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Authors: Lucy Worsley
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account of the execution. It often had a striking picture of the gallows as well.
The most infamous crimes were honoured with the publication of ‘books’, consisting of more than one broadsheet folded together. The printers discovered that they could sell ‘books’ about old murders, too, at the time a new one occurred. It seems that once people were in a murder mood, they wanted as much of it as they could get. The sales could be very significant indeed: in 1849 they rose to the almost incredible figure of two and a half million copies of a book on the crimes and deaths of the husband and wife murderers Maria and George Frederick Manning.
And you didn’t even have to know how to read in order to join in the fun. Rosalind Crone describes the activities of the specialized London street-sellers whose product was the news. They were ultimately trying to sell broadsides, but in order to catch the attention of the crowd they would call out, perform or even sing the main story of the day. Henry Mayhew, one of the co-founders of
Punch
, was also the compiler of a tremendous work of oral history gathered from people on the streets of London in the 1840s. One of his interviewees was a street ‘patterer’. Posted on a street corner, he kept up a lively constant ‘patter’ of verbal information, and workedwith a partner to perform dramatic mini-reconstructions of crimes: ‘He always performs the villain, and I take the noble characters. He always dies, because he can do a splendid back-fall, and he looks so wicked when he’s got the moustaches on.’
These two were ‘standing patterers’, who took up a fixed spot on a street corner. They were complemented by ‘running patterers’, who moved constantly through the crowds, shouting out details of what was in their broadsides. Emphasizing words such as ‘horrible’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘murder’, they made a vital contribution to the very distinctive aural landscape of the Victorian city.
There were also ‘chaunters’, or ‘singing patterers’, whose sales technique was music. They incorporated the stories of a crime into a song or chant. All three types of patterer would converge on the prison on the day of an execution, contributing greatly to the noise and energy of the scene. ‘Where they came from was as much a mystery to the inhabitants [of a town hosting a hanging] as whither they disappeared when the last dying speech had been sold,’ recollected one Victorian gentleman. The patterers turned up in such large numbers because, of course, on hanging days they could expect to make their greatest sales.
No horrible detail was overlooked by the printers of the broadsides, and their careful technical language and close observation is strikingly similar to the police procedural fiction of today. The crime scene incorporating the body of Mrs Lees, murdered by her husband William in 1839, was described like this:
there were several gashes on her face, and a deep wound on the throat separating the jugular vein, there was also abruise on the right eyebrow, which appeared to have been inflicted by the same blunt instrument from which it appears that the murderer, after striking his hapless victim with a stick or piece of wood and rendering her perfectly senseless, completed by cutting her throat.
The illustrations usually showed the criminal and victim in the throes of the crime, with melodramatic poses and spurts of blood. Today they appear comical, because so unconvincing, and yet also horrific, when you stop to consider what is actually being shown.
But despite the sensationalism, the broadsides ultimately had a moral message. The gallows confession of the repentant criminal was almost always included, though inevitably made up, because of the need to have it printed and ready by the time of the actual execution. Writing these ‘confessions’ was a specialized job. ‘I wrote Courvoisier’s sorrowful lamentation,’ explained one man who wrote for the
The most infamous crimes were honoured with the publication of ‘books’, consisting of more than one broadsheet folded together. The printers discovered that they could sell ‘books’ about old murders, too, at the time a new one occurred. It seems that once people were in a murder mood, they wanted as much of it as they could get. The sales could be very significant indeed: in 1849 they rose to the almost incredible figure of two and a half million copies of a book on the crimes and deaths of the husband and wife murderers Maria and George Frederick Manning.
And you didn’t even have to know how to read in order to join in the fun. Rosalind Crone describes the activities of the specialized London street-sellers whose product was the news. They were ultimately trying to sell broadsides, but in order to catch the attention of the crowd they would call out, perform or even sing the main story of the day. Henry Mayhew, one of the co-founders of
Punch
, was also the compiler of a tremendous work of oral history gathered from people on the streets of London in the 1840s. One of his interviewees was a street ‘patterer’. Posted on a street corner, he kept up a lively constant ‘patter’ of verbal information, and workedwith a partner to perform dramatic mini-reconstructions of crimes: ‘He always performs the villain, and I take the noble characters. He always dies, because he can do a splendid back-fall, and he looks so wicked when he’s got the moustaches on.’
These two were ‘standing patterers’, who took up a fixed spot on a street corner. They were complemented by ‘running patterers’, who moved constantly through the crowds, shouting out details of what was in their broadsides. Emphasizing words such as ‘horrible’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘murder’, they made a vital contribution to the very distinctive aural landscape of the Victorian city.
There were also ‘chaunters’, or ‘singing patterers’, whose sales technique was music. They incorporated the stories of a crime into a song or chant. All three types of patterer would converge on the prison on the day of an execution, contributing greatly to the noise and energy of the scene. ‘Where they came from was as much a mystery to the inhabitants [of a town hosting a hanging] as whither they disappeared when the last dying speech had been sold,’ recollected one Victorian gentleman. The patterers turned up in such large numbers because, of course, on hanging days they could expect to make their greatest sales.
No horrible detail was overlooked by the printers of the broadsides, and their careful technical language and close observation is strikingly similar to the police procedural fiction of today. The crime scene incorporating the body of Mrs Lees, murdered by her husband William in 1839, was described like this:
there were several gashes on her face, and a deep wound on the throat separating the jugular vein, there was also abruise on the right eyebrow, which appeared to have been inflicted by the same blunt instrument from which it appears that the murderer, after striking his hapless victim with a stick or piece of wood and rendering her perfectly senseless, completed by cutting her throat.
The illustrations usually showed the criminal and victim in the throes of the crime, with melodramatic poses and spurts of blood. Today they appear comical, because so unconvincing, and yet also horrific, when you stop to consider what is actually being shown.
But despite the sensationalism, the broadsides ultimately had a moral message. The gallows confession of the repentant criminal was almost always included, though inevitably made up, because of the need to have it printed and ready by the time of the actual execution. Writing these ‘confessions’ was a specialized job. ‘I wrote Courvoisier’s sorrowful lamentation,’ explained one man who wrote for the
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