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 ego-indulgence. 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 that they thought about it all the time. But their attitude was somehow more realistic. They regarded sex as they regarded a good dinner. The first pornographic novel, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, appeared in 1749, nine years after Richardson’s Pamela. Cleland’s description of a rape could hardly be more down-to-earth:
The first sight that struck me was Mr H— pulling and hauling this coarse country strammel towards a couch that stood in a corner of the dining room; to which the girl made only a sort of awkward hoidening resistance, crying out so loud that I, who listened at the door, could scarcely hear her: Tray, sir, don’t… let me alone… I am not for your turn… You cannot, sure, demean yourself with such a poor body as I… Lord, sir, my mistress may come home… I must not indeed… I will cry out…’ All of which did not hinder her from insensibly suffering herself to be brought to the foot of the couch, upon which a push of no mighty violence serv’d to give her a very easy fall, and my gentleman having got up his hands to the stronghold of her VIRTUE, she, no doubt, thought it was time to give up the argument, and that all further defence would be vain; and he, throwing her petticoats over her face, which was now as red as scarlet, discovered a pair of stout, plump, substantial thighs, and tolerably white; he mounted them round his hips, and coming out with his drawn weapon, stuck it in the cloven spot, where he seemed to find a less difficult entrance than perhaps he had flattered himself with (for, by the way, this blouse had left her place in the country, for a bastard), and indeed, all his motions shew’d he was lodg’d pretty much at large. After he had done, his DEAREE gets up, drops her petticoats down, and smooths her apron and hankerchief. Mr H— look’d a little silly, and taking out some money, gave it her with an air indifferent enough, bidding her be a good girl and say nothing.
Cleland’s attitude towards sex is the attitude of the eighteenth century: commonsense and earthy. We find it again in Boswell’s London Journal – written for only his own eyes:
I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with the intention to enjoy her in armour [contraceptive sheath]. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling, and had command enough of myself to go without touching her.
This seems to explain why Fanny Hill, in spite of its wide popularity, found no imitators; Boswell’s contemporaries were less interested in reading about sex than doing it.
Then came the Victorian age. With an eighteen-year-old virgin on the throne – Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837 – England felt the need to mend its morals – or, at any rate, its public attitudes. In the early years of Victoria’s reign, men and women still bathed nude at many seaside resorts; all that soon changed. The undergarment known as drawers (because they could be drawn on) was soon being referred to as underpants (in the case of the male) and knickers – short for knickerbockers – in the case of women; the embarrassment, it seemed, was that the word ‘drawers’ might evoke an image of them being drawn off. This kind of thing was, naturally, self-defeating; the more there was a sense of taboo, the more people found to blush about. Women became embarrassed if they had to refer to a chest of drawers; table and piano legs were swathed in frills because a naked leg – even of wood – might invoke impure thoughts. By the late Victorian age, even ‘knickers’ had acquired a faint air of naughtiness, and the frills on table-legs – which suggested long knickers – were replaced by long table cloths. Prudery induced a kind of galloping inflation in euphemisms.
By the law of reverse effort, the taboos made sex seem wicked and attractive, with the result that there was suddenly a market for ‘forbidden’ books. On the Continent, there had always been a brisk trade in what might be called ‘anti-clerical pornography’ – books about priests who seduce their penitents and monks who indulge in sodomy or bestiality. These now began to be imported into England, together with some of the classic works of outstanding sexual frankness – Boccaccio, Margaret of Navarre, Aretino, Casanova. But by 1830, a new tone had begun to creep into the sexual literature. It can be seen in a work called The Ladies’ Tell-Tale, an undisguised imitation of The Decameron, containing various descriptions of seduction; the opening story, ‘Little Miss Curious’, tells of an eleven-year-old girl who watches the butler masturbate through a crack in his bedroom door, and who finally allows – indeed, encourages – him to seduce her. Here we can sense the influence of de Sade, with his obsession with ‘the forbidden’. It is no longer a matter of straightforward couplings, as in Fanny Hill, but of peeping through doors, surreptitious fingerings, unlikely accidents that provide the excuses for intimacy (the girl loses her virginity by falling on a stick when chasing a butterfly). The influence of de Sade is also apparent in The Lustful Turk (published in 1828) about two middle-class English girls who are captured by Moorish pirates and deflowered in the Dey’s harem by the masterful Turk. The emphasis is all on the pain: ‘he unrelentingly rooted up all the obstacles my virginity offered, tearing and cutting me to pieces, until the complete junction of our bodies announced that the whole of his dreadful shaft was buried within me.’
In 1853, an obscenity act enabled the British customs authorities to seize indecent books and pictures. The result, of course, was an increase in home-produced pornography. By the mid 1870s, there were enough books with titles like Chastity Deflowered, Peregrine Penis and Female Flagellants to enable a pornophile named H. Spencer Ashbee to devote a three-volume work – Index Librorum Prohibitorum – to listing and describing them. In July 1879 there appeared in London a ‘journal of facetiae and voluptuous reading’ called The Pearl, which continued for a little over a year. This is no mere attempt to imitate The Decameron, where the sex and humour are equally balanced, or even The Lustful Turk, with its touches of geographical authenticity; The Pearl is quite simply intended as an aid to masturbation. One of its models is the tale of ‘Little Miss Curious’; in fact, a serial called ‘Lady Pokingham, or They All Do It’ contains a lengthy episode in which a butler allows himself to be persuaded to seduce a twelve-year-old girl: