Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain: The Story of Madeleine Smith (review)

More than 150 years have passed since the 22-year-old Madeleine Smith, eldest of five children born to upper-middle class parents in Glasgow, was charged with poisoning a handsome, social-climbing, 33-year-old warehouse clerk named Emile L’Angelier. As the sensational tale unfolded, it was learned that Madeleine, an attractive young woman living with her family since attending a London boarding school, had been conducting a secret affair with L’Angelier for nearly a year. Soon after, the authorities discovered scores of her letters in the dead man’s rooming house, and Madeleine was brought to trial for murder in June, 1857 at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh.

Seventy-seven of her letters were read aloud in court, consuming nearly a full day of the nine-day trial. The fifteen-member male jury of ordinary working men—mostly artisans and clerks—listened spellbound to Madeleine’s repeated declarations of passionate love for Emile, her concerns about her father’s objections to their match, and her graphic descriptions of their lovemaking. The Lord-Justice Clerk refused even to present certain sections of the letters, declaring them written in terms “perhaps … never previously committed to paper as having passed between a man and a woman.”¹

These communications revealed, however, that in the weeks that led up to his death in March, 1857, and despite her panic-stricken pleas, Emile had not only refused Madeleine’s repeated requests to return her letters to her but threatened to show them to her father if she tried to break off their engagement. Emile suspected, rightly, that Madeleine’s anxiety was explained by her having received, and accepted, a proposal in marriage from a parentally-approved suitor. The desperate young woman continued to appeal to her suspicious lover as her ‘sweet pet’ and ‘sweet love’; but by this time she no longer called Emile her ‘husband;’nor did she refer to herself as ‘Mimi L’Angelier.’²

Meanwhile, early in 1857, Madeleine also made several recorded purchases of arsenic. In itself this fact is less incriminating than it would appear, since arsenic in small doses was commonly used at the time as a cosmetic face wash. Druggists even played along, as their registers contain many signatures by young ladies with middle class addresses who claimed the poison was for “garden” use, or that it was “for rats.” In the strained days following L’Angelier’s death, when it was rumored that the clerk had died of poison, Madeleine felt compelled to confide to her new fiancé that she had written letters to “a Frenchman,” and that she had lately bought some arsenic for her complexion.³

Soon after, Miss Smith was formally charged with handing arsenic-laced cups of cocoa through her bedroom window to Emile on two occasions in February during his nocturnal visits to her parents’ townhouse on Glasgow’s fashionable Blyth’swood Square. Reportedly he was ill on both nights. She was accused, too, of giving L’Angelier a third and fatal dose of poison, in like fashion, on a subsequent visit to the Square during the wee hours of Monday, March 23^rd. Emile had returned home at 2:30 a.m. so sick that his alarmed landlady called in a doctor. Despite the latter’s efforts, Emile was pronounced dead by 11 a.m.; and a post-mortem the next day showed that arsenic was most likely the cause of death. Madeline was arrested on the basis of the post-mortem and the discovery of her letters. She signed a statement readily admitting a relationship with the clerk, conceding that she had given him cocoa through the bars of her bedroom window, and owning up to purchases of arsenic. Yet she denied putting arsenic in the drinks she gave L’Angelier and declared that she had not seen him at all during the three weeks prior to...