In the summer of 1860, in a well-to-do country house in sleepy Road Hill, Wiltshire, a little boy was snatched from his nursemaid’s bedroom while she was sleeping, and brutally murdered. The resulting investigation threw open the private domestic life of the Kent family, raising questions about class, ‘femininity’ and madness, and was to capture the public imagination not only then, but for decades to come.
Following the publication of Kate Summerscale’s popular ‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’, find out about the documents at The National Archives which shed light on this complicated, sensational case.