cautionary tales

perhaps an intro post is in order

Few of The Franchise Affair’s early readers must have been familiar with the case of Elizabeth Canning. To them, however, Betty Kane’s story would almost certainly have recalled that of a different Elizabeth: the 18-year-old aspiring striptease artist Elizabeth Jones, who, after taking up with an American army deserter in a tea shop in October 1944, embarked with him on a six-day spree of robbery and violence that ended with the slaying of a taxi driver. The “Cleft Chin Murder”, as the case became known, is the one discussed by George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Decline of the English Murder”: for him, the killing typified a distinctly modern trend in which murder was the product of anomie and squalor, rather than part of the calculated drive for respectability it had been in the palmy days of poisoners such as Crippen and Mrs Maybrick. “Indeed,” he writes, “the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period” — and, as he also points out, “the brutalising effects of war” may have lent extra vehemence to the expressions of outrage that erupted when Jones was imprisoned rather than, like her male accomplice, executed. (“SHE SHOULD HANG” was apparently chalked on the walls of her home town, Neath, alongside pictures of a gallows and a dangling human figure.)

Since they were to come in the days of the power of Melkor, Aulë made the Dwarves strong to endure. Therefore they are stone-hard, stubborn, fast in friendship and in enmity, and they suffer toil and hunger and hurt of body more hardily than all other speaking peoples; and they live long, far beyond the span of Men, yet not for ever. Aforetime it was held among the Elves in Middle-earth that dying the Dwarves returned to the earth and the stone of which they were made; yet that is not their own belief. For they say that Aulë the Maker, whom they call Mahal, cares for them, and gathers them to Mandos in halls set apart; and that he declared to their Fathers of old that Ilúvatar will hallow them and give them a place among the Children in the End. Then their part shall be to serve Aulë and to aid him in the remaking of Arda after the Last Battle. They say also that the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves return to live again in their own kin and to bear once more their ancient names: of whom Durin was the most renowned in after ages, father of that kindred most friendly to the Elves, whose mansions were at Khazad-dûm.