Bandit's Roost: The old Newsletters

The State of Forensics in the 1800s

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 18:31:12 GMT

What we consider standard in modern investigations—fingerprints, ballistics, blood evidence, toxicology, hair and fiber—were in their infancy. As was the science behind them. They rarely appear in either an investigation or a criminal trial and it is not until the close of the century that we see policies created for the systematic processing of a crime scene.

That does not mean forensics cannot be a part of historical detective fiction—Arthur Conan Doyle proved that. But it isn’t just the final decade of the century where forensics and physical evidence can play a part. The key is understanding what science was available, what law enforcement thought about physical evidence, and what characteristics physical evidence must possess to be of use to your detective.

The 1800s were fertile ground for forensics. By the end of the century, most of the scientific groundwork for modern forensics has been laid. No less significant, was the shift of both law enforcement and the public, away from confession and toward the burden of proof. (Photography below courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access)

Why the 1800s and not before?

The nineteenth is a century of significant change. Society shifts from rural to urban, methods of transportation carry people faster over greater distances (the stranger is everywhere), and a fear of increased crime and revolution takes seed. This insecurity of the upper classes led to calls for organized, state-financed crime prevention (not detection, but prevention).

In the midst of this, there is an explosion of scientific study and discovery, and the creation of the scientific method. Observation and experimentation become more important than theory and presumption. For something to be true, it must be proven true.

This trickles into the legal system. Though physical “persuasion” continues (it is in the middle of the century that the term “third degree” is coined), torture is abandoned. What constitutes proof is changing. Ideas of evidence and proof are solidifying and becoming science-based; the intervention of God has been replaced with the necessity of tangible proof and an accusation ceases to be sufficient proof of guilt.

Though not a driving force in scientific discovery, law enforcement does benefit from it. For example, this is the century when Galenic medicine is finally abandoned for modern, science-based medical practice; illness becomes the result of bacteria and virus rather than an imbalance of the four humors or a miasma carried on the wind. A greater understanding of human biology allows for more accurate causes of death, particularly the distinction between natural and unnatural.

Without the scientific revolution, there would be no forensics. Without the creation of professional police forces there would be no systematic investigations (or arena in which the need for evidence fed the development of forensics). Without changes to society neither forensics nor professional policing would likely exist.

But we’re here to talk about Forensics

Forensics, as we understand it, makes sporadic throughout the century (and long before 1800), but that is all they are. Finding the earliest use is not the same as finding the point at which it becomes part of policing. Care must be taken not to identify the event, or the individual, as the “Father” of forensics. There are decade-long gaps between “earliest appearance” and onset of use. It is not until the twentieth century that forensics becomes an independent science, and crime scene guidelines appear. (Edmund) Locard’s Exchange Principle does not appear until 1934. (“Any action of an individual, and obviously the violent action constituting a crime, cannot occur without leaving a trace.”)

These dates hold greater significance for fiction authors. These early appearances demonstrate that, even though the systematic collection of evidence did not exist, physical proof could be obtained by observant and innovative individuals.

Forensics, especially in the early part of the century, is not drive by the establishment; it’s driven by individuals. Even if it’s not standard police procedure, your detective or constable, is allowed to use physical/forensic evidence to help catch the criminal.

To give you an idea of what was available, let’s take a brief look at some of the fields of forensics.

Fingerprints

Fingerprints make a late appearance in criminal investigations. The earliest confirmed instance occurred in 1892 in Necochea, Argentina. Francesca Rojas accused her suitor, a gentleman named Velasquez, of murdering her two young children. A bloody fingerprint was found at the scene and Juan Vucetich (who developed the method of classifying fingerprints used by South America) matched it to Rojas’s. When presented with the evidence, she confessed and was convicted.

The first appearance of fingerprints in a trial was in Chicago, Illinois, USA, in 1910 in People v. Jennings; where Thomas Jennings was convicted of the murder of Clarence Hiller.

Despite awareness of fingerprints, and their potential for confirming the identities of convicts, they did not replace Bertillonage until the early twentieth century, and their use at crime scenes was sporadic. Experiments are done to develop latent prints in 1882 (by French legal physician René Forgeot) and later in 1888 (Prussian veterinarian, Wilhelm Eber), its decades before doing so becomes standard procedure.

Ballistics

One of the earliest confirmed instance of ballistics is in 1794 when Edward Culshaw of Lancashire was shot in the head by a burglar. The ball from the pistol was extracted along with the scrap of paper used as wadding in the muzzle. When unfolded, it was identified as a strip torn from a song sheet. When suspect John Toms was apprehended and searched, a ripped song sheet was found in his pocket which fitted perfectly with the piece used to wad the muzzle. Toms was convicted and executed for the murder.

Bloodwork

It was impossible prior to 1862 to test for the presence of blood. A year later, J. Van Deen’s test was improved upon when Christian Schonbein observed that hemoglobin oxidized hydrogen peroxide, causing it to foam.

Linking blood found at a crime scene to either victim or perpetrator came much later. Blood groups were not discovered until 1901 and Karl Landsteiner identified three of the four (A, B, O; AB came in 1902). Even then, the most which could be determined is that blood found was either of the same or different blood group to that of a victim or suspect; it could not definitively identify the person from which it came.

Toxicology

Of all the forensic sciences, toxicology has the most significant presence in the nineteenth century, not simply due to the scientific developments which allowed for the detection of poisons in human tissue, but, to understand how information moved, or didn’t move, from its place of origin to the wider scientific (and policing) community. Most people think James Marsh was the first to develop a test for arsenic. In truth, it was Valentin Rose, a German pharmacologist, who developed a technique in 1806 using nitric acid, potassium carbonate, and lime. The first conviction (of Anna Margaretha Zwanziger) using toxicology to prove poisoning by arsenic occurred in 1809. Marsh’s Test did not appear until 1836.

Hair and Fibers

Hair and fibers did not play a significant role in forensics until the second half of the century. The first forensic report was released in 1861 by Rudolph Virchow who confirmed that strands of hair have identifiable characteristics. Unfortunately, he acknowledge its evidentiary limitations. (Distinguishing between human and animal was not possible until 1901 when Paul Uhlenhuth developed an antigen-antibody precipitin test.)

Forensics in nineteenth-century fiction

When researching how evidence was collected (or destroyed) and used, contemporary detective fiction is invaluable, not only of what could or couldn’t be done, but also of social practice and attitudes. How did police move within society and what did society think of them? There’s a reason there are no stories where the constable is the champion, and it’s not because they were all bumbling and useless. Among other things, it was unseemly for someone of the lower classes to be portrayed as the hero; less so for people of higher standing to cheer for them.

Sometimes, our best source of information is fiction; if you want to learn about a society, read its fiction.

One of the characters in George Payne Rainsford James’ novel, Delware or the Ruined Family, published in 1833, is Principle Officer Mr. Cousins, a Bow Street Runner. Runners were famous investigators, known for their thorough examination of a crime scene and the collection of evidence. The fictional Cousins employs many of the techniques that were standard practice to Principle Officers. James’ novel is significant. Delware, and its hero, can serve as models for an early-nineteenth-century investigation, and for its investigator.

Though somewhat fictionalized, Eugene François Vidocq’s Mémoire, provides a colorful look at criminal investigations in France in the early nineteenth-century. It’s grittier than English detective fiction and its focus is not on the “genteel” classes, but on the criminal underworld of Paris. It provides eye-opening insight into the culture of thieves, as well as techniques (both legal and not) used by police to apprehend criminals. It provides a wealth of information on undercover techniques, including a few points on disguises.

Though contemporary law enforcement (or their fictional counterparts) did not have access to modern forensic science, they did use what was available to them. When discussing forensics, you do an injustice if you do not incorporate the methods of investigation used; methods which became the foundation for investigative procedures. When taken as a whole, the state of forensics in the 1800s, as far as authors are concerned, is rich with possibilities.

Don’t Limit Yourself

When writing historical detective fiction, don’t think of it as forensics. That puts you in a modern state of mind and places your focus on the resources law enforcement have today. Think of it as your characters would: physical evidence. That opens up you and your sleuth to all kinds of evidence.

Remember, if your sleuth comes across a piece of evidence (say bloody footprints) and there is neither science nor procedure for processing it, they’ll find their own solution. In 1862, three bloody footprints were found at the site where Jessie M’Pherson was murdered. Knowing that the prints would be valuable, they cut up the floorboards, sent it to a scientist at the university who carried out a number of experiments and was able to prove that the footprints on the floor matched those of the suspect.

Nineteenth-century law enforcement knew the value of physical evidence to an investigation, and the good ones collected everything that might help identify and convict the criminal. As long as the science existed, they found a way to use every piece of physical evidence they found.

If the police can’t help you...

A Curiosity of Crime — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 03:25:21 GMT

“A friend to honesty and a foe to crime.”
Allan Pinkerton

...perhaps they can.

In 1833, Eugène François Vidocq founded Le Bureau des Renseignments, (Office of Information), the world’s first private detective agency. It was part detective agency, part private police force. He started with eleven detectives, a secretary, and two clerks. He employed both men and women and most were former convicts; likely associates from his days as a police informant, or during his own stint on the wrong side of the law.

He described the agency as defending citizens against fraudsters, imposters, and other criminals (faiseurs). Though quite successful, there were no spectacular cases or scandal-worthy encounters. The “jobs” seem mundane, especially when compared with the adventures depicted in his Mémoirs (first published in 1828). Many of his clients were fathers and mothers concerned about bachelors of unknown pedigree paying too much particular attention to their daughters.

While fiction fills the private detective’s cases with murders and intriguing mysteries, the reality was very different. (Quite different as you’ll see in the discussion of the Pinkertons.) In the early years of Vidoq’s agency (and others that followed) they were hired to act as de facto police in matters that official law enforcement were neither willing nor equipped to do.

Vidocq had a habit of making enemies. This led to the eventual demise of the Bureau. His opponents claimed that the methods used to resolve the “cases” were morally questionable and many suspected that some were illegal. It is reasonable to believe that these accusations were genuine rather than fabrications meant to damage Vidocq’s reputation and business. On more than one occasion, while in the service of the police, he engaged in immoral and, by today’s standards, illegal activity to procure confessions and evidence. (Many of them involved profuse amounts of alcohol.) In 1843, his Bureau was accused of forcibly transporting women to nunneries at the request, and payment, of their families. In other words, forcible confinement.

Compounding his unpopularity was the Bureau’s habit of coming into conflict with Paris’s police force. There were influential individuals uncomfortable with his close connections with the War Department who worried it was not just the work of French citizens he was engaged in. Numerous raids upon his officers were conducted and an attempt was made by officials to have Vidocq exiled from the city using his status as an ex-convict to bolster their demand. During a raid on the offices on November 28, 1837, over 3,500 files and documents were seized and Vidocq was arrested a few days later. He was charged with corruption of civil servants, “the pretension of public functions,” and acquisition of money by deception. He was released in February 1838 after a judge dismissed the charges.

Despite the animosity with police and his knack for making enemies, the Bureau flourished, but, in the end, could not survive the scandals and accusations. Vidocq thought about selling the agency but could not find a buyer. After a final, brief trip to prison for fraud in 1849 (again, the case was dropped), Vidocq settled into a private life. He took a few cases after his release from prison, but did not continue with the Bureau.

Though the first, the Bureau was not the most famous private detective agency. That honor goes to Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded around 1850 (under the name North-Western Police Agency). At the height of their success, the Pinkerton Agency was the largest private law enforcement organization in the world. It has survived unto this day (rebranded as a personal security and risk management firm).

The Agency was involved in some famous cases, escorting president-elect Abraham Lincoln to his inauguration (see below) and the assassination of Frank Steunenberg (a former governor of Ohio) in 1905. Harry Orchard confessed to the murder to James McParland, a Pinkerton agent. They were involved in the hunts for Jesse James, the Reno Gang, the James-Younger Gang, and the Wild Bunch whose members included the famous Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

They were also hired for protection. Businesses employed them to transport money and high-value merchandise between cities. The agents were said to be well paid and well armed.

We think of them as private detectives, but during the American Civil War, Pinkerton agents were hired by President Lincoln for espionage and as his personal security. History has a dim view of the intelligence Pinkerton and his agents provided, pointing out that often it was false (especially estimates of Confederate troop sizes which were grossly exaggerated).

The Agency was not limited to assisting the police solve crimes and hunt down convicts. In the late nineteenth century (into the twentieth) they were employed as strike breakers. Companies hired them to infiltrate unions and provide information of their activities and members. They were also used to form “goon squads” to intimidate workers to prevent them from striking or joining unions. In 1892, during the Homestead Strike, three Pinkerton agents were killed when violence broke out.

This involvement in strikebreaking became public knowledge. Public pressure and their enthusiasm during the riots resulted in the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893. Their contracts with the federal government were severely curtailed; as stated in the act an “individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia.”

Their role in strikebreaking has followed them into the present day and, in many areas of the States, the name Pinkerton is associated with anti-labor and antiunion more than it is with tracking down criminals and solving crimes.

Perhaps the most famous (real life) private detective is Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884). Born in the Gorbels area of Glasgow, Scotland, he emigrated to the United States in 1842.

He dropped out of school at the age of 10, after his father’s death, and worked as a cooper (maker/repairer of casks or barrels), an abolitionist (his house was a stop on the Underground Railway), a detective, and a spy (providing military intelligence to General George B. McClellan of the Army of the Potomac.)

He settled in Dundee Township, near Chicago, and took up his trade as a cooper, building his own house and bringing his wife out from Chicago when it was done.

His first foray into law enforcement occurred when he was wandering the forest near his home looking for trees to make barrel staves. He stumbled across counterfeiters (maybe associated with the Banditti of the Prairie) and informed the local sheriff who arrested them. In 1849, Pinkerton became Chicago’s first police detective. He partnered with attorney Edward Rucker in 1850 to form the North-Western Police Agency which became the Pinkerton & Co, and then, Pinkerton National Detective Agency. His company exists today as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations (as a subsidiary of Securitas AB). He used an eye as his logo with the caption “We never sleep.”

Along with many movies, Pinkerton detectives made appearances in novels by Arthur Conan Doyle (The Valley of Fear), Dashiell Hammett (Continental Op), and many Louis L’Amour books.

Kate Warne (1833-1868) was a spy, a female superintendent of detectives, and a supervisor of women agents. She is most famous for being America’s first female private detective.

In 1856, Warne walked into the Pinkerton National Detective in response to an ad the agency had placed indicating they were looking for new hires. Pinkerton thought she wanted secretarial work, but Warne corrected him and stated that she was interested in detective work. She pointed

out what his agency was lacking an important source of information: women. That oversight deprived his agency of an essential avenue of information: the role of a woman’s confidante. She argued that she would have access to information through wives, mothers, and sisters that men would not. And, pointed out that men tended to boast when women were around.

He was convinced and she was hired. He would identify her as one of his five best agents, ever.

Pinkerton described her as a “commanding person, with clear cut, expressive features ... a slender, brown-haired woman, graceful in her movements and selfpossessed. Her features, although not what could be called handsome [beautiful], were decidedly of an intellectual cast ... her face was honest, which would cause one in distress instinctly [sic] to select her as a confidante.” (Allan Pinkerton, The Spy of the Rebellion, 1883).

Warne became a valuable member of the Agency and in 1860 she was made head of the new Female Detective Bureau. She was instrumental in the Adams Express Company embezzlement. She befriended the lead suspect’s wife and collected enough evidence to convict Nathan Maroney and recover the majority of the stolen money.

Her greatest achievement was uncovering a secessionist plot (the Baltimore Plot) to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861. Accompanied by three men, Warne met Mr. Lincoln at the train station in Philadelphia and joined him for the remainder of the journey to Washington D.C. If approached, Warne did the talking, explaining that her brother was ill and needed his privacy. They went to the sleeper car where she paid the conductor so he wouldn’t place anyone near them at the rear. They arrived safely.

Not a private detective himself, Dr. Joseph Bell was the “literary embodiment” of one of the most famous fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes. Bell (1837-1911) was a Scottish surgeon and lectured at the University of Edinburgh (though he was never a member of the university’s faculty). He stressed the necessity of close observation when diagnosing patients. “Clothing revealed lives of hardship or good fortune. Hands screamed occupation. ‘The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman,’ [Bell] pointed out, just as the calluses build up on a carpenter’s hands ‘are not those of the mason.’ Soldiers and sailors walked in different ways. Tattoos recorded voyages to distant lands. Details such as these were telling and mattered. Never forget ‘the vast importance of little distinctions,’ [Bell] urged his students, ‘the endless significance of the trifles.’” (Dean Jobb, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream)

His deductive abilities went beyond a person’s medical condition. Students, and the patient’s themselves, marvelled at Bell’s ability to identify their occupations, where they lived, and how they had travelled to the clinic. On one occasion (witnessed by Conan Doyle) he was able to determine that a patient was a non-commissioned officer from a Highland regiment stationed in Barbados before asking a single question.

Like all the other medical students, Doyle paid to attend the outpatient clinic which Bell held at the infirmary. As Bell’s clerk in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, Doyle was able to observe the surgeon often and up close. He was responsible for preparing Bell’s case notes and interviewing patients before they were examined.

On occasion, Bell assisted Dr. Henry Littlejohn, Edinburgh’s police surgeon with criminal inquiries and is credited with cracking at least one murder. In 1877 he alone noticed that Eugene Chantrelle had murdered his wife by loosening a gas pipe fitting.

How did he know about the soldier? “[T]hough the man was respectful, he did not remove his hat. They didn’t remove hats in the army, but had he been long discharged, he would have adjusted to removing it. He had an air of authority, but not too strong an air; thus he was a non-commissioned officer. He was obviously Scottish and thus from a Highland regiment. And finally, his condition of elephantiasis was common in Barbados.” (James O’Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes)

(Photo courtesy of the Wellcome Collection)

Of Particular Interest:

Post Mortem Examinations, by Rudolph Virchow

A little bit of a departure this month with the book review. Usually it is a reference book to help you learn about something, or to provide ideas. This month it is a source which won’t teach you much per se (unless you are planning on performing on autopsy yourself, which I wouldn’t recommend) but an example you can reference and use in the event you need one for your story. The other departure from the regular is that this book is available to download. There are copies to be purchased on Amazon (for .ca and .com) but you can have access to a copy of the original in electronic form if you prefer.

In terms of nineteenth-century medicine, Rudolph Virchow was a giant and he is considered the founding father of pathology. You might find his name familiar. He was discussed in the September 2022 issue. I won’t go into detail because it isn’t the man who is of relevance here, but the book he wrote.

Post-Mortem Examinations is a textbook which is helpful because it is succinct and devoid of extraneous explanation. It presents a methodical approach to post mortems. Virchow was a stickler for details and thoroughness, and this book reflects that. It is a step-by-step instructional guide about how to carry out a nineteenth-century autopsy.

The link is to the 1880 edition. His book was first published in German as Die Sektions-Technik im Leichenhouse des Charité-Krankenhauses, mit besonderer Rüchsicht auf die gerichtsaertzliche Praxis in 1875. It is one of only two of his works translated into English.

His book is the first published attempt to standardize autopsies. It was written with the intention of assisting in police investigations by creating a thorough, logical, and systematic examination of a corpse so that pathologists (and any other medical individual) could determine what damage was done, and, thereby, the cause of death.

A bonus is that he provides case studies of autopsies he performed. These are valuable because it provides the terminology and process your medical man would use. How would they describe the organs, the discoloration, the condition, the size of the organs? The corpse itself? It’s all contained within Virchow’s book. That helps build authenticity and credibility in your characters.

I talked previously about autopsies and how limited they were in terms of determining cause of death. The nineteenth century was the period when doctors were moving from the Galenic method (imbalance of the four humors) into modern medicine. As the century progressed, their understanding of how the body worked increased. What that means is the book is only relevant to stories occurring after 1880. But, since it won’t cost you anything to get hold of it, if you are presenting an autopsy, it contains excellent descriptions. Even though your medical man might not know the meaning of what they are looking at, you can accurately describe it.

Pet Peeves

Point-blank Range. More specifically, the seeming misuse of the phrase. Maybe it’s just me being ultra critical or creating an error where there is none. (I’m going to go with: Neither.) But more and more in TV shows and movies, it seems that they are portraying point-blank range as a shot fired when the gun is in contact with the victim, or very very close to them. It’s neither.

Point-blank range is not a specific or fixed distance; it’s different for each weapon. Bows and arrows and crossbows have a point-blank range. If I wanted to get really snippy, I’d say even a thrown stone has one. So, it’s not about the barrel of a gun being close to the unfortunate individual about to be shot.

In a popular fantasy TV series from years ago (not Game of Thrones, I never watched it) the writers/director decided to get “creative” and showed the flight of an arrow from bow to victim. Trouble was they didn’t do it right. To the dismay of the people around me, I commented on it. My feeling was: If you’re going to try to impress people, get it right. Especially when all they had to do was ask a marksman how an arrow flew. I knew, and I was a student who had only dipped her toes into the shallow end of the archery pool.

The origin of the phrase apparently is French from 1570; the English is derived from pointé à blanc (pointed at white). The blanc is thought to refer to a zero point, or empty space, of elevation when testing range. (Yeah, I’m not sure what that is either.) It comes from muzzle-loading canons whose barrels tapered from breech (back end) to muzzle. If the top of the canon was horizontal, its bore was slightly elevated and the canon ball would rise above the line of sight then drop below it. In marksman speak: it’s the distance they can fire a weapon and hit their target without adjusting their sights.

When you throw or shoot something, it doesn’t travel in a straight line. All projectiles fly in an arc; they rise, then they fall. Except when the distance between “shooter” and target is close enough that the projectile doesn’t get a chance to drop. Because of gravity, if you are beyond the weapon’s point-blank range, you have to aim above the point you want to hit to compensate for this drop. This distance is different for each weapon; a powerful rifle will have a different point-blank distance than a revolver. To complicate matters further, it also varies according to the firearm’s external ballistics and the size of the target.

You don’t have to be Einstein to use point-blank range in your story. You don’t even need to calculate what the range would be for your target and weapon; though you could if you really wanted to (there are equations to do so). You just need to remember it isn’t when the barrel touches the victim or when it’s really really close to the victim. If you have a large target and a flat trajectory it could be quite far away.

This Edition’s Slang

I’m returning to the old formula (actual slang) since there was nothing related to this topic that I could find that needed explaining. I thought about going into greater detail about the terminology around point-blank range, but reading various sites and explanations only left me more confused.

Bub and grub: British slang referring to food and drink; in this instance the drink is of the alcoholic sort. It was used in the later half of the nineteenth century and appeared in The Slang Dictionary in 1873.

Swag: (Not what you think.) From the seventeenth century to the twentieth it referred to money or goods taken by a thief or burglar. There are references to swag-shop (a shop selling goods) and a rum swag (full of rich goods). From the Willamette Farmer paper from Oregon, we are told that “Silverware in those days was the choicest swag known to burglars...” (October 14, 1989)

The modern version of the word, referring to freebies, did not appear until the 1960s. Its popularity increased in the 1990s.

If a picture is worth a thousand words…

A Curiosity of Crime — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 02:42:47 GMT

“Photography, in Byrnes’s conception, exposed as criminal those faces which looked most respectable.” [Thomas Byrnes, head of NYPD Detective Division, Police Chief 1880-1895]
Simon A Cole, Suspect Identities, 2001

...what would these ones say?

This month I’m talking about photography in crime, focusing on the (in)famous Rogues’ Gallery. A quick technical note before I dive in. From 1839 to 1850s the images were daguerreotypes and from 1850 to mid-1860s they were ambrotypes. For ease, I will refer to all of them as photographs. (See Vocabulary for descriptions.)

Almost from the time photography was invented, police were using it (or trying to) as a means to identify convicts, most specifically, repeat offenders, aka recidivists. The Belgians were reported to have used them from 1839, the French in 1841, and the British in the 1840s. In 1854, Lausanne, Switzerland, expanded the field to suspected criminals.

In 1858, the New York Police Department employed the earliest recorded “rogues’ gallery” (notorious criminals displayed to acquaint police with their appearance). By this date, the NYPD had collected 450 ambrotypes. In 1859, Albany joined the practice, but constables had to finance it from their own pockets. Theirs often included photos they had taken themselves. Shortly after this, cities began sharing their photographs. From America, the “gallery” spread to Europe arriving in Danzig, Poland, in 1864, Moscow in 1867, and London by 1870.

Much of policing involved constables and detectives recognizing (both in person and descriptions) known criminals. It was hoped that, by providing photographs, police and the public would become familiar with more criminals. Though police forces boasted that their detectives could recognize hundreds of “rascals,” identification through accessing archived photographs was not as easy as it is today.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t the violent criminals who found their pictures prominently displayed in rogues’ galleries, nor the ones police were most interested in identifying. Most of those found in the rogues’ gallery were forgers and confidence men (an American term coined around 1849). These were the “poster criminals” of the era. One reason for this is forgers and cons tended to travel, whereas thieves, for example, remained within a single city and became known to police through personal contact. Moving between cities and adopting a new identity in each, kept forgers and confidence men anonymous and hidden from police. By circulating photos of such convicts between cities, it was hoped to counteract their anonymity.

Gustave Macé, head of the Detective Division of the Paris Police, required all criminals to be photographed. By 1880, they had collected around 75,000. They were kept in filing cabinets, boxes, and loose along corridors.

Much as we see the advantage of photographs for identification, in the nineteenth century the rogues’ gallery never evolved into a functional system of identifying repeat offenders, or suspects from witness descriptions. Two shortcomings prevented this: the photographs, and the filing.

Daguerreotypes were expensive, cumbersome, and required skill and specialized training. Slow lenses required that convicts remain absolutely still for prolonged periods of time, sometimes as long as twenty minutes, this often resulted in them being strapped to a chair. All a convict had to do to obscure their image was to move their head slightly.

For photographs to be usable they had to be taken in good light, optimally in sunlight which was not always possible. Even when multiple artificial sources were employed, the quality of nineteenth-century lighting was substandard. As technology improved (the lenses got faster), images got clearer, and the cost of creating the images went down, police employed them to a greater extent.

Even with these advances, the images were often of poor quality, overexposed, blurred, or of the entire body (rather than just the face) which made identifying features difficult to see. Problems with the technology were exacerbated by a lack of consistency in how the photographs were taken. In the absence of guidelines, such things as distance between camera and subject, the angle of the face, the direction of the lighting, and size of the image depended on the mood of the photographer.

In 1882, a neurasthenic clerk in the Paris Police, Alphonse Bertillon (creator of system of identification using eleven body measurements which became known as bertillonage), standardized the mug shot. He employed photographs as part of his system, but remained sceptical of their effectiveness as a system of identification. He instituted guidelines for photographs insisting that all were taken from the same angle, lit in the same manner, and that profiles be included. The reason was his belief that everyone’s ears were unique and that made them one of the most useful features for identification.

Creating a workable filing system eluded nineteenth-century police. Though images were kept alphabetically by the name the convict provided, the method of retrieval was cumbersome and ineffective. It was said that no criminal ever went to prison with the same name twice. A single convict could be present in the photographic collection multiple times under multiple names. This created a list of convict’s names and a quantity of photographs so vast that mug shots were rendered useless as a means of identification.

If a detective were (delusional) determined enough to find a known convict or a suspect, up to 8 hours of searching was required. Considering the Paris police had 75,000, that was a monumental task. It could not function like today where police gather mug shots of suspects and present them to victims and witnesses and ask them to point out the assailant.

The Rogues’ Gallery became more useful when overall methods of identifying people improved; criminal and law-abiding. Before then, there were great in theory, but of limited use in reality.

Identifying recidivists was not the only use that the rogues’ gallery was put to. The other was to identify outward signs of deviance (criminality). This was a form of physiognomy, the study of facial features. Though, through technological advances, the former lived up to its potential (identifying criminals), the latter (luckily) did not.

Photographs were a godsend to criminal anthropologists; those who believed that criminality was an inherited trait like eye and hair color. Today, we would say someone was born bad. These “scientists” believed that there must exist an outward manifestation of “criminality.” If they could identify it, they could remove from society all those who possessed the trait and rid the world of crime. Photographs allowed them to test their theories using a method known as composite photography.

Francis Galton, British statistician, was obsessed with this theory of inherited criminality (also known as atavism) and he created this method of examination. The technique involved layering multiple exposures of mug shots onto a single photographic plate. By doing so, he hoped to identify a physical trait that was shared by them all.

Needless to say, their experiments amounted to nothing.

Throughout the nineteenth century, photography was time consuming. As the century went on, lenses became faster, but even in optimal conditions with studio lighting on bright sunny days, it took several seconds. When the weather was not conducive to picture-taking, the process took considerably longer. During this time, the subject could not move. In one early instance, with daguerreotype portraiture, a Swedish amateur almost caused his subject to go blind in one eye from staring into the sun for the five-minute exposure.

Studios had a daylight room on the roof which resembled greenhouses to allow in as much light as possible. Once electric lighting became available, photographers were less dependent upon the weather. This helped in the quality of the photo, but also lowered the amount of time the subject had to remain motionless.

Specialized chairs were created to provide support to make it easier to sit completely still. It had a mechanism against which to rest the head and often the subject was arranged so they could lean their elbows on a support. This could be a posing table whose height could be adjusted. This created stiff, severe poses.

Convicts were not always as cooperative and, on occasion, had to be tied to the chairs.

[The above photo was staged and used to highlight the difficulty of photography as an effective means of identification.]

As noted, Alphonse Bertillon’s system of identification used photographs for more than “mug shots” which were included alongside the document which contained a description of the individual.

One of the shortcomings of bertillonage was the inconsistency of description. What one person considered a long nose, another operator might consider medium. Given that there were no parameters for the categories, there was no consistency for either the individuals writing the description or those reading it. This created difficulties in filing and retrieving. Cards were filed according to body specifications, not the name the convict gave.

To counter this, a series of “tableaux” were created. Collections of photographs showing different shapes of facial features to impose some consistency in how features were described as well as display the different shapes for each. These collections included noses, ears, hair styles, shapes of the head in profile, facial hair, and eyebrows. It had minimal success.

(Photo provided by the Wellcome Collection)

Of Particular Interest:

A Guide to Improvised Weaponry, by Terry Schappert and Adam Slutsky

This book is so much fun. Part of me thinks it should be called “How to MacGyver Your Main Character.” It was written by Terry Schappert, who is a U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret which is nothing to sneeze at), and Adam Slutsky. It is useful to those writing historical as well as contemporary fiction. It provides methods of defense and escape “by deploying the hidden tactical uses” of common everyday items.

The book includes 100 improvised weapons arranged in alphabetical order. Some of them are obvious: hammer, pool cue, rolling pin, and broom/mop. But there are others which I would never have thought could be either a weapon or a means of defence. A drinking straw, a comb, an oven mitt, and, my personal favorites, a bag of dog poop and dirty diapers. (What does that say about me?)

It offers advice such as getting titanium, steel, carbon fiber, or fiberglass chopsticks from the internet, or ones with sharpened points or concealed “needle-like daggers.”

They provide a fun, theoretical situation for each weapon: “You’re at the local coffeehouse writing the great American [Canadian] novel on your laptop when in comes a robber intent on making off with the cash register and all the patrons’ wallets. What do you do?” These are followed by a variety of ways you can use the improvised weapon to defend yourself or escape and what advantages it will give you. In this instance, the everyday item was a laptop.

Expert Advice is offered such as not holding a hammer too tightly or you will weaken your fingers, hand, and forearm too quickly.

The book is not only about how to use common items. There are sections with “Green Beret Guidance” about attitudes and mindset of those who make their living putting themselves in dangerous situations. Things you can use to make your bad-ass characters more realistic. Items like: “If you act like a victim you’ve already become one...When going anywhere, if you feel eyes on you, instead of averting your eyes and conveying cowardice, return the gaze.”

Best thing about it is that the advice does not require you to be specially trained or familiar with martial arts or any other style of fighting. Anyone can do what the authors suggest. So, if you’ve got your protagonist in a sticky situation and you’re looking for a realistic and creative way to get them out of it, check out this book.

And, hey, maybe they’ll be able to thwart your bad guy with a bag of dog poop.

Pet Peeves

“The blood belongs to your vic.” This is a specific annoyance, but I’ll do my best to expand it beyond a single show. It comes from a Canadian crime drama set in the interwar years, Frankie Drake Mysteries, decades before DNA technology. The show is about a female private investigator and she visits her friend, an ME-in-training, when there’s a corpse in the morgue related to their case. On more than one occasion, the ME-in-training informs Frankie that the blood found at the scene is from the victim.

In 1901, Karl Landsteiner of Austria discovered three of the human blood groups: A, B, and O. In 1902, he added the fourth group, AB.

I am old (I mean young) enough to remember crime dramas and real police cases when the most blood evidence could do was eliminate someone. You could not point to someone and say: “It’s their blood.” And yet, this show does just that.

I don’t know if the writers didn’t realize forensics couldn’t do that or they just didn’t care. Either way, it’s sloppy.

That doesn’t mean you can’t play with history when you’re writing fiction, sometimes you have to to make it relevant and interesting. But if it is something this significant to your story, probably best if you get it right.

What is the bigger peeve? It’s bringing the future into the past. Be careful not to solve your plot problems by looking at what technology we have available today and transporting it back in time. Might just be me, but I prefer it when problems are solved using the technology and scientific knowledge of the time. I find it much more interesting. So, don’t be like this Canadian show, or another one that created a long-range listening device from a phonograph and used it in a public setting, and managed to record only the conversation of the bad guys. Don’t get me started on that...

This Edition’s Slang

A bit misleading to call it slang. (Okay, it’s entirely misleading.) Instead, it’s vocabulary related to the topic of early photographic technology.

Daguerreotypes: An early form of photography named after its inventor Louis Jacques Daguerre, a French artist and chemist. It was the first type of photography available to the public. They were popular in the 1840s and 1850s.

The process required the operator to polish a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish; treat it with fumes to make the surface light-sensitive; expose the plate in a camera (a few seconds if in bright sunlit space, up to five minutes in dimmer environment); fume the plate with mercury vapor (removing its sensitivity to light); rinse; dry; and seal it behind glass in an air-tight frame.

One of the drawbacks was that the process could only produce a single image; unlike today’s negatives, duplicates were not possible. (For those old, I mean young, enough, think Polaroids.)

The daguerreotype produced a reverse image which complicated their use for identification; any writing would appear backwards. Identifying marks on an individual’s right side, would appear on the left side in the daguerreotype. This could be remedied by pointing the camera at a mirror, rather than the subject. For the image to have any amount of detail (therefore, identifying features) the subject had to remain still for a long time, even after improvements to the lens were made.

In the 1850s, they were no longer used and were replaced by new easier, less expensive processes such as the ambrotype.

Ambrotypes: Introduced in the 1850s it was invented by James Ambrose Cutting and within a decade had replaced the daguerreotype. It is a positive image photograph.

Because the image used the iodized collodion system, it had to be coated, sensitized, exposed, and developed within the span of fifteen minutes, requiring the darkroom to be portable. The process was as such: a clean glass plate coated with a thin layer of iodized collodion; dip it in a solution of silver nitrate; expose the plate while still wet; develop the plate, which fixed it. A glass plate was put on the emulsion side to protect it before being mounted in a metal frame in a protective case.

To produce a quality ambrotype, the plate needed to be overexposed. For how long depended on the brightness of the setting and the speed of the lens, and varied from five to sixty seconds.

Like the daguerreotype, the process produced a single image. To obtain a copy, the ambrotype was “photographed.” So, copies were pictures of pictures.

They were less expensive than daguerreotypes and lacked the mirror-like metallic surface, thus making them easier to view and features easier to see. As a drawback, they appeared drabber and duller than their predecessor.

Ambrotypes did not last long; they were replaced in the mid-1860s by tintype (image on a thin, sturdy black-lacquered iron sheet).

When the notes don’t seem to work...

A Curiosity of Crime — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 02:05:02 GMT

“Few Countries have had as rich a counterfeiting history as America.”
Ben Tarnoff, Moneymakers, 2011

Paper for metal...

This month is the second part of counterfeiting, specifically forging paper money.

Until shortly after the Civil War, America was perhaps the most fertile and profitable ground for counterfeiters of paper currency. There are three main reasons for this. First, North American governments were early to print paper currency and to do so in quantity. The British government limited the export of gold and silver which meant a shortage of precious metals for coinage. That forced officials to create other forms of currency. The Massachusetts legislature started printing bills of credit in 1690 in order to pay debts.

Second, an absence of a strong central government. With law enforcement in the hands of each state, there was no unified and coordinated program to combat counterfeiting. It fractured efforts between states and provided counterfeiters with an easy escape. They could set up camp along borders and if detected, they evaded prosecution simply by slipping into the adjacent state where their pursuers had no jurisdiction.

Third, was an absence of centralized currency for most of the century. During the American Free Banking Era (1838-1863) banks were allowed to design and print their own paper money. There were hundreds of different banks which created hundreds of distinctive bank notes. In 1863, there were approximately 1600 banks issuing currency in denominations between $1 and $500. Not only were the designs and sizes unregulated, so too was the paper they were printed on. This made it almost impossible to know what was genuine and what wasn’t. By 1840, the Bicknell’s Reporter, Counterfeit Detector and General Prices Current, included the description of 1,930 different counterfeit bank notes.

Geography was another factor that favored counterfeiters. Vast stretches of wilderness allowed them hide and print a large batch of bank notes, then pack up shop and leave before authorities were aware of their presence. In the early part of the century, British North America (aka Canada before 1867) played a role. Many American counterfeiters came north to print their bills and then smuggled them back into the States for distribution through established pipelines. As Ben Tarnoff, Moneymakers, said “a poorly guarded border between bickering neighbors offered the ideal location to base an operation.” Given the antagonistic relationship between Britain and the States, and the War of 1812, British North American officials were not inclined, and in some instances unwilling, to invest manpower and money to hunt down American counterfeiters on their soil.

Shopkeepers encountered dozens of different bills from different banks each day. From as early as 1726, newspapers did what they could to help. They published descriptions of counterfeit bank notes. Later, periodicals such as Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter and Van Court’s Counterfeit Detector were published on a regular basis. They described which denomination from which banks had been counterfeited, and described how to detect the false from the legitimate. These might be the lettering, not the correct signature on the note or the correct signature misspelled (the signature of the bank’s president was printed on the note).

Forgeries of legitimate bank notes were not the only form of counterfeiting. Banks came and went. When a bank went out of business, their engraving plates were sold, or stolen. Many of the individuals who obtained these plates were counterfeiters. News of such failures was slow to travel, money could be printed and distributed before merchants, or the detectors, knew the bank no longer existed. Other counterfeiters created fictitious banks and “issued” their own currency.

This began to change with the Civil War.

The Union government needed money to fight the war. In 1861, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase provided a solution. The government would be allowed to borrow $250 million. People could buy bonds which matured in twenty-years or Treasury notes which matured in three years. The most significant of these were the “demand notes” which earned no interest, were issued in small denominations, and were redeemable on demand. These circulated like money and were an early form of federal currency which set the stage for the elimination of all other bank notes.

In 1862, counterfeiting started to get more difficult. The federal government passed the Legal Tender Act, which took another step toward a monopoly of printing currency. By 1877 independent bank notes disappeared and all that remained were those printed by the federal government. Though the federal currency bore the name of the institution that issued it, Chase commissioned engravers to make the master plates. That improved the quality of the images and created consistency in appearance. Rather than having to contend with hundreds of different types of bank notes, merchants and shopkeepers had a single currency to handle. Counterfeits were now easier to spot and more difficult to pass along.

These bills were referred to as Greenbacks and they were unique among all bank notes that had ever existed in the States. Rather than being a promissory note, they were the equivalent of, and legally indistinguishable from, gold or silver. They weren’t a promise of money; they were money.

Though occurring in the early 1700s, this is far too charming a story not to tell. Around 1716, in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, Mary Peck Butterworth, started a counterfeiting operation out of her kitchen. While other counterfeiters were using metal plates and etchers, Mary was using a simple household iron and starched cotton/muslin cloths. (Sometimes identified as the first disposable counterfeiting plates.)

There were three steps in the process. One, cover a note with damp muslin/starched cloth, run an iron over them. Two lay that marked cloth over a blank piece of paper, run an iron over them. Three, use quill pens to fill in the pattern by hand. A batch of false notes could be made with a single piece of muslin. It is estimated that she made a few thousand bills.

She enlisted her three brothers, at least one sister-in-law, neighbors, a deputy sheriff, and even had a sign-up list posted at her church. She sold the notes to her husband’s business and friends and made a fortune. The enterprise lasted seven years. There are different stories about her downfall: her employees were caught distributing the forgeries; Mary’s boasting; or that a passer, Arthur Noble, got drunk and was too generous buying everyone drinks, which raised the innkeeper’s suspicions. He turned Noble over to authorities.

Mary went on trial on August 14, 1723. Though witnesses (including her brother and his wife) testified against her, the case was dropped for lack of physical evidence. When authorities searched her home, all they found was an iron, ironing board, and some scraps of burnt muslin in the fireplace.

(The picture is “Woman Ironing,” by Edgar Degas, 1873, and provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access)

Samuel Curtis Upham owned a shop at 403 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and sold stationery, newspapers, and cosmetics. He was also one of the most prolific sellers of fake currency, even though he never intended to be a counterfeiter.

He got started shortly after February 24, 1862 when the demand for that day’s issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer exceeded its supply. The reason? They had printed on their front page a copy of a $5 Confederate note. Upham figured this was good business and started printing his own. He sold them a souvenirs of the war. And he didn’t do it in secret. He took out full-page ads in newspapers touting the quality of his “mementos” and sent orders through the mail.

What prevented him from being arrested as a counterfeiter was perspective. The Union government did not recognize the legitimacy of the Confederate government, and, therefore, did not recognize its bank notes as legal currency.

The South had a very different perspective, referring to Upham as a “knave swindler, and forger of the most depraved and despicable sort.” (Richmond Daily Dispatch) The South knew who he was because Upham created a margin at the bottom of his “mementos” where he included his name and address.

The biggest passers of his “mementos” were Union soldiers. Many traveled through Philadelphia on their way to battlefields in the South. They supplemented their income by buying Upham’s bills and used them to buy supplies in the Confederate states. Whether or not Southern merchants recognized them as counterfeit is irrelevant. As Ben Tarnuff puts it, “a Southern merchant would presumably be more inclined to accept a bill from someone with a gun.”

The quantity of counterfeits circulating not only damaged the economy of the South, and the population’s faith in it; it damaged the legitimacy of the Confederate government itself. By printing Confederate notes, Upham had inadvertently contributed to the Union victory.

How prolific was he? A historian interviewed him in 1874 about Confederate currency. Upham estimated that he printed about $15 million worth of fake bills. Not all of them reached the South (some were purchased as souvenirs and remained in the North). If all of it had, that would have been close to three percent of the total amount of Confederate currency in circulation. That might not seem like much, but compare it to statistics from 1911 when the Secret Service stated that counterfeits made up less than one-thousandth of one percent of the money in circulation.

It wasn’t just a new unified currency that came out of the Civil War; it was a coordinated and dedicated effort to stamp out counterfeiting. With the printing of money in federal hands, the Treasury didn’t have to rely on local efforts, or jurisdiction across state borders. Counterfeiting

became a federal crime.

The urgency to crack down on counterfeiting had political implications for those on both sides of the conflict. Too many fake bills in circulation decreased the public’s faith in a currency, and that would lessen the value of the currency. The lower the value the more difficult it would be to fund the war.

In April 1865, the U.S. Treasury Department created an agency whose sole purpose was hunting down counterfeiters. It was called the Secret Service. William Wood (pictured above) was named its first director. It was quite successful. In its first year it made more than 200 arrests.

Though applauded for his success, Wood was criticized for his questionable (and sometimes illegal) methods. He used government funds to subsidize illegal activity, put criminals on the payroll and encouraged them to commit crimes to collect evidence to convict forgers higher up the chain. The regular breach of the law and of people’s liberties put the Service at odds with more than one judge.

Part of this stemmed from the inability of the agency to make arrests. The Secret Service was formed by the Treasury, not by Congress. This meant operatives had to work with local authorities who weren’t always averse to counterfeiters on their turf so long as they received a percentage of the profits. Wood and his men would buy counterfeit cash, have other operatives witness the transaction, then make a citizen’s arrest. At times, Wood dropped the façade and seized the suspects and evidence by force.

He made a halfhearted attempt to reform the Agency in 1868 by issuing a series of directives to modify the behavior of his agents. To no avail. When Ulysses S. Grant became President in 1869, Wood was dismissed. At the time, he was under indictment for false imprisonment.

Though it had a less than auspicious start, the Secret Service developed into one of the most effective organizations against counterfeiting.

Last month I spoke of the Vauxhall coiners, the coin punch, and the note which read: Two men named Buckley and Andrews were arrested while working on this punch and were afterwards executed. Theirs was the last execution for forgery.

The Royal Mint Museum was kind enough to let me include pictures of the die the Vauxhall coiners used and the letter. Many thanks to the Royal Mint Museum and David Mason, Public Engagement and Information Officer.

Of Particular Interest:

Fight Write, by Carla Hoch

If your story has a fight scene anywhere in it, you need to have this book.

There are many things I like about Carla Hoch’s Fight Write. To start with, everything written is coming from someone with personal experience. Hoch is a fighter, so her book is not about providing theory; she’s talking about things she knows. The items she doesn’t have personal experience with, she brings in someone who does.

Her style is conversational which I appreciate. You won’t get lost in technical jargon and she is not trying to impress you with what she can do. It’s like having a conversation across a table.

Having said that, there are the technical aspects. Terminology, different styles of fighting and what distinguishes them, how to throw a punch, and fighting stances. Hoch talks about the different types of knives, hand guns, rifles, shotguns, and what she refers to as WOOs (weapons of opportunity). But there’s more to her book than the mechanical.

There is a chapter on the impact of the adrenaline rush (good and bad) and the aftermath (the adrenaline dump). She discusses how your character might react to the threat of violence. (I never thought of submission as an advantageous option; I only thought about it in the bad way.) It is very much about the character, how they will react (or won’t), what they’ll feel, the physical consequences of fighting, and the mental consequences of killing.

For me, she brought to the forefront aspects which seem obvious, but only after someone has said them. Things such as all fighters are afraid. That, when wrestling, sometimes the person on the bottom has the advantage. She includes unexpected subjects that contribute to your scene’s authenticity. For example, discussing how culture, societal expectations, and geography impact how your characters will fight.

For me, there were two equally important (and invaluable) parts to the book. Hoch encourages you to plot your fight using a wide net. It isn’t about what punches are thrown; it’s more complicated than that. It’s about why your characters are fighting (their motivation), where they’re fighting, and who they’re fighting and using the answers to these questions to choreograph your fight. It forces you to create the human aspect of a fight and decide how that aspect will impact what each character does.

Which brings us to the second important part. It’s about the people, not just the physical act of fighting. How should your character react to being threatened, to confronting more than one assailant, to being smaller or less experienced than their opponent. I particularly appreciate the realism she brings when she acknowledges that the vast majority of us (and our characters) have no experience fighting. So, this isn’t about making your kidnapped schoolteacher fight like a black belt martial artist, unless they are.

I will end with a boast. Those who have read it will understand: I was able to guess what a Superman punch was.

Pet Peeves

Surviving impossible wounds. I am not a doctor, but there are certain wounds I know are not survivable. I remember watching Cloverfield. There is a measure of suspended disbelief when watching science fiction and I’m okay with that. My annoyance stems from the extension of that “our reality but not” to things such as wounds. I use Clovefield as an example because one of the characters who survived had been impaled through the left shoulder by rebar poking out from a big chunk of concrete. They removed her from the metal bar, put a small cloth over the wound, and went on their less-than-merry way. Miraculously, she didn’t bleed to death. She should have, especially since she didn’t receive extensive medical care.

The unrealistic presentation of wounds extends to an inequality of consequences. The hero/heroine will survive a wound that the villain won’t. Something that kills or debilitates one person, should kill or debilitate everyone. Our biology is not impacted by our ethics. So, if your baddie dies from a gunshot to the gut, so too must your hero/heroine.

Our characters have to get wounded to make the story exciting, to add danger and suspense. Whatever wound they receive, make certain they can survive it. If they can survive, then so too must your villain. You don’t have to be a medical doctor to know what wounds are/aren’t survivable (though it helps). There are resources available that you can and should consult.

So, suspension of disbelief is fine, but if your characters are surviving impossible wounds, you had better explain why they are able to survive when the rest of us (including the baddies) aren’t.

This Edition’s Slang

A bit misleading to call it slang. (Okay, it’s entirely misleading.) Instead, it’s vocabulary related to the topic of counterfeiting.

Specie: Money in the form of coins (metal) rather than paper (notes). This is significant for American currency in the nineteenth century. Banks were not supposed to issue more banknotes than they were able to redeem. At anytime, an individual could redeem their bank notes for coins. The bank was supposed to have enough coin on hand to exchange for the bank note. Such was not always the case. “Wildcat” banks: built in remote areas (often in the wilderness) were founded with fraudulent intentions. The theory (or scam) behind such banks was that their remoteness would deter both patrons and financial institutions in distant states from redeeming their bank notes because the bank was too far away. In other instances, the banks were located in places so remote, they couldn’t be found. They could issue bank notes at a profit knowing they would never be redeemed.

Raised bills: These are legitimate, legal tender that have been manipulated. The denomination has been raised. For example, when a $1 note has been raised to $10. This could be done using a penknife and pen or the denomination could be removed using a chemical process. Such bills could be detected by looking at the color of the paper around the denomination (both words and digits). The chemical process turned it almost white. Other means of detection was to look at the “s” in the word “dollars” and comparing it to the lettering and the ink in the rest of the word. If the note has been raised, the form of the “s” might be different in shape or the ink could be darker.

Shinplasters: Paper banknotes of low denomination, usually below a single dollar. They were printed because of the shortage of metal for coinage. They were used predominantly in the 1800s. The origin of the name is said to have come from the American Revolutionary War when soldiers put pieces of paper inside their boots to prevent chafing. Because paper money was perceived to be worth less than metal currency, these small denominations came to be referred to by this slang to reflect the public’s opinion about their lack of value. Stores as well as banks, could issue shinplasters since they weren’t currency per se; they were a note of credit.

In Canada, the term was restricted to 25 cent monetary notes and were issued between 1870 and 1923. The term is believed to have come from the five-shilling note (1/4 pound) which, in French, was referred to as cinq piastres. (Image courtesy of Jbeaulieu)

Checking the change in your pockets...

A Curiosity of Crime — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 03:04:07 GMT

“I have executed and perfected such an apparatus or Machinery as will make Coin not only superior in Beauty & Workmanship to that of any Nation in Europe but also so manufactured ... that Counterfeiting will be prevented.”
Matthew Boulton, to the Privy Council Committee on Coin, December 1789

For the love of [fake] money...

This month it is counterfeiting, but with a focus on coins. I’ll talk about paper money in a future issue.

As soon as there were coins there were people trying to counterfeit them. The nineteenth century was no exception.

The majority of forged coins were the smaller denominations. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, was in their creation, the second, in their distribution.

Before I talk about the fake ones, let’s talk about the real ones. Small denomination coins are the cornerstone of any economy. Even today, few of us walk around with $100 bills in our wallets. In the nineteenth century, as the population grew, the demand for such coins increased and not all governments were able to keep pace with it. Coin production (see below) was labor intensive and expensive. Some governments were unwilling to invest the money required to create massive amounts of small coins to keep pace with the demand. This meant that they remained in circulation longer than they should have which wore down the images on them and made them easier to counterfeit. In England, between 1773 and 1821, workers made up for the shortfall of small coins by purchasing tokens made from private diesinkers. Most were made in and around Birmingham. These tokens were easy to duplicate and, for a time, the term “Birmingham coiners” was synonymous with counterfeiting.

Let’s begin with distribution because there’s less to say about it. The more fake coins you can put into circulation, the greater the return on your investment. It was easier to flood the “market” with counterfeit pennies than it was the larger coins.

Counterfeiters were not drawn from society’s elite and neither were the people who distributed or uttered their coins (see below). A gold sovereign was the equivalent of £1 or 20 shillings. In 1867 the average income for a working-class family has been estimated at 31 shillings a week. Many had to survive on 10-12 shillings. The majority of the population was too poor to possess gold coins which meant that in the grand scheme of things, they weren’t used very often. When they did appear it was notable, which meant it was suspicious, which meant greater scrutiny, which meant it was more likely to be detected. A shopkeeper lost considerably more money when he accepted a fake sovereign than he did a fake penny. In turn, it made gold coins less attractive to the individuals paid to distribute them who, in turn, paid the coiners a smaller fee for each one.

That didn’t mean it didn’t happen. Places that were busy, like racecourses, where coins changed hands quickly and with little more than a glance at the denomination and color (make sure it was gold), were fertile environments for distributing fake currency.

In terms of their creation this can be divided into two groups: what they were made of and how well they were made.

The coin you created had to be the same size (diameter and thickness) and weight as the legal tender. This was not as great an obstacle for coins made of silver or copper/bronze as the difference in weight was so slight it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect without specialized equipment. Not so with gold coins.

Gold is dense and, therefore, heavy. There are few metals that could imitate its physical qualities. Platinum is one of them, and in the 1860s its value was considerably less than gold; in some instances, about half its value. Counterfeiters got very good at making gilded platinum sovereigns and half-sovereigns. So much so that, occasionally the real thing was presented to the Royal Mint under the belief that they were fake.

The other challenge was recreating their appearance, and this is true for all coins. This is often where counterfeiters fell short. One method of creating a cast was to press a genuine coin into heated metal; what resulted was simplistic compared to the real thing. In the 1800s, that failure to produce a perfect reproduction became the primary method of detection. More about that below.

The other method of discovery was the shape and size of the coin. Coin counterfeit scales became popular with vendors. (An example shown below.) The coin would be inserted into the relevant slot to ensure it was the correct diameter and thickness. Then its weight would be compared to one known to be legal. A fake coin will pass one of the tests, but not both.

As mentioned, one of the main defenses against counterfeiting was the production of high-quality coins that were exact replicas of each other.

The world’s first mechanized mint, invented by James Watt and Matthew Boulton, came into use in 1786 and was capable of producing between 400 and 920 coins per minute. By 1789 there were eight steam-powered presses working at the new Soho Mint. (Between 1789 and 1809 the Soho Mint had produced 600 million items including coins and medals.) Boulton eventually earned the title: Master of Modern Minting.

Prior to this, coins were made either by imparting a heavy blow from coining dies onto a smooth metal disk, or to use a screw press which was operated by between four and six strong men. It was time-consuming and labor intensive.

Of relevance to counterfeiting, with the manual presses each genuine coin was slightly different (some weren’t even perfectly round). This made it almost impossible to distinguish legitimate coins from forgeries just by looking at them.

With Watt and Boulton’s machine the strike upon the die was more accurate which created coins of uniform size with straight edges and high-quality standardized images. This made them more difficult to copy and provided a guaranteed template against which to compare suspected counterfeit coins. This visual comparison is used today to separate the real from the fake.

Watt and Boulton’s machine, and other steam-powered presses were adopted by government mints throughout the world, revolutionizing currency both in how money was created and in its appearance.

To get an idea, the image of the stacked coins is from this century, but the principles are the same. You can see how the quality of the counterfeit (top) falls short of the legitimate.

Counterfeiting was a serious crime. Today, it isn’t considered high treason, but in nineteenth-century England you could be charged with that.

In the 1820s a group of six individuals known as the Vauxhall coiners worked with a punch to create sovereigns of George IV. They were Daniel and Mary Ann Buckley, Jeremiah Andres, Shadrach Walker, Daniel Pycroft, and Mary Ann Patrick. Suspicion was aroused when on several occasions they were seen loading/unloading carts and delivering heavy baskets to different London locations. A stakeout ensued in the autumn and on December 23, 1826 a raid was carried out on their houses. Coining tools and a few thousand counterfeit coins were found and they were arrested. It has been estimated that they were making about £100 a week.

The men were charged with high treason and the women with minor crimes. Pycroft brought a character witness to his trial who did a remarkable job of creating sympathy within the jury because Pycroft was set free. Buckley and Andrews weren’t so lucky. They were found guilty and on April 23, 1827 they were hanged.

In the Royal Mint Museum there is a coin punch and below it is a slip of paper from the 1800s. It reads: Two men named Buckley and Andrews were arrested while working on this punch and were afterwards executed. Theirs was the last execution for forgery.

Even in the nineteenth century counterfeiting was an international enterprise.

Between 1876 and 1877 the Royal Mint was in correspondence with the Bank of France regarding British coins they suspected were being manufactured in Spain. They believed that the sovereigns and half-sovereigns were being made to order and sent to North and South America. A number had turned up in Rio de Janeiro and Venezuela. This was not the first time that the French and British governments worked together against counterfeiters.

The situation was a little sketchy, but considered legitimate enough for Detective Sergeant Charles Von Tornow to be sent to Barcelona, to meet with a Monsieur Deschanel. This is a friend of a friend story, for, although Deschanel claimed not to know the identity of the Spaniards who were forging the coins, he claimed to be a close associate of a man who was. Deschanel said that 800 sovereigns were to be dispatched to Buenos Aires. What was known for certain was that the platinum used to create the coins had been purchased in Paris and transported to Barcelona.

The arrangement fell apart when Deschanel insisted on an advance of 10,000 francs before providing details such as names and the location of the factory.

Von Tornow was not convinced and he refused to pay the money and the deal fell through. The problem of counterfeit sovereigns and half-sovereigns eventually went away on its own. By 1905 the price of platinum was higher than the price of gold, thus making the counterfeits more expensive than the genuine article.

Of Particular Interest:

A Counterfeiter’s Paradise, by Ben Tarnoff

Something a little different this month. Rather than a review of a single book (which I will do), I’m going to offer a larger overview of books which contain either a collection of stories, or case studies.

This month’s book is A Counterfeiter’s Paradise. All of the counterfeiters are from the States and the circumstances under which they operated and succeeded were particular to American. As Tarnoff states “Few countries have had as rich a counterfeiting history as America.” It starts in the eighteenth century with Owen Sullivan (c.1720-1756), moves on to David Lewis (1788-1820), and ends with Samuel Upham (1819-1885).

Each story highlights a different aspect of the counterfeiter’s world. For example, part of Sullivan’s success was the result of weak law enforcement. Lewis is described as a bit of a Robin Hood hero who lived in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Upham lived during the free banking era when counterfeiting of bank notes (and other illegal banking activity) ran rampant through the States.

The book begins with a brief introduction set in 1876 when a group of counterfeiters tried to kidnap Abraham Lincoln’s corpse to hold it in exchange for the “gang” leader Ben Boyd who had been arrested by the Secret Service. It moves on to provide an overview of the banking, economic, and political circumstances which made America such a profitable breeding ground for counterfeiters (and other swindlers).

Tarnoff’s book is comprehensive, informative, and an easy read (which is always good when you have lots of research to do). He presents pictures of the individuals involved and places them firmly in the context of their society. He discusses the financial aspects of counterfeiting and banking without getting bogged down in the lingo or with the technical aspects of the actual forging.

I am not a financial person and, in researching for this newsletter, sometimes got lost in the heavier articles which delved into the nitty gritty of currency. That can be difficult and discouraging when you are gathering information for your book; wading through things you sort of understand, but don’t, and then wondering if you need to become an expert to create an accurate portrayal of your character and their crime.

Books like Tarnoff’s allow you to see how those facts played out in real life which adds realism to fiction. You see how the counterfeiters worked, thought, schemed, what opportunities they took or created, and how they used the circumstances to their advantage. You can create richer more realistic characters, on both sides of the law, and you get to see examples of those dense historical facts that you’ve been reading. The other advantage is they “lighten” the reading and allow you to enjoy well-written prose while you gather information for you own work.

This is not the only book of this sort. Currently, I am reading Stephen Bates’s, The Poisoner: The Life and Crimes of Victorian England’s most Notorious Doctor, and up next is George Cooper’s, Lost Love: A True Story of Passion, Murder, and Justice in Old New York (recommended to me by author Carrie Hayes). Bate’s book shows how all the academic discussion on poisons played out on.

If you need a brain break from intense academic articles and books explaining life, crime, and the law in the 1800s, pick up a book that puts it all together and shows how the theory translates into reality. As you are scouring the academic books and journals, don’t forget the “case studies” that help you put it all into context.

Pet Peeves

People falling through the ice. Because it’s still winter (and because I discovered my waterproof winter boots are no longer waterproof) this month’s annoyance is about the cold and water. More specifically when people go through the ice into the water.

Lots of TV shows and movies have characters falling through the ice or falling into streams, getting themselves out, and then walking to wherever. When ice is present, the water is at freezing (0^oC and 32^oF) unless its bracken or salt water. It lowers your core temperature quicker than being in a cold coming-off-of-the-prairies wind. Once out of the water, it’s time which decides whether or not you survive; that is, how quickly you are able to get somewhere warm and into dry clothes. And it’s not measured by hours, but by minutes. If you’re walking, you’re not going to get very far.

Worse, are the rescue scenes. They depict people crawling or, worse, standing at the edge of the water. To rescue someone, you drop to your belly and keep your arms and legs extended to distribute your weight over as large an area as possible. You do this whether you’re running away or being heroic. If the latter, you go close to, but not right up to the edge of the ice or you’ll also end up in the water. If it didn’t support their weight, it isn’t going to support yours, especially after it’s broken. You use a belt or whatever else you can stretch between them and you and you pull. If they come toward you, you move away until you know you are on ice thick enough to support the weight of two people.

Don’t get me started on people punching their way through the ice once they’ve gone under. We’ll be here all day. Suffice it to say: Impossible. No human is capable of punching through more than a foot of ice, less so when in water (think about what it’s like running in water), even less “less so” when the water is cold.

So, to sum up, if your character falls through the ice, you better get them somewhere warm very quickly. Despite what James Cameron thinks, you don’t live long in freezing water.

I crossed the North Atlantic quite a few times when I lived in England and travelled back and forth to Canada. I recall one plane journey when the stranger beside me was annoyed because I was reading rather than paying attention to the flight safety speech. He said, in a condescending voice, something about needing to know these things if I hoped to be rescued. I responded that, if we went down, it would be into iceberg-infested waters where our life expectancy would be very short and that the little lights on our life jackets weren’t for rescuing us, but to make it easier for the salvage team to find our bodies. He didn’t talk to me for the rest of the flight.

This Edition’s Slang

A bit misleading to call it slang. (Okay, it’s entirely misleading.) Instead, it’s vocabulary related to the topic of counterfeiting.

Uttering: According to the Oxford Canadian Dictionary, it is to issue or circulate a forged document, counterfeit money or cheque. For our purposes, it’s to put forged money into circulation. To be pedantic, when a forger gives counterfeit money to their “distributor,” that is not uttering. It requires an exchange of the coins for goods or services. Let’s turn to the Canadian Criminal Code: “If you made a counterfeit $100 bill, that would be forgery. If you gave the counterfeit bill to a convenience store in exchange for groceries, that would be uttering.” An individual could be arrested for one or the other or both. Uttering can include trying to pass coins that are not current.

Counterfeiters often used utterers rather than distribute the money themselves and on many occasions they used women as it was thought they appeared more honest.

(Three charges are associated with counterfeit money: forgery, possession, and uttering.)

Tokens: A form of money whose intrinsic value is less than its face value. In other words, our paper money are tokens.

Counterfeiting was one problem faced by governments with regard to currency, melting the coins down was another. This occurred when the value of the metal in the coin exceeded the face value of the coin. For example, in France, copper was used for coins valued at two, three, and five centimes (100 centimes in a franc). But when the price of copper went up, the coins were melted down and the metal was either sold or “refurnished” into new coins that contained less copper.

To prevent this, mints issued coins whose intrinsic value was less than the face value of the coin. English pennies had an intrinsic value equal to 44% of their face value. It didn’t always work. In 1807 France created a 10 centimes coin containing 10% silver (intrinsic value 95% of face value). They weren’t melted down, but the counterfeiting of the coins was so extensive and so convincing that it was removed as legal tender a year later.

The language printed on the body...

A Curiosity of Crime — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 02:12:17 GMT

“A good knowledge of tattoos and scars was most useful to a Victorian-era detective.”
E.J. Wagner, The Science of Sherlock Holmes

Marks upon the flesh...

It is commonly thought that contemporary tattooing was introduced to Europe after Captain Cook’s voyage of the 1770s. Though it helped make tattooing vogue among the upper-classes, tattooing had existed in Europe for close to two thousand years by the time Cook set out. Thracians wore tattoos to indicate status and the Greeks adopted the practice from them, though they used them to mark someone as a slave. We have record of the practice among the Picti (the name meaning painted people). Christian crusaders and pilgrims to Jerusalem got tattoos to commemorate their journey. As early as the sixteenth century, pilgrims to the Italian shrine of Loreto were being marked with religious imagery. Historians argue that the practice of tattooing among sailors was well-established by the end of the eighteenth century. (It was referred to as pricking prior to Cook’s voyage.)

Two things impede our study of tattoos. First, the people who were getting tattooed were not the people who were recording history. Second, no one took much notice of the practice until the nineteenth century. What does this have to do with crime?

In the 1800s there were three groups who became very interested in tattoos: Doctors, government and law enforcement agencies, and “scientists” seeking explanations for crime. The first group I’m going to ignore because it isn’t very crime related and our largest collection of tattoos was assembled by the other two.

For government and law enforcement their interest in tattoos stems from their obsession with repeat offenders. Unlike today, identifying someone was not straightforward in the 1800s. In some respects, it was nearly impossible, even in France where passports/ID papers were in existence throughout the century. False names were given, and appearances could be changed fairly easily. What was difficult to alter were tattoos. They, along with scars, were seen as the best means of identifying repeat offenders.

The Victorians kept a tattoo index and in 1869 Britain passed the Habitual Criminals Act, creating the Register of Distinctive Marks which maintained detailed lists of every convict’s tattoos.

Gruesomely enough, it was penal tattoos which triggered the earliest attempts at tattoo removal which included pouring acids onto the marked skin, or just cutting it out.

Along with recording physical features upon arrest, the appearance and location of scars and tattoos were recorded. This is on particular display with convicts who were transported to Australia between 1817 and 1853. They were stripped and all tattoos were noted prior to leaving the UK. Upon reaching Van Diemen’s Land, another examination was carried out, noting any tattoos which were acquired along the way.

These “prison” tattoos were not like today’s. Excluding those imposed by the government as part of their punishment, the tattoos chosen by convicts were not a catalogue of the crimes they had committed. A considerable number of those who were tattooed during the passage to Australia were marked with anchors to symbolize hope, both for safe arrival in Australia and for a possible return home.

Tattoos during incarceration were for the purpose of joining a community or from boredom. The same is believed to have been the motivation for soldiers and sailors, though identification after death also played a role.

In terms of numbers, it’s a smaller percentage than you might think. For those transported the number never rises above 40 percent. Not every convict had a tattoo.

Which leads to the third group obsessed with tattoos: The medico-legal experts and criminologists. The most celebrated of these “scientists” were Italian Cesare Lombroso and French Alexandre Lacassagne. Lombroso, who believed crime was inherited the same way eye color is, went so far as to claim that criminality could be identified by the presence of a tattoo. If you had one, you fell into one of two groups (according to Lombroso): you’d committed a crime, or you eventually would.

The results of their studies were published in the 1880s which created a frenzy of interest and debate. The discussion was not isolated to tattoos; it was part of the greater search for the explanation of why some individuals (predominantly the lower classes) committed crimes while others (read the wealthy) were law-abiding. There are many prejudices involved in these studies (hence the quotation marks around “scientists”) which are beyond the scope of this topic. Suffice it to say, these studies, like other investigations in to crime, limited themselves to members of the working class.

Both Lombroso and Lacassagne closely linked tattoos with criminality and it was this aspect of their research that was given the greatest attention. It created another layer to the scandalous nature of tattoos and for many it became the mark of the criminal. Prior to their studies, there had been no such association, and in England even after their appearance, the link was not given much credence.

Lombroso’s studies were flawed. The sample of people studied extended no further than convicts. Data like the percentage of convicts with tattoos versus those of the general public was never collected. Most strikingly, he ignored the presence of tattoos on individuals such as army and naval officers (aristocratic sphere), nobility like Lady Churchill (Winston’s mother; hers was around her wrist), and royalty. The last of these included Victoria’s sons Albert and Edward, the Grand Duke Alexis of Russian, Prince and Princess of Denmark, Queen Olga of Greece, King Oscar II of Sweden, and the Duke of Newcastle.

If you want to view a sample of nineteenth-century tattoos, the Wellcome Collection has a number of them online. A word for the squeamish. They’re not representations of the tattoos; they are the actual tattoos with skin still attached.

The first recorded tattoo salon in North America was opened in 1870 (or 1872 depending on who you reference) by Martin Hildebrandt who is also recognized as the first professional tattoo artist. A German immigrant, he learned his craft while serving in the United States navy on the USS United States. During the Civil War he worked as an artist and claimed to have tattooed thousands of soldiers both Union and Confederate. At that time, tattoos cost between $0.50 and $2.50.

After the Civil War, he worked with some of the most famous of the Tattooed Ladies who toured with the circus sideshows, and were “spectacles” in dime museums, and carnivals. This included his common law wife, Nora, described as the “mother of all tattoo circus ladies” (whose picture I used in the absence of one of her husband).

Hildebrandt opened the atelier on Oak Street (now called Monroe), between Oliver and James Streets, in New York’s Lower East Side. The shop was located in a tavern and is described as having “finely sanded wood floors” and its walls were “lined with paintings of odalisques” (images of concubines in a harem). Hildebrandt used India ink (considered the best for tattooing because it didn’t cloud like common ink) which cost $1.50 an ounce.

The electric tattoo machine was invented (patent granted) in 1891 by Samuel F. O’Reilly who had opened a tattoo shop in Chatham Square in the Bowery section of New York in 1875. It is now commonly referred to as the tattoo gun. The machine was adapted from Thomas Edison’s electric stencil pen used for sign painting and embroidery, and the rotary action was based on that of a sewing machine. It was battery operated and handheld and the motor controlled either a single needle or a row of up to five. The “reciprocating needle” made shallow wounds and pushed ink into them. Before Mr. O’Reilly’s machine, tattoos were applied the same way they had been for thousands of years. Tiny pricks were made into the skin with either a needle, small hammer with a sharp point, or a pointed stick. The area was then smeared with pigment which remained in the dermis when the wounds healed.

The tattoo gun made the process faster, producing up to 3,000 pricks a minute. When done by hand, the fastest tattoo artist could only make 150 to 200. The gun made the process less painful and allowed for greater detail in the designs and more subtlety in the coloring and shading. This allowed for more technical proficiency and facilitated the movement toward “works of art” and away from their crude designs of their predecessors. Tattoos became more artistic, some describing them as like paintings and the artists were being trained in informal apprenticeships.

There has to be something gruesome or unsavory cause I’m evil that way. In this instance, it’s the risks that came along with getting a tattoo in the nineteenth century. Not all of them were genuine. Even into the early part of the twentieth century hospitals quarantined patients with tattoos from a fear that they might spread disease and infection. Some cities went so far as to ban tattoos because it was believed they spread cancer.

There were genuine health risks involved. Gangrene was a possibility which could end in amputation or death. Then there was syphilis. In 1861, M. Ernest Berchon was one of the first to investigate the connection between syphilis and tattoos.

In 1877, James Kelly, like other tattooists, was in the habit of moistening ink by putting his needles into his mouth, passing on syphilis through his saliva. It is not unreasonable to believe that this was how he had contracted the disease. Bercheron suggested that such carelessness should be “treated as an unlawful wounding.”

Another tattooist, likely a former soldier known only by the initial ‘S,’ used designs on paper printed in copying ink that required moistening before application. He did this with his spittle. He would also keep his needles “clean” and the ink moist with his spit. The French and British navies tried to discourage the practice of tattooing after outbreaks of syphilis spread through a number of their barracks. In Portsea, Hampshire, in 1888, twelve soldiers were infected. The attached picture is of a tattoo with signs of syphilis.

Of Particular Interest:

I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother… Edited by Michel Foucault

I love this book.

On June 3, 1835, Pierre Rivière went to the house where his mother lived with his younger sister and brother. (Pierre lived elsewhere with his father.) And he murdered them. This book is a retelling of the investigation and trial through the documents of its contemporaries.

The front section is the “narrative” of the investigation and the trial. It’s like being a tag-along, listening in on the conversations of those tasked with finding and prosecuting Pierre. It’s almost the nineteenth-century’s version of reality TV, only not fake. Though the book is a step-by-step guide to what followed a horrendous crime, it is also an investigation into legal insanity. Foucault is mute about whether he believes Pierre was or wasn’t insane; he leaves that to the reader, which I think gives the book more potency. A bit of a spoiler: It’s not as easy as you’d think.

The book begins with the report of François-Eduard Baudouin, cantonal judge, who visited the scene of the murder. He had been informed of the crime by the mayor of the commune of Aunay. He described the bodies as they lay where they had died and the wounds which had killed them.

There are statements by witnesses, letters notifying law enforcement and calling for them to search for Pierre (including how he was described), reports of the prosecutor, and newspaper articles about the crime. It takes you through the investigation from the beginning to Pierre’s conviction and death.

During his incarceration Pierre wrote a memoir to explain his actions. This is presented as a prelude to three medical reports (one of them from Matthieu Orfila of toxicology fame). Each report presents a different conclusion about Pierre’s sanity. Presenting it in this order allows you insight into Pierre’s thoughts before you read the “specialist’s” position. This was the era when concepts of insanity versus legal insanity were being debated. This case, and this book of contemporary documents, provides insight into that debate, what contemporaries thought about insanity, and how they determined it. It is a fascinating study of nineteenth-century medicine and its understanding of human nature.

The back end of the book is an examination of the social and political contexts of the case. I didn’t agree with many of their “findings,” but the commentaries were interesting in how social historians viewed such a crime and the trial which followed.

If you want to get a feel for how a nineteenth-century investigation and trial were carried out, this is an excellent and invaluable resource. Though occurring in the first half of the century, there are aspects which are applicable throughout. The medical theories toward insanity will evolve the further you get into the 1800s, but the appearance of the government official (here the cantonal judge; in England the coroner) to inspect the scene, the role of police, the manhunt, and the mechanisms of the investigation will be similar at the beginning of the century until almost the end.

Of equal value, is the access it gives us to the minds of those who carried out the investigation and were tasked with the responsibility of determining Pierre’s fate.

Pet Peeves

The Cold. This is a nod to Toronto’s first snowfall of the season which happened a few days ago. Cold in itself can be an annoyance if the wind is throwing snow into your face and you realize you forgot your gloves at home. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I grew up in a place with lots of snow and cold temperatures. (Regularly hit -40F/C.) There is a quality to cold that you have to experience to understand. With that understanding comes the knowledge of how quickly it can kill you. I’ve read stories about individuals walking for miles through the snow without shoes and not suffering frost bite and not dying. There was a reality show I was subjected to (against my will) set in the north of Canada. They interviewed an individual who had apparently been out on the frozen lake for about an hour. I know it was fake because he was Caucasian and his face wasn’t red. I’ve seen movies where people lie in the snow (sometimes without a coat) for prolonged periods of time and then get up and walk around without any difficulty. When you’re lying in the snow, it melts, and that water seeps through your clothes and is like ice. And it burns.

I remember heading home to North Bay on the late bus up from Toronto. It was about -36C/-32F and the heater wasn’t working properly. By the time I got home (over 5 hours later) I could barely stand up. I couldn’t walk without assistance. My knees wouldn’t straighten and I was bent over at the waist. My fingers were crooked into claws that I couldn’t move. I didn’t have the strength or dexterity to undo the zipper on my coat or untie my bootlaces. It was a few hours sitting in front of a fire, but not too close, before I stopped shivering and a long time before I felt warm again. And that was without being directly exposed to the elements. (A bit of explaining. We heated our house with a wood stove; as for proximity, if you’re really cold, you only sit too close to a fire once, cause the pain that follows keeps you from ever doing it again.)

So, if your characters are sent into the snow/cold be certain to include the impact and damage that the cold will have on them. And remember, they aren’t going to live for very long if they don’t get somewhere with heat, especially if they’re not properly dressed.

This Edition’s Slang

A bit of pseudo science.

Atavism: A resemblance to remote ancestors rather than to parents in plants or animals; reversion to an earlier type (Oxford Canadian Dictionary; have to get my Canadian quota in). The Oxford English Dictionary defines Atavistic as relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral. Nineteenth-century origin and based on the Latin atavus “forefather.”

As noted, one of the “scientific” obsessions of the nineteenth century was explaining why some individuals committed crimes while others didn’t. “Scientific” interest in crime did not extend to what we would refer to as “white-collar” crimes. A popular explanation, put forward by Italian physician Cesar Lombroso in his book L’uomo delinguente, published in 1876, and championed by other scientists, was the belief that individuals of the working classes were “evolving backward” which made them “savage” and uncivilized and predisposed to crime. This theory was referred to as atavism.

Recidivism: A person who relapses into crime (Oxford Canadian Dictionary). Recidivist a convicted criminal who reoffends. Origin nineteenth century from French récidiviste, from récidiver “fall back.” (OED)

Those engaged in law enforcement (from the beat cop to the judge to the members of government) were concerned about crime prevention and part of that was the identification of repeat offenders. Transportation fell into this category—lower crime by removing the repeat offender.

Because the same name was never given twice when someone went to prison, other methods of identification were needed. Tattoos were one way of doing that. It was why the British government was so thorough in its recording and description of tattoos on convicts before they left the UK and upon arrival in Van Diemen’s Land. As a result of their fixation on identifying repeat offenders, law enforcement created one of our largest collections of nineteenth-century tattoos.

Them damn’d murderin’ anatomists...

A Curiosity of Crime — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 02:04:31 GMT

“Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the Thief, Knox, the man who buys the beef.”
Nineteenth-Century Nursery Rhyme

Procuring the dead...

In honor of Halloween, this month’s topic is somewhat macabre: Grave robbing (aka body snatching).

Grave robbing, as an “industry,” was a phenomenon which started in the eighteenth century, but had its heyday in the nineteenth. At its height, it is estimated that as many as 10 bodies a night were being snatched in cities with medical/anatomy schools.

The rise in grave robbing is a direct result of the expansion of medical schools (both in number of schools and number of men enrolled). As medicine moved from lore into science, an understanding of anatomy became essential. In the words of pioneering surgeon Astley Cooper (1768-1841), “Without dissection there can be no anatomy, and…without anatomy, a surgeon can do nothing.” Cooper, a fellow of the Royal Society and surgeon to three monarchs, created an England-wide network of informers and body snatchers and boasted that there wasn’t a person in Britain whose body he couldn’t get hold of after their death.

In the United States, it is estimated that up to 40,000 corpses were dissected each year. But corpses were hard to come by. Laws and an overall aversion to dissection kept the supply low. Surgeons were limited to executed murderers, and, only a portion of those made it to the dissection table. Often, smaller private institutions were denied access to these corpses and only those with long-standing reputations were supplied by the gallows. British law in the eighteenth-century considered dissection a vile act and, in crimes considered particularly heinous, it was included as part of their punishment. Acceptance of human dissections (and the donation of bodies for medical study) is a twentieth-century phenomenon.

The best, and most reliable, supply was stolen corpses. From this demand an industry rose. In its early days, medical students themselves participated in and organized the exhumations of the recently deceased, but by the nineteenth century this was rare. Grave-robbing was so integral and so important that, with their fluctuating promises and prices, the resurrection men (aka grave robbers) could destroy a school of medicine/anatomy simply by refusing to do business with it.

Grave robbers were paid a fixed rate which ranged between 8 and 10 guineas depending on the condition of the corpse (damage done to it as well as its “freshness,” and, to a lesser extent, its age). That fee was equal to what they could earn in a year as a workman. Children and fetuses were priced by the inch.

They had to be quick. Some teams could exhume a body in 15 minutes. They dug a hole at the top of the grave and pulled the body out using a hook. They stripped the corpse of clothes, valuables, and the shroud in which it had been wrapped and, discarded them beside the grave. This was important. Bodies had no legal value, so, under the law, they couldn’t be “stolen.” So, odd as it sounds, it wasn’t illegal to be traipsing around a city with a dead naked person. It was illegal to rob a corpse which is why items were left at the grave, to prove nothing had been stolen from the deceased. If something as insignificant as a sock was left on the corpse, then you would be arrested for theft.

There were dangers other than arrest. There were high walls covered with broken glass, spring-guns hidden in the graveyards, sextons (officers of the church) with cudgels and firearms, and colleagues who would steal the body you had just stolen. One father filled his child’s coffin with gunpowder as a deterrent. If a passerby suspected that you were in the act of grave robbing, it didn’t take much to rouse a mob. Grave-robbers were beaten and whipped, sometimes to death.

Other precautions against a loved one’s grave being pillaged were metal coffins, stone or cement slabs, a framework of metal over the grave (called mortsafes), or hired watchmen. Bodies were only at risk of being stolen during the first ten days after burial. After that, they were too decomposed to be of use to the medical profession.

The end came in stages. In America, individual States passed laws to allow unclaimed corpses to be used for dissection beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Thus increasing the supply and decreasing (but not eliminating) the need for grave robbers. In Great Britain, it ended in 1832 with the passing of the Anatomy Act which allowed for similar access to corpses. The Continent wasn’t plagued by the phenomenon of body-snatching. There were no laws which limited access to bodies and there was less societal aversion to dissection itself.

As mentioned, digging up graves was risky and more than one resurrection man thought it safer, easier, and more profitable to make his own corpses. (The fresher the corpse the more it was worth.) The most notorious of them were William Burke and William Hare, in Edinburgh. (In the etching, Burke is on the right.) Their fame was such that Burke gave his name to the practice of murdering someone to sell their corpse to medical/anatomy schools. It was referred to as “burking” and people walking through the poorer areas at night were warned to be careful they weren’t “burked.”

Unlike others who murdered for the anatomists, Burke and Hare were never grave robbers. They ran a boarding house. One of their guests died with an outstanding bill and, to recover the money lost, they sold him to the local medical school which proved more profitable than running a boarding house.

The two are believed to have killed 16 people. Burke plied his victims with alcohol or opium then pinched their nose while he lay on their chest so he wouldn’t cause any damage which might decrease their value. They were caught when the body of Mary Docherty was found stripped, dead, and hidden in the straw of Burke’s bed. In 1829, Burke was hanged and dissected for his crimes. His skull is still on display at the Edinburgh College of Surgeons.

Dr. Knox, the third member of the nursery rhyme, was known to have purchased “things” from Burke and Hare, as well as from others. Though opposed to experimenting on animals, considering it morally questionable, he was perfectly happy to buy corpses that were freshly murdered and use them in his anatomy classes.

A little bit before our time, it is an interesting incident nonetheless, and related to body snatching.

On April 13, 1788 a group of children was playing outside the New York Hospital close to the dissection room. Richard Bayley, a known procurer of the recently buried, was teaching his anatomy class. His student John Hicks, was annoyed by the noise. Perhaps as a prank or as an attempt to frighten them away, he leaned out the window, waved the arm he had been dissecting and shouted, “This is your mother’s arm. I just dug it up.”

As chance would have it, one of the children had recently lost his mother. He reported the incident to his father who went to her grave, exhumed the coffin, and found it empty. A riot ensued (numbering up to 2,000 people) and lasted for days, first at the hospital, then at the jail where some doctors had fled for safety, and then in the streets as rioters searched house to house to find the doctors. The militia was called in and medical students fled the city, not returning for several weeks.

By the end, between three and twenty rioters were killed. In January 1789, a law was passed that made grave robbing illegal, imposing a penalty of public whipping, fines, and imprisonment. It also allowed the bodies of executed criminals to be used in dissection. That didn’t stop the practice. When legislation was passed in 1854, making it legal to use bodies abandoned in hospitals for dissection, grave robbers were stealing around 700 bodies a year in New York City alone. (Between 1765 and 1884, there are documented at least 25 crowd actions against American medical schools in protest to their students dissecting the dead.)

Although the public was appalled by the practice of body snatching, it was a poorly kept secret; both the act and the individuals who performed it. One of the places body snatchers frequented was the Fortune of War pub (demolished in 1910) on Giltspur Street, Smithfield, conveniently located across from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Many of them began their day drinking here. The Royal Humane Society designated it a place “for the reception of drowned persons.” The landlord is said to have shown the benches with the resurrection men’s names on them while they waited until St. Bartholomew’s surgeons could appraise the bodies kept there. The grave robbers who frequented the pub were known as the London Burkers.

As well as being a hangout for resurrection men, its is the place where, in 1666, the Great Fire of London allegedly came to a halt. It was mentioned in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

Of Particular Interest:

The Italian Boy, by Sarah Wise

In 1831, an orphan was murdered on the streets of London. In itself, the killing was unremarkable. What gives it substance is the reason for which he was murdered and what followed. His was life was ended by body snatchers John Bishop, James May, and Thomas Williams for the purpose of selling to a medical/anatomy school. When the crime was discovered, the country rose in protest. Ten months later, Parliament passed the controversial Anatomy Act.

Bishop, May, and Williams were long-time body snatchers who worked for the aforementioned Astley Cooper who had them procure specific corpses for him.

Sarah Wise provides a detailed, intimate look at the world of body snatching. The book is thoroughly researched and written in narrative form. Wise introduces us to the characters on the day the “Italian Boy” was murdered, showing us their lifestyle and providing a picture of the type of men who engaged in the business of bodies. Wise takes us into the underbelly of early nineteenth-century London, creating a vivid picture of what life and the people were like. She takes us into the squalor which made grave robbing an “attractive” occupation, and allowed for the deaths of an unknown number of individuals to supply the growing demand of anatomists.

What I like about the book is the view that it provides into the phenomenon as a whole. It doesn’t limit itself to the individuals who dug up the graves. It paints a picture of a disturbing “industry,” how widespread it was, and, unfortunately, how essential it was to the progress of medical knowledge. She introduces us to all stages of the process from hospital porters, night watchmen, church employees, doctors/anatomists, and medical students. Hospitals would leave hampers lying around their precinct to make it easier for the resurrection men to deliver their product.

She shows us the culture and the business of body snatching. How Bishop and May went from one medical/anatomy school to another looking for a buyer. How they presented the value of their “fresh ‘un” and negotiated a better price. She shows the “market factors” which drove up the price of a fresh corpse. She even explains how the presence of dirt played a role in determining if the body on offer had been “body snatched” or murdered. It is a comprehensive look at a morbid practice that was a fundamental and essential ingredient in the progress of medical science; one which doesn’t always appear in the medical history books.

Pet Peeves

Shooting into water. It makes for a dramatic scene. The hero/heroine is fleeing the villain and, for whatever reason, they end up underwater. The camera follows and we see them swimming as bullets stream through the water around them. Occasionally, one of them gets hit. Not fatally, that would end the story too abruptly, but enough to heighten the tension. Yeah. No.

In a different realm of fiction, I’ve seen commercials for a reality show where hunters are killing alligators by shooting them when the animal is submerged. Except they can’t happen.

You cannot kill your villain, or put your hero/heroine in danger by having someone shoot them while they’re underwater. Not even if your villain has an elephant gun. The force of the impact when the bullet hits the water shatters it and slows its momentum. Even if the bullet remained intact, there’s not enough force left for it to pierce flesh. So, if you want to keep your hero/heroine in peril, or make sure your villain actually dies at the end, keep them out of the water.

This Edition's Slang

A bit of morbid slang this month, and a bit of Frankenstein.

Resurrection men or resurrectionists: Synonymous with grave robbers. The obvious play on words is a reference to their habit of digging up the dead, but there was a darker aspect to the name. Scientists and medical men were raising questions about life and death and the line which divided them. Some believed the dead could be returned to life in a process referred to as revivification. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an excellent illustration of the questions being raised and the uncertainty around the answers. One scientist was John Hunter, the greatest experimental physiologist of his time. He was uncertain where to mark the point when life became death, and believed that it was possible, if only theoretical, to reverse the process. Therefore, the men who procured the recently deceased, the resurrectionists, were participating in the process of literally trying to raise the dead.

They were also referred to as body-snatchers, exhumators, lifters and grabs, sack-’em-up men, resurgam homo.

Corpses: The obvious term used to refer to the “commodities” of the resurrection men, but not the only one. Euphemisms were necessary to allow both sides of the transaction to discuss price, quantities, and delivery. Other terms were things, subjects, stiff ’uns, and bodies. While adults were referred to as “larges,” children were called “smalls.”

Bringing out the Dead...

A Curiosity of Crime — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 01:57:12 GMT

“[We should] dissect in anatomy, experiment in physiology, follow the disease and make the necropsy in medicine; this is the three fold path, without which there can be no anatomist, no physiologist, no physician.”
Marie Francois Xavier Bichat, Father of Histology

A Fascination with Death...

Autopsy is derived from the Greek words autos (self) and opsis (eye), and has been loosely translated as “seeing for oneself.” Its history stretches back to Greek physicians, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that post-mortems could provide any enlightenment as to why someone died.

When you hear “autopsy” in historical texts or crime reports, don’t be fooled into thinking doctors were able to determine cause of death or that they knew much about what they were looking at once the body was opened. Even in the nineteenth century, there were many occasions when doctors listed cause of death as “by the visitation of God.” This is a carry-over from previous centuries when it was believed that the individual had died because they had “incurred the wrath of the Almighty.” In the nineteenth century, it was code for having no idea why the person died.

Autopsies had two major hurdles to overcome before they would be of use to doctors, or to the courts. The first was the limited understanding of how the body worked. In his lecture in 1843, American physician John Locke admitted that the functions of the pancreas and spleen were not known. The second was Galenic theory. For much of history, it had a stranglehold on medicine: the belief that illness was a result of the imbalance of the four humors, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century and improvements in the microscope that micro-organisms were identified as the real source of illness. Of equal importance in the demise of Galenic medicine was the inability of anatomists and physicians to locate black bile in the body.

Much of the demise of Galenic theory was thanks to Giovanni Battista Morgagni. In 1769, he published his comprehensive textbook on pathological anatomy, On the Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy. In it he described 640 autopsies that he had carried out and correlated the symptoms with the findings of the autopsy. He furthered the principle that disease had a biological cause thereby wiping away thousands of years of medical theory. The publication of text made all previous treatises on morbid anatomy obsolete.

Though he compared and contrasted effects of disease on various organs in a systematic fashion, his was not a pathology text. It was a description of anatomic changes, but because of the limited knowledge of physiology, there could be no significant links made between symptoms, autopsy observations, and cause of death.

Substantial progress came about half a century later and it is here that the empiric foundations for modern pathology were laid alongside the establishment of procedures and techniques of autopsy. Men such as Karl Von Rokitansky and Rudolph Virchow (below) revolutionized the study of the human body and our understanding of illness and death.

A third, often overlooked, individual who changed medicine and, by default, autopsies was Marie François Xavier Bichat, the father of histology. His short career marked a turning point in medicine. He experimented with tissue in various chemicals as well as subjecting it to boiling, freezing, putrefaction, and desiccation and observed the resulting changes. From his studies he distinguished 21 different tissues in the human body and moved pathology from the organs to these tissues.

Even with this knowledge, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that physicians and scientists were able to declare with confidence how a person died.

Karl/Carl von Rokitansky (1804–1878) was the most capable gross pathologist in medical history. He contributed to both pathology (its development as an independent discipline) and our understanding of disease. He was the first physician to approach the study of pathological changes in organs in a systematic way. He correlated autopsy findings with the symptoms experienced by the individual prior to death and his pioneering work established autopsies as the primary method for investigating the mechanisms of disease.

He is reported to have performed over 30,000 autopsies and supervised another 70,000.

What made his autopsies different from the previous standard was his insistence on inspecting every part of the body. Previously, the physician would decide where the “seat of the disease lay” and examine only those organs. Once an abnormality was identified, it was declared the cause of death, and the autopsy was considered finished.

As much as he contributed to both medical knowledge and pathology, he provided no theoretical interpretations of the diseases/symptoms encountered during the autopsy. His work was further limited by his failure to employ microscopy.

Fortunately, his leading rival didn’t. (I talk about him next.)

Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow (1821–1902) revolutionized medicine by embracing modern technology, exploiting the potential of microscopy, and demonstrating that cellular pathology was the basis and origin of disease. He is considered the father of modern pathology. He was one of the first to insist that the cell was the basic unit of the body and, if science was to understand disease, it had to do so by studying the body on the cellular level. His use of the microscope to determine cause of death laid the foundations for cellular pathology.

He created the procedure that all autopsies should follow.

When he became assistant to Robert Froriep, the Prosecutor at the Charité in 1844, he found the autopsies irregular, unmethodical, and performed by individuals who had not taken the State examination and who had no technical training. Believing that this lack of systematization hampered medical progress, he published what we would consider a procedural manual in 1876 outlining how an autopsy should be conducted. If autopsies were not approached with purpose and intent, how was anything to be learned? Like his rival Rokitansky, he believed that autopsies should be comprehensive, sometimes taking over three hours to complete his.

In 1603, King Henri IV of France granted a fur monopoly to Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Monts (a Huguenot noble). But there was a condition. He must transport 100 settlers to New France each year at his own expense. Du Gua set out the next year with Samuel de Champlain as his mapmaker and geographer. They were accompanied by 79 others and they settled on the small island of St. Croix which sits along the Canadian-American border in the St. Lawrence (between New Brunswick and Maine). They found themselves stranded there over the harsh winter of 1604/05 during which 35 men died. Scurvy was suspected, but at the time, the only way to diagnose the disease was by the presence of periosteal lesions on the leg bones. This could only be done post-mortem. Champlain ordered his surgeon (there were two on the voyage) to “open several of the men to determine the cause of their illness.”

This marks the first recorded instance of an autopsy conducted in North America. Confirmation that the autopsies had been carried out came in 2003 when the site was excavated and the bodies were analyzed. The individual in Burial 10 provided the most definitive evidence. He exhibited signs of a symmetrical, trans-verse cranial autopsy. The skull was opened and the brain removed and examined. When the 1604/05 autopsy had been finished, the cranium was replaced and the individual was buried.

We know much about this doomed venture because Champlain kept detailed journals (published in 1613). He documented the symptoms of the disease which he referred to as “mal de la terre” (land sickness). At the time, it was thought that there were two forms of scurvy: one you caught at sea, the other on land. His description of the autopsies included both the external and internal examinations. For example, he identified what might have been hematomas (purple spots) on the thighs which the surgeon incised with a razor to reveal clotted blood. His notes are the only known instance in historical literature in which we have an eyewitness account of scurvy alongside the paleopathological analysis of the bones.

Champlain and his surgeons determined that the men had died of scurvy, a diagnosis which was confirmed 398 years later.

Of Particular Interest:

Forensic Medicine in Western Society, by Katherine D. Watson

It is exceptionally difficult to separate a discussion on the progress of forensic medicine from advancements in medicine in general. You can’t know what is abnormal if you don’t know what healthy tissue looks like, and you can’t know what caused an illness or death if you don’t know how the body works. The latter fed directly into the former. Katherine Watson does an excellent job of separating the two, and firmly places medicine within the context of the law.

She provides a detailed history of the close association of medicine and the legal system beginning with the early Middle Ages and going through to the twentieth century. She presents the foundations of the Western legal system and shows how those origins directly impact what happens today.

Her book is comprehensive, discussing topics as diverse as witchcraft, the participation of experts (including how that definition changed), and the role of the midwife in medico-legal proceedings.

Rather than limiting herself to the physical aspects of medicine (what we think of as pathology), she discusses criminal responsibility and the insanity defence. She talks of how medicine was at loggerheads with the legal system and how the line between “insane” and “legally insane” was drawn and bickered over. She touches upon a subject I’ve not come across in other discussions of medicine and the law. She refers to it as the “medicalization of deviance” which includes instances of infanticide, homosexuality, and suicide, and shows how the notion of deviance, and its criminality, changed alongside societal attitudes. She shows the role medicine played in all of it.

Watson casts a wide geographic net including France, Germany, Australia, and England in her book. She shows how different countries contended with the establishment and enforcement of their legal systems; where they differed and where the “common ground” was.

Quick case studies are used to illustrate the points she makes which puts the “theory” into context.

It is a heavy read and academic in nature and is not something I would recommend taking to the beach or poolside on your holiday. Having said that, it is a fascinating read. By the end, you have a comprehensive understanding of medicine in the legal system of today (and the nineteenth century) through an understanding of its foundations. If you have an interest in the development of legal systems and the role of medicine in that development, this is your book.

Pet Peeves

Horses running everywhere all the time. (This extends to erroneous portrayals of cavalry charges, but that’s another annoyance entirely.) It seems that no matter what movie or TV show I watch, more often than not the horses are running, even when pulling a carriage. Probably done for dramatic effect. Watching a horse walk is only mildly more entertaining than watching grass grow.

It was rare for people to run their horses when travelling because horses can’t run full out over great distances any more than humans can. Racing, both organized and not, is a different story. The steeplechase was invented in Ireland when locals would race between church steeples in different villages.

The earliest system for delivering messages over long distances dates from Egypt (approx. 2000 BC), and there are similar references throughout history. There were times when these messages had to be delivered quickly which meant galloping. Even when they weren’t rushing, these were relay systems with posthouses located along the route where fresh horses were available. Nobody ran start to finish on the same horse.

My father grew up on a farm in south-western Ontario before machines replaced horses, and my grandfather kept a few “trotters.” (A style of racing where the horses trot and the driver is pulled behind on a two-wheeled cart called a sulky.) He told me the story of when they had to fetch the doctor quickly. They hitched the mare up to the cutter, raced into town, got the doctor, and returned. My father thinks the mare sensed the urgency because she went full tilt in both directions, faster than she had ever run before, surprising all involved (my father, grandfather, and the doctor). The heroic feat did not go without consequences. My father said the mare was never the same; the run had ruined her. There are instances in the historical documents where horses were run so hard they died or had to be put down. So, if you are going to have your characters ride somewhere, have some kindness for the horses carrying them, and have them walk, not run. Unless they’re being chased.

This Edition’s Slang

A bit misleading to call it slang. (Okay, it’s entirely misleading.) Instead, it’s vocabulary related to the topic of autopsies.

Animism: The belief that “what happens in the world around us is somehow controlled by personal beings or gods, or some sort of spiritual forces that stand above the merely “natural” order of things.” (van den Tweel, J.G., and C.R. Taylor, “The rise and fall of the autopsy,” Virchows Arch 462, 371–380). This meant that illness and disease had no biological basis, but were the result of divine displeasure. It has been around since the millennia before Hippocrates (468-377BC) and was eventually replaced by the view that disease had natural causes.

Necropsy: Another term for autopsy. During the seventeenth century it became the habit of medical men to carry out and record post-mortem examinations, or necropsies. These were put together in collections. The most famous and influential of these was Theophile Bonet who published his Sepulchretum sive anatomia practica ex cadaveribus morbo denatis in 1679. It became the foundation for future necropsies and anatomical studies, and played an important role in the development of modern medicine.

The Paris of the Sun King...

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 21:50:16 GMT

“Day and night they kill here, we have arrived at the dregs of all centuries.”
Guy Patin, doctor of the Faculty of Medicine

With a death, a police force is born ...

We’re venturing into seventeenth-century France—Paris to be exact—to look at the founding of the city’s first police force. It is relevant to the nineteenth century, so bear with me a moment. Also, because it lets me talk about one of France’s most fascinating scandals: the Affair of the Poisons.

On a hot August day in 1665, Réne and François Touchet broke into the home of Criminal Lieutenant Jacques Tardieu. As a magistrate, Tardieu had jurisdiction over most of the crimes committed in Paris. The brothers thought the house empty. When confronted, they shot Tardieu’s wife and cut him four times in the neck. The Touchets were convicted and executed, but the event had far-reaching implications. If a man of Tardieu’s position and authority could be murdered in broad daylight, no one was safe. It was one thing for commoners to be robbed and slaughtered, quite another for it to happen to the affluent and influential.

King Louis XIV was no less affected by it and took action in order to “purge the city of what was causing its disorder.” That meant doing away with the archaic system of policing. At the time, there was no centralized, government-funded police force and the pursuit of justice was almost entirely limited to those who could afford to pay the commissioners to investigate and the court fees for taking an assailant to trial. It was the responsibility of 48 commissioners (about 1 for every 15,000 Parisians) to maintain order and enforce the law.

There was another aspect at play. In 1648, when Louis was ten years old, France erupted into civil war, the Fronde uprising, and he and his family barely escaped with their lives. The event left him with a profound fear of revolution. He built Versailles for the purpose of aggrandizement, but also to move the royal family out of the volatile city of Paris and away from revolutionaries.

Because of this, when Louis created the police force he did so with the intent of it establishing order within the city more than for enforcement of law.

In March of 1667, Nicolas de la Reynie, a lawyer and head of the Bordeaux courts, was appointed Lieutenant General of police, or police chief. The office he stepped into is not one we would recognize as a police chief’s. La Reynie was granted unprecedented authority over the city of Paris and filled a position more akin to that of a city’s mayor. He built fountains so citizens didn’t have to take unclean water from the Seine. He imposed a mud tax on everyone with a residence or business within the city. Everyone including churches, aristocracy, and the king himself. The tax was to cover the expense of cleaning and maintaining the streets, both of which fell under his jurisdiction. A refusal to pay or a late payment could result in your furniture being taken. He stopped the longstanding practice of emptying chamber pots from windows. A fine was imposed at the first violation, a beating was given with the second. The measure was only partially successful. What was no longer disposed of in the street was emptied in the back garden.

La Reynie contributed to law enforcement. He codified procedures for arrest and interrogation, making them painful enough to be intimidating to hardened criminals. Then he publicized them to act as a deterrent. He established a series of foot and horse couriers who came and went from his home at all hours of the day and night. They carried reports from the wardens in charge of the prisons and from the 48 commissioners who were required to provide daily updates. He was a tireless worker, reviewing and deciding which of the crimes should (or should not) be investigated further, and creating a “plan of action” for his officers for each case. He reported regularly to the king.

How does this tie back to the nineteenth century? When the English parliament was attempting to establish its first police force, they were met with opposition from the public, partly because of England’s view of French police, or the gendarmerie; that it was an agent of oppression rather than policing. In 1822, when the Bow Street Foot Patrol (a private police force in London operating out of Bow Street Magistrate’s court) were to be put in uniforms that had a military look to them, and again when the Metropolitan Police were issued civilian-type uniforms in the 1830s, cries of “gendarmerie” were carried throughout England. La Reynie’s gendarmerie had its roots in the military, and people in England feared that, rather than establishing an agency of law enforcement, the government was creating the instrument of martial law.

There’s another connection. Both forces were created for crime prevention, the protection of property of the wealthier classes, and creating order. Detective divisions came later.

One of the major facilitators of crime was, and still is, darkness, a problem more pronounced in the autumn and winter months. Eugène Vidocq, in his Mémoirs of 1859, recounted a period when he and his accomplices were prevented from engaging in criminal activity because “the nights were not dark enough, and the days had become too long.”

La Reynie had a solution. In 1667, he issued an ordinance for the installation of lights along all of Paris’s thoroughfares and at intersections. One of the things which particularly vexed him was the amount of vandalism done to the lamps. An ordinance was issued in January 1669 allowing witnesses to the destruction of the lanterns to make a “citizens arrest,” and made it a felony, punishable to the fullest extent of the law, to damage a lamp. As Vidocq shows us, they were still breaking lamps in the early 1800s. Because of La Reynie, Paris became the first major European city to have public street lighting which earned it the title the City of Light.

Considering himself a devout Catholic, La Reynie believed it was his duty to police the morality of Paris’s citizens. An interest shared by Louis XIV. He created a system of fines for behavior considered morally corrupt. A finders’ fee was offered which amounted to a third of the fines imposed upon those engaging in questionable behavior. Reporting a violation was as simple as going to the home of the neighborhood commissioner and lodging a complaint. Offences included swearing, public intoxication, and prostitution.

One instance brought to La Reynie’s attention was that a man named Orléans who had shouted “execrable blasphemies” during a handball match where he was struck by the ball below the belt. Despite several men speaking to La Reynie of Orléans’ good character, the police commissioner was not moved to mercy. He recommended “a long stay in prison, ordered His Majesty, [to] allow the man to recognize his error and give him an opportunity to repent.” We don’t know what happened to the fellow, but chances are the king stood by the recommendation.

One night, on the Pont Neuf, the coachman of the duke of Roquelaure and a page of the duchess of Chevreuse stabbed a student to death. The police responded quickly and arrested the two men. They were tried and convicted. Admirable, unless you were a member of France’s nobility.

They reacted to La Reynie’s intervention with outrage. They complained to the king that he had infringed upon their rights to control and punish their own servants. As far as they were concerned, the murder was a private affair and the State had no business interfering. The king sided with La Reynie and the men were publicly executed (hanged). The incident established La Reynie as the sole wielder of authority when it came to what was good for the city and its citizens.

Of Particular Interest:

City of Light, City of Poison, by Holly Tucker
There are two books this month, but the subject of both is the same: l’affaire des poisons (the Affair of the Poison). Between 1677 and 1682 scandal rocked the court of Louis XIV, as prominent members of the aristocracy were implicated in witchcraft and poison. The list included Louis’s brother, Philippe, the Duke of Orléans who was accused (and guilty) of poisoning his wife, Henrietta Anne, youngest daughter of King Charles I of England.

Within the span of five years, 367 orders of arrest were issued, 218 were carried out, 36 people were executed, 23 were exiled, and five were sent to the galleys. Others died by torture or suicide while in custody, and a fair portion of those implicated were never brought to trial, but spent the remainder of their lives in prison, sent there by a lettre de cachet. (see Vocabulary)

I’ve included both books because they provide different views of the Affair; both equally fascinating and enlightening.

In City of Light, Tucker shows us Paris’s underbelly: filth, rampant crime, daily violence, and the people who lived in its worst area. We see how the highest of French society rubbed shoulders with the lowest; how veiled women arrived by carriage to have a fortune told, to procure poison, or have an abortion. The main player in the story is Voisin, a well-known abortionist and accused witch. We glimpse the occult of the seventeenth-century, its beliefs, and the network of participants.

She walks us through the investigation, from the discovery to the arrests, the interrogations and the torture, ending with the methods of their disposal (execution, exile, or life in prison). It is intimidating how much the enforcement of laws depended on the permission of the king. Tucker does an excellent job of giving readers the feel of life in the city and the daily conditions under which its citizens lived. We see the dedication of La Reynie and how his strength of character helped to shape law enforcement.

The Affair of the Poisons, by Anne Somerset
Somerset provides access to the court of a king with absolute power, when the law was built on the command of a single individual. She shows the politics of the aristocracy as they vie for Louis’ favour and build their wealth and status upon it; including the rise and fall of Athenaïs, the king’s favourite mistress. The veil of civility and beauty is stripped away to reveal the viciousness of life at court. We are given access to the motivations of the poisoners, both personal and political, and the consequences once discovered.

Somerset does a wonderful job of showing how the scandal impacted both Louis and his court, the political crisis it caused, and the “damage control” that was done to preserve his reputation and authority. She shows how the law was subjective, both in its creation and its execution (pun sort of intended), and how power was personal, gained and lost on the whim of one man. By the end of the book, you understand what it means to have absolute power and how a single scandal could topple everything. You realize how prevalent murder was at the highest levels.

Pet Peeves

Brides always wearing white. It seems no matter the era, pop culture puts brides in white. I don’t know if it’s because they assume that such was always the case, that they didn’t do research, or that they’re catering to modern ideas of what a woman should look like on her wedding day. The bride wearing white is a modern tradition.

Western attitude about the symbolism of the white wedding dress is a nineteenth-century creation. In 1849 Godey’s Lady’s Book said this: “[c]ustom has decided, from the earliest ages, that white is the most fitting hue [for brides], whatever may be the material. It is an emblem of the purity and innocence of girlhood, and the unsullied heart she now yields to the chosen one.”

It’s a load of rubbish. Roman brides wore long veils of deep yellow while ancient Athenian’s wore long violet or light reddish robes. White was exceptionally rare and, rather than a symbol of purity, it was a display of wealth. Through much of history, wedding ceremonies were equally rare. People got married, just not with all the pomp and circumstance, but that’s another story.

Prior to the late nineteenth-century, royal brides wore white when they could afford it, but, on the whole, tended to wear gold or blue with red being one of the most popular colors. Those of lower social status wore their best dress, whatever color it might be. Brides wore their gowns on more than just their wedding day. Sometimes they would dye them a different color, and alterations were done until the changes in fashion no longer made it feasible. Even Queen Victoria wore her wedding dress to later royal functions.

The first recorded instance in Western culture is in 1406 when the English Princess Philippa married Scandinavian King Eric. (She wore a white tunic lined with ermine and squirrel fur.) Mary Queen of Scots wore white in 1558 despite it being the color of mourning in France. It was Queen Victoria who started the modern trend. Rather than wearing the red robes of office, she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg on February 10, 1840 in a gown of heavy white silk with lots of English lace.

When images of the wedding spread through Europe, white wedding dresses became more common among the wealthiest. It did not extend to the middle class until well past the century’s halfway mark. White was expensive because getting material to that “shade” was difficult, as was keeping it that pristine. It wasn’t until both dying/bleaching and cleaning methods got cheaper and easier that white became the standard for all Western brides.

This Edition’s Slang

A bit of vocabulary rather than slang per se.

Arsenal: Along with being a popular English football/soccer team, it was the name of a judicial tribunal in France in the late seventeenth century. It was known as the Chamber Ardente (Burning Chamber). It was located between the Bastille and the Seine and had served as the primary arms depot in France. Soldiers were court-martialled within its confines. “It harkened back to similar ad hoc courts of much earlier eras, where black curtains lined the walls, blocking all light, while judges tried criminals by torch- and candlelight. Now those rooms would be used to try charlatans, poisoners, and witches.” (Tucker, 168) Between April 1679 and July 1682, members met on 210 occasions, questioned 442 people, 218 of them were put in prison, 34 were executed, and 28 were sentenced to life in prison or to serve on the galleys as slaves.

Lettre de cachet (letter of the signet): A writ issued by the King of France to dispose of inconvenient law breakers, dysfunctional family members, a daughter’s unwanted paramour, or simply to settle scores. A word in the king’s ear and the letter was produced. The king, or his scribe, signed the letter and a royal minister countersigned. They were folded, sealed with wax, and embossed with the royal insignia. The person named in the letter was collected and, more often than not, spent years in a French prison or died in the Bastille. They were issued with such frequency that the king’s secretary designed and kept a collection of preprinted forms that required only the name of the condemned and the date of issue to be added.

The Office of the Coroner...

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 21:40:28 GMT

“As the office is attended with many unpleasant duties, gentlemen in these nicer times have shrunk from its performance and it has consequently fallen into disrepute; and too frequently into low indigent hands.”
John Ayrton Paris, Royal College of Physicians

Murder as Entertainment ...

In England and Wales, when a death presented as unnatural, it was the coroner’s duty to convene an inquest, made up of twelve to twenty-four men who were issued warrants to appear at a specified place and time. It was to occur as soon as possible after notification of the death. The inquests were often held alongside the investigations carried out by the police or magistrates (where there was no police presence).

The law required that it occur super visum corporis (upon viewing the body). When an inquest was convened, this was their first order of business. If the body was not viewed, the inquest was voided and any investigation had to stop. There was no formal area to view the deceased; often the jury was taken to where the body had been laid out on their bed. Equally, it was put on public display where the inquest was taking place, on a table for everyone to see. (Even in the days before refrigeration which must have added a macabre element to the proceedings.) Juries were required to examine the body, to look for signs of violence or poisoning, not simply have a quick gander and leave.

When completed, the jury gathered to hear testimony from everyone who had anything relevant to say, including any witnesses to the death. Circumstantial as well as physical evidence was given, with each bearing equal weight. The coroner, jury, and the accused were allowed to question those who gave testimony. In 1833, Coroner Charles Carttar, informed the accused, John Bodle, that “if you think proper, you may put any questions to the witnesses. You are not obliged to say anything to criminate yourself. Recollect that what you say will be taken down and, if necessary, used in evidence against you.” (Hempel, Inheritor’s Powder, 93).

Verdicts could come down quickly, with some juries taking only five to ten minutes to deliberate before giving their decision. In Scotland, they had three choices: guilty (to be held over for trial), innocent (to be released), or not proven. This last one was in situations where they suspected the defendant was guilty, but the prosecution had not made an adequate case against them.

Inquests were held in pubs. This practice grew from the belief that they should be open to all who wished to attend. That meant the venue had to be of sufficient size to contain coroner, defendant, jury, and spectators, as well as known and accessible to all. It wasn’t until the final years of the 1800s that municipal institutions or courtrooms were employed. In some rural areas, it wasn’t until the 1920s that inquests were finally relocated out of the local drinking establishment.

When I say “coroner’s inquest” you likely conjure an austere image of civility and reverence, a dignified gathering of respected, law-abiding men keen to see justice done. Weighing truth against fiction, listening intently for inconsistencies, and posing questions to clarify any confusion or omission, to ensure that the innocent went free and the guilty were sent to trial to answer for their crimes.

You would be wrong.

Coroners inquests were “spectator sports” for communities starved for entertainment, diversion, and not to mention scandal. They provided sordid conversation in the weeks that followed.

In the spirit of art reflecting life, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, offers a wonderful, and sadly accurate, portrayal of both coroners and the inquests they convened. Dickens’ coroner (who is not given a name) is described as a man who “frequents more public houses than any man alive.” In Bleak House, the inquest is convened at the Sol’s Arms where the “smell of sawdust, beer tobacco smoke and spirits is inseparable in his vocation from death in its most awful shape.” During the proceedings, the coroner had to shout to make himself heard over the rowdy crowd whose attention is divided between the inquest and playing at skittles (a game that resembles nine-pin bowling). If you’re looking for a model, it’s difficult to do better than this one.

On occasion, the rambunctiousness of participants went beyond shouts and jeers. In the 1829 inquest into the death of Catherine Cashin, a drunken juryman interrupted the proceedings. As one report stated, his “conduct so boisterous as to distress the witness exceedingly and to put a stop for a time to the solemn investigation.” After a brief pause, the coroner tried to continue the proceedings only to be interrupted by Catherine’s brother-in-law.

He demanded that the man be removed since he was in no fit state to perform his duties. The drunken juryman took offence and became noisier and more difficult to control which made his eviction inevitable. It took multiple men almost 15 minutes to overpower him and drag him from the pub. (Hempel, Inheritors Powder, 86)

(Photo: Plume of Feathers where the famous George Bodle murder inquest took place in 1833.)

Fighting wasn’t the only drama, or entertainment (depending on your perspective), that could occur at a coroner’s jury. In cases of poison, the symptoms experienced by the victim prior to death and the condition of the internal organs during the autopsy were important in proving the cause of death. That made descriptions of such unpalatable aspects a necessity. Not every juror (coroner’s and criminal trial jury) had the stomach for it. In the 1859 trail of Dr. Thomas Smethurst for the murder of Miss Isabella Bankes, the details were too much for the foreman of the jury. He fainted. He was taken outside, to the fresh air, and he remained there until he had recovered enough to rejoin the proceedings.

Before we judge him too harshly, it is reported that when Gustave Flaubert wrote his description of Madame Bovary’s suicide, he threw up his dinner on, at least, two separate evenings. (Whorton, Century of Arsenic, 121)

(Painting: The Jury, by John Morgan)

Of Particular Interest:

The Science of Sherlock Holmes, by E. J. Wagner

A short while ago, I received an email from Kim Taylor Blakemore (best-selling

author of After Alice Fell and The Deception; (https://www.kimtaylorblakemore.com) recommending a book. It happened that it was one of the first books I had read when I started this trek into the darker side of the nineteenth century. Her glowing words got me thinking that I should make others aware of its existence and value. So, before I delve into what I think of the book: Thanks Kim!

The book is E. J. Wagner’s, The Science of Sherlock Holmes and it is an excellent resource. There is a nice breadth to the forensics topics covered which makes it a good reference book for your shelves. Each chapter is a different theme, beginning with “Dialogue with the Dead” then moving on to subjects including disguises, ballistics, poison, and blood work.

Every aspect is tied back to one of Sherlock Holmes’s mysteries and she discusses how Conan Doyle fit current knowledge and science into his stories. Sometimes, going beyond what the police of the time were doing, for example the analysis of typewriters.

But Wagner goes beyond this. She interweaves Holmes with actual cases, showing how they complement or contradict each other. Some of the cases are famous, including the murder of Lizzie Borden’s parents where Wagner discusses the blood analysis employed by the police.

Of equal value to authors, she places the actions of police, scientists, and other law enforcement agents into their social context. Reputation, status, fear of scandal, all have a place in her explanation as to what was done. She not only tells us what; she tells us why. This helps authors create the scene and the characters. Social context is an aspect that doesn’t always make it into books about the history of crime.

There are gems of information that can enrich a story. Going back to the Borden case, it was here that I learned Mr. Borden’s autopsy took place on the dining room table.

There is so much you can take away from this book to enrich your fiction.

I think it’s obvious that there are many things I like about The Science of Sherlock Holmes, but what I particularly like is its style. This reads like a narrative rather than a textbook, or something intended solely to inform. It entertains as much as it intrigues and educates.

Pet Peeves

Mud. Everywhere. As someone who does a lot of walking through parks, this is an annoyance in life as well as in popular historical fiction. It doesn’t happen in every depiction of the nineteenth century, but it crops up enough that it’s made its way into my consciousness. There seems to be this idea that, prior to our century, the natural state of the earth was muddy. Streets. Muddy. Forecourts. Muddy. Paths. Muddy. Everything. Muddy.

I recall a TV series set in the American Midwest (maybe the Badlands, but can’t recall for certain). This is an area whose climate is semiarid, so mud is something they don’t experience often. But episodes showed people in the area where they were setting up living tents ankle-deep in mud. I don’t know if they are using this to create the appearance of hardship or if they think that mud is formed when lots of people walk over a patch of land. Or if they aren’t thinking at all and it has become a knee-jerk reaction to a historical setting. “Darn it, man, it’s the seventeen hundreds, there has to be mud!” And there was mud in the 1700s, but only after it rained, or the snow melted, or a bunch of people tossed a lot of water onto the dirt.

Keep in mind, not all mud is created equally. Before you describe their shoes as caked with mud, make certain that the mud actually will cake. In Bellville, (where I lived for a bit and spent far too much time running through the farmers’ fields around us) the land has a lot of clay in it. You couldn’t walk very far in the mud before you had to knock it off your shoes. Your feet got too heavy and cumbersome and sometimes, your shoe stayed in the mud while your foot moved on to the next step. But in North Bay, you don’t have that problem. You just get your shoes wet and the mud doesn’t build up on the shoes your mother told you to keep clean or else.

This Edition’s Slang

This issue we’re returning to my friend Eugène François Vidocq (nineteenth-century criminal and head and founder of the Sûreté nationale). There are so many fun and odd phrases in his Mémoires, I couldn’t stay away forever. The terms are taken from the 1859 edition published in Philadelphia. Except for the first one, each of these sayings was explained in the edition for its American audience. I have taken the core definition from there, and expanded, where possible, in other dictionary sources.

Blow the gaff: (colloquial; used through 19th century, British) To reveal a secret especially in a public way; usually referring to criminal activity.

Prigging lay: (colloquial; used through the 19th century, British) thieving business (prigs were pickpockets)

College chum: fellow prisoner. Chum was originally seventeenth-century slang from Oxford University and denoted a room-mate. In the Victorian era, it was expanded to include a fellow prisoner.

Mens rea...

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 20:21:04 GMT

“Consciousness was an unsteady entity: it could be led astray or even abolished under the sway of a more powerful individual...”
Lisa Appignanesi, Trials of Passion

...and the fear of hypnotism.

The question of hypnotism in nineteenth-century legal circles is the question of criminal responsibility; it challenged mens rea by suggesting that conscious intention could be removed entirely from a criminal act. Part of the answer was supplied by the legal system and how it defined insanity, but a bulk of it was determined by mind doctors, or psychiatrists.

There are one aspect and two schools of thought involved. Let’s look at aspect first. After, we take a look at hypnotism.

It became a popular topic in medical journals and popular magazines in the 1880s and ’90s. They discussed how it was to be defined, what its uses were, what the dangers were to both the individual and to society. It wasn’t just the law that was fearful of hypnotism. It was a diagnostic and therapeutic tool for individuals suffering physical and mental conditions. But it was also used as entertainment in theatres and stately homes. Though doctors were considered immune from the temptation of abusing their influence over hypnotized individuals, charlatans were believed to be motivated by it.

Let’s move to that aspect I mentioned. One of the great debates about hypnotism was the extent of the practitioner’s power over the patient. This had significant legal implications. If the power was absolute, there could be no criminal intent. Could someone in a hypnotic trance be made to do something immoral or illegal which they would not commit if they were conscious? This is where the two schools of thought enter the picture. The first was Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris led by Jean-Martin Charcot; the second the University in provincial Nancy led by Hippolyte Bernheim. Salpêtrière insisted that hypnotism was a psychological condition and was closely related to hysteria. This meant there was a percentage of the population who could not be hypnotized.

The Nancy school argued that hypnotism was not linked to any other pathology, including hysteria. They considered it a physical condition. They believed that some individuals were more suggestible (more easily hypnotized), and the depth of the trance varied. Most significantly, they believed everyone could be hypnotized.

The differences went deeper. Jules Liégeois, a law professor from Nancy University, claimed, in 1884, that once put into a trance, an individual became an automaton, physically and psychologically. This meant they were not in control of their actions and they would commit any act the hypnotist commanded.

The Salpêtrière disagreed, insisting that hypnotized individuals would not do nothing in their trance that they would not do when fully conscious. If the Nancy school was correct, then no one could be held responsible for criminal activity, and good, decent people could be compelled to commit the most heinous of acts. Not surprising that juries and legal systems sided with Salpêtrière.

Hypnotism was viewed as a danger to the foundations of society as well. Women were considered especially vulnerable to hypnotism, because they were believed to have a fragile hold on reason and logic. This was of particular concern because bourgeois women were considered the bastion of virtue. If they could be seduced through mesmerism and have their virtue stolen, then the foundations of the family would crumble and society would follow soon afterwards.

The fear was so great that demands were brought to the French parliament that the Nancy school should cease to teach their theories about hypnotism. Though this did not happen, in November 1892, France outlawed performances of hypnotism in an attempt to restrict its use to trained medical practitioners. Other European countries followed their lead.

The Gouffé Case

Bailiff Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé of Montmartre, Paris was reported missing on July 26, 1889. His corpse was found two weeks later in a suburb of Lyon (300 miles/480km away). He had been strangled, sewn into a burlap sack, stuffed into a trunk, and driven to the disposal site. After a lengthy investigation Gabrielle Bompard and Michel Eyraud were arrested and brought to trial. This was the first case where hypnosis was employed as a defense strategy in a criminal trial. Bompard’s lawyer portrayed her as a vulnerable twenty-one-year-old who had been “enslaved” in a hypnotic trance by her lover; a man who was twice her age. Though testimony was given to prove (and to dispute) Bompard’s ability to be hypnotized, that was not what lay at the centre of the case.

Along with the debate regarding the power of the hypnotist over their patient, there was another, equally important and dangerous, question brought before the court: Was a young woman, of a bourgeois family, capable of murder? Society insisted she wasn’t; she must have been under a hypnotic influence. But the jury did not find her entirely innocent.

Eyraud, acting as his own defence, claimed that it was Bompard who was the hypnotist, and he who was under her control.

In the end, Eyraud was sentenced to death and went to the guillotine on February 3, 1891. Bompard was sentenced to twenty years hard labour, but was paroled in 1903.

The Chambige Affair

This is a twist on the hypnotism and criminal responsibility. Rather than determining whether Henri Chambige was guilty or innocent, the question debated was whether a crime had been committed at all.

On January 25, 1888, twenty-two-year-old psychology student, Henri Chambige was found injured in his family’s stately home. He had shot himself in the mouth and had two bullets lodged in his cheek. On the bed, in gentle repose, was thirty-year-old Magdeleine Grille, dead from two gunshots to the head.

Chambige claimed the two were in love and had engaged in a passionate affair. Since they could not be together and discovery would mean dishonour, Grille suggested a suicide pact. Madame Grille’s family disputed the claim, insisting that Chambige had used mesmerism to rape her twice and then murder her. Grille’s doctor claimed that her expression in death was more akin to someone who had been “magnetized” than someone who had committed suicide.

Much of this has to do with society’s beliefs of what bourgeois women were and were not capable of. Grille’s family argued she was incapable of engaging in an affair. Prominent jurist, Gabriel Tarde, diagnosed Grille as a ‘doublement de la vie’ or split personality (a derivation of hysteria). In other words, the only way she could engage in a love affair was if she were insane.

Chambige was given seven years labour in the penal colony of Cayenne, which was lowered to seven years in an Algerian prison. (The crime took place in Algiers.) He was also required to pay the Grille family one franc as compensation for besmirching Magdeleine’s honour.

Of Particular Interest:

A Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley.

I am a firm believer that, to understand a society, you look to its fiction. It’s that writing adage “show, don’t tell.” History books will tell you; studies of fiction/literature will show you how those prejudices, fears, trends, and social norms manifested themselves in the general “psyche” of a culture. For fiction writing, this is invaluable because it allows you to understand the social context.

I was going to recommend The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, because it had two excellent articles relevant to this month’s topic. Unfortunately, it’s fairly expensive and, from what I can see, not available on Amazon (but from Blackwells for over $100). I will give it a shout out in case you are able to find it in your library, and you want to include hypnotism in your plot.

If so, this book should be read. There is a nice mixture of science and literature. Among other things, Kelly Hurley’s article, “Science and the Gothic,” put into context Dracula’s ability to control humans just by looking at them. It’s mesmerism, and, as noted, the fear of being placed in a trance and made to do things against your will was very real in the late 1800s when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. The article is an excellent review of how the two schools of thought influenced public perception about hypnotism, and puts on display the nature of those fears by examining its portrayal in fiction.

The other book, whose picture is at the top, is A Companion to Crime Fiction. I’ve read a few books about the history of crime in fiction, and found this one the most informative. Topics range from the Newgate novels of the early 1800s, to Sherlock Holmes, to the golden age, to modern-day thrillers. Its scope includes English, French, and American fiction. In contrast to The Victorian Gothic, Companion’s focus falls more heavily upon the literature. This doesn’t lessen its value as a source for history, though. After reading the articles, you come away with a clear understanding of how crime, law enforcement, culture, and social hierarchy impacted each other.

It makes clear why we have stories of detectives (either professional or men of independent means) and not stories about constables. That, even after the establishment of professional police forces, the upper classes continued to believe that breaches of the law should be handled within the family. (Murderers in fiction were sent to an asylum, or died; none went to prison.) It shows ow early American crime was intended to discourage delinquency by showing it consequences, and how the French allowed their detectives and cases to be grittier and less gentile than the English did.

In all of these discussions, social context takes the lead. The articles offer views of the fiction and how it develops, but also the society in which it is written and read. You are not only learning the what, you are also learning the why.

Having this context helps create a richer environment for your own fiction.

Pet Peeves

Regional accents creeping in. I’ve noticed a recent tendency in film and TV of bourgeois characters speaking with a regional accent. Most often Scottish. Accents indicated more than where you were from; they indicated which rung on the ladder of hierarchy you occupied, or wanted to portray yourself as occupying.

The accent we would refer to as “Queen’s proper English” was the mark of status, education, and intelligence. If your character holds social standing, either by birth or professional rank, this is what they must speak. That includes your detective.

A friend’s husband, who was from Essex, was told he would have to take elocution lessons before he would be allowed to teach.

I was introduced to a professor of Pictish studies (whose name I cannot recall). When he took a lecturer’s position at Edinburgh University in the 1970s or 80s, he caused quite a kerfuffle in academia. Why? Because this gentleman, who was born, raised, and educated in Scotland, had the audacity to keep his regional Scottish accent. That made him a social radical.

It did not matter where you were from, if you were to occupy the upper echelons of British society, you had to speak with the correct accent.

To flog a dead horse, think about the importance placed upon Liza Doolittle’s accent in My Fair Lady.

This Edition’s Slang

Not so much slang this month as terminology.

Mesmerism: The process or practice of inducing a hypnotic state by the influence of an operator over the will and nervous system of the patient. (Oxford Canadian Dictionary) First appeared in 1784, but not in general use until the mid-nineteenth century. Originally the phenomenon was referred to as animal magnetism and its practitioners as “magnetizers.” Terminology changed soon after its arrival in England and became mesmerism and mesmerists. (Though doctors would never refer to themselves as mesmerists.).

Derived from its “creator,” Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), it swept across Europe, arriving n England last, in the 1830s. He believed an invisible, natural force existed in all living things, referred to as “magnetic fluid.” (Yes, Luke, the Force is real.) The transfer of this energy (or ethereal fluid) between patient and magnetizer allowed the latter to heal, and command, the former.

Automaton: A person who behaves without active intelligence or mechanically in a set pattern or routine. (Oxford Canadian Dictionary) First appearance in writing: 1639 with reference to one of those creepy mechanical contraptions that mimic a human activity.

In the nineteenth century it was also used to refer to individuals in a somnambulistic (sleepwalking) or trance-like state. Hypnotism was believed to create such a mental state.

The Belle Époque...

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 20:06:12 GMT

“When seduction was the beginning, mischief was almost sure to overtake the seducer in the end.”
Anonymous Magistrate, quoted in the Times, December 1, 1847, p.7

...and the Era of Crimes Passionnel

France seemed more willing to accept crimes of passion than other countries—both in the law and in society. Victorian England was less tolerant. Violence committed by women was not acceptable. Such women were considered abnormal and were unlikely to gain public sympathy, even if they acted out of provocation. Though, opinion shifted when the age of vitriol crossed the English Channel from France.

Because of its complex relationship with these crimes, France will be the focus.

We have a tendency to think of crimes of passion as being a particularly bourgeois female activity. But it’s not true. Most individuals brought before the courts for these crimes were working-class, and, at least during the 1870s, 82% were male.

If we look at percentage of crimes committed by gender, a different picture emerges. Women had a greater tendency to commit crimes of passion. For men, it’s about a third of the murders (or attempted murders), but for women it is the main defence, and that percentage rises: 1881 saw 5 of 6 murders being passion crimes; 1905 saw 9 of 11; 1919 saw 14 of 14.

The closing decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth are particularly associated with crimes of passion, especially those involving vitriol (concentrated sulphuric acid). Between 1871 and 1900 France saw a rise in crimes passionnel. During this time, the Central Criminal Court in Paris (Cour d’Assises) saw 264 individuals claim “passion” as their defence. The number rose at a rate higher than that of homicide overall. In Paris in 1880, six out of 30 crimes were those of passion (20%), but by 1905 this had increased to 35%.

Women were acquitted more often than men. Partly because psychiatrists insisted that women had a weaker grip on reason, and were more vulnerable to fits of hysteria which resulted in such crimes. Juries tended to acquit men when adultery on the part of their wives or partners could be “proven.” Where concrete proof was lacking, gossip would suffice. Equally, when people were convicted, women’s sentences were markedly shorter than men’s. This leniency for women was the result of the belief that they were acting according to conviction intime (inner conviction), carrying out “natural” justice. Laws in France were particularly harsh to women, offering them little to no protection. When the law was considered unjust, their violent actions were accepted as a righting of a legal wrong. Their crimes were seen as desperate acts caused by social restrictions, gender attitudes, the injustice of the law with regard to women, and their unequal status.

This attitude was not universally applied. Class played a dominant role. Bourgeois and upper-class women were society’s bastion of virtue. When they committed violence, it was because they were driven to it; when extreme distress or the threat of lost virtue catapulted them into something resembling madness. For working-class women who committed similar crimes, they were seen as motivated solely by a desire to do harm. They were not considered bastions of virtue and were not believed to have any honor which required defending.

These crimes had a greater impact on the law than mere spectacle; and that impact was felt beyond France’s borders. This era which saw a rise in crimes of passion corresponded with the rise of alienists, mad-doctors, or mind doctors. We know them as psychiatrists.

Crimes of passion raised questions about mens rea (criminal responsibility), insanity, and where the line should be drawn in the law. Declarations of insanity could not be made by untrained laymen; they required the expertise of the emerging field of psychiatry.

The rise of crimes of passion helped to lift the reputation and public view of psychiatrists.

The press played a role in this development. It was particularly ravenous when it came to crimes of passion (where intimate private details were made public). Their reporting of psychiatric testimony (and the public’s thirst for these sordid details) helped to shape the debates about sanity/insanity. More significantly, they caused people to question what it was to be human and the established beliefs about innate character traits based on gender or social standing.

The impact of the spree of passion crimes which emerged in this period did more than satiate a public’s desire for scandal; they put a spotlight on an aspect of society that many refused to acknowledge.

In the words of Lisa Appignanesi: Pandora’s box flew open [in which] [t]ransgressive sexuality, savage jealousies, rampant forbidden desires, passions gone askew, vulnerable, suggestible, hysterical minds, were revealed to be aspects not only of those ‘others’ we label mad, but potentially of us all. (Trials of Passion, p. 2)

Of Particular Interest:

Trials of Passion, by Lisa Appignanesi.

Lisa Appignanesi chronicles three crimes in three different countries that were committed around the turn of the nineteenth century: Christiana Edmunds in 1871 (England), Marie Bière in 1879 (France), and Henry Kendall Thaw in 1906 (America). Each embodies a different face of what were referred to as crimes of passion. The elaborate scheme of Edmunds to murder Mrs. Emily Beard and replace her as Dr. Charles Beard’s wife. After a failed attempt, Edmonds embarked on a campaign of poisoning, leaving contaminated chocolates in random places, or sending them to multiple citizens of Brighton (most of them strangers). Marie Bière who shot the lover (and the father of her illegitimate child) after he abandoned her for a less complicated relationship. Thaw’s revenge killing of architect Stanford White who was his wife’s lover.

The book is far more than a retelling of these tragic stories; it is a study of society. Appignanesi puts the cases, the trials, the perpetrators, and the victims securely in their social context. For writers, this is invaluable. You learn about more than the mechanics of their crimes; you learn what society and the law thought of what they did, and how that impacted their treatment and the verdicts.

Appignanesi shows how society tried to contend with individuals of reputable social standing who committed violent crimes, and discusses how attitudes changed about the law, women, and the presumptions about what was and wasn’t natural. She deftly explains how debate around each of three high-profile cases (along with a few other crimes of passion) resulted in sweeping changes in society, the law, and the medical professions. We are shown society as a character in story.

This was the era when psychiatrists held considerable sway in court, especially with crimes of passion, and the question of mens rea comes to the forefront of legal and medical debate. Where is the line between who is insane and who isn’t? Where should that line be drawn in law? If a sane individual, overcome by rage or obsession, commits a crime, should they be held responsible? Should they be executed or sent to prison if they pose no further danger to society? Knowing how these questions were posed, approached, and, in some instances, answered can bring a richness to crime fiction. It allows you, not just to place your characters in a setting, but also in the mindset.

It is not just for stories about crimes of passion that her book is useful to authors. She provides a sense of the driving factors, and the prejudices, for each of the three systems of justice, both in the context of their different law codes, and in the attitudes each held toward women, status, crime, and culpability. Trials of Passion, helps us to understand what society was really like; a society that is often glossed over in popular fiction. She shows you the underbelly.

Her book provides authors with social context and the environment in which your story will unfold. How will society and the press react to your victim/villain and the crime committed? Just as important, she explains why some crimes of passion were treated with mercy and understanding, and others weren’t.

Pet Peeves

Writing left-handed in historical fiction. I haven’t come across any books where a character is described as being left-handed. I have seen TV/movies where someone uses their left hand when writing. They didn’t. Not in real life. This is true for more than just the 1800s. My high school history teacher, Mr. Statham, explained to us why his writing was so bad. (And it was barely legible.) He was left-handed, but when he went to elementary school, he wasn’t allowed to use his left hand. Nobody was. Especially not in the nineteenth century.

As Sita Schutt put it: “To have been left-handed in the nineteenth century was also to have been seen as backward, if not downright deviant.”*

Not convinced? Let’s turn to language. Gauche, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, means unsophisticated and socially awkward. In French, it means left. Adroit means skilful in the OED. In French, it means “according to the right.” This prejudice against left-handedness was so entrenched that it found its way into our language.

If you are thinking of having a character who is left-handed, you must have them write with their left hand. Make your story stand out from the crowd and show what it was like for left-handed people in a world that saw them as sinister. Mr. Statham was resentful of being forced to be right-handed, so, too, should your character be.

*[“French crime Fiction.” in Priestman, Martin (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. (New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2003) pp. 59-76]

I’m cheating with the second one.

Alienist: The nineteenth-century word for psychiatrist; or, keepers of people whose reason had been “alienated” (from the Latin meaning “other”). Its origins are nineteenth-century France (the noun aliéniste) and made its first appearance in print in English about mid-19th century.

Bedlam: The slang came from Bethlem Royal Hospital (or St. Mary of Bethlehem), established in the fourteenth century. It was shortened to bedlam in early- to mid-eighteenth century and it came to signify madness or chaos. It is said to have reflected the chaotic state of the establishment, made known after the public was allowed to visit and view the inhabitants.

The Dawn of a New Age

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 18:57:15 GMT

“The time-honored procedure of leaving chemical analyses to the abilities of whatever neighbourhood physician or surgeon or apothecary happened to be the one called to treat the victim of poisoning would not longer do...From the 1840s on, arsenic trials would require the services of expert chemical witnesses.
James C. Whorton, The Arsenic Century

The Witness is an Expert...

Expert witnesses began to appear at the back end of the 1700s. Most often they were doctors (a blanket term that includes physicians, surgeons and apothecaries), but they could be anyone with a specialized knowledge relevant to a court case (a bullet or shoe maker, for example). They were granted leeway in their testimony that “ordinary” witnesses weren’t. Along with presenting facts, they were allowed to express opinions and interpretations related to their specialty to help the judge/jury understand the conclusions they had come to.

Before 1836, death by poison was determined by circumstantial evidence including symptoms and appearance of the digestive tract at autopsy, which required specialist medical knowledge. The Marsh test for arsenic changed this. Doctors, especially those outside major cities, had neither the knowledge nor the experience to perform complex chemical tests with any accuracy. Chemists who became toxicologists, were the new expert witnesses. Evidence was collected by the attending doctors, then transported to the chemists/toxicologists for analysis.

Expert witnesses were not limited to criminal cases. When needed, they testified in civil cases. They were also known to bring in specimens and tools of their trade and perform demonstrations for the judge and jury to prove their science.

A few of them became famous, and their reputations in court made them influential. Henry Letheby in London, Robert Christison in Edinburgh, William Herapath in Bristol.

Mathieu Orfila, the father of toxicology and probably the most famous expert witness of the nineteenth century. He was the first scientist/chemist who focused his studies on aiding law enforcement to detect poison in human tissue. His Treatise on Poison, was the first text published on toxicology. He performed hundreds (if not thousands) of experiments to understand how various poisons affected the body to make autopsies more effective.

He advanced toxicology more than any other individual in the nineteenth century.

He appeared as a witness in trials all over France and was considered to be the definitive poison expert.

Alfred Swaine Taylor, a professor of chemistry, he was the first to lecturer in medical jurisprudence in England doing so at Guy’s Hospital in London. His treatise, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, written for medical students, is a treasure trove of nineteenth-century pathology.

Taylor was the preeminent expert witness in England appearing in more than thirty trials and examining samples from all over the UK. He met his downfall in 1842 during the murder trial of Dr. Thomas Smethurst when he discovered that the arsenic he detected in the victim’s remains might have been a false positive. When performing the Reinsch test, the copper foil had likely been contaminated from a previous test. It was years before science and the “expert witness” recovered their reputation; Taylor never did.

So, you don’t think that expert witnesses were limited to toxicologists, there’s Michael Faraday. He was a chemist, and one of his specialties was fire. His series of lectures, The Chemical History of a Candle, is still considered a key treatise on the subject.

In 1819, he appeared as a witness in a civil case between the owners of a sugarhouse and their insurance company. The point in question was whether or not whale oil had caused a fire. Faraday experimented and determined that the oil was not the cause because it was inflammable. When a member of the jury didn’t believe him, Faraday set fire to a sample of the oil’s distilled vapors he’d brought with him to court. The jury ruled in favor of the owners.

Of Particular Interest:

Law, Crime and Deviance since 1700, by Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash (eds.)

I love this book and have found it a valuable resource about crime and law enforcement. But I wouldn’t recommend buying it. (It’s quite pricey at $135-$230, though the electronic version is a bit cheaper). If you can get hold of it in your library, I would strongly suggest a perusal. The reason is in its sub-title: Micro-studies in the History of Crime.

Micro-histories, which are gaining in popularity in the academic world, are personal, and they provide snippets of information that can enrich historical fiction without requiring hundreds of pages of reading. Of greatest value are the tiny details the articles contain; details that don’t fit in the larger overview books. For authors, this offers access to a number of individual case studies and aspects that are unique to them.

It has a wide scope; everything from prostitution as a contagious disease concern, to youth crime, to prison pastors, to undercover stings to catch pubs serving alcohol during off hours. Each “case study” is put in the context of law reform, societal attitudes, and how legal reform and legislation improved, or worsened, the situation.

Sarah Wilson’s article on financial crime, explains why they were as shocking (if not more so) than violent ones. They were committed by the upper echelons of society; people thought to be incapable of committing crime.

Helen Johnston’s article on career criminal Julie Hyland revealed that prisoners could be confined to their cells for days just for singing at night. She talks about conditions inside prisons, and the parole procedure.

When starting your research, books provide the big picture, but to understand what really was going on, or to gather tiny details that will enrich your text, move quickly to articles (both from journals and conference proceedings).

Pet Peeves

Chloroform. I’m cheating a bit this month. I’ve only recently learned I’m supposed to be annoyed about this. (Which in itself is annoying.)

We’ve all seen it: the villain sneaks up behind their victim and presses a cloth over their nose and mouth. A single breath and—bang—the victim passes out. This is nothing new. Chloroform’s reputation as a quick, safe knock-out drug has been around almost from its first appearance as an anaesthetic. Reality is far different.

First, the quick bit. It’s not. Even in the hands of the most experienced surgeon, it takes about two minutes for a person to fall unconscious (longer if they hold their breath). If you remove the chloroformed handkerchief, the person wakes up in about the same amount of time.

Now, the part about it being safe. Again, it’s not. To render your victim unconscious, the chloroform has to be diluted, otherwise your victim will die of cardiac arrest. (Chloroform was used as a poison in the 1800s.) And, it causes burning and blistering when it comes in direct contact with skin. When first used as an anaesthetic, a handkerchief or towel folded into a cone was used. In the 1880s that was replaced with a mask.

Rather than making kidnapping easy, chloroform gives the victim lots of time to escape and carries a high chance of homicide.

This Edition’s Slang

Something a bit different this month: words that are still with us.

Lushy: Drunk; the state of inebriation rather than the person inebriated. (1805 America; 1815 Britain; faded out by end of the 19th century.) Eugène Vidocq, in his Mémoirs (1859) uses lush to mean wine.

Ticker: Watches. (1820s British and American). It wasn’t until the 1930s that it also referred to hearts.

In a den of thieves...

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 18:49:14 GMT

“I allowed him to go on, and returning again to the room he had before entered, he completed the gutting of it; and scarcely had ten minutes elapsed before he descended the second time, carrying on his head a bed, mattress, quilts, curtains and sheets…
“I think I shall go back a third time, if you will go with me, as we can then get down the window-curtains and blinds.”
“Agreed,” said I; “when one sleeps on straw, curtains are a luxury.”
Eugène Vidocq, Mémoirs (1859 edition).

Life of a Nineteenth-Century Thief...

Based on the above quote: When they cleaned out a house, they really cleaned it out.

Theft was the most common crime in the 1800s and items stolen are unusual by today’s standards. In addition to the above, candelabras, Etruscan vases, cloths, cashmeres, linen, and muslins were taken (Vidocq, p. 371), and in port towns, ropes often went missing from the docks.

Not everything that was stolen was sold on for profit; sometimes they were high-end everyday objects the thief could never hope to afford; a gold sniff box, or watch, for example that they kept for themselves. Grace Marks, immortalized in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, stole Nancy Montgomery’s shoes, stockings, and dresses. That she was wearing them when apprehended was used as proof she wasn’t an innocent bystander to Montgomery’s murder.

Vidocq taught me a considerable amount about the life of a thief in early nineteenth-century France; things that wouldn’t be found in history books. (More on that in the review of Vidocq’s Mémoirs.)

One thing (among many) that I found interesting was the role keys played in robberies. You were not prepared for your job until your keys were made. (p. 386)

Members of the “gang” insinuated themselves into the lives of their targets. Noel with the Spectacles, was a talented musician and teacher of the piano-forte. That gave him access to many wealthy homes, and their locks. Vidocq does not tell how the impressions were made, but he does indicate that it was an art, and that the person who made the impression was not always the person who made the key. (p. 417)

Fossard cut the keys to match Noel’s impressions. His talents were such that “nothing resisted the efforts of his skill.” His comrades regarded him as “the prince of thieves, and in fact amongst the ‘tip-top cracksmen’ that is, in the aristocracy of robbers” because of his ability to create counterfeit keys that fit perfectly into the locks. (p. 417) Cutting false keys was not easy; Vidocq took about four hours to create one. (p. 400)

The ability to fabricate keys was so entwined with robberies, that it was used as proof that you were a thief. But not by the police. During one of his jobs, Vidocq took up residence with Mother Noel who hid thieves from law enforcement, and provided shelter to those newly-released from prison. To prove he was a convict, she had him fabricate a key. She went to the ironmonger’s and purchased a key whose wards had not been cut. (Ward is what hangs down from the key and is inserted into the lock, the opposite end is the bow.) She provided him with files and a small vice, which he fixed to his bed. He created the key under Mother Noel’s watchful eye. Satisfied, she recommended him for a job. (pp. 399-400)

Though the theft would be devastating to the family, it was carried out by highly skilled individuals and without damage to house. But in 1810, a new kind of robbery made its appearance in Paris. Robberies that were “committed by ladders and forcible entries; apartments on the first and even second floor had been broken into by these extraordinary thieves.” (p. 388)

Of Particular Interest:

Mémoirs, by Eugène François Vidocq

Contemporary works of fiction and memoirs are invaluable sources for an author. (In Vidocq’s case, you could argue that his memoirs are a bit of both.) They are the opposite side of the same coin. Facts can be found within their pages that would never make it into history books.

For example, Vidocq taught me that:
· among “thieves as amongst bullies, spies, and informers” people were “called only by the last syllable of their Christian name.” So the thief Constantin was called Antin, (p. 372)
· Petite Chaise and Bons Puits were “two cabarets of renown for robbers,” (p.430)
· it was the “custom of thieves” to send a gift of food to the prison when a “brother laborer is grabbed,” (p. 434)
· some had “day jobs” as coachmen, messengers, “room-cleaners,” and, at least, two music teachers, (p. 389)
· people from Savoy were celebrated from “time immemorial” for their inability to appropriate the property of another. (p. 389).

It’s not just in these tidbits where the strength of works of fiction and memoirs lie. Contemporary narrative sources give you a feel, or flavor, for the society. In this instance, the culture of thieves in Paris. Their camaraderie, how they interacted with each other, how they organized their groups, where they found shelter and with whom, and what methods they used to protect themselves from agents of the police. You get a sense of the solidarity in the community that would not come through in secondary texts. It wasn’t until reading Vidocq that I understood the pervasiveness, and importance, of identification papers in France. The frequency with which they were required and the seriousness of the consequences if you traveled without them—even within your own city. Before accompanying a group for a job Vidocq “declared that [he] neither could nor would venture out in the night” without his papers. (p.376)

History books might supply the core of information, but without contemporary sources, it’s difficult to get the feel of your era. For thieving in early-nineteenth-century Paris, Vidocq’s Mémoirs are invaluable.

As a bonus, if you like Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, or Victor Hugo, you will find the Mémoirs just as adventurous and enjoyable.

[The link takes you to Google Books where there are four versions, two of which were published in the nineteenth century. They are of varying lengths. The 1834 edition 458 pages, while the 1844 edition is 311 pages. It includes a second book, Salvador, or Memoirs of a Marquis, written by “Vidocq, Chief of the Parisian Police.” The 1859 edition (580 pages) from where I take my references, is not available on this link, nor is the 1829 edition which is 4 volumes. I recommend consulting the longer versions if you can get access to them.]

Pet Peeves

That whole cutting your hand to become blood brothers thing. This is anatomy and whoever started this either didn’t know anything about the hand, or didn’t care.

There’s not much flesh on your palms, which means you don’t have to go very deep to do catastrophic damage. How? By cutting the tendons. It annoys me when I see characters drag their blade across the center of their palm, and still have the ability to make a fist to shake the other guy’s hand.

If such a cut occurred, they’d require surgery to sew the tendons back together, then undergo a period of recovery as they healed. Then, maybe, if the operation was done correctly, they’d have use of their fingers again. Sometimes, not so much. Either way, no one is going risk losing the use of their hand to demonstrate the sincerity of their pledge.

You could try making a small incision on the fleshy bit at the bottom of your thumb, but even this has its dangers. There are tendons there as well (though deeper). The largest artery in your hand goes into your thumb, and anyone who has cut into it knows how much it bleeds. A lot. So, it’s going to be very (very) messy. At university, I sliced the pad of my thumb down to the bone (nearly took it off). By the time my housemate answered my call for assistance (less than a minute), there was so much blood running down my arm, she thought I’d sliced my thumb off. We ruined two kitchen towels before we got it stopped, and cleaned up, enough to get a cab to emergency. (Needed it stitched and washed to remove the metal flecks…it’s a long story.)

So, if you have a character cut their hand to pledge allegiance, make certain you have a skilled surgeon close by and a block of time for them to recover (possibly) the use of their fingers.

This Edition’s Slang

Cracksman: (first appeared in 1812; used throughout century) British and American. Burglar or safecracker.

Fake: (colloquial; used through 19th and into 20th century) British and American. To quote the Oxford English Dictionary: “An activity or action, typically one characterized by dishonesty or deception, usually more specifically a stratagem, a trick, a method of swindling, a con.” Eugène Vidocq, in his Mémoirs (1859), defines it as thievery. (p. 427)

The Arsenic Edition

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 02:11:21 GMT

“Poison has always been a crime of the deepest dye, because of its treacherous and secret character.”
Attorney General Sir Lionel Heald at Louisa Merrifield’s trial

Arsenic without the old lace...

Say “serial killer” and “nineteenth-century” and just about everyone will respond “Jack the Ripper.” Some will refer to him as the first serial killer. But he wasn’t.

Truth is, Europe was awash with serial killers in the 1800s; though not all exceeded him in gruesomeness, they did exceed him in victims.

The majority of the murders were done with arsenic. It was easily obtained, in almost every household, and often mistaken for English cholera (a general term that encompassed episodes of sickness and diarrhoea when other causes were not apparent). Even after James Marsh developed a method for detecting arsenic in human flesh (aptly named the Marsh Test) poisoners were not deterred (and convictions could not be guaranteed).

Not all multiple murderers were the unfeeling psychopaths we associate with serial killers. Some were just poor and desperate. One such was Rebecca Smith, hanged in 1849 at Devizes for murdering her one-month-old son, Richard. She was 43, married to an alcoholic and destitute. During the investigation, some of her other children were exhumed (she’d had 11 children in 18 years; only her firstborn survived). Toxicologist William Herapath found arsenic in two of her children, and during interrogation, Rebecca confessed to murdering the seven others. Her only regret: that her daughter would be left in her husband’s care.

Others were more sinister.

Hélène Jégado, executed by guillotine in Rennes in 1852, poisoned upward of 30 people between 1833 and 1841. She gained nothing from the deaths so her motive seems to be maliciousness. Her victims were members of different households in different towns in which she was employed.

Though with a smaller body count Gesch Margarethe Gottfied exceeded Jégado in heartlessness. Her patient nursing of her victims through their illnesses won her the nicknamed the “Angel of Bremen.” She likely poisoned them with small doses prolonging their suffering and her martyrdom. It has been suggested that she suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She murdered 15 people including both parents, her three children, two husbands, a fiance, and her brother. Gottfried was beheaded in 1831 in Bremen.

The woman who exceeds them all is Maria Catherina van der Linden-Swanenburg of the Netherlands, nicknamed “Goeie Mie.” Between 1864 and 1883, she murdered 27 people but is suspected of murdering over 100, including a dozen relatives and friends. Her motive: money. Her method: arsenic in milk. Swanenburg had life insurance policies on a number of her victims.

Though the above examples are all women, poisoning was an “equal opportunity activity” (split about 50-50 between genders). Women, though, were in an optimal position to carry out the deed and that created a measure of fear in the upper classes—death by servants’ hands. Women were the cooks and the individuals expected to nurse you back to health, should you fall ill. That made slipping a bit of arsenic into a drink or sprinkling it on a bit of cake far too easy, and, in some cases, far too tempting.

One final, chilling thought. We can only talk about the people (serial killers and not) who were brought to trial. As for the rest, nothing can be said except that the number of victims and murderers we don’t know about far (far) exceeds the number that we do.

Of Particular Interest:
The Inheritor’s Powder, by Sandra Hempel

This is a fascinating, and disturbing, tale of widespread poisoning in nineteenth-century England.

Arsenic has been dubbed the inheritor’s powder, but as Hempel illustrates, it was a far more complicated phenomenon than bumping off parents; more often parents used arsenic to dispose of unwanted children.

Inheritor’s Powder goes through the stable of court cases that mark the milestones in arsenic’s history (George Bodle, Marie Lafarge, Eliza Fanning, Sarah Chesham), but it is more than a catalogue of villains.

Hempel puts arsenic and poisoning in its social context. The attitude of society toward it—horrified by its easy availability, yet nonchalant about its presence in their homes. How the onset of life insurance policies and burial clubs increased the number of poisonings; how arsenic was often used by poor unwed mothers as an alternative to starvation and by fathers to dispose of unwanted illegitimate children.

You get a feel for the English legal system of the nineteenth century and how different it was from today. Sudden death under suspicious circumstances was not enough to initiate an investigation by the coroner. How the cost of a trial was weighed against bringing a murderer to justice. And, how difficult it was to get a conviction.

In the discussion of toxicology and science, Hempel goes beyond describing the advancements and lays bare the role ego played. She talks about the setbacks and loss of trust created by bickering experts who would put their reputation above justice.

The Inheritor’s Powder provides insight into nineteenth-century England beyond the poisonings and court cases.

Spoonful of Medicine

Physicians didn’t understand how poison functioned (or how it actually killed someone). When presented with a case of possible poisoning, they worked from less than accurate theories of how the body worked and what the arsenic was doing to it.

Some of the treatments for arsenic included:
- 12 to 15 leeches on the abdomen.
- milk, linseed, lots of sugar and water.
- tickling the back of the throat using fingers or a feather to make them vomit.
- iron perchloride (a toxin) or iron oxide.

With the exception of the first one, the treatments were intended to have the patient either expel the arsenic from the stomach, or to create a chemical bond with another substance, thereby rendering it neutral and harmless.

Pet Peeves

Blades: There are two parts to this rant; both of them about how blades are handled in popular media.

First, watch any history (or fantasy) show where there are swords/knives and, at some point, someone is going to touch the blade. They’ll rest it on their palm to display it to others, or take hold of it to pass it to someone else. (Not the hilt, the blade itself.)

Trouble is, stainless steel was not invented until August 13, 1913. Prior to that, the oil on our skin was very destructive to steel. If you pressed your thumb to the metal, on say Tuesday, by Wednesday morning there’d be a perfect impression of your thumbprint in rust.

You touch the blade; you ruin the blade.

Second, is a bit gruesome and has to do with blood on the blade. It always annoys me when people sheath the blade after they’ve stabbed someone, while it’s still covered in blood. You have to clean it first. If you don’t, the blood will mess with the metal and the sword/knife will become fused to the sheath and you’ll never get it out. You’ll have to buy a new one.

To protect the blade (either to do away with a fingerprint or to clean off the blood of the dastard who touched it) use sheep skin. The woolly side. The lanolin in it protects the metal while the wool cleans off the messy bits.

And clean off the blade before the blood dries or there’s no point.

This Edition’s Slang

Clodhopper: 1. a clumsy or awkward person, 2. a large heavy shoe, 3. a plowman (only in Am.) (American/British slang; throughout the 19th century).

Cove (or covey): a man (similar to “chap”) (American/British slang; throughout the 1800s, first appeared in 1567).

Bandit's Roost - January 2022

A Curiosity of Crime — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 01:35:13 GMT

Thank you for signing up for my monthly newsletter. This is where I
share tidbits, pet peeves, book reviews, and slang.

A bit about the picture, Bandit’s Roost. The location is 39½ Mulberry Street, New York, in about 1890. It was taken by Jacob Riis, a newspaper reporter who had the radical idea that “environment rather than biological predisposition” caused crime. He used his own photographs and those of others to change people’s understanding of crime and dispel the prejudice against the poor (Phillips, Police Pictures, p. 77).

I like the atmosphere of it, and in that single moment, it tells so much about the lives of its residents.

I also thought it would be a nifty name for a newsletter about things historical and criminal.

January’s Tidbit
What do Queen Victoria, street lamps, and fashion have in common?

The color mauve. A color which did not exist prior to 1856.

It wasn’t until a year later that it made its first mark in fashion when Empress Eugenie of France began wearing “Tyrian purple.” But true popularity came in 1858 when Queen Victoria wore it to her daughter Victoria’s wedding to German Emperor Frederick III. Mauve was in demand.

But what about street lamps? To answer that, I have to do a shallow dive into chemistry. Stay with me. I promise you’ll find it useful (and not too science-y).

London’s streets were lined with gas lamps, and that gas was derived from the distillation of coal. Millions of tons per year. One of the by-products of this process was oily tar (coal tar) which was considered worthless; they gave it away for free.

Interest in chemistry was exploding in the 1800s and many of its scientists took advantage of the free substance, and experimented with it to see what they could create.

One of those individuals was William Henry Perkin who, in 1856, isolated the molecule for purple from the coal tar. (He was eighteen at the time!)

His discovery is revolutionary for two reasons. First, chemists realized their experiments could make them rich. (Perkin retired wealthy at the age of thirty-six.) This helped fuel the “chemical revolution.”

Second, and, perhaps more importantly for writers, fashion was changed forever.

Perkin’s discovery lay the foundation for the synthetic-dye industry. Prior to the 1850s dyes came from natural sources: plants or animals. This made them very expensive, which, in turn, made clothes with vibrant colors expensive and beyond the reach of most people. Purple, was the most expensive, which is why it has associations with royalty and Roman emperors. (Julius Caesar ruled that only members of the imperial family could wear it.) It took 8,000 snails to produce a single gram of the dye.

Synthetic dyes were considerably cheaper, which meant that a richer color pallet was available to a greater swatch of the population. So, clothing became more colorful, thanks to Mr. Perkin.

For historical authors, the 1850s is the dividing line between clothes that were dull with a color pallet limited to earth tones, and the variety of colors we are familiar with today.

Book Review: Scientific Sherlock Holmes, by James O’Brien

Published in 2013, it’s a bit old, but it is wonderful if you want nineteenth-century science. The science is detailed, but understandable; be prepared for multiple formulas and chemical equations. His bibliography is superb, which is often the most important part of a research book.

O’Brien talks about the science used in the Sherlock Holmes series, and then proves/disproves it. Even going so far as to argue against Isaac Asimov’s opinion that Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t a very good with his science.

As expected, he discusses the usual forensic topics, but in a more detailed scientific way than I have read elsewhere.

What I found special about this book is that it goes beyond the usual forensic sciences and provides all kinds of interesting morbid-ish things that could be of se to a writer of historical crime fiction. Things such as a formula to figure out how long it will take someone to suffocate in an air-tight room; how to make small gemstones look large (known as a doublet) to foil your thieves; and, the chemistry of using an “amalgamation” to create counterfeit coins. It is from his book that I got much of the information on the color mauve.

If you want to dive deeper into nineteenth-century science with a focus on crime, this is the book for you.

Pet Peeves

Hung vs Hanged. I am hearing an increasing number of TV shows and movies talking about people being hung. This is not so much an historical mistake as it is a vocabulary one. When they say someone was hung, they’re using the wrong verb. If you are referring to executions, or murders in your story, it’s important to get the terminology right.

Just remember the saying: Pictures are hung; people are hanged.

Spoonful of Medicine

The shortest scientifically executed operation was the amputation of an arm, performed by Robert Lister.

It lasted 33 seconds.

Legs took two to four minutes to amputate.

That changed on October 16, 1846 when general anaesthetic became available and made longer surgeries possible.

January’s Slang

Drawing a wipe: picking a pocket.

Cag-mag and snivellers: stinking meat and onions.

Bandit's Roost: The old Newsletters

The State of Forensics in the 1800s

Why the 1800s and not before?

But we’re here to talk about Forensics

Fingerprints

Ballistics

Bloodwork

Toxicology

Hair and Fibers

Forensics in nineteenth-century fiction

Don’t Limit Yourself

Archives

If the police can’t help you...

...perhaps they can.

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

If a picture is worth a thousand words…

...what would these ones say?

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

When the notes don’t seem to work...

Paper for metal...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

Checking the change in your pockets...

For the love of [fake] money...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

The language printed on the body...

Marks upon the flesh...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

Them damn’d murderin’ anatomists...

Procuring the dead...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition's Slang

Bringing out the Dead...

A Fascination with Death...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

The Paris of the Sun King...

With a death, a police force is born ...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

The Office of the Coroner...

Murder as Entertainment ...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

Mens rea...

...and the fear of hypnotism.

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

The Belle Époque...

...and the Era of Crimes Passionnel

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

I’m cheating with the second one.

The Dawn of a New Age

The Witness is an Expert...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

In a den of thieves...

Life of a Nineteenth-Century Thief...

Of Particular Interest:

Pet Peeves

This Edition’s Slang

The Arsenic Edition

Arsenic without the old lace...

Of Particular Interest: The Inheritor’s Powder, by Sandra Hempel

Of Particular Interest:
The Inheritor’s Powder, by Sandra Hempel

January’s Tidbit
What do Queen Victoria, street lamps, and fashion have in common?