The Invention of Murder (18 page)

And then there was a final, extraordinarily derivative theatrical version.
After All
(1895) was written by Freeman C. Wills, W.G. Wills’ brother. Aram was played by Martin Harvey (later Sir John MartinHarvey), who had worked for Irving for fourteen years, and Ruth (the Madeline character) by Mabel Terry-Lewis, Ellen Terry’s niece. It had, remarkably, a happy ending: Houseman denounces Aram, Aram defends himself, and Walter in a gentlemanly way accepts his apology. It is not surprising that no one chose to follow this.

The constant renewal of Aram’s story contrasts sharply with another eighteenth-century murder case that also achieved a blaze of interest in the nineteenth century, but as quickly sputtered out. In 1739, a Mr Hayes stopped at Jonathan Bradford’s Oxfordshire inn. In conversation Hayes disclosed that he was carrying a great deal of money, and, two guests overhearing this, a robbery was planned. That night the two men entered his room, only to find Hayes dead and Bradford standing over the body, bloody knife in hand. Bradford’s defence was that he had gone in to rob his guest, but had found him already dead, and had just picked up the knife that was lying beside the corpse when the two men discovered him. This unlikely story was given short shrift at his trial, and Bradford was found guilty and hanged. Eighteen months later, so the story goes, Mr Hayes’ servant confessed on his deathbed: he had murdered and robbed his master, and Bradford had appeared just as he fled. There is little contemporary material to allow a balanced assessment of the case, but four inhabitants of an inn all set on robbery on the same night sounds more like art than life.

Kirby’s Wonderful Magazine,
a hodgepodge miscellany which reprinted the story in 1804, felt it needed an injection of realism, so it made the two guests enter the room because they heard a noise, not because they too were planning robbery. Several newspapers picked up the story, although with no great sense of urgency – the
Ipswich Journal
ran it two years later, mixed in with paragraphs on the slave trade and on the reported death of the explorer Mungo Park, and a report that a pointer had had a litter of seventeen pups.

The novelist Amelia Opie used the basic scenario for a short story in 1818. In ‘Henry Woodville’, Woodville is a clerk to a prosperous merchant. At an inn he and David Bradford, an ex-colleague who had been sacked for dissipation, quarrel. That night the inn’s waiter robs and murders Bradford, knowing that Woodville will be suspected because of the quarrel. Woodville is found guilty, but as he is about to be executed the waiter, now repentant and dying, appears at the foot of the scaffold to assure the crowd, ‘I – I murdered Bradford! – I am the real murderer!’ before collapsing. There were no detective, suspense or procedural motifs in this version – none of the elements that, half a century later, would be the main purpose of any similar tale.

It was perhaps the still undeveloped nature of detective fiction that made Bradford of more interest to theatre. There was a token nod in 1811 in
Killing No Murder,
by Thomas Hook. One of the characters is named Bradford, the play is set in an inn, and another character is told to report his own pretended death. Otherwise it is a standard farce, with everyone in love with someone else, all at the same time pretending to be their own cousins or uncles or valets. In 1826 Drury Lane’s
The Murder’d Guest
had a very Jonathan Bradford-like set-up, with an Oxfordshire inn, a guest who arrives with his servant and is put in a room next to two strangers, and a murderer who is preempted. This was followed in 1830 by
The Murderers of the Round Tower Inn,
a ‘Nautical Drama’ at the Royal West London Theatre. It too had a Bradford-like innkeeper, whose stepdaughter innocently wonders, ‘What can be the reason of his always sending me to bed so early, whenever Travellers sleep in the house?’ ‘Dreadful groans and noises in the night’, combined with the travellers’ complete absence in the morning, fail to enlighten her.

It was in 1833 that the story of Jonathan Bradford finally found fame, when David Osbaldiston, the manager of the Surrey Theatre, turned to Edward Fitzball for a new work. Many years later, Fitzball claimed that a theatre manager had once advised him: ‘Look into the papers’ for a subject; the daily crime-sheets had ‘incident enough
invented
there’. This was standard procedure for many dramatists. For most of the century, playwrights barely scratched out a living, while churning out vast quantities of work. For authors, drama did not pay. A century earlier, Dr Johnson had received nearly £300 for the performing and publishing rights for a play that ran nine nights. By 1829 Douglas Jerrold was paid £5 a week as house author at the Surrey, and was expected to write at least one play a month; George Dibdin Pitt, the man who brought Sweeney Todd and his murderous barber-chair to the stage in 1841, produced twenty-six plays in 1847 alone. Dickens claimed that W.T. Moncrieff had written seven melodramas for £5 each.
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In terms of content, the result,
Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Roadside Inn,
was not much different from earlier evilinnkeeper melodramas. Fitzball definitely knew Mrs Opie’s story, because two years earlier he had adapted another story from the same collection. He also used some standard elements from stage and penny-bloods: there was an underground crypt borrowed from gothic romance, a devil-may-care Irish highwayman and a comic Cockney apprentice. The key to the play’s extraordinary success was the completely novel staging devised by Fitzball. He set the four rooms of the inn all onstage at once, in cross-section, and wrote the murder scene so that the action took place simultaneously across them. Or, as one advertisement had it, ‘In this peculiar scene an effort will be made (never yet attempted on any stage) so to harmonize four actions as to produce
one striking effect!
Fitzball later remembered how the mutinous actors petitioned Osbaldiston ‘to insist on my leaving out this perplexing, unexampled, undramatic, unactable four-roomed scene’. Osbaldiston too was unenthusiastic, but finally agreed to let Fitzball make the attempt. On the opening night, ‘the audience looked at each other exactly in the same fashion as the actors had done’. But then, ‘as if convinced, on reflection, that there was something original to applaud. they took the lenient side, and applauded unanimously’
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.

The play was a smash. Its hundredth performance, or ‘centenary’, got a notice in
The Times.
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Ultimately the play closed in December, after a run of 161 consecutive performances (excluding Sundays). It was the first play ever to achieve this, and the record that was held for over two decades. Smaller populations had produced a repertorybased system reliant on the repeated attendance of the same people, rather than the infrequent attendance of different ones. In the 1840s, only four plays ran in London for more than a hundred nights and they were not consecutive. Short runs in 1833 did not necessarily signify failure, only the small theatregoing population.
Jonathan Bradford
was staged in Dublin in November and, at least according to the advertisements, was received with ‘rapturous and unbounded applause’, but it only appears to have had three performances. The play was revived over and over again – advertisements for different versions continued to appear as late as the 1880s.

Within months of the London opening, there were productions across the country – Edinburgh, Oxford, Liverpool, Ipswich, Dublin and Belfast newspapers all carried advertisements, although only the
Hampshire Telegraph
mentioned the novel staging, the original selling point. Instead, many theatres interpolated local speciality acts. In Portsmouth, audiences were promised ‘a Parody on the popular Song of “The Sea, the Sea, the open Sea”,’ as well as the appearance of Miss Parker to sing ‘A Kind Old Man Came Wooing’.

By 1839, the novelty staging was used in other plays. A production of
Jack Sheppard
at Sadler’s Wells had a similar compartment set to show Sheppard’s escape from Newgate: ‘Four Cells, two above and two below … doors, leading from one cell to the other – a fire-place at the back’. As the audience watches, Sheppard frees himself from his fetters, scrapes away at the brickwork until he can wrench out the bar blocking the chimney flue, which he then climbs into and vanishes from sight. In a moment, a hole opens in the cell above, and Sheppard appears once more. He then breaks down the cell door and vanishes through it, to reappear above, on the flat roof of the prison. This was very obviously of enormous drama, for at that moment, instead of escaping, Sheppard says, ‘Ah! my blanket! I had forgotten it,’ and makes the entire trip in reverse: through the two cells, down the hole in the chimney and back into the condemned cell. He collects his blanket, and the audience watches as he makes the trip a third time. On the roof he then tears up the blanket and is finally seen through the cell window abseiling down the side of the gaol.

Given Fitzball’s triumphant success, it is a surprise to see almost no subsequent fiction based on Bradford’s story. The only adaptations of any repute are three versions all by Sheridan Le Fanu, the Irish novelist and ghost-story writer.
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He approached it first in 1848, in ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston’, then again three years later in
The Evil Guest.
A third version,
A Lost Name,
appeared in 1868. All were variants on the same story: a man of bad character is found dead at a friend’s house. A faithful servant is suspected (and in one of these versions confesses), but it was the friend who killed him, after which the servant came into the room to find him dead, as in
Bradford.
When a memory of the penny-blood version cropped up in Dickens’ ‘The Holly Tree Inn’ (1855), it was as ‘a sixpenny book with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four incidents of the tragedy’. What had lingered in Dickens’ memory was the staging.

Instead, it was the penny publications that picked up the story, following the stage version closely, rather than inventing facts or characters to beef up the eighteenth-century story on their own. The real crime had by now been almost entirely forgotten. In the 1850s, in publishers’ lists of penny-bloods,
Jonathan Bradford
appeared together with fictional titles like
The Poisoner, or, The Perils of Matrimony. Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Road-side Inn. A Romance of Thrilling Interest
was published in eighteen parts, attributed to ‘the author of “The Hebrew Maiden”, “The Wife’s Secret”, &c. &c.’, who is thought to be Thomas Peckett Prest, a prolific penny-writer who had had a hand in the original version of
Sweeney Todd
. This was very much a story aimed at the working classes, in that throughout it is the petty bourgeoisie who thwart the good honest working people. An unpleasant, officious lawyer casts suspicion on all the good characters, while Dan Macraisy, the highwayman, although condemned in somewhat perfunctory fashion for being a murderer, offers the justification that ‘perhaps if this Mr. Hayes had not gone about with so much gold in his pocket, he might have been alive at this moment’. It was the victim’s fault for being rich while others were poor.

And finally,
Jonathan Bradford
cropped up regularly in police reports when penny-gaffs were raided, or booth-theatre proprietors were prosecuted for performing without a licence.
Household Words
also published a reminiscence of childhood ½d. peepshows, describing a showman who carried a box on his back. ‘The interior was lighted up with a candle in the middle of the day, and the different highly-coloured tableaux were let down with a heavy flop by strings at the side. wonderful atmospheric effects were introduced at the back, by lifting a lid, and the whole was made more interesting by a running description. by the proprietor.’ The shows that were mentioned by title were
Mazeppa
(Astley’s most popular hippo–drama) and
Jonathan Bradford.

The most lasting, and most important, contribution of the Jonathan Bradford story was to extend our ways of seeing. In 1852, the playwright Dion Boucicault adapted a French play as
The Corsican Brothers.
Originally it had been a very ordinary melodrama of a murdered man and his brother’s revenge. Two elements, both descendants of Fitzball’s
Jonathan Bradford,
lifted the piece out of basic genre and made audiences see anew. Acts I and II of the play were to be understood to occur simultaneously, seen from the perspective of each brother; furthermore, at the end of Act I, the actions that would take place at the climax of Act II were, with the aid of new stage technology, played out at the back of the stage as a ghostly pre-vision.

In 1858 the idea of simultaneity of view was taken further by the painter Augustus Egg. His
Past and Present
triptych is a morality tale, set, like a theatrical melodrama, in a middle-class home. And, like
Jonathan Bradford,
it shows in its tripartite structure actions that take place in different – and simultaneous – times. The centre panel shows the moment a wife’s adulterous liaison has been discovered by her husband. Egg’s depiction could be a tableau from any melodrama, with the husband holding the telltale letter, the woman in a swoon at his feet. (Over his shoulder is a painting of a shipwreck by Clarkson Stanfield, a noted set designer, tying the story even more tightly to the theatre.) It is the outer wings of the triptych, however, that make the work so innovative. Both are set some time after the central scene. On the left, the adulterous woman, reduced to destitution, sits under the arches by the river, contemplating suicide as she gazes at the moon. On the right, her two soon-to-be-motherless children are alone in their attic room, also staring at the moon, which is covered with the identical cloud formation that the mother is staring at, indicating that the two panels are depicting the identical moment in time. As both the children and their mother face inwards, to the central panel, Egg also conveys that they are, simultaneously, all thinking of that day when their world collapsed.