Mary Ann Cotton: Who was the real woman behind Dark Angel?

Mary Ann Cotton, the subject of ITV's new historical drama Dark Angel, was a Victorian Sunday school teacher, a nurse, a wife and a mother. But she was also a serial poisoner who is said to have killed multiple husbands, children, friends and family members.

In the macabre two-part drama, adapted from David Wilson's biography, Downton Abbey's Joanne Froggatt plays Mary Ann as a cool, clever smiling assassin, always ready with a cup of arsenic-laced tea. But what do we know about the real woman?

Mary Ann Cotton's background

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Born Mary Ann Robson in 1832, in what is now Sunderland, Mary Ann was just nine when her father was killed in a mining accident. Her widowed mother remarried to a man Mary Ann didn't like, and at 16 she moved out of home to become a nurse. It was the first of many jobs she would hold, including Sunday school teacher. At 20, she married a colliery worker, William Mowbray, but he would be followed by a string of ill-fated husbands and lovers.

The Black Widow murders

By the time she was hanged at Durham in 1873 at the age of 40, it is thought Mary Ann had killed as many as 21 people, including her mother, three of her husbands, a lover, eight of her children, seven stepchildren and a friend.

Her first victims were probably her children with Mowbray, several of whom died of "gastric fevers". Mowbray himself was next to go, also dying of an intestinal disorder. His life had been insured and Mary Ann collected a payout of £35 on his death, equivalent to about six months' wages for manual labour at the time. The subsequent husbands' deaths followed a similar pattern. The children, it seems, were mainly murdered when they became a burden, although some of their lives were also insured. Mary Ann's friend and mother may have been killed because they knew too much about her past.

Cotton's murders have been classified as "Black Widow" murders, a term originating from the spider who kills her mates, generally for profit. Her murders seem to have been motivated purely by monetary gain, rather than lust, jealousy or revenge.

How did she do it?

Mary Ann's murder method of choice was arsenic, a Victorian poisoner's favourite. It was readily available from chemists and used for household cleaning and killing bed bugs. Cheap, odourless and said to be almost tasteless, it could easily be slipped into food or tea. It had the added "benefit", for the murderer, that it builds up in the victim's system, and can be administered over time to give the impression the person is dying from a "natural" disease.

Depictions of Froggatt making her victims cups of arsenic-laced tea on the ITV series have apparently made many viewers nervous about having a cuppa at home, reports the Daily Mail.

How did she get caught?

Mary Ann moved around the North of England, finding new towns where she wasn't known to ply her deadly trade. She would typically meet a new man, and either fall pregnant before or after marrying him, and then persuade him to get life insurance before dispatching him to claim the rewards. Despite being a bigamist, forger, fraudster and thief, as well as a serial killer, it took two decades before justice caught up with her.

In the end she became a little too confident, and is said to have confided to a parish official that her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, was a burden she would soon be rid off. When the boy died of a stomach complaint, the official, who also worked as a coroner, ordered an inquiry that revealed the boy had died of arsenic poisoning.

The end for Mary Ann

Mary Ann Cotton's murder trial was a Victorian sensation, and courtroom artists depicted her as a sinister old hag, despite the fact she was only in her late 30s at the time. She protested her innocence until the end, but was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. The final cause of her death was in fact strangulation, as the gallows rope was too short to break her neck.

What are the critics saying?

Froggatt "excels" in the lead role, her performance "a marvel of meticulously observed nuances", says the Arts Desk, adding: "Judging by contemporary photographs, the real Mary Ann more closely resembled Mr Bates than his wife, but Froggatt can spin nimbly from grey-faced exhaustion or tearful misery to full-beam seductiveness, despite being encumbered with the full kit of skirts, bloomers and bonnets."

But other critics found the plot hard to follow, with the action skipping from year to year with no date subtitle to help viewers.

"Two years would slip by with a snip of the scissors in the edit suite," says Jasper Rees at the Daily Telegraph, and the script "shuttles as if on amphetamines between altar and graveyard somewhere in the North-East".

Rees is not rushing to watch the second episode. "Dark Angel is in too much of a tearing hurry to ask insightful questions about a grim reaper oop north," he says.

Sam Wollaston at The Guardian describes the first episode as "unintentionally entertaining", but agrees it would be "hard to stomach a second episode".