The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

All this enables us to see that the stories in The Pearl are, in fact, a form of imaginary sex crime. Victorian pornography only magnified a process that had been taking place since man built the first cities. When a man lives a complex social life among his fellow men, he can no longer allow free expression to his spontaneous impulses. He could be compared to someone who has become accustomed to driving at ninety miles an hour on the open highway, and then has to get used to the heavy traffic in a city. Our minds have a brake as well as an accelerator (and, for practical purposes, we could say that the right brain is the accelerator, the left the brake). The more civilised we become, the more we have to learn to stamp on the brake. Every impulse has to be monitored and checked.

We can see the result in any shy adolescent. The tendency to blush and stammer springs out of a nervous habit of applying the accelerator and brake simultaneously. And ten thousand years or so of civilisation have turned us all into permanent adolescents. We do not all blush and stammer; nevertheless, at almost any point in our daily-lives, we are equally ready to apply the accelerator or the brake. This also means that we have a ‘double’ view of any challenge. Part of us is inclined to go ahead; part holds back. Part of us sees it as a wonderful opportunity; part sees it as a dangerous trap.

In effect, it is as if every one of us contained a kind of Faust and Mephistopheles. Goethe’s Mephistopheles describes himself as ‘the spirit that negates’. He is the perpetual doubter. But, as William Blake remarked:

If the sun and moon should doubt

They’d immediately go out.

Man’s life is a permanent state of ‘ambivalence’, a continual attempt to negotiate minor hurdles and overcome inhibitions. This explains why man is the only creature who goes insane and commits suicide.

In many of us, ‘ambivalence’ is so much a way of life that we are not really sure we want to go on living. We do, of course. Any sudden danger makes us aware that the desire to live constitutes the very foundation of our being. And this is why human beings voluntarily expose themselves to dangers – drive racing cars, pilot single-handed yachts, climb mountains. Danger raises them above the ‘ambivalence’ and fills them with the certainty that life is strange and beautiful.

This also explains why the history of civilisation is largely a history of wars; war is like driving at ninety miles an hour. And when man is not at war, life becomes a search for what William James called ‘the moral equivalent of war’ – forms of excitement, of purpose, that sweep away our doubts.

These ‘doubts’ have become purely automatic reflexes, like a knee-jerk or the salivation of a Pavlov dog. The Norwegian writer Agnar Mykle has a novel, The Hotel Room, that enables us to see this point very clearly. The hero has gone to the bedroom of a woman he knows slightly, and tries to force her to make love. They struggle for a long time, and he finally succeeds in gaining entrance. At this, she decides to give way. ‘But already, as he was undressing, he had caught the faint smell from her loins that told him she had made herself sterile for the occasion. For a brief instant that had excited him, but the next moment… the effect had been damping, fatal.’

Why? The girl who has introduced the spermicide is the same girl who excited him so frantically a few minutes earlier. But because she has ceased to resist, she has ‘normalised’ the situation. His will has been allowed to relax, and this has produced a certain automatic reflex, like a hypnotic command. He has ceased to be a man with a clear objective; her acceptance has transformed him once again into ‘ambivalent man’.

We once again confront this basic fact about human beings: that they have a confident sense of their own identity only when the will is firmly connected to its objective, like a water-skier to a motor boat. As soon as that connection is broken as the sense of urgency disappears, ‘mechanicalness’ supervenes, and we become victims of doubt and ambivalence.

The connection may also be broken by sheer fatigue. Civilised life is as complicated as juggling a dozen cups and saucers; in our frantic attempt not to break them, we often drive ourselves to the point of sheer exhaustion. Crime is an attempt to solve the problem by smashing the cups and saucers. That is, an attempt to reduce life to simplicity instead of trying to develop the self-control to cope with its complexity.

There is, of course, a less harmful way of reducing life to simplicity. In imagination, juggling a dozen cups and saucers becomes as easy as tossing a coin. In the past two thousand years, man has deliberately developed his imagination as a counterbalance to his tendency to left-brain obsessiveness. Imagination is a deliberate attempt to allow us to relax by short-circuiting reality. It offers a unique combination of relaxation and fulfilment. It also serves the important purpose of restoring our strength and courage. In short, it is an intoxicant. Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau discovered that when imagination is combined with sexual desire, the result is twice as intoxicating. In Fanny Hill, John Cleland carried the process one stage farther, and distilled a kind of raw alcohol. Victorian prohibition turned this form of bootlegging into a major industry.

Sooner or later, the ‘imaginary’ sex crime was bound to be translated into reality. This began to happen towards the middle of the nineteenth century. In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing mentions that between 1851 and 1875, 22,017 cases of rape came before the courts in France, that is to say, about nine hundred a year. He also mentions the astonishing fact that three-quarters of these involved children. It is possible, of course, that sexual offences against children were more frequently reported than those against adult women; even so, it seems clear that sexual violence in the nineteenth century was directed more at children than at adults. It was a question of ‘forbiddenness’. In the streets of Victorian London or Paris, women were fairly easily available – not just prostitutes but (as we can see from My Secret Life} shopgirls, factory girls, maidservants. So the aura of ‘forbiddenness’ clung to children more than to adults. In the twentieth century, increased prosperity meant that an increasing number of working-class girls ceased to be sexually available; so the rape of adults increased.

What seems strange is that, in spite of this increase in the crime of rape, the Victorians were still slow at recognising the sexual element in crimes involving sadism. On a Saturday afternoon in July 1867, three children were playing in a meadow near the town of Alton, Hampshire, when they were approached by a young man named Frederick Baker. Baker was known to be subject to depressive fits, and was the son of a man who had attacks of ‘acute mania’; but he was generally regarded (according to the Illustrated Police News) as a ‘young man of great respectability’. Baker gave the children a ha’penny each, and persuaded eight-year-old Fanny Adams to go for a walk. It was two hours before the children told Fanny’s mother that she had gone off with Baker (whom they knew). She met Baker returning to the town, and asked him what he had done with her daughter; he seemed perfectly calm and self-possessed, and assured her that Fanny had gone off to buy sweets. It was many hours later that a search party found the body in a nearby hop garden; it had been hacked into fragments and scattered over a wide area. Baker was arrested; he continued to protest his innocence. But his diary was found to contain the entry; ‘Killed a young girl today. It was fine and hot.’ He was sentenced to death, and a huge crowd watched his hanging at Winchester gaol.

The Illustrated Police News was a scandal sheet that catered for the public appetite for gore and violence; it was full of hair-raising pictures of horrible murders and accidents: men hacking up corpses or being bitten in two by sharks. Yet its account has no hint that this is a sex crime. Not only does it omit to mention that the child’s genitals were missing (which is perhaps understandable in a Victorian journal); it also says nothing about the crucial diary entry. So far as its reporter was concerned, Baker was simply suffering from an attack of ‘mania’. (Krafft-Ebing added the sexual details in his account of the crime twenty years later.)

In fact, there are enough clues even in the Illustrated Police News account to enable us to play the detective and piece together the story. We observe, first of all, that when Baker met Mrs Adams he seemed perfectly calm, and there was no sign of blood on his clothes. Yet he should have been soaked in blood. This suggests that he removed all his clothes before killing the child – he had probably throttled her into unconsciousness. It also suggests premeditation. A man who has given way to a sadistic impulse on the spur of the moment would be shaken and frightened afterwards. Baker’s calm suggests that he had thought this out in advance. Few sex killers commit a crime of this sort without either leading up to it with minor offences, or fantasising about it long in advance. Since Alton was a small town, and there is no mention of previous offences – Baker was ‘a young man of great respectability’ – we may assume that he was a fantasist. He was a solicitor’s clerk in a dull country town; his family background had probably been difficult – since his father suffered attacks of ‘acute mania’ – and he must have found life boring, frustrating and lonely. He is a paedophile, his sexual fantasies are sadistic, involving decapitation. (Fanny’s head was the first part of her to be found.) He finally convinces himself that he can only achieve the kind of full sexual satisfaction he craves by killing a child. This is dangerous – in a small town – but he feels that the satisfaction will be worth the risk. He persuades Fanny to go with him, and completes the crime, finding it as satisfying as he had expected. (‘It was fine and hot.’) If he had not been caught, he would certainly have killed again. In fact, if he had taken the precaution of committing the crime in a city, where no one knew him, he would probably have killed many times, and England would have had its ‘Jack the Ripper’ twenty years earlier.