I don't often review historical fiction here, but this one is worth a closer look for anyone interested in the history of prisons.

I've been a fan of the Oscar Wilde Murder mysteries by Gyles Brandreth for quite some time now, with all six of the series cheering up my bookshelf with their colourful covers. I enjoy Oscar Wilde as an author and for the legendary personality that history has attributed to him, so it's always a joy to see an author slip on the outfit of his memory and send him off on fanciful adventures
.
The whole series is a success for delivering the fun of reading about Oscar and his friends' personalities at close quarters and for putting Oscar into the role of Sherlockian sleuth and delivers some entertaining murder-mysteries. What really makes the books special, however, are the real passion that the author delivers when it comes to historical authenticity in the details. He cares about being as faithful as the subject matter allows to Oscar's life and the lives of his friends and he works hard to give you the kind of flavour of late-Victorian life that stays on your tongue long after.

This latest book in the series is, in my opinion, the weakest when it comes to the actual murder-mystery itself. It never quite hangs together as well as its predecessors, nor does it excite or entertain to the same level. But for this book this is not what the main focus is about, instead the book works hard to give the readers a real view into the most difficult part of Oscar's life - his time incarcerated in Reading Gaol for 2 years for 'indecency'. From a narrative perspective seeing Oscar cut off from the hedonistic life of fame he previously enjoyed is fascinating and saddening, but the author takes especial care to make sure that the setting is pitch-perfect. Clearly he had painstakingly researched the prison life of the 1890s and this book is a great success in showing it in a way that we can all relate to the horrors and loneliness that prisoners were expected to endure.

As with all the books in the series, the author adds on appendixes to showcase some of the historical facts behind the historical fiction. For example, we see that Oscar -like the other prisoners - would have been placed in solitary confinement over his time, lived under the threat of beatings for even the smallest of misdemeanours, was expected to work hard labour (often alongside children) and, even when walking about the prison, was not permitted to speak and was forced to wear a hood that restricted his identity and his eyesight. As with every institution these rules encouraged both viciousness and kindness from the wardens who oversaw the running of the place.

The book is worth picking up if you're interested in viewing the Victorian prison system through a historical figure's eyes and would certainly be a good starting point to dive deeper into the subject.

Prisoners in 1860s wearing official hoods

If you fancy reading the series in order they are:

-Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders
-Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death
-Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile
-Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers
-Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders
-Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol

Prisoners and criminals, throughout hsitory, have always occupied a strange place in society's structure. In many ways they still do.

Credit: Yavapie County Sheriff's Office

They are part of society but somehow also in a sphere slightly outside of it. Not to start off on a downer, but criminals can be romanticised in the media while at the same times being subject to human rights violations. Racism and classism are always heavily at work in both arrests and convictions and, in the case of America, whether police officers choose to shoot to kill. Subjects that might be horrific if inflicted on a 'free' 'law-abiding' person, are often treated as jokes when inflicted on the incarcerated. And while the majority of 'law-abiding' society may condemn criminals on principal, for some reason we seem to be relentlessly curious about their mugshots.

Today there are hundreds of click-bait websites showing off modern bizarre mugshots, but things are just as interesting if we look back through history to when the tradition of photographing arrested 'criminals' began...

Before Mugshots

In the past, social presentation and the body were very much linked and often criminals were identified and shamed by being branded, tattooed or mutilated in order to display their status.For example, in the film Pirates of the Caribbean (set in around the 1700s) Jack Sparrow has a branding scar that shows that he had been previously convicted as a pirate.

Jack Sparrow Branding scar: 'P' for pirate

As these actions often made the subject unemployable unless they could be easily hidden, it hardly helped them turn over a new leaf. Should the person be captured or questioned, they could easily be linked to past crimes.
When suspects were not mutilated, the police instead had to rely on descriptions, sketches (if available) and the memorization of each person's face and build. In early history, where people were typically more likely to be part of small communities, common kinship and acquaintance meant that people could be easy to track down. While criminals could escape by moving homes to other communities, harsh vagrancy laws often meant that when they arrived in a new community without ties they were rarely very welcome and could even be actively persecuted.
When industrialisation took hold and communities suddenly swelled at an alarming rate, it became far more easy to remain anonymous.A better form of identification and record was needed badly.




The Victorians & Edwardians
 
When the camera was first invented, the Victorians saw an opportunity to record themselves for the future in family portraits, postmortem momentos and for practical reference. When the prices  of this new technology decreased, the police decided to jump on the bandwagon and photograph the people they arrested for further identification.  By the 1870s, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk in the Prefecture of Police in Paris, had designed a formulaic photo-record which consisted of one front shot and one profile shot under standardised lighting, which was soon circulated and adopted by police all over Europe and America. And so the mugshot was born.

 George Bennet was arrested in 1860. After many previous convictions he had been taken in for assaulting a police constable. As with all the mugshots, the photograph was accompanied by detailed descriptions to aid with identification and to record his crime. You can find his mugshot in the Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Centre.

 Owen Cavill was arrested in 1914 for sheep stealing, and his mugshot shows the formulaic presentation of the photographs.

In many of the early mugshots the hands are visible as well as the face. This is largely due to the Victorian interest in criminal anthropology and eugenics. They believed that genius, sentiment and criminal 'nature' could be mapped by measuring the head and hands. This belief persisted for quite some time - even in Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes stories the great detective ascribes to the belief that a criminal nature may be identifiable by the shape of his head.
In this picture, the very young Magaret Cosh was convicted of stealing a coat, and was sentenced to two month's hard labour.

Another child to be convicted was 12 year old Henry.L.Stephenson. He was sentenced to 2 months in prison for the crime of breaking into houses in 1873.

Naturally, many criminals objected to being recorded for identification and put up a fight when it came to sitting for their photography, and Victorian policemen were rarely afraid to get heavy handed. This resulted in some of the most distressing and emotive mugshots in the collection. Here Thomas Murphy is restrained by the Manchester Police.

Here too 'Paddy the Devil' (Patrick Cox), a notorious counterfeiter, was restrained in Machester in 1893.

 By The 1920s, despite the unenviable position of the criminals, a certain dapper quality can be seen in many of the mugshots.

Here, William Henry Moore is photographed unusually in his hat. He was convicted in 1925 for dealing in Opium.

Rather topically, given the last few years' rising obsession with paedophilia, this is a mugshot taken in 1920 of Albert.S.Warnkin and Beutler. Warnkin was arrested for trying to 'carnally know a girl of eight years old' and Beutler was arrested for indecent exposure.

Harry.L.Crawford's story is a quite remarkable one. Having been arrested for the murder of his wife, it was revealed that Harry was in fact really Eugeni Falleni - a woman who had been passing as a man since 1899. Little is known about whether Harry was genuinely transgender or had other motives for such cross-dressing, but in 1914 he married the widow Annie Birkett. By 1917 his wife had disappeared under suspicious circumstances. It is believed that this coincided with her revealing to a friend that she had found out "something amazing about Harry". Did Harry murder his wife to stop the secret coming out?

 

Another story almost too bizarre to be believed is that of 'Pep the Cat Murdering Dog'. He was admitted to Eastern State Penitentiary in 1924, it is said, by the Pennsylvania Governer Gifford Pinchot. The dog did hard time - sentenced for life for killing Gifford's wife's cat.

In the prison records, Pep's inmate number has been skipped over (but not assigned to anyone else), as if the people recording the logs were too embarrassed to formally own up to  admitting a Labrador as a prisoner. We may never know how far this is fact and how far thisis prison folklore, but it's certainly a compelling story.

Mugshots are, in short, a fantastic piece of social history. They allow us to put  faces to sweeping historical movements and attitudes.

For example, what's more emotive of the civil rights movement then the mugshots of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr? What's more chilling than to see the faces behind such legendary names as Al Capone?  And what is more bizarre than to see a currently well known celebrity photographed in such a sterile setting? And, in the end, when so many family photographs are lost to a historians through either private the collections never going public, through destruction or a simple loss of memory over time, mugshots provide a real timeless record of individuals across hundreds of years.

 Rosa Parks, photographed by Alabama police in 1956, following her arrest during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.

The gangster Al Capone, responsible for the Saint Valentines Day Massacre of 1929.

Martin Luther King, photographed in 1956 during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. Scribbled on top of the photo is a record of his murder on April 4th 1968.

Here is a selection of suffragists who were arrested for a variety of crimes of vandalism in 1914, from smashing windows to attacking paintings of classically 'beautiful' women.

 1 - Margaret Scott, 2 - Olive Leared (née Hockin), 3 - Margaret McFarlane, 4 - Mary Wyan (Mary Ellen Taylor), 5 - Annie Bell, 6 - Jane Short, 7 - Gertrude Mary Ansell, 8 - Maud Brindley, 9 - Verity Oates, 10 - Evelyn Manesta

David Bowie has become an enduring pop icon, and here his mugshot records him for posterity. This comes from 1976 in New York, where Bowie was photographed following a short arrest for cannabis possession.

 Finally, If you'd like to learn more about historical crime, make sure to also check out the Old Bailey Online.

Largely run by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, The Old Bailey Online is a fantastic resource to dig deeper into crime recorded at the Old Bailey in London between 1674-1913. Alongside providing transcripts and scans of the original sources for each recorded crime, it also gives several guides on how best to interpret the evidence, along with articles on relevant issues such as gender in crime.


Sources
-  Last Week Tonight: Prisons
-The Gaurdian: Texas Prsions Violate International Human Rights Standards
- The Telegraph: Dexter Author - Don't Romanticise My Serial Killer
-The Telegraph: Romanticising violence - the serial killers we love to hate
-Huffington Post: 10 Unforgettable Mugshots
-The Independent: 'Courts are biased against blacks'
-Ferguson Protests over the shooting of Mike Brown (via the continually updated tumblr tag)
-Hotties, Hunks and Beat up Celebrities - The Allure of the Mugshot
- 17 Hauntingly Beautiful Victorian Mugshots
-Vintage Mugshots from the 1920s
-The Wanted Victorian Women
-The Smoking Gun: Historical Mug Shots
-BBC History Victorian Mugshots Gallery
-Child Mugshots of the 1800s
-Victorian Mugshots Show 19thc Interest in Criminal Anthropology
-New Zealand Police Museum - Victorian Mugshots
-First criminal mugshots
-Criminal Identification before mugshots
-Suffragette Mugshots
-The Old Bailey Online

Evil, or at the very least villainy, has never been confined to one gender.

There's a reason why fairy-tales so often centre around a wicked witch or a sorceress: the juxtaposition between beauty and wickedness is certainly compelling, and if you add a dash of great power they are frightening indeed.
Like it or lump it, women  have often been associated with the roles of caregivers and as holding sensitivity to the point of subservience as mothers and wives. As 'the fairer sex' they were seen as physically and emotionally weaker. While they may be affected by 'hysteria' at times and become unpredictable, on the whole one knew what to expect from them. Women that went against these predictable roles were therefore alarming, and these infamous women's memories live on because of this.

Below is a collection of some of the wicked women of history. Some of these are straight-up evil through violence, and some were seduced by the Machiavellian tactics of politics as surely as Lady Macbeth herself.


Mary Ann Cotton - The Victorian Serial Killer

Sometimes a serial killer is caught by being altogether too enthusiastic and repetitive.

Picture from the Watford Observer

Born in 1832 in County Durham, Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)  is throughout to be Britain's first convicted serial killer on record. She was described as 'small and frail' and worked as a dressmaker and was charged for the murder of four people (including children) and convicted of one: the murder of her stepson. However, it was thought that she killed many more members of her own family.

Her job and marriages caused her to travel across the country which, it is thought, is part of the reason for her not being discovered for so long.

Her first marriage was to William Mowbry who brought four children from a previous marriage and Mary Ann produced four more. They lived in Plymouth but five years later, when they returned to County Durham, five children were dead from 'gastric fever and stomach pains'. When they moved to Sunderland two more children died, and William Mowbry was also struck down in 1865. Because he and all the family were insured with Prudential, Mary was able to collect the sum of £35 . 
While currency conversions are always difficult, this would be about £21,000 in today's money. Alternatively, a skilled seamstress employed in 'the best class of work' could hope to earn 22-26shillings -£1 - per week in 1897, which would mean that this was worth at least 35 week's work. (To compare, modern minumum wage at £6.31 an hour for 40 hours a week would be £252.40. So 35 week's work could come to £8,834. But, of course, the price of living was quite different in Victorian Britain.) Needless to say, it was no small sum, but was it large enough to murder a whole family for?

Mary's second marriage came after she took up work as a nurse in Sunderland infirmary, where she met George Ward. It wasn't long before 'gastric fever' struck him down too.

Next, she moved on to the shipyard foreman James Robinson and married him within six months, getting rid of his own three children of a previous marriage as well as one of her own remaining offspring. The couple remained together and Mary gave birth to two ore children, one who died within the hour of perhaps natural complications. When she finally broached the subject of Robinson taking out life insurance, her husband grew suspicious. Mary, it seems, had run up large debts and he confronted her about her possibly sinister motives. Mary fled, leaving her surviving child behind. Robinson, it seems, let things slide rather than inform the police.

Estranged from her husband, she returned to her mother who - unsurprisingly at this point - died and left an inheritance of her furniture.

Picture from rarenewspapers.com

In 1870 she met the widower Frederick Cotton and they entered into a bigamous marriage, living in North Wallbottle. Mary Ann's poisoning began to come to light when a number of pigs were found dead in mysterious circumstances. While the circumstances of this remaining unclear, Mary and the family were soon on the move again to West Aukland. Two month later her husband was dead again of 'gastric fever'.

She moved in with Joseph Nastrass, who had lived with the couple for a while, but soon she was asked to care for a higher-class man named Quick-Manning who was suffering from smallpox. Mary and Quick-Manning quickly became lovers and, with alarming speed, within three weeks more members of Mary Ann's family were stricken with gastric fever: Cotton's 10 year old son, her own baby Robert and her former lover Joseph Nastrass who had made out his will to her. Mary at this time became pregnant to Quick-Manning, who had no interest in marrying her, and raised Cotton's sole remaining son, the 7 year old Charles Edward.

Due to Quick-Manning's disinterest, Mary Ann had to get by on a pittance of allowance as income. It was reported that when the assistant overseer of the village -Thomas Riley- came to see her about asking her to care for another smallpox patient, she refused due to having to take care of Charles Edward. She refused to go into the work house and Riley wouldn't accept the child there without her. She said that she would not be able to marry Quick-Manning because of the 7 year old, but added  "'t won't matter, I won't be troubled long". The following Friday the boy was dead and Riley was understandably suspicious.

Riley went to inform the police and Dr.Kilburn who in turn refused to issue a death certificate for the boy. This meant that there was no payout when Mary went to collect the £4 10s in insurance money. While a post mortem was carried out nothing was found, but Dr Kilburn decided to secrety take the boy's organs to his own house for closer study. Here, to his alarm, he found that the boy had been poisoned with arsenic.This was soon matched to witness statement saying that Mary had sent her stepson to buy arsenic and soap for the common practice of rubbing down the bedposts to kill bedbugs. When Dr Scattergood of Leeds also confirmed the arsenic poisoning (without the dodgy practice of stealing organs that had so harmed Kilburn's credibility) Mary was arrested. Several bodies were exhumed and more arsenic poisoning was found.

Mary Ann was hanged at age 41 in County Durham on March 24th 1873. Deliberately or not, she died slowly due to the hangman not issuing a long enough drop-rope.


Isabella the 'She Wolf' - Wife to Edward II and Invader of England

Picture from HistoricalHoney

In 1308, and at 12 years old, Isabella of France arrived in Boulogne for her wedding to Edward II of England - a tactical move set in motion to end England's War with France over the territory of Gascony. Isabella and Edward were a neat match on paper - both were handsome people from great families and Isabella knew well her rights - but there was already trouble at hand. 

When Piers Gaveston entered the royal household the king was instantly enamoured with him, and the king's favourite was promptly married to a niece to make him a member of the royal family. Gaveston became, in many ways, a guest of honour at the coronation of the royal couple: tapestries bore only the coat of arms of the king and Gaveston at great insult to Isabella's family, Gaveston had been given the honour of carrying the coronation crown and, to make things worse, Gaveston had been put in charge of the coronation planning and the organisation of the festivities turned into a shambles. Wedding gifts and lands that were intended for the new queen were instead given to Gaveston and her financial allowances were overlooked. It is rather unsurprising that rumors circulated that Gaveston was Edward II's lover.

Isabella put up with the relationship for another four years, which won her much popularity, but soon the barons decided that they had had enough of the king's head being so easily swayed. They exiled Gaveston but, when the king brought him back, they soon conspired to execute Gaveston instead. After his death the royal couple reunited, bore children, and Edward II allowed Isabella into his court and to attend council meetings. However trouble was soon on the horizon again as the susceptible king was soon wooed by another charismatic man: Hugh Despenser. Despenser was ambitious, ruthless and cunning, using the king to climb politically. Jealous of Isabella's influence, Despenser convinced the king to limit her powers and voice and, it is rumoured, sexually threatened the queen. Isabella finally managed to get Despenser banished, but he was recalled again the next year by the king.

In 1325 Isabella's brother Charles IV of France seized the England's territory in France and so she had the opportunity to get some distance by going with her son to negotiate a peace treaty. There she met an old acquaintance - Roger de Mortimor, Baron Wigmore - and soon the two became lovers. The two began to make plans to invade England themselves and put her son on the throne instead of Edward II. Sick of her husband's disrespect, Isabella was ready to take action. While Edward soon heard of the affair and demanded that his son be returned, she refused to concede until Despenser, and his family's influence, was removed.

Edward II

Isabella and her supporters soon invaded England and Edward II and the Despenser family fled only to be captured. She had Despenser hung drawn and quartered after a quick trial and her son was crowned Edward III with herself and Mortimer named as regents. The deposed king became an increasing threat as public option started to return to him now that the Despenser family had been eradicated, and multiple escape attempts were carried out.


This was a problem that needed solving. In September 1327 Edward II died in a famously horrific manner: supposedly by a red hot poker thrust rectally into him, which would leave little to no marks on the body. It is widely believed that it was Isabella herself who arranged this murder.

Of course, all things come full circle. When Edward III came of age he was aware that Mortimer had grown more poisonous and promptly had him executed, though Isabella intervened so that he would not suffer a traitor's death. Isabella was spared and welcomed back into court. While she reacted to often humiliating circumstances out of her control, the history books are loath to forgive her for permitting regicide.


Iise Koch  'The Witch/Bitch of Buchenwald'

By far the most difficult aspect of the Third Reich and the Concentration Camps that followed is that such evil could be enacted by so many normal and, we assume, formerly balanced people. Not every Nazi was a cackling Indiana Jones villain, so what was it that made people, including women, want to be the guards of the anguished and toxic concentration camps?
Sarah Helm studied this phenomenon and found that naturally not all women are the same. Many were 'pathetic creatures' who fell into guard duty almost absent-mindedly. For them, compared to jobs such as munitions work, there was better pay, more comfortable conditions, travel, a new well kept home and new people to court. In Ravensbruck, for example, there were on site hairdressers and boating trips on a lovely lake.Sometimes they were housed in pretty villas with beautiful views. All they had to do was turn their heads a certain way or draw the curtains, and the ashes of the crematoriums might as well be a dream.When it came to the job, it was a necessary duty that had to be done and the Nazis had enough words and brainwashing ideology to make viewing the inmates as subhuman chillingly easy. All it takes are a few steps over a line that should never be crossed and, in the end, it is impossible to go back.

While these crimes will always be unforgivable, we can at least make an effort to understand how the majority of guards in the camps did what they did. But for some, they took the monstrosity to the next level, and one of these was Iise Koch.

Koch was a secretary and joined the Nazi party in 1932. In 1936 she married the head of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp -Karl Otto Koch - who was assigned to build a new camp in Buchenwald in 1937. She joined him and became the 'queen bee' as the overseer of the camp. She soon gained her nickname as the 'bitch of Buchenwald' for her viscous sadism. It was said that she rode her horse around, whipping and beating whichever prisoners took her interest. She was said to have an affinity with poetry, but her taste in 'art' had a vile nature. Koch was reported to have also been on the look out for prisoners with interestingly tattooed skin. When she found them, she would have them murdered and their skin preserved, tanned and stored for later use to be fashioned into lampshades and 'other ornamental household articles'. Sickeningly, this was not altogether an isolated incident and similar 'souvenirs' was found as being owned by other SS officers. The cruel indignity she inflicted on her victims carried on even after death.

At the end of the war Koch was arrested for war crimes due to the atrocities at Buchenwald and in 1947 and American Military tribunal sentenced her to life imprisonment. After serving only two years the military governor of the American zone in Germany - General Lucius D Clay - pardoned her. Though, unsurprisngly, there was a huge public backlash at this decision. In 1949 Koch was re-arrested and put on trial for 135 cases of murder. in 1951 she was sentenced to life imprisonment, and in 1967 she committed suicide while incarcerated.



Victoria Dryer the Baby Farmer

Picture from executedtoday.com

She told her own daughter, when the young girl enquired as to why babies would enter the house and then soon disappear, that she was an 'angel-maker'. She was sending the children to Jesus, she said, who wanted them far more than their mothers did.
This, of course, was not true. In Victorian England many women gave birth to illegitimate children or had far more children than they had the resources to feed. (The wealthy Charles Dickens, for example, had 10 children and felt the stress of the burden keenly. Many people were in a similar situation without his advantages.) While some women were glad to advertise and pass on their children, others were weeping, reluctant and aimed to see them again. One such woman was the 25 year old Evelina Marmon: a farmer's daughter who has gone to work as a barmaid in the city and had the misfortune to fall pregnant. After giving birth, she put an advertisement in the paper asking for someone to care for her new daughter Dolly. To her surprise and joy there was also an ad in the paper from a couple who were looking to adopt a child for the fee of £10. When she went to meet 'Mrs Harding' she was surprised by her age, but the woman seemed to want to care for the child and would allow Evelina contact. She passed over her baby girl and 'Mrs Harding' rode away in the train. Afterwards Evelina wrote letters, but they were never replied to.


'Mrs Harding' had been the pseudonym of Victoria Dryer, who was part of the wicked occupation known as baby farming. All too common in a period of time where no reliable contraception mixed with a double standard of sexism that led to pregnant unmarried women being shunned and fired from their jobs, it was common for people to try to make a living from taking in babies. A high class woman might pay as much as £80 for the privilege or a working class girl perhaps £5. Some would pay in weekly instalments and some would pay all at once. Many babies would often be hoarded by these opportunists and stuffed into drawers and cots in groups and drugged to stop them from crying. Often the money would begin to dry up after a period and, when this happened, the babies who were unfortunate enough to have no income were slowly starved, their 'owners' waiting for them to die. As a former midwife Victoria Dryer was well aware of the trade and over her time in this profession either a warped compassion or simple greed and impatience caused her to take to killing the babies more directly. Soon, after a close call with a suspicious doctor, she didn't even bother attaining death certificates and would dispose of the bodies in secret. Dolly, Evelina's daughter, was dispatched as were the other children, with a cord of tape to strangle her.

Dryer was finally found out thanks to a bargeman's keen eye when he saw a brown paper parcel lying in shallow water near the bank. Inside contained the body of a baby girl aged six to twelve months with white tape knotted around her neck. One piece of brown paper had a railway label on it from Temple Meads Station, Bristol and the faint outline of the name 'Mrs Thomas' and an address in Reading. Police soon raided that address and while the stench of human decomposition hit them, no body could be found. Nevertheless they matched the murder weapon to white tape in a sewing box, and in the cupboards were bundles of telegrams arranging adoptions, pawn tickets for children's clothing, receipts for adverts and letters from the mothers who had given up their children. In a few months alone, 20 children had been placed in 'Mrs Thomas', Amelia Dryer's, care. The body found had turned out to be Helena Fry, the illegitimate daughter of Mary Fry, a servant girl from Bristol.

The river was dredged and five murdered babies were discovered. Dolly was inside a carpet bag with Harry, her last victims. Evelina was called in to identify the body of her daughter and the evidence against Dryer was assured. The jury only took four and a half minutes to reach their conclusion and Dryer was sentenced to hang.



Sources

Historical Honey
Wonderlist
Buzzle
Watford Observer: Mary Ann Cotton
Historical Money calculator
Victorian London - Wages
National minimum wage
Scandalous Women - Isabella of France
Daily Mail: 'Bitches of Buchenwald: Which death camp guard is the evil inspiration behind Kate Winslet's role in The Reader?'
Clay souls and glass hearts:Ilse Koch
Daily Mail: The Baby Butcher
Executed Today -1896

There is a huge elephant in the room amongst my friendship group, and his name is Ian Watkins.

Lostprophets was a great band.
Sure, the rock didn't really break any new ground: it was basic but high-energied and uplifting, with great stomping songs like Streets of Nowhere, your classic emo ballads like Rooftops and The Light That Burns Twice as Bright... and earlier thrashing songs that nod to pop-punk and nu metal like We Are Godzilla, You Are Japan.  We loved the music, it made us happy, it was art, like all music is art.

Like all art, memories attached themselves to it. We put on the albums when we relaxed together and were happy.  The music consoled us when we were down. We followed their progress in rock magazines. When we were younger we put up posters on our walls. We went to see the gigs (hell, my friends went to enough that you could have filled a whole scrapbook with Lostprophets ticket stubs alone). We thrilled over getting closer and closer to the front row. We bought the merchandise. Back then, one of the best events in my friends' lives were actually getting to meet their idols after winning a competition. To talk to them. Thank them. Take photos with them. To stand face to face with the lead singer.

Which is why it was devastating when the news broke out.

On the 26th November 2013, Lostprophets' lead singer - Ian Watkins - pleaded guilty to the attempted rape and sexual assault of a child under 13, but not guilty to rape. This followed his charge on 19th December 2012 with conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a one year old girl. He also pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual assault involving children, the creation and posting of indecent images, and conspired with two mothers to abuse their children. Videos of his abuses were found in an encrypted computer which, reportedly, had the password 'Ifuckkids'. In a recorded phonecall made from Parc Prison to a female fan he described the whole situation as "Mega Lolz", which mimiced the band's merchandising catchphrase.

"It was like either me go up there and say 'Come on, it wasn't that bad, nobody got hurt'.
"I do my charm or do I end up making things worse for myself or do I just say I was off my head and can't remember?"
Discussing his possible sentence, he added: "I'm going to put out a statement on the 18th now (the day of his sentencing) just to say it was mega lolz, I don't know what everyone is getting so freaked out about."

Despite insisting that he was too drugged to remember the crimes and was 'showing off', he was sentenced to 35 years, with at least 29 to be spent in prison. Two of his female accomplices - themselves mothers - were also charged and imprisoned.

Sat in my chest of drawers, there is a MEGALOLZ t-shirt. Sat in my ipod, there are five albums of music where he sings. As I sit deleting the songs off my 'Top Rated' playlist, Taff Street is pulling up paving stones that bear the Streets of Nowhere lyrics. Elsewhere, MEGA LOLZ T-shirts are selling out on amazon and ebay in a sudden rush and a man has tattooed his face on his leg. While the newspapers are up in arms about Watkins standing to make £150,000 from the band's break up, the fans try to reassemble themselves.

Knowing what the front man has done, can you still be a fan of Lostprophets' music?

Vice.com tackled this very question, and sought out Lostprophets fans how they feel about Watkins' confession and whether they could still bring themselves to listen to the music. It's worth looking at the whole article, but here are some examples of the responses:

How has Ian Watkins' confession affected you?
Female, 16: I'll still listen to Lostprophets' music, but will probably be disgusted every time I hear it and not enjoy it at all.
So surely it makes sense not to listen to it?
It’s a shame this had to happen, as I loved that band so much. I still have respect for the other members, as long as they had no idea what was going on.
Can you ever separate the music from Ian Watkins and his crimes?
I don’t think I’ll be able to separate them, as I really looked up to him. Every time I hear his voice my mind will go straight to what he has done.
How have your friends reacted?
My friends will be absolutely disgusted and not listen to him any more. As for fans in general, I suppose it’s up to each person.


Hi there. Do you still like Ian Watkins as a person? 
Female, 15: Well, before the trial I did still like him as I didn't quite believe it all. But now he's pleaded guilty, it's difficult to like someone who's done that. So I don't still like him as a person, but I doubt many people do. As an artist, he is good, but I don't think anyone is gonna see him the same. But that doesn't change how their music sounds – it's still good.
Are you worried what people will say if they catch you listening to Lostprophets?
No, I'm not bothered about what they say – if they even say anything – because the music is completely different to what's happened with Ian. My mate and her sister like them, and I think they'll probably still listen to the music, too.
What would it take you to stop listening to somebody’s music?
Well, I see the music as a completely different thing. I don't know how bad something would have to be, really. Obviously it's wrong what Ian's done, but the rest of the band haven't done anything so it shouldn't stop me from listening to them.

Overall there is confusion, and I must admit that I count myself around the morally shellshocked. In my head I know that the music is not simply about Ian Watkins. That it is a collective effort of the band. That it shouldn't affect our enjoyment of the music at all and that the music has not become any less great or the lyrics any less true. But I still can't bring myself to press play. Even in linking to those videos in my first paragraph, I pressed the pause button as quickly as possible. The problem will always be this:

How far can we separate the artist from their art?

There's no denying that the art world rather pivots on the celebrity of the artist. It's one of the reasons why art becomes more valuable after the creator is dead (one of the others might be, if we're going to be cynical, the simple fact that the 'factory' of the artist has stopped production, so what we have left is more valuable.)  Just as the MEGA LOLZ T-Shirts are selling with new vigor and interest following Watkin's conviction, art also can gain new value due to the reputation of the painter.

Perhaps the greatest case in point is none other than Hitler himself.

To my eye, the above pictures are very pretty. Sensitive biscuit-tin paintings, but pretty nevertheless. Yet they were painted by the most infamous dictator in history. 
While I'd be a fool to morally compare Hitler and Watkins, nevertheless both sets of the artworks that made them famous were created to some degree before their crimes either occurred or came to light. Untainted by their personalities they can be regarded unsullied in their own right. There should be no shame in admitting an enjoyment in their creation.


In the extreme right-wing wiki Metapedia, when discussing his art they quote this description by Leon Degrelle in Hitler the Artist:

'(Hitler) was able to draw skillfully when he was only eleven. His early drawings and watercolours at the age of 15 were full of poetry and sensitivity...Hist artistic orientation took many forms...he wrote poetry and dedicated an entire work to his sister Paula. At the age of 16...he embarked on the creation of an opera.' 

Clearly he had some talent, though not enough to court success. He had some affection and playfulness in his choice of subject - even choosing to paint some Disney characters. Without his reputation he was unremarkable, his art can be enjoyed for it's own sake. But the reputation, inescapably, remains.


For Richard Wollheim (1923-2003), we shouldn't ever ignore an artist's past or personality:

'Artists are conditioned by their context- their beliefs, histories, emotional dispositions, physical needs and communities - and the world that they interpret is a world of constant change.'

No creative art is totally independent of the institutions of which it operates. Therefore we can extend it to mean that no art is independent of the artist either. They shouldn't be separated. They communicate with one another and one leads to the other. In the idealism of Hitler's paintings we might see the reflections of the idea of the Aryan ideal, for example.The instinct of wrongness that you can't shake when you think of him is, in the end, correct and should be embraced.


But is it as simple as this?

Art is subject to interepretation in all of its forms. We see that more than ever now that the internet has escalated and evolved fan-culture. Any piece of work does, in a way, belong to its fans. If those that view the art take something new away from it - something separate to the artist's original meaning and the work itself - does this then mean that the artist's opinion and, therefore his viewpoint, is ireelevant?

The fantastic Pbs Ideas Channel discussed just this as they analysed whether the fans of Neon Genesis Evangelon should listen to the creator's opinion that the show was 'meaningless'. In short, it seems that his opinion really doesn't matter.

 Certainly enough people agree.
According to Roland Barthes in 'Death of the Author' the modern writer is is born simultaneously with his text. He is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing.'...'Text does not consist of a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning, despite the Author and critics' impotent attempts to do so.' Therefore, in the end, 'the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.' 

Certainly my own opinion slants this way. It is possible to enjoy a piece of any form of art without knowing the history of its creator, or indeed his or her purpose for creating it. While certain emotions would have been invested into a painting or piece of music, it doesn't mean that the piece inherently takes on these characteristics. If this was true then interpretation would be pointless. For example, my favourite poem in the world is The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock by T.S Eliot. For some this is a straight up tale of a man who is lovesick for a woman. But for me, it's a look at the dull frustration and heartache of a life that can never quite be fully lived, all seen through the eyes of someone with a traveller's soul and  a mind full of quiet suburban social cowardice. The poem is something I love because it is me. It moves me to tears almost every time because of what I put to it. Similarly, the man or woman who turns to it whenever they need validation of unrequited love also puts themselves into it. Whatever was Eliot's original purpose, that pales in comparison to what people need to see in those words. And, if his intention is not relevant, then surely the history and morality of the artist himself is no longer relevant either.

This is something that many artists are acutely aware of. Oscar Wilde, for example, is as much an icon for his lifestyle as for his art: the artist as a celebrity. His fame, we can expect, might not be the same if it wasn't for his dandy fashion, the romantic hedonism of his lifestyle or even his sexuality and subsequent conviction. Oscar Wilde the man encapsulates the tragedy of oppression, the comedy of wit, and the beauty of talent all in one. All of these give layers to his art. But even Wilde was quick to renounce ownership over his own creations.

In 'The Critic as Artist' Wilde wrote:

'The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.'

Furthermore, in 'The Decay of Lying' one of the characters clarifies that 'Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.'
  
In the end, the artists' work simply is no longer attached to him. We can completely separate the artist from their art, and lose nothing in doing so.


But in the end, logic can only take you so far.


Whatever you believe about how the artist and their art interact, it is always going to be hard to shake off the knowledge of where that art came from.  You can't delete your own gut feelings.

Art is the child of the artist. You may love the offspring with all your heart, and you know that they are a different person than their parents. But the parents' genes went into  creating them and, like it or not, you're more than likely to have to eat christmas dinner across from the wretched parents every once and a while. 
I suppose that all you can hope to do is to learn how to look the parents in the eye when the time calls for it, until you can return home with the offspring that you love and appreciate them for their own sake.


Sources

Lostprophets statement following Watkins' conviction
 The Independant
The Daily Mail - £150,000
BBC News: Wales
BBC News: Wales - Paving Slabs to Go
Ian Watkins Wikipedia
Daily Mirror
Daily Mail: T-shirts
Mirror: Tattoo
Vice.com
Metapedia
Roland Barthes - 'The Death of the Author' 
Oscar Wilde - 'The Critic as Artist'
Oscar Wilde - 'The Decay of Lying'