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

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      And here I am, palls, merry and free,

      A regular rollocking Romany.

      Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

      In 1835 Rookwood was adapted for Astley’s Amphitheatre, which specialized in staging hippodramas – spectaculars with vast numbers of horses, riders and extras. It was retitled Turpin’s Ride to York and the Death of Black Bess, taking the element that people had enjoyed the most. (It is notable, two years after Cold Bath Field, that Black Bess no longer dies of exhaustion after her epic journey, but is shot by the wicked Bow Street Runners.)

The success of Rookwood, both onstage and as fiction, led to even more novels in which criminals were glamorized, with Ainsworth’s next book revolving entirely around a historical criminal: the eighteenth-century thief and gaol-breaker Jack Sheppard. Serialization began in Bentley’s Miscellany just as another story in that magazine, also about a boy-criminal, also illustrated by Cruikshank, was ending, and for four episodes they overlapped, so it was natural to think of them together. The second tale was Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. Today it is surprising to think of Oliver Twist as a crime novel, but stripped down to its bare bones, the plot is very similar to Bulwer’s Paul Clifford: the orphan who is, unknown to himself, from a ‘good’ family but is left to be raised by criminals. Similarly, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard is the story of an apprentice who becomes a thief, with a parallel story of a good apprentice cheated out of his inheritance by an evil relative; Oliver Twist is an apprentice who has ostensibly gone bad by joining Fagin’s gang, while he is unlawfully kept from his inheritance by his evil half-brother. (The name ‘Twist’ in the title would also have tipped off contemporary readers that this was a book about crime and criminals: ‘to twist’ was underworld slang for ‘to hang’.)* These books were classed together as ‘Newgate novels’, connecting the stories both to the Newgate Calendar and also to the gaol from which Sheppard himself so famously escaped.

      Some critics left Dickens out of their discussions of Newgate novels, which were condemned for portraying criminals sympathetically. As the Edinburgh Review summed up, Dickens ‘never endeavours to mislead our sympathies – to pervert plain notions of right and wrong – to make vice interesting in our eyes. We find no. creatures blending with their crimes the most incongruous and romantic virtues.’ This praise of Dickens was, very obviously, also a poke at Bulwer. Punch magazine, too, condemned Newgate fiction in its drawing of ‘The Literary Gentleman’ surrounded by thoughts of ‘Murder’, ‘Gallows heroism’, ‘Burglary’ and ‘Robbery’. On his desk is a dagger, a gallows, a broadside printed with a ‘Dying Speech’, a copy of the Newgate Calendar and another of the Annals of Crime. The verse that follows mocks:

      … you, great scribe, more greedy of renown,

      From Hounslow’s gibbet drag a hero down.

      Embue his mind with virtue; make him quote

Some moral truth, before he cuts a throat.*

      Bulwer was a punchbag for everyone. For now Eugene Aram’s name – even without reference to Bulwer – was being used for anything, even a toothache cure. This advertisement appeared regularly in both the London and the provincial papers, making a segue from a murderer to a patent medicine seem bizarrely normal:

      EUGENE ARAM. – It will be in the recollection of most of our readers that after the murder of Daniel Clarke, Eugene Aram resided many years at Lynn, in Norfolk, in fancied security and seclusion. – Sweeting’s Tooth Ache Elixir has also found its way to the same place. In the advertisement in another part of this paper respecting this deservingly popular medicine, will be found a letter from the agent at Lynn, from which we may conclude that while it is giving peace and ease from pain to many, yet (like Eugene Aram), it will not be allowed any rest for itself.

To dissociate himself from this type of thing, in 1840 Bulwer produced a second edition of Eugene Aram, with numerous changes, blandly assuring his readers that ‘the legal evidence against [Aram] is very deficient’. The most important alteration was that Aram was no longer a murderer, but had simply fretted himself to a shadow for fourteen years over a murder committed by another man, Bulwer’s response to the fear that, as with Thurtell and Turpin, Newgate novels would lead the young to emulate their heroes. This was of even more concern with stage versions, which had larger audiences than the printed word. Oliver Twist’s huge popularity – there were six stage adaptations in London even before the end of the book was serialized, and the Surrey alone claimed that 300,000 people had seen its production in its first year – meant that most people’s ideas of the story were based not on the novel, but on stage versions speedily mounted in small theatres. From 1839 to 1859 there were at least sixteen productions of Jack Sheppard,*and a dozen of Oliver Twist. Eugene Aram was not particularly popular in London, but was a perennial favourite outside the capital: at least thirty productions appeared in those two decades. Plays that were performed by fairground companies, fit-up companies and booth theatres (travelling companies that carried their own stages with them) have little recorded history, but they were what most people saw. Today we can only record their existence from rare survivals (like the Maria Marten marionettes), or from moments when the theatre companies met the authorities, as when in 1857 the Leeds Mercury reported that in Great Horton, outside Bradford, the owner of a booth theatre had been charged with performing Eugene Aram without a licence.

      There were probably many dozens of productions like this, and in 1859 the Lord Chamberlain decided that enough was enough. Jack Sheppard was considered to be the worst offender: Oliver Twist, after all, featured a middle-class child who didn’t want to be a thief, while Eugene Aram was a gentrified, remorseful murderer. Sheppard was working-class and repeatedly escaped from gaol, thumbing his nose at authority. All stage productions of Jack Sheppard were therefore banned, apart from the one that had first been licensed. Not coincidentally, this version had originated in the West End, where the respectable middle-class audience could be counted on not to take away an inappropriately immoral lesson. Yet the Oliver Twist productions, at least the non-West End versions, perhaps did not have the moral content the Lord Chamberlain assumed. The manager of the Gaiety Theatre remembered seeing Oliver Twist at the Victoria in the 1840s: ‘Nancy was always dragged round the stage by her hair, and after this effort Sikes always looked up defiantly at the gallery. He was always answered by one loud and fearful curse, yelled by the whole mass. Finally when Sikes, working up to a well-rehearsed climax, smeared Nancy with red-ochre, and taking her by the hair (a most powerful wig) seemed to dash her brains out on the stage. A thousand enraged voices, which sounded like ten thousand. filled the theatre.’

      It was commonly assumed that different audiences would take different messages from the entertainment, depending on their class background. The middle classes were almost unanimous in condemning working-class penny-bloods. Punch reflected the middle-class viewpoint in the cartoon overleaf (the ‘likeness’ in the caption is a portrait of the murderer). The Derby Mercury claimed that there were ‘one hundred distinct publications’ with titles like Dick Turpin, The Bold Smuggler, Jack Sheppard, Claud Duval, or, The Dashing Highwayman, which contained ‘every variety of tale of vice, murder, and obscenity’. In 1846 the Leeds Mercury reported that a druggist and his wife had been found ‘insensible and frothing at the mouth’, and shortly died of opium poisoning. At the inquest, the woman’s mother reported that the previous night the druggist had been reading Eugene Aram aloud. It was clear from the report that the couple drank heavily and were in debt, but it was Eugene Aram that was highlighted – reading about crime was a sign of bad character in the working classes. In 1870, one middle-class journalist СКАЧАТЬ