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At first sight, it looked like a piece of bark from a tree. It was only as I lifted it close to my face that I could see that it really was - as promised - the scalp of a human head. Looking carefully, I could see a fuzz of short ginger hair and a tiny shrivelled ear.This was the skin from the back of the head of the late-Georgian murderer William Corder. He was hanged at Bury St Edmunds in 1828 for killing his lover and burying her beneath the floor of a Suffolk barn.
The scalp remains on display to this day at the local museum. It's among the many gruesome by-products of the 19th-century's fascination with the crime of murder, which I've been investigating for a new series on BBC4.
A Very British Murder: 19th-century fascination with murder, which Lucy's been investigating
From the Regency period onwards, the great British public loved to read about real-life murders, to sing songs about notorious crimes, and even to buy souvenirs such as mugs or china figurines depicting celebrated killers. This obsession with crime would lead to a whole new type of entertainment. From ballads to plays, crime fiction to board games like Cluedo and even the films of Alfred Hitchcock, a vast array of art forms grew out of a very British - and very ghoulish - interest in murder.
Seeing William Corder's scalp caused a strange mixture of reactions. I felt guilty at handling the remains of a real human being in such a spirit of salacious curiosity. But I also felt wildly thrilled. We all feel these emotions, guilt and pleasure mixed, as we watch a horror film, or hoover up the details of a true crime in the newspapers, or even relax with an undemanding detective novel.
This idea that murder can provide entertainment is relatively recent in origin. It wasn't really part of Georgian life. People in the 18th century enjoyed attending the public hanging of a criminal. Yet they felt some sympathy for the person on the gallows. Capital punishment was attached to so many crimes, even quite minor thefts, that the condemned were often seen as desperate, or unlucky, rather than bad.
In the 19th century all this was to change. An overhaul of the law in 1832 reduced the number of crimes for which you would swing, making the death penalty mandatory for murder and treason only.
How the deed was done: scenes from the murder of Patrick O'Connor
Now the tone of public hangings changed. The figure on the scaffold was seen as truly evil, and was hooted and hissed at. And the spectators themselves had often left close village communities to move to Britain's crowded and expanding cities. Living in an urban world, among people they didn't know, they felt a new form of fear: that of being murdered by a stranger.
Along with the fear, though, came the thrills. At a hanging you could buy a printed sheet with the dying confession of the criminal (invented ahead of time by a journalist). These simple newspapers would also include a song about the murderer. One of my favourite parts of our filming was the singing lesson I took with Vic Gammon, a folk music historian. We bellowed out a verse about William Corder's victim and the crime scene, 'After the horrible deed was done, she lay weltering in her gore/Her bleeding mangled body buried, under the Red-barn floor.' The song ends with Corder's retribution, and warns us all against killing our girlfriends and burying them in barns. But it's also a lip-smacking celebration of a gory story. In 1828, it was on the lips of everyone in Britain.
The Victorians had an interesting problem when it came to murderesses. They were reluctant to believe that the weaker and more 'virtuous' sex could kill. During filming I became attracted to the character of Maria Manning, perpetrator of the 'Bermondsey Horror' of 1849. Acting in tandem with her husband, she bashed her lover on the head and buried him beneath the kitchen floor of their London home. Then Maria double-crossed her spouse, stole their joint wealth and made off for Edinburgh by train. She was caught by some nimble footwork from the new detective branch of the Metropolitan Police, who used that very modern appliance, the telegraph, to alert their Scottish colleagues.
In court, Maria's husband's lawyer said it was all her fault. 'When once she gives way to vice,' he declaimed, a woman, 'sinks far lower than our sex.' Maria appeared in tight-fitting black satin, and let out a stream of invective against the judge and jury. I recreated this scene, shocking myself with the passion I put into Maria's words. All right, she was guilty of a terrible crime, but she was also venting against a society that judged her on her gender and appearance as much as on the actual evidence.
Charles Dickens was present at Maria's execution in 1849, and was both 'astounded and appalled' by the sight of the crowd baying for her blood. Deeply scarred by the experience, he would put Maria into his novel Bleak House in the character of the murderess in black. And her crime won her immortality. You could still see her wax figure in Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors in the 1970s. In fictionalising murder, Dickens opened the floodgates. Bleak House would be followed by a deluge of stories about killers and detectives that would dominate our leisure reading for the next two centuries.
It's easy to dismiss the Victorians as barbarous, but I've a feeling we're no better ourselves. Check tonight's TV schedule. I bet someone, on some channel, will still be getting murdered.
A Very British Murder starts on Monday at 9pm on BBC4.
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