The seedy night-life of gaslight nineteenth-century towns and cities was replete with violence, disease and death. It was the heyday of freaks and monsters whose means of livelihood was to sell passers-by a glimpse of their distorted limbs, and of conmen and crooks ready to murder for the price of a cheap meal . . .!
One cold, foggy evening in the late 1860s Sir Frederick Treves, a surgeon at the Mile End Infirmary in east London, was walking home along the Whitechapel Road. Hansom cabs clattered by on the wet cobbles, and Sir Frederick had to walk cautiously to avoid cracks in the pavement. Perhaps this was why he noticed a strip of canvas flapping in the cold wind. By the dim gaslight he could just make out the words: “Elephant Man, admission two pence.”
He pushed aside a greasy canvas flap and found himself in a narrow space between two buildings. In Victorian times these were known as “holes in the wall”: space was so valuable in the overcrowded slums that the gaps between houses were covered with a canvas roof and let out at low rents. There was a single dim light, and the surgeon could see a huddled figure, covered in tarpaulin, and sitting on a packing case. The surgeon gently pulled back the tarpaulin, and the man
looked up at him. What Sir Frederick saw made him gasp. The “elephant man’s” face was hardly human; the nose was a swollen, trunk-like mass of flesh, and everything else about him was distorted.
The surgeon drew up a packing case, and sat talking to this human creature who looked like a beast from a fairy tale. The elephant man proved to be a man of mystery. His body was as distorted as his face, so it was not even clear to which sex “he” belonged. He knew that his name was John Merrick and that he was about 20. But he could only speak in an incomprehensible mumble, and could apparently remember nothing of his origins, or where he had grown up. When his “keepers” came back from the pub. where they had been drinking to keep out the cold, they told Treves that they had simply found the elephant man wandering in the street, and had decided that he might bring them in a few pence as -a freak show. But he was so horrible that women fainted at the sight of him and children had fits. When the surgeon offered them five pounds for the monster, they could scarcely believe their luck. The next day Treves took the elephant man to the hospital. and gave him a private suite of rooms, cut off from the rest of the building. Few nurses could bear to see him, and before a nurse was asked to bring him food or help him to dress she was given a preliminary look at him to see if she could bear it without fainting.
Yet the elephant man proved to be gentle and charming. His gratitude touched everybody. Obviously, his life had been hard and miserable; no one had ever been kind to him. Now, at last he had warmth and comfort, and he found it almost impossible to believe that fate had finally relented towards him.
One of his favourite occupations was cutting pictures out of illustrated magazines. One of these, his most treasured, was of Princess Alexandra, who would be Queen of England when her husband, later Edward VII, came to the throne. The princess was the patroness of the hospital, and she was deeply interested in the elephant man. One day she told Treves she wanted to see him. Treves tried hard to dissuade her, but she was determined. She was shown into the elephant man’s presence. She did not flinch as the twisted, monstrous creature dragged himself towards her, or as he took her hand in his own distorted claw and bent over to kiss it. Then she was shown out. As the door closed behind her, she fainted.
This strange story of the pathetic human monstrosity involves no crime, yet it is thoroughly typical of that foggy, gaslit London that was drawn so powerfully by the artist Gustave Dore. It was a grim city in which mothers with babies at their breast slept out on the freezing pavements, a city of disease, violence and corruption. It comes to life in the pages of that curious work called My Secret Life by an unknown Victorian whom we know only as Walter. Walter often wandered around the slum streets, seeking to satisfy his peculiar desires.
He might have a sudden impulse to have sex with a pregnant woman, or with a young virgin, or even a child. On one occasion he picked up a woman and a 10-year-old girl, went back to a cold, dismal room with them and spent the night possessing them both. Moreover, it was not the first time the child had been made to give herself to a man for money. Again and again Walter describes buying young girls for a shilling.
Coarse-looking
It was a city of unsolved mystery. The Jack the Ripper murders are the most famous of these; but there are many others that are equally strange. For example, there was the case of the disappearing German baker. His name was Urban Napoleon Stanger, and he and his wife were natives of Kreuznach, in Germany. They bought a house at 136 Lever Street, behind Gray’s Inn Road.
It was a rough area, which had been the scene of many crimes, and Pentonville Prison was not far away. However, it was densely populated, and Stanger’s bakery business prospered. There were many Germans living in the area-mostly of Jewish extraction. Stanger became friendly with another baker called Felix Strumm. Strumm had a dark beard, a hooked nose, dark, deep-set eyes and a powerful body; he gave an impression of cunning and malice, but Stanger seemed to like him. So did Mrs. Stanger, a hard- faced, coarse-looking woman.
On the evening of November 12, 1881, Stanger’s journeyman baker walked past the shop around midnight and saw Stanger, Strumm and two other men talking outside the shop; then Stanger went inside. He was never seen again. When the journeyman got to the shop the next day, Mrs. Stanger immediately sent him to get Strumm, who lived nearby. He came, and stayed all day. Two people who came to see Stanger were told he had gone to Germany on business.
Elizabeth Stanger and Strumm began to be seen in public together, usually arm in arm. And a few weeks later residents of Lever Street were amazed when they saw Strumm painting out the name of Stanger from above the shop and substituting his own. Rumour went around that Mrs. Stanger had found an interesting way of disposing of her husband: converting him into meat pies. The sale of their meat pies dropped, but otherwise business continued to prosper. The police decided there were no grounds for taking action, even though several neighbours talked about Stanger’s disappearance.
In April 1882, six months after the baker’s disappearance, an advertisement appeared in the press offering a £50 reward for anyone who could give information leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of Stanger. It seems to have been inserted by a relative of Stanger’s who was not satisfied with Mrs. Stanger’s story about the sudden visit to Germany.
Finally Stanger’s solicitors brought a charge against Strumm, accusing him of forging a cheque in Stanger’s name. Strumm and Mrs. Stanger were both detained. In court Mrs. Stanger was shrill. Strumm was sullen, both were defiant. Their story was that Stanger had been a spendthrift and was heavily in debt. The virtuous Strumm often lent him money. One day, after Mrs. Stanger had taxed her husband with his feckless ways, Stanger announced he was going to leave her. Mrs. Stanger went to bed in tears, and next morning her husband had gone. Since then, she said. Strumm had helped her run the business.
It was all manifestly untrue. Stanger had nearly £500 in the bank when he disappeared, and Strumm had been out of work and in debt before he moved into the bakery in Lever Street. Stanger’s will deepened the suspicion that he had been murdered. He left his money to his wife, on condition she did not marry or live with another man. This suggested he suspected her of being involved with Strumm, something the whole neighbourhood had known in any case.
Mrs. Stanger was questioned as a witness and made a bad impression; she was hooted and hissed as she left court. When the jury announced a verdict of guilty, Strumm stood up and bellowed with rage. The judge, perhaps irritated by this display of contempt of court, sentenced him to the maximum for forgery—10 years. Strumm proved to be a bad prisoner, violent and resentful, and he served the whole term. Mrs. Stanger, surrounded by hostile neighbours, returned to Germany, in the company of Mrs. Strumm. it is said.
It seems fairly certain that Mrs. Stanger murdered her husband that night in November, and that she sent for Strumm to help her dispose of the body. But how she killed him, and what became of the body, will never be known. Strumm’s rage was undoubtedly due to a sense of the sheer unfairness of it. He had not killed Stanger; his mistress had. He had only forged a cheque. Yet it would have done him no good to denounce her to the court; the result would only be that she would probably hang, and he would get another 10 years added to his sentence as an accessory. Hence, one presumes, his baffled rage.
Two other unsolved murders created a great deal of public excitement. One of these became known as the Euston Square Mystery. One day in 1879 a man named Severin Bastendorf brought in some workmen to help him clear rubbish out of his cellar at 4 Euston Square, so that he could use it for storing coal. Under a pile of old refuse they found the skeleton of a woman, with a piece of rope around the neck. Bloodstains on the floor suggested she had been stabbed as well as strangled. The woman had suffered from curvature of the spine, and this made it easy to identify her.
She had been a lodger of the Bastendorfs, and her name was Matilda Hacker. She was a strange, eccentric woman with golden curls, who dressed like a teenage beauty, although she was approaching middle age. She apparently came from a wealthy Canterbury family, but one of her eccentricities was to skip from lodging to lodging to avoid her creditors. She had vanished 18 months before, and a maidservant named Hannah Dobbs had announced that the eccentric lady had done another moonlight flit. Shortly thereafter Hannah Dobbs herself had left.
