GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Oliver Smith finds the body of a baby
A Hawker Finds The Baby
Sunday, 26 October 1890. A hawker named Oliver Smith
was walking inside a hedgerow across a vacant lot early in
the morning when he spotted something out of place in the
landscape. As he drew closer, he realised he was peering down
at a dead baby girl and noticed she was missing a tiny shoe
and sock. Smith tracked down a doctor, Dr John Maundy Biggs,
and a constable, PC Dickerson, who removed the baby to the
Hampstead Mortuary where an autopsy was performed to
determine cause of death.
Though Dr Joseph Augustus Pepper had performed countless
autopsies as Master of Surgery at the University of London 12 he
could not say definitively what killed the child. She appeared to
be roughly two years old and was well fed and clean except for
a small smudge of dirt on her cheek. Other than this smudge,
he described in his notes that her lips were pale blue - a sign of cyanosis - due to a lack of oxygen in the blood, which
he believed was caused by asphyxiation. 13 Pepper couldn’t rule out death due to exposure either, though The Times
reported the weather for 25 October as singularly mild.
The Puzzle Pieced Together
The body of the dead child was eventually linked to the bloody perambulator, and finally, to the nearly decapitated
woman decomposing in the Hampstead mortuary. As the details of the case unfolded, Scotland Yard was as surprised as
the public - and perhaps also as relieved - to learn that the murderer was not Jack the Ripper, but a 24-year-old woman
named Mary Eleanor Pearcey (née Wheeler).
Pearcey purportedly murdered Frank Hogg’s wife, Phoebe, and infant child, Tiggie. Hogg being Pearcey’s lover of
several years, the crime was always attributed to jealousy, but the evidence at the scene suggested that Pearcey killed
Phoebe in a fit of rage and murdered the child to either silence her cries, or out of desperation having realised what
she’d done. The murder clearly took place in Pearcey’s kitchen at No. 2 Priory Street. Several witnesses saw Phoebe
pushing the pram along Haverstock Hill, the street on which she stopped at a confectioner’s shop to buy Tiggie a
butterscotch candy, or, more exactly, a toffee candy, and then along Priory Street. Later, she was seen struggling to get
the pram into the hallway at No. 2 at approximately 3.30pm, which aligns with a probable time of death based on body
temperature and weather conditions.
* * * * *
The Nature of Murderous Women
What is the character of tragedy? Aristotle tells us that an act is truly tragic only when it arouses pity and fear. 14
Separated, pity and fear provoke independent responses, but combined, they aggravate inquiry into the depths of
human nature. And so the journalists and writers who broke the story that late autumn morning in 1890 rightly named
the murders of Phoebe and Tiggie Hogg “The Hampstead Tragedy”.
Until the nineteenth century, murder was considered an act of will. Socrates argued that the unrestrained person
acted as such because he lacked self-understanding. Through reason one might willfully restrain the passions that - left
unchecked - so often caused human hurt and fatal harm. Aristotle later finessed this theory, suggesting that human
tragedy was not tied to self-knowledge, but was due to an excess of certain emotions. Such emotion was felt so intensely
among some people they could be driven to act against their better selves.
12 Augustus Joseph Pepper. Biographical entry 1849-1935. www.livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/biogs/E004458b.html
13 “Trial of Mary Eleanor Wheeler Pearcey.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online. December 1890, www.oldbaileyonline.org.
14 George Whalley, et al. Aristotle’s Poetics. (Montreal, Que: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997).
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