Excerpt
A Melancholy
Occurrence in
St. James''s Street
If in the Park, as usual, my walk I should pursue,
And civilly accost a Miss—"My pretty, how do you do?"
So strange the times! Each Miss is sure my meaning to
misconstrue,
And jumps and squeaks, and cries aloud—"O Heavens! Here''s
the MONSTER!
You nasty thing.
You''ll surely swing!"
And then she''ll swear,
Would make you stare,
She saw me ready to—O rare!
To stab her thro'' the pocket-hole—exactly like the MONSTER.
—Mr. Hook, "The Monster," from the World, May 31, 1790
If one wishes to go back in time more than two hundred years to study thedaily life of the Londoners in 1790 and how it was disrupted by the terrorand rage caused by the London Monster''s crimes, the best resource toconsult is the Burney newspaper collection at the British Library. Thiscollection was originally compiled by the Rev. Charles Burney, brother ofthe novelist Fanny Burney. (The Burney Collection today exists on microfilm,and one thus does not get the agreeable smell and feel of the huge,bedraggled-looking tomes of old newspapers in the Colindale NewspaperLibrary.) The year 1790 is reasonably well covered: long-defunct newspaperslike the Argus, the World, the Oracle, and the Diary depict themetropolis, soon to be threatened by the Monster in its midst, with many curiousdetails. These late-eighteenth-century newspapers were notoriouslyburglars, pickpockets, footpads, and highwaymen at large in the metropolisand its vicinity. There were rookeries where the police hesitated to arrestany criminal because his friends and any other ruffian standing nearbywere sure to fall upon them with bludgeons, knives, and axes, to free him bythe use of force. The many ale-houses, hotels, and seamen''s hostels inLondon gave the brothels a roaring trade; the increasing wealth of theupper and upper middle classes attracted burglars, and the immense numberof lanes, courts, and narrow alleyways gave street criminals great possibilitiesfor concealment and anonymity. In 1782, after the American Revolution,robberies and burglaries increased, and pickpockets were morenumerous than ever. By 1784, Londoners were fearful of going outdoorsafter dark, even in the well-lit main streets, due to the threat from the violentfootpads infesting the city. Although the policing of London was notoriouslylax and ineffective, the sheer number of crimes committed meantthe prisons were nevertheless crammed full of villains of every description.
What could be done with all these criminals? The system of criminallaw of this period, the Bloody Code, had originally contained just a fewcrimes punishable by execution, such as treason, murder, and rape, butthroughout the eighteenth century, more than one hundred capital offenseshad to be added. The moneyed classes felt inadequately protected in theabsence of a regular police force; in a vain attempt to deter criminals,an increasing number of property crimes were made subject to the deathpenalty. By the 1790s there were more than two hundred capital offensesthat were punishable by death. It was a capital offense to steal a sheep, topickpocket more than a shilling, to illegally cut down trees in an orchard, tobreak the border of a fish pond so as to allow the fish to escape, or to break apane of glass in a winter''s evening with intent to steal. But the objective ofthe criminal law was to frighten and deter the potential criminal, and at thesame time the number of capital statutes had been increasing in the mid-eighteenthcentury, the number of executions had been decreasing. An increasingproportion of the convicted felons had instead been deported tothe American penal colonies. But after the American Revolution, this wasno longer possible, and the prison hulks on the Thames and the penitentiariesfor hard labor were woefully inadequate both as crime deterrentsand as a way to get rid of the villains. After the crime wave in the early andmid-1780s, an increasing number of prisoners were executed, sometimesfor very insignificant crimes. It was not until the Botany Bay penal colony inAustralia was founded in 1786, and the first fleet of prisoners was sentthere the year after, that the overpopulated prison system was able torecover.
The rising scale of punishment in the 1780s and 1790s meant thatminor property offenders were whipped and/or imprisoned in houses ofcorrection for six to nine months. More serious thieves, housebreakers,and pickpockets were usually transported to penal colonies. Finally, murderers,highway robbers, arsonists, and hardened burglars and robberswere hanged. Late eighteenth-century justice was overwhelmingly concernedwith property, and pickpockets could be hanged after stealing triflingamounts. In December 1789, fourteen-year-old Thomas Morgan andtwelve-year-old James Smith were convicted of stealing seven silk handkerchiefsfrom a shop; they were sentenced to death. On the other hand,many rapists walked free because their victims were disbelieved. In general,woman were considered untrustworthy witnesses, and a lower classwoman in particular had little chance of winning a case against a gentlemanof some social distinction.
Visitors to London, and many of the less fastidious Londoners, regardedpublic executions as major attractions. When, in 1789, a housebreakernamed William Skitch was executed, the Times reporter on thescene was recounted that the rope slipped off the gallows and Skitch''s bodyfell heavily to the ground. The crowd was moved by the condemned man''spredicament, but Skitch simply stood up and said to the executioner and hisassistant, who were getting another rope ready: "Good people, be not hurried;I can wait a little." Another writer in the same newspaper found it amelancholy contrast that from 1775 until 1787 just six people had beenexecuted in Amsterdam and Utrecht, while during the same period of time624 prisoners convicted at the Old Bailey had been hanged at Tyburn orNewgate. In 1790, a humanitarian writer in the Gentleman''s Magazineblasted the laws of England as cruel, unjust, and useless. The number ofpeople strung up on the gallows was sufficient proof that the laws werecruel; the fact that the same punishment was inflicted on the parricide as ona starving wretch who took three shillings on the highway proved they wereunjust; and the frequency and multiplicity of serious crimes offered ampleevidence that they were useless as a deterrent.
Long prison sentences were rare, and were reserved for "specialcases," for example, a woman of good family who had murdered her childand who was protected from the gallows and transportation by family influence.A considerable percentage of London''s prisoners were debtors, someof whom were incarcerated for protracted periods of time until their debtswere settled. The pillory was irregularly used for crimes thought particularlyheinous. To be pilloried for a sexual offence could literally be a deathsentence in itself? When, in early 1790, two homosexual valets (caught "inthe act") were put in the pillory, an enormous mob gathered to see thempunished. The mob did not arrive empty-handed. A newspaper reporterwas delighted to find that the valet named Bacon was pelted heavily witheggs. Potatoes, stones, and brickbats were showered over the two blood-spatteredwretches in the pillory; the police took cover from the torrent ofmissiles; and the two valets were barely extricated from the pillory alive.
* * *
In London of 1790, several debating societies met to discuss the burningquestions of the day. They had many female members, and some cateredalmost exclusively for the fair sex; thus it is somewhat surprising that oneof the questions for late 1789 was whether women had no soul. During thistime, women were regarded as defective men: little interested in publicconcerns, they were weak, imbecile creatures fit only for gossip and embroidery.In one newspaper comment prompted by the debate about the souls ofwomen, a disgruntled man wrote that women who attended debating societieswould be better employed at needle and thread. A question inanother debating society was whether "the tender sensibility of the femaleheart lessened or increased the happiness of the fair sex." The 1780s andearly 1790s were the height of the culture of sensibility. While courage andcleverness were seen as male attributes, kindness, attentiveness and delicacybelonged to the female sex. It was widely believed that a woman''sweaker, finer nerves made her more timid and tenderhearted, liable tovapors and hysterical paroxysms when faced with strong emotions. It becamefashionable among the ladies to weep, faint, and go off in hysterics atthe slightest provocation as evidence of their refined, delicate nerves. Theideal woman in contemporary fiction was a pale, helpless, timorous creaturewith a nervous system strung as high as a violin. A banging door, a violentgust of wind, a peal of thunder, or the appearance of a toad or a mousewas enough to send her into hysterics. The contrast between the predatorymale gallant, strong, fierce and sexual, and the innocent, passive youngheroine who suffers endless crises of nerves, was particularly marked inthe Gothic novels of Mrs. Radcliffe and her various imitators which wereenormously popular in the 1790s—not least among female readers.
The sexual world of London of 1790 was male dominated. The chastityof a young woman before marriage was considered of paramount importance.A woman''s life after marriage was dull and respectable: she gavebirth, took care of the household, and obeyed her husband in everything.Young men had a more interesting time. Sexuality was on public view everywherein the metropolis: there were erotic novels, lewd songs, and pornographicprints in abundance. The most prominent feature in the femaledress of the time was the décolletage. The newspapers advertised brothels,aphrodisiacs, and cures for venereal disease, and Jack Harris''s popularWhoremonger''s Guide to London listed a directory of prostitutes thatdetailed addresses, physical characteristics, and "specialties."
Sexual exploitation of maidservants was common: the image of thechambermaid as sexual fodder for the young master is a cliché, but it has itsbasis in reality. Even very young girl servants were raped or seduced bylibertines who were aroused by pedophilia or fearful of venereal disease.Actresses, dancers, and serving girls in the taverns were considered sexually"easy"; some played along with the morals of the time and preferred tobe well-kept mistresses of a string of reasonably attractive men to exploitationas a domestic servant or "respectable" wife.
There were brothels in every part of town. Mrs. Hayes''s Seraglio in PallMall was famous for a live show with naked dancers of both sexes. AtMother Wisebourne''s house off the Strand, girls were said to cost £250 anight. London at this time was home to 10,000 prostitutes who openly pliedtheir trade in the streets, markets, and theaters. The district between CharingCross and Drury Lane, and well into Soho, was the favorite haunt ofthese prostitutes. The Covent Garden area was particularly notorious:There, in addition to regular brothels, were many alehouses where prostituteswere available and a number of "bagnios," brothels disguised asbathhouses, some of which were veritable dens of vice and catered to variedsexual tastes. One constabulary raid on Covent Garden resulted in thearrest of twenty-two prostitutes, two of whom turned out to be men dressedas women.
If the sexuality of London of 1790 was earthy and abandoned, thepopular amusements were of a corresponding vigor and brutality. Upperclass rakes spent their time at racecourses and gaming parlors, bet onpugilists, and caroused around the streets, fighting, drinking, and whoring.One newspaper report states that it was a popular pastime of the"bloods"—the young hooligans about town—to blacken the faces of elderly,respectable people who passed through the West End, using a long brushand a bucket full of a mixture of eggs and lampblack. The common man of1790 did not much care for a public reading from the works of Shakespeare,or indeed anything that hinted of intellectual activity, as long as there washope of going down to the pub to have a jug of ale while watching a badgerwith its tail nailed to the floor being harried by three fierce fox terriers.Several rat pits in the city allowed bets to be made as to how many rats adog could kill in a certain number of minutes. After a couple of sacks ofsquirming rats had been poured into the pit, an evil-looking cur was introducedin their midst to begin his gory work of destruction. When sewer ratswere used, lady visitors used perfumed handkerchiefs to counteract therodents'' pungent smell. The champion dog Billy reportedly could kill onehundred rats in five minutes. His fellow champion Jacko once piled up onethousand corpses in an hour and forty minutes, but there were allegationsthat the rats had been drugged with laudanum beforehand. Henry Mayhewonce spoke to a costermonger who sometimes took the dog''s place, leapingdown into the pit and killing the rats with his teeth: his face was badlyscarred from the bites of the infuriated rodents. In March 1790, after a bethad been agreed to, a man drank five quarts of ale and then masticated andswallowed the earthen mug; he died two days later. In January 1790, afteranother bet had been agreed upon in a public house near Windsor, a manate a living cat, tearing it to pieces with his teeth and leaving only the bones"as the memorials of the exercise of a brutal appetite, and the degradationof human nature." A few weeks later, the newspapers reported that theWindsor cat eater had once more revealed his brutality: suddenly and withoutreason he hacked off his own right hand with a bill hook. The reasonhe gave was that he was "disinclined to work" and hoped the overseers ofthe parish would provide for him in his maimed condition. This sinisteroutbreak of brutality in early 1790, heralding the coming of the Monster,even spread to the animal kingdom: "A Poney seized a sheep, and bit andkicked it till it died. The Poney then separated the head from the neck, anddevoured near two quarters of the sheep."
* * *
At least at the outset, a sinister event in early 1790 was the queen''s birthdayon January 19. To celebrate the day, flags were up everywhere, church bellswere rung, and guns were fired. The illuminations on the main streets weremore numerous than on any previous royal birth night: the theaters onDrury Lane were splendidly lit, and the gunsmith''s shop at Ludgate''s Hilldisplayed a brilliantly illuminated storefront, with a transparency of thequeen. The World published an exhaustive feature about the dresses ofthe ladies. The queen and princesses were soberly dressed and could notcompete with such extravagant fashionables as the countesses of Westmorelandand Warwick and Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, who were glitteringwith diamonds and fitted out according to the latest fashions. A hugecrowd, some in the ballroom and some in the galleries, as befitted theirrespective social stations, had admired the dazzling crowd of courtiers andnobles. The prince of Wales made a brief appearance at the ball, wearing aMazarine coat emblazoned with silver, before going out to his normal rake-hellynocturnal pursuits. The Princess Mary, her majesty''s fourth daughter,made her first public appearance in the ballroom that night.
Among the crowd assembled in the galleries, consisting mainly of thosewho were not quite considered gentlefolk, were twenty-one-year-old MissAnne Porter and her nineteen-year-old sister Sarah. Their father, ThomasPorter, did not belong to the nobility or gentry, nor was he of an old andrespected family; he was a contented, relatively well-to-do member of thelower middle classes who kept a combined hotel, tavern, and cold-bathestablishment called Pero''s Bagnio, at No. 63, St. James''s Street. This bagniohad existed since 1699; it was named for an early owner, a Frenchmannamed Peyrault. Unlike the rowdy bagnios of Covent Garden, Pero''s wasa reasonably respectable establishment, and if it served as a concealedbrothel, that fact was kept well hidden. The area of St. James''s was at thistime not as fashionable as it had been in Restoration days, but at least thevicinity of St. James''s Palace was still prosperous, and Pero''s Bagnio waslikely to have attracted a good deal of clientele from the gentleman''s clubsnearby. Thomas Porter was prosperous enough to give his six children agood education. He also was not unwilling to give his four daughters, ofwhom Anne and Sarah were the two eldest, some experience of fashionablelife. The Porter girls were all pretty and vivacious, and this was not the firsttime they had visited a ball. They liked to dance and were regular visitors tovarious dancing parties and assembly rooms, chaperoned, of course, tokeep them out of mischief. But it was not just in the ribald novels of the timethat a chaperone might be careless in her duty, or persuaded to let heryoung charges wander off by a bribe from the girl''s wealthy admirer.
The pleasure-loving Anne and Sarah would have liked to stay at theball as long as possible, but the queen retired early, at eleven o''clock, andthe others followed her. Reluctantly, the two Misses Porter left the ballroomgallery. Their father had arranged to escort them home at twelve, but theywere tired and did not want to stand about for an entire hour waiting forhim. After consulting their chaperone, a stockily built, middle-aged ladynamed Mrs. Miel, Anne and Sarah decided to walk the short distance hometo Pero''s Bagnio, without waiting for any male companion to protect them.Neither of them was fully at ease with the situation, however; they set out ontheir short walk with some trepidation, for this was the time when theLondon Monster was known to prowl the dark streets of the metropolis.
* * *
To begin with, the Porters and their companion made swift progress. It wasa quarter past eleven, but due to the festivities of the day, the streets werebrightly lit and there were still quite a few people about. When they hadcome about half way up St. James''s Street, and could see the bagnio just afew houses away, Anne and Sarah believed themselves safe. Some men carryinga sedan chair approached them, calling out "By your leave!" and theladies moved aside. This cry apparently alerted a man who had been lurkingnearby. He went up to Sarah Porter and stared her hard in the face. As thesedan bearers walked away, he cried out "Oh ho! Is that you!" and struckher a violent blow on the back of the head. Sarah pitched forward with theforce of the blow, but managed to keep her footing. She ran toward Pero''sBagnio as fast as she could. To alert her sister and Mrs. Miel, she cried out,"For God''s sake, Nancy, make haste! Can''t you see that—that wretch behind!"They all made a dash for the front door of the bagnio: the terrifiedSarah in front, Mrs. Miel panting to keep up, and Anne bringing up the rear.Anne Porter had not quite heard what her sister had said, except that theyshould all make haste, and was not aware of the danger she was in.
The man did not, at first, pursue them, but as Sarah Porter was bangingon the door of the bagnio to get in, he suddenly ran up and struck AnnePorter on the hip. It did not hurt much; she only felt "a strange sensation."Turning round to see who or what had struck her, she saw a man in an oddposture, with his legs stretched out. The man walked on to the next house,without any hurry, and then once more returned, to gloat at the sight of theterrified ladies. He stared Anne fun in the face and grinned at her. He stoodclose behind them as John Porter, Anne and Sarah''s brother, finally openedthe front door; in a wild stampede, the ladles rushed past him into thehouse. Their mysterious assailant remained standing outside looking atthem, and made no attempt to run away. John Porter asked Sarah whetherthis gentleman was in their company, preparing to invite him inside. Sarahreplied, "No; shut the door against the fellow," little knowing what hadhappened to her sister. Anne now complained about a sharp pain in her hip,and nearly fainted when she saw and felt that her dress was completelydrenched with blood on one side. Blood dripped down from the garment andformed a growing pool on the floor. The London Monster had struck again!
The entire Porter family came rushing along, fun of concern forpoor Anne. When Mr. Porter saw that his daughter had been dangerouslywounded, he sent a couple of servants after her assailant, but the Monsterhad absconded in time. A local practitioner, Surgeon Tomkins of Park Place,was promptly sent for. As he dressed the wound, which was situated on theoutside and back of Anne''s thigh and buttock, he found it to be more than sixinches long and three inches deep in the middle. Apparently, the incision hadbeen made with a particularly sharp instrument. A few days after his daughtershad been assaulted, Thomas Porter went to the Bow Street publicoffice—the name of the main London police station in 1790—to lodge a complaintabout the attack. Sarah came with him, according to the record, shedescribed her assailant as at least six feet tall, thinly built, with light brownhair and a large nose. He appeared to be about thirty years old. It is notclear whether this was Sarah''s own observation or a composite view of theobservations made of the Monster that fateful evening; it is likely that JohnPorter, Mrs. Miel, and Anne Porter herself had also seen him. Later, indeed,Sarah told Richard Bond, one of the Bow Street magistrates, that she herselfwas quite unable to describe the man who attacked her, and when hersister Anne was asked to describe the Monster for a newspaper account, allshe could volunteer was that he had a very pale and fair complexion.
Continues...
Excerpted from The London Monsterby Jan Bondeson Copyright © 2002 by Jan Bondeson. Excerpted by permission.
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