“The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective”, by Kate Summerscale

 

384 pages, Walker Books, ISBN-13: 978-0802715357

Detective Inspector Jonathan “Jack” Whicher was one of the original eight members of Scotland Yard’s Detective Branch, established in 1842 (and the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket in Bleak House), and we, the public, get to know this man very well indeed in Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (incidentally, isn’t Mr. Whicher a humdinger of a name for a detective, and a real-life detective, to boot?). This book gives a clear account of the famous Constance Kent murder case that rocked England and mystified all in the middle of the 19^th Century. In brief, Sometime one evening in late June 1860, 4-year-old Francis Kent disappeared from his room in his house; his lifeless body was later found in the vault of an outhouse on the property, still dressed in his nightshirt but wrapped in a blanket with his throat slashed so deeply that the body was almost decapitated, along with several other knife wounds on his chest and hands. His nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, was initially arrested, but was later released when Detective Inspector Whicher arrested the boy’s 16-year-old half-sister, Constance, instead, on July 16^th, but she was later released without trial owing to public opinion against the accusations of a working class detective against a young lady of breeding. After the investigation collapsed, the Kent family moved to Wrexham in the north of Wales and sent Constance to a finishing school in Dinan, France. More than that…well, I guess you’ve gotta read the book.

While Summerscale does an in-depth investigative job in describing the murder, the investigation and the trials that followed, Suspicions is so much more than a real-life mystery, as the author shows how the case influenced the development of forensic science and detective work, the whole reason the Detective Branch was established in the first place. She also describes how sensationalist details of the case worked their way into the literature of the time in the novels of Charles Dickens (in the aforementioned Bleak House) and Wilkie Collins (in The Moonstone with his Sergeant Cuff) and detective fiction which came after. And while the case would seem to end unsatisfactory for everyone involved, Summerscale not only follows all the major figures and the lives they lived after this horrible crime, she also presents a possible solution of the crime which, if not entirely new, has not previously been given with such convincing details, bringing in new material not contained in classic accounts of the case. In short, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher places the facts of a particular murder within the culture of the day and shows how it shifted values and changed Victorian society.