#41. A Sticker On The Cover – The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale (Paperback)

Obviously there are many books I could have chosen with a sticker on the front cover saying ‘buy one get one free’ etc, but I was interested in this book because the sticker said:

“BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER.”

That was a true crime book I had read many years ago and I found Kate’s writing and research fascinating, so I was excited to see that she had written another book based on a real crime. (It turns out, she’s actually written a few books which have passed me by, including The Haunting of Alma Fielding which I later read as #39 of this challenge!)

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and so I was interested to read another case that was infamous at the time it was committed, but has now been relegated to the back of the history books.

“On 8 July 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his younger brother Nattie set out from their East London home to watch a cricket match. Over the next ten days they spent extravagantly, visiting the theatre and eating out. The boys told neighbours their father had gone to sea, and their mother to visit family in Liverpool. But when a strange smell began to emanate from the house, the police were called. What they found threw the press into a frenzy – and the boys into a highly publicised trial.”

A book about the real life murder of a parent could be a disturbing read, but Summerscale is a skilful writer, she manages to bring context to the killing, humanity to the boy who committed murder, and comes full circle to show that redemption is achievable in certain circumstances. The book becomes less disturbing and more contemplative and brings into question some of the concepts encountered in Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment.’

Her research is thorough and factual. The start of the book shows the Coombes family tree, maps of West Ham and Plaistow as they were in 1895, and a floorplan of 35 Cave Road where the Coombes family lived. In order to take the reader back to the heart of Victorian England, and the working class terraces of the East End of London, she details the cost of goods such as bread, milk, rent and wages from the era. She also adds a note on pre-decimalised currency so that you can understand what times were like in the book and how people struggled to earn enough to eat. As the story progresses, you begin to feel like you are placed right at the centre of the crime and watching the events as they unfold.

This is not just the story of a murder though, it is an exploration of the Victorian attitude towards juvenile crime and how children were, and still are, often neglected and vulnerable; and how they can head down the wrong path if society is not there to keep an eye out or to lend a helping hand. It is a horrific case, but so too was the violent world that Robert and his brother Nattie inhabited.

“ ‘I did it’, Robert began. ‘My brother Nattie got a hiding for stealing some food, and Ma was going to give me one. So Nattie said that he would stab her, but as he could not do it himself he asked me to do it.’ ”

And so with a clear confession, and the post-mortem completed and the inquest commenced, newspapers were free to start reporting on “the most dreadful murder of the century.” Then, as now, the newspaper reports didn’t let a little thing like the truth get in the way, and many reported inaccuracies about the boys, and especially Robert’s mental capacity.

There was a popular theory raging at the time that the human race was in crisis and was heading back into the Dark Ages. “ We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic, a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria” wrote author Max Nordau. He pointed the finger of blame at Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde for the decline of people’s mental health, apparently it was due to the outrageous literature they were publishing. And just like today’s society, the populous swallowed this disinformation without question. Good ole British media!

Unlike an Agatha Christie novel, we don’t need to know who did the murder, there has been a confession after all, instead, we want to know why a child would commit murder. Summerscale guides us through the inquest which questioned the boy’s characteristics (rude, impertinent, spoilt, bad, addicted to pilfering but also sharp and intelligent.) The influence of the 'Penny Dreadful' weekly publications which Robert enjoyed reading was questioned – which would be akin to today’s arguments about the video games children are allowed to play. These details all start to paint a picture of the lives the boys led, but what was most telling was Robert’s interview with the warder when he was remanded at Holloway gaol.

Robert explained to Dr Walker that he had “an irresistible impulse” to kill his mother due to the voices in his head; he had to kill her before she killed his little brother Nattie. He explained that she threw knives at Nattie and had threatened to hit him with a hatchet. Whilst physical force was often used to make children behave in Victorian society, what Robert was describing was a mother often losing self-control and becoming increasingly violent.

The question that remained therefore was Robert an evil and calculated killer, or were the voices in his head indicative of insanity? In the 1860s, criminals were increasingly found to be insane, and the figure was continuing to rise into the 1890s. Could the injuries inflicted on Robert when he was born (forceps compressing the brain) be responsible for Robert suffering from homicidal mania?

As you flick through the book there are a couple of sections of photographs and newspaper sketches of the house, the family members, Holloway gaol, the Old Bailey in the 1890s, “reconstructions” of the crime, Broadmoor and an adult Robert Coombes which add another layer of interest to the book.

Whilst the tale of a boy murdering his mother is dark and disturbing, the true heart of this tale arrives whilst Robert is imprisoned. Let us not forget, this boy was 13 when he carried out his crime. He spent his years in prison locked up with adults including a curate who had slit a vicar’s throat and a man who had killed his daughter on Brighton beach. However, Coombes was also in the company of a man who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary and therefore was allowed an additional room in which to keep his books which Robert read. Other men would allow Robert to enrich his life learning how to play chess, cricket and musical instruments; these men gave him opportunities he hadn’t experienced whilst living at 35 Cave Road, the home where instead, he endured an abusive mother and an absent father.

Summerscale’s account of what happens after the trial gives the book its extraordinary twists and makes the second part of the book far more interesting than the original events leading up to the murder. It allowed the characters to regain some humanity and redemption. An added irony was that the adventures read about in the penny dreadfuls, seen as the cause of evil behaviour, ended up becoming the foreign adventures an abused East End boy could have only dreamt of.

This is an extraordinary and gripping tale, told in such vivid detail, that at times it is hard to believe that this isn’t a work of fiction!

 

Genre: Nonfiction, True Crime, History, Crime, Mystery, Biography, Victorian British Literature, 19^th Century

Release Date: 1^st January 2017

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 382

 

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