What Book to Read?

This intriguing little book (2008) is about a nasty murder that happened at Road Hill House in Wiltshire in 1860. It’s also about public reactions to the case, in particular to the role of the detective, Mr Whicher, who investigated it. There is a whole slice of social history in the descriptions of the life of the household where the murder occurred. And Kate Summerscale also talks about the way the case influenced writers at the time, including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

In his excellent review of the book, Ian Rankin tells the reader who committed the crime. He doesn’t, as he says, give away the end, but I’m not even going that far. I guess it’s pretty obvious who the culprit is, as there isn’t a large cast to choose from. But I found there was real suspense in not knowing until it was revealed, though Rankin is right that that is not the end of the story.

When the nursemaid Elizabeth Gough got up on the morning of 30 June, 1860, one of her charges, Saville Kent, aged 3, was not in his cot. She said she thought at first that his mother, Mary Kent, must have taken him into her room, which adjoined the nursery. But he wasn’t there. Samuel Kent, the boy’s father, had locked the house carefully the night before. Where could the child be? A window was found slightly open. Could someone have crept in and stolen him? But all too soon the body of the little boy was found in the servant’s privy; he had been stabbed, and his throat cut. Everyone in the house, family and servants alike, fell under suspicion. The local police had their own ideas, but insufficient evidence to back them up. Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard was called in.

Whicher was one of the original eight detectives appointed in 1842 by the London Metropolitan Police to deal with serious crime in the city. By 1860, he was famous for his ingenuity in catching thieves, conmen and murderers. He thought what evidence there was pointed clearly to the perpetrator, but he was unable to make out a case that convinced the local magistrates.

The case caused huge public interest on a number of levels. That such a terrible thing could happen in what was outwardly a respectable middle class home seemed to undermine the assumptions on which families’ peace and security were founded, or so newspapers editorialised. Everyone had a view of who dunnit, and wrote to the police and the papers to say so. Then there was the role of the detective himself. The initial euphoria of expectation surrounding him soon evaporated, and he was blamed variously for trampling class boundaries and invading the privacy of a respectable family and for being personally arrogant and incompetent. ‘For the country as a whole,’ Summerscale writes, ‘the murder at Road Hill became a kind of myth – a dark fable about the Victorian family and the dangers of detection.’ Had the public known what Summerscale finally reveals as the probable root of all the evil, they would have been even more disturbed. The writer does a great job of creating her own mystery story.

I found the social history personified in the Kent family fascinating. They are clearly perceived as middle class: Road Hill House was a three story Georgian affair on a hill above the village of Road, and Samuel Kent employed several servants. His friends seem to have been doctors, lawyers or other professional men. Yet Samuel was the son of a cabinetmaker. How did the son of a tradesman make it into the ranks of the middle class? He was a sub-inspector of factories, and hoped to be made a full inspector; he needed the extra money to support his growing family – four children from a first marriage, three from a second, with another on the way. His first wife was the daughter of a prosperous coachmaker, so perhaps she brought some money into the family. His second wife was the children’s governess, who he married as soon as his first wife died. He must have been a self-made man, and though Summerscale doesn’t discuss this, there is some interesting social mobility going on here.

The influence of this crime on literature is also fascinating. One of the main Hill Road House ‘clues’ was a missing nightgown; Wilkie Collins uses just such a circumstance in The Moonstone, (reviewed here). Sergeant Cuff, in the same story, is loosely based on Inspector Whicher. Charles Dickens used elements of the case in his unfinished detective story Edwin Drood. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James also has some resonances with it. Summerscale has done a good job of more generally connecting the rise of detective fiction in Victorian England to this case.

Kate Summerscale says of herself: ‘I’m a journalist playing historian, and then I try to convert what I’ve found into something like a novel’. She’s done a pretty good job. You can read an interview with her here.