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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Later accounts claimed that Houseman was found not guilty, but in fact the prosecution against him was withdrawn in order for him to testify against Aram.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.* 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.* 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 СКАЧАТЬ