Kate Colquhoun retells with aplomb the tale of a celebrated Victorian murder trial
In the spring of 1889, the health of a Liverpool merchant named James Maybrick began rapidly to deteriorate. He could not stop vomiting; he had a sore stomach and diarrhoea; he felt dizzy and generally "seedy"; his legs were numb; his mouth was as "foul as a midden". Having taken to his bed, invalid dishes – bowls of arrowroot and glasses of beef essence – were duly sent up to his room, but nothing seemed to agree with him. A doctor prescribed a digestive physic based on prussic acid, better known as the poison hydrogen cyanide; regular doses of Fowler's Solution, a tonic containing arsenic; champagne, which was thought calming; and a chemically treated plaster that would be applied to the skin to produce a blister and thus draw "infection" from the patient's system. Unsurprisingly, none of these remedies made any difference. Maybrick was sinking fast. Fifteen days later, he died.
Was James Maybrick poisoned? And if so, by whom? (We must accept, I think, that his doctor, however good his intentions, almost certainly helped to give him a final push towards the exit.) His wife, Florence, believed he had long been slowly killing himself. A hypochondriac, Maybrick was, she insisted, addicted to all manner of pills and potions, many of which contained not only the arsenic found in his body, but strychnine and belladonna too – and after his death, some 120 such bottles were removed from the house. Her late husband's relatives, however, disagreed, suspicion having bloomed in their hearts even before he'd drawn his last breath. According to them, his loss was all Florence's work. Their grim hunch centred on three facts. First, Florence had recently soaked flypapers to extract their arsenic. Second, she had adulterated her husband's fortifying beef juice. Third, she had been having an affair with a family friend, Alfred Brierley.
Florence could not deny her adultery; she had spent two nights in a London hotel room with Brierley, and the paperwork existed to prove it. But about the poison she was clear. The arsenic from the flypapers was the key ingredient of a cosmetic face wash designed to maintain her alabaster skin, while she had tinkered with the beef essence only when she could bear her husband's desperate pleading no longer (he simply could not endure the night without his precious powder). Alas, these denials were not enough. The loathing of her in-laws (Maybrick's brothers considered her a gold-digger and a spendthrift) combined with her infidelity and outsider status (she was an American of dubious background some 23 years her husband's junior) worked to ensure that she was soon charged with Maybrick's murder in spite of the lack of convincing evidence against her. Her trial began at St George's Hall, Liverpool, on 31 July.
It's well known what happened next. In spite of the best efforts of her advocate, Sir Charles Russell, the jury found Florence Maybrick guilty, and she was sentenced to hang. There then followed a public outcry. The summing up of the presiding judge, James Stephen, was thought to have been too hostile to the accused, and many felt, having been won over by her performance in the dock, that she was guilty only of adultery. In the end, she was saved from the gallows by Henry Matthews, the home secretary. She served 15 years in prison, and died destitute in America in 1941, without ever having set eyes on either one of her two children again.
Kate Colquhoun's account of the Maybrick case is brilliantly detailed – her knowledge of the uses and misuses of poison would put that of many pharmacists to shame – even if her researches have turned up no new hard evidence and, ultimately, no final answer to the question posed by her title: Did She Kill Him? That said, her sympathies are plain, and they lie with Florence, whom she holds up just a little predictably as an illustration of all that the Victorian female was expected to be, and what fate might befall her should she fail to live up to such an ideal. Setting Maybrick in context, she quotes not only Hardy and Flaubert – from the mouth of the corpse of Flaubert's heroine, Emma Bovary, there flowed a stream of dark fluid just like that which had poured from the body of James Maybrick – but also the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton, who coined the phrase "The Girl of the Period" to refer to those dangerously modern creatures, bold and unconventional, who ached to stretch their wings (Linton was a strident anti-feminist). Colquhoun's big problem, however, is that Florence Maybrick could not have been less of a New Woman if she'd tried. She liked shopping and gambling, and perhaps she even liked sex, too (though her dirty weekend with Brierley seems to have been a one-off). But in every other respect she appears on these pages as an utterly conventional heroine, dull and shallow: a swooning cliche in a mourning veil, a cipher. Even her own mother thought her "a woman of little penetration". I only started to get truly interested in her once she was in prison – for it seemed to me that it was only there, her youth stolen by a brutal regime, that Florence Maybrick finally learned to behave badly. Locked away from the male gaze, she would sometimes unbridle her temper, allow her cunning (such as it was) free rein. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.
In the spring of 1889, the health of a Liverpool merchant named James Maybrick began rapidly to deteriorate. He could not stop vomiting; he had a sore stomach and diarrhoea; he felt dizzy and generally "seedy"; his legs were numb; his mouth was as "foul as a midden". Having taken to his bed, invalid dishes – bowls of arrowroot and glasses of beef essence – were duly sent up to his room, but nothing seemed to agree with him. A doctor prescribed a digestive physic based on prussic acid, better known as the poison hydrogen cyanide; regular doses of Fowler's Solution, a tonic containing arsenic; champagne, which was thought calming; and a chemically treated plaster that would be applied to the skin to produce a blister and thus draw "infection" from the patient's system. Unsurprisingly, none of these remedies made any difference. Maybrick was sinking fast. Fifteen days later, he died.
Was James Maybrick poisoned? And if so, by whom? (We must accept, I think, that his doctor, however good his intentions, almost certainly helped to give him a final push towards the exit.) His wife, Florence, believed he had long been slowly killing himself. A hypochondriac, Maybrick was, she insisted, addicted to all manner of pills and potions, many of which contained not only the arsenic found in his body, but strychnine and belladonna too – and after his death, some 120 such bottles were removed from the house. Her late husband's relatives, however, disagreed, suspicion having bloomed in their hearts even before he'd drawn his last breath. According to them, his loss was all Florence's work. Their grim hunch centred on three facts. First, Florence had recently soaked flypapers to extract their arsenic. Second, she had adulterated her husband's fortifying beef juice. Third, she had been having an affair with a family friend, Alfred Brierley.
Florence could not deny her adultery; she had spent two nights in a London hotel room with Brierley, and the paperwork existed to prove it. But about the poison she was clear. The arsenic from the flypapers was the key ingredient of a cosmetic face wash designed to maintain her alabaster skin, while she had tinkered with the beef essence only when she could bear her husband's desperate pleading no longer (he simply could not endure the night without his precious powder). Alas, these denials were not enough. The loathing of her in-laws (Maybrick's brothers considered her a gold-digger and a spendthrift) combined with her infidelity and outsider status (she was an American of dubious background some 23 years her husband's junior) worked to ensure that she was soon charged with Maybrick's murder in spite of the lack of convincing evidence against her. Her trial began at St George's Hall, Liverpool, on 31 July.
It's well known what happened next. In spite of the best efforts of her advocate, Sir Charles Russell, the jury found Florence Maybrick guilty, and she was sentenced to hang. There then followed a public outcry. The summing up of the presiding judge, James Stephen, was thought to have been too hostile to the accused, and many felt, having been won over by her performance in the dock, that she was guilty only of adultery. In the end, she was saved from the gallows by Henry Matthews, the home secretary. She served 15 years in prison, and died destitute in America in 1941, without ever having set eyes on either one of her two children again.
Kate Colquhoun's account of the Maybrick case is brilliantly detailed – her knowledge of the uses and misuses of poison would put that of many pharmacists to shame – even if her researches have turned up no new hard evidence and, ultimately, no final answer to the question posed by her title: Did She Kill Him? That said, her sympathies are plain, and they lie with Florence, whom she holds up just a little predictably as an illustration of all that the Victorian female was expected to be, and what fate might befall her should she fail to live up to such an ideal. Setting Maybrick in context, she quotes not only Hardy and Flaubert – from the mouth of the corpse of Flaubert's heroine, Emma Bovary, there flowed a stream of dark fluid just like that which had poured from the body of James Maybrick – but also the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton, who coined the phrase "The Girl of the Period" to refer to those dangerously modern creatures, bold and unconventional, who ached to stretch their wings (Linton was a strident anti-feminist). Colquhoun's big problem, however, is that Florence Maybrick could not have been less of a New Woman if she'd tried. She liked shopping and gambling, and perhaps she even liked sex, too (though her dirty weekend with Brierley seems to have been a one-off). But in every other respect she appears on these pages as an utterly conventional heroine, dull and shallow: a swooning cliche in a mourning veil, a cipher. Even her own mother thought her "a woman of little penetration". I only started to get truly interested in her once she was in prison – for it seemed to me that it was only there, her youth stolen by a brutal regime, that Florence Maybrick finally learned to behave badly. Locked away from the male gaze, she would sometimes unbridle her temper, allow her cunning (such as it was) free rein. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.