By the time the case was resolved, the family had splintered, never to regroup. The townspeople had numerous reasons to loath the patriarch of the family, Samuel Kent, but no one alleged anything out of the ordinary, even the servants who lived at the estate. When the story broke, the Kent family was considered to be perfectly respectable. Simultaneously, English journalism was in a renaissance: newspapers grew 57 percent, from 700 to 1,100 titles between 18, fueled by the public’s increasing literacy and thirst for news.
Indeed, the word “detect” stemmed from the Latin ‘de-tegere’ or ‘unroof’ and the detective was perceived as the lame devil Asmodeus, ‘the prince of demons’, who took the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside. One of the cornerstones of the era was the concept of privacy at home, and the advent of the detective was at once thrilling and threatening to the secretive sensibilities of the middle class. In Victorian England, the public viewed newspapers and detectives in the same light: they were seen alternately as crusaders for truth or as sleazy voyeurs.
Viewed as a sort of superman, the detectives divined the truth using clues, facts and science, organizing chaos from a supremely neutral position. The first detectives were appointed to the London Metropolitan Police in 1841 they were soon regarded with awe. The story became symbolic of phenomenon specific to the era, the darkness in the bosom of the Victorian family and the thrills and dangers of a new art: detection. The murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in 1860 was unusually brutal - he was nearly decapitated and dumped in a privy - but even more scandalous was the revelation that the perpetrator was a member of the household. As easy as it is to believe the current public obsession with crime investigation was fueled by this lurid case, it actually had its genesis 130 years ago in Victorian England. The girl was found in her home on a snowy morning, and the lack of outside suspects and the graphic nature of the crime gripped the nation and saturated news coverage for months on end. Media coverage of even these heinous stories paled in comparison to the murder of child beauty pageant contestant Jon Benet Ramsey. During my lifetime there have been numerous crime stories that have gripped the nation, from the Manson Family mayhem to the Guyana massacre masterminded by the Reverend Jim Jones.
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