The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

IN the whirl of the world's news, the hurricane of happenings, the rush of events, the impression made upon the public mind by the dramas and tragedies of everyday life is bound to be transient.

All England may be thrilled on Monday by a horror that causes the Press to bristle with headlines, but after the Sunday papers have reproduced the details—perhaps with portraits by way of illustration—the horror loses its grip on the public imagination. A dozen new sensations have come to the front and forced the old one into the background.

There is always a large section of the public that retains its interest in a condemned murderer or murderess right up to the morning of execution. In the years when exciting news was scarcer, "hanging mornings" were quite national events. Special editions of the morning papers came out at ten o'clock with a full account of the painful proceedings, and the last dying speech and confession, if any, of the condemned. The halfpenny evening papers were rushed out at the same time, and the sale was huge. Not long since two halfpenny evening papers quarrelled about their statistics of circulation, and one reproached the other with quoting the figures of its "hanging editions" as those of its everyday sale.

With the execution chapter the story of a murderer ends so far as the general reader is concerned. The interest has been keenly maintained through all the chapters that have gone before relating to the crime, the arrest, the police-court proceedings, the trial, the verdict, scenes in the condemned cell, and, perhaps, the efforts made to obtain a reprieve have kept the story at a high level of interest. But with the last scene of all the details cease to be lovingly dwelt upon in the Press. The curtain falls with the disappearance of the central figure into the pit below the scaffold. The drama is considered—from the point of view of public interest—to be at an end.

Many sympathetic people, especially women, give a passing thought on the day of doom to the innocent relatives of the men and women whose throat the hands of Justice have clutched in the death grip; but the sun rises on another mom, and the tragedy and all concerned in it are lost in the mists of yesterday.

What becomes of the family of a murderer or murderess, of the women and children, the husbands and wives, the brothers and sisters, who bear the name that is branded with infamy for evermore?

Long before the fatal bolt has been withdrawn the children of criminals of fair or good position have disappeared from their old surroundings. They could not stay in their home or walk abroad in the neighbourhood in which they are known. Imagine a group of little ones in the park with their nurse, and a hundred eyes turned upon them pityingly as the children of a man or a woman lying under sentence of death.

The situation, of course, is too terrible to be risked. So from the hour that the tragedy of a great crime becomes public, the near relatives of the criminal try in every way to avoid being identified with it. If they can afford it, they seek a new home, and often arrange to live the remainder of their lives under another name. It happens sometimes that children grow up to manhood and womanhood ignorant of the fact that the name they bear is an assumed one. The ghastly thing that made their own a brand of shame beyond the bearing has mercifully been kept from them.

Even among the poor, when the shadow of the gallows has fallen across the little home, there is an effort to escape from that shadow and all that it means. It is not often that the children remain in the house of tragedy or the street where all their little playmates know their story.

Yet it happens sometimes. Last Christmas morning, wandering in the East End, I entered a house in a little side street packed with a people speaking an alien tongue.