Here's more from the narrative of the Seddons. I think this stuff is fascinating but it slowed the story down so much it made me want to slit my wrists. It's also pretty much irrelevant to the story of the book. And at one point it was even longer because I wanted to go into all this stuff about how poison brought to people's minds not just cholera, which they already didn't want to think about, but also the taint of the Orient, which only reminded them that the British Empire was falling to pieces. And then there was a whole thing about people being horrified by the attempt at class mobility. I'd include that stuff too, except that I never got it into any kind of shape worth my finishing, much less worth your reading.
The 1912 murder trial of my mother’s father’s father’s father, Frederick Henry Seddon, and his wife, Margaret, was a sensation in England. At first glance it’s difficult for me to understand why the proceedings received such wild attention, given that they followed so quickly on the heels of the 1910 trial of the much more extravagant Henry Crippen, who had drugged and dismembered his wife, incinerated her limbs in the stove, dissolved her organs in acid in the bathtub, buried her torso in the basement, thrown her head overboard while at sea on a day trip to Dieppe, and set sail for the United States with his secretary and lover, Ethel Le Neve, disguised as his son, only to be arrested when the ship stopped at Newfoundland. I mean, really: what is feeding your tenant arsenic in comparison with that? (Though I read the other day that the torso from the basement was recently discovered to be that of a male, which means that Crippen was either innocent or even more extravagant than we knew.)
But then I read a book by Harold Schechter called The Devil’s Gentleman, about Ronald Molineaux, accused in 1899 of poisoning his Brooklyn landlady, a romantic rival, and the president of the club he belonged to, and I began to understand better part of why the trial of the Seddons was such a big deal.
The terror of society today, in the twenty-first century, is the stranger who turns out to be a serial killer. That’s why you always go on a first date in a public place, that’s why if you arrange sex with somebody online and you show up and he looks wrong you just turn around and go home, though if his deltoids are incredibly well developed perhaps it’s not an easy choice to make, that’s why parents on the Upper East Side yell so loudly at the nannies they underpay when they bring their kids back late from Enrichment Tutoring or when they suspect them of being the subjects of a Bad Nanny Sighting on isawyournanny.blogspot.com. We’re surrounded by strangers about whom we know absolutely nothing, who can enter our lives without a moment’s notice, who could rape us and murder us and leave us as nothing more than the inspiration for a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of Law & Order: SVU.
Things were different a century ago. Back then, you didn’t speak to people you didn’t know. The days when you needed an introduction from a common friend before you were allowed to talk to somebody you hadn’t met before without being drummed out of society for it may have been over and gone, but you were still circumspect about letting somebody into your life. Nobody had to tell their kids not to talk to strangers, because nobody talked to strangers in the first place. Social intercourse simply wasn’t as free, so people felt far less cause to worry that one day they would meet somebody at a party and he’d show up the next day at their house in the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a hockey mask and disembowel them.
What they did feel cause to worry about, however, according to The Devil’s Gentleman, was what they put in their mouths, because people were finally understanding that, when they bought pills advertized in the newspaper as cancer cures, 1) not only might they not cure cancer, but 2) they might also contain, for example, a combination of opium, arsenic, baking soda, ferrous sulphate, Pepto-Bismol, boric acid (used today as an antiseptic, an insecticide, and a flame retardant), and Vaseline, and 3) this might be bad. Or that they could go to the grocery store and come back with candy colored with oxide of lead, cheese mixed with mercury salts, and lard preserved with caustic lime and alum. It had yet to occur to people that, since what they ate could kill them, it might be a good idea for the government to decide what merchants were allowed to put in food and medicine they were selling, but they were edging toward that notion.
In other words, people were terrified of their food.
Enter Freddy (as I affectionately think of him), whom the Internet calls “the meanest murderer in the history of poisoning.”
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