Death at the Priory: love, sex and murder in Victorian England
James Ruddick Atlantic Books, 202pp, £14.99
ISBN 1903809045
An obsession with law and order features as high on the list of Victorian achievements as medicine or engineering. The age that gave us the first police force and the rudiments of forensic science also spawned a profitable relationship between publishing and true crime, one that began with James Catnach and endures to this day. Analysing 19th-century misdemeanours is by no means restricted to historians or criminologists: novelists succumb to it, policemen retire on it, and journalists get hooked on it. James Ruddick is the latest writer to be seduced by an unsolved Victorian murder.
Death at the Priory reinvestigates one of the greatest unexplained cases in the annals of English domestic crime - the agonising death of Charles Bravo, a young barrister killed by a lethal dose of antimony, just five months into his marriage to the wealthy Florence Campbell. For three months in 1876, Bravo's poisoning attracted as much publicity as the Whitechapel murders 12 years later. The inquest, which the Times described as "the most disgusting exhibition to have been witnessed in this generation", eclipsed Disraeli's negotiations with Egypt and the conflict in the Balkans. The jury's verdict - wilful murder, but with insufficient evidence to convict any one person - laid down the challenge to amateur investigators from Agatha Christie to the BBC, but none has come up with a conclusive solution. None, that is, until now.
Few true crime books possess the instinctive narrative power that, say, P D James brought to T A Critchley's reinvestigation of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. But the events that Ruddick is relating are inherently fascinating, and the first section of the book, which deals with the spiral of cause and effect that led to Bravo's death, is riveting. Florence was a woman ahead of her time - independently wealthy after the death of her estranged first husband, scandalously involved in an affair with a married physician 40 years her senior, and fatally determined to control her own destiny. Using Florence's life and her husband's death to paint a meticulous portrait of Victorian society, Ruddick sets about solving the crime, exploring theories from suicide to manslaughter and cross-examining the prime suspects for murder: Mrs Jane Cox, Florence's loyal companion, who faced dismissal and poverty at Bravo's hand; Dr James Gully, Florence's former lover; George Griffiths, a coachman with a grudge against Bravo; and Florence herself, who, behind the veneer of married respectability, was regularly subjected to Bravo's cruelty and abuse.
True crime can license greater flights of the imagination than fiction, but Death at the Priory has its feet refreshingly on the ground, and what Ruddick lacks in style he makes up for with exhaustive research: newspaper reports, witness statements and Home Office files combine with the testimonies of surviving descendants, previously unpublished letters and, most importantly, considerable social and historical awareness to produce a solution that is not just plausible, but inevitable. However, therein lies the flaw: Death at the Priory may be billed as the long-awaited solution to a riddle, but Ruddick's conclusions are hardly shattering, and the final twist, the moment of realisation, never quite happens. Today, the fascination of the Bravo case lies not so much in who, but in why, and Ruddick is extraordinarily good at dissecting a woman, her marriage and society. Despite its rather confused nature (part literary Cluedo, part sensationalist expose, part academic paper), Death at the Priory highlights, with satisfying irony, the way in which institutionalised order can compel someone to commit a crime - and then unwittingly protect the criminal from its consequences.
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