LIFE IN
IN LONDON.

I. ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE HOXTON MYSTERY.

66

NOTHER tragedy in Hoxton!" The newspaper placards last month only stimulated my remembrance of Wednesday, July 10. The new incident of Hoxton history occurred within call of the shop where, in the middle of a bright summer day, Mrs. Squires and her daughter were done to death with a plasterer's hammer. And the murderer is still at large. The latter fact has made me shudder whenever I have found myself even as near to Hoxton as Clerkenwell Green. This terrible crime has been allowed to drop out of public memory with a calm resignation which does not add to one's peace of mind. When the Marrs were assassinated in Ratcliff Highway, in 1812, all England thrilled with the horror of the scene. The murderer left no clue behind, and the police were helpless; but London was wild with fear. The subject was never allowed to rest. The knowledge that the criminal was at large made the very heart of the nation beat with anxiety. When the "great artist" (as De Quincey called him in that marvellous essay, "Murder as a Fine Art") followed up his first awful stroke of bloody business by a second crime, the populace of London seemed to arise en masse against him. Are we in these days becoming callously accustomed to foul deeds, or is the business of life so much more engrossing than it used to be, that we see criminal after criminal slipping away from justice, without some stirring protest? The police of London do the duty of keeping order, regulating the traffic, and catching ordinary thieves; but as a detective force dealing with "artists" in crime they are notably deficient. There is something singularly like the Marr murders in the Squires tragedy, only that the latter was done in the daylight, and in an open shop. A hammer was used by the modern assassin; a mallet served Williams's purpose. The Ratcliff villain inflicted unnecessary injuries upon his victims; the Hoxton murderer beat his after they were dead. Williams got clean away and beyond suspicion after his first work; the Hoxton tiger is still abroad. Where? A half-witted fellow told one of the police magistrates the other day that he knew him, and was continually on his track. Once he had nearly caught him. Did the murderer

smile sardonically as he read this statement in the papers? Is he in London, or has he escaped beyond the seas? Perhaps he is living in Hoxton. He may occasionally visit Hyde Road to contemplate the scene of his awful labours. If he is a student of De Quincey, he will grow cynical over the importance which this street has assumed since his great performance in July. Painting and plastering, and patching up of broken shutters are going on all around the closed blank tenantless shop. The street has received so much public recognition that it has grown ashamed of its dirt. The shops of Mrs. Squires and her three commercial neighbours were the tidiest places in the locality. The well-known stationer's store stands out now like a rebuke to the rest; the name of the dead stares at you from the doorway as if the letters were traced in blood; the blinds are closed against the daylight; the dumb windows seem still to shut in the scene of blood; the whole house pleads to the passer by for vengeance. If the Hoxton tragedy were a chapter in fiction, the son of Mrs. Squires would devote his life to tracking down the culprit ; but we are in real life, and Mr. Pritchard (he is the son of her first husband, and a musician) is going to take the shutters down, and open the shop as a music warehouse!

But to the raison d'être of this article. The "other tragedy in Hoxton" induced me to visit that part of London, the atmosphere of which would seem to engender foul deeds. The only feature in which the Northport Street business differs much from that of Chelsea, is in the fact of Augustus Elliott being jealous of Ellen Moore. Jealous! This strange passion seems equally strong, whether the object of it be Traviata or Desdemona. Elliott had spent his money, and he could not endure his "fair acquaintance" visiting another man! This is the police theory of the story, and there is every reason to believe it is the correct one. Elliott declines to speak about the circumstances. When Ellen Moore thought she was dying, she said, "'Gus did it." The pair were carried fearfully mutilated to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, the woman much more desperately injured than the man. Let the young gentlemen who hang about the haunts of Circe lay this and the Chelsea lesson to heart. A life of immorality must end miserably.

Northport Street and Hyde Road lie in the very midst of that dense quarter of London called Hackney, like a district apart. Northport Street is the outcome of a shabby locality of dirty houses and fifth-rate shops; and it leads to nowhere-I beg its pardon, it leads to the very street of all others which should hem it in and stop its free current of air; it leads to Hyde Road, where Mrs. Squires and her daughter were murdered at noon in presence of the

No. 9,

miscellaneous traffic of that very miscellaneous district. Northport Street is a freshly-painted one-story house, with suspicious reddish moreen curtains at the bedroom windows. With the exception of the next house, the other houses are dingy-looking, povertystricken places. The street is macadamised and dusty; dusty with last month's dust, "nubbly" with last year's repairs. " with last year's repairs. Nothing is so demoralising as badly kept thoroughfares. Foul paths extend their influence to doorsteps, from doorsteps to windows, from outsides of houses to their insides. Dirt is the offspring of crime and misery and death; it would be easy to charge it with murder.

"Is that the house in which the affair of Monday took place?" I asked a painter who was at work on the other side of the street.

"It is, and something more, and has been this two year."

The man laughed, as he eyed the quiet-looking house.

Queer neighbourhood this ?" I suggested.

"Some of it," he said, laughing again. "Lodgings is easily found here."

"These poor people are likely to get better, I am told."

"Yes, they say so; the young fellow is getting on fast; that man yonder" (pointing to a man in his shirt sleeves on the other side of the street) "is the man who went in first; he held the fellow, and he can't get the blood off his arm now."

"Is that so?" I asked of the other person.

"Yes," he said; "won't wash off;" and he exhibited some stains on his flesh.

I have done Northport Street another injustice; I intimated that No. 9 was the best painted house in it. The street has its Bar or Gin Palace, which towers up above the dirty surroundings with plate glass, showy sign, and polished lamps. It is the only really cleanlooking thing in the shadow of the Hoxton tragedies. Working men's wives who wish to keep their husbands at home should compete with the Gin Palace on the score of cleanliness and civil words.

For cleanliness and a look of prosperity, the Bar in Northport Street might have been in the sunshine of Mayfair instead of the shadow of Hyde Road. The landlord, a courteous, merry fellow, served us promptly with a foaming tankard of stout, and commenced to chaff a slippered slovenly woman who was taking her morning nip.

"Got a paper? No," he said. "These exciting scenes in Hoxton em to drive people mad for papers."

"I wanted to see the Hackney Gazette," said the woman.

"Ain't got it; you must wait for the Police News, that's the paper for you."

"Yes," said the woman, her eyes expanding with anticipation; "I do like that paper; ain't it a good un? sich pictures, lor! there ain't nothin' to come up to that."

"It almost makes one ready to commit a murder for the sake of having one's portrait a-doing of the deed," I said in a reckless sort of way, secure under my slouch hat.

"Lor it do!" said the woman in a maudlin fashion; while the landlord laughed heartily, and said that was looking at it in a new light; "but it is an interesting paper, mind you."

A plasterer entered here, evidently an intelligent working man, followed by a couple of lazy-looking fellows, to all appearance having no particular calling.

"They're getting better, I hear," said the plasterer.

"Don't know, don't care," said the landlord.

"Oh," was the reply, "this is becoming a nice neighbourhood; these murders and things have taken a hundred a year off the value of your house."

The landlord laughed, and served several customers in "The Bottle and Jug Department."

"It don't matter to me what such cattle as them comes to; they may all shoot themselves if they like."

"Rubbish shot here," said the plasterer; and the company laughed loudly.

One of the other fellows said he wouldn't mind shooting some people; he did not want to commit murder, but he should have nerve enough to do it; whereupon he went into a rambling criticism of men who are afraid "to go in and stop a murder."

"Alexander, as went into No. 9, wasn't afraid," said the landlord. "I shouldn't be afraid," said the Sloucher, "though I were once asked to do a thing; it was in Moorgate Street, four o'clock in the morning; a bobby, he found a door open, and says he to me, 'There's something wrong here,' says he, 'come in with me,' he says. No, thankee,' says I. But you must,' says he. 'I'm going to my work,' says I. "Then I charges you in the Queen's name,' he says. So says I, 'If that's it, go in,' and in he goes, and I follers. When he gets halfway upstairs, I follers three steps; and then, when he thinks I was a goin up three steps more, I was a going three steps down, and I bolted into the passage, out into Coleman Street, and goes home."

VOL. IX., N.S. 1872.

N N

Thereupon the Plasterer commenced to chaff the Sloucher as to the probability of the policeman wanting him for other reasons than the door being open. "That bobby got dismissed for letting a prisoner escape," he said. "He had an eye to your going up some other stairs."

The Plasterer climbed an imaginary staircase that revolved. The Sloucher joined in the general laughter at this very personal joke, and I left them ordering "another go of gin and bitters."

"And it was a plasterer's hammer that killed the women in Hyde Road," I thought, as I betook myself to the scene of the tragedy of July, which, for various reasons, I found well worthy of a visit.

It is curious to note, in spite of its general accuracy, the small exaggerations and mis-statements of the London press. The scene of the latest Hoxton tragedy is described as within fifty yards of the house where the Squireses were murdered. The distance is at least two hundred yards, about "within call." When the first tragedy was enacted, the reporters described the business of Mrs. Squires as a newsagency. It had always been in my mind that the boy who discovered the murder went in to buy a paper. I had often wondered in a halfmorbid, half-curious way, whether it was Bow Bells, the Boys of England, the Police News, or "Jack Sheppard" that he wanted, building upon this some fanciful ideas of the impression of the scene on the boy's mind, and connecting the crime by a very fine hair-link with the literature of the shop. But Mrs. Squires and her ill-fated daughter did not sell newspapers at all. This discovery had a singular effect upon my previous notions of the quality and character of the murder. But what astonished me more than anything was the generally busy aspect of Hyde Road. It is hard to believe that in the middle of the day a murder could be committed in an open shop situated in a public street, and that, being committed, no one should know anything about it until the criminal had done his work, plundered the house, and escaped. This Hoxton tragedy is a mystery which becomes all the more startling and appalling the more it is looked into.

Turning to the right out of Northport Street you come into Hyde Road. On your left are four respectable-looking shops. The fourth is closed. Over the door is painted "S. Squires, Wholesale Stationer, Printseller. The Trade Supplied." Even now there is an evidence of cleanliness about the place. The windows of the two stories over the shop are furnished with green Venetian blinds ornamented with brass rods. Adjoining the shop is a row of smaller houses. On the other side of the way the street has a more shambling look