That there is nothing new under the sun is well illustrated by an entry in the Faber Book of Diaries from 197 years ago this week, in which a Somerset clergyman laments the vulgarisation of public tastes by clickbait media, although not in those exact terms.
“Still the same dreadful weather,” Rev John Skinner begins his account of August 14th, 1828. Then his mood darkens further as he surveys a two-page newspaper spread on the notorious “Red Barn Murder” of a year before.
In an earlier entry, he had deplored the grisly tourist industry that had since arisen, whereby “people of all kinds and classes flocked to the barn” in Suffolk where one Maria Marten had been killed and buried by her lover, William Corder.
Now he was appalled by news that 10,000 people had turned up to watch “when [that] detestable wretch was launched into eternity”.
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In the short-term, the Suffolk murder scene attracted tourists “from as far afield as Ireland”
Rev Skinner was especially depressed to read of “well-dressed and delicate females” jostling to be close to the gallows where the hangman had to supplement the basic procedure by himself hanging out of the condemned man “for two minutes” to finish the job.
But he was in no doubt about where the blame for such bad taste lay. Of the newspaper coverage, he summarised: “There needs not any other proof of the deplorable state of depraved feelings in which this country has gradually arrived through the instruction of novelists and fatalists ...”
In a famous essay of 1946, George Orwell mock-lamented the “Decline of the English Murder”. He was satirising British tabloids, especially the now late and little lamented News of the World, for their sensationalist (and very popular) reporting.
But he cut the irony so fine you could easily mistake the essay as nostalgia for a golden age of homicide, whose practitioners included Dr Crippen, Mrs Maybrick, and Jack the Ripper.
By Orwell’s calculation, England’s “Elizabethan period” of murder occurred “between roughly 1850 and 1925”. Since then, he suggested, the crime had become too commonplace and banal to merit the dramatic journalism and fiction of old.
Recalling the “most talked of English murder of recent years”, he wrote: “It is difficult to believe that this case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.”
Whatever about 1925 being the endpoint, the Red Barn Murder suggests Orwell should have predated the start of his golden age by a generation at least. Certainly, the crime had no lack of strong emotions. And its infamy inspired many ballads, books and stage adaptations, one as recently as the 1990s.
On the gallows, prompted by the prison governor, the murderer did indeed confess
In the short-term, the Suffolk murder scene attracted tourists “from as far afield as Ireland”. But blame for the murder had a similarly reach, and for long afterwards. In a 1996 column for the Belfast Telegraph, for example, Sam McAughtry recalled the anti-Catholic propaganda of his 1930s childhood in Tiger’s Bay, Belfast:
“The accusation that sticks in my mind from those far-off days was to the effect that the Micks were at the back of a famous case which was dramatised under the name of Maria Martin [sic] and the Red Barn Murder.”
In fact there was no known Irish angle in the 1827 case, although it has similarities with the 1940 one involving Moll McCarthy, which was still haunting Tipperary as recently as last year.
Marten was an attractive, unmarried young woman who had children by different local men, including Corder, a known corner boy. She hoped he would marry her and the pair had discussed elopement, which was assumed to have happened when they both disappeared.
When he turned up again and could not produce her, however, worse was suspected. Then came the big breakthrough in the investigation, when Marten’s stepmother had a supposed dream in which Corder confessed guilt, leading to a search of the barn where the couple often met.
On the gallows, prompted by the prison governor, the murderer did indeed confess. But among the competing theories during his trial was that the stepmother had been having an affair with him too and the “dream” was cover-up for her own involvement.
In any case, as was the way then, the saga also spawned a lucrative trade in memorabilia. Pieces of the barn door were stolen as souvenirs. The hangman’s rope was sold in sections for a guinea each. After the usual public dissection of the body, the skeleton was displayed for a time in a hospital, with a tasteful mechanism attached that caused one of the arms to move, drawing visitors attention to a collection box.
There’s an old saying in publishing that “everyone has a book in them”. This was more than usually true of Corder, who had part of a book on him, at least. Earlier this year, British newspapers reported the find in a Bury St Edmonds museum of a 200-year-old account of the Red Barn trial, one of two volumes now known to be bound with the murderer’s skin.
