Yet after the verdict was handed down, strangely, Thurtell the monster, Thurtell the drinker of blood, began to disappear, to be replaced by Thurtell the gallant, Thurtell the debonair. One broadside respectfully reported his considerate behaviour on the day of his execution, when he stood under the scaffold: ‘he looked at the crowd, and made a slight bow, instantly every head was uncovered, and many muttered “what a Gentleman”. His appearance at that moment was affecting beyond description.’ In the 1920s the historian G.M. Trevelyan claimed that, a hundred years before, children wrote the sentence ‘Thurtell was a murdered man’ as an exercise in penmanship.
In 1857 George Borrow drew for his middle-class audience a picture entirely in keeping with this debonair post-trial image. In his novel The Romany Rye, the narrator is in money difficulties. ‘A person I had occasionally met at sporting-dinners’ comes to hear of his trouble and lends him £200.
I begged him to tell me how I could requite him for his kindness, whereupon, with the most dreadful oath I ever heard, he bade me come and see him hanged when his time was come. I wrung his hand, and told him I would, and I kept my word. The night before the day he was hanged at H—, I harnessed a Suffolk Punch to my light gig … and … in eleven hours I drove that Punch one hundred and ten miles. I arrived at H—just in the nick of time. There was the ugly jail – the scaffold – and there upon it stood the only friend I ever had in the world. Driving my Punch, which was all in a foam, into the midst of the crowd, which made way for me as if it knew what I came for, I stood up in my gig, took off my hat, and shouted, ‘God Almighty bless you, Jack!’ The dying man turned his pale grim face towards me – for his face was always somewhat grim, do you see – nodded and said, or I thought I heard him say, ‘All right, old chap.’ The next moment – my eyes water.
He concludes philosophically, ‘Well, some are born to be hanged, and some are not; and many of those who are not hanged are much worse than those who are.’
It was said that 40,000 people attended Thurtell’s execution, and afterwards his body was sent to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection by the faculty of medicine and its students, as was standard for felons. In theory, the anatomization process was a matter for the faculty alone, but on the day crowds of people descended on the anatomy theatre. For those who couldn’t be there, The Times reported on the appearance of the body in the dissecting room, and Pierce Egan’s Account of the Trial of John Thurtell and Joseph Hunt carried a notice from the publisher: ‘SPECIAL PERMISSION having been given to the Editor of the MEDICAL ADVISER to examine the body of Thurtell after the execution, a full account of the PECULIAR CRANIOLOGICAL Appearances, with illustrative engravings, will appear in the next Number.’ Rowlandson produced a watercolour of the scene, ‘The Lancett Club at a Thurtell Feast’. (The surgeon doing the dissection is grotesquely caricatured, while the corpse of Thurtell is entirely realistic.)
Despite the finality of death, some found it hard to let go of such a money-spinner. ‘Light be the stones on Thurtell’s bones,’ Thackeray wrote satirically; ‘he was the best friend the penny-a-line men had for many a day. and when he was turned off [hanged], their lamentation was sincere. There are few windfalls like him.’ It was later claimed that James Catnach, the most successful broadside printer of the day, had sold 250,000 Thurtell broadsides, and after his execution he produced yet another, headlined ‘WE ARE ALIVE’, with the space between ‘we’ and ‘are’ so reduced that the unwary read ‘WEARE ALIVE’. Another was less tricksy, and simply lied. ‘The Hoax Discovered; or, Mr. Weare Alive’ claimed that Thurtell had bet Weare that he could be arrested, tried and then, ‘at the very crisis of their fate, the supposed murdered man should appear, stagger the belief of the world, and make John Bull confess his being hoaxed’.
The theatres returned to this profitable subject. At the Coburg, The Hertfordshire Tragedy, or, The Victims of Gaming was back onstage the day after the execution. The Surrey re-offered The Gamblers three days later, and as well as the ‘identical Horse and Gig’, it also promised an eager public that the set now contained the ‘TABLE AT WHICH THE PARTY SUPPED, The SOFA as DESCRIBED to having been SLEPT on, with Other Household Furniture, AS PURCHASED AT THE LATE AUCTION’. In January, the theatre combined two items of popular interest by adding a ‘new scene of Jackson’s Rooms [Jackson was a prize-fighter who taught the gentry], for the purpose of introducing the celebrated Irish Champion’, Langan himself.
The selling of Thurtell went on. A novel, The Gamblers; or, The Treacherous Friend: A Moral Tale, Founded on Recent Facts, by Hannah Maria Jones, appeared, borrowing elements from the play (both have characters named Woodville). The novel also acquiesced in the growing legend of Thurtell’s nobility of spirit. Here Arthur Townley is purely ‘a victim to his own lawless passions’, a noble dupe brought down by ‘hardened villains’. The novel, by one of only two women known to have successfully produced penny-bloods (her speciality was gypsies and gothic subjects), is unimportant except insofar as it may have influenced Edward Bulwer-Lytton. *Bulwer has been called one of the forefathers of the detective novel, and he popularized the outlaw-as-hero in Paul Clifford (1830), a novel with a good-hearted highwayman, and Eugene Aram (1832), this time with a self-sacrificing scholar-murderer (see pp.99–123). In Pelham (1828) his hero is Lord Pelham, who steps in to save a friend from a false accusation of murder. Thornton, the real murderer, is a fairly straightforward portrait of Thurtell. Unlike the prevailing attitudes to Thurtell, Thornton here is not a good-hearted naíf, but has coldly murdered his victim in a botched robbery.
Everything to do with Thurtell had a commercial value. In February 1824 an advertisement in The Times offered for sale the model of the cottage and outbuildings that had been used in court to explain the details of the crime to the jury. The advertisement appeared only once, so presumably the model sold quite quickly. This would hardly be surprising, for the Thurtell legend was growing with every day that separated him from his brutal crime. The most unlikely people were fascinated. The Radical journalist William Cobbett claimed that his son Richard had learned to read ‘to find out what was said about THURTELL, when all the world was talking and reading about THURTELL’. Richard was born in 1804, and was therefore nineteen or twenty when Thurtell came to notoriety, yet the legend made it worth building stories around him. The philosopher Thomas Carlyle also followed the case closely, complaining that, ‘Thurtell being hanged last week, we grew duller than ever.’ He soon cheered himself up, however, with one of his longest-running jokes. An (erroneous) trial report claimed that a witness had considered Thurtell to be respectable ‘because he kept a gig’. Carlyle found this immensely comic, and coined the words ‘Gigmania’ and ‘Gigmanity’ to describe those who judged character by the value of a person’s possessions. George Eliot later expanded this, writing of ‘conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish. proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build’. And in 1848, towards the end of his novel Vanity Fair, Thackeray gave the dangerous Becky Sharpe a law firm named Burke, Thurtell and Hayes – the reader is entirely expected to recognize the three murderers’ names.* And the joke ran and ran. In 1867, in Miss Jane, the Bishop’s Daughter, a novel that used elements of the Constance Kent case (see pp.362–79), the Bishop is advised to put his case ‘into the hands of Bedloe [a seventeenth-century fraudster], Wade and Weare of Thurtell’s Inn … Very respectable solicitors in, ahem! their own line.’
In 1862, this kind of post-mortem approval made Thurtell, Probert and Hunt names to give authority pause. The Marylebone Theatre, a melodrama house, applied for a licence for a play to be called The Gipsey [sic] of Edgware. On the manuscript submitted for approval, in handwriting that appears to be that of the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays himself, notations marking the resemblances between the play and the murders appear in red ink throughout. At the end of the script ‘Turtle’s’ half-sister dies, crying out, ‘You are innocent, I know it.’ Next to this, the censor simply added a large red exclamation point, and the licence was refused.
Another quarter of a century later, the poet Robert Browning remembered a bit of doggerel he had learned as a child:
His throat they cut from ear to ear,
His brains they battered in,
His name was Mr William Weare,
Wot lived in Lyons Inn.*
* * *
When the next great murder to capture the public’s imagination rolled around only four years later, Thurtell was the reference point to which people naturally returned. Maria Marten was the daughter of a mole-catcher in Polstead, a small Suffolk village. She was no better than she should be, having had two illegitimate children by two different men. A third man, a farmer named William Corder, was her current companion, by whom she had a third child. This time she was pressing for marriage. She was last seen in May 1827, heading to meet Corder at his barn on her way to Ipswich to be married. Corder returned to Polstead several times that year, telling her father and stepmother that he and ‘Mrs Corder’ had settled in the Isle of Wight. At first he said she had hurt her hand, and so couldn’t write; then that she had written and her letters must have gone astray. After the harvest, he left Polstead for good. Eleven months after the supposed marriage, her father found his daughter’s remains buried in a shallow grave in the Red Barn (barns in the area were traditionally painted red, but this one quickly became the Red Barn). The local magistrates sent for a Runner to trace Corder, and he was soon arrested in the London suburb of Ealing, where he was now married and the proud co-proprietor of a girls’ school.
