Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [72]
But he argued that the prison was not the sole cause of neighborhood decay. Landlords were charging excessive rents, and “trams and tubes also tend to make the better class working people move farther away.” Another problem was “the numbers of rats which I am informed infest the houses there.” Decline clearly had occurred, he wrote. “I have observed that the people who reside in Market Street are not of as good a class as they were a few years ago. In fact every time places are to let they appear to be taken by people not so well off as those who lived there before them and so moves are more frequent.”
In closing, he offered a suggestion: “that the tolling of the bell after an execution should be stopped—there appears to be no reason for it and if it were stopped I think very few people in the neighborhood would be aware of anything unusual taking place.”
He was overruled. The bells had always rung. They would continue to ring. It was, after all, the law, and this was, after all, England.
BELLE DECORATED IN PINK. She wore pink dresses. She wore pink underclothes, including a pink silk ribbed undervest. She bought pink pillows with pink tassels, walled rooms with pink fabric, and hung pink velvet bows off the frames of paintings. She loathed green. It was unlucky, she believed. On seeing green wallpaper in the drawing room of a friend’s home, she exclaimed, “Gee. You have got a hoo-doo here. Green paper! You’ll have bad luck as sure as fate. When I have a house I won’t have green in the house. It shall be pink right away through for luck.” By that standard, she would now be very lucky indeed.
She exhibited an odd mix of frugality and extravagance, according to her friend Adeline Harrison. “Mrs. Crippen was strictly economical in small matters in connection with their private home living,” Harrison wrote. “In fact, to such an extent did she carry it that it suggested parsimony. She would search out the cheapest shops for meat, and go to the Caledonian Market and buy cheap fowls. She was always trying to save the pence, but scattering the pounds.”
She spent most heavily on clothing and jewelry for herself. For the house, she bought knickknacks and gewgaws and odd pieces of furniture. Given her passion for bargains, she no doubt frequented the famous Friday market of “miscellanies” at the Metropolitan Cattle Market. At first “miscellanies” was meant to describe livestock other than cattle, hogs, and sheep, such as donkeys and goats, but over the years the term had come to include anything that could be sold, whether animate or inanimate. On Fridays, as Charles Booth discovered when his survey of London took him to the cattle market, “nearly everything is sold & nearly everything finds a purchaser.” Anyone browsing the stalls could find books, clothes, toys, locks, chains, rusty nails, and an array of worn and beaten wares that Booth described as “rubbish that one wd. think wd. not pay to move a yard.” Another writer observed in 1891 that the “buyers and sellers are as miscellaneous, ragged and rusty as the articles in which they deal.”
Belle adorned the house with ostrich feathers and in one room installed a pair of elephants’ feet, a not uncommon decoration in middle-class homes. Her friends noted with cheery malignance that while Belle paid a lot of attention to how she looked and dressed, her housekeeping was haphazard, with the result that the atmosphere within the house was close and musty. “Mrs. Crippen disliked fresh air and open windows,” Harrison wrote. “There was no regular house cleaning. It was done in spasms. The windows in all the rooms, including the basement, were rarely opened.” Despite the size of the house—its three floors plus basement—Belle refused to spend money on a maid, even though servants could be hired for wages that later generations would consider laughably low. To reduce the amount of housework, she simply closed the top-floor bedrooms and regulated