Read Online A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lucy Worsley
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cheap printers. ‘I wrote a pathetic ballad on the respite of Annette Meyers. I did the helegy, too, on Rush’s execution,’ he continued, tossing off a list of murderers’ names. Rush’s ‘was supposed, like the rest, to be written by the culprit himself, and was particular penitent’.
Reading through a series of broadsides, it’s striking that all the confessions are penitent and the lamentations sorrowful. Each crime closes, satisfyingly, with the confession and final punishment of its perpetrator. We have no real idea whether these murderers did indeed repent on the gallows and regret their crimes. We cannot even know if some of them were truly guilty. But no reader of broadsides could have been left withoutthe impression that to turn to crime leads inevitably to shame, repentance and death.
THE MIXTURE OF fear and pleasure produced by reading about true crime applied to fiction as much as factual writing. There had existed since the eighteenth century a separate school of fiction, the Gothic novel, devoted entirely to creating feelings of horror, revulsion, awe and excitement.
The quintessential work in the genre was Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794). During the course of this long, intricate and frankly implausible story, the young and orphaned Emily St Aubert is imprisoned in a remote castle. Its hectically plotted pages are packed with sublime scenery, malevolent characters and feisty heroines. Indeed, Radcliffe’s novels have been described as ‘the verbal equivalent of Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine’ in art. Poor Emily becomes the captive of the evil, haughty and brooding Montoni (an Italian brigand masquerading as an aristocrat, who has also murdered her aunt) but finally flees just before he can force her to sign over to him all her property.
Udolpho
was hugely popular. Radcliffe received an astonishing £500 for her work, in an age when the average fee for a copyright to a novel was £80. Radcliffe herself was a figure of some mystery: she broke off publishing novels at the height of her success, and eventually died of asthma, at her home in Pimlico, in 1823. Various inaccurate but more exciting stories circulated about what had happened to her (and, wisely for the purposes of sales, she did nothing to correct them). She’d been confined, mad, it was said, toHaddon Hall in Derbyshire, or else maybe she’d died, in 1810, ‘in that species of derangement called “the horrors”’.
By the end of the eighteenth century, though, Gothic novels such as Radcliffe’s were looking dated. Jane Austen’s first completed work,
Northanger Abbey
(written in 1798–9, but published only posthumously in 1817), is a send-up of the genre and
Udolpho
is Austen’s target.
The overfanciful Catherine Morland, who by the age of 17 is firmly ‘in training for a heroine’, finds herself on a visit to a country house, Northanger Abbey itself. She is addicted to novels with titles like
Mysterious Warnings
or
Necromancer of the Black Forest
. At Northanger Abbey, based on her reading of Ann Radcliffe, she firmly expects to find dark passages, secret rooms, locked chests containing clues and, ultimately, some piece of evidence to show that her host, General Tilney, has murdered his dead wife. Instead, the house is warm, welcoming, light and refurbished in the modern style, and the naïve Catherine finds only embarrassment and shame when her Gothic fantasies are revealed. ‘Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you,’ says General Tilney’s son, a young man whom she much admires. ‘Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?’
But the cool, sophisticated humour of Jane Austen was lost upon those who, like Catherine Morland, had a cheap and lurid taste for horror and mystery. Had she been born a decade or two later, and belonged to a lower social class, Catherine Morland would have been an avid reader of
Reading through a series of broadsides, it’s striking that all the confessions are penitent and the lamentations sorrowful. Each crime closes, satisfyingly, with the confession and final punishment of its perpetrator. We have no real idea whether these murderers did indeed repent on the gallows and regret their crimes. We cannot even know if some of them were truly guilty. But no reader of broadsides could have been left withoutthe impression that to turn to crime leads inevitably to shame, repentance and death.
THE MIXTURE OF fear and pleasure produced by reading about true crime applied to fiction as much as factual writing. There had existed since the eighteenth century a separate school of fiction, the Gothic novel, devoted entirely to creating feelings of horror, revulsion, awe and excitement.
The quintessential work in the genre was Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794). During the course of this long, intricate and frankly implausible story, the young and orphaned Emily St Aubert is imprisoned in a remote castle. Its hectically plotted pages are packed with sublime scenery, malevolent characters and feisty heroines. Indeed, Radcliffe’s novels have been described as ‘the verbal equivalent of Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine’ in art. Poor Emily becomes the captive of the evil, haughty and brooding Montoni (an Italian brigand masquerading as an aristocrat, who has also murdered her aunt) but finally flees just before he can force her to sign over to him all her property.
Udolpho
was hugely popular. Radcliffe received an astonishing £500 for her work, in an age when the average fee for a copyright to a novel was £80. Radcliffe herself was a figure of some mystery: she broke off publishing novels at the height of her success, and eventually died of asthma, at her home in Pimlico, in 1823. Various inaccurate but more exciting stories circulated about what had happened to her (and, wisely for the purposes of sales, she did nothing to correct them). She’d been confined, mad, it was said, toHaddon Hall in Derbyshire, or else maybe she’d died, in 1810, ‘in that species of derangement called “the horrors”’.
By the end of the eighteenth century, though, Gothic novels such as Radcliffe’s were looking dated. Jane Austen’s first completed work,
Northanger Abbey
(written in 1798–9, but published only posthumously in 1817), is a send-up of the genre and
Udolpho
is Austen’s target.
The overfanciful Catherine Morland, who by the age of 17 is firmly ‘in training for a heroine’, finds herself on a visit to a country house, Northanger Abbey itself. She is addicted to novels with titles like
Mysterious Warnings
or
Necromancer of the Black Forest
. At Northanger Abbey, based on her reading of Ann Radcliffe, she firmly expects to find dark passages, secret rooms, locked chests containing clues and, ultimately, some piece of evidence to show that her host, General Tilney, has murdered his dead wife. Instead, the house is warm, welcoming, light and refurbished in the modern style, and the naïve Catherine finds only embarrassment and shame when her Gothic fantasies are revealed. ‘Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you,’ says General Tilney’s son, a young man whom she much admires. ‘Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?’
But the cool, sophisticated humour of Jane Austen was lost upon those who, like Catherine Morland, had a cheap and lurid taste for horror and mystery. Had she been born a decade or two later, and belonged to a lower social class, Catherine Morland would have been an avid reader of
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