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

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СКАЧАТЬ and Reading Room in Queen Street, Portsea, in which it ‘earnestly requested that their subscribers who have [borrowed] the first volumes … of Eugene Aram … will return them forthwith. as detaining them so long prevents that accomodation [sic] which they wish should be received by all’.

Others rushed to elaborate the subject. Although he would have been disgusted to have his work categorized as fiction, there is nowhere else to put Norrisson Scatcherd’s highly coloured Memoirs of the Celebrated Eugene Aram … Scatcherd, a barrister who devoted his life to antiquarian and local-history research, claimed to have become interested in Aram in 1792, when he was about twelve, on a visit to Harrogate, and he says it was then that he began to interview locals who had known Aram thirty-three years before. In his version, Aram was ‘modest’, ‘amiable’, ‘beloved and admired’. His wife, however, was ‘a low, mean, vulgar woman, of extremely doubtful character’, who was unfaithful, and thus Aram’s doubts of their children’s paternity made it perfectly natural that he should be ‘disposed. to neglect them’. According to Scatcherd, Clark was Mrs Aram’s lover, and in addition he and Houseman were planning to rob and kill a pedlar boy. Aram helped Clark dishonestly order plate and goods, but only because he was ‘wretchedly poor, having a family to support’. The three men went to St Robert’s Cave, but it was obvious to Scatcherd that it was Houseman who murdered Clark, because Aram was ‘a man of moral habits, delicate health, prepossessing countenance, slender form,* and unassuming deportment’.

Scatcherd’s account was well-received. A review in the Leeds Mercury said he had ‘corrected some important errors’, and Aram could now be seen as an ‘amiable and accomplished murderer’. There appears to be no irony intended in that phrase: the newspaper repeated Scatcherd’s views on the justice of the killing owing to Mrs Aram’s infidelity, and implied that as both Clark and Houseman were robbers and murderers themselves, the killing of Clark was really not so very terrible. As late as 1870, Scatcherd was still commended for having ‘done much to … rescue’ Aram’s name; the murderer was now merely ‘imprudent’ for having ‘associat[ed] himself with persons beneath his own standing’. In the Daily News in 1856, the Metropolitan Board of Works considered the possibility of renaming some London streets to avoid multiple streets with the same names, and some alternatives are suggested: Ainsworth, Keats, Southey and Bulwer are among them, as are Richard Mayne (the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police) and Eugene Aram.†

The great success of these accounts of Aram’s case brought theatrical adaptations in their wake. W.T. Moncrieff’s version opened at the Surrey in February 1832; within a month it was advertising additional performances, ‘Owing to the complete overflows’. Soon the Royal Pavilion and Sadler’s Wells had their own versions, with another at the Royal Grecian by the end of the year. There were also productions in Edinburgh, Wakefield and Sheffield. The Surrey version continued the Bulwer/Scatcherd trend of turning Aram into an anguished, noble and excessively learned murderer: he ‘perfected himself in … Hesiod, Homer, Theocritus, Herodotus, Thucydides’ before he ‘began to study Hebrew’, not to mention ‘the Chaldee and Arabic’ and ‘Celtic. through all its dialects’. He is introduced to the audience as ‘Master Aram, the great scholar’, while Houseman is ‘guilty-like’, and so repellent that all who see him ‘turn aside – as from a thing infect [sic]’. Aram confesses that ‘poverty and pride’ had led him to commit the crime: ‘I yearned for knowledge but had no means to feed that glorious yearning.’ Madeline dies of grief at his feet, promising to wait for him in heaven, and Aram then kills himself, as ‘I have been no common criminal; – Eugene Aram renders to the scaffold! his – lifeless body – pardon – pity – all.’ This was an authorized adaptation of Bulwer’s novel, and he himself attended the first night.* The New Monthly Magazine highly recommended the production, although by an astonishing coincidence the editor of this magazine was one E.L. Bulwer, author of Eugene Aram.

      Two years after these theatre adaptations, the young novelist Harrison Ainsworth published Rookwood, which was very much the love child of Eugene Aram and Paul Clifford crossed with gothic tales, and this led the way to a new kind of fictional criminal-hero. Ainsworth was not concerned, as Bulwer claimed to be, with examining the motivation of criminals, and society’s responsibilities. He was not even terribly concerned with facts: it was in Rookwood that Dick Turpin first made his epic ride from London to York on Black Bess, although the historical Turpin had only ridden as far as Lincolnshire – a sixty-mile trip instead of two hundred. Ainsworth wanted to entertain, and his highwaymen are debonair and dashing, usually men of rank cheated out of their birthrights. As Ainsworth’s Turpin says, ‘It is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman, as it is for a doctor to have his diploma, or an attorney his certificate.’

      Turpin, hanged in 1739 for horse-stealing, had from about 1800 been turned into popular entertainment in coarse and inexpensive chapbooks, and in 1818 in an onstage incarnation, as Richard Turpin, The Highwayman. By 1823 his name was already a byword for a dashing, brave criminal. Thurtell had boasted to his brother, ‘We are Turpin-like lads, and have done the trick.’ From the 1830s penny-bloods returned again and again to his story. One of the most popular was Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, which appeared in 254 numbers over five years: Turpin was not executed until page 2,207. Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, Eugene Aram and others made up the subjects for series like Purkess’s Library of Romance and Purkess’s Penny Plays. These publications were so popular, the police complained, that vagrant boys spent their leisure time playing cards and dominoes and reading Jack Sheppard and Oliver Twist ‘and publications of that kind’, the implication being that this reading material would in and of itself lead to crime.

      Rookwood was filled with songs – twenty-three in the first edition, and more later. Ainsworth may have been thinking of theatrical adaptations from the first: they certainly followed quickly, and nearly every one of them included the song he had written in ‘flash’, or thieves’ slang, which ‘travelled everywhere. It deafened us in the streets, where it was. popular with the organ-grinders and German bands … it was whistled by every dirty guttersnipe, and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips.’

      In the box of the Stone Jug [prison] I was born

      Of a hempen widow [my father was hanged] the kid forlorn.

      Fake away [Go on, steal].

      My noble father as I’ve heard say

      Was a famous merchant of capers gay.

      Nix my dolly, palls [Nothing, friends], fake away.

      The knucks in quod [thieves in prison] did my school-men play

      And put me up to the time of day.

      Fake away.

      No dummy hunter had forks so fly [pickpocket had fingers so nimble]

      No knuckler so deftly could fake a cly [pick a pocket]

      Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

      But my nuttiest lady one fine day

      To the beaks did her gentleman betray.

      Fake away.

      And thus was I bowled out at last,

      And into the Jug for a lag was cast [and was sent to prison].

      Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

      But I slipp’d my darbies [fetters] one morn in May

      And СКАЧАТЬ