The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-04 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS,

THE EXAMINER ox CONSTANCE KENT'S SECOND
CONFESSION.— Our notice of the first confession of
Constance Kent concluded with the expectation
that time would bring forth another confession, and
so it has proved ; but of such a character is con-
fession No. 2 that we reckon upon still more con-
fessions to come, for the stuff of Constance Kent's
confessions is not, like truth, exhaustible. Indeed,
but for the gravity of the subject, we should sup-
pose Constance Kent to be playing at confessions.
It is true that the truth is not Always like the truth,
but seldom indeed do circumstances all bear the
broad stamp of improbability which we observe in
the statement before us. We are to believe that
Constance Kent took the . child out of its cot and
carried it down stairs without waking it. Well,
children sleep soundly. But we are to believe next
that Constance, a girl of fifteen, with a heavy boy
of four on one arm, was able to lift open a window
with the other hand, and that also without waking
the child. We are to believe next that the rush of
night air did not wake the child, and that, carried
through the fresh air of night, he continued sleeping
most conveniently for the purpose of the murder,
before -which, indeed, he never woke. Now, most
people know the effect which a change from a close
atmosphere to a fresh open air has upon the heaviest
sleepers. To wake a sleeper snoring in a railway
carriage the sure expedient is to open a window, and
let in a draught of fresh air. We are to believe that
Constance Kent, having cut the child's throat with
a razor, and also plunged the razor into its side,
escaped all marks of the butchery except two spots
of blood on her night-dress, and this though the
deed was done in a very small place, where she must
have been in very close contact with the bleeding
body. We are to believe that she washed out these
two spots, put on another night dress, and left the
first to dry ; though she must have expected an im-
mediate search, and the recently washed dress
must have excited suspicion. We are to believe that
two days afterwards Mr. Foley and Mr. Parsons ex-
amined the dress without noticing the signs of recent
and partial washing, or the stains which had not
been wholly removed by the washing. Mr. Parsons
has written to say that he did not see that dress.
We are to believe that Constance Kent became ex-
tremely anxious about this dress after it had passed
examination, though she had been careless about it
before ; that she secreted it in several places, and
eventually burnt it in her bedroom and put the
ashes in the kitchen grate. We arc to believe that
in the height of summer a night-dress could be
burnt in a bedroom of a small and rather crowded
house without attracting notice both by the unusual
light and smell. It is worth the sacrifice of a night-
dress to try the experiment. Lastly, and above all,
we are to believe that this foul murder was not com-
mitted from and to the boy, to •h I •
or punish his
mother for any ill-treatment of herself, none of
which elle had experienced, but to pay off a score of
remarks disparaging to the family of the first mar-
riage. It is much easier to believe Constance
Kent mad ; indeed, operated upon by motives so
trivial to an act of malignity so disproportionate,
and withal of vengeance wholly misplaced, it is im-
possible to suppose her of other than unsound mind,
though not of the degree of insanity exempting from
responsibility and punishment. Such would be the
conclusion if wo accepted her evidence against her-
self. But we do not believe her statement. There
may be facts in it, but mixed with fictions. Certain
we are it is not the truth, the whole truth, and no-
thing but the truth. It is something like I'rit-
chard's first confession, but he had a motive, he had
some hopes of mercy, while Constance Kent can
have none. And she does not extenuate but aggra-
vates her guilt by her account of it, so that the only
conceivable object seems to be to blacken herself
in order to set her family in a fairer light, and de-
liver her father and stepmother of the suspicion that
she was goaded to her crime in revenge for cruel
treatment. Still it may be asked, why should she
tell falsehoods about the circumstances of the
murder ? and the answer, according to our theory,
would be to increase the horror against herself. And
it is thoroughly believed in the neighbourhood that
the child was choked before he was taken out of the
house, and that the cutting instrument was used
after death to divide the body so that it might be
more easily hid away, but that the horrid task
proved too much for the girl.
THE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON THE SIN OF
LIGHT READING.—There is a sad piece of news just
come to the surface for the Archbishop of York, and
all the other serious persons who hold the reading
of sensation novels to be one of the most pestilent
practices of a confessedly disreputable age. It ap-
pears that a company was started for the purpose of
lending people books to read. But, unfortunately,
all hope of a dividend lay in the anticipation that
the books which people would ask for would be
serious books, which are less expensive in the first
place, and in the second, like Sam Weller's muffins,
are uncommonly filling at the price. A reader gets
through his three-volume novel with a rapidity that
is most unwelcome. A stout volume of sermons,
on the other hand, or an elaborate history, lasts
him perhaps ten times as long. A good novel draws
him along, while, with a more valuable book, the
process is exactly reversed. So the hopes of the
shareholders were somehow not fulfilled. With the
pertinacity of the daughters of the leech, people in-
sisted on demanding three-volume novels. History
and philosophy slept the sleep of the just upon their
shelves, while fiction had as many votaries as there
were subscribers to the library. And it was not
fiction of that exhilarating kind which even Dr.
Thomson thinks an allowable refreshment. The
subscribers did not care for those admirable stories
which draw their interest from " the larger
chapter of homely sympathies"—stories of
" pious mothers training little children, of
secret prayers offered up to God in the silence of
the night for those children, of hints and helps to
duty strewn in the path of those children continu-
ally." For all this an evil generation with a vitiated
palate has no liking. They prefer the doings of
grown-up people to those of little children, and pious
mothers have to make way for questionable wives.
Hints and helps to duty are as a drug in the mar-
ket. There is a much more lively demand for hints
and helps to break the Ten Commandments than
for encouragement to keep them. A single fact will
serve to illustrate the frivolity and light-mindedness
of modern readers. Ten copies of Mr. Froude's
History more than met the demand, while 170
copies of Miss Braddon's " Only a Clod" barely
sufficed to keep the crowd of readers at bay. The
taste for novels may therefore be reckoned as more
than 17 times stronger than the taste for history. This
distressing but instructive fact is clearly one not to
be too lightly passed over. That a large body of
readers should take a livelier interest in a man who
is supposed to come in for a windfall of thirty
thousand a year, but who in truth never lived at all,
and whose thirty thousand a year is mere moon-
shine, than in a real King of England and six real
wives, with real incidents to match, must seem
incredible to a lover of Social Science. Such a state'
of things is really most disheartening to the mem-
bers of that enthusiastic Association. It shows a
systematic absence of reverence for facts and
figures. When one thinks of the number of papers
that might have been written and read in the time
and with the attention given to this imaginary man