The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

by Kate Summerscale

'I could even notice the eye, nervous and snatchy, and the secret-like movement of withdrawing the head as she saw the man, and then protruding it a bit when she saw him busy.' The journalist William Russell, in one of the detective stories he published as 'Waters' in the 1850s, tried to capture the complexities of looking: 'her glare, for such it was, continuing fixed upon me – yet an introspective glare – searching the records of her own brain as well as the tablet of my face – considering, comparing both'. This formulation caught the way the accomplished detective worked: he looked keenly out at the world and, simultaneously, as sharply inwards, searching the records of his memory. The eyes of others were the books to be read, his own experience the dictionary that enabled him to read.

'There is nothing truer than physiognomy,' says the narrator of Dickens' short story 'Hunted Down' (1859), 'taken in connection with manner.' He explains how he formed his judgement of a man named Slinkton. 'I took his face to pieces in my mind, like a watch, and examined it in detail. I could not say much against any of his features separately; I could say even less against them when they were put together. "Then is it not monstrous," I asked myself, "that because a man happens to part his hair straight up the middle of his head, I should permit myself to suspect, and even to detest him?" ' Yet he defends his violent dislike of Slinkton's centre parting: 'An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.' Faces and bodies held clues and keys; tiny things answered huge questions.