The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

* (#ulink_59300e67-e73e-504b-8158-4f240c46aa47) A patterer sold broadsides – ‘pattering’, or reading from them, and teaching the tunes to the songs. A standing patterer had a fi xed pitch; a running patterer roamed a district with his goods.

THREE Entertaining Murder (#ulink_57d754c2-aa11-5a60-ac3b-087f36f1e6ec)

One of the most influential stories of murder throughout the Victorian age was not Victorian at all, but had taken place while Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandfather was on the throne. Yet this 1745 crime resonated as late as the 1880s, when the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry toured in a heavily romanticized version of the life and death of Eugene Aram.

Eugene Aram was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1704, the son of a gardener. He received a fairly good education, and by the 1730s he was living in the town of Knaresborough, Yorkshire (today on the edge of Harrogate), married, with four or five children, and employed as steward to a local landowner. Daniel Clark was a shoemaker, about twenty-three years old, doing well in business, and with a fiancée who was known to have some money. He was thus able to order plate and silver on credit for his forthcoming wedding breakfast, to be held on the night of 7 February 1745. He also ordered other goods, probably more than he should have, but nothing sinister. Not sinister, that is, until the night before his wedding, when he told his brother-in-law he was going to visit his fiancée, and vanished. It was quickly discovered that £200 in cash and plate had gone with him, although his horse had not. Two men had been seen with him earlier that evening: Richard Houseman, a flax-dresser (someone who wove linen), and Eugene Aram. Their reputations were poor, and when their houses were searched, goods identified by the creditors were found. Aram said Clark had asked him to keep the things for him, and he was released, although it was noted that he had recently paid off a mortgage, and was unusually flush with cash. Soon afterwards, he abandoned both Knaresborough and his family. And that was the way things remained. He got a succession of jobs, first in London, ultimately in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, as an usher in a school (an usher was a junior teacher, with little respect attached to the position, and even less money).

Fourteen years later, a labourer digging in a field outside Knaresborough found a skeleton. Daniel Clark’s abandoned fiancée’s brother claimed that it must be that of Clark, as no one else had gone missing from the area in the previous two decades. Eugene Aram’s wife Anna gave evidence at the inquest on the bones, and said quite straightforwardly that she believed her husband and Houseman had murdered Clark. The jury’s verdict was that ‘from all apparent circumstances, the said skeleton is the skeleton of Daniel Clark’. Houseman protested: an eye-witness had seen Clark a few days after his disappearance. When questioned, however, this witness turned out only to have heard from a third person that yet a fourth person had said that he had once seen someone who resembled Clark. Houseman was arrested, and evidently began to think of how to save himself. He said that the skeleton was not Clark’s, because he knew where Clark’s body really was, and he sent officials to a local beauty spot called St Robert’s Cave, where another skeleton was duly found. Houseman claimed that he had last seen Clark heading off to Eugene Aram’s house on the night of his disappearance, while he, Houseman, had been left with the goods Clark had ordered, which they planned to fence. The next day his story had altered: he now said that he, Aram and Clark had all gone to St Robert’s Cave together to divide up the goods, and Aram had killed Clark there. At the reconvened inquest Mrs Aram testified to seeing the three men set out in the early hours of the morning, after which Aram and Houseman had returned alone and burnt some clothing in the fire. The jury found that Daniel Clark had been murdered by Eugene Aram and Richard Houseman.

There are many versions of how Aram was found, usually involving the miraculous workings of providence. In reality, the speed of his arrest suggests that everyone had known where he was, but for the previous fourteen years hadn’t much cared. Later rumour said he was living with a woman whom he passed off as his niece; others suggested it was his daughter; still others that he was living incestuously with his daughter. It could simply be that his daughter or niece was keeping house for him, and that that was how he was located. The warrant was delivered to the King’s Lynn Justice of the Peace and MP, and he accompanied the constables to the school where Aram was employed. Aram denied knowing Clark at all, and claimed never to have been to Knaresborough. He was arrested nonetheless. By the time he was taken to York Castle (the nearest gaol to Knaresborough), he recalled that he had known Clark, but otherwise amnesia ruled his life: he couldn’t remember when he had last seen Clark, nor that he had been friends with Houseman, nor what they were doing on the night Clark vanished, nor that he had paid off his debts afterwards. The only thing he could remember was that both his brothers had seen Clark after his disappearance, but, like Houseman’s eye-witness, this came to nothing. Later his memory improved: Houseman and Clark had planned the fraud with another man, he said, and the four of them had gone to St Robert’s Cave, but he had remained outside the cave, and when the others came out without Clark, they had told him that he had gone away.

Either Houseman or Aram was going to have to turn king’s evidence if the prosecution was to succeed. Houseman was the logical choice, as Mrs Aram’s testimony was crucial. Later accounts claimed that Houseman was found not guilty, but in fact the prosecution against him was withdrawn in order for him to testify against Aram. Houseman claimed pretty much what Aram had at the magistrates’ hearing, just shifting the characters around: they had all gone to the cave, but now it was Aram who killed Clark, while Houseman remained outside. At the trial there were fourteen witnesses against Aram, while his defence, in later legend held up as a model of its kind, was in actuality poor.* (#ulink_06cf13f2-9560-50e8-a168-b215b661672e) In an age when character – reputation – meant a great deal to perceptions of guilt and innocence, Eugene Aram could not find a single witness to vouch for him. And a legal historian has noted that he could think of no other defence that ‘condescends so little to any notice of so vulgar a thing as evidence’. Most defendants, he suggested, ‘do make some endeavour to meet the case against them’, but Aram did – or could – not. Instead, in his defence he set out his life history, trying to act as his own character witness; then he claimed he had been too ill at the time, too ‘enfeebled’, to commit murder (perhaps he hoped no one would remember the witnesses who had seen him walk several miles to St Robert’s Cave two nights in a row); then he simply stressed the unreliability of circumstantial evidence. To no one’s surprise, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Initially his body was to be anatomized after his execution, as was standard, but such was local feeling that the jury asked to have the punishment increased: Aram would be gibbeted – hanged in chains after death, for his body to decay slowly in front of the local population.

That was the end of Eugene Aram, but only the beginning of the romance. In 1794, thirty-five years after the trial, the philosopher William Godwin published Caleb Williams, planned as a fictional counterpart to his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice. This endeavoured to show how those who lived in an unequal society were victimized by it, but it is Godwin’s links to Aram that matter here. Godwin grew up only twenty-five miles from King’s Lynn, and later studied at the Hoxton Academy under Andrew Kippis, who was working on a Biographia Britannica which included an entry for Eugene Aram, taking the standard eighteenth-century view that he was a thief and murderer. But when the story reappeared later in the Newgate Calendar it focused more on Aram’s self-education, sliding over the fact that he was a receiver of stolen goods, and concentrating instead on the picture of a man with a thirst for learning, oppressed by a rigidly hierarchical society. In Caleb Williams, Godwin expands this theme: when hiding from his unjust persecutors, Caleb finds ‘a general dictionary of four of the northern languages’ and determines ‘to attempt, at least for my own use, an etymological analysis of the English language’. This is the earliest linkage of Aram to linguistics or philology, and thereafter virtually no recounting of the story was complete without a breathless recapitulation of his brilliance as a scholar.

In 1828 the poet and comic writer Thomas Hood added to the growing myth with ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’, a ballad that was to shape ideas of Aram for the rest of the century. One pleasant summer, ‘four and twenty happy boys/Came bounding out of school’. As they frolic, however, ‘the usher sat remote from all,/A melancholy man’, watching a boy who is reading ‘The Death of Abel’. He winces, tormented, telling the boy ‘Of horrid stabs in groves forlorn,/And murders done in caves’. He himself dreamed of murdering ‘A feeble man and old. here, said I, this man shall die,/And I will have his gold!’ Then, retribution: ‘That very night, while gentle sleep/The urchins’ eyelids kiss’d,/Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,/ Through the dark and heavy mist/And Eugene Aram walk’d between/With gyves upon his wrist.’

Now, instead of a ruffian who killed a fellow criminal when dividing up their spoils, Aram is depicted for the first time as a tormented, repentant sinner. By casting the act of murder as a dream, Hood was able to ignore entirely the mercenary element, making the criminal more important than the crime. The enormous success of the poem swept away more down-to-earth retellings. In the Manchester Times, the ballad was reprinted with a preface telling readers that ‘The late Admiral Burney [brother of the novelist Fanny Burney] went to school … where the unhappy Eugene Aram was usher … The admiral stated, that Aram was generally liked by the boys; and that he used to discourse to them about murder in somewhat of the spirit which is attributed to him in this poem.’ (Burney had been dead for seven years when this report appeared, so was not in a position to confirm or deny it.) Three years later, from ‘generally liked’, the Examiner now said firmly that Aram was ‘beloved’. This is no longer a comment on the poem, but is presented as a biographical fact.

The next person to handle Aram’s story was the most influential. Bulwer, fresh from his triumphs with crime and criminals in Pelham and Paul Clifford, in 1832 took on Eugene Aram. Bulwer begins his story in Grassdale, where Aram, a reclusive scholar-genius, falls in love with Madeline Lester, the squire’s daughter. All are pleased except her cousin Walter, who is in love with Madeline himself, and who now travels to forget. In a saddler’s shop in the north, he recognizes his long-vanished father’s whip. But he is told it was owned by a man named Daniel Clark, a villain who was later murdered. Walter meets Houseman, who incautiously connects Clark’s murder to Aram.Walter thunders home to prevent the wedding of his cousin to a murderer, Aram is arrested, tried and convicted, and Madeline dies of grief. Aram confesses: he was ‘haunted with the ambition of enlightening my race’, but was prevented from making ‘a gigantic discovery in science’ by ‘the total inadequacy of my means’. He decided, therefore, that it was ‘better for mankind – that I should commit one bold wrong, and by that wrong purchase the power of good’. His crime was further diminished: Clark was a vicious aristocrat who had raped a ‘quiet, patient-looking, gentle creature’, who subsequently killed herself. Aram’s repentance, such as it is, entirely revolves around the shame he has brought to the noble family of Lester, out of remorse for which he then commits suicide.

Bulwer aimed to make Aram a tragic figure: a noble man destroyed by a single flaw. To do so he had to rewrite almost all the known facts, apart from the long-undiscovered crime itself.* (#ulink_78e3207f-6c63-5e07-b084-93b36ba744d5) Clark, instead of a young labouring man, is now, melodrama-fashion, an upper-class despoiler of women; Aram’s abandoned wife and half-dozen children vanish without a trace; while Aram himself is no longer a humble usher, but a scholar of international renown.

This fiction quickly displaced fact. In 1832, the Trial and Life of Eugene Aram; several of his Poems, and his plan and specimens of an Anglo-Celtic Lexicon, with copious notes … worked backwards from the novel, using Bulwer’s fictional account of the trial as though it were a verbatim court report. The Leeds Mercury commented admiringly on Aram as ‘a man of most extraordinary talents and character’, and the Gentleman’s Magazine agreed that he was entirely innocent. It was widely reported that Archdeacon Paley had pronounced Aram’s defence to be one ‘of consummate ability’. (A modern scholar has noted that Paley was an adolescent at the time, so if he had made the remark at all, it wasn’t a hugely mature judgement; later in life he said that Aram had ‘got himself hanged by his own cleverness’.) The journalist Leigh Hunt went even further in his praise: ‘Had Johnson been about him, the world would have attributed the defence to Johnson.’ Bulwer’s biographer later claimed that Bulwer’s creation, Madeline Lester, was also based on reality, ‘taken word for word, fact for fact, from Burney’s notes’. As Burney had been eight years old at the time, we might assume that his memories of an impoverished usher yearning after the local squire’s daughter might not be terribly reliable, if they ever existed.

Of the success of Bulwer’s novel, however, there could be no doubt. Within its first year, the Morning Chronicle noted, as well as French and German translations, the book sold over 30,000 copies in the USA. The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle published a plea from the Library and Reading Room in Queen Street, Portsea, in which it ‘earnestly requested that their subscribers who have [borrowed] the first volumes … of Eugene Aram … will return them forthwith. as detaining them so long prevents that accomodation [sic] which they wish should be received by all’.

Others rushed to elaborate the subject. Although he would have been disgusted to have his work categorized as fiction, there is nowhere else to put Norrisson Scatcherd’s highly coloured Memoirs of the Celebrated Eugene Aram … Scatcherd, a barrister who devoted his life to antiquarian and local-history research, claimed to have become interested in Aram in 1792, when he was about twelve, on a visit to Harrogate, and he says it was then that he began to interview locals who had known Aram thirty-three years before. In his version, Aram was ‘modest’, ‘amiable’, ‘beloved and admired’. His wife, however, was ‘a low, mean, vulgar woman, of extremely doubtful character’, who was unfaithful, and thus Aram’s doubts of their children’s paternity made it perfectly natural that he should be ‘disposed. to neglect them’. According to Scatcherd, Clark was Mrs Aram’s lover, and in addition he and Houseman were planning to rob and kill a pedlar boy. Aram helped Clark dishonestly order plate and goods, but only because he was ‘wretchedly poor, having a family to support’. The three men went to St Robert’s Cave, but it was obvious to Scatcherd that it was Houseman who murdered Clark, because Aram was ‘a man of moral habits, delicate health, prepossessing countenance, slender form,* (#ulink_214111e5-72e0-51cf-afe1-ae3584c97ecb) and unassuming deportment’.

Scatcherd’s account was well-received. A review in the Leeds Mercury said he had ‘corrected some important errors’, and Aram could now be seen as an ‘amiable and accomplished murderer’. There appears to be no irony intended in that phrase: the newspaper repeated Scatcherd’s views on the justice of the killing owing to Mrs Aram’s infidelity, and implied that as both Clark and Houseman were robbers and murderers themselves, the killing of Clark was really not so very terrible. As late as 1870, Scatcherd was still commended for having ‘done much to … rescue’ Aram’s name; the murderer was now merely ‘imprudent’ for having ‘associat[ed] himself with persons beneath his own standing’. In the Daily News in 1856, the Metropolitan Board of Works considered the possibility of renaming some London streets to avoid multiple streets with the same names, and some alternatives are suggested: Ainsworth, Keats, Southey and Bulwer are among them, as are Richard Mayne (the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police) and Eugene Aram.† (#ulink_87680ca0-03d2-5bfc-b54f-2a655c81110e)

The great success of these accounts of Aram’s case brought theatrical adaptations in their wake. W.T. Moncrieff’s version opened at the Surrey in February 1832; within a month it was advertising additional performances, ‘Owing to the complete overflows’. Soon the Royal Pavilion and Sadler’s Wells had their own versions, with another at the Royal Grecian by the end of the year. There were also productions in Edinburgh, Wakefield and Sheffield. The Surrey version continued the Bulwer/Scatcherd trend of turning Aram into an anguished, noble and excessively learned murderer: he ‘perfected himself in … Hesiod, Homer, Theocritus, Herodotus, Thucydides’ before he ‘began to study Hebrew’, not to mention ‘the Chaldee and Arabic’ and ‘Celtic. through all its dialects’. He is introduced to the audience as ‘Master Aram, the great scholar’, while Houseman is ‘guilty-like’, and so repellent that all who see him ‘turn aside – as from a thing infect [sic]’. Aram confesses that ‘poverty and pride’ had led him to commit the crime: ‘I yearned for knowledge but had no means to feed that glorious yearning.’ Madeline dies of grief at his feet, promising to wait for him in heaven, and Aram then kills himself, as ‘I have been no common criminal; – Eugene Aram renders to the scaffold! his – lifeless body – pardon – pity – all.’ This was an authorized adaptation of Bulwer’s novel, and he himself attended the first night.* (#ulink_1ef675d3-d9a5-5723-b642-40179f4028b7) The New Monthly Magazine highly recommended the production, although by an astonishing coincidence the editor of this magazine was one E.L. Bulwer, author of Eugene Aram.

Two years after these theatre adaptations, the young novelist Harrison Ainsworth published Rookwood, which was very much the love child of Eugene Aram and Paul Clifford crossed with gothic tales, and this led the way to a new kind of fictional criminal-hero. Ainsworth was not concerned, as Bulwer claimed to be, with examining the motivation of criminals, and society’s responsibilities. He was not even terribly concerned with facts: it was in Rookwood that Dick Turpin first made his epic ride from London to York on Black Bess, although the historical Turpin had only ridden as far as Lincolnshire – a sixty-mile trip instead of two hundred. Ainsworth wanted to entertain, and his highwaymen are debonair and dashing, usually men of rank cheated out of their birthrights. As Ainsworth’s Turpin says, ‘It is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman, as it is for a doctor to have his diploma, or an attorney his certificate.’

Turpin, hanged in 1739 for horse-stealing, had from about 1800 been turned into popular entertainment in coarse and inexpensive chapbooks, and in 1818 in an onstage incarnation, as Richard Turpin, The Highwayman. By 1823 his name was already a byword for a dashing, brave criminal. Thurtell had boasted to his brother, ‘We are Turpin-like lads, and have done the trick.’ From the 1830s penny-bloods returned again and again to his story. One of the most popular was Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, which appeared in 254 numbers over five years: Turpin was not executed until page 2,207. Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, Eugene Aram and others made up the subjects for series like Purkess’s Library of Romance and Purkess’s Penny Plays. These publications were so popular, the police complained, that vagrant boys spent their leisure time playing cards and dominoes and reading Jack Sheppard and Oliver Twist ‘and publications of that kind’, the implication being that this reading material would in and of itself lead to crime.

Rookwood was filled with songs – twenty-three in the first edition, and more later. Ainsworth may have been thinking of theatrical adaptations from the first: they certainly followed quickly, and nearly every one of them included the song he had written in ‘flash’, or thieves’ slang, which ‘travelled everywhere. It deafened us in the streets, where it was. popular with the organ-grinders and German bands … it was whistled by every dirty guttersnipe, and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips.’

In the box of the Stone Jug [prison] I was born

Of a hempen widow [my father was hanged] the kid forlorn.

Fake away [Go on, steal].

My noble father as I’ve heard say

Was a famous merchant of capers gay.

Nix my dolly, palls [Nothing, friends], fake away.

The knucks in quod [thieves in prison] did my school-men play

And put me up to the time of day.

Fake away.

No dummy hunter had forks so fly [pickpocket had fingers so nimble]

No knuckler so deftly could fake a cly [pick a pocket]

Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

But my nuttiest lady one fine day

To the beaks did her gentleman betray.

Fake away.

And thus was I bowled out at last,

And into the Jug for a lag was cast [and was sent to prison].

Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

But I slipp’d my darbies [fetters] one morn in May

And gave to the dubsman [turnkey] a holiday.

Fake away.

And here I am, palls, merry and free,

A regular rollocking Romany.

Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

In 1835 Rookwood was adapted for Astley’s Amphitheatre, which specialized in staging hippodramas – spectaculars with vast numbers of horses, riders and extras. It was retitled Turpin’s Ride to York and the Death of Black Bess, taking the element that people had enjoyed the most. (It is notable, two years after Cold Bath Field, that Black Bess no longer dies of exhaustion after her epic journey, but is shot by the wicked Bow Street Runners.)

The success of Rookwood, both onstage and as fiction, led to even more novels in which criminals were glamorized, with Ainsworth’s next book revolving entirely around a historical criminal: the eighteenth-century thief and gaol-breaker Jack Sheppard. Serialization began in Bentley’s Miscellany just as another story in that magazine, also about a boy-criminal, also illustrated by Cruikshank, was ending, and for four episodes they overlapped, so it was natural to think of them together. The second tale was Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. Today it is surprising to think of Oliver Twist as a crime novel, but stripped down to its bare bones, the plot is very similar to Bulwer’s Paul Clifford: the orphan who is, unknown to himself, from a ‘good’ family but is left to be raised by criminals. Similarly, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard is the story of an apprentice who becomes a thief, with a parallel story of a good apprentice cheated out of his inheritance by an evil relative; Oliver Twist is an apprentice who has ostensibly gone bad by joining Fagin’s gang, while he is unlawfully kept from his inheritance by his evil half-brother. (The name ‘Twist’ in the title would also have tipped off contemporary readers that this was a book about crime and criminals: ‘to twist’ was underworld slang for ‘to hang’.)* (#ulink_6e32c065-d0c7-5f2d-a2eb-a9d9fd5ebf5c) These books were classed together as ‘Newgate novels’, connecting the stories both to the Newgate Calendar and also to the gaol from which Sheppard himself so famously escaped.

Some critics left Dickens out of their discussions of Newgate novels, which were condemned for portraying criminals sympathetically. As the Edinburgh Review summed up, Dickens ‘never endeavours to mislead our sympathies – to pervert plain notions of right and wrong – to make vice interesting in our eyes. We find no. creatures blending with their crimes the most incongruous and romantic virtues.’ This praise of Dickens was, very obviously, also a poke at Bulwer. Punch magazine, too, condemned Newgate fiction in its drawing of ‘The Literary Gentleman’ surrounded by thoughts of ‘Murder’, ‘Gallows heroism’, ‘Burglary’ and ‘Robbery’. On his desk is a dagger, a gallows, a broadside printed with a ‘Dying Speech’, a copy of the Newgate Calendar and another of the Annals of Crime. The verse that follows mocks:

… you, great scribe, more greedy of renown,

From Hounslow’s gibbet drag a hero down.

Embue his mind with virtue; make him quote