Unbuttoning the female killers of Victorian Britain
‘This is really steamy stuff!” says Lucy Worsley with lip-smacking relish midway through the second episode of Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley (Radio 4, Wednesdays & BBC Sounds). She and fellow historian Rosalind Crone were picking through some juicy extracts from the impassioned love letters of 18-year-old Glasgow socialite Madeleine Smith, accused, in 1857, of murdering the recipient of the letters – who had threatened to show them to her father when she threw him over for marriage to someone more suitable. Worsley promised the case would “offer the most amazing insight into the mind of a girl on the cusp of adulthood in the 19th century.” And it really did. So much so that the murder itself faded into the background somewhat, when set against the vivid social detail – high privilege, higher passion, and premarital sex in an era when we all assumed everyone to be sexless and buttoned up to the chin.
Above all, what emerged were the fearful social and economic consequences of transgression – a ruining of reputations that was often harsher than the law. Just as illustrative was last week’s opener, in which Worsley looked at the case of wealthy Balham widow Florence Bravo who, in 1876, was widely suspected of poisoning her second husband in response to what would almost certainly be regarded as coercive control these days.
Again, while all the details of the case were expertly laid out, the spotlight was on Florence’s thorny marital situation and the month-long inquest that turned into a trial by media where the most intense interest focused on her pre-marital affair with a local doctor. By the end of the episode, one could entirely understand why Bravo, though never tried in a courtroom, ended up drinking herself to death within two years.
All 10 editions are now available as a podcast on BBC Sounds, and they make fascinating listening. At the top of each, Worsley reminds us she is taking a specifically feminist look back at these Victorian murder cases. So, it’s understandable that the victims’ stories don’t always get much of a look-in. Issues around her subjects’ class and economic circumstances are the key focus. Sometimes because they protected the women from the force of the law; often because those issues are more compelling than cloudy questions of guilt or innocence.
Still, Worsley and her production team know the entertainment value of keeping us guessing about verdicts – until, of course, the verdict becomes what matters. Episodes three and four take us across the Atlantic – to explore the infamous Lizzie Borden axemurders in the US and, in Canada, the case of servant Grace Marks, best known via Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace – where social conditions for women weren’t so different. Later episodes tackle tougher subjects such as mass infanticide and serial murder. Overall, the series gives a vivid, impressively researched and engagingly presented snapshot of the extremity of some Victorian women’s lives – with plenty of resonances for our own age.
Questions of guilt also weighed on Belgrano (Radio 4, Monday & Tuesday). On the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Argentine cruiser during the Falklands War, Richard Monks’s absorbing two-part drama looked back at the still controversial case of Clive Ponting – the civil servant who leaked files that contradicted parts of the official government line on the sinking.
Public opinion rarely approves of politicians’ efforts to stifle whistleblowers, and if one thing emerged clearly from Monks’s drama, it was the vindictive short-sightedness of the decision to prosecute Ponting. He had already offered to resign and go away quietly, which would have caused a lot less fuss. As it is, the Ponting trial has gone down as one of the more ignominious moments of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and the famously “perverse” verdict of the jury in the case (acquitting Ponting of breaching the Official Secrets Act despite effectively being directed by the judge to find him guilty) lives on in history as evidence of the democratic benefits of the jury system as a bulwark against the secretive and authoritarian tendencies of governments.
As a drama, Belgrano was a little stiff and abstruse in parts, but found its heart in the second half, especially regarding the larger constitutional issues at stake. Impressively, it never really tried to make Ponting (voiced by John Heffernan), who died in 2020, into an heroic or especially radical figure. Rather he emerged almost as a stickler or pedant who, finding himself pushed into a corner, fought back with the only weapon at his disposal – the truth.