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

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СКАЧАТЬ Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society’.*A Social Reform Society’s weekly entertainment included a reading of Hood’s ballad. The poem was regarded by some as a bit suspect, though, smacking too much of theatre, and too little of moral uplift. The Revd J.C.M. Bellew was condemned by the Birmingham Post for performing it too dramatically: ‘A less demonstrative reading would have been. more suitable.’ Others disagreed:‘Penny Readings for the People’ at Mechanics’ Institutes frequently included the poem.

      There were also professional performances of the work. In 1858 ‘Mr Walter Montgomery’ appeared at the Music Hall, Broad Street, Birmingham. On the first night he recited ‘from Memory, the whole of SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDY OF “MACBETH”, ASSISTED BY AN EFFICIENT CHOIR’. The next night too was devoted to ‘the BEAUTIES of SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER CELEBRATED AUTHORS’, including ‘Little Jim: a Tale of the Collieries (by desire)’, Poe’s ‘The Raven’, and Hood’s ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. Hood seemed not to work in music hall: I have found only one reference to a performance, and the review says the choice was ‘very injudicious’, being ‘long’ and ‘heavy … altogether out of place’. For those who wanted theatre, but could not attend because of religious or moral scruples, Aram was available elsewhere. The Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street staged one-man entertainments from 1850, and in 1873, when a new theatrical adaptation of Eugene Aram opened at the Lyceum with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the Era reviewed the Gallery’s last night of the season, which included ‘a new drama, performed for the first time on any stage, entitled Impeached, written apparently [‘apparently’ is wonderful] in blank verse, and in artistic style, by Miss H.L. Walford, who takes for her plot the leading incidents of Eugene Aram’.

Ultimately Henry Irving took over as the supreme reciter of Hood’s poem. At a time when it was still the norm to have two plays on the bill every evening, he performed it in the break between the two; he also frequently performed it separately in mixed programmes. He also had years of success in The Bells, an adaptation of a French play called Le Juif polonais, in which he played a burgomaster who, fifteen years before, had robbed and murdered a man. This long-undiscovered secret is threatened by his guilty conscience, which transforms some passing sleigh-bells into those on the murdered man’s sleigh. Shrieking, ‘The bells! The bells!’ he falls into a fit, is later hypnotized and betrays himself. To follow this success, in 1873 the playwright W.G. Wills took the story of Aram, as glamorized by Bulwer, and turned it into classy West End fare by removing the melodrama: there is no trial, no criminal awaiting execution; Aram is not only not executed, he doesn’t even kill himself. Instead, he just somehow dies, romantically, in a moonlit churchyard in his fiancée’s arms. Perhaps, mocked the Saturday Review critic, ‘he caught cold by sleeping in a damp churchyard’.* By the 1890s, Irving was reciting Hood’s verses with ‘Dr. Mackenzie’s incidental music’. (Alexander Campbell Mackenzie was the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, as well as a conductor and composer.) In 1896, Granville Bantock wrote a four-act opera based on Bulwer’s novel.

Opera was the logical culmination of music and melodrama. Initially, music had been essential to melodrama, as licensing laws barred spoken dialogue in the minor theatres. After speech was reintroduced, music continued to play a major part, not only in the form of songs, but to underscore the emotions of the characters. Every theatre orchestra had its own ‘agits’ (that is, agitatos, music indicating fear or distress), ‘slows’ (slow music for grave moments), ‘hurries’, ‘pathetics’, ‘struggles’ and more. As late as 1912, the catalogue of Samuel French, the theatrical publisher, listed: ‘Incidental Music Suitable for Lively Rise of Curtain, Entrance of Characters, &c., Hurry, Combat, Apparitions, Pathetic Situations, Martial, &c.’ The critic Percy Fitzgerald, who had been one of Irving’s assistants, noted that at transpontine theatres, ‘what so natural as that when smugglers, or robbers, or captives trying to make their escape should, when moving lightly on tiptoe past the unnatural tyrant’s chamber, be kept in time by certain disjointed and jerking music?’†

      As late as 1890, Aram was still attracting novelists. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (author of one of the first sensation-novels, Lady Audley’s Secret, pp.296–7), now with nearly sixty novels to her name, and an invalid husband to support, produced One Life, One Love. In it she repeats the long-hidden-murder motif, enmeshed in a story of the Paris Commune, double-identity, heroines regularly going mad and a plot so confusing that there is no real resolution, because, I strongly suspect, the author could not quite work out what had happened, and understandably did not want to read it over again. The Aram theme was briefly touched on in 1894, in Catherine Louise Pirkis’s ‘The Murder at Troyte’s Hill’, in which a lodgekeeper is murdered after decades of blackmail, and the case is solved by the lady detective Loveday Brooke. The murderer is writing a treatise on Aram’s legendary subject, philology, ‘a stupendous work. a work that will leave its impress upon thought in all the ages to come’ (for more on this story, see p.402).

      And then there was a final, extraordinarily derivative theatrical version. After All (1895) was written by Freeman C. Wills, W.G. Wills’ brother. Aram was played by Martin Harvey (later Sir John MartinHarvey), who had worked for Irving for fourteen years, and Ruth (the Madeline character) by Mabel Terry-Lewis, Ellen Terry’s niece. It had, remarkably, a happy ending: Houseman denounces Aram, Aram defends himself, and Walter in a gentlemanly way accepts his apology. It is not surprising that no one chose to follow this.

      The constant renewal of Aram’s story contrasts sharply with another eighteenth-century murder case that also achieved a blaze of interest in the nineteenth century, but as quickly sputtered out. In 1739, a Mr Hayes stopped at Jonathan Bradford’s Oxfordshire inn. In conversation Hayes disclosed that he was carrying a great deal of money, and, two guests overhearing this, a robbery was planned. That night the two men entered his room, only to find Hayes dead and Bradford standing over the body, bloody knife in hand. Bradford’s defence was that he had gone in to rob his guest, but had found him already dead, and had just picked up the knife that was lying beside the corpse when the two men discovered him. This unlikely story was given short shrift at his trial, and Bradford was found guilty and hanged. Eighteen months later, so the story goes, Mr Hayes’ servant confessed on his deathbed: he had murdered and robbed his master, and Bradford had appeared just as he fled. There is little contemporary material to allow a balanced assessment of the case, but four inhabitants of an inn all set on robbery on the same night sounds more like art than life.

      Kirby’s Wonderful Magazine, a hodgepodge miscellany which reprinted the story in 1804, felt it needed an injection of realism, so it made the two guests enter the room because they heard a noise, not because they too were planning robbery. Several newspapers picked up the story, although with no great sense of urgency – the Ipswich Journal ran it two years later, mixed in with paragraphs on the slave trade and on the reported death of the explorer Mungo Park, and a report that a pointer had had a litter of seventeen pups.

      The novelist Amelia Opie used the basic scenario for a short story in 1818. In ‘Henry Woodville’, Woodville is a clerk to a prosperous merchant. At an inn he and David Bradford, an ex-colleague who had been sacked for dissipation, quarrel. That night the inn’s waiter robs and murders Bradford, knowing that Woodville will be suspected because of the quarrel. Woodville is found guilty, but as he is about to be executed the waiter, now repentant and dying, appears at the foot of the scaffold to assure the crowd, ‘I – I murdered Bradford! – I am the real murderer!’ before collapsing. There were no detective, suspense or procedural motifs in this version – none of the elements that, half a century later, would be the main purpose of any similar tale.

      It was perhaps the still undeveloped nature of detective fiction that made Bradford of more interest to theatre. There was a token nod in 1811 in Killing No Murder, by Thomas Hook. One of the characters is named Bradford, the play is set in an inn, and another character СКАЧАТЬ