HOW GREED, LUST AND ANGER LED TO MURDER
The trial of a ruthless wife-killer in rural Ireland became an explosive 19th century cause célèbre
On May 3, 1849, as the brutal ravages of famine swept through Ireland, a group of women gathered at dawn on a street in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. They stood outside a modest two-storey house, hissing and jeering. When the door stubbornly remained closed against them, they began pelting it with stones until every pane of glass in it had shattered.
‘Then, surging forward, they pushed their collective weight against the front door, determined to break it down. As they heaved, there was the sound of a key struggling in the lock.
‘The battered door suddenly broke open. Several men emerged from the interior of the house, carrying a pale timber coffin on their shoulders.
‘It was this the women had been waiting for...’
Andrew Tierney’s story of the true and scandalous death of Ellen Langley opens in gripping style and rarely falters as it moves back and forth through time, reconstructing the dramatic events and social conditions that led to her agonising death.
Makeshift coffins of timber as described above were considered fit only for paupers yet Ellen was the daughter of one of the area’s ‘better families ’ and the wife of a local physician.
The reader joins the author, wondering what she did to deserve such a shabby farewell, why her husband is missing from the scene and why her funeral has provoked such a shocking display of public anger. So many burning questions.
Drawing on news and court reports, genealogical research, history, the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu and John Stuart Mill among others, Tierney offers a solidly reasoned argument as to how a confluence of lust with malign marital forces and a husband’s explosive temperament culminated in a sensational murder trial, the like of which had never been seen before in Ireland and which, according to the presiding judge, exhibited ‘a frightful amount of depravity and immorality’.
The Doctor’s Wife Is Dead belongs to the relatively new genre of Narrative Non-fiction where unsolved mysteries or suspicious events are recreated through authentic historical detail rather than imaginative feats, psychological insights or other mainstays of creative fiction.
Ellen Poe was a gentlewoman from Anglo-Irish stock who wed at 40, in those days considered terribly late in life. Her husband Charles Langley was also of the landed gentry and 15 years her junior.
Langley was a physician but he was greedy for money and had what we would now describe as several ‘conflicts of interest’. He had sidelines as a moneylender and a landlord, and he was ruthless in his dealings with tenants who during a time of mass destitution regularly slid into arrears and faced eviction.
While piecing together his portrait of the uneasy marriage between the gentle Ellen and the despotic Charles, Tierney also lays bare the two faces of 19th century Ireland: one of the threadbare and impoverished peasantry, the other of the pampered allpowerful elite.
In the Langleys’ genteel world of landed estates and servants, with family connections reaching into the top tier of society (one branch of Ellen’s family contained 1st Viscount Jocelyn, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, her first cousin was private secretary to George IV) the effects of famine were only seen at a distance, in the increased prevalence of diseases like cholera, dysentery and typhus and in tumbling rental income from the land.
When Ellen was slowly poisoned and starved by her husband she often had an egg for breakfast, tea and brown bread, then considered inferior to the more refined white bread.
Her humble repast would have been a banquet for the starving peasantry who sold their clothes to buy food and, if they were lucky, got a spot in the local workhouse. But even as Charles began plotting his new life without Ellen the storm clouds of change were gathering for the prosperous descendants of Cromwellian settlers.
For the early 1800s saw the emergence of a Catholic middle-class for whom Nenagh was a flourishing town, alive with business opportunities.
And in 1829 Catholics won the right to sit in Parliament, the prohibition against Catholics practising law had been lifted. The judge in Charles Langley’s murder trial was Nicholas Ball, a Jesuiteducated Liberal MP for Clonmel who was briefly attorney-general – only the second Catholic to hold such a post since the reign of James II.
But while the steely grip of the Anglo-
‘Confining her against her will in unwholesome lodgings and declining her medicine and food’
Irish was slowly shifting, nothing occurred to dislodge the second-class citizenship of Victorian women. Ellen Langley meekly agreed to moving to a squalid flat in a seedy part of town when her husband accused her of adultery. Charles also freely conducted a correspondence with her brother-in-law about the pittance he’d pay her after their divorce.
A twist revealed during the captivating murder trial tells why Langley suddenly became so set on ridding himself of his wife, even though he knew her fate would arouse suspicion.
And also why her family remained so strangely aloof from the ensuing legal wrangles.
Langley had penned a letter for the coroner, requesting an inquest some days before Ellen passed away. But in the face of page-turning testimony from the servants about their master’s cruelty and evidence of other parties sympathetic to Ellen, the jury did not believe the defence’s case that she had died from cholera.
The inquest jury charged Langley with ‘unnatural and diabolical treatment’ and found him guilty of manslaughter.
Initially Langley was to be tried in court for manslaughter but that was upgraded to murder where the penalty was death by hanging. On March 27, 1850, at Nenagh Assizes, dressed in black and with his long black hair parted on his forehead and falling down his shoulders the doctor faced the charge that he murdered his wife ‘by confining her against her will in a certain cold, unwholesome, and unhealthy lodging, and by declining to give her sufficient medicine and proper food’. Another count stated that death was caused by his providing her ‘with food injurious to her body and health’. The sensational evidence became a cause célèbre in these islands. With the stakes so much higher, the prosecution spared no pains on the discovery of Langley’s hidden motive for murder, relaying it in salacious detail while the defence, perhaps predictably, relied on the character assassination of Ellen. This fascinating and well researched book doesn’t just tell the story of the murderous intentions of a doctor against his wife, but positions it within the political and social milieu of the time. And it was those forces that meant that tragic Ellen Langley was not just a victim of domestic violence but also of the severe social and sexual mores of her time.