The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Categories: History , Staff Picks , Nonfiction
Englishmen in July 1860 opened their newspapers to accounts of a shocking crime: in a respectable Wiltshire country house, a child had been abducted from his bed, murdered, and flung into the privy just outside the stable yard.
Who could have committed the murder? To the horror of the nation, it soon became apparent that it must have been one of the household. The Victorian home was supposed to be a private sanctum, the “castle” of proverb.
The local police and public opinion quickly fastened suspicion on one of the live-in servants, the nursemaid who slept unusually near her employer’s bedroom. But the case went nowhere.
Enter Jack Whicher, one of the first professional detectives of Scotland Yard, summoned from London. His investigation focuses on an even more shocking villainess: the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house, the child’s half sister.
Uproar. The rushed case is dismissed, the detective is disgraced, and wild speculation ruins the lives and reputations of almost everyone involved.
So who really did it?
Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a meticulously detailed history of the murder of young Saville Kent, but it unfolds like one of the sensational novels that the crime inspired, most famously Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Summerscale reveals each turn in the long, baffling case gradually and suspensefully.
The book is also a fascinating picture of Victorian society. Summerscale explores the ambivalent English attitude toward the detective: admiration for the detective’s almost supernatural cleverness (remember Dickens’ Mr. Bucket in Bleak House?), but deep uneasiness about this lower-class, professional spy who could worm his way into the homes of his superiors and make public their most private lives.
Class divisions, attitudes towards women and children, the workings of the extended Victorian family, and the hint of sexual secrets—the same reasons why the case riveted the attention of a nation a century and a half ago make it compelling reading now.
If you find this interesting, you might also like Michael Crichton’s equally meticulous, lightly fictionalized account of another Victorian crime, The Great Train Robbery.
