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

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       THREE Entertaining Murder

      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 СКАЧАТЬ