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Miserable Kate: Femininity, Space and Literary Conventions in Representations of a Late‐Victorian Murder

Kate Marshall was sentenced to death and sent to Newgate to await her execution, which was due on Tuesday, 31 January 1899. Only a few days earlier, the forty-fouryear-old whip maker from Spitalfields, in London’s East End, was convicted of the willful murder of her young sister, Elizabeth (Eliza) Roberts, who was stabbed to death in her Dorset Street room on 26 November 1898. Kate protested her innocence, claiming that it was her sister’s husband who delivered the fatal blow. Nobody seemed to believe her. She, by then, had a long history of violence, and was already labelled, in the justice system as well as in the press, as a ‘dangerous woman’. The fatal incident took place in the room where the sisters had been residing with Elizabeth’s husband, David Roberts, a painter and decorator, and their three-year-old son. The sisters, who earned their living by making and selling whips, supposedly argued about their day’s revenue whilst Roberts and the child were present in the room. Ultimately, Elizabeth was stabbed in the chest and died shortly afterwards. After standing trial at the Old Bailey, Kate was found guilty. Three days before the carrying out of the execution, the Home Secretary advised the queen to respite the capital punishment with a view to its commutation to penal servitude. Many studies have demonstrated the importance of gender in the administration of criminal justice in turn of the century England.1 Martin Wiener has argued that gender increasingly tended to be a factor in women’s favour with judges, lawyers, juries, as well as with the press and public, and that newspaper reporting had become a significant venue for debating ideologies related to gender, class and accountability. Moreover, the press played an increasing role in criminal justice.2 Wiener has demonstrated that late Victorian ‘professional’ men of law often believed that women had less power of self-control than men, and that they were inclined to act violently, under the influence of overwhelming emotions. Thus, women had become less liable to execution.3 Trials where women were accused of murder, and their press coverage, then, offered ‘cultural moments’ to define gender roles and expectations, as well as femininity.4 Ginger Frost’s article on the 1902 Kitty Byron case, in which a working-class young woman was accused of murdering her lover with a knife, demonstrates how, in both the trial