The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale Read Free Book Online

surface.
    The far east of London was the ultimate industrial wilderness. Where the German visitor to Plaistow in 1886 had seen brass bands and fat-cheeked children, most journalists and novelists saw only pinched, degraded lives. An
Illustrated London News
reporter described West Ham’s lines of ‘little hideous slate-roofed houses of stucco and pale brick. Row follows row, all dreary, all mean.’ The French novelist Emile Zola said that he had never seen such miles of soulless brick and mortar. The English writer Ford Madox Hueffer (later known as Ford Madox Ford) described West Ham as a featureless fog, ‘a vast cloud beneath a cloud as vast’, while Walter Besant saw it as a ‘sea of the working class’: ‘its history is mostly a blank, making no more mark than the breezes of yesterday have made on the waves and waters of the ocean’. It was a city without a centre, said Besant, ‘a city without art or literature, but filled with the appliances of science’. To a passing visitor, he wrote, it seemed a ‘joyless’ region, ‘the City of dreadful Monotony’, ‘a vast city without a heart’.
    Many onlookers detected an atavistic horror beneath the blank uniformity of East London. ‘ As there is a darkest Africa , is there not also a darkest England?’ asked William Booth, the Methodist preacher who founded the Salvation Army. ‘The stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpselike, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilisation.’ The technologically advanced environment seemed, perversely, to be propelling people back to their bestial origins, the factories and machines turning out morons and monsters. The landscape was both futuristic and primeval. Every resident of the district, wrote Hueffer, was ‘conscious of having, as it were at his back, the very green and very black stretches of the Essex marshes’. The American novelist Jack London characterised East Londoners as a ‘people of the machine and the Abyss’.
    In
The Nether World
, a novel of 1889, George Gissing described a railway journey east out of the city. From the train carriage, the passengers see the ‘pest-stricken’ suburbs sweltering in sunshine that ‘served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination’. The train passes ‘above streets swarming with a nameless populace’, stops at stations ‘which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal’. At last the train leaves ‘the city of the damned’, carrying its passengers ‘beyond the utmost limits of dread’.

5
    A KISS GOODBYE
    On the Thursday after the arrest of the Coombes boys and John Fox, the
Star
newspaper managed to secure an interview with Mary Jane Burrage , who had been present at the discovery of Emily Coombes’s body. Mrs Burrage told the reporter that she had been an intimate friend of the murdered woman, whom she used to see almost every day. Emily, she said, was a bright, happy person, an exemplary wife and mother, and a careful housewife. As for Robert and Nattie, ‘no boys were ever better brought up, but they were dark, sullen lads, with never a smile for anybody’. They were ‘deceitful and dishonest in small things’, she said, and when they told her that their mother had gone to Liverpool for a funeral she had known instantly that it was ‘all lies’: ‘I knew she would never go away without telling me, and I knew she would not leave the boys in the house alone.’
    â€˜The neighbours laughed and sneered at me when I first said she was dead,’ said Mrs Burrage, ‘but now they see.’
    Mary Jane Burrage was exhausted by her ordeal, said the
Star
. She recalled the horror of finding the