It is mostly accepted that she did kill off her children. (Each of them had little life insurance policies after all.) Their death count is partly why hers is said to exceed that of Jack the Ripper. While the show is perfectly happy to to confirm that the woman who goes from Mary Anne Mowbray to Mary Anne Ward to Mary Anne Robinson in the space of the first hour is definitely offing the men around her, they are far less willing to come down on the side of her killing off the babes. And everytime there's a roll in the hay (or the filth), another baby is suddenly on the way, and just as quickly dies. With the first husband down, the pattern is established. Another poor choice of husband and provider leads to poverty, debts, squalor, life insurance policies and finally, pots of tea. As she makes her now crippled husband that fateful cup of tea, she looks up at the cabinet and reaches for the arsenic. Though he insists he'll be fine, and off again to find work in a few weeks, inside we see Mary Anne finally snap. All these factors come to a head when Mowbray comes home with a crushed leg. We have scenes of Mary Anne screaming and sobbing at her crying baby to please just be silent. As if these oppressive circumstances weren't enough, we see her growing crush and sexual frustration over one Joe Natress ( Jonas Armstrong)-the classic "bad girl falls for bad boy".Īdd to that the insanity of single motherhood in these circumstances, while Mowbray is away. We can also see that she's none too pleased with her lot as baby maker, as after giving birth to Margaret Jane 2, she laughs off the idea of having another one-until the next scene where she is already pregnant again.
#Dark angel cast full#
Living in a filthy hovel, there's a bed full of bugs, and squalor all around. Suddenly away from her parents, Mary Anne sees what a poor provider she's married. Mary Anne: I’ll not be a coalminer's lass for as long as I live! There’s not a woman alive, but she wants better than that. At least, until her daughter Margaret Jane dies in the cradle, and Mowbray moves her and their other daughter Isabella away from her family, to his finally achieved job as a miner. Instead this is the work of her father as "protection." In fact, Mary Anne seems fairly ok with her lot at first.
Mary Anne is not shown as being the one to take out that first life insurance policy on her husband that she would poison him to get later. Though we are not given much reason for this, Mary Anne's father and mother ( Alun Armstrong and Penny Layden) clearly think this a bad match, and furthermore a weak one. When we first meet Mary Anne ( Joanne Froggatt), she has just married Billy Mowbray ( Tom Varey), and returned home while he attempts to find work. After all, what man would think that the soothing, loving wife and mother, sitting by his bedside pouring a nice cuppa tea, could be poisoning him slowly for the insurance money? And yet, that's exactly what Cotton did for nearly twenty years. Perhaps that's why, when it comes to the Victorian era, they hold up Jack the Ripper as an example instead of Mary Anne Cotton.Ĭotton got away with her killing spree for as long as she did-taking out three out of four husbands-exactly because of this social stereotyping.
#Dark angel cast serial#
Serial killing seems to be mostly the provence of men, especially in our society's telling. And yet, our patriarchial society insists that women, though the "fairer and weaker" sex and also the "more emotional half" of the human race somehow never go on crazed killing sprees. What does make a woman go over the edge? Presumably the same things that make a man go a little mad sometimes. Mary Ann: Why don't you let me make you a nice cup of tea. A story of the a woman who killed her victims using pots of tea laced with arsenic, the two hour production explores what might make a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown tip into madness.
Masterpiece presents a portrait of Mary Ann Cotton, the first female serial killer in the industrial era, in drama Dark Angel.
Credit: Courtesy of Justin Slee/World Productions and MASTERPIECE
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