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

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СКАЧАТЬ time pretending to be their own cousins or uncles or valets. In 1826 Drury Lane’s The Murder’d Guest had a very Jonathan Bradford-like set-up, with an Oxfordshire inn, a guest who arrives with his servant and is put in a room next to two strangers, and a murderer who is preempted. This was followed in 1830 by The Murderers of the Round Tower Inn, a ‘Nautical Drama’ at the Royal West London Theatre. It too had a Bradford-like innkeeper, whose stepdaughter innocently wonders, ‘What can be the reason of his always sending me to bed so early, whenever Travellers sleep in the house?’ ‘Dreadful groans and noises in the night’, combined with the travellers’ complete absence in the morning, fail to enlighten her.

It was in 1833 that the story of Jonathan Bradford finally found fame, when David Osbaldiston, the manager of the Surrey Theatre, turned to Edward Fitzball for a new work. Many years later, Fitzball claimed that a theatre manager had once advised him: ‘Look into the papers’ for a subject; the daily crime-sheets had ‘incident enough invented there’. This was standard procedure for many dramatists. For most of the century, playwrights barely scratched out a living, while churning out vast quantities of work. For authors, drama did not pay. A century earlier, Dr Johnson had received nearly £300 for the performing and publishing rights for a play that ran nine nights. By 1829 Douglas Jerrold was paid £5 a week as house author at the Surrey, and was expected to write at least one play a month; George Dibdin Pitt, the man who brought Sweeney Todd and his murderous barber-chair to the stage in 1841, produced twenty-six plays in 1847 alone. Dickens claimed that W.T. Moncrieff had written seven melodramas for £5 each.*

In terms of content, the result, Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Roadside Inn, was not much different from earlier evilinnkeeper melodramas. Fitzball definitely knew Mrs Opie’s story, because two years earlier he had adapted another story from the same collection. He also used some standard elements from stage and penny-bloods: there was an underground crypt borrowed from gothic romance, a devil-may-care Irish highwayman and a comic Cockney apprentice. The key to the play’s extraordinary success was the completely novel staging devised by Fitzball. He set the four rooms of the inn all onstage at once, in cross-section, and wrote the murder scene so that the action took place simultaneously across them. Or, as one advertisement had it, ‘In this peculiar scene an effort will be made (never yet attempted on any stage) so to harmonize four actions as to produce one striking effect! Fitzball later remembered how the mutinous actors petitioned Osbaldiston ‘to insist on my leaving out this perplexing, unexampled, undramatic, unactable four-roomed scene’. Osbaldiston too was unenthusiastic, but finally agreed to let Fitzball make the attempt. On the opening night, ‘the audience looked at each other exactly in the same fashion as the actors had done’. But then, ‘as if convinced, on reflection, that there was something original to applaud. they took the lenient side, and applauded unanimously’*.

The play was a smash. Its hundredth performance, or ‘centenary’, got a notice in The Times.† Ultimately the play closed in December, after a run of 161 consecutive performances (excluding Sundays). It was the first play ever to achieve this, and the record that was held for over two decades. Smaller populations had produced a repertorybased system reliant on the repeated attendance of the same people, rather than the infrequent attendance of different ones. In the 1840s, only four plays ran in London for more than a hundred nights and they were not consecutive. Short runs in 1833 did not necessarily signify failure, only the small theatregoing population. Jonathan Bradford was staged in Dublin in November and, at least according to the advertisements, was received with ‘rapturous and unbounded applause’, but it only appears to have had three performances. The play was revived over and over again – advertisements for different versions continued to appear as late as the 1880s.

      Within months of the London opening, there were productions across the country – Edinburgh, Oxford, Liverpool, Ipswich, Dublin and Belfast newspapers all carried advertisements, although only the Hampshire Telegraph mentioned the novel staging, the original selling point. Instead, many theatres interpolated local speciality acts. In Portsmouth, audiences were promised ‘a Parody on the popular Song of “The Sea, the Sea, the open Sea”,’ as well as the appearance of Miss Parker to sing ‘A Kind Old Man Came Wooing’.

      By 1839, the novelty staging was used in other plays. A production of Jack Sheppard at Sadler’s Wells had a similar compartment set to show Sheppard’s escape from Newgate: ‘Four Cells, two above and two below … doors, leading from one cell to the other – a fire-place at the back’. As the audience watches, Sheppard frees himself from his fetters, scrapes away at the brickwork until he can wrench out the bar blocking the chimney flue, which he then climbs into and vanishes from sight. In a moment, a hole opens in the cell above, and Sheppard appears once more. He then breaks down the cell door and vanishes through it, to reappear above, on the flat roof of the prison. This was very obviously of enormous drama, for at that moment, instead of escaping, Sheppard says, ‘Ah! my blanket! I had forgotten it,’ and makes the entire trip in reverse: through the two cells, down the hole in the chimney and back into the condemned cell. He collects his blanket, and the audience watches as he makes the trip a third time. On the roof he then tears up the blanket and is finally seen through the cell window abseiling down the side of the gaol.

Given Fitzball’s triumphant success, it is a surprise to see almost no subsequent fiction based on Bradford’s story. The only adaptations of any repute are three versions all by Sheridan Le Fanu, the Irish novelist and ghost-story writer.* He approached it first in 1848, in ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston’, then again three years later in The Evil Guest. A third version, A Lost Name, appeared in 1868. All were variants on the same story: a man of bad character is found dead at a friend’s house. A faithful servant is suspected (and in one of these versions confesses), but it was the friend who killed him, after which the servant came into the room to find him dead, as in Bradford. When a memory of the penny-blood version cropped up in Dickens’ ‘The Holly Tree Inn’ (1855), it was as ‘a sixpenny book with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four incidents of the tragedy’. What had lingered in Dickens’ memory was the staging.

      Instead, it was the penny publications that picked up the story, following the stage version closely, rather than inventing facts or characters to beef up the eighteenth-century story on their own. The real crime had by now been almost entirely forgotten. In the 1850s, in publishers’ lists of penny-bloods, Jonathan Bradford appeared together with fictional titles like The Poisoner, or, The Perils of Matrimony. Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Road-side Inn. A Romance of Thrilling Interest was published in eighteen parts, attributed to ‘the author of “The Hebrew Maiden”, “The Wife’s Secret”, &c. &c.’, who is thought to be Thomas Peckett Prest, a prolific penny-writer who had had a hand in the original version of Sweeney Todd. This was very much a story aimed at the working classes, in that throughout it is the petty bourgeoisie who thwart the good honest working people. An unpleasant, officious lawyer casts suspicion on all the good characters, while Dan Macraisy, the highwayman, although condemned in somewhat perfunctory fashion for being a murderer, offers the justification that ‘perhaps if this Mr. Hayes had not gone about with so much gold in his pocket, he might have been alive at this moment’. It was the victim’s fault for being rich while others were poor.

      And finally, Jonathan Bradford cropped up regularly in police reports when penny-gaffs were raided, or booth-theatre proprietors were prosecuted for performing without a licence. Household Words also published a reminiscence of childhood ½d. peepshows, describing a showman who carried a box on his back. ‘The interior was lighted up with a candle in the middle of the day, and the different highly-coloured tableaux were let down with a heavy flop by strings at the side. wonderful atmospheric effects were introduced at the back, by lifting a lid, and the СКАЧАТЬ