A London inquest jury inspects a corpse

Abstract

This extraordinary early 19th-century print (figure 1) shows an inquest jury arriving to view a dead body, before their verdict on the cause of death. Contemporary newspapers often reported the official process of inspecting corpses by coroners' juries, but Georgian newspapers were not illustrated, and these events were seldom if ever shown elsewhere, which makes this a highly unusual image. The importance of inquest procedure in the history of medicine makes such a rare image significant. It comes from a sixpenny chapbook, published in London in 1829 (figure 2).Figure 2Chapbook published by John Fairburn in London in 1829View Large Image Copyright © 2013 Courtesy of the London Collection, Bishopsgate InstituteChapbooks were slender booklets made by printing on both sides of a large single sheet of paper that was then folded to form the pages. They were cheap to make and to buy. The chapbook that features this inquest image was produced by John Fairburn, who worked as a printer-publisher in London between the 1790s and the 1830s. Fairburn published a wide array of affordable literature for adults and children. His output was often nautical in flavour, musical, radical, sentimental, or humorous; he issued some fine maps of London, clever caricatures and charming pocket volumes of sea songs, alphabets, reading primers, traditional tales, valentines, and drama. Fairburn also dealt in accurate coverage of important trials at the Old Bailey, and execution literature for the big public hangings which took place outside Newgate Prison, both institutions being just across Ludgate Hill from his shop.Facing their title pages, Fairburn's chapbooks often featured fold-out images: sometimes plain in black and white, but others—like this one—bright with hand-applied colour, perhaps from a family workshop. The colours here remain vibrant, having been well-kept for many years in the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute in the City of London. Fairburn's news images were often semi-documentary portraits or topography, but sometimes—though rooted in fact—sensational and imaginary, featuring the dramatic highpoint of a shipwreck, a crime, or an execution.Fairburn's image, The Coroner's Jury viewing the murdered body of Margaret Hawse, centres on the girl's emaciated corpse, and portrays the shock of men confronted with evidence of mortal cruelty. The group represents the 12 men of the inquest jury arriving with the Coroner and his deputy to witness the body at the centre of a case that eventually involved the wretched deaths of three young workhouse apprentices from starvation, cruelty, neglect, and exposure.Margaret Hawse had been one of eight young girls bound as live-in apprentices to Esther Hibner senior, of 13 Platt Place, Battle Bridge. The site now lies under the great train shed of London's St Pancras Station. All were orphans, aged between 6 and 10 years, sent out from the workhouses of various London parishes to learn the female trade of tambour-work, a specialised kind of embroidery. “Apprenticeship” was a misnomer for exploitation: the children were made to work standing at their tambour-frames from before dawn to nearly midnight. They were fed on dilute milk and two boiled potatoes a day. Their bed was a bare floor with only two blankets between them even in midwinter. Their employers ate separately, and well.Intimations that something was seriously wrong had come to light at Bow Street Magistrates' Court, 2 days before the event pictured. The grandmother of one of the apprentices, Frances Colpit, having been repeatedly turned away at the workshop, was told at last that the child had gone to visit her brother. By now seriously worried, the grandmother visited her grandson to confirm her suspicions, and went for help to the overseers of St Martin's-in-the-Fields, the parish from which Frances had been apprenticed. An overseer, Mr Blackman, went to investigate. He found the children “exceedingly ill”, filthy, with hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, and death-like countenances: emaciation so extreme that their bones were “ready to start through the skin”. He fetched the local beadles of St Pancras parish and took the children away. Two were not expected to survive: the feet and arms of one were already mortified from exposure, and the other was in a “dangerous state”.Seven girls were found in the house, although Mr Blackman knew there should be eight in all. The eighth, he was told, had gone into the country to visit an aunt. But once away from the Hibners, the children confessed that they had been browbeaten with the threat of flogging to deceive him. The missing child—Margaret Hawse—had been dead a fortnight. Like them, she had been starved and beaten, but she was additionally victimised. She never regained consciousness after being pushed down stairs because she had been too ill to stand at her loom.Her disposal was shrouded in secrecy. In London localities the task of washing the dead and laying out corpses was always traditionally undertaken by experienced adult women, but in this case two of the younger girls were instructed to perform this task. The local “searchers”—female officials employed in every central London district at that date to affirm cause of death and to compile mortality statistics—were not sent for before the coffin was nailed down and taken to be “privately” buried.Mr Blackman laid charges of cruelty against the three adults: Mrs Hibner, her daughter, and Ann Robinson, the workshop forewoman. On February 16, 1829, Sir Richard Birnie, the magistrate at Bow Street, heard one of the starved apprentices, Eliza Loman, report that her employers “would not let such vermin as us lie in the beds to rot them”, and that the children were so famished they were driven to eat candle-ends and pig-swill. There was a sensation in the court when the witness reported that the younger Hibner had forced one girl's nose and face into her own urine. The magistrate urged the parish authorities to prosecute for “abominable cruelty”, and suggested the Middlesex Coroner be asked without delay for a warrant to disinter the body, to clarify if the charge should be murder.In 1829, the date of these events, London had neither coroners' courts nor public mortuaries. Inquests were held and corpses stored in any convenient building near the death-scene, often in a public house. Margaret Hawse's inquest took place on Feb 18 in The Elephant, a tavern near Old St Pancras Church, whose stone-vaulted crypt looks to be the setting for the image. In the print, the empty coffin, gravedigger's tools, human bones, and loose screws scattered on the floor, signify the exhumation. Exactly what the Hibners most wanted to hide—the corpse—occupies centre-stage. To serve on an inquest, jurymen had to be householders. These men are shown as well-dressed gentlemen confronted with a terrible and shocking sight. Their facial expressions, hand gestures, and postures reveal each one to be aghast in his own way. The tallest bespectacled figure standing over the body, placed centrally to the arched window above, may be intended for the Coroner, Thomas Stirling. Despite all he had witnessed in the course of his career, he seems as shocked as the rest. Thomas Wakley, the founder of The Lancet, was elected as Coroner for West Middlesex after Stirling's death in 1839. Near the end of his life, Stirling referred to this case as among the worst he had ever experienced.So it is the inquest—rather than the crime itself or the trial at the Old Bailey or Esther Hibner's execution at Newgate—which Fairburn chose for the chapbook illustration. Sadly, we have no indication of the artist's identity. Fairburn employed a number of well-known illustrators of the day, including the Cruikshank family, but not for this image. Fairburn himself or an artist within the family might be responsible, as it resembles other unsigned images under his imprint. The moment the inquest jury came into the presence of the body certainly makes for a dramatic tableau, and provides a fair indication of the chapbook's content, soliciting as it does sorrow and pity for the child's terrible fate. It is not difficult to imagine her poor corpse left for reburial after the jury's return to The Elephant to reach their verdict—wilful murder.With thanks to the Bishopsgate Institute, Camden Archives, and to the London Metropolitan Archives. This extraordinary early 19th-century print (figure 1) shows an inquest jury arriving to view a dead body, before their verdict on the cause of death. Contemporary newspapers often reported the official process of inspecting corpses by coroners' juries, but Georgian newspapers were not illustrated, and these events were seldom if ever shown elsewhere, which makes this a highly unusual image. The importance of inquest procedure in the history of medicine makes such a rare image significant. It comes from a sixpenny chapbook, published in London in 1829 (figure 2). Chapbooks were slender booklets made by printing on both sides of a large single sheet of paper that was then folded to form the pages. They were cheap to make and to buy. The chapbook that features this inquest image was produced by John Fairburn, who worked as a printer-publisher in London between the 1790s and the 1830s. Fairburn published a wide array of affordable literature for adults and children. His output was often nautical in flavour, musical, radical, sentimental, or humorous; he issued some fine maps of London, clever caricatures and charming pocket volumes of sea songs, alphabets, reading primers, traditional tales, valentines, and drama. Fairburn also dealt in accurate coverage of important trials at the Old Bailey, and execution literature for the big public hangings which took place outside Newgate Prison, both institutions being just across Ludgate Hill from his shop. Facing their title pages, Fairburn's chapbooks often featured fold-out images: sometimes plain in black and white, but others—like this one—bright with hand-applied colour, perhaps from a family workshop. The colours here remain vibrant, having been well-kept for many years in the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute in the City of London. Fairburn's news images were often semi-documentary portraits or topography, but sometimes—though rooted in fact—sensational and imaginary, featuring the dramatic highpoint of a shipwreck, a crime, or an execution. Fairburn's image, The Coroner's Jury viewing the murdered body of Margaret Hawse, centres on the girl's emaciated corpse, and portrays the shock of men confronted with evidence of mortal cruelty. The group represents the 12 men of the inquest jury arriving with the Coroner and his deputy to witness the body at the centre of a case that eventually involved the wretched deaths of three young workhouse apprentices from starvation, cruelty, neglect, and exposure. Margaret Hawse had been one of eight young girls bound as live-in apprentices to Esther Hibner senior, of 13 Platt Place, Battle Bridge. The site now lies under the great train shed of London's St Pancras Station. All were orphans, aged between 6 and 10 years, sent out from the workhouses of various London parishes to learn the female trade of tambour-work, a specialised kind of embroidery. “Apprenticeship” was a misnomer for exploitation: the children were made to work standing at their tambour-frames from before dawn to nearly midnight. They were fed on dilute milk and two boiled potatoes a day. Their bed was a bare floor with only two blankets between them even in midwinter. Their employers ate separately, and well. Intimations that something was seriously wrong had come to light at Bow Street Magistrates' Court, 2 days before the event pictured. The grandmother of one of the apprentices, Frances Colpit, having been repeatedly turned away at the workshop, was told at last that the child had gone to visit her brother. By now seriously worried, the grandmother visited her grandson to confirm her suspicions, and went for help to the overseers of St Martin's-in-the-Fields, the parish from which Frances had been apprenticed. An overseer, Mr Blackman, went to investigate. He found the children “exceedingly ill”, filthy, with hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, and death-like countenances: emaciation so extreme that their bones were “ready to start through the skin”. He fetched the local beadles of St Pancras parish and took the children away. Two were not expected to survive: the feet and arms of one were already mortified from exposure, and the other was in a “dangerous state”. Seven girls were found in the house, although Mr Blackman knew there should be eight in all. The eighth, he was told, had gone into the country to visit an aunt. But once away from the Hibners, the children confessed that they had been browbeaten with the threat of flogging to deceive him. The missing child—Margaret Hawse—had been dead a fortnight. Like them, she had been starved and beaten, but she was additionally victimised. She never regained consciousness after being pushed down stairs because she had been too ill to stand at her loom. Her disposal was shrouded in secrecy. In London localities the task of washing the dead and laying out corpses was always traditionally undertaken by experienced adult women, but in this case two of the younger girls were instructed to perform this task. The local “searchers”—female officials employed in every central London district at that date to affirm cause of death and to compile mortality statistics—were not sent for before the coffin was nailed down and taken to be “privately” buried. Mr Blackman laid charges of cruelty against the three adults: Mrs Hibner, her daughter, and Ann Robinson, the workshop forewoman. On February 16, 1829, Sir Richard Birnie, the magistrate at Bow Street, heard one of the starved apprentices, Eliza Loman, report that her employers “would not let such vermin as us lie in the beds to rot them”, and that the children were so famished they were driven to eat candle-ends and pig-swill. There was a sensation in the court when the witness reported that the younger Hibner had forced one girl's nose and face into her own urine. The magistrate urged the parish authorities to prosecute for “abominable cruelty”, and suggested the Middlesex Coroner be asked without delay for a warrant to disinter the body, to clarify if the charge should be murder. In 1829, the date of these events, London had neither coroners' courts nor public mortuaries. Inquests were held and corpses stored in any convenient building near the death-scene, often in a public house. Margaret Hawse's inquest took place on Feb 18 in The Elephant, a tavern near Old St Pancras Church, whose stone-vaulted crypt looks to be the setting for the image. In the print, the empty coffin, gravedigger's tools, human bones, and loose screws scattered on the floor, signify the exhumation. Exactly what the Hibners most wanted to hide—the corpse—occupies centre-stage. To serve on an inquest, jurymen had to be householders. These men are shown as well-dressed gentlemen confronted with a terrible and shocking sight. Their facial expressions, hand gestures, and postures reveal each one to be aghast in his own way. The tallest bespectacled figure standing over the body, placed centrally to the arched window above, may be intended for the Coroner, Thomas Stirling. Despite all he had witnessed in the course of his career, he seems as shocked as the rest. Thomas Wakley, the founder of The Lancet, was elected as Coroner for West Middlesex after Stirling's death in 1839. Near the end of his life, Stirling referred to this case as among the worst he had ever experienced. So it is the inquest—rather than the crime itself or the trial at the Old Bailey or Esther Hibner's execution at Newgate—which Fairburn chose for the chapbook illustration. Sadly, we have no indication of the artist's identity. Fairburn employed a number of well-known illustrators of the day, including the Cruikshank family, but not for this image. Fairburn himself or an artist within the family might be responsible, as it resembles other unsigned images under his imprint. The moment the inquest jury came into the presence of the body certainly makes for a dramatic tableau, and provides a fair indication of the chapbook's content, soliciting as it does sorrow and pity for the child's terrible fate. It is not difficult to imagine her poor corpse left for reburial after the jury's return to The Elephant to reach their verdict—wilful murder. With thanks to the Bishopsgate Institute, Camden Archives, and to the London Metropolitan Archives.