The decline of melodrama and sensation and the (aspired for) rebirth of tragedy, as well as the aspired for decline of mass culture in favour of a creation of a modern elitist culture. Did any of these aspirations indeed materialize? But for now, we say farewell to the fin de siècle, culminating in that big blood-letting that followed the big bloodless brawl. Was the fin de siècle a lark, a herald of a new age in art and culture, or a nightingale? Perhaps it really was a threshold, a betwixt and between, and the war, the “universal feast of death”28 which seemed to spring right out of the vilest nightmares and deepest wishes of contemporaries, a rite of passage? In sooth, I still know not. It’s murder, I tell you.

Notes 1 Ezra Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1950), 106. 2 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering (Downtown Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 35–36. 3 Ezra Pound, “The New Sculpture”, The Egoist 1, no. 4, February 1914, 67–68. 4 Blast 1 (London: Bodley Head, 1914), 31. 5 Laura Cowan, “Henri Gaudier-Brzeska”, The Princeton University Library Chronicle 46, no. 3, spring 1985, 315. 6 “Edward Wadsworth”, The Egoist 1, August 1914, 306. 7 Paul Peppis, “‘Surrounded by a Multitude of Other Blasts’: Vorticism and the Great War”, Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 2, 1997, 39–66. 8 Although Gaudier-Brzeska’s attitude towards individualism was more complex and ambivalent. See: Cowan, “Henri Gaudier-Brzeska”, 315. 9 Richard Cork, Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009), 145–147. 10 Ezra Pound, A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (London: John Lane, 1916), 64. 11 Ibid., 62. 12 I will not discuss here Patricia Cornell’s, and other, earlier assumptions about the possibility of Jack the Ripper being Sickert, which are, except for being dubious, not directly connected to my argument and discussion here.

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13 “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom”, retrieved from https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/jackthe-rippers-bedroom-206026?gclid=CjwKCAiAnZCdBhBmEiwA8nDQxRnFgC7c3h wNt3J91dF-fISVjWdt10edHzE4FPrU5STAUHfJ86LQQBoCkm4QAvD_BwE | Art UK, retrieved 22.6.2022. 14 Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career Up-to-Date (London: Hutchinson, 1950), 129. 15 Wyndham Lewis, “Enemy of the Stars”, Blast 1 (London: Bodley Head, 1914), 105. 16 Anthony Paraskeva, “The Clown and the Über-Marionette: Performance Style in Enemy of the Stars”, Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies 4, 10. 17 With all suicides taking place off stage. 18 Peter Raby, “Theatre of the 1890s: Breaking down the Barriers”, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed., Kerry Powell, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 186. 19 Elizabeth Outka reads literary modernism in light of the 1918 influenza pandemic and demonstrates how the pandemic haunted the literature of the interwar period, in works such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Waste Land, and The Second Coming. See: Elizabeth Outka, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Perhaps, may I speculatively suggest, the prevalence of murder in “high” culture was also undermined by the trope of disease in the era of high modernism? 20 “My Modern Model Play”, Judy, 17 February 1906, 76; see also: The Gentlewoman, 28 February 1891, 302. 21 The Era, 20 April 1895, 15. 22 George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York: Brentano’s, 1913) 227. 23 J.A.T. Lloyd, “Feodor Dostoieffsky”, Fortnightly Review, February 1914, 322. 24 Laura Cowan, “Henri Gaudier-Brzeska”, 310. 25 Will Turtle, “‘The Truth of Mere Transcript’: Browning’s Agamemnon”, Translation and Literature 14, no. 2, 2005, 196. 26 As cited in: Charlotte C. Watkins, “Robert Browning’s The Inn Album’”, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 6, no. 3/4, December 1973, 12. 27 See: Michael Saler, The Fin de Siècle World (London: Routledge, 2014), 1–7. 28 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 716.

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Index

Ackroyd, Peter 51 adventure magazines 17 Aeschylus 83–86, 99n1, 100n13, 128, 150 Agate, James 28 Ainley, Francesca 126 Ainley, Henry 126, 133 Ainsley, Jill Newton 111 Ainsworth, Harrison 17 alcoholism 103, 107–108, 113, 116–118 Alexander, George 124, 126 Alfieri, Vittorio 91 algophilia 74 Alkalay-Gut, Karen 96 Allan, Dr F.J. 105 Allan, Maud 95–98, 132 anarchism 3, 12n12 anthropology 1, 5, 74 Archer, William 21, 23, 28, 150 Arnold, Mathew 12n12, 30 Bailey, Peter 22, 49, 106 Bantock, Granville 84 Barnard, Fred 60 Barrett, Wilson 71–73, 85 Barrie, James Matthew 72 Bayliss, William 26 Beardsley, Aubrey 74, 95, 132 Beasant, Annie 25 Beckett, Samuel 148–149 Beer, Rachel 51, 65n62 Benson, Francis Robert 83, 124, 133 Bentwich, Norman 68–69, 95, 149 Bernard Shaw, George 2, 28–29, 149 Binyon, Laurence 136 Blake, William 136 Boer War 3, 25, 86 Boker, George Henry 125 Boleyn, Ann 56 Booth, Charles 4, 83, 118

Boucicault, Dion 21, 150 Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 22 Braddon, Elizabeth 16 Bradley, Andrew Cecil 79 Brayton, Lily 127 Bridges, Robert 138 Bright, Addison 72 broadside murder ballads 15 broadsides 15, 38 Brookfield, Charles H.E. 51, 65n62 Brooks, Peter 117 Browning, Robert 17–18, 150 Buckley, Matthew S. 38 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Robert 16, 85 Burke, Edmund 2, 23 burlesques 37, 39, 42–43, 46, 56, 76 Byron, Kitty 115 capital punishment 58, 104–105, see also executions capitalism 22–23, 25, 54 Carlyle, Thomas 30 censorship 28–31 Chekhov, Anton 148 Chesney, George Tomkyns 92 Chesterton, G.K. 3 Chevalier, Albert 43 Childer, Erskine 92 children 17 Christianity 65n62, 91, 93–94, 102n62, 130 Church, Rev. Alfred J. 87–88 Clarck, William 56 class 9–10, 31, 37, 53, 86, 95; class conflict 3–4; middle class 15, 17, 20, 23, 31, 50, 54, 56, 61, 71, 76, 95, 103, 110–111, 113, 118; sensational murders and 49–52; upper class 15; working class 2, 4, 15–17, 20, 23–24, 31, 53–54, 56, 76, 83, 103–119

172

Index

Clytemnestra 83–91, 99n1, 138 Cobbe, Frances Power 26 Cock, Sir Edward 7 Collier, John 84, 87 Collins, Wilkie 16 Colomb, G.H. 70 Colvin, Sydney 131 Comyns Carr, J. 70, 136 Conan Doyle, Arthur 72 Conrad, Joseph 3 Contemporary Review 61–62 Corder, William 47 Courtney, William Leonard 76–77, 123, 150 Crone, Rosalind 20 Cruikshank, George 60, 113 Curtis, Perry L. 3 Da Rimini, Francesca 125 Daily Mirror 43–45, 61, 98 Daily News 15, 112–113, 115 Daly, Nicholas 21 Daniel, Maud M. 78 Darwin, Charles 1, 70, 119n11 Davidson, John 2 de Lorde, André 47 de Montepin, Xavier 53–54 De Quincey, Thomas 1–2 death penalty see capital punishment; executions deterrence 58–61 Dickens, Charles 16–17, 60, 67n112, 150 Dicksee, Frank 125 Dimmock, Emily 146 domestic violence 33n43, 64n36, 113–114 domesticity 21, 52, 87 Donaldson, D. 95 Dore, Gustave 125 Dowling, Linda 22 dual personalities 5–6 Duncan, Walter 135 economic crises 4–5 Electra 68, 83–84, 89, 99n1 Eliot, George 17, 71 Eliot, T.S. 140 elitism 1, 12n12, 25, 27–29, 31, 69, 99n8, 151 Ellis, Havelock 2–3, 74–75 Ellis, Sylvia C. 96 Engels, Friedrich 113 Esquirol, Étienne 77 ethnic relations 4–5, 49, 58, 72, 86, see also racism

eugenics 3 Euripides 68, 76, 83–84, 99n1, 100n13 executions 15–16, see also capital punishment Faversham, William 85, 100n13 femininity 9–10, 13n23, 23, 27–28, 38, 52–54, 62, 79, 87–88, 105, 111–112, 114–115, 118 Fielding, Henry 17, 29 fin de siècle 1–2, 6, 9–11, 22, 37, 52, 62, 95–98, 132, 142n43, 149, 151 Flaubert, Gustave 132 Flaxman, John 87 Fodéré, Emmanuel 77 Ford, Ford Madox 27 Forman, Alfred 28, 30 Forman, Henry Buxton 30 Forster, John 16 Frankfurt School 54 fratricide 1, 126 Frazer, James 1 French Revolution 2, 19, 23, 38 Freud, Sigmund 1, 18–19, 90 Frost, Peter 140 Fry, Alfred 111, 116 Frye, Northrop 37 Fun 40, 47, 54–55, 60–61 Furnivall, Frederick James 28, 30, 72 Gall, Franz Joseph 13n26 Galt, John 85 Garrick, David 71 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 11, 145–147, 149 gender 9–10, 25–26, 31, 37–38, 79, 85–88, 111–114, 118; female beauty/ sexuality 55–56; masculinity of women 54, 87–88, 108, 112, 121n56; mocking murderous women 52–58; New Woman 52, 55, 86, 111; women’s suffrage 3, 26–27, 52, see also femininity; masculinity Gilbert, Sandra M. 52 Gilbert, W.S. 70 Gissing, George 103 Godfrey, Charles 135 Godwin, William 17 Gosse, Edmund 23, 28, 50 Gothic tradition 17–19, 109, 111 Graphic 71, 73, 110 Graves, Arnold Felix 89–91 Greek tragedy 10, 68, 75–79, 83–95, 103, 116–117, 135

Index Grey, Daniel 114 Gubar, Susan 52 Hadley, Elain 19 Haigh, Arthur Elam 78, 87, 100n26 Hall, Albert 135 Hall, Edith 76 Hall, George 115–116 Hall, Stuart 9 Halle, Charles Edward 125 Hamlet 69–70, 73, 79, 88–89, 126, 150 Hardie, Keir 26 Hardy, Thomas 71, 75, 78 Harris, Augustus 54 Harris, Ruth 19 Harvey, John Martin 92, 124, 138, 150 Harwood, Isabella 88, 101n33 Hastings, Walter 57 Hauptmann, Gerhart 99n8 Hayes, Catherine 17 Hayes, Christopher 106–107 heredity 10, 75–79, 92, 99, 105, 118, 119n3, 124, 149 Hilton, A.C. 70 Hobhouse, Emily 3, 86 Hobson, J.A. 25 Hofer-Robinson, Joanna 51 Holcroft, Thomas 19 Homer 125 homosexuality 74 Hulme, T.E. 27 Hunt, Leigh 125 Hurst, Isobel 84 Huss, Magnus 116 Ibsen, Henrik 29, 76, 148–149 Illustrated Police News 108–111, 113–115 individualism 145–146 Industrial Revolution 21 industrialization 8, 20–21, 23, 77 insanity 5, 111–112, 118 Irish Republican Brotherhood 3 Irving, Henry 43, 124, 126, 133 Jack the Ripper 3–4, 26, 51, 60–61, 73, 108–110, 146–147 James, Henry 3 Jeffries, Maud 127, 130 Jones, Ernest 90 Joyce, James 140 Judaism 49, 65n62, 93–94, 130, 142n33 Judy 40, 42, 46, 56, 61, 149

173

Kaplan, E. Ann 18–19 Keats, John 85 Kelly, Mary 108 Kneale, James 106 Koven, Seth 110 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 70 Lane, Grace 126 Le Bon, Gustave 9, 24–25, 27 Le Gallienne, Richard 84–87 Le Queux, William 92 Leech, John 16 Leigh, Henry S. 43 Leighton, Frederic 84, 87 Lévy, Michel 77 Lewis, Mathew 18 Lewis, Wyndham 27, 145, 147–148 Lidyard, May 136 Lisle, Herbert 133 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 111–112, 115 Lombroso, Cesare 27, 74 London 104–119; Whitechapel murders see Jack the Ripper London Society 70–71 Long, Edwin Longsden 135 Lord Chamberlain 28–30 Louis XVI 2 Ludovici, Anthony Mario 2–3 Macbeth 71, 73, 79 MacCarthy, Desmond 68–69, 95, 149 Macintosh, Fiona 86 Maeterlinck, Maurice 99n8 Maine, Sir Henry 68 Malatesta, Gianciotto 125 Manning, Maria 15–16 Mariotte, Antoine 132 Marsh, Richard 18 Marshall, Kate 104–118 Marshall, Patrick 118 Marten, Maria 47 Marx, Eleanor 28 Marx, Karl 2, 28 masculinity 9, 23, 27–28, 38, 111–113; of women 54, 87–88, 108, 112, 121n56 Massenet, Jules 85, 132 Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney 25 match girls’ strike 25–26 matricide 83 Mayer, David 43 Mayhew, Henry 17 McCarthy, Lillah 92 McDougall, William 25 Mearns, Andrew 4

174

Index

melodrama 4, 7, 10, 18–20, 38–45, 47, 53, 61, 103–104, 107, 115, 117, 149, 151 Melville, Walter 55–56 middle class 15, 17, 20, 23, 31, 50, 54, 56, 61, 71, 76, 95, 103, 110–111, 113, 118 Mighall, Robert 109 mob violence 23–27, 49, see also revolution modernity 10–11; definition of 8; and melodrama 18–20, 38–45, see also melodrama; and murder 61–63 Moonshine 45–46, 50–51 Morrow, George 70 Mosley, B.L. 30 Moulton, Richard Green 78–79 Mullins, George 55 murder, definition of 7–8 murder representations: elitist reactions to 27–28; in Greek tragedy 10, 68, 75–79, 83–95, 103, 116–117, 135; historiographical traditions 6–11; humorous 10, 36–63, 148; and melodrama 18–20, see also melodrama; mob violence 23–27, see also revolution; in Phillips’ writing 123–140; popularity of 15–18; in Shakespearean tragedies 10, 69–79, 88–89, 93, 103, 125–126; vulgarity of 21–23; working class ‘heroes’ 103–119 Murray, Alma 150 Murray, Gilbert 88–89, 92–93, 150 music hall 37, 46, 52, 56–58, 66n95, 97–98 Neil, Ross 88, 101n33 New Woman 52, 55, 86, 111 Newgate Calendar 16–17 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 27, 75 Oedipus 23, 90, 92–95, 150 Olive, Edyth 85 Orage, Alfred 27 Orestes 83–91, 99n1, 138 Osborne, Charles 57 Othello 70, 73, 81n31 Pall Mall Gazette 4, 45, 107, 137 Palmer, Beth 51 Pankhurst, Emmeline 26 parricide 1, 28–30, see alsoindividual murderers Partridge, Bernard 129–130

Pater, Walter 85, 95–96 Pember, Edward Henry 135 penny dreadfuls 17 Philips, W.H. 56–57 philistinism 12n12, 28, 30–31, 96, 145 Phillips, Stephen 11, 118–119, 123–140, 149–150 Pinero, Arthur 148 Piorry, Pierre-Adolphe 77 Pixérécourt, René- Charles Guilbert de 19 Potter, S. 57 Pound, Ezra 27, 145 poverty 3–5, 51, 71, 99, 103, 105–106, 113–114, 135 Powel, Orlando 135 prostitution 4, 53, 105, 107, 146, see also Jack the Ripper Punch 36, 39–42, 53–54, 59–60 punishment 58–61; capital punishment 58, 104–105, see also executions Quilter, Harry 61 racism 57–58, 72 radicalism 2, 4, 25 railways 22–23 Reade, Charles 16 regicide 1–3 Reinhardt, Max 92–95, 150 religion seeindividual religions revolution 2, 4, 38, 51; French 2, 19, 23, 38, see also mob violence Reynold’s Newspaper 112–113 Roberts, Dave 104–110, 112–114, 117 Roberts, Eliza 104–118 Roberts, S.J. 78 Rose, Jonathan 70 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 85, 125 Rossetti, William Michael 28 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 19 Rymer, Thomas 72 sadism 55, 73–74, 95 Salome 95–98, 131–133, 142n42, 142n43 Savoy, The 2, 74, 125 Saward, William T. 88–89, 101n40 Schnitzler, Arthur 99n8 Schuyler, Montgomery 131 Scott, Walter 125 Sennett, Richard 19 sensationalism 10, 18, 21, 23, 38, 45–46, 49–53, 62, 72, 149 Shakespeare, William 69–70, 76–77, 145

Index Shakespearean tragedies 10, 69–79, 88–89, 93, 103, 125–126 Shaw, Thomas Claye 73 Shelley, Mary 125, 133 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 23, 28–30 Shelley Society 28–31, 150 Sickert, Walter 27, 146–147 Sikes, Bill 60, 67n112, 67n113 Smith, William Robertson 1 socialism 1, 4, 24–26, 51–52 Sophocles 84, 94, 99n1 Spencer, Herbert 70 Spielmann, Marion Harry 36 Starling, Ernest 26 Stead, W.T. 4 Stevenson, Robert Louis 5, 18 Stoker, Bram 18 Strauss, Richard 84, 95, 97, 132 Strindberg, August 148 Sullivan, W.C. 5 Swinburne, A.C. 85 Symons, Arthur 1–2, 74, 84, 134 Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe 27 taste 10, 31, 37 Thackeray, William Makepeace 16–17 Tickner, Lisa 146 Times, The 16, 51, 113 Tissot, James Jacques Joseph 135 trade unionism 24–25 tragedy 103–5; Greek 10, 68, 75–79, 83–95, 103, 116–117, 135; Shakespearean 10, 69–79, 88–89, 93, 103, 125–126 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 72, 81n31, 124, 127, 129–131, 136 Trollope, Anthony 16, 71 Trotter, Wilfred 25

175

Tubbs, Diogenes 54–55 Tyrrell, Robert Y. 89, 91 upper class 15 urbanization 4–5, 8, 20, 25, 77 Veblen, Thorstein 22 Verall, A.W. 89 Vernon, James 19 Victorianism 1, 4, 28, 74 vivisection 26 Vorticism 11, 145–147 Voskuil, Lynn 51 Walkowitz, Judith R. 3, 69 Wallas, Graham 24–25 Walpole, Robert 29 Warner, Charles 47 Warr, George Charles Winter 83 Watts, George Frederick 125 Wedekind, Frank 148 Welldom, Rev. J.E.C. 5 Wells, H.G. 92 Weston, Robert P. 97–98 Whitechapel murders see Jack the Ripper Wiener, Martin 115–116 Wilde, Oscar 15, 85, 95–96, 98, 131–132 Wincoott, H. 57 women’s suffrage 3, 26–27, 52 working class 2, 4, 15–17, 20, 23–24, 31, 53–54, 56, 76, 83, 103–119; Marshall murder 104–118; sensational murders and 49–52 Yardley, William 70 Zola, Émile 19, 27