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‘semi-lunatic’ and a religious fanatic – the paper ran its report under the headline:
    HORROR ON HORROR’S HEAD
    THE MOST DREADFUL MURDER OF THE CENTURY
    TWO PLAISTOW BOYS SLAY THEIR MOTHER
    AND PLAY CARDS BENEATH THE CORPSE WITH A MANIAC
    The
West Ham Herald
was told – also incorrectly – that Nattie had continued to go to school after the killing, and had been found once or twice with tears streaming down his cheeks. When his playmates asked him what was wrong, he said: ‘I am crying about Mother.’ Nattie was said to have told a friend that he wanted to kill himself. The
Herald
reported that Aunt Emily arrived at 3.30 p.m. on 17 July to find Nattie alone in the house, sobbing as he informed her that his mother was lying dead in her bedroom.
    Several of the stories relayed by the newspapermen depicted Nattie as vulnerable, powerless, distraught, and Robert as the insouciant mastermind who took pleasure in the plunder of his mother’s house. These accounts suggested that one boy, at least, had traces of conscience, even if the other was thoroughly bad.
    An editorial in Saturday’s edition of the
Stratford Express
, which had the highest circulation of any West Ham paper, described the murder at Plaistow as ‘the most horrible, the most awful and revolting crime that we have ever been called upon to record. In the wildest dreams of fiction, nothing has ever been depicted which equals in loathsomeness this story of sons playing at cards in a room which the dead body of their murdered mother filled with the stench of corruption.’ The ‘Plaistow Horror’, it said, ‘is a story which must depress all who are longing for the improvement of mankind. It will pain public feeling to an extent which has rarely been equalled. It seems to plunge us back at once into the Dark Ages.’
    The newspaper was alluding to the popular belief that the human race was in crisis. ‘We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic, a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria,’ wrote the Hungarian author Max Nordau in
Degeneration
, a work of 1892 published in English early in 1895. As evidence, Nordau pointed to the prevalence of madness and criminality among the poor, as well as the publication of decadent literature by such artists as Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. ‘The day is over,’ he warned, ‘the night draws on.’ Nordau’s tract was much discussed in the British press. Its feverish tone was mocked in some quarters, and its apocalyptic ideas treated with scepticism by many, but its pessimism was commonplace. ‘A wave of unrest is passing over the world,’ warned the British author Hugh E. M. Stutfield in the summer of 1895: ‘Revolt is the order of the day. . . ours may be an age of progress, but it is progress which, if left unchecked, will land us in the hospital or the lunatic asylum.’
    Darwin’s theory of evolution was widely accepted by the end of the nineteenth century, but with it had come the possibility that the human organism could develop backwards as well as forwards. The atrophy of the species was attributed to the speed and pressure of modern life – telegrams, railways, big business, a craving for instant pleasure – and to an increasingly urban, industrial environment. ‘The close confines and foul air of our cities are shortening the life of the individual, and raising up a puny and ill-developed race,’ wrote James Cantlie in
Degeneration amongst Londoners
. ‘It is beyond prophecy to guess even what the rising generation will grow into, what this Empire will become after they have got charge of it.’ In
The Time Machine
, published in 1895, H. G. Wells imagined a future in which the workers had degenerated into pale, ape-like Morlocks living in darkness underground, toiling on machines to make goods for the frail, decaying Eloi on the Earth’s