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

by Kate Summerscale

The ordinary was made sinister.

Unlike the tenant of a foreign domicile, the occupier of an English house, whether it be mansion or cottage, possesses an indisputable title against every kind of aggression upon his threshold.

On Saturday, 14 July, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lord Palmerston's Home Secretary, instructed Sir Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to dispatch 'an intelligent officer' to Wiltshire as soon as possible. 'Inspector Whicher to go,' Mayne scribbled on the back of the Home Office directive. The same day Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher received his orders to head for Road.

The English public had a horror of surveillance. There had been outrage in the early 1830s when it came to light that a plainclothes policeman had infiltrated a political gathering. In this climate, the detectives had to be introduced by stealth.

. It was a lovely idea!' The artistry of crime was a familiar conceit, most strikingly advanced in Thomas de Quincey's ironic essay 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827), but the artistry of the law enforcer was something new.

The eyes of others were the books to be read, his own experience the dictionary that enabled him to read.

. And where is the evidence? The one fact – and I am ashamed in this land of liberty and justice to refer to it – is the suspicion of Mr Whicher, a man eager in the pursuit of the murderer, and anxious for the reward that has been offered .

The word 'detect' stemmed from the Latin 'de-tegere' or 'unroof', and the original figure of the detective was the lame devil Asmodeus, 'the prince of demons', who took the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside. 'The Devil Asmodeus is the Devil of Observation', explained the French novelist Jules Janin. In his book about the Road Hill murder, Stapleton used the figure of Asmodeus, 'peering into the privacies' of the Kent family house, to embody the public fascination with the case.

Jeremy Bentham's A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825), for instance, argued that testimony needed to be backed up by material proof. Only things would do: the button, the boa, the nightgown, the knife.

Dipsomania could mark a man's offspring, said the doctor, as could other kinds of intemperance, such as greed for money or an excess of sexual desire.

I may say there is such a thing as torturing evidence so as to make it look uncommonly different from what it is.'

In 1873 William was appointed resident biologist at the Brighton Aquarium, which had opened the previous year, a spectacular gothic arcade sunk into the promenade by the pier.

till she came to the conclusion that goodness was impossible for a child & could only hope to grow up quickly as grown-ups were never naughty.