A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

It is clear, therefore, why sex crime suddenly made its appearance in the second half of the
nineteenth century: it was due to a combination of imagination - fed by the new habit of novelreading
- and of frustration due to Victorian prudery. Suddenly, sex was no longer the down-toearth
occupation it had been for Cleland and Boswell; it had become something to brood about and
gloat about. Baudelaire remarked that unless sex was sinful, then it was boring and meaningless;
what he meant was that, in the crucible of the imagination, sex could be turned into something that
was at once wicked and delicious. In the works of the new ‘sexologists’ such as Krafft-Ebing and
Havelock Ellis, we read of various kinds of fetishism - of men who were sexually excited by
women’s shoes, stays, knickers, aprons, even crutches. The sheer pressure of desire had imbued
these objects with sexual ‘magic’. Havelock Ellis himself had once seen his mother urinating in
Regent’s Park, and for the rest of his life, wrote poetically about ‘golden streams’ and persuaded
his mistresses to urinate in front of him.
All this explains why, although Victorian prudery was fast disappearing by the year 1901 (when
Queen Victoria died), the problem of sex crime showed no sign of going away. It is true that the
old, morbid sense of ‘forbiddenness’ gradually leaked away as sex became a subject that could be
discussed openly, and that one result was that violent sex crimes - like those of the Ripper and
Vacher - became increasingly rare. But there could be no return to the realistic sexual attitudes of
Defoe and Cleland. For better or worse, sex had been taken over by the human imagination.
This meant, of course, that sex had become slightly unreal. Shakespeare idealised Juliet; but he
knew precisely what she was like as a human being. The heroines of Dickens and Thackeray and
Wilkie Collins lack a whole dimension of reality. ‘Professor’ Joad once remarked that he became
interested in women when he discovered they were not solid below the waist. The Victorian
novelists give the impression that their heroines are solid from the waist down (no wonder ‘Walter’
found it impossible to imagine them having female organs like his cousins). So the new sexual
frankness - and the alarming theories of Professor Freud - made no real impact on the romanticism
of the Edwardians. They continued to be avidly interested in seduction and adultery, even when
they were convinced they were being shocked.
Newspaper proprietors - like William Randolph Hearst - soon made the discovery that sex sells
newspapers; so the public had to be told the details of every divorce scandal. Murder cases
involving adultery received headline treatment for as long as the case lasted. In America in 1904,
the sensation of the year was the trial of Floradora girl Nan Patterson for shooting her lover in a
hansom cab when he announced he was leaving her (she claimed it was suicide). In 1906,
journalists labelled the murder of architect Stanford White ‘the crime of the century’; White was
shot by a rich playboy named Harry Thaw, who had discovered that his wife - another Floradora
girl - had been White’s mistress. Both were utterly commonplace crimes of passion; but they had
the necessary element of adultery and glamour.
Even glamour was not essential; it was the sex that mattered. The sensation of 1908 was the case of
the sinister Belle Gunness of Indiana, who advertised for husbands and then murdered them. 1910
was a good year. In London, Dr Crippen was tried for the murder of his wife (yet another exshowgirl);
he dismembered her and eloped with his mistress, who was disguised as a boy. In
Venice, there was the trial of Countess Marie Tarnowska, who had persuaded one lover to murder
another in order to collect his insurance money and run away with a third. We would now describe
her as a scheming nymphomaniac; but a contemporary book about her calls her ‘the strange
Russian woman whose hand slew no man, but whose beauty drove those who loved her to commit