Crime, Sensation, and Empire

The 1857 criminal trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of Pierre Emile L’Angelier became a cause célèbre throughout the British world. Enmeshed with scandal and speculation, it involved a secret affair between a young upper middle-class Glasgow woman and her older foreign lover of lower social standing; accusations of arsenic poisoning that led to his demise; erotic love letters that were read out in court; and an inconclusive—and uniquely Scottish—verdict of ‘not proven’. In 1866, a butcher under the name of Thomas Castro from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, claimed to be the heir to an ancient English baronetcy: the Tichborne estates. Similarly described as its own cause célèbre, the Tichborne baronetcy case spanned two long-running civil and criminal trials and led to a political movement in Britain that continued to take aim at political, legal, and religious institutions long after the trials had ended, in 1874.

Although the crimes at the centre of the two cases were incongruous, both Madeleine Smith and the Tichborne Claimant ignited significant public debate over criminal procedures, class, gender, and identity. Smith’s case played a key role in the development of ‘sensation’ journalism and literature centred on the violent propensities that lurked beneath the seemingly respectable and repressive Victorian social code, while the Tichborne Claimant’s case confronted Britons with anxieties around the definition of ‘respectability’ and the homecoming of expatriates from the colonies.

While coverage of the cases has been well-documented within Britain, less scholarly attention has been paid to their pervasive coverage in the colony of Australia. Both cases were major news items in the colonial press, as updates on the trials were sourced from British media outlets and published in local newspapers almost daily. So pervasive was the coverage that gossip and misinformation surrounding the two cases spread throughout Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand, as speculation surrounded Smith’s later whereabouts over the late nineteenth century and questions about the Tichborne Claimant’s identity lingered.

By examining the widespread coverage of the cases in Australia, this work explores how the cases harnessed the communicative powers of the press and stirred sensation in and outside of Britain. Both cases played a role in forging British-Australian transnational identities in the colonies, as Australian newspapers lent their unique voices to associated British metropolitan discussions and weighed in on the respective trial verdicts. With Smith embodying the perceived exodus of undesirable migrants to Australia and the Tichborne Claimant representing colonial life being brought back to the British metropole, Australian newspapers also used the cases to confront the way British metropolitan newspapers wrote about the colony. Fixation on the appearances, manners, and movements of Smith and the Tichborne Claimant, and the crimes with which they were implicated, meant that the Australian newspaper press became an arena for long-standing and far-reaching debate about class, social respectability, gender, sexuality, criminality, and colonial justice.