Kate Colquhoun

This was a fascinating biography of Joseph Paxton, who began as a working-class gardener on a country estate and ended up designing the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition and serving as Member for Parliament. Kate Colquhoun has little to say about Joseph Paxton's origins, because the details are sketchy, but once he's older, he apprentices at the Horticultural Society, and then he is hired as head gardener by William Cavendish, Sixth Duke of Devonshire. Paxton was an intelligent, show more enthusiastic man whose enthusiasms fed into a positive feedback loop with the Duke. Basically, anything Paxton wanted to do with the estate, the Duke would pay for. They amassed a huge collection of orchids, racing others to cultivate and flower species new to England. Paxton got the first Victoria regia (a giant water lily several meters wide) to flower, and was also the first person to cultivate a banana in England. The bananas we eat today are the Cavendish bananas, named after Paxton's patron.

Paxton taught himself architecture to build new glasshouses for the Duke's collection, and he put in a proposal for the building to house the Great Exhibition. This thrust him into the national spotlight, and soon he was designing public parks, on the boards of railway corporations, standing for Parliament, creating a daily newspaper edited by Charles Dickens, and organizing relief efforts in the Crimea! Colquhoun's account of his rise is a fascinating look at a fascinating life, and she peppers the book with little human details ably, especially the stories of Paxton and the Duke's appreciation for each other and for plant life. Their enthusiasm for rare plants is infectious even through the printed page. I loved her accounts of Victoria's two visits to the Duke's estate, one as a young princess, one with Albert in tow. The Duke of Wellington thought Paxton's gardeners so well organized that he said Paxton would have made a good general!

Arguably, the Victorian period was the first time we really became conscious that we were moving into the future, and Paxton was one of the people trying to design that future. "The Busiest Man in England" is a great story in itself, and also filled with connections to other stories of the nineteenth century: I was pleased to see, for example, that Jane Loudon (author of The Mummy!: A Story of the Twenty-Second Century) got a couple mentions, and Paxton's life brought him into contact with Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Tenniel, and many other familiar names. A nice personal story from my favorite period of history. show less

In 1864, a train's first-class carriage was discovered to be empty of passengers but liberally smeared in blood. Some hours later, the original occupant was found--dead, his body discarded near the train tracks. The police tracked his stolen top hat and watch chain through the pawn shops of London, and quickly zeroed in on a suspect: a poor German tailor. But by the time they discovered his identity, Franz Müller had already gotten on a ship to America (currently in the throes of their show more Civil War). The lead detective tracked him down and, though there was some political & legal trouble over the extradition (both sides in America wishing for more aid from the UK at the time, and insulted that they weren't getting it), brought him back to London for a swift trial. On the basis of his owning a hat and watch chain that were probably the banker's, Müller was convicted of murder and hanged.

This is mostly useful in revealing the types of investigative, journalistic, and legal procedures of the time. The detectives were hampered by being a fairly new profession (established only twenty-two years earlier), and still without the ability to even definitively tell animal blood from human. So instead, they mostly relied on evidence that modern courts would call circumstantial. Meanwhile, the papers went mad for this murder, to the extent that mobs waited for hours for the chance to see Müller. And in terms of the trial, the accused was not allowed to speak in his own defense, and trials were customarily very short.

The truth of what truly happened that night in 1864 may never be known--certainly Colquhoun doesn't really know. So for readers looking for a murder mystery, this might feel a little dissatisfying. But as a snap-shot of mid-Victorian English justice, it's fascinating. show less

In the late 1800s, Florence was an American who married James Maybrick from England, although he was 24 years older than she was. He was a hypochondriac who took a lot of “medicines”, including many with various poisons in them, including arsenic. Florence and James were having trouble in their marriage and both were cheating. He went through a time period where he was in all kinds of pain and he eventually died. Florence, along with servants and two brothers and various doctors were all show more trying to help him. But James’ brothers didn’t trust Florence and pointed a finger at Florence suggesting that she may have killed him with arsenic. A couple of the servants also reported things they found odd that Florence did, indicating a possible poisoning by James’ wife.

So, it seems Florence’s trial was… maybe not undertaken in the best way. The jury was (of course, due to the time frame) all men, but also all farmers and tradespeople. Not people who might easily understand a confusing array of medications and how much arsenic was or was not in each of many different bottles. Even the experts disagreed on whether or not arsenic was even what killed him. The judge seemed predisposed to find her guilty, but not because he necessarily thought she killed him, but because she was a middle class woman with loose morals – that is, he didn’t like that she had had an affair. The judge wasn’t the one to decide anything, but he did summarize for the jury… in a way that seemed somewhat biased. Anyway, this was interesting and frustrating to read about this case, well-known at the time. Fun fact: James Maybrick has been suggested as a possible Jack the Ripper (this wasn’t discussed much in the book, just mentioned, so I don’t know why he has been suspected – something about a diary… that has not been proved to be his or to be real?). show less

I must admit to a certain initial prejudice against purchasing this book because, having read the blurb, it seemed to me an attempt to cash in on the success of Kate Summerscale's excellent 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher'. Indeed Jack Whicher is mentioned in these pages as a contemporary of the detective Inspector Richard Tanner who is the chief investigator of the murder of Thomas Briggs in a Victorian railway carriage, the subject of Kate Colquhon's book. It's certainly true that the show more Colquhon story covers the same period of history, tracks the investigation of a real-life high-profile murder and treats its subject in a very similar style to Kate Summerscale, but I came to the conclusion that I couldn't blame the author for the publisher's opportunism and that her own credentials were anyway impeccable. So I bought the book.

I'm glad I did. As with 'Mr Whicher' I was transported to mid-Victorian England and was as thoroughly engaged with the murder, the investigation, the chase, trial and aftermath as newspaper readers of the time obviously were, though Colquhon writes with far more restraint than many of those journalists covering the story. Ms Colquhoun's admirable research allows us not only to become steeped in the details of the case but also to have a tangible sense of the lived context, with plenty of rich descriptive background to place the reader in the territory. We do hear the occasional riffle of research notes but in general the learning is presented subtly and in tune with the narrative.

Tanner is not brought to life as effectively as Summerscale's Whicher, but the difficult-to-pin-down Francis Muller - the supposed villain of the piece - is very carefully drawn in all his ambiguities.

This being real life, there is no fully realised close-the-book resolution, but Colquhon makes that a strength of her book, particularly in the final chapters. I won't say more than that, not wishing to give too much of the game away, but I do warn readers not to take too close a look at the picture captions before you've finished the narrative, otherwise you will discover more than you may wish to know at that point. show less