The Invention of Murder (45 page)

Mrs Bartlett’s defence was perhaps the most remarkable – and imaginative – that had been seen that century. She claimed that she and her husband had lived in a celibate marriage; that he believed that every man should have two wives, one for friendship and one for ‘use’, and she had been the former. However, she had wanted a child, so there was one ‘episode’ of sexual congress, from which she became pregnant. Instead of a doctor, Bartlett had taken her to the wife of Dr Nichols, the author of
Esoteric Anthropology, or, The Mysteries of Man,
which explained birth control. (The dissemination of birth-control literature was considered legally equivalent to the dissemination of obscene literature, and was a prosecutable offence.) Dr Nichols had recommended a nurse, Annie Walker, but the child had been stillborn. From that time, said Mrs Bartlett, she had used chloroform to ward off her husband when he became amorous. Furthermore, her husband, fearing that he would not live long, had ‘given’ her to Dyson to become his wife after Bartlett’s own anticipated death.

At the trial, Mrs Bartlett was defended by Edward Clarke, QC, MP, very prestigious legal representation, paid for, rumour had it, by her supposedly noble family. The charges against Dyson were formally dismissed as the trial began, so Mrs Bartlett appeared alone in the witness box. She was, for the time, oddly dressed: instead of being in deep mourning for her recently deceased husband, as custom demanded, she wore a silk dress, with no hat, and with her hair cropped short. I can find no explanation for this remarkable appearance, which, given her defence team, must have been at the very least sanctioned. For the evidence against her was formidable, and her team handled it immaculately.

The prosecution set out to paint Adelaide Bartlett as a liar and a hussy. Her father-in-law repeated his assertions about her, saying that she had run off with Fred, and had only returned to her husband when Fred emigrated to America. He added that until the last month of his life, Bartlett had been in good health, contrary to his wife’s statements, and that they had lived together as man and wife. He also asserted that the signature on his son’s will was forged (despite the two witnesses testifying to watching Bartlett sign it), and displayed a letter written to him by his daughter-in-law, refusing him permission to visit his son without express invitation, adding, ‘understand that I have neither forgotten nor forgiven the past’. When he asked her to call in another doctor for a second opinion on her husband’s illness, she refused on the grounds of cost. Dyson, appearing as a prosecution witness, said that Mrs Bartlett had told him that her husband had an ‘internal complaint’ which she soothed with chloroform supplied by Annie Walker, Dr Nichols’ nurse, and that she had asked him to buy chloroform because Mrs Walker was in America. She also told him, he said, that Nichols had said Bartlett had at most a year to live. Nichols rebutted this: he had never seen either of the Bartletts, nor had he, therefore, made any diagnosis. Furthermore, Annie Walker said she had only looked after Mrs Bartlett after her pregnancy, had never bought chloroform for her, and had never gone to America. Dyson did, however, admit that Bartlett had spoken to him of his two-wife theory, and had told him he did not expect to live. The minister added bitterly that he had been ‘duped by a wicked woman’. The prosecution laid stress on the dubiousness of Mrs Bartlett’s statements on the celibacy of her marriage, presenting evidence that Bartlett had condoms in his possession (no one appears to have considered that they might have been for use elsewhere). The prosecutor also hammered away at the change to Bartlett’s will only months before he died. An earlier version had left everything to his wife on the condition that she did not remarry; the new one left her everything outright, and made Dyson Bartlett’s executor.

Clarke’s defence dealt with both the practical administration of chloroform, on the one hand, and the moral questions on the other. First he concentrated the jury’s minds on the fact that no one had ever before been intentionally poisoned by swallowing chloroform. Chloroform has a strong taste, a pungent smell, and it burns. It was implausible, therefore, that Bartlett could have drunk it unknowingly; as he was a strong man, it appeared impossible that his wife should have forced it upon him. The prosecution had suggested that Mrs Bartlett had administered it while Bartlett was unconscious, but there were no burn marks on his windpipe to indicate that she had done so, nor had he vomited, which was the normal reaction. An analyst from the Home Office deposed that he had three times tried to administer chloroform to an unconscious patient, and had managed to do so only once. In contrast to the failure of this skilled doctor, an unskilled woman had supposedly managed the feat with no trouble, perpetrating a crime ‘absolutely unknown in the history of medical jurisprudence’. Why, Clarke demanded, if she wanted to kill him, had she not simply let the unconscious man breathe in the drug until he overdosed? He also held up Dyson’s testimony about Annie Walker and Dr Nichols to ridicule: there was no evidence for any of it except the minister’s word, which was now as discredited as his reputation. Clarke’s second line of defence was to put the dead man on trial: his peculiar views on marriage, his complaisance relating to Dyson’s visits to his wife, his recourse to Nichols and his disgusting book. (Later in life Clarke outlined the case in his memoirs, and it is clear that he thought Mrs Bartlett was having an affair with Dyson. He noted that Dyson called her by her first name, kissed her when her husband was present, she visited his lodgings, and they went for walks together – all, apparently, infallible signs of immorality.)

If Adelaide Bartlett had killed her husband so she could be with her lover, she would have been a statistical anomaly. Of the forty-seven women accused of murder between 1828 and 1900, only three fall into this category (Sarah Dazley, Mary Ann Cotton (pp.387–94) and Hannah Southgate, the latter of whom was acquitted). Statistics show that men kill women for adultery, and not vice versa; men kill their wives’ lovers, and not vice versa. In Mrs Bartlett’s case, however, the jury took an hour to consider, returned to question a legal point, then conferred again. Finally, they pronounced cautiously: ‘Although we think there is the gravest suspicion attaching to the prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence to know how or by whom the chloroform was administered.’ The judge was forced to ask, ‘Then you say, gentlemen, that the prisoner is not guilty?’ and only then did the foreman formally declare, ‘Not guilty.’ The court erupted.
Lloyd’s
felt obliged to report that it was ‘one of the most disgraceful scenes ever witnessed in an English court of justice’, but nonetheless its reporter very obviously approved the spectators’ ‘Cheering, shouting, and clapping of hands …
on the bench a number of men excitedly waved their hats,
while shouts of “Bravo!” rang through the building …’

Bell’s
spelled out the reasons for its approval: ‘There is no hanging,’ it wrote, ‘on suspicion.’ Did Bartlett die of chloroform poisoning? ‘The medical evidence tends’ in that direction, but ‘by no means makes it certain’. Was Bartlett murdered? ‘There is not one item of evidence that he was; and we must remember that the prisoner is not called upon to prove that he was not; it is for the prosecution to establish the charge.’ Even if Bartlett had been poisoned, it continued, there was no evidence that Mrs Bartlett had done the deed.

A year later, a novella was published in
Beeton’s Christmas Magazine,
spelling out the public’s feelings towards medical experts and their unpleasant practices. In this story, a disabled army doctor is looking for someone to share the cost of lodgings. A friend takes him to meet an acquaintance who is in a similar position, but warns the doctor: the man ‘is a little too scientific for my tastes – it approaches to coldbloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness.’ Medical experts may be clever, was the popular feeling, but they do not share a common humanity, and are to be distrusted. (Although the public learned not only to trust but to love this particular medical expert: the disabled doctor was one John Watson, the inhuman scientific machine a certain Sherlock Holmes.)
John Bull
was in agreement with this distancing of medical experts from ‘us’, stressing that the experts at the trial had failed to understand the home life of a decent middle-class woman. If anything, it urged, the fact that Mrs Bartlett had been alone with her husband by his bed when he died proved she was innocent: it was ‘where she ought to be – watching at the bedside with a wifely devotion’. The evidence that confirmed to middle-class journalists that a middle-class woman was innocent was the very same evidence that had hanged so many working-class wives: she was alone with her husband when he died of poison.

It was less the did-she/didn’t-she aspect that attracted public interest; it was the details of the Bartlett-Dyson ménage. Even the
Lancet,
while claiming to be interested in the ‘physiological and medico-legal bearings’ of the case, in fact cosily circled around the Bartletts’ marriage, dwelling on the expected outcome of a relationship ‘When the principles of
Esoteric Anthropology
are made the guide’, a book ‘fit only to be burned by the public hangman’. A few pages on, an article on ‘Feminine Pruriency’ brought the medical mind to bear on the ‘vice’ of women attending trials.

All the newspapers (and the judge, who made ‘strong remarks’ on the subject) were shocked that nearly two-thirds of the trial spectators were women. This was a long-running complaint (although it is noticeable that these same newspapers did not object to female readers buying their papers). ‘Feminine Pruriency’ stated that it was the presence of women that had ‘reduced’ the court ‘to the level of a place of public entertainment of the lowest description. Why were extra seats provided, or, being provided, why were they allowed to be occupied by women?’
Bell’s
did not see the presence of women as the factor that turned a courtroom into theatre, but it had no doubt, however, that it was a theatre all the same: ‘The most successful dramatic entertainment during the past week has been the Bartlett trial. At every representation of this sensational drama the theatre – I beg pardon, the court – has been crowded to the doors. The play was very fascinating. but. the tone was morbid, and the dialogue often of a very indecent kind. I think I may venture to assert that had the piece been submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. it would have been suppressed.’ If crime had become theatre, theatre now acknowledged crime. Clarke attended the Lyceum on the night of Mrs Bartlett’s acquittal, and was given a standing ovation by the audience. And it would only be another decade before that type of accolade was given to a fictional detective. After Holmes unravels one mystery, Dr Watson and Inspector Lestrade ‘with a spontaneous impulse. both broke out clapping as at the well-wrought crisis of a play … [Holmes] bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience.’

A sixteen-page penny publication, The Life of the Reverend George Dyson and his Strange Adventures with Mrs. Bartlett, even had section
titles that mimicked the playbill descriptions: ‘The Actors’, ‘The Wife’s Tutor’, ‘Gave His Wife Away!’ The tone is one of genial amusement, and there are two morals: ‘Dangerous Drugs Should be Used Only by Doctors’, as they were too tempting in an unhappy home; and ‘Marriage is All a Lottery … for every one prize there are a thousand blanks.’
*
Don’t, the author urged, neglect your wife, ‘And above all, don’t leave her to take Latin lessons from a younger, better educated, and more handsome man than yourself.’ Good advice, surely.

Other publications were crueller, yet always with the tone of comedy that prevailed across the Bartlett saga. During the trial, Dyson, poor man, was revealed to have written verse to Mrs Bartlett:

Wits quickly supplied additional verses: ‘Who is it my poor heart disturbs/With chloroform and Latin verbs?’

As Madeleine Smith’s case had generated a rash of fiction, so too did Adelaide Bartlett’s.
Tempest-Driven,
a three-volume novel by the Irishman Richard Dowling, appeared first. Dowling usually wrote tales of Irish peasants, and was used to working fast – between 1879 and 1884 he had produced nine novels.
Tempest-Driven
opens with a wife in an otherwise deserted house who calls to a passing stranger when her husband dies after inhaling chloroform, which she says he used to help his asthma. The stranger, who is most conveniently a doctor, immediately thinks, ‘I hope this is not a case of foul play.’ Mrs Bartlett’s distrustful father-in-law is here a brother-in-law, there is the lover in the wings, and a deceased husband with peculiar ideas. The wife is not prosecuted because at the post-mortem the dead man is found to have swallowed a suicide note,
*
and his wife conveniently goes mad.

Three years later,
The Fatal Phryne,
by F.C. Philips and C.J. Wills, tells a similarly Bartlett-ish story. An older man marries a young wife in an arranged marriage in Paris. He seems to condone his wife’s liaison with a younger, more attractive man, although as it turns out he is secretly ferociously jealous, and administers one of those fictionally common poisons that does not kill, but destroys the younger man’s appearance. The husband then discovers that his wife has been true to him all along, and dies, apparently of mortification, mouthing the word ‘Forgive.’

Neither of these books was interested in the question of how the chloroform had been administered, the mystery that has preoccupied most commentators ever since. It was the peculiar private life that they rehearsed; science would have to wait.