A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

1886’ (p. 183). But a photograph of Holmes reveals that the two sides of his face are quite
different, and that it is the right that looks degenerate - the side that is governed by the left cerebral
hemisphere, the ego. Holmes speaks of ‘the malevolent distortion of one side of my face and of one
eye - so marked and terrible that... Hall Caine [a contemporary novelist]... described that side of my
face as marked by a deep line of crime and being that of a devil...’
Like Jack the Ripper, Holmes is a kind of grim landmark in social history. But his sadism was far
more cold and calculated than that of the Ripper. Why, then, has he never aroused the same
horrified fascination as the Whitechapel killer? The answer is partly, of course, that the Ripper was
never caught, so we are free to fantasise him into a monster. But it is also because Holmes’s
contemporaries failed to grasp his motivations. The account of the case in Thomas S. Duke’s
Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) - the American equivalent of the Newgate Calendar
- treats him as a swindler who murdered for money. The confession was disregarded - Holmes had
already made one lengthy confession in which he insisted that he was innocent of murder, and the
second was considered just as untrustworthy. Later writers on the case have been inclined to
believe he exaggerated his ‘wickedness’ to make it more saleable to the newspapers. But we have
seen other cases in which a criminal who has been sentenced takes pleasure in describing his crimes
in detail. The whole point of such a confession is that he enjoys telling the precise truth, without
excuses or exaggeration.
And what the confession enables us to understand is that Holmes represents a supreme example of
the criminal tendency that seems to be a part of mankind’s inheritance. Certain episodes give us a
clue: for example, locking the janitor in the ‘vault’ - a huge safe with a heavy metal door - and
allowing him to starve to death. The janitor had tried to extort money from Holmes. Holmes’s
response was murderous rage - the rage a Roman emperor would have felt if his slave had insulted
him. In the same way, his response to Emily Cigrand’s announcement that she meant to marry was
to push her into the vault, force her to sign a paper swearing that she would abandon the idea, and
then to kill her slowly with poisonous gas. (Holmes seemed to have several varieties of poisonous
gas - detectives who opened one tank were almost overpowered by an evil-smelling vapour.)
We know nothing about Holmes’s early development; but it is safe to say that he was always a
person who wanted his own way. But even Right Men have to learn to conceal the overweening
ego and appear normal to most people; only a Domitian or Ivan the Terrible can afford to indulge
every flash of rage. Holmes set out to realise the Right Man’s fantasy - total and uninhibited egoindulgence.
His ‘murder castle’ was the realisation of his dream. With its elaborate machinery for
torture, murder and destruction of bodies (he had a furnace that could reduce a body to ashes
without producing tell-tale black smoke) it became an extension of his ‘remorseless ego’. When
Holmes had watched Emily Cigrand choke to death, then destroyed her body in the furnace, he
could look at himself in a mirror and tell himself that he was one of the most powerful and
dangerous men in the world. As he strolled amongst the crowds at the Chicago Exhibition, he could
feel that he was a god in disguise. All he had done, in fact, was to turn himself into a super-spoilt
child. Only in the last months of his life did he recognise that the fantasy had destroyed his own self
as surely as any of his victims.
THE RISE OF SEX CRIME
We have already noted that sex crime was rare before the mid-nineteenth century; among all the
hundreds of cases in the Newgate Calendar, only about half a dozen concern rape. This was not
because people were less interested in sex; it is clear from Moll Flanders, Pamela and Tom Jones