Manning, Maria DeRoux, -1849

Marie Manning (née de Roux; c. 1821 – 13 November 1849) was a Swiss domestic servant who was hanged on the roof of London's Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 13 November 1849, after she and her husband were convicted of the murder of her lover, Patrick O'Connor, in the case that became known as the "Bermondsey Horror". It was the first time that a husband and a wife had been executed together in England since 1700. The novelist Charles Dickens attended the public execution, and in a letter written to The Times on the same day wrote: I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. Dickens later based one of his characters—Mademoiselle Hortense, Lady Dedlock's maid in Bleak House—on Manning's life.