Murder, Magic, Madness

The Victorian Trials of Dove and the Wizard

Davies Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138407978
• eBook ISBN: 9781317867555
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In 1856 William Dove, a young tenant farmer, was tried and executed for the poisoning of his wife Harriet. The trial might have been a straightforward case of homicide, but because Dove became involved with Henry Harrison, a Leeds wizard, and demonstrated through his actions and words a strong belief in magic and the powers of the devil, considerable effort was made to establish whether these beliefs were symptomatic of insanity. It seems that Dove murdered his wife to hasten a prediction made by Harrison that he would remarry a more attractive and wealthy woman. Dove employed Harrison to perform various acts of magic, and also made his own written pact with the devil to improve his personal circumstances.

The book will study Dove's beliefs and Harrison's activities within the rural and urban communities in which they lived, and examine how modern cultures attempted to explain this largely hidden mental world, which was so sensationally exposed. The Victorian period is often portrayed as an age of great social and educational progress. This book shows how beliefs dismissed by some Victorians as 'medieval superstitions' continued to influence the thoughts and actions of many people, viz most famously Conan `table tapper' Doyle.

CHAPTER 1

An inauspicious start in life

‘… pious parentage and religious training are not the infallible guarantees of virtuous maturity’¹

Even if William Dove had lived a quiet and unremarkable life he would still have secured a small place in the historical record by virtue of his family’s business and religious activities.² His grandfather Christopher Dove was a yeoman’s son brought up in the North Yorkshire village of Newby Wiske. Like many young men from his social group, at the age of fifteen Christopher was apprenticed and sent to York to learn currying, a skilled job involving the treatment and dressing of tanned leather. Christopher stayed and worked in York after the end of his apprenticeship, but in the early 1780s he set up his own currying and leather-cutting firm in Prebend Row, Darlington, a town that had long been a centre of leather manufacturing in the northeast.³ Christopher’s business prospered and when he died in 1816, aged seventy-one, he bequeathed a substantial sum of money. In the words of Henry Spencer, who wrote a large tome on the worthies of Darlington, he ‘passed a sober quiet life, unmarked by extraordinary incidents’.⁴ The family firm was taken over by three of his ten children, Christopher junior, and his younger brothers William and Thomas. Only a year later, though, tragedy struck when Thomas died aged only thirty. The two remaining business partners set about building up the firm with considerable success. Spencer remarked that they ‘pushed their trade with tact and energy’, and were a good demonstration that the accumulation of wealth was achievable ‘without the possession of eminent intellectuality’.⁵

Christopher junior converted to Wesleyan Methodism in his twenties and met his first wife through his business and religious connections. She was Mary Steele, a grave and sedate young woman from Barnard Castle whose family were also curriers and Methodists.⁶ The couple were married in the spring of 1814, and a friend of the Steeles wrote that when she left the town ‘sorrow was portrayed on many countenances, and some wept aloud, on account of their losing so kind and generous a friend.’⁷ Less then a year later she was also lost to the world, entering ‘the haven of eternal blessedness’ on 13 February at the age of twenty-four. Christopher’s austere response to her death was shaped by his puritanical Methodism. On her deathbed, when she asked Christopher if ‘he had not remarked in her a backwardness, and an apparent aversion to our entering into close conversation on the subject of Christian experience,’ he replied he ‘certainly had, and lamented it.’ Her last wish was to become Christopher’s guardian angel if God permitted. Hours after her death he wrote a memoir of her character and last days in which expressions of love mingled with evangelical criticism. ‘She was, perhaps, naturally too diffident and reserved,’ he observed, ‘which disposition the enemy sometimes availed himself of; and which, no doubt, prevented her from enjoying at all times that clearness of experience which is so highly desirable.’⁸

Christopher married Mary Dunn the following year. She was the daughter of William Dunn, a Durham ironmonger and fellow Wesleyan Methodist. It was said that she ‘possessed considerable literary ability’, though her only published writing was a pamphlet on the quality of sober dressing entitled Thoughts upon Dress, which was presumably a reflection upon John Wesley’s essay of the same title.⁹ Henry Spencer had the opportunity to read a copy and remarked that her ‘antiquated’ views would have been ‘read with astonishment’ by the ‘fair wearers of gaily-trimmed bonnets, and extensive crinolines’ of his day.¹⁰ We gain some insight into her early years of marriage from the correspondence of her only sister Margaret Burton, who died of a long lingering illness in 1830. Her letters and diaries are full of references to the kind attentions of her sister and Christopher. When, one time, he was very seriously ill with an ‘attack of inflammation’, she wrote to her sister expressing the hope that ‘thy invaluable husband shall yet for many years continue to grow in grace, and to be a general blessing. Amen, Lord Jesus.’¹¹

It was a sign of their increasing prosperity and upward mobility that around 1820 the Dove’s moved to a newly built rented house in Wellington Place. Darlington was about to undergo something of a housing boom, due initially to population pressure as the economy attracted new migrants, and then in response to the opening of the Stockton to Darlington railway in 1825, which led to considerable urban development. New commercial streets were built on the outskirts of the town, and the small residential development of Wellington Place, named in honour of the general, was one of the first of a series of new middle-class residential areas in the town.¹² Not long afterwards Christopher moved to the newly built Grange House. It was here that William was born on 1 July 1827. He was the eighth of Mary and Christopher’s nine children, six girls and three boys. Their first was Mary, born in 1818. She later married Benjamin Marsden, son of John Marsden, a Leeds hosier and glover. Jane was born in 1819 but died eight years later. Their first son, Christopher, was delivered on 6 April 1820. The following year Elizabeth was born. Sarah came next in 1824 and was to be the longest lived of the Dove children. Anna was born in 1825 and Margaret the following year. William was three when the last of the Dove children, Samuel, died aged only eleven months.

Samuel’s death happened not long after the family had moved to Leeds. The difficult decision to uproot from Darlington was in response to Leeds’ growing prominence in the leather trade. The booming population generated demand for large quantities of meat, which in turn generated large quantities of hides, while the textile mills that fuelled the expansion of Leeds required a constant supply of heavy leathers for their machinery.¹³ The industry expanded rapidly, with all grades of leather being produced, from industrial drive belts to fine morocco leather.¹⁴ From 1827 quarterly leather fairs were held at the newly built South Market, and soon became the largest outside London. It made good business sense, therefore, for the Doves to remove to Leeds; besides, they already had premises in the town at 37 Boar Lane. But the decision was not taken ‘without much prayer and deliberation’. The Doves were well integrated into the religious and commercial world of Darlington, but ultimately Christopher felt that the ‘finger of Providence’ pointed in the direction of Leeds.¹⁵

The Doves settled at 3 Park Square, one of several red brick developments built for the gentry and prosperous merchants on the western edge of Leeds during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It was initially a highly desirable area but as the woollen mills and dye houses spread westwards along the banks of the River Aire a thick pall of smoke replaced the country air and workers’ cottages encroached on the genteel suburb.¹⁶ In 1824, Park Square householders had taken legal action against the biggest of the offending factory owners, Benjamin Gott, but to no avail.¹⁷ So around the time the Doves moved in, the wealthiest of the middle classes were beginning to move out of the neighbourhood and relocate to villas further westwards and northwards where the air was cleaner and the working classes not so evident. Nevertheless, Park Square and other such residential areas near the town centre remained home to many professionals and businessmen. The Dove’s neighbours included the likes of the barrister Thomas Horncastle Marshall, the borough engineer Thomas Walker, the banker Thomas Blayds, and the Rev. Edward Cookson.¹⁸ Christopher soon established himself as an influential member of the Wesleyan Methodist community. He became the secretary of the Auxiliary Wesleyan Missionary Society for the Leeds circuit¹⁹ and was instrumental in the construction of Oxford Place Chapel, one of the largest Wesleyan chapels in the country, which opened in the autumn of 1835 and provided places for 2,600 worshippers, with 1000 seats being offered free to the poor.²⁰ Its plans were determined at a meeting held in the Doves’ drawing room, Christopher contributed significant sums to its construction, and he was its treasurer for many years. Yet he was not a staunch sectarian and was also widely respected by the local Anglican clergy and other Nonconformists through his involvement with and donations to such bodies as the Evangelical Alliance, Bible Society, Leeds Town Mission and the Strangers’ Friend Society.²¹

Leeds was described in the 1830s as a town ‘favoured with many signal revivals of religion; and in which many truly religious people are to be found.’²² Indeed, as a recent comprehensive survey of Victorian religion has shown, Wesleyan Methodism flourished more than any other denomination in the rapidly expanding northern towns of Victorian England.²³ A census of Leeds taken by the town council in 1839 revealed that Methodism was running a close second to Anglican churches regarding the provision of places, with Wesleyan chapels providing 11,160 seats to the Church of England’s 13,255.²⁴ By 1851 there were significantly more people attending the various Methodist chapels in Leeds than the Anglican churches. The situation was similar in other large towns in Yorkshire such as Hull and Bradford.²⁵ At the time of the Doves’ move to Leeds, however, the town’s Wesleyan community had only recently settled down after the acrimonious schism generated by the installation of an organ in Brunswick Chapel in 1827. Such an apparently innocuous move was taken as a grave mark of religious vanity by some and led a small group to break away from the Wesleyan Connexion.²⁶ ‘Embarrassed finance, diminished congregations, disruption of friendships, depressed hopes, and many melancholy instances of backsliding, were the sad fruits,’ wrote one observer.²⁷ Christopher, who remained loyal to the Connexion, proved himself a key figure in restoring confidence, raising money and healing personal and public rifts.

Working hard and giving generously

The Methodist environment in which Christopher brought up his children did not mirror his own upbringing. Christopher senior had been opposed to the Wesleyans but considered there were some good men among them and sent his sons to a local preacher’s school. Christopher junior did not, however, immediately follow in the devout footsteps of one of his brothers, John, who trained as an Independent minister and wrote a biography of the Wesley family.²⁸ It was said that once out of school Christopher forgot God, and his life until the age of twenty-five was ‘spent in the follies and vanities of the world’ – a not uncommon story in male Methodist biographies and autobiographies of the time.²⁹ His father’s resistance to his son’s conversion was not solely on religious grounds, he was also concerned that Christopher’s attendance at Methodist meetings would interfere with the running of the family business. Christopher was determined to allay his concerns. He made a point of being the first to arrive at the workshop in the morning and the last to leave at night. He may have mixed religion with business but he ensured that the one did not interfere to the detriment of the other. Anthony Steele, his brother-in-law and business companion in these early years, recalled with great respect and affection their first trip to London in 1815: ‘For between two and three weeks, we acted together in business affairs during the day, and at night cast up our spiritual accounts. I well remember how, during our journey by coach, he watched for opportunities to do good, distributing religious tracts, and h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Publishers’ Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• 1 An inauspicious start in life
• 2 A wizard’s business
• 3 Poisonous relations
• 4 Dove in the dock
• 5 Mad or bad?
• 6 Fate
• 7 Hunting Harrison down
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index