Name: The Wicked Boy
ISBN: 9781594205781

Kate Summerscale

First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing.

The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

The Wicked Boy

Zoe Smolen

I really loved this book! As a big fan of true crime and history this book was the perfect combination. 

I felt like the author did a great job just telling the story and not getting lost in explanations and trivial details. There was not a lot of conjecture. While this might maker the book slow for some people, I didn't have a hard time with it and actually found it quite easy to read. 

Thanks to Penguin for an advanced copy on exchange for an honest review.

In East London in the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age thirteen) and his brother Nattie (age twelve) were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. The judge sentenced him to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Shockingly, Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Summerscale re-creates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past.

An Infamous Murder in Victorian London

 Bruna Acioly Leão

The Wicked Boy is the story of a Victorian murder. A boy kills his mother for seemingly unknown reasons and afterwards appears cool and collected on the courtroom. Is he a psychopath? Or did he actually have a strong motive to commit the murder, say to protect his younger brother's life and his own? Or should we blame the gory literature he was consuming to escape his harsh reality (the "penny dreadfuls" as they were called by the sensationalist press of the time)? The author had conducted research on this case and presented them all in this book in a clear and concise way, subtly inferring her own opinions here and there, but mostly leaving the facts out for interpretation of the reader.

I have to confess: it's been a long time since I've read true crime books (looking back at my adolescence, I know now that I did in fact read them, but I did not recognize the genre staple at the time), so I am not used to them. I went into this book a little wary, but curious anyway. What would it be about? Would it offer insights on the psychiatry of crime? Or would it discuss the abuse imposed on children in the 19th century, when it was legal for a parent to abuse their child to violent extremes without being questioned about it in any court of law? 

Some bits from here on might contain spoilers.

I enjoyed the pursuit of these ideas, and so in the beginning of the book I was very engaged by it. Towards the middle, however, after the trial period had passed, I found myself rather bored by the endeavor. I did not care about Robert Coombes' time at the hospice Broadmoore, and cared even less about his time in the army and about the time after that when he lived as a farmer. I should blame my self, however, for not liking these parts. I hate reading about anything military. It is what it is.

In the end, I was left feeling a bit disappointed. Those insights I went it searching for seemed lacking in the book. I have reached the end and still have not understood the point the author was trying to make with this story. I understood it as a story of redemption and it that aspect, it seems like a powerful message: we are not defined by a single action in our lives, no matter how significant. We should be defined by the whole course of our lives and by the good we choose to do onto others even if we have done wrong in the past. However, it seems like there should have been more to it.
Robert lived a quietly life and dedicated himself to work (first in the army, then with his music, then in his farm) and I am sure he helped plenty of people (such as when he was carrying the war-injured on the battlefields), but if that was the story the author was trying to tell, it seemed like she should have set up for it from the beginning.

At first, based on the descriptions of Robert in court and his declarations in the murder trial, it is hard to say whether he was abused or whether he was a psychopath. Having reached the end, I believe now that he was abused by his mother, both physically and emotionally, and seeing no other way out of it he had decided to kill her. Remember, that he lived in a time when parents had every right over a child and children had close to no rights. Judges were disinclined to persecute a parent for abuse. His father, which seemed to be a source of comfort at sometimes for him, was gone from the house. His brother was also being threatened and in danger of being seriously hurt by their mother. He did not see her as the benevolent figure who had given him life anymore, but as a monster akin to the ones he had been reading about on his stories (stories which were not the source or the blame for Robert's violence as the press was inclined to believe, but merely a reflection of the reality he was leaving and which he was trying to escape from). 

You can come to this conclusion from most of the facts throughout the book, but especially from the epilogue in which we seen adult Robert encounter a child victim of abuse and take the child into his care, to protect him from his abusive parent. It is possible that Robert had recognized (maybe consciously, maybe not) that this was a similar situation to what he had suffered, and he saw a way to help the child, so that his future could be a better than Robert's own.

All of those things are speculations and reflect my own opinions based on the facts in the book, however. We will never quite know for sure. I do appreciate that the author has left things mostly for the reader's own interpretation, but I do wish that the story had had more purpose than it did. I think the narrative was well written and informed, but it lacked direction and at some points it was too dry and slow and failed to engage.

Ultimately, if you enjoy reading about true crime and are curious about what the book might reveal, I would still recommend it, but I am not sure if it would be a good place to start if you are someone who is new to the genre.

Abi 

Early in the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother Nattie set out from their small terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building. When the police were called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the 'penny dreadful' novels that Robert loved to read. Kate Summerscale uncovers a true story of murder and morality.

The Wicked Boy The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer