“The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” by Kate Summerscale 

Review by Trizia

Why did I choose this book? Well…it has all the elements I love:

• Real life mystery
• Social history
• Crime

Also, the name Whicher is one of many variations on Whitear, the name of my maternal forebears, whose history I have traced back to late 1700s. The family history reveals some links with Hampshire, which is the county bordering Wiltshire so I have indulged myself in fantasies of a tenuous connection! The family also has more modern connections with Frome, which is also mentioned in the book.

We visit Freshford and Bath quite often and while walking we saw a sign to Road – but I did not realize it was the Rode in this book, if I had, I would have satisfied ghoulish curiosity and visited the house.

Real Life Mystery:

Although solved in its time, the story is illuminated and a motive revealed by Kate Summerscale as modern day sleuth. The amount of research she carried out, her minute examination of seemingly innocuous and boring documents brings to life so realistically many aspects of Victorian society, that I felt completely immersed in it.

I am hugely impressed by her dedication not only in uncovering a wealth of information, much of which was not known at the time, but also by the way she’s used those facts to weave a narrative which holds the reader from start to finish. The book won the Samuel Johnson prize for non fiction in 2008, and it was richly deserved.

Our discussions on Monday agreed that this was a strangely passionless crime in many ways. Constance was 15 or so when she killed her younger half brother, slitting his throat in the privy and hiding his body on the shelf above the soil heap. Yet she insisted, and others agreed, that she got on well with little Savile, and liked him, indeed the day before the murder, he had given her a ring she had made.

The reason she gave was revenge on the step mother, who favoured Savile and the other half siblings over the children of the first marriage. The step mother had been governess to those children, and when their mother died, it was but a short time before she took her place and married Mr. Kent. It seems likely that there was an overlap in Mr. Kent’s espousal affections – in other words, rumour below stairs had it that he was carrying on with the governess while the mother was still alive. To make things worse, the governess spoke ill of the children’s mother both before and after she died – disparaging her memory and by Constance’s account, drawing the children into this web of disrespect. Constance relates that it was only in looking back after her mother had been dead sometime, that she realized how she had colluded with the step mother and felt ashamed of the way she had treated her mother.

Yet all this had happened some considerable time before, and in the intervening period, although everyone agreed that the children of the second family were favoured over the others, there did not appear to be overt ill feeling within the household. So it is hard to understand how the situation deteriorated from one of stasis to such a violent bloody act.

The family dynamics are fascinating – Constance protests her innocence and although Mr. Whicher suspects her from the beginning, he cannot prove it. When she is released from custody, she returns to her family for a while before being sent away to school abroad. They closed ranks. We know nothing of their feelings towards her. Did they know or suspect that she’d killed the youngest child? She looks physically capable, but Savile was a chubby lad and there are grounds for thinking that Constance was helped by her younger brother in the deed. It is only some years later when Constance has returned to the UK, and her family have placed her in a kind of religious finishing school, that she seems to have an attack of conscience and confesses to the crime.  Yet even this confession, the author suggests, has a premeditated motive – she fears that the taint of evil might affect her brother’s future, and so confesses to draw attention away from him as he is about to embark on his career as a botanist. Constance serves her full time in prison –I think it was 23 years – and on her release, goes to rejoin her brother, his wife and family, and her other siblings in Australia. How on earth did they welcome her back into the family, knowing she had been found guilty of killing their brother?

Social History

There are lots of lovely detail that place the story firmly in another era:

• What on earth is a breast cloth?
• The press reports. These contained highly loaded physical descriptions of suspects and remind us that it was acceptable to judge character by appearance and that certain physical characteristics were accepted as being symbolic of virtues or vices. And in turn, the use of such descriptions in the press reports of court proceedings reminds us that photography was yet to become an integral part of journalism, and also how powerful the reporter was. Where there is a photograph, the reader can make up their own mind. Where there is a photograph, there is no need for such detailed, loaded description.
• Phrases in use then that we just don’t hear now – a farm labourer described as “bumble footed”, footprints are called “footmarks”
• The use of the pub as the setting for the inques

Crime:

The development of a new discipline – that of detecting. It has its own language - the author mentions the following:

detegere – to detect – from the Latin meaning to lift the roof off which links with the Spanish

tejado/techo – meaning a roof tiledenouement –literally, unknotting

clew/clue –the end of a piece of string

The observational skills of Mr. Whicher are astounding, and Kate Summerscale brings to life his well deserved rise through the ranks of the new detective force – to the astounding salary of £60k in today’s money! The detection doesn’t always go well though. There’s a laugh out loud moment when dirty great foot marks are found on the white carpet – these are found to belong to P.C. Urch (fab name!) The public get in on the act too, swamping the detective force with their own pet theories – shades of the internet armchair detectives who got in on the act regarding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann? This part of the 19^th century also saw the rise of the penny dreadful and the yellow sheets – fictionalised and sensationalised accounts of lurid crimes – a parallel maybe with 21^st century reality tv and misery lit? Prurient interest seems to be a well established human instinct.

Mr. Whicher suspected that Constance was guilty, but he couldn’t prove it. Being the role model for the new detective police force, his reputation was irretrievably damaged by the failure to bring the criminal to justice. He was slated in the press and in parliament. He was never trusted with a high profile case again, and retired from the police force to become a private investigator.

Throughout the whole book, Kate Summerscale keeps coming back to the human scale of the saga, as it affected the Kent family, but also how it affected Mr. Whicher. She recreates a real human being and the times in which he operated. She draws the London he saw growing, watching Big Ben being built and living just a few streets away from the new hub model prison –Millbank-where Constance served much of her time. She follows Whicher’s personal story and we wonder how he felt to have his suspicions vindicated many years later after he had retired from the police force, under a cloud of criticism. We meet the people he knew and his effect upon them – Dickens was impressed by his skills of observation, and perhaps more than one fictional detective had his roots in Whicher’s character and experiences.

And like all the best detective stories, there’s a further denouement. Despite her best efforts, the author had not been able to find a photograph of the detective. Following the first edition of the book, a reader wrote to Kate Summerscale to say she had discovered one and finally we can put a face to Jonathan Whicher, the blueprint for the modern detective.

Trizia