Abstract
On 18 May 1827, the son of a respectable farmer, William Corder, murdered his lover Maria Martin in the Red Barn, a storage building on his land, in Polstead. The discovery of this murder the following year set off a feeding-frenzy in which Corder’s body became consumed in different ways. The extent to which Corder’s body was carved up, and his crime endlessly replayed, remains astounding to this day. His body was sent on a series of journeys that would have it measured, convulsed, staged, and re-staged. Corder was arrested in London and was tried and convicted of murder in August 1828. He was sentenced to be hung and anatomized and his execution was witnessed by thousands in Bury St Edmunds.
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Notes
The best account of the Red Barn murder remains J. Curtis (1828) An Authentic and Faithful History of the Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten: With a Full Development of all the Extraordinary Circumstances which led to the Discovery of Her Body in the Red Barn, etc. (London: Thomas Kelly). Curtis’s book was the result of a frenetic few weeks’ residency in Polstead where he interviewed locals and family members of those connected with the trial. Unfortunately, most histories of the Corder case have been corrupted by the elaborate hoax sources contained in Donald McCormick’s The Red Barn Mystery: Some New Evidence on an Old Murder (1967). McCormick (aka Richard Deacon) wrote thinly referenced and widely speculative books on crime and espionage and fabricated the existence of manuscript sources in his The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959) and Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder General (1976). The errors, fabrications, and fantasies contained in The Red Barn Mystery are too numerous to list, but his “new evidence” centred on correspondence he claimed to find linking Corder with the infamous artist and convict Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. McCormick then invented stories about Corder’s bohemian life in the London criminal underworld in the 1820s in the company of people like Wainewright, William Hazlitt, and a Creole prostitute/ fortune-teller named ‘Hannah Fandango’.
See R. D. O’Neill (2006) “‘Frankenstein to Futurism’: Representations of Organ Donation and Transplantation in Popular Culture”, Transplantation Reviews, 20, 222–30;
K. Rowe (1999) Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP).
See K. Park (1994) “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy”, Renaissance Quarterly, 47:1, 1–2.
See R. Shorto (2008) Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason (New York and London: Doubleday); D. W. Davies (2013) “The Unquiet Cranium”, Times Literary Supplement, November 8, 13–15.
See S. Tarlow (2013) “Cromwell and Plunkett: Two Early Modern Heads Called Oliver”, in J. Kelly and M. A. Lyons (eds) Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe: Historical Perspectives (Sallins, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press), pp. 59–76.
See A. Reynolds (2009) Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford: Oxford UP).
For later examples see A. M. Klevnäs (2011) “Whodunnit? Grave-robbery in Early Medieval Northern and Western Europe”, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge;
N. Caciola (1996) “Wraiths, Revenants, and Ritual in Medieval Culture”, Past and Present, 152:1, 26–33.
Anon (1828) An Accurate Account of the Trial of William Corder, for the Murder of Maria Marten, of Polstead, in Suffolk, which took place at Bury Saint Edmunds, on Thursday and Friday, the 7th and 8th Aug. 1828, etc. (London: George Foster), pp. 13–16.
J. Glyde (1856) Suffolk in the Nineteenth Century: Physical, Social, Moral, Religious and Industrial (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co.), p. 87.
C. Pelham (1841) The Chronicles of Crime; or, the New Newgate Calendar, 2 (London: Thomas Tegg), p. 154.
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© 2014 Shane McCorristine
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McCorristine, S. (2014). The Murder in the Red Barn. In: William Corder and the Red Barn Murder: Journeys of the Criminal Body. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439390_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439390_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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