A True History of Thirteen
Respectable French and English Women
Accused of Unspeakable Crimes
VICTORIAN
Murderesses
Mary S. Hartman
Dover Publications, Inc.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Copyright 1977 by Mary S. Hartman
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2014, is a republication of the work originally published by Schocken Books, Inc., New York, in 1977.
International Standard Book Number
eISBN-13: 978-0-486-78047-4
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
78047301 2014
www.doverpublications.com
A version of some of the arguments and cases in this book first appeared in an article, Crime and the Respectable Woman: toward a Pattern of Middle-Class Female Criminality in Nineteenth-Century France and England, Feminist Studies, 2, no. 1 (1974): 3856, Feminist Studies, Inc., 417 Riverside Drive, New York, N.Y. 10025.
Portions of were first published in an article, Murder for Respectability: The Case of Madeleine Smith, Victorian Studies, 16, no. 4 (June 1973): 381400.
Portions of were first published in an article, Child Abuse and Self-Abuse: Two Victorian Cases, History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, 2, no. 2 (Fall, 1974): 221248.
FOR MY PARENTS,
Dorothy M. Robertson
AND
Kenneth W. Robertson
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THESE LADIES are no friends of mine, but I shall miss them. Notorious women they surely were, or most of them at any rate, but it is their very familiarity which makes them disturbing. They are uncomfortably ordinary. There are thirteen of them, French and English, and twelve casesone accusation involved a mother-daughter team. The cases span the period from the 1840s to the 1890s, a critical time when the middle classes to which the women belonged were taking on their modern appearance.
These accused daughters, wives, and mothers have little to teach any would-be twentieth-century practitioner about the art of murder; nearly all of them bungled badly in the act, and those who got away with it relied upon methods that required special circumstances and relations between the sexes which no longer obtain. What their stories do offer are some glimpses into the domestic confines of middle-class families and some hints of the problems and even the terrors that women faced there. Some of the accused murderesses would make superb individual subjects for psychological analysis; but this study, while not ignoring these more particular aspects, will stress the ways in which the womens lives were linked to those of their more typical female peers. The accused women will be the center of attention, but the accounts will focus on their collective contribution to our understanding of their less sensational sisters.
Many persons have generously helped me in preparing this study. I trust that I can thank them all while mentioning only a few. Thanks, then, to the editors of Feminist Studies, the History of Childhood Quarterly, and Victorian Studies for permission to reprint portions of earlier versions of the cases published in those journals. Thanks to the administrators of the National Endowment for the Humanities and to the Rutgers Research Council for funds which permitted research in England and France. Thanks to the librarians at Rutgers University, Princeton University, the New York Public Library, the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothque Nationale, the British Museum, and the Public Record Office. I am indebted to M. Henri Polge and M. Jean dOrlans, directors of the Departmental Archives of Gers and Indre-et-Loire, for their kindness in locating materials on the Lacoste and Lemoine cases. I am grateful to Dorothy Christie who directed me to the documents collected by her late husband, Trevor L. Christie, for his excellent study of the Maybrick affair, Etched in Arsenic (London, 1969), and to David Crosson, research historian in the Division of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Wyoming, who graciously made the Christie Collection available to me.
Special thanks, too, to Rudolph Binion, Marc Hollender, Elizabeth Jenkins, Maurice Lee, William ONeill, Elaine Showalter, Peter Stearns, Hilah Thomas, and Judith Walkowitz, all of whom read versions of the draft, offered helpful criticism, listened patiently to the theories I concocted, and offered some better ones of their own. Thanks to Katherine Finnegan and Margaret Nierenberg, who collected many of the materials, to my fine editor, Christopher Kuppig, who was a hero of patience, to Judith Kahn, who improved my prose, and to Inez Elkins and Shirley Meinkoth, who deciphered my handwriting and are the best typists I can imagine. Thanks, finally, to my husband Edwin, who wishes to assure anxious friends that he is alive and well.
MARY S. HARTMAN
Douglass College
Rutgers University
June, 1976
VICTORIAN
Murderesses
INTRODUCTION
THE SUBJECTS of this study are thirteen nineteenth-century English and French women of respectable middle-class status, all of whom were accused of being murderesses or accomplices in murder. They include the independently wealthy wives and daughters of merchants, industrialists, and professional men, as well as near-resourceless shopkeepers wives, and one spinster governess. The victims were the womens husbands, lovers, rivals, pupils, siblings, offspring, and grandchildren. Two of the victims were suffocated, one died of a skull fracture, two were shot, another succumbed to knife wounds and body blows, and the remaining six were poisoned. Most of the accused women were probably guilty as charged, although only six were convicted and none was made to suffer the death penalty. Furthermore, five of the six who went to prison were freed before their full sentences were served. Six of the seven others were acquitted, and the thirteenth was never brought to trial. It is possible to conclude that it was wise to be female and respectable if one intended to dispose of somebody in the nineteenth century. Middle-class women were literally getting away with murder.
The cases of several of these women have long fascinated the practitioners of true-crime literature.social class is, on the face of it, implausible. Their involvement in criminal investigations appears to make them automatically atypical creatures fit only to the interest of collectors of the bizarre and the macabre. But these women do not deserve to be dismissed so lightly. The circumstances which prompted their actions, the strategems they employed, and the public responses to their reported behavior display a pattern which suggests that, far from committing a set of isolated acts, the women may all have been responding to situations which to some degree were built into the lives of their more ordinary middle-class peers.
To argue that this handful of women may have been closer to the typical women of their class than might be expected is not to suggest that untold numbers of middle-class women in the nineteenth century were undiscovered murderesses. Nor is it to imply that some qualities characteristic of several of the accused women, such as a peculiar sort of ruthlessness or an apparently well-developed sexual appetite, were necessarily common among the noncriminal women of the class. It is, however, to suggest that the women in this study may have been among a group which was especially sensitive to certain problems and tensions which were common to a large number of middle-class households.
