Search and enjoy ... Photograph: David Levene
I am researching a book on Victorian murders and how they became mass entertainment - how the scandal de jour immediately became a play, a novel, or a penny-dreadful. For years I have sworn that there is no substitute for holding the object of research in your hands - the newspaper, the play-bill, the novel or the magazine that the person in 1828 might have held. But to hold it, you have to find it. And while dedicated research can find great deal of material, you know that the wider you cast your net, the more material slips through. But now I've discovered that search engines pick up more material than I'd ever expected.
In 1828, the "Red Barn Murder" became the sensation of the moment. William Corder, a farmer in Polstead, Suffolk, was being pressed by his mistress, Maria Marten, to marry her. She was not the type of girl one married: she had no money, she had had a child by another man (and one by Corder), as well as having had a relationship with Corder's own brother. Corder stalled until he could stall no more. He promised to take her to Ipswich and marry her, and she was never seen again.
According to legend, her mother dreamed three nights in a row that Maria was calling out from a Red Barn nearby. She sent her husband to search it, and he found signs of recent digging. Sure enough, Maria's body was found, and Corder was traced to London, where he had married a woman he had met through a newspaper advertisement. He was arrested, tried and executed, all in fairly short order.
Even before the trial, theatrical productions of "Maria Marten and the Red Barn" were performed. But this was never a big-city hit: mostly it was staged at annual fairs, by small travelling companies that didn't advertise. Certainly they didn't advertise in the national newspapers. So, no point in newspaper searches, then?
Well, not quite. The Manchester Guardian archive starts to track Maria's bloody appearances in Manchester in the 1870s, and continues on to the turn of the century. In 1874 it reports a performance at the Cambridge Theatre, which ended with an audience riot: the manager had to come out front and apologise, "stating that he was unable to gratify his patrons by hanging the actor who represented the murderer". The "gods" were having none of that, and shouted "Bring out the --- with a rope round his neck", and were only persuaded with difficulty that this was not going to happen.
I now know there was also a performance at Runcorn in 1893: the Guardian reported that an actor appearing in the play was charged with assault at a fish shop, which had run out of fish suppers. Certainly I would never have known of the production there, had the actor not been so hungry. The play was still going in 1895, at Manchester's St James's Theatre, although the actors were getting a little desperate: Corder sometimes interpolated "a sly sentence in burlesque of a line in Hamlet, and sometimes the house is made to roar over an allusion to a great cabbage". By 1898, however, things were clearly winding up: "The company do what they can with the play. Perhaps the best feature of the production is the incidental music", reports the paper, a tad grimly.
Had I been immensely diligent, had I searched every line of the paper for 70 years after the murder, I would have found all these references. But would I really have searched the local arrests column, and bothered to check out a report of an affray in a fish shop? I'd like to believe that I would, but I fear this may not have been the case. Of course, nothing beats paper. But now, nothing beats online searching either: they just do different things.
