The body in the basement that gripped Victorian England

THE LADY IN THE CELLAR by Sinclair McKay (White Lion £20, 320pp) oNE morning in May 1879, in the coal cellar of a large London house, a teenage errand boy made a terrible discovery: a decomposing corpse with a rope around its neck.

With that as his macabre beginning, Sinclair McKay tells a compelling story, connecting class, snobbery, sex, immigration, early forensic science and, fascinatingly, if a bit tenuously, Sir David Attenborough.

The house was No 4, Euston Square, which was bulldozed in the Sixties as part of the new Euston station development.

McKay, in this meticulously researched book, has now excavated its lurid secrets.

In 1879 it was owned by one Severin Bastendorff, an immigrant from Luxembourg who had built a successful business making bamboo furniture.

Severin married an Englishwoman, Mary Pearce. By 1879 they had four children and ran their home as a boarding house.

The rapid proliferation of boarding houses in London in the mid-19th century had changed the culture of the city. This startling new convention of living cheek by jowl with strangers fascinated authors such as Dickens. The Victorian public were captivated by stories of murdered landladies, predatory widows and illicit sexual liaisons, but little intrigued them as much as the corpse in the Bastendorff cellar.

Eventually, thanks to ingenious detective work by a rising star at Scotland yard, the body was found to be that of Matilda Hacker, a woman in her 60s, who, although wealthy, chose to move between London boarding houses. In 1877 she arrived to lodge at 4 Euston Square, where she was well liked but seen as conspicuously odd, so no one questioned her sudden departure.

In fact she had been murdered, her body hidden in the cellar.

The prime suspect was the Bastendorffs’ maid, Hannah Dobbs. On trial at the Old Bailey, it emerged that she had been having a sexual relationship with severin’s younger brother, and possibly severin himself. Had Miss Hacker found out? Or had she simply discovered Hannah stealing from her? The public were agog.

It didn’t help Hannah that another sensational case was being reported at the time: that of a servant, Kate Webster, who had murdered her employer in Richmond-upon-Thames. Hannah and Kate met while awaiting their verdicts, and Hannah drew comfort from Kate’s cheerfulness.

But Kate was found guilty and hanged, her wax effigy soon on display at Madame Tussauds. she had dismembered and boiled the corpse; the skull was found more than a century later, unearthed by builders working for sir David attenborough.

Hannah was acquitted and published a bestselling account of her experiences, shedding light on more seedy goings-on at 4 Euston square. she alleged that an urchin had also been murdered there and, causing yet more indignation among victorian readers, that a dog had been tortured. she claimed the villain of the piece, to whom she’d lost her virginity in a rampant affair, was severin.

Having denied this during Hannah’s trial, severin was then tried for perjury, found guilty, and sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour.

Unsurprisingly, his marriage disintegrated. It was also no surprise that, with his attempt to assimilate into the English middle class having come so spectacularly unstuck, he became increasingly unstable.

He was eventually locked up in a lunatic asylum, where nobody listened when he told them who

really killed Matilda Hacker . . .