What are his first impressions of it?
They are various. That it is like a bit out of a gamekeeper’s room, with a bigger bit out of a smith’s forge, a touch of a carpenter’s workshop, a broad suggestion of a harness-room, something of a marine store complexion (and a good deal of its odour), a lump of an open-air stall in front of a pawnbroker’s shop, a little of the barrack-room gun-rack, with no bright barrels, enforced a general air of a lumber-room, with just a dash of an anatomical museum; but above all, and increasing with every moment’s prolonged observation, a likeness to the cutlery booth in a foreign fair, the articles being so rusty that the said booth might have been shut up for full half-a-century, and the salesman and his customers were all ghosts.
Opposite the door, and on the face of the wall to the right, are displayed on a wooden shelf with iron rings, which convey to the visitor a hint of the open-air stall in front of a pawn-shop in a very small way of business indeed, a common looking-glass in a wooden frame, four black glass buttons, two wisps of rope, a pair of trumpery ear-rings in card-box, two bullets, a pipe, a cluster of soft light brown hair wound round a pad, a comb, a pocket-knife, and a little wooden stand covered with glass, are the most noticeable articles. On the shelf to the right are a dirty Prayer-book, a pocket dictionary, a pair of boots, a gaudy bag worked in beads, and the crushed remains of a woman’s bonnet, made of the commonest black lace, and flattened into shapelessness.
In both these instances the other impressions of the place came in too, for over the shelf fronting the door hung workmen’s tools, hammer, and cleaver, and spade, and beside them to the right is just such a bundle as adorns the walls of a marine-store. It consists of a gown, a petticoat of cheap, poor stuff, bearing dreadful dim stains, and a tattered crinoline.
The visitor is in the presence of the objects which perpetuate the memory of two peculiarly horrible crimes.
The soft, brown hair is that of Harriet Lane, murdered by Wainwright; the buttons and the earrings are those which were found in the earth where her body had been buried.
The bullets were taken out of her skull. The object under the glass case is the several pieces of her skin which completed the identification of her body. The wisps of rope dragged her out of the earth under the warehouse; the cleaver, the hammer, and spade are the implements with which the horrible deed, which led to Wainwright’s detection, was done.
The knife was Thomas Wainwright’s, the pipe was Henry’s, and when the visitor is leaving the museum he will be shown in the pack-cloth on the floor under the shelf outside the door the wrapper in which the dismembered body was packed, and one of the dirty coats—a horrid thing, with its hideous rents and smears—Wainwright’s vesture on the occasion.
The coat of the captain of the “Lennie,” with the gash in the cloth, torn by the knife of his murderer, and eaten through and through with rot and moth, is not nearly so disgusting an object; and as for the serge robe of that poor rogue, “Professor Zandavesta,” and the little cloak of the confiscated “anatomical” wax African, who grins awfully in one corner of the museum, a real skeleton hand and arm considerably hidden behind him, they are quite cheerful to look at in comparison.
The Prayer-book and the other pitiful objects upon the shelf to the right were found on the body of Maria Clousen, who was murdered in Kidbrook-lane; the blood and mud-stained clothes were hers, and they contrast with grim-irony as evidences of an unpunished crime, with the all-gory objects which tell of one brother hanged and the other transported.