Джудит Фландерс – The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (страница 11)

Seducer-murders were not unknown, but the details of this one were a newspaper’s dream. First Miss Marten was tidied up, while opprobrium was spread over Corder. From a modestly prosperous tenant farmer, he was transformed into the rich squire of melodrama, preying on the innocent village maiden: one broadside called him the ‘son of an opulent farmer’, ‘living in great splendour’. Miss Marten, by contrast, was ‘a fine young woman’ who had merely formed an ‘imprudent connexion’. George IV, the erstwhile Prince Regent whose numerous affairs had been daily fodder for prints and satire, had come to the throne in 1820; Victorian mores were some time in the future, and the broadsides do not deny her two illegitimate children, they just don’t think they mattered. In one, Miss Marten was ‘of docile disposition’, inculcated with ‘moral precepts’, and her behaviour aroused ‘the esteem and admiration of all’; her little missteps (the children) were caused entirely by a ‘playful and vivacious disposition’; although ‘her conduct cannot be justified, much might be said in palliation’. The Times even commended the father of her second child, for sending financial support; and his letters to his discarded mistress ‘express the goodness of his heart … his conduct throughout has been that of a man and a Christian’.

Corder was condemned untried. He was ‘unfeeling and wretched’, said The Times, adding that he had also attempted to kill his mistress’s second child. The Observer picked up this story, which it elaborated. Corder had offered the child a fig, but – ‘as if by Divine interference’ – it was refused. Miss Marten’s stepmother, the story went on, cut open the fig, to find ‘something in the shape of a pill. in it’. Oddly enough, Mrs Marten did not trouble to question Corder about this, and he next gave the child a pear. Mrs Marten, fruit-examiner-extraordinary, again found a pill in it, and again did nothing – from which we may safely conclude, unlike the newspapers at the time, that the incident never took place. But the newspapers were in full cry: Corder had murdered his child by Miss Marten, they reported; Corder had been involved in forgery; Corder had been engaged with ‘the convict Smith’ in ‘transactions of a felonious nature. such as pig and horse-stealing’. Another report stated that Miss Marten’s first child was by Corder’s own brother.

But the real excitement for the readers was the facts of the murder and its discovery. Corder had persuaded Miss Marten to wear men’s clothes for her trip to the barn: he claimed, falsely, that the village constable was going to arrest her for having no visible support for her surviving child. (A later broadside gives an alternative explanation, that she was dressed this way to throw his disapproving relatives off the track.) Then there was the legend of the discovery of the body. Broadsides and even sermons recounted how Miss Marten’s stepmother had had a dream, three nights running, as in a fairy tale, in which she saw Miss Marten dead and buried in the barn. At these supernatural promptings, she persuaded her husband to go and search the Red Barn. The story of the dream was put in evidence at the inquest, although it is noticeable by its absence at the trial itself, being replaced with a more pragmatic explanation: as Miss Marten’s continuing silence became more worrying, a neighbour remembered that Corder had borrowed a spade on the day of her disappearance, and another person had seen him leaving the barn with a pickaxe. More cynically, the Observer suggested that the Martens had not worried unduly until Corder stopped sending money; then ‘the old people. began to dream about the murder of their child’. Most print outlets, however, were happy to give credence to the dream: ‘For many a long month or more, her mind being sorely oppress’d … she dream’d three nights o’er, Her daughter she lay murdered, under the Red Barn floor.’ Theatres loved it too: W.T. Moncrieff, in an 1842 version of the Red Barn story, The Red Farm, or, The Well of St Marie, noted in his foreword to the printed edition that ‘The extraordinary discovery of a murder … through the agency of a dream, might reasonably be doubted, did not the Judicial Records of our own Criminal History place it beyond all reach of scepticism.’ As late as 1865–66, the dream in particular continued to be a perennial favourite.

Another piquant detail was found in Corder’s life after he left Polstead, for he had met his wife by placing advertisements in the Morning Herald and the Sunday Times:

MATRIMONY. – A Private Gentleman, aged 24, entirely independent, whose disposition is not to be exceeded … To any female of respectability. and willing to confide her future happiness in one every way qualified to render the marriage state desirable, as the advertiser is in affluence; the lady must have the power of some property, which may remain in her own possession. should this meet the eye of any agreeable lady, who feels desirous of meeting with a sociable, tender, kind and sympathising companion, they will find this advertisement worthy of notice. Honour and secrecy may be relied on.

Scandalized and thrilled, readers learned that Corder had received more than forty replies from the Herald alone; there had been another fifty-three from the Sunday Times, but by then he was fixed up, so he never bothered to collect them. After the murder the owner of the accommodation address where the replies to the newspaper advertisement had been sent published them in a pamphlet, to the delight of all. In Douglas Jerrold’s play Wives by Advertisement, a send-up of Corder’s love life, the Hon. Jenkins Cigar advertises: ‘To the fair sex possessed of ten thousand a-year! A desirable opportunity! The advertiser is a gentleman aged five-and-twenty … has been inoculated and had the measles. he wears his own hair, and his moustachios, though in the stubble at present, promise to be forward in the spring. The advertiser wishes to meet with an agreeable partner. No letters received unless brought in a carriage and four …’*

After a number of fairly standard farcical scenes, Cigar, ‘alias Tomkins, alias Winks, alias Puppylove’, is arrested, and the remaining characters, having learned their lesson, sing:

… oh, ye youths, the dame for ever scorn That’s advertised with horses, pigs, and corn! …

And, oh, ye maids, from husbands turn away, If advertized with razors, dogs, and hay! …

Jerrold’s farce was at least staged after the trial. The same could not be said for many others. A dramatic version of the murder was reported to have been presented at the Stoke-by-Nayland Fair in May 1828; in July, while Corder was still awaiting trial, two ‘theatrical representations’ of ‘The Late Murder of Maria Marten’ were staged at the Cherry Fair in Polstead itself, one of which included a scene in the Red Barn, ‘where the mutilated body was [seen] lying on … the floor, surrounded by the Coroner and the gentlemen of the jury as they appeared … after the fatal discovery’. Ballad-singers also cried their wares, selling broadsides that stated outright that Corder was a murderer.

The prosperous were as much absorbed as the masses. Staffordshire pottery figures were produced of Corder and Miss Marten, and, even more importantly, of the Red Barn, impossibly bucolic, and frequently with Maria Marten looking winsome in the doorway. These were big, expensive pieces, not for the working classes. There were further options for those who wanted to disguise their interest under the cover of morality: long before the trial began the Revd Mr Young preached an entire sermon on Corder’s evil deed, to a congregation said to number 5,000.

When Corder finally came to trial in August, the court spent some time on these affronts to justice.

DEFENCE: Pray had you not got a person preaching about this murder in the very barn itself?

THE LORD CHIEF BARON: What! what d’ye mean by preaching? – Is it a sermon?

DEFENCE: Yes, my Lord, and to a congregation of several thousand persons, specially brought together after regular notice in the parish, to hear this man described as the murderer of this unfortunate girl.

THE LORD CHIEF BARON: Scandalous! …

[Mr. W. Chaplin, the churchwarden is asked by the defence]: Did you hear the parson preach in the barn?

MR CHAPLIN: No, certainly not; but I heard of the occurrence.

DEFENCE: And you never interfered to prevent it?

MR CHAPLIN: I did not.

DEFENCE: Are there not exhibitions going round the neighbourhood, representing Corder as the murderer. And you’ve not interfered to prevent them? Is there not a camera obscura near this very hall at this moment, exhibiting him as the murderer?

MR CHAPLIN: There is a camera obscura, I believe about the streets, but I do not know the nature of the exhibition, neither am I aware that I have any power to prevent them in my own parish, much less in this town.

Technically, a camera obscura is a box with a lens, which projects an image of a place or a person onto a flat surface. They were frequently used by artists at the time for sketching from nature. It may be that here the term is used to describe some form of peepshow using projections. George Sanger, later the proprietor of one of Europe’s largest circuses (self-ennobled as ‘Lord’ George Sanger), as a boy in the late 1820s and 1830s toured fairgrounds with his father. Their peepshow ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ had pictures ‘pulled up and down by strings’, lit at night by candles.