The Invention of Murder (20 page)

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In George Borrow’s novel Lavengro (1851), Thurtell boasts that he is ‘Equal to either fortune’, which was said to be a quote from Aram’s defence speech. Most commentators have taken this to indicate that Thurtell was acquainted with the details of the murder of Daniel Clark. All it really means is that Borrow, the author who put these words into Thurtell’s mouth, was familiar with Aram’s defence, and since as a young man he had compiled a six-volume edition of
Celebrated Trials,
this is hardly a surprise.

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While Bulwer may have thought his novel a moral portrait, Pierce Egan was more clearsighted. After its publication he called on Bulwer to present him with his treasure, the caul of Thurtell, as a tribute to a man he obviously thought of fi rst and foremost as a murder specialist. Bulwer was appalled.

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Even in today’s size-zero world, I don’t think anyone has defended themselves against a charge of murder by claiming they were too thin to have done it.

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At first I thought this must be satire, but it doesn’t appear to be; the basic information was reprinted the following day in another context.

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Before 1832, copyright in a novel did not extend to other art forms: anyone could write and produce a play based on any fi ction. After 1832, legislation protected plays that had been published from being re-produced by other theatres, but if the play was staged without the script being published, then it too was fair game.

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Dickens is ‘literature’ now, and it takes an effort to see him through different eyes. Yet the number of murders and otherwise unnatural deaths that occur in his novels is astonishing: Oliver Twist has a murder, an accidental death by hanging, an execution, and a dog’s brains are smashed out for good measure; a murder, a violent riot leading to many deaths and a double execution appear in Barnaby Rudge; a murder, attempted murder and suicide by a murderer in Martin Chuzzlewit; while in A Tale of Two Cities there is a guillotining, and Madame Defarge shoots herself; David Copperfi eld has two accidental drownings and one suicide; a character falls down an abandoned mineshaft in Hard Times; Bleak House has two deaths from exhaustion, one suicide, one murder and one spontaneous combustion; in The Old Curiosity Shop there is one death by drowning, one from exhaustion; the fi rst person killed by a train in literature appears in Dombey and Son; Our Mutual Friend has a double, murderous drowning, another accidental death on the river, and two attempted murders; in Great Expectations there are two attempted murders and one death by drowning; in Little Dorrit a house crushes a self-confessed murderer. In the unfi nished Edwin Drood it is perfectly clear that the eponymous Drood has been murdered, but Dickens himself died before that murder was unravelled.

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Punch really had its knife out for Bulwer, and ran a series triggered by Eugene Aram, in which parallel columns compared Bulwer’s romanticized version of Aram’s life with the rather sordid facts. It later mocked Bulwer’s many names by referring to him as ‘Sir E. L. B. L. BB. LL. BBB. LLL.’

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After the success of the play, the grave of a completely unrelated Jack Sheppard, who had been buried in Willesden cemetery two centuries before the gaol-breaker, was overrun with visitors, and the cemetery’s wily sexton chipped off bits of the headstone to sell. (The criminal Jack Sheppard was buried in the workhouse of St Martin-in-the-Fields, now under the site of the National Gallery. In 1866 the remains of the cemetery’s inhabitants were transferred to Brookwood, in Surrey.)

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In case someone else was accused of the crime after his death, Ferroll had deposited a confession in his fi rst wife’s coffi n. How, the reader asks, was anyone supposed to know to exhume his fi rst wife in the hope that a confession might have been buried with her? Answer comes there none.

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Vicars had a penchant for the story. A sale of autographs collected by the late Revd F.W. Joy included a letter from Aram after his arrest, as well as a letter from Bulwer authenticating it (although why Bulwer, born more than half a century after Aram died, should be an expert on his handwriting, is unclear). There were also ‘relics’: a box made from the wood of Aram’s gibbet, a bone from his skeleton, another box made from a beam from Daniel Clark’s house, as well as a portion of his skull (this time authenticated by the governor of York Castle), and there was a letter from Aram ‘relating to a recent tour on the Continent’. The idea of a poor school usher making a grand tour is so risible that it is hard to take the rest of the collection seriously, but people did. It was estimated to sell for £19, while a letter from Robert Burns was valued at £13, and an entire manuscript in Carlyle’s hand a sad little £3.

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Wills had a knack for turning theatrical fi ction into untheatrical theatre: his adaptation of Jane Eyre drops the novel’s dramatically interrupted wedding scene; instead, Jane is informed of Rochester’s previous marriage in a letter.

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Gilbert and Sullivan parodied this in Ruddigore (1887), which had dialogue accompanied in melodrama fashion. (The West End audiences were bemused, failing to recognize the convention.)

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Dickens had a history with Moncrieff and stage adaptations, however. In 1837 Moncrieff had written an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers before the serialization had reached its conclusion. Dickens took his revenge in Nicholas Nickleby, with a depiction of a ‘literary gentleman’ who had ‘dramatized … two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out’. Given this type of speedy hackwork, it is not surprising that many authors stuck to newspapers. C.H. Hazlewood, the house author at the Britannia, regularly fi lleted the newspapers, magazines and pennydreadfuls, précising the stories and fi ling ‘sundry axioms, aphorisms, and moral sentiments’ alphabetically under headings such as ‘Ambition’ or ‘Kindness of Heart’. When he began a new melodrama, he merely took one of his précis and fi lled it in with relevant quotations. Fitzball, receiving his commission from the Surrey, similarly went back to an old story.

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So popular was this novelty that it was quickly turned to satire. Only two weeks later, Figaro in London announced that Sadler’s Wells was planning a play ‘in which there is to be a scene showing twenty rooms at once, with a different tragedy acting in ten of them, operas in fi ve, and the remaining fi ve representing as many perfect comedies’.

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Another way of measuring the play’s success was the appearance of racehorses named after the murderer. The Earl of Burlington ran a gelding named Jonathan Bradford at the 1834 Derby, and on the second day of the meeting a Mr Breary was listed as the owner of another horse with the same name.

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There is also a story by Mrs Gaskell, ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, begun in late 1858, which begins as though Mrs Gaskell might have read of Jonathan Bradford. It is said, however, that she based her story on a Knutsford case of a lawyer who vanished.

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In 1896, Bernard Shaw saw a production at the Princess’s Theatre in which real water was used, which he felt destroyed the illusion, although ‘the spectacle of the two performers taking a call before the curtain, sopping wet, and bowing with miserable enjoyment of the applause’, was something ‘I shall remember … while life remains’

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Our American Cousin’s main claim to fame today is that it was the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated.