The Secret Life of Celestina Sommer: a very Victorian murder

By David J. Vaughan

Set in North London in 1856, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the press and Victorian middle-class society get caught up in Sommer's brutal murder of her own daughter. Now this forgotten, TRUE event in the annals of British crime has been rediscovered and re-told, exposing cracks in the C19th façade of family life and domestic bliss...

This brand new eBook analyses the events leading up to and beyond the tragic act. It recreates the Victorian criminal trials, charts her life through a harsh penal system and reveals the saddest of fates awaiting those sent to its lunatic asylums.

For the first time in history, it explains the political and social reaction to her surprising escape from the noose, and concludes with the truly shocking truth behind the British Government's inexplicable silence.

Published exclusively as an eBook, David J Vaughan's work has taken three years to research and write. He unravels not just the facts but the unspoken truths behind the case and its seismic aftermath; and delivers the explosive denouement of incest, murder, feminism and madness as lives collide with an appalled yet hypocritical Victorian society.

Over two years in the making, one thing is for certain...the TRUE story of Celestina Sommer will never leave you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David J. Vaughan
• Release date: Apr 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311133021

David J. Vaughan

Further detailswww.davidjvaughan.co.uktwitter: @David_J_Vaughanfacebook: David J. Vaughangoodreads: www.goodreads.com/DavidJVaughanauthorsdB: http://authorsdb.com/authors-directory/9690-david-j-vaughanPublished author (Pen & Sword, The History Press, etc), historian, blogger, book reviewer, media presenter and public speaker, David J Vaughan writes both fact and fiction including on history (often bloody), crime and insanity (spanning 500 years). A 'jobbing' feature writer across mainstream independent publications.His latest book, The Suffering of Women Who Didn't Fit. 'Madness' in Britain, 1450-1950 was published by Pen & Sword History in November 2018.His other titles include:•Out of Control: Young Criminal Lunatics in Victorian Britain (Pen & Sword History, due 2019)•Mad or Bad? Crime & Insanity in Victorian Britain (Pen & Sword History, 2017)•The Little Book of Herefordshire (The History Press, 2016)•Bloody British History: Salisbury (The History Press, 2014)•The Secret Life of Celestina Sommer. A Very Victorian Murder (Amazon eBook, 2014).All are available from leading High Street and Online retailers and direct from the publishers.David also owns and writes his blog about Crime and Insanity in Victorian England, at criminalunacy.blogspot.co.uk, receiving in excess of 2000 hits every month.He gives talks and lectures on various related topics of interest: such as crime, madness, local history and the archaeology of Britain.He also reviews titles for Routledge and other, similar publishers of related journals and books.David is a former Assistant County Archaeologist of Wiltshire, south-west England, but now lives in Herefordshire's glorious Golden Valley just outside the capital of books, Hay on Wye, home to the world-famed literary festival.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

A child is taken

If it had been at all possible, Celestina Sommer would have turned back the clock. As it was, she sighed heavily and left the safety of her home in Islington for the streets of Shoreditch, a parish but a short distance to the east. It was Thursday 7th February 1856.

The weather had long been unsettled: unseasonably warm nights followed by ferociously cold days which had left an incessant grey cloud draped across the city. The fog that had descended three days ago was thick this evening and she was grateful for its cover, for this was an errand as full of deceit as it was desperation.

A short woman, just four feet nine inches, slightly built ('of spare form and below the middle height' ) with locks of blonde hair which 'inclin[ed] somewhat to red', she had a fresh complexion and the palest of blue eyes and looked much younger than her twenty-eight years. Indeed, she was frequently mistaken for a girl of fifteen, even less.

Nevertheless, the unpleasant events in her life had brought her here, to this time and place, and to the one thing she knew she must now do. The past three weeks had seen their repercussions reach breaking point but, over the next few days, they were set to violently erupt…

It had taken twenty minutes to walk from Islington to the house in St Peter Street, just beyond where it veered away from the Hackney Road. The house, number four, stood in one of the terraces built just two years previously as part of a huge regeneration programme. Seeking to replace the overcrowded slums of east London, they had merely perpetuated the problem with large and extended families living still in cramped, squalid conditions that did little to deter the next cholera outbreak.

For now, Celestina remained focussed on the job in hand as she approached the door and rapped small knuckles against the dark, painted wood.

On the other side, Julia Harrington busily prepared the evening meal in the cold, tiled kitchen at the rear of the house. A round woman of fifty-eight, she had the appearance of someone much older. She had moved here with her husband from a house in Hackney, their three daughters, Catherine, Hannah and Rebecca and a fourth, who had lived with them from birth, completing the number. It was this younger girl who now opened the door to the repeated knocking.

Standing on the step outside, Celestina recognized the girl instantly, knowing she was a little more than ten years of age. Resembling a waif, she didn't actually look undernourished but she gave the appearance of someone from a humble background if not poor.

'Is your mother in?' Her voice was impatient, with the air of someone with things to do, things that could not wait.

'My mother?' the young girl replied. 'You are my mother!'

'Don't be impudent, child! Mrs Harrington, is she in?'

Julia had heard the early exchange and was already in the hallway. Her spirits fell when she saw the woman. 'Celestina, what do you want at this hour? Or have you come to give me my money?' Her rhythmic tones betrayed an Irish background.

'No, I have not! I just want the child.'

Julia moved nearer the girl. 'What do you mean, you want her?'

'I finally have a place to take her, somewhere I'll no longer need my husband to pay your fees.'

Julia ignored the reference. 'And where is this place?'

'Never you mind, it's all arranged. Now come on, I don't have all night.' She held her hand out to the girl.

Julia leaned forward, placing a protective arm around the child's shoulders. 'You may be her natural mother, Celestina, but you can't just turn up like this and whisk her away.'

'I can do what I like! As you say, I am her real mother.' She moved a small foot across the threshold.

'Damn it, Celestina! Where are you taking her?' Julia seldom lost her temper but she was struggling to remain calm.

'I've told you. A position awaits her now. That's all you need to know, anything else is private.' She held her hand out for a second time. Despite her small and slender build, she possessed a steeliness in her eyes that left both Julia and the girl feeling unnerved. This was a woman not to be thwarted.

Instead, Julia spoke quietly, attempting to calm the situation. 'I'm sorry, love, I can't just hand her over, not when you won't tell me where you're taking her. Not now, after all this time. She's been in my care for ten years, for goodness sake.'

'Oh, do you think I don't know that?!' Celestina placed her face close to the child. 'You, miss, have caused me a great deal of trouble, and an absolute fortune. Well, you're threatening my marriage now and I won't allow that to happen. Do you hear me?'

The girl stared back, unflinching, her eyes bearing the same cold glint as her mother's. 'That's not my fault. You shouldn't have had me!'

Incensed, Celestina took another step forward but Julia matched her, sandwiching the young girl between them both.

Celestina continued. 'I have just about had enough of your foul mouth and horrid lies. I know you've been saying things about me, wicked things.' She looked at Julia. 'Well I'm not standing for it any longer, so hand her over.'

The older woman had also heard the gossip, about how the girl had come into the world and who her father was, but they couldn't be true, surely. She had also heard the rumours about Celestina's strange episodes, what some called eccentricity, others madness. Was this the latest? She knew she could resist her for only a short while but to hand over the girl with Celestina in this state did not sit well.

She looked down at the girl and up at her mother. She wasn't sure how far to push her, but she needed an answer, or this doorstep impasse would never end. 'Where are you planning to take her, Celestina? I am not letting her leave this house without telling me.'

Celestina finally flew into a rage. 'For pity's sake! If you must know, I've arranged to take her to my sister, in Murray Street.'

Julia sighed, relieved. 'I don't know why you couldn't have told me that in the first place!' She turned to the girl. 'It's all right, lamb, go and fetch your coat.'

'But -'. The child's eyes were large.

'Ssh now, all will be fine. I know where you're going and she is your real mother, after all.'

'You're my mother -'

'Ssh,' She put a finger to the girl's lips. 'You have somewhere else to stay, for the time being at least.' She held the child close. 'We'll see each other very soon, I promise. Now go on, I'll be here if you need me.'

The girl reluctantly went back into the house while Julia again spoke to Celestina. 'Wait here.' She disappeared into the front parlour and returned with a small bundle which she passed to the young woman. 'You can collect the rest of her things once you've let me know she's settled.'

Celestina took the parcel but said nothing. Fishing inside her cloak, she pulled out a letter and thrust it towards Julia. It simply confirmed the end of the woman's role as the girl's carer, but it had evidently been written in a hurry, for the script was unmistakably Celestina's yet much less composed, more frantic, almost illegible.

The girl returned with her coat draped awkwardly around the shoulders. Celestina, taking her hand, dragged her out into the cold air. 'Come on, you're with me now.

As they walked, Celestina recalled the problems that had led her here. She had been having frightful arguments with Charles, her husband, who despite his premarital promises was refusing to provide the money she needed to pay for the girl's keep. She had no idea how she would raise such an amount in the future - she was already well behind with Julia's fees. But it was just as much the other problem that needed resolving: how to stop the child spreading malicious gossip. That carried the bigger threat to her welfare.

***

In ten brief and often difficult years of her short, displaced life, the young girl had known love. It came from her adoptive family, the people she had lived with since birth and without whom, she now thought, who knows what would have become of me? She recalled how she had felt when it was time to start school…

Julia had taken her there that first day, the school house barely a few yards from home, but from the second morning and for every one after that, she had gone alone. Carrying her only possessions, a piece of chalk and a small, square slate, she willingly and quickly learned everything she was taught. Occasionally she resisted the mistress's discipline, but overall she had been a model pupil.

Just a few months later though, the other children began to tease her, in the cruel way they often do. It was always about where she had come from and who her real parents were.

'Here she comes, poor thing, without a mother or a father in the world!'

'Ah, come over here, pet, you look like you've lost something. Oh I know what it is, it's your parents! Shall we help you look for them?!'

'Alone again, are you? Well they couldn't have loved you much to have got rid of you!'

She had known early on, of course, that Julia was not her real mother, that her siblings, Catherine, Hannah and Rebecca, were not really her sisters. But they provided all the care and tenderness she needed and it was irrelevant whether or not they were related by blood. They may not be her real family, but they were family enough.

As much as the sharp emotional pain of their horrid unkindness, she despised the injustice of it all. Once or twice, she had lashed out at anyone careless enough to get too close yet, after a while, she adopted a new attitude, becoming numb to their spite. In time, the other children too forgot about her unfortunate start in life, seeing the whole subject as a terrible bore if she could no longer be provoked.

The worst pain remained the new rumours, of how she had been conceived. It was wicked and unpleasant, and untrue surely, but it stuck in her mind so that, on the rare occasions when Celestina had come to Julia's house, she already hated her.

Looking at her mother now, on this cold, wintry evening, as far as the girl was concerned, Celestina had done her a favour by giving her up to the Harringtons.

Sommer pulled the girl along the dark streets, heading south towards Hoxton, a district in the borough of Hackney. They had already come close to the house she shared with her husband, though at the moment it was empty except for the servant girl who even now should be preparing the meal and keeping the fires lit. But taking the girl there was certainly no option.

Suddenly, the child pulled free and insisted on walking unaided. Celestina regained her grip. 'No you don't, young lady! It's about time you learned to do as you're told.'

The girl looked back stoically, but said nothing.

'For one thing,' continued Celestina, 'you can stop telling those horrible lies you've been spreading.'

'I've said nothing that ain't true!' School had taught her to be obdurate.

Celestina put her face close to the girl's, her eyes watering as her mother's nails pressed into the flesh. 'You might be my daughter, you may even bear my name - heaven knows why - but there is no other connection between us, none. And the vile tittle-tattle you've been preaching is untrue. Do you hear me?!'

The girl remained unmoved.

'It stops here, now. '

Still nothing.

'Come on!' Celestina dragged her towards Murray Street.

CHAPTER 2

The unwelcome child

Little more than a decade before the miserable walk to Hoxton, the pregnant but unmarried Celestina brought fear and shame on her family and her own previously good name.

As far as the records tell us, the intimacy and the child it created could have been, quite literally, forced upon her; or might indeed have been the product of her own unchaste behaviour. Whatever the truth, a missed period, stomach cramps, morning sickness and the common sense that came from an intelligent and knowing mind confirmed beyond doubt that she was indeed with child.

Yet this was the age of Victorian society, with its royal example of marriage and domestic bliss and an era of a church whose teachings on immorality reached deep into every household. Celestina had known quickly that she alone would have to accept the blame for her own disgrace.

Celestina was shaking as she broke the news to her unyielding parents. They stood in the parlour of the house in King Square, a fashionable and well-appointed development on the north-east edge of the City. Nestling in the triangle formed by three ancient thoroughfares, Goswell Street, City Road and Old Street, it had been laid out in 1820, the year of King George IV's accession. The land on which it sat had once belonged to St Bart's Hospital and used for a long time as a market garden.

The area was definitely middle class. Many of the families here lived and worked as watchmakers, clockmakers, engineers, teachers, surgeons and jewellers. William himself had been a silversmith since being apprenticed in the London Guild, as had his father before him and as his own sons were destined to be. As soon as he was sufficiently successful, he moved his growing family from Windsor Street in the north to the relative affluence and tranquillity of the square.

'You are what?!' William, her father reacted with an anger she had seldom seen.

'Pregnant.'

'Oh good God, girl! You're only seventeen.' That she looked so young only made things worse.

She said nothing but looked nervously from the floor to the two pairs of eyes burning deep into her soul.

William's face was pale. 'When did this happen?' But before she could reply, he continued. 'Oh my God, you do know who the father is I take it?'

'Yes, sir.' Her voice was soft.

'Speak up, Celestina.' Her mother's voice was more gentle than her husband's but she was still part of the interrogation.

'Yes. I believe so.'

'You believe so!?' William's face turned to the colour of alabaster. 'What does that mean?'

'Well, I only had - with him.' She looked at the ground again, shame and an unpleasant memory lining her face. 'It was horrible,' she added as a whisper.

'So you haven't had - with anyone else?' He didn't mean to mock her.

She shook her head. 'No.'

'Well, that's something, at least.' He sighed loudly and lowered himself into his favourite chair by the window and looked across at the church of St Barnabus where it dominated the square. He recalled his own deep faith and keen morals and he heard his wife behind him begin to cry. Elizabeth was trying desperately to stifle her sobs as she drew up another chair and like him sat before her trembling legs gave way.

Both of them had worked hard to create a respectable and upright family; their reputation was enviably high amongst their peers. They were friends with influential people, including notably the newspaper proprietor and author, Charles Dickens. How would they live this down?

Celestina remained silent. She felt like a mute witness in a makeshift court, standing quite alone in a world about to disown her. The pregnancy, if it ever became known, would ruin her father's business, as well as her family's reputation and it went without saying that in this brave new world, of progress and individual moral responsibility, she alone needed to prevent their social destruction.

With the initial shock subsiding, all three of them turned to resolving the problem. William again spoke first. 'Can we still involve the father, get him to support you?'

Elizabeth answered. 'We can't, William. Times have changed.'

Indeed amendments to the law a decade before were society's response to the belief that all illegitimate children were the product not of consenting adults, male and female, but purely (or rather, impurely) of licentious and immoral women. Laws had been altered to promote an image of the family epitomised by Victoria and Albert and their affectionate children, the perfectly robust and upright domestic entity. At the same time, they had reversed the fiscal and moral decrepitude of the state, caused by the rising number of unmarried mothers, as it was decreed that all bastard children born after 1834 and aged under sixteen years were the sole responsibility of their mothers.

William drew in a deep breath. 'Hmm. Nevertheless, who is the father, Celestina?'

She flushed again, her head dropping as she unsuccessfully attempted to hide her embarrassment. 'I cannot say, sir.'

'Cannot or will not?'

'Cannot.'

Elizabeth, having composed herself, leant forward to touch her daughter's hand. 'You must answer your father, Celestina. If he doesn't know all the facts, he won't be able to help you.'

'I cannot, mama, I am sorry. So sorry for the shame I have brought to our family and for defying you. But I simply cannot say.' Her voice faltered and cracked.

William sighed again, exasperated. Yet deep inside, he understood, respected even, her need for privacy. 'All right then, we must deal with this situation without his involvement.'

She nodded, relieved.

'What is done is done, and it cannot be undone. As unusual for this age as it may be, I am not prepared to see my daughter thrown out onto the streets in a fit of cruel piety.' No, they would have to conceal their shame some other way, he thought.

He also knew that they had to protect her health, not a foregone conclusion for a young, pregnant girl in nineteenth century London.

He addressed both women. 'So what can we do?'

Celestina now found her voice, having waited for this opportunity. She had not been idle in coming to terms with her predicament and she was keen to tell them now of her discovery. 'There are people,' she spoke, enthusiastically, 'who will take the child as their own.'

'Baby farmers, you mean?' William and Elizabeth exchanged glances. They had heard of these women, but knew little of what they actually did or of the services they offered, only of their unhealthy reputation.

London had developed a thriving service industry in the taking care of unplanned pregnancies and one widespread solution was for the expectant mother to move into a 'lying-in house' where the 'baby farmer' would secretly prepare the girl for her labour and afterwards nurture her back to health, her reputation unblemished and her prospects unhindered. The 'baby farmer' would then bring up the child as a member of their family. Convenient. And all for only a 'modest' fee!

Although these leeches, as William preferred to see them, advertised their services openly in the newspapers, their standing in society and an awkward relationship with the authorities had brought the constant risk of prosecution. Indeed, there had been several albeit failed attempts to illegalise the practice, but various efforts to demonise it had been successful. Many were now being convicted of child cruelty and an alarming number found guilty of murder. The term 'baby farmers' had become synonymous with another Victorian peculiarity, child killers.

William now looked to Elizabeth for support. But Celestina had anticipated her father's mistrust. 'I think, papa, I have found someone who will be more of a foster mother to my child - to the child. Her name is Mrs Harrington and she lives in Hackney; I made contact with her and she has said she will help me.'

William rubbed his forehead. 'And how much will this cost us?'

'Not us, father, me. I will meet the cost.'

'But how?!' He admired her independence. 'You'll need to give up your job before long and what then?'

She had worked for the last six months teaching music to children of upper class families, people who had learned of her reputation through her father's business. Of course, they would all dismiss her as soon as she 'began to show' and she would have to go into hiding as soon as possible.

'Most of what Mrs Harrington charges is only paid after the baby is born. I will need to lie in with her beforehand, yes, but I will be able to return to work soon enough.'

William was unconvinced. 'We will still need to stop people knowing about this.'

'She has assured me of her total discretion. Nobody need ever find out.' She turned to Elizabeth. 'Mama, please, this is the only way.'

Her mother though looked heartbroken. 'Perhaps.'

'We can tell them I am ill?'

'Lie you mean? I don't know.' Though