Looks like the Victorian countryside was shit sometimes too

Last weekend I picked up a copy of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, which bookelfe  had brought to my attention a while ago in a way that was almost tailor-made specifically for me to be all like "I MUST READ THIS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE." And this is because this book has all my favorite things in it--detectives, and true crime, and madness, and a lot of crap about Poe stories and sensation novels (nobody can possibly understand my adoration for 1850s/60s sensation novels) and the Victorians basically being one of the most batshit wacko cultures ever in their prim, repressed little way, and even a girl who dresses as a boy and runs off to go to sea, although this is only a minor point and she doesn't get there.

In fact, this book has so much of my favorite stuff in it, because the case it is about involves so much of my favorite stuff, that I was like five chapters into the book when I realized I had read about this murder before. One of the sources I used for a paper I wrote for my Women Writer's class last year on "Female madness and criminality in Jane Eyre and Lady Audley's Secret" was a chapter from a book called Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, which I have sort of wanted to read in its entirety one of these days, but buying actual srs bsns academic books costs lots of dollars. Anyway, the chapter I used was on "Murder, Gender and Popular Fiction in the 1860s" and directly tied three popular sensation novels, including Lady Audley's Secret, to the Road Hill House murder and subsequent borked-up investigation. And I dimly recall being like "Man, that sounds like a fascinating case; I should learn more about it some day."

Anyway, the Road Hill House murder basically is a 1860s sensation novel except real. One day, totally randomly, three-year-old Francis Saville Kent was found suffocated, stabbed in the chest, and stuffed in the privy with his throat cut open. Abduction by a stranger was quickly ruled out, leaving the shocked Victorian public with a scenario that upset nearly all of their most cherished beliefs about family life. Who, in this quiet, middle-class, comfortable Victorian household where these sorts of things are not supposed to happen, had murdered the boy? And how far into the privacy of an outwardly respectable family home should the investigation be allowed to go? Some people suspected Mr. Kent, and some people suspected the governess, and some people suspected Mr. Kent and the governess, who must have totally been having an affair, especially because the current Mrs. Kent was actually his second wife and she had been the governess to the kids of his first wife (who was ~mad!~), and Jane Eyre had come out about a decade earlier and shocked the hell out of everybody and I don't think they were quite over it. Some people suspected the shoemaker who found the boy's body, either as being involved with the governess or because he was married to the daughter of the washerwoman who something something I don't even know. Some people suspected the children of the first wife, especially Constance, who was WEIRD, dontchaknow, she once dressed up as a boy and tried to run away and join the navy! Also one of her nightgowns is missing! This was the theory of the titular character, anyway, and I am not kidding when I say "character" even though he was a real person.

DETECTIVE-INSPECTOR JONATHAN WHICHER was one of the very first Scotland Yard detectives, and he was generally considered the shiniest, most awesome, detective-y-est detective on the force. He arrived on the scene two weeks late, got along very badly with the local police who had comically little idea what the fuck they were doing (no, seriously, they lost evidence and got themselves locked up by accident and one of them once thought he found ~a clue!~ but it turned out to be a jar of jam his own bootprint from earlier that afternoon), and decided it was Constance, because of the missing nightdress. The Victorians were mostly just scandalized and titillated and basically Victorian over all this discussion of nice young ladies' nightdresses, and Constance was eventually exonerated, and Whicher sent home in disgrace, because even though his nightdress theory was very clever and made the most complete picture of what little evidence was available, it still might have been one of the weakest murder cases ever presented in a court. Five years later, there was A CONFESSION, which only mostly cleared up the case, and you will have to read about this case yourself if you want to find out who confessed, and who was the PROBABLE ACCOMPLICE WHO WAS PROTECTED BY THE CONFESSION, and HOW LIKELY IT WAS THAT THE WHOLE FAMILY HAD SYPHILIS, and all those other fun things, because I feel like writing it out would count as MAJOR SPOILERS. I know history is not supposed to have spoilers because it has already happened, but as I mentioned, this book is kind of exactly like a mystery novel, and so of course I cannot just tell you who the killer was.

This book also features lots of hilarious newspaper clippings from hilarious Victorian newspapers, many of which involve helpful suggestions like "If you look in the dead boy's eyes, you should be able to see an image of the murderer, because he/she/they were the last thing he ever saw!" This theory was dismissed as unhelpful not because it was pseudoscience but because the boy had been asleep, duh, even though the coroner believed that he had woken up. The author also keeps time by intermittently telling us what had happened in the latest installment of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, which was being released in serial at the time the murder and investigation happened. As a total dork who has read The Woman in White, and adored it and wrote a paper on it, this was one of those things that made me feel like Summerscale must have been writing this book just for me.

I feel like I haven't sufficiently covered the degree of sheer wacky involved in this case, but... you get the idea, no?