| THE LONDON MONSTER:
A SANGUINARY TALE CHAPTER 1 The Coming of the Monster
One of the more enigmatic figures in the old Newgate Calendar is that
of the London Monster. The strange crimes of this mysterious offender
have earned him the title of a forerunner of Jack the Ripper. Indeed,
the alarm and terror caused by the Monster's wanton outrages against
unprotected women was equal to the uproar after the Marr and Williamson
murders in the Ratcliffe Highway in 1811, or the Ripper murders in 1888;
and the general alarm in London's female world was without precedent.
A certain John Williams was arrested for the Ratcliffe Highway murders,
but later committed suicide under highly suspicious circumstances; later
research has cast considerable doubt on whether he was really the murderer.
As we know, no arrest was made for the Ripper crimes, and in spite of
a bevy of suspects being paraded by imaginative writers, the case is
still unsolved and likely to remain so. By a combination of chance and
vigilante effort - the police of 1790 were incapable of tackling the
London Monster - an arrest was finally made for these crimes: the young
Welshman Rhynwick Williams was taken as the Monster and committed to
Newgate Prison after a sensational trial at the Old Bailey. He was eloquently
described in Wilson's Wonderful Characters: "His unnatural and unaccountable
propensities in maliciously cutting and stabbing females whenever he
found them unprotected, soon made him a terror to the metropolis: his
behaviour was so revolting to the feelings, and carried with it such
hellish appetite, and dreadful consequences, that the horror he spread,
it is impossible to describe." Quite a few contemporaries believed that
Rhynwick Williams was innocent, however, and he was energetically defended
by the eccentric Irish poet Theophilus Swift, a blood relation of the
great Dean, who wrote a pamphlet depicting Williams as the innocent
victim of an elaborate conspiracy. The wealthy philanthropist John Julius
Angerstein, one of the founders of Lloyd's, had offered a reward of
£100 to the person capturing the London Monster, and Swift claimed that
this immense sum had induced several of the key witnesses to perjure
themselves. Theophilus Swift actually appeared as the barrister of Rhynwick
Williams in a farcical second trial, a transcript of which reads like
an episode of Blackadder III. The doubts concerning the guilt of Williams
have prevailed. In Knapp and Baldwin's New Newgate Calendar, it is remarked
that Rhynwick Williams had a modestly solid alibi and that all were
not convinced about his guilt, "believing that the female witnesses
(a circumstance which we have shown too frequently to have happened)
mistook the man who wounded and ill treated the prosecutrix". Some other
writers have presumed that there never was a Monster, and that the hysteria
in 1790 was merely some weird kind of mass hysteria: the London Monster
was a bogeyman in the tradition of Sawney Beane, the Scottish cannibal,
Spring-heeled Jack, the fire-breathing horror who mystified the Londoners,
or Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Rhynwick Williams
was just a scapegoat, one of the men who habitually pestered and insulted
women on the London streets, and he was unlucky enough to fall into
the hands of the authorities to personify the Monster in a trial that
could be likened to a ceremony of exorcism: after Williams had been
committed to Newgate, the Monster attacks ceased. My first acquaintance
with the London Monster was made in 1996, when I was looking through
some large, late eighteenth-century scrapbooks in the British Library.
They had once been the property of Miss Sophia Sarah Banks, the sister
of Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society of London. Miss
Banks collected handbills and broadsides relating to popular entertainments:
ballooning, firework displays and theatrical productions. More pertinently
for my book The Feejee Mermaid, there was also a section on 'learned
pigs' and other eighteenth-century performing animals. The most intriguing
discovery that day, however, was Miss Banks's scrapbook on the London
Monster. She had taken much interest in the Monster-hunt, and built
up an extensive collection of newspaper cuttings, prints and manuscript
material. She herself took an active part in the vigilante efforts to
catch the Monster. At first, I believed that Miss Banks's collection
was the definitive account of the Monster-mania that consumed London
in the spring and summer of 1790, but this turned out to be very far
from the truth. Not only was there a wealth of information about the
Monster in various other newspapers, not covered by Miss Banks, but
not less than seven pamphlets had been written about the hunt for this
elusive criminal, and the indictment and trials of Rhynwick Williams.
Three of these pamphlets were kept at the British Library; one had once
been there but was a casualty of wartime action; three had never been
held even by this famous library. Fortunately, it turned out that two
very rare and valuable Monster pamphlets could be consulted at the Free
Library of Philadelphia. Another vital clue to the Monster mystery was
unearthed at the Public Record Office in Kew, in a dusty volume of reports
on criminals. Another amazing thing was the amount of attention given
to the Monster business by the London caricaturists: there were no less
than twelve caricature prints on this subject, some of them praiseworthy
attempts to present a likeness of the perpetrator to the public, others
lewd fantasies on the subject of sharp rapiers piercing exposed female
buttocks. I am pleased to say that the majority of my research on the
London Monster was performed in the venerable North Library at the old
British Museum site, next to the famous Round Reading Room, which is
now, alas, gone forever. The final touches were added at the present-day
abomination at St Pancras, the monstrous ugliness of which might well
have inspired my work further ... |