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1
Charlotte
It must have been a terrible shock to see his name in the newspaper. It appeared not just in one, but in all of them. His unmistakable face was everywhere-those bulging eyes behind the spectacles, the drooping mustache. As they read the grisly details of what he had done to his wife it would have been impossible for them not to think of Charlotte. What might he have done to her?
Selina Leary knew it was only a matter of time before the journalists came calling at 225 West 120 Street. She was prepared for them when they knocked on the door of her Harlem apartment. The New York American had already been to see her brother, William Bell, in Long Island. Selina was less forthcoming than he was. William spat out angry words; she chose hers carefully. She was asked about Belle Elmore, but Selina "did not care to say anything about the slain woman" or about Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, beyond admitting that she once "knew him well" and that she would be able to identify him should he be caught.
William had told the journalist about Charlotte's letters. He had told them that Charlotte's former husband had insisted she submit to "unnecessary operations." The reporter asked Selina if she wished to confirm this, but she said nothing.
The New York American wanted a photograph of the first Mrs. Crippen to print in their publication alongside that of the second Mrs. Crippen, and so someone, most likely Selina, went and retrieved one from an album or a frame or a drawer. It had been taken on a day sometime between 1882 and 1884, not long after Charlotte Jane Bell, her mother Susan and Selina had arrived in New York from England. Charlotte had gone to the fashionable studio of the French-born photographer Marc Gambier, who took portraits of famous actresses and middle-class Manhattanites. It cost $5 for a dozen 10 x 7-inch prints of one's own face. Charlotte had her dark hair pulled back into a bun and her fringe curled loosely on her forehead. She had the clearest of blue eyes, a small, firm mouth and a square, full face. She was neither beautiful nor unattractive by late-nineteenth-century standards. As might be expected of an unmarried, educated young woman in her mid-twenties, she had dressed modestly in what appears to be a dark-colored taffeta bodice with a high lace neck. She also chose to wear a large plain gold locket. These were the early days of Charlotte's new life in America, and it is difficult not to spot a glint of optimism in her distant, pensive look.
To most Americans who were unfamiliar with the realities of life for the Irish "gentry," Charlotte's description of her upbringing at Bellview House, in Abbeyleix, County Laois, must have sounded like a romantic tale. She was born on April 20, 1858 to Arthur Bell, a gentleman farmer and a Justice of the Peace, who had studied Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. Bellview, with its seven bedrooms, its drawing room, parlor, dining room and library, all richly appointed with mahogany furniture, sat on the rise of a hill, in the middle of 90 acres of pasture, meadow and woodland. Its stable was filled with horses. Its farms produced hay, wheat, oats and potatoes, and reared pigs, turkeys, chickens, geese and dairy cattle. Charlotte, with her elder siblings, Susan Rebecca, Madden and William, and her younger siblings, Charles and Selina, used to travel about the countryside, to Abbeyleix and Kilkenny, in the Bells' polished open-top brougham. Her father rode with the local hunt, and the family attended balls and charity events at Abbeyleix House, the home of the Viscount de Vesci, for whom her grandfather acted as a land agent. Arthur had married Susan, the daughter of Reverend Samuel Madden, the Prebendary of Kilmanagh, an educated woman who strongly believed in the promotion of literacy. The Bells were a family drawn to science, medicine and technology. In 1862, Arthur invented a new type of sawmill which required a fraction of the horsepower normally used by such machines. Susan encouraged the family's servants to read, and regularly lent her employees books from her own collection. The Bells were Protestants in an Ireland whose English-made laws were not designed to favor the Catholic majority. For generations, their faith conferred on them political and social advantages which allowed them to enter the fringes of elite life.
On the surface, they seemed to enjoy an existence no different from that of the English gentry, but the Bells' perceived prosperity, their comfortable chairs and French drapery, their schooling, servants and manners were merely the trappings of a life they could not actually afford. For centuries, in Great Britain and Ireland, true enduring wealth was predicated on landownership, which offered security of tenure and a guaranteed income. Its inheritance might ensure a family's position, economically, politically and socially, for years to come. Unfortunately, the Bells, like the majority of Irish families, from those of their class down to the poorest of cottier farmers, were tenants. The Bells had leased their land from the Viscounts de Vesci since the eighteenth century, pouring their resources into developing their holdings, subdividing their property among family members and subletting to smaller tenants. Money was borrowed and usually repaid against the value of the land's income, but in 1852, after seven years of crop failures during the Great Famine, the Bells were increasingly unable to make good on their debts. Around the time of his marriage, Arthur had agreed to take over the lease of Bellview from his father and to pay off some of the encumbrance with Susan's dowry. This only partially cleared the burden and, upon his father William's death in 1860, a further encumbrance against the property came to light. The Bells, with their growing family, began to struggle and Bellview House was in urgent need of repairs to its roof. It had originally been Arthur's plan to hand back the lease to de Vesci, sell his goods and emigrate with his young family to New Zealand, but his father's ill health kept him in Ireland. "My means are so small (only amounting to £46 per annum besides what I can make by my own industry in Bellview) and so crippled that it is not in my power to do the work myself . . ." Arthur wrote in a lengthy pleading letter to the Viscount in May 1860. He asked to borrow £50 for the costs of maintaining a property which, in effect, belonged to the Viscount, not to him. "If your Lordship should have any opportunity of giving me or procuring me employment, I trust you should find me not only deeply grateful, but most anxious to attend to your Lordship's interest, or do credit to your patronage . . ." he added, in what must have been a mortifying request.
Arthur was granted the loan, but when in 1867 his financial circumstances had still not improved and the floorboards had begun to rot beneath his family's feet, he was forced to borrow a further £50 from his lordship. The Bells were hardly able to keep their heads above the rising tide of their debts when, in the following summer, typhoid fever came to Bellview. While Charlotte and her younger siblings recovered, Arthur did not. He died on August 20, 1868 and was followed to his grave in October by Charlotte's elder sister, Susan Rebecca. After this blow, her mother struggled to maintain the estate. She sold the farm equipment in order to repay her husband's debts, and by 1871, her brother-in-law Reverend William Jacob and her sister Rebecca had taken on a share of the lease, but neither of these remedies staunched the bleed of money from Bellview. Arthur had written to Lord de Vesci as early as 1860 that he knew his "prospects of getting on in this country were very slight." After the catastrophic impact of the Great Famine on the Irish population and economy, no one wanted to assume a lease encumbered with debt for land which barely yielded enough income on which to live. The events of 1845-51 drove roughly 1 million Irish to emigrate, and in the years that followed a scarcity of work or opportunities to build a future would push the numbers of those leaving the country higher still. Ultimately, by 1877, Susan could no longer manage what remained of the Bells' family home. She and her children would now have to look overseas for any promise of prosperity.
There would always be opportunities for her boys. In 1877, an uncle placed Charlotte's younger brother, Charles de Hauteville Bell, into an apprenticeship with the merchant navy in England. Madden Arthur Bell emigrated to Australia to seek his fortune in the gold fields, and William Oscar Robert Bell bought a passage to New York in 1881 and became an engineer. The women of the family had two choices, the most preferable of which would have been to marry. The least favorable would have been to go forth into the menacing world and earn an income. In 1877, Charlotte was a marriageable nineteen, but a well-bred, educated young woman without a penny in her pocket was unlikely to have attracted the right sort of suitors. However, it did make her a perfect candidate to become a governess or a teacher, the only jobs considered appropriate for a young woman of her station in life.
When and under what circumstances Charlotte was hired to teach at Brackley Grammar School in Northamptonshire are unknown. She appears on the 1881 census as a "teacher." The word "governess" had originally been written into the column designated for "occupation," but someone mindfully amended it. A governess required no professional training to shepherd and instruct young children, usually within the household of a relatively wealthy man, but by 1881, the role of a teacher increasingly did. Adverts for "certified teachers" filled the wanted columns of the newspapers in the early 1880s, and church-sponsored teacher training colleges for women, such as Whitelands College and Maria Grey College in London, were offering rigorous one- and two-year courses which prepared students to become schoolmistresses. Qualified female teachers hired by schools might be expected to offer instruction in English, foreign languages, music, history, mathematics, "moral" and natural sciences. There is no indication which of these Charlotte offered the seventeen male pupils at Brackley Grammar. The school, with its affiliations to Magdalen College, Oxford, had grand aspirations to make itself "a middle-class school of the first order" and "a very important center of education." It was headed by the Reverend John William Boyd, who appears to have preferred Irish Protestant teachers; the colleague with whom Charlotte shared her instructional duties, Dudley McLeish, had, like her father, studied at Trinity College, Dublin. Both she and Mr. McLeish, along with Reverend Boyd's wife and six children, two boarding pupils and four servants, shared his large but "damp and unsanitary" home. It was suggested that these conditions led to an outbreak of typhoid which would claim the life of Boyd's son later that year. Boyd would leave the school shortly after this, as it seems so too would Charlotte, whose life had already been devastated by the unfortunately familiar disease.
So little is recorded about the lives of Arthur Bell's widow and daughters after his death that the circumstances which finally compelled them to emigrate to the United States remain a mystery. While Charlotte was employed in Northamptonshire, Susan had found a position in Wales working at the National School in Holyhead, where she and Selina also lived. Evidently, this arrangement had proved unsatisfactory, or perhaps letters from her son William in New York encouraged her to join him there. Holyhead, poised on the windblown tip of Wales, the port from where the ships set sail and returned from Ireland, must have seemed a transient place in which to station their lives: somewhere between the past and the untried future. It is difficult to believe that leaving did not feel inevitable. Susan and Selina departed for New York in 1882, with Charlotte either accompanying them or following soon after.
Until their arrival in New York, the Bells had lived a mostly rural existence, with visits to Dublin, Kilkenny and other cities and towns in Ireland and Great Britain. Nothing they would have seen, smelt and heard prior to their arrival in the United States would have prepared them for the sensory assault that awaited them in the screeching, belching, snarling, sprawling American metropolis. In 1882, the Statue of Liberty was not yet in place to greet them, and the incomplete Brooklyn Bridge sat like a partially strung harp in the middle of the East River. Laborers working for Thomas Edison's Illuminating Company were digging the streets of Lower Manhattan and laying electrical cable through the otherwise gaslit city. Above them rose gargantuan buildings which spread along entire city blocks. Inside they contained the highest ceilings and the widest cathedral-like windows. There were rumbling, rattling trains cantilevered over streets, held in place with forests of criss-crossed, riveted, rusting iron girders. The roads were as wide as rivers, and two and three deep on either bank with wagons and carts, carriages, horses, barrels-and people. The city bulged with roughly 2 million of them in the early 1880s. They were of every country, every language, every description, dark skin and light skin, speaking in languages the Bells had only seen mentioned in books. They wore colored shawls and brightly embroidered headscarves and waistcoats, Chinese silk robes and slippers with curled toes, beads and braids and hats: flat or triangular or little skullcaps. Oscar Wilde, another native of Ireland who visited New York in that year, commented on the frenetic pace of life and that everybody seemed "in a hurry to catch a train." The city fizzed with ideas and industry and business. There were streets of clothiers, haberdashers, bookstores and furniture sellers that seemed to run for miles. The entire place felt like "one huge Whiteley's shop," Wilde marveled, while also remarking on the infernal noise of it all: "One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle . . ."
Susan, Charlotte and Selina cast themselves into this vast ocean of a city. Where they landed first is unknown, but by 1885 Susan and Selina are recorded as living at 411 West 40 Street, right in the rotting heart of an area known as Hell's Kitchen, the Irish settlement. Few New York neighborhoods were as notorious as that bounded by 34 Street to the south and 59 Street to the north. From there its reputation ran down to the docks, west from 8 Avenue. The waterfront and the Hudson River Railroad attracted heavy industry into the area; distilleries, stockyards and slaughterhouses with tanning and fat-rendering facilities. These, along with milk sheds, carpet mills, wallpaper factories, gasworks and ironworks, all provided jobs for poorly paid, unskilled laborers, the majority of whom were Irish immigrants. Cheap tenement housing sprang up to accommodate the area's population, who also built themselves shanties along the vacant lots between 37 and 50. Drinking establishments and brothels plugged the gaps between the factories and the ramshackle homes. The area's housing quickly became overcrowded. Residents shared their squalid quarters with chickens, goats and geese. The thick stink and effluent of industry was an all-pervasive, hanging, drifting presence. Sanitation was poor and diseases such as cholera, typhus and diphtheria would sweep through the community. Criminality bred as easily; barefoot children as well as adults turned to violence and theft, pickpocketing and robbery, the sale of sex and stolen goods. According to the journalists who ventured into the area, peering into the infamous buildings-the Barracks, the House of Blazes and the place which lent its name to the entire locality, Hell's Kitchen on 40 Street-everywhere was a scene of human misery, intoxication, lethargy, vice, filth and illness. Guns blew out neighbors' brains, drunken men beat their wives unconscious, bodies were found sunk into the fetid mud and shit pudding of the streets. Newspapers of the 1880s liked to heighten the worst of these tropes for their readers, but rarely mention that Hell's Kitchen was also populated by people who ran shops and provided services, those who merely wanted to get on with their lives: carpenters, seamstresses and grocers.
