After committing murder, Robert Coombes and his brother went to watch cricket and played cards. The author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher delves into another revealing Victorian crime
In her hugely successful The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), Kate Summerscale explored that moment in Victorian Britain when the middle-class household found itself under siege from a new cadre of professional watchers. The eponymous Mr Whicher was a Scotland Yard detective, mandated to barge into an Englishman’s castle and ask impertinent questions about bedsheets and the privy. Resentment about the barbarians at the gate soon gave way among contemporary newspaper readers to an appalled fascination with what had really gone on behind the closed doors of Road Hill House in 1860 that led to the murder of three-year-old Saville Kent by his 16-year-old half-sister Constance.
For her latest forensic investigation into the throttled passions of Victorian family life, Summerscale has moved forward 35 years to 1895 and turned away from the provincial bourgeois home to the working-class terraces of London’s East End. The mechanisms of surveillance and intervention of which Mr Whicher represented an advance guard are now firmly in place. In Plaistow, east London, where the Coombes family live, there are school boards and truant officers, free libraries and municipal parks; in fact, a whole infrastructure designed to control and cajole the human life that surges around the Docklands.
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