Given the uncanny constancy with which Victorian poisoners set about their dirty business, it seems amazing that the victims didn’t cotton on sooner. Indeed, to read Linda Stratmann’s account of how these ghastly deeds were done is to find yourself frustrated by all those unsuspecting chumps who insist on gulping down gallons of funny-tasting soup or refrain from asking sharp questions about where all the rat poison has gone. So, by way of a safety announcement, here is what any potential victim of a Victorian poisoner should be watching out for:
1. Be careful if you have a doctor in the family or, failing that, a pharmacist – or if you live next door to a farmer who is particularly partial to sheep dip.
2. Although this person has always given the impression of not liking you very much, these days they can’t seem to do enough for you. They even want to cook you dinner, despite having previously left that to someone else (poisoners are generally narcissists and consider themselves far too special for housework).
3. When, having eaten the proffered dinner, you start feeling queasy, don’t be surprised if the suspect acts strangely. Either they seem insultingly unconcerned, or else they throw themselves around in a ballyhoo of anxiety that would embarrass you if you weren’t already feeling too peculiar to care.
4. Now you’re lying in bed, gushing from every orifice. Instead of leaving the cleaning to the servant (narcissism again), the suspect has turned into a neat freak. They can’t stop whisking bedpans and sick bowls away and – odd, this – burying the contents in the garden.
5. You’re dead now, but keeping a beady eye out from the afterlife and feeling increasingly indignant. The poisoner has been putting it about that you had a weak heart, whereas in fact you’ve always been fit as a fiddle. If he’s a doctor, he signs the death certificate himself, or else he gets his brother-in-law, who once almost qualified three decades ago, to do it.
6. It turns out that your friend went to the undertaker and ordered a coffin a week before you were taken ill. It was exactly your size.
Although the protocol for poisoning remained remarkably steady throughout the 19th century, the toxins themselves changed. Whereas arsenic had initially been the substance of choice, the telltale traces it left both in the body and on utensils made it a risky proposition. Strychnine, opiates, even nicotine and Spanish fly were all pressed into service, as murderers tried to stay one step ahead of the increasingly smart forensics.
The general public, though, didn’t care much about the detail. What outraged them was the principle of the thing. Poisoning was just so sneaky. Shooting, stabbing or bludgeoning someone to death was understood. But poisoning took so much planning – buying the stuff, storing it, finding a way to slip it into dinner, standing by glassy-eyed while the victim frothed and fitted – that it struck right-thinking people as positively inhuman.
And just look at who went in for it. If the poisoner wasn’t a doctor, then chances are a woman was the culprit – exactly the person who should be safeguarding the domestic hearth rather than working towards its destruction. Of course, thinking practically, you can see why poison might appeal to the female criminal mind. Arsenic and opiates could easily be bought in the high street and stored in plain sight in a kitchen cupboard. Slipping them into food was, quite literally, a piece of cake. Best of all, there was no worry about overpowering the victim: assuming all went according to plan, they simply keeled over. There was, it is true, more clearing up than you might have anticipated (Stratmann doesn’t spare us any of the spilled body fluids), but, at a pinch, poisoning could be construed as a ladylike way of bumping someone off. Classy, almost.
If you were particularly squeamish, you could even manage the whole thing from a distance. One of the best cases in this book concerns Miss Christiana Edmunds, who in 1870 went on a killing spree that earned her the tag of “the Brighton Borgia”. Her MO was to put strychnine in chocolates and leave them lying around temptingly in public places. Although her first intended victim was the wife of the man she was in love with, Edmunds soon became positively profligate in her attempts to wipe out half the seaside town. She started sending poisoned chocolates in the post to anyone she had never much cared for. Although her tally of mortalities amounted to one boy and a dog – where poison was concerned there was many a slip ’twixt cup and lip – this was horror enough and earned her a sentence to hang, later commuted to a life in Broadmoor.
The most striking thing about Stratmann’s fine account is the light it sheds on domestic desperation. In a time before easy divorce or legal separation, the main reason people poisoned each other was either to obtain a marriage or to get out of one. In the first instance, existing spouses and inconvenient stepchildren were ruthlessly eliminated as impediments to nuptial bliss. In the second scenario, violent husbands and drunken wives were made to disappear in a frantic bid for some kind of peace.
The other motive was money. The book is awash with heiresses of a minor stripe who attract some suburban adventurer fallen on hard times. It rarely goes smoothly. There is always a mother in the mix, some old trout who starts to ask difficult questions about why her darling girl has started looking so peaky ever since you took to hanging around the kitchen when dinner was being prepared. So you end up having to poison her too. And then there’s the maid, who is both nosey and a tattle. To stop her saying what she’s seen, you’re obliged to slip something into her evening cocoa. What had once seemed so simple – stylish, even – has now become a big old vomity mess that ends, more often than not, with you swinging for it.
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