“Murder or no Murder?”: Crossing the Boundaries of Victorian Genres and of Facts and Fiction in James Redding Ware’s Rewritings of the Road Hill Murder

One of the most notorious cases in mid-Victorian England, the brutal murder of four-years-old Francis “Saville” Kent (1860), also known as the Road Hill tragedy, became the topic of much public debate, inspiring journalists and writers alike. If references and rewritings of the case have been traced in novels by Collins, Dickens, Braddon, Wood and William Trevor among others, very little attention has been paid to “A Child Found Dead – Murder or No Murder?”, one of the stories composing The Female Detective (1864), arguably the first book to feature a woman as a detective as well as the principal narrator. Since only recently has Andrew Forrester Jr., the author of the collection, turned out to be the pseudonym of editor/writer James Redding Ware (1832-1909), my paper aims to investigate the ways in which the case is fictionalised in the short story, first published in 1862, as compared to the pamphlet The Road Murder. Analysis of This Persistent Mystery that Ware wrote after the startling confession of Constance Kent, Francis’s stepsister (1865). In particular, my analysis will focus on Ware’s argument for a sleepwalking woman killer as illustrated in detail by Hardal, the detective lawyer in the story, and his use of contemporary pre-Freudian theories on human psyche and dreams, further explored in a later work, Wonderful Dreams of Remarkable Men and Women (1884).