CAUSES CÉLÈBRES.
XXIII.
NO. 29 RATCLIFFE HIGHWAY.
[1811.]
The recent Whitechapel tragedies recall to mind a series of crimes which eighty years ago threw not only the city of London, but the greater part of England it self into a paroxysm of consternation and terror. These murders, says De Quincey (in his essay on "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts"), were "the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed." While the perpetrator of the Whitechapel atrocities is still at liberty, the author of the atrocious deeds above referred to was, fortunately, speedily discovered. Less cunning than his more modern rival, he himself furnished the authorities with the means of his detection.
Within a few minutes of midnight on Saturday, Dec. 7, 1811, Mr. Marr, a young newly married man, keeping a small lace and hosier's shop at No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway, sent out his servant-girl to pay a baker's bill and to get some oysters for supper. Mrs. Marr was at the time in the kitchen, rocking her baby in its cradle. The apprentice—a young, ruddy Devonshire lad, named Goven, aged fourteen—was either busy in the shop or at work downstairs. The girl was alarmed, as she left the house on that peculiarly gloomy December night, by seeing a man in a long dark coat standing in the lamplight on the opposite side of the street, as if watching her master's house. The watchman, a friend of Marr's, had also previously noticed this mysterious man continually peeping into the window of Marr's shop, and thinking the act suspicious, had gone in and told the proprietor. A few minutes after Mary the servant left, as the watchman was returning on his ordinary half-hourly beat, Marr called to him to help him put up the shutters; and the watch man then told Marr that the man who had been skulking about had got scared, and had not been in the street since. In the mean time the girl, looking in vain for an oyster-shop still open, had wandered from street to street and lost her way. It was nearly half an hour before she got home; when she arrived there, to her surprise she found no lights visible, and no sound within the house. She rang, and then gently knocked, but there was no reply. She rang again after a pause, but violently. Presently (but we take this fact, with some slight doubt, from Mr. De Quincey's wonderful narrative of the tragedy) she heard a noise on the stairs, and then footsteps coming down the narrow passage that led to the street door. Next, she heard some one breathing hard at the keyhole. With a sudden impulse of almost maniacal despair, she tore at the bell and hammered at the knocker; partly, perhaps unconscious of what she did, to rouse the neighborhood and paralyze the murderer, feeling now certain that a murder had been committed. Mr. Parker, a pawnbroker next door, threw up his bedroom window, and the servant told him that she felt sure her master and mistress had been murdered, and that the murderer was even then in the house. Mr. Parker half dressed himself, and armed with a kitchen poker, vaulted over the low brick wall of his back yard and entered Mr. Marr's premises. A light was still glimmering through the half-open back door by which the murderer must have just escaped. The shop was floating with blood. Marr lay dead behind the counter near the window, his skull shattered by blows of a mallet, and
