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How a Victorian Woman's Odd Quest for Fame Foretold Clickbait and 'Law & Order'

In 1898, an elderly widow named Anna Maria Druce walked into St. Paul's Cathedral and asked that her father-in-law's grave be exhumed. She claimed he was never who he said he was—and ignited a media frenzy.
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Although they have come to represent a certain kind of contemporary journalism, headlines in the style of "You Won't BELIEVE What Happened Next!" are not an advent of the Upworthy era. Pre-internet, we saw now-quaintly outrageous newspaper headlines; today, tabloids still greet us with news of baby bumps and who's cheating on whom at many-a grocery store and pharmacy check-out line. While the newest evolution of the convention became so widespread that one of the chief mechanisms of the style's popularity changed its policy to penalize sensationalism, "clickbait," of a kind, was around long before we were.

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This is especially apparent in historian Piu Marie Eatwell's juicy nonfiction book The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse: An Extraordinary Edwardian Case of Deception and Intrigue. The title is itself a kind of bait, as (spoiler alert) there isn't really a missing corpse anywhere in the book. Even Eatwell admits it: "The title was a rather wily choice on the part of the original UK publishers—my original title was 'No Body of Evidence'," she says. "This was thought to be too legal/dry! I was not madly keen on the new title at first, but I have come 'round to it now, as it does intrigue readers." Indeed, it's as intriguing as the case that she discusses in the book, with all its twists and turns, and as misleading as many of the headlines she refers to throughout.

The driving force of the narrative is a legal case that went on for around ten years, spanning so many different courts that it's hard to imagine how Eatwell stayed sane while conducting her research. It involved a deep conspiracy theory: that two incredibly strange and reclusive men—the 5th Duke of Portland, William John Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, and a merchant, Thomas Charles (T. C.) Druce—were the same person. In 1898, Anna Maria Druce came to the court at St. Paul's Cathedral in London and requested that her late father-in-law, T. C. Druce, be exhumed. Her aim was to prove that he wasn't buried there—that he hadn't died in 1864 as had been reported. Instead, the elderly woman believed that in her father-in-law's grave was a coffin filled with lead in place of a body.

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Her seemingly outlandish conviction rested on the idea that her father-in-law was an alter ego of the then-recently-dead 5th Duke of Portland, a millionaire who'd had no children as far as anyone knew and whose dukedom had been passed to a distant cousin who became the 6th Duke of Portland. According to Mrs. Druce's story, when the Duke had become tired of the merchant class lifestyle he was living as his alter ego, the Duke simply killed him off and went on for the rest of his days as an aristocrat. Since women couldn't, at the time of Mrs. Druce's husband's death, acquire their husbands' property, what Mrs. Druce was trying to claim was that the dukedom—and the Portland millions—belonged to her son, Sidney, who had emigrated to Australia by that time.

Left: T.C. Druce. Right: the 5th Duke of Portland. Images courtesy of Piu Eatwell

They did look alike. But Chancellor Tristram, who presided that March day in 1898, knew the case seemed odd, especially with the various details Mrs. Druce laid out. But Highgate Cemetery, where T. C. Druce was ostensibly buried, was consecrated ground, and as such the Church court had the right to grant Mrs. Druce the exhumation of her father-in-law's body as she requested.

Meanwhile, "the Druce-Portland affair—as the case was being called—had already provided a field day for the penny press, the nascent tabloids of the new, media-hungry era," Eatwell writes. "Overnight, Anna Maria had become a celebrity, her case discussed in inns, parlours, and private gentlemen's clubs around the country."

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Unfortunately, as her claim was stalled and shuttled from court to court, Mrs. Druce went mad, claiming wealth she didn't have and power she'd never earned. But she not only became famous, but she attempted to promote that fame: She was selling bonds to be redeemed on her case's success. Like today's ten-minutes-of-fame reality TV stars, Mrs. Druce too became known for being an object of admiration, pity, disdain, envy, and a realm of other emotions.

Both men were strangely reclusive and built underground tunnels on their properties; both men disliked red meat and liquor; and both men had a strange affinity for chicken.

Today and in the Victorian era, when the Druce­–Portland case began, women were the primary consumers of live courtroom dramas. When I Googled "who watches law and order," the results, in order, were: a Slate article about women's obsession with Law & Order; a listicle with seven reasons for "Why Women Love Law & Order: SVU So Much"; and another, much longer listicle with a similar title. While this may seem bizarre—women are stereotypically afraid of horror films and grossed out by gore, while men are supposedly into the slasher flicks and action movies—it's clearly not a new phenomenon. "The fascination that these big trials held for women in the Victorian period is well documented in the media of the time," Eatwell says. "Hordes of middle-class ladies would come to celebrity trials and sit transfixed with ghoulish fascination throughout the day, peering at some unfortunate accused woman in the box through their opera glasses, even bringing sandwich boxes for lunch. In this period, it was a consequence of increasing literacy rates, the rise of a significant 'leisure class' of married women who were brought up—as per Victorian ideals of a woman's role—not to work but [still] restricted to the home, and the lack of other kinds of popular entertainment (no TV or radio then)."

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The media was changing at the time—as it is now—with the sixpenny Times competing with cheaper and more accessible penny or half-penny papers like the Daily News, Daily Telegraph, Pall Mall Gazette, The Sun, Daily Chronicle, and more. Like many publications today, the new set of papers in the late 1800s aimed to both educate and expose, using shocking headlines such as "The Violation of Virgins" and "Strapping Girls Down." Another similarity between then and now lies in what Eatwell writes in her book: "In the Druce affair, everybody—journalists, housewives, butlers and laundry maids—had turned into super sleuths, bent on unravelling the mystery." Now with the internet at our fingertips, people are live-tweeting news as they see it happen, and the rest of the world reads rapt, trying to follow along as situations play out.

Mrs. Druce's claim was eventually debunked, but others hoping to piggyback on her story followed. Eerily familiar is the fact that, like Mrs. Druce, all the claimants to the Portland title raised money for the prosecution law firms by basically creating a form of crowdfunding—selling shares of the eventual profits of the case's settlement, or of the money of the Duke's estate should the claimant win.

Why did this work? For a time, it seemed as though Mrs. Druce was onto something—or that at least as though the 5th Duke had more skeletons in his closet than did the vault T. C. Druce was buried in. Various people corroborated the belief that T. C. Druce—who, having run a hugely profitable bazaar, was himself very wealthy, as well as a philanderer with many illegitimate children—was the very same man as the 5th Duke of Portland. There were certain oddities that made sense: Both men were strangely reclusive and built underground tunnels on their properties; both men disliked red meat and liquor; and both men had a strange affinity for chicken. The Duke would eat chicken for breakfast and dinner—Druce ate it for lunch and nothing else.

However, Eatwell concludes in her book that the two were not the same, as much as that would have soothed the audience's sense of drama. "I am sure, after investigating the case thoroughly, that T.C. Druce was NOT the 5th Duke of Portland," Eatwell writes. "The evidence that really convinced me was the wealth of documentation showing that Druce and the Duke were in different places at the same time. And the stunning witness evidence from a household servant that, when T.C. Druce visited the 5th Duke at Harcourt House in London one day as his decorator, the servant had let T.C. Druce in the front door, and then mounted up the stairs when the Duke rang for him in the bedroom above!"

Nevertheless, modernity, for all the debts it owes to the 19th century, did bring a strange twist to the case. After reading the first edition of the book, a great-great-great-grandson of the 5th Duke of Portland (who was thought not to have any children) contacted Eatwell on Twitter.