1 Charlotte It must have been a terrible shock to see his name in the newspaper. It appeared not just in one, but in all of them. His unmistakable face was everywhere-those bulging eyes behind the spectacles, the drooping mustache. As they read the grisly details of what he had done to his wife it would have been impossible for them not to think of Charlotte. What might he have done to her? Selina Leary knew it was only a matter of time before the journalists came calling at 225 West 120 Street. She was prepared for them when they knocked on the door of her Harlem apartment. The New York American had already been to see her brother, William Bell, in Long Island. Selina was less forthcoming than he was.
William spat out angry words; she chose hers carefully. She was asked about Belle Elmore, but Selina "did not care to say anything about the slain woman" or about Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, beyond admitting that she once "knew him well" and that she would be able to identify him should he be caught. William had told the journalist about Charlotte''s letters. He had told them that Charlotte''s former husband had insisted she submit to "unnecessary operations." The reporter asked Selina if she wished to confirm this, but she said nothing. The New York American wanted a photograph of the first Mrs. Crippen to print in their publication alongside that of the second Mrs.
Crippen, and so someone, most likely Selina, went and retrieved one from an album or a frame or a drawer. It had been taken on a day sometime between 1882 and 1884, not long after Charlotte Jane Bell, her mother Susan and Selina had arrived in New York from England. Charlotte had gone to the fashionable studio of the French-born photographer Marc Gambier, who took portraits of famous actresses and middle-class Manhattanites. It cost $5 for a dozen 10 x 7-inch prints of one''s own face. Charlotte had her dark hair pulled back into a bun and her fringe curled loosely on her forehead. She had the clearest of blue eyes, a small, firm mouth and a square, full face. She was neither beautiful nor unattractive by late-nineteenth-century standards. As might be expected of an unmarried, educated young woman in her mid-twenties, she had dressed modestly in what appears to be a dark-colored taffeta bodice with a high lace neck.
She also chose to wear a large plain gold locket. These were the early days of Charlotte''s new life in America, and it is difficult not to spot a glint of optimism in her distant, pensive look. To most Americans who were unfamiliar with the realities of life for the Irish "gentry," Charlotte''s description of her upbringing at Bellview House, in Abbeyleix, County Laois, must have sounded like a romantic tale. She was born on April 20, 1858 to Arthur Bell, a gentleman farmer and a Justice of the Peace, who had studied Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. Bellview, with its seven bedrooms, its drawing room, parlor, dining room and library, all richly appointed with mahogany furniture, sat on the rise of a hill, in the middle of 90 acres of pasture, meadow and woodland. Its stable was filled with horses. Its farms produced hay, wheat, oats and potatoes, and reared pigs, turkeys, chickens, geese and dairy cattle. Charlotte, with her elder siblings, Susan Rebecca, Madden and William, and her younger siblings, Charles and Selina, used to travel about the countryside, to Abbeyleix and Kilkenny, in the Bells'' polished open-top brougham.
Her father rode with the local hunt, and the family attended balls and charity events at Abbeyleix House, the home of the Viscount de Vesci, for whom her grandfather acted as a land agent. Arthur had married Susan, the daughter of Reverend Samuel Madden, the Prebendary of Kilmanagh, an educated woman who strongly believed in the promotion of literacy. The Bells were a family drawn to science, medicine and technology. In 1862, Arthur invented a new type of sawmill which required a fraction of the horsepower normally used by such machines. Susan encouraged the family''s servants to read, and regularly lent her employees books from her own collection. The Bells were Protestants in an Ireland whose English-made laws were not designed to favor the Catholic majority. For generations, their faith conferred on them political and social advantages which allowed them to enter the fringes of elite life. On the surface, they seemed to enjoy an existence no different from that of the English gentry, but the Bells'' perceived prosperity, their comfortable chairs and French drapery, their schooling, servants and manners were merely the trappings of a life they could not actually afford.
For centuries, in Great Britain and Ireland, true enduring wealth was predicated on landownership, which offered security of tenure and a guaranteed income. Its inheritance might ensure a family''s position, economically, politically and socially, for years to come. Unfortunately, the Bells, like the majority of Irish families, from those of their class down to the poorest of cottier farmers, were tenants. The Bells had leased their land from the Viscounts de Vesci since the eighteenth century, pouring their resources into developing their holdings, subdividing their property among family members and subletting to smaller tenants. Money was borrowed and usually repaid against the value of the land''s income, but in 1852, after seven years of crop failures during the Great Famine, the Bells were increasingly unable to make good on their debts. Around the time of his marriage, Arthur had agreed to take over the lease of Bellview from his father and to pay off some of the encumbrance with Susan''s dowry. This only partially cleared the burden and, upon his father William''s death in 1860, a further encumbrance against the property came to light. The Bells, with their growing family, began to struggle and Bellview House was in urgent need of repairs to its roof.
It had originally been Arthur''s plan to hand back the lease to de Vesci, sell his goods and emigrate with his young family to New Zealand, but his father''s ill health kept him in Ireland. "My means are so small (only amounting to £46 per annum besides what I can make by my own industry in Bellview) and so crippled that it is not in my power to do the work myself ." Arthur wrote in a lengthy pleading letter to the Viscount in May 1860. He asked to borrow £50 for the costs of maintaining a property which, in effect, belonged to the Viscount, not to him. "If your Lordship should have any opportunity of giving me or procuring me employment, I trust you should find me not only deeply grateful, but most anxious to attend to your Lordship''s interest, or do credit to your patronage ." he added, in what must have been a mortifying request. Arthur was granted the loan, but when in 1867 his financial circumstances had still not improved and the floorboards had begun to rot beneath his family''s feet, he was forced to borrow a further £50 from his lordship. The Bells were hardly able to keep their heads above the rising tide of their debts when, in the following summer, typhoid fever came to Bellview.
While Charlotte and her younger siblings recovered, Arthur did not. He died on August 20, 1868 and was followed to his grave in October by Charlotte''s elder sister, Susan Rebecca. After this blow, her mother struggled to maintain the estate. She sold the farm equipment in order to repay her husband''s debts, and by 1871, her brother-in-law Reverend William Jacob and her sister Rebecca had taken on a share of the lease, but neither of these remedies staunched the bleed of money from Bellview. Arthur had written to Lord de Vesci as early as 1860 that he knew his "prospects of getting on in this country were very slight." After the catastrophic impact of the Great Famine on the Irish population and economy, no one wanted to assume a lease encumbered with debt for land which barely yielded enough income on which to live. The events of 1845-51 drove roughly 1 million Irish to emigrate, and in the years that followed a scarcity of work or opportunities to build a future would push the numbers of those leaving the country higher still. Ultimately, by 1877, Susan could no longer manage what remained of the Bells'' family home.
She and her children would now have to look overseas for any promise of prosperity. There would always be opportunities for her boys. In 1877, an uncle placed Charlotte''s younger brother, Charles de Hauteville Bell, into an apprenticeship with the merchant navy in England. Madden Arthur Bell emigrated to Australia to seek his fortune in the gold fields, and William Oscar Robert Bell bought a passage to New York in 1881 and became an engineer. The women of the family had two choices, the most preferable of which would have been to marry. The least favorable would have been to go forth into the menacing world and earn an income. In 1877, Charlotte was a marriageable nineteen, but a well-bred, educated young woman without a penny in her pocket was unlikely to have attracted the right sort of suitors. However, it did make her a perfect candidate to become a governess or a teacher, the only jobs considered appropriate for a young woman of her station in life.
When and under what circumstances Charlotte was hired to teach at Brackley Grammar School in Northamptonshire are unknown. She appears on the 1881 census as a "teacher." The word "governess" had originally been written into the column designated for "occupation," but someone mindfully amended it. A governess required no professional training to shepherd and instruct young children, usually within the household of a relatively wealthy man, but by 1881, the role of a teacher increasingly did. Adverts for "certified teachers" filled the wanted columns of the newspapers in the early 1880s, and church-s.