You're Dead to Me - Greg Jenner talks to Lucy Worsley about Lady Killers

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Greg Jenner and fellow historian Lucy Worsley discuss Lucy’s Radio 4 podcast, Lady Killers, which is about Victorian murderesses. Lucy explains why she wanted to examine these historical cases and what these women's stories tell us about life and society in 19th-century Britain. The pair also discuss some of the fascinating and extraordinary murder cases which are investigated in the podcast.You can listen to Lady Killers on BBC Sounds.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Greg here. Hope you're enjoying Series 5 of You're Dead to Me. This little episode is something extra, a little bit different, which I hope you're going to enjoy just as much. I have had the pleasure of chatting to fellow historian Lucy Worsley, and we talked about her fantastic podcast series, Ladykillers, or rather Ladykillers, as well as our shared love of telling surprising,

exciting, amazing stories from history. You can find Ladykillers on BBC Sounds. But first, here's some of our conversation. So, Lucy Worsley, you have made a fascinating podcast, which is sort of new territory for you, I think, maybe. I think if you was a television presenter and an author and a curator. So do you want to tell us a bit about Lady Killers and why it was such an interesting project for you? Well, I did it, Greg, to be more like you. You're my role model going ahead of me here, making podcasts.

I had a long interest in detective fiction. Actually, I love detective fiction. And years ago, I made a series about the history of detective fiction. And I noticed how important different historical murderesses were in contemporary culture in the 19th century. People loved reading in the newspapers about them and they would make their way into actual fiction, which is why I was interested in them then. But I thought it would be good to look at them as people in their own right. And they've always been really important in women's history. Right. And they've always been really important in women's history.

Actually, murderesses have because sometimes and this is a bit weird. So bear with me. But sometimes a woman in the dock on trial for murder can say things that are otherwise unsayable in Victorian society. Right. Things like my husband shouldn't have beaten me. Right. Things like my husband shouldn't have beaten me. The man shouldn't have raped me. He had no right to treat me in that way. They OK. Murdering people is bad. Let's get that clearly accepted amongst us. But sometimes a woman accused of murder can be a bit of a canary in the goldmine. Somebody who can give you insight into what's important, what's being discussed in society more generally. And crimes. Crimes are bad, yes, but they're also great for historians because when a crime happens, it's like a little window into the past because stuff gets recorded.

We do, yeah, we get evidence. What was she doing? What was her motive? What was her motive? How was the room arranged? They're like little peepholes or portholes into the past. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And what I found so interesting about your series, there are 10 episodes, 8 cases.

So you have two sort of discursive episodes where you sort of talk about four cases previously, have a discussion and then do four more cases and then have a discussion. And that's a really interesting way of framing it because you're looking at individual stories and then you're looking holistically at a kind of wider picture. And so how did you decide to make the show that way? Oh, basically, because I wanted to spend-on-one in a kind of tutorial situation with our fabulous historian rosalind crone was the historian she appears in all the episodes

but in the discussion shows she tells me how to make connections between the cases that we've looked at but basically um she was a big part of why i wanted to to make this show to hear her hear her views she's she's a historian of vict why I wanted to make this show, to hear her views. She's a historian of Victorian society. More broadly, she knows stuff about social reform as well as prisons and justice and crime. I really love social history. I like the way that it's about ordinary people. And all the way through making Lady Killers,

I couldn't make up my mind whether these people were deeply strange, whether they were living in a foreign country, a country that's very different to contemporary Britain, or whether there were things that seemed fabulously familiar about their lives. Are the Victorians really just like us? Discuss. Are the Victorians really just like us? Discuss. Yeah, I'm definitely hearing echoes of the modern day. There's a really interesting conversation you have about the impact of newspapers and that sort of 19th century eruption of almost tabloid culture, the fact that newspapers are cheaper and there are more people who can read and write. And there's a sort of real energy when these cases get covered and women get described and written about in quite sensationalist ways. But you've raised the

point of it being a bit like modern day social media as well. Yes, nothing is new under the sun, really. And one of the cases, so sad, it broke the woman who was at the heart of it. Her name was Florence Bravo. And, you know, it's possible that she poisoned her violent alcoholic husband. Nobody really knows the truth of that. This all happened in 1876. But she wasn't even put on trial for murder. Her role in all of this was investigated in a sort of pre-trial way. But it happened in public, in front of this room full of men,

in a room over the pub. And all of it was reported in the newspapers. And she got off, right? Partly perhaps because people thought, oh, look at this beautiful, charming, rich young widow. I'm sure she wouldn't have done anything as awful as poisoning her husband. But the whole sort of shaming of it, the way it revealed stuff about herself, it caused immense damage, as I see it. Because two years later, although she possibly got away with murder, she drank herself to death. Yeah, it's a sad story. And it's one of eight stories you tell that are all of them sad, of course. These are stories of crimes and of people's lives being ended and interrogated, investigated. I suppose what I found really interesting is the number of cases that had elements of sympathetic qualities in there.

There are almost all of the cases, I think, maybe one or two exceptions. There's a sense where you're sort of going, well, I can see where this person has ended up. I can see the pressure on them. I mean, a lot of pressure on these women. All of them are quite different women, different backgrounds, but these were women in dire straits. We wanted to be sympathetic to their words. That was one of the goals we had.

We wanted to hear from these women themselves. And some of what they have to say is utterly harrowing. I'm particularly thinking of the character Esther Lack, for example, who had given birth to 12 children, had lost half of them and committed her crime of killing some of her children. It's a very, very distressing case, but quite possibly in an incident of post-childbirth psychosis. And we were very sympathetic to her. And surprisingly, perhaps, to people who think that the Victorians were all sort of lock them up and throw away the key. The Victorians were sympathetic to her as well. Yeah. And I think one of the things that's surprising about the stories you cover is there is sometimes newspapers came out in defence of the women accused of crimes. Sometimes, as you say, the wealthier women were deemed to be a better sort. And so perhaps they couldn't have possibly done this crime. And some of the poorer women were perhaps given much less of an opportunity to defend themselves.

So there's also this sort of a lot of externalising, a lot of people looking at these women and judging them based on who they are and what they're wearing, which is not a new thing in our society either. People who are from the higher levels of society sometimes get away with more stuff. Madeleine Smith was pretty well off. She was a sort of debutante type girl from upper class Glasgow. It's quite interesting that the different papers came out against her or for her depending on what their readership

was. So the papers that were perhaps sort of like the Times and the Telegraph today said, oh yes, poor girl, hard done by. But the socialist worker like, no, no, she did it. Guilty as sin type thing there's one murderess whose name is mary ann cotton and if you just tell people about her people can't help sort of smiling a little bit just because she was so fabulously prolific as a murderess she killed

so many people she killed three out of four of her husbands, like 75% of her husbands. And I do not condone this. Do not do this at home. But what's very slightly cool about her is that she was doing it for the life insurance. She was trying to move on and up through the world. And in a way, she was expressing Victorian values, right? If you're a Victorian man, you're supposed to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and build a factory, start a business, become an entrepreneur. Well, what do you do if you're a Victorian woman?

You use the tools that are available to you, life insurance policies and arsenic, and you try to make something better of yourself in a dark, shadowy way. Yeah, in a slightly scary, alarming way. There's also that other thing that you go into, the notion of being terrified of your servants, of your maid or your manservant might club you over the head in the night. All these sort of anxieties and the fact that we talk about Victorian society as this big singular block where everyone agreed, but actually Victorians were all very different from each other and they come in a variety of classes and they are from different backgrounds and that there are all these different worries and anxieties throughout the series, which are explored in different ways.

It's quite an interesting survey of Victorian society, not just in the UK and Britain, but in you look at America and Canada, too. Well, that was the hope. It's, you know, you come for the true crime, stay for the history. It's like a secret history show. Well, that was that was my hope. But what do Victorians have that does unite them? And possibly, I think you were onto it when you mentioned this fear of the servants, because domesticity is okay.

A lot of people would say to you, this was the age in which the Englishman's home becomes his castle and everything is about the home. And lots of other historians would say, oh, no, no, no, no, that's far too simple. But there is something in it. And Victorian fears, I think, are significantly different from Georgian fears. In the 18th century, your biggest fears, it's likely you would have been living in a village, right, Greg? your biggest fears, it's likely you would have been living in a village, right, Greg? And your fears would have been dying of famine, or disease, or maybe in a war. But in the 19th century, it was much more likely you would have been living in a city or a town and you would no longer know

who your neighbours were. And after the Industrial Revolution, it became aspirational for a man to go out and earn the money to keep the wife at home. So the domestic world seems much more important in the 19th century, or it does to me. So that the fears that people have are domestically located and they are fears like, can I trust my servant? Can I trust my doctor? Can I trust my spouse? And it's sort of funny and awful that the prevalence of wonderful new cleaning products like arsenic or tonics like arsenic or wallpapers containing products like arsenic are also, you know, domestic ways to kill. Yes, arsenic is a terrifying threat. And I suppose there's also this notion that women poison and they're not necessarily so violent in the way they might kill. But we do have Lizzie Borden's story.

And she's sort of renowned in America, at least as an axe murderer. Her story is intriguing too, because it's also about how women are supposed to behave when accused of a crime, and she doesn't behave appropriately, inverted commas. A woman in the doc becomes like a sort of mirror reflecting back all these different views that people have, that people hold about how women ought to behave. If she did chop up the parents, if she really did it, can we find any kind of sympathetic motive for her? Well, possibly it was just the idea that the daughter in a wealthy family simply has nothing to do. The father was quite mean, wouldn't give her an allowance, wouldn't let her do very much.

What does life hold? Perhaps she killed out of frustration. Although, you know, very, very tenuous that one I think that of all the sympathetic ways that we've looked at murderesses she's the one it's hardest to make a case for And they're not all found guilty no spoilers here but it's not a universal

every single one of them gets locked up banged up, dead to right so there's also quite a lot of doubt you can't solve all these cases and in terms of the team you've doubt. There's quite a lot, you know, you can't solve all these cases. And in terms of the team you've put together, what's quite fun on this series actually is you're taking modern professional women with expertise in the law, in policing, criminal psychology.

You've got Roz, the historian as well. And you're applying modern understanding of criminality and how the system works back onto the past. So there's sort of revisionism. Why did you want to do that? What was the goal in bringing together that team? Well, I know that you totally subscribe to the view that all history, Greg, is written in the present, right? The history that we write in 2022 is going to be different from the history we write in 2021. So we really wanted it to be what we think now about these particular stories from the past and we happen to look at the stories through the eyes of contemporary feminists that's not the only

way of looking at these stories it's just a way that happens to appeal to to me and my team of detectives um and the sort of lens that gets used changes over time, doesn't it? History is a big tent and there's lots of other lenses too. It's just that our particular lens is what are we going to be interested in about these women's lives from the position of the women that we are today? And also it was just fascinating for me finding out about what it's like to be a Met detective or a forensic psychologist or a barrister or a crime reporter all these other things that my guest detectives do

yeah now I learned a lot by listening in um I learned even more in the tea break the special stuff that wasn't broadcast um it's a very enjoyable fascinating series I learned a lot and I obviously I'm a historian and I tend to assume I know a fair bit about the 19th century but there was stuff I was writing down

going ooh okay need to look that up that's lovely to hear thank you pleasure well if people want to listen to

Lady Killers they can find it on BBC Sounds and on BBC Radio 4 and I highly recommend it. Go check it out. Hiya, Greg again. Just if you haven't already hopped over to listen to Lady

Killers, you might like to know that in that podcast feed there's even more of my conversation with Lucy Worsley. We talk about the making of You're Dead to Me, we talk about how I like combining comedy with history, and Lucy asks me about dressing up and larking about with horrible histories. So if you'd like to listen to that, then look up Ladykillers on BBC Sounds,

check out that fantastic series, and then you can find our conversation right after episode 10. So there we go. Ladykillers, BBC Sounds, you know what to do. Bye!