Original subtitles

They were attracted to hypocrisy

..to dark secrets, to mysterious

in the fight against crime.

There was forensic science...

and the coming of a new kind

of an absolutely enjoyable crime.

the air is warm and stagnant.

"In these blissful circumstances,

that you want to read about?"

At the top of the list of Orwell's

"For a really entertaining murder,"

"The murderer should be a little man

"living an intensely respectable

Well, it's not quite the suburbs,

is the rather unlikely setting

On the 20th of November 1855,

a man called John Parsons Cook died in the upstairs room of that pub.

It was then called the Talbot Arms.

At first it seemed Cook might have

but William Palmer - the doctor

seemed to be in quite a hurry

And over the previous days, there'd

the week before Cook's death.

It all starts with a big day out

John Cook has gone to enjoy himself

and Cook wins a lot of money

He and Palmer toast each other

but unfortunately the brandy doesn't

and luckily his friend William

Palmer gives Cook a cup of coffee -

If I were you, I wouldn't accept a drink from William Palmer.

and within just a few days,

The chambermaid described the

and the frightening grimaces

The fascinating thing about William Palmer as a murderer

is that he was an upstanding member

These are the tools of his trade - he was a respectable family doctor.

Someone you hoped that you could

"When a doctor does go wrong, he's the first of criminals.

would have been kept in this little powder drawer at the bottom -

Palmer had a motive - money!

The dead man's betting book,

His wife had died the year before,

yielding another big cash windfall.

This meant that newspapers suddenly

Combined with a brilliant murder story, circulation exploded.

What the newspapers particularly

In Palmer's case it was compromised

to be present at the autopsy,

and during it he managed to jostle the person handling the stomach

so that its contents spilled out.

Later Palmer tried to bribe the courier taking the victim's stomach down to London to make it disappear.

the analytical chemists explaining exactly how poisoning worked -

and the Staffordshire Advertiser

The readers of all these newspapers

were getting a very detailed lesson in the science of chemistry

Palmer's trial featured 60 witnesses and lasted a record 12 days.

The case gave the public a potent

And at St Bartholomew's hospital,

the Victorian pathology museum contains the fascinating gory stuff

murder trials now revolved.

I'm meeting an expert in Victorian

There are various new things going

toxicology, forensic science.

of the William Palmer case?

Well, he marks the transition between the earlier poisoner

of the 1830s and 40s which was seen to be crude, unsophisticated.

The archetypal poisoning case

was arsenic, in copious doses,

more complex, more subtle poisons.

When William Palmer's on the scaffold, he's about to die,

he says, and this is very famous,

the agent that he was convicted of

And so what he's saying, in effect, is, "I may or may not be a poisoner,

So this case is so intriguing

who weren't actually able to prove

It was quite finely balanced.

is to make the poisonous substance actually present to the court,

to show it in a vial or on a slide.

is getting more sophisticated,

are having to run to catch up.

Oh, absolutely. They are locked in a self-reinforcing spiral.

As poisoners are getting more

so too do the means of detection

sophisticated in order to catch them.

the ever-more refined crimes

As scientific knowledge increased, murderers could be caught through

Collections like this one helped these magicians of the modern age -

and the forensic scientists -

to understand the human body.

so they could tell what was normal

This is somebody's stomach,

but it's been corroded away because

Detective Force at Scotland Yard,

of the cleverest police officers.

They aimed to make policing

through observation of crime,

which was very small at first,

out on the beat, preventing crime.

These detectives often came from

as the criminals they investigated,

so they understood the Victorian

Charles Dickens was very taken

He loved following them around and spending time with them.

and even glamorous characters, to his middle-class readers.

They can walk into a crime scene

which are invisible to other eyes.

Dickens invites the whole of

into the offices of Household Words

the detective police party.

Over brandy-and-water and cigars,

The most impressive detective present is called Inspector Wield,

"a husky voice and a habit of emphasizing his conversation

of a corpulent forefinger."

Now, these very distinctive tics

And Dickens uses his right name when he follows Inspector Field

This essay, called On Duty With Inspector Field, begins like this.

"How goes the night? St Giles's

is stalking Inspector Field.

And his description is full of

"Inspector Field is, tonight,

of its solitary galleries."

Soon Field emerges, and leads Dickens on a journey of discovery

into London's criminal underbelly.

What I love about this essay

into the squalid, grimy, horrible world of the slums of Saint Giles,

where Inspector Field is completely at home and completely in charge.

He isn't different from these

He's risen up through his own

and this gives him the power

from the slums to the middle-class

that the real Inspector Field

soon got a fictional counterpart.

bears a striking resemblance

fictional police detectives.

But Dickens wasn't just taken

I've come to Dickens's own house to hear about the great writer from his

He moved in parts of society that were unknown to most of his readers.

He specialised in the underbelly.

unvarnished detail of murder

was evident in his famous public readings from Oliver Twist.

Especially the killing by Bill Sikes

Dickens appeared in tails with a white starched shirt and bow tie.

which he'd designed himself,

so he was gas lit within this frame.

And then he'd give himself, just

he wrote a score for himself.

And, it's fascinating that you see he rewrote some of the scenes to make them tighter and more vivid.

So, for example in letters so marked,

his pen almost breaking on the page is the word "TERROR" - underlined

And he maintained that atmosphere of extreme dread all the way through.

But the moment that people remembered

"It was a ghastly figure to look

"The murderer, staggering backward to

"and shutting out the sight

He did this. Sometimes he didn't

This was the thing that frightened

till they actually began to see her face disintegrating under his fist.

psychotic performance, really.

terrifying accounts of murder

and the criminal underworld

who found they could now enjoy

And they liked it even more when murder left the grimy back streets

and entered the country house.

In 1860, one real-life case seized Britain's attention.

mill inspector, Samuel Kent - joined his second wife Mary.

Their five-year-old daughter

and the shutters were barred.

totally sealed off from the world.

Three-year-old Francis Saville Kent

The family and servants searched

must have spirited the child away.

and his throat was cut so deeply that his head was almost off.

Soon, as in all the best detective stories, a series of clues emerged.

The first clue was the clue of the blanket - from the boy's bed.

on his nursery maid Elizabeth.

She seems to have changed her story

that the blanket was missing.

by trying it on to the various

It fitted Elizabeth the best.

as if they were somehow above

But this was a red herring.

it was from the Times instead.

But the most exciting clue was something notable by its absence.

When the laundry came back, there was something missing.

Two weeks after the murder, Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher

amidst huge public expectation and pressure from the press.

A leading figure at Scotland Yard,

he was described as the prince of

and examining the evidence.

Soon, he came to a conclusion.

that the missing nightdress was the key to the whole thing

and the nightdress's owner, Constance, who was only 16 years old

He was convinced that she sneaked down these servant's stairs,

got the body of her sleeping half-brother from the nursery

and out to slit his throat.

but without the still elusive nightdress, Whicher couldn't make a

The accusation by a working-class detective of a nice, middle-class girl caused public outrage.

Whicher was criticised for intruding tarnishing Constance's name.

Kate Summerscale, author of a

has discovered that this story

Not content with reading about the crime, they were determined to find

This is from a woman in London

is the brother of William Nutt

"and the son-in-law of Mrs Holly,

This is brilliant! It's like she's

Well, this one is suggesting

was purchased in the neighbourhood

because if the boy had been

why the parents didn't wake.

thought of this themselves?

offering suggestions relative

I feel really sorry for him.

He's done a pretty good job really, but people are writing some terrible

This is a particularly sort of

Yes, this is typical of the letters

The scorn for his lack of education

"A policeman may be a good hand

and a mind enlarged by observation

Well, on one level, I agree. On another level, what a snob!

And where does that leave the professional police detective?

His status has been rocked by this?

The police detective, I would say,

didn't regain the kind of kudos and integrity that they had enjoyed

Somehow the experience of doubting

super-human police detective.

that Whicher was right all along.

In 1865, Constance Kent confessed to killing her little half-brother,

The murder of Francis Saville Kent

spelled the end of the police

and the birth of what we'd call today the armchair detective.

You can't make it out, but it says here he was cruelly murdered.

new appetite in the middle classes

for the intellectual rigours

His death made retired colonels

and all sorts of respectable people

and largely without success!

because only he knows the secrets of

The case at Rode Hill House -

In 1868, Wilkie Collins published a book called The Moonstone.

"The first, the longest, and the best of English detective novels."

Whether it's a true detective novel or not is a bit of a moot question,

Basically, it's about a stolen

because Collins expert Matthew Sweet

cut the little end off here.

Turning it around slowly. Turning it, so you get it nice and evenly...

So, what role do cigars play in the story of the Moonstone?

Well, the cigar, strangely, is the engine of the plot in the Moonstone.

Without the cigar, the moonstone diamond would never have been stolen.

Because the hero, Franklin Blake, is a cigar smoker who stops smoking.

And then, because he's sleepless,

he finds that his drink has been

so this puts him into a very strange

during which he commits the robbery that he himself wants to see solved.

You make that sound really neat

but it takes place over 800 pages

Twists and turns and all with this strange kind of narcotic fug waiting

is a highly original story,

but the detective element clearly draws on the Rode Hill House murder.

So, Mr Whicher becomes Sergeant Cuff, this detective who is called in when the local police fail,

and puts the finger of blame on the daughter of the household,

but then fails in his investigation,

But there's also the detail

Whicher's suspicions were founded upon an anomaly in the laundry list

This nightshirt that should have been there but wasn't.

Franklin Blake has been sleepwalking

and his body's rubbed against a wet architrave of one of the doors

So what's the case for the Moonstone

There are things in the Moonstone

you've got the questionable servants.

who comes into a kind of complacent

who don't want that kind of detective

looking in their drawers, inspecting the business of their personal lives.

is the planting of the clue,

The way that if you're paying

you know that this normal detail

is going to hold the secret

Well, yes, I mean it's the classic

might use a cigar like this,

it's the explanation for the whole

Novels designed to quicken the pulse

What could be more sensational than

The Queen of sensation fiction was

She really was one of the 19th centuries most prolific and

Lady Audley's Secret, was set here.

a place of full of secrets,

The book's plot revolves around

George Tallboys comes back from

He expects to find his wife at home

but instead hears that she's died.

He goes with a friend, Robert Audley, to visit Audley Court,

the new, young Lady Audley.

she arranges to meet George here.

This is the famous Lime Tree Walk

In the story, it leads to a well,

Mary Elizabeth Braddon said that the whole story was inspired by a walk that she took here.

She said this secluded spot, "Suggested something uncanny."

the mystery is investigated

who has turned amateur detective.

I'm really fascinated by Braddon,

whose own life seems to reflect

biographer Jennifer Carnell.

probably from when she was a toddler.

She's not exactly the sort of

No, she's much more of a slightly

describe him - John Maxwell - he was her sort of partner in life.

He was. He was a very pushy publisher, good at publicity -

So she had the skill at writing and he had the salesmanship.

But there was a problem with

There was a slight problem - because he did already have a wife!

birth of her last child and had gone back to her family in Ireland.

saying that Mrs John Maxwell

And unfortunately, many people

and the letters and telegrams of

as she was very much alive, the cat was out of the bag!

You couldn't make it up. It's like

Can you tell me how she targeted her work at different audiences?

She was quite clever in that

Yes, and she also wrote for poorer people - the working class.

This is a "penny dreadful", which is clearly aimed at people

We've got an article here addressed

What would the other readers

Shop girls, young clerks, and teenagers, as well, also read these

and each weekly number starts with a story called the Black Band.

and it's got extraordinary number of murders, plots, poisonings, duels...

This is another female murderess,

So this is even less plausible

It is, it is - it's campy fun!

But at the same time, people who haven't got much money are enjoying this? They're lapping it up, yes!

Tell me about the different types

in the two types of writing?

For example in The Black Band,

as the friends of the people.

They're magicians of modern life

they're an intruder and they're not

And the amateur detective will always prevail over the professional.

about murder and detection.

The middle classes had their

there were cheap magazine stories

of different types of story

and different types of detective

"I am aware that the female

"Indeed, my experience tells me that when a woman becomes a criminal

not one, but two, female detectives

because she's a professional.

that the first girl detectives

This was a time when ladies' movements were restricted by the decade's impractical fashions.

Particularly the crinoline,

which ladies actually referred to

The Revelations of a Lady Detective,

Mrs Paschal isn't going to let a giant skirt get in her way.

The heroine of the story is chasing

He goes down a hole into a cellar.

She can't follow him because

so - her words - she takes off

It's a brilliant little moment

These two groundbreaking books were published within months of each

and since they're rather rare,

with curator Kathryn Johnson

Are these filling the gap between cheap and disposable magazines and the more expensive hardback novels?

a three-volume novel would have cost

This is priced at sixpence,

Looking at the cover of the Revelations of the Lady Detective,

what would a reader have seen

They might have been shocked. As you can see at the top, she's

and at the bottom you can see

showing not only her ankles,

but a considerable amount of leg.

In 18th century prints, if you hold up your dress and show your ankle, you are a prostitute. Indeed!

What other unladylike things does

She tells us that she has one

although perhaps disappointingly,

a great comfort with the enormous weight of it in her pocket!

I like this about the female detectives - they're bursting

and so the implication is that she wouldn't undertake something so

She justifies herself quite hard,

I like the bit where she actually

"I have nerve and strength, cunning and confidence, resources unlimited"

were a bit or a false start,

because there wouldn't be any more

But the British appetite for murder

The victim was an eight-year-old

She was attacked and cut into little pieces by a solicitor's clerk who

And although the crime was a fairly

In 1869, the sailors in the British Navy were issued with a new type of

this stuff - it was a bit disgusting

They started calling it Fanny Adams

because it could have been the cut-up dead body of a murder victim.

This expression "Sweet Fanny Adams" passed into language more generally,

to describe something that was tiny, or negligible or worthless -

Now FA doesn't stand for what you

Beyond a little dark humour,

the murders that really intrigued

tended to be more complex than mere

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde broke new ground because the violence in it was motiveless, it was animalistic.

It turned out that the killer,

The book was a huge success,

and it quickly became a stage play with an actor called Richard

It opened in 1888, here in London

For the first time, Victorian audiences encountered the idea

The transformation scene was said to

that women fainted and had to be

These days we're so familiar with the image of Jekyll drinking the potion and turning into Hyde

that it's hard to imagine the shock

But how did Richard Mansfield do it?

Michael, what actually happened in the transformation scene,

Well, he actually transformed

On the stage and in the book, it's the monster into the nice man.

Surely, there must have been

That's all he did, and the lighting, the orchestra, the sound effects,

and everything that went with it

There's a brilliant contemporary description of how he appears,

but he's going to completely

So we're going to go on our toes, put your weight on your toes

This is Mr Hyde the murderer, walks

.. and straighten your fingers.

to the end of those fingers.

And a slightly deformed shoulder.

Shoulder up. One shoulder up. OK?

Leer - the leer of a fiend!

Serious, serious. Now, over there is Dr Lanyon. Is Dr... who? Lanyon.

he isn't your friend any more.

to Dr Lanyon how you do it!

"Behold, man of disbelief."

Behold, man of disbelief! Behold!

Don't say that you're taking

2,000 people are watching you!

Yes, I'll drink this down. Oh!

And suddenly, amazing relief and totally strengthen you'll feel your whole body going upright

and you say, "Lanyon." Dr Lanyon.

The play Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

opened in what would turn out to be a particularly fearful summer.

In 1888, there was a series of brutal murders in Whitechapel.

The murder of the prostitute,

which some considered to be the first of this group of crimes,

after Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

five more women were killed

They'd had various internal organs

This gave rise to the speculation

could have been a trained doctor.

murderous doctor with the fictional one in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

One newspaper said that, "Mr Hyde is at large in Whitechapel."

Some people were even more confused

the actor who played Mr Hyde could be the killer himself.

he proved he could transform himself

from a respectable looking doctor

Behold, man of disbelief, behold!

And if even an honourable doctor could harbour the brutal instincts

anybody walking the streets

The serial killer could be anywhere.

The fear and excitement escalated when a letter arrived at the offices of the Central News Agency.

and it went on to mock the police,

It was signed Jack the Ripper,

an irresistibly catchy name.

In fact, the whole thing became something of a theatrical event

and an interactive one, too.

Once again, ordinary people started

They sent letters purporting to be from the Ripper himself.

When she appeared in court,

"of greater intelligence than is common for one of her class."

to have been light entertainment

criss-crossing each other's paths.

The Ripper's story is a massive subject, for all different types of

Therefore there's lots of questions,

Before the murders took place,

was already a tourist attraction -

So perhaps it's not surprising

These tours have quite a history.

They've been going on for at least 100 years, possibly longer.

The first formal recorded tour

carried out the post-mortem

The legendary amateur detective

of the police to find a culprit

created a desire for a fictional sleuth who was never wrong.

Sherlock Holmes was the perfect the nervous middle classes.

but there was something of the

to solve crimes that had defeated the plodding members of the police.

into an elegant crossword puzzle.

The very first time we see Sherlock

approach is immediately seen.

and a large round magnifying glass

"With these two implements, he trotted noiselessly about the room.

"and once lying flat upon his face.

"and packed it away in an envelope.

"Finally, he examined, with his glass, the word upon the wall,

"going over every letter of it

Holmes uses the bloody finger-marks,

was genuinely pioneering and would actually inspire real-life policing.

Now, your job has been to teach

Well, one of my jobs. We would take

So, this is quite important that you

because people could go to prison on the basis of this. That's right.

The ink is the same as they use

You have to smear this now.

it's all done electronically.

Ooh, ooh, why do we roll it

from one side of the finger to the other because of the pattern area.

Some patterns are wider than others,

You are, um, you're quite strict.

What happens if people don't want

Well, I think they can be persuaded to have their fingerprints taken.

Police do have the authority,

but I don't think that often

doing this in Britain, then?

We've been taking fingerprints

by the police, is that right?

When the fingerprint bureau is set up in 1901 they already have access, don't they, to this large databank?

They had about 18,000 - 20,000 sets of fingerprints on record

criminals - they'd been in prison?

That's right, so there's a mass reclassification of all these

that they'd actually built up

by their fingerprints and uniquely identifying suspects begins?

gave a sense of discovery and excitement to the solving of crimes,

and the process of detection became ever more fascinating

So, next on A Very British Murder,

investigate why the "whodunit"

and how the best of these murder mysteries came to be written