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English > E-text George Orwell Decline of the English Murder It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already as leep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice lon g walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roas t pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneat h you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these b lissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? If one examines the m urders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British p ublic, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and ov er again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resembla nce running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murd er, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roug hly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was a nother very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but whic h I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitte d Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had successful nove ls based on them, one has been made into a popular melodrama, and the am ount of literature surrounding them, in the form of newspaper write-ups, criminological treatises and reminiscences by lawyers and police office rs, would make a considerable library.
Before ret urning to this pitiful and sordid case, which is only interesting from a sociological and perhaps a legal point of view, let me try to define wh at it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that you never seem to get a good murder nowadays. In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by excluding the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself. Of the other e ight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged to the middle class. In one way or another, sex was a powerful motive in all but two cases, and in at least four cases respectability the desi re to gain a secure position in life, or not to forfeit one's social pos ition by some scandal such as a divorce was one of the main reasons fo r committing murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance po licy, but the amount involved was nearly always small. In most of the ca ses the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful invest igations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relative s; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in whic h the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episod es that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen's flight acro ss the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith play ing Nearer, my God, to Thee on the harmonium while one of his wives wa s drowning in the next room. The background of all these crimes, except Neill Cream's, was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were e ither wife or husband of the murderer. With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the perfect murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class a dentist or a solicitor, s ay living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and str ong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforese eable detail. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgrac eful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and mu rderer. Most of the crimes mentioned above have a touch of this atmosphe re, and in three cases, including the one I referred to but did not name , the story approximates to the one I have outlined. It was almost chance that the two people concerned committed that particul ar murder, and it was only by good luck that they did not commit several others. The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of t he dance-halls and the false values of the American film. The two culpri ts were an eighteen-year-old ex-waitress named Elizabeth Jones, and an A merican army deserter, posing as an officer, named Karl Hulten. They wer e only together for six days, and it seems doubtful whether, until they were arrested, they even learned one another's true names. They met casu ally in a teashop, and that night went out for a ride in a stolen army t ruck. Jones described herself as a strip-tease artist, which was not str ictly true (she had given one unsuccessful performance in this line); an d declared that she wanted to do something dangerous, like being a gun- moll. Hulten described himself as a big-time Chicago gangster, which wa s also untrue. They met a girl bicycling along the road, and to show how tough he was Hulten ran over her with his truck, after which the pair r obbed her of the few shillings that were on her. On another occasion the y knocked out a girl to whom they had offered a lift, took her coat and handbag and threw her into a river. Finally, in the most wanton way, the y murdered a taxi-driver who happened to have 8 in his pocket. Hulten was caught because he had foolishly kept the dead man's car, and Jones made spontaneous confessions to the police. In between crimes, both of them seem to have behaved with the utmost callousness: they spent the d ead taxi-driver's 8 at the dog races. Judging from her letters, the girl's case has a certain amount of psychol ogical interest, but this murder probably captured the headlines because it provided distraction amid the doodle-bugs and the anxieties of the B attle of France. Jones and Hulten committed their murder to the tune of V1, and were convicted to the tune of V2. There was also considerable ex citement because as has become usual in England the man was sentence d to death and the girl to imprisonment. According to Mr Raymond, the r eprieving of Jones caused widespread indignation and streams of telegram s to the Home Secretary: in her native town, SHE SHOULD HANG was chalk ed on the walls beside pictures of a figure dangling from a gallows. Con sidering that only ten women have been hanged in Britain this century, a nd that the practice has gone out largely because of popular feeling aga inst it, it is difficult not to feel that this clamour to hang an eighte en-year-old girl was due partly to the brutalizing effects of war. Indee d, the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movi e-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essential ly to a war period. Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of recen t years should have been committed by an American and an English girl wh o had become partly Americanized. But it is difficult to believe that th is case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at l east ensu...
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