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excitement, the prosecutor formally announces that he wishes to extend the charges against Christiana Edmunds to include not only attempts against all the individuals who had received parcels by post on 10 August, but also earlier attempts to administer poison to a number of people, one of whom has been seriously ill in hospital.
    By the end of these preliminary hearings, the charge against Christiana will rise to murder, a rare charge against a middle-class woman. As witnesses detailing her activities – to obtain poison, infuse it into chocolate, return poisoned chocolates to Maynard’s, leave bags of poisoned sweets in sundry shops – and their effects grow in number, ‘deeply veiled’ Christiana, The Times comments, remained ‘perfectly calm and self possessed’ and employed ‘her time in writing notes to her sister [Mary] who sat below the dock, for her solicitor’. The prisoner’s countenance, the reporter goes on to observe, ‘is one likely to be remembered if once seen, and this will account for the readiness with which she was identified’. Christiana is indeed identified by a range of boys and young men who had acted as her messengers, as well as the various shopkeepers who had served her.
    The excitement around the case is now such that the courtroom is completely filled an hour before start time. Lawyers overseeing the case for other implicated parties – Maynard’s, Garrett’s – and soon one representing the family of the dead boy, Sidney Barker, join the principal prosecution and defence counsels. Each poisoning charge is heard in turn and the inevitable repetition makes the evidence against Christiana rise with damning momentum. A bird-stuffer testifies to collecting, and another to examining, a dead dog picked up from 16 Gloucester Place: when opened up the dog was found to be full of poison. A handwriting expert from London deposes that the writing on the deal gift boxes and their notes corresponded to Christiana’s, while that on the notes to the chemist didn’t correspond to anyone at the neighbouring establishment, Glaisyer’s, orto the coroner’s. Christiana, in other words, has written all the notes herself.
    Various expert witnesses, doctors and a professor testify to finding dangerous quantities of arsenic in the cake sent to Mrs Beard and lesser amounts in the sweetmeats in other parcels, as well as to treating those who had eaten fruit and cakes for symptoms corresponding to the effects of ‘irritant poisoning’. More young messengers depose that over the summer they had bought chocolates from Maynard’s at Christiana’s request and then brought them back to the shop after showing them to her. Shopkeepers claim that she had left bags from Maynard’s in their shops from as early as last March. When asked by one shopkeeper if she had forgotten a bag of Maynard sweets in her store, she denied it. Their contents eaten, serious illness followed. The chemist Professor Letherby reiterates the evidence he had given at the Barker inquest as to the strychnine contained in little Sidney’s stomach. The difference now is that it is clear that Christiana Edmunds not only had access to strychnine some days before the child’s death, but had also, through her messengers, had chocolates purchased from and then returned to Maynard’s, where they were put back on display shelves. These chocolates contained poison.
    On 7 September, Christiana Edmunds is charged with the murder of Sidney Barker. Like a woman in a trance, she seems oblivious to the seriousness of this new charge. Nor do the newspapers indicate any particular response from her as Sidney’s uncle, Charles David Miller, a superintendent to a coach builder, describes how he asked for the ‘best’ chocolates from Maynard’s on 12 June, then took them home for his nephew who was holidaying with his parents in Brighton. The chocolate