Mosaic, Murder and Charles Dickens
Somerset, 29th June 1860.
Version 1: Constance Kent waits until the family and the servants are asleep. By dead of night she lifts her sleeping brother from his bed, takes him to a privy and cuts his throat – so brutally that he is virtually decapitated.
Version 2: Constance’s father is having an affair with his son’s nursemaid. Their love making interrupted by the child, he slits the boy’s throat in a fit of jealous rage and takes him to the outhouse.
Version 3: Jealous and enraged by their father’s second marriage, Constance’s brother murders his step brother and dumps the body in the outhouse. Constance is complicit, or alternatively, Constance is entirely free from involvement.
Five years after the murder, Constance confesses her guilt to an Anglican clergyman. She is tried, pleads guilty and is imprisoned. Many people doubt the validity of her confession, amongst them Charles Dickens, who feels she is shielding her father, or perhaps her brother. Dickens uses Constance as a model for Helena Landless in his unfinished novel ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’.
There is an English folk song about the case. These are some of the lines. Perhaps they scan better when set to music:
His little throat I cut from ear to ear
Wrapped him in a blanket and away did steer
To the water-closet, which soon I found,
In the dirty soil then I pushed him down.
Constance is sentenced to death, but her sentence is commuted, owing to her youth and her confession. She is incarcerated in a number of places, and it is in prison that she is trained in the art of mosaic making. She makes mosaic pavements – sometimes known as ‘Opus Criminale’. One is for the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, another is for St Peter’s, The Grove on the Isle of Portland. After 20 years in jail, she goes on to spend 50 years in Australia, dying at the age of 100.
Constance Kent
Pavement design for the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral
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