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

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      The most lasting, and most important, contribution of the Jonathan Bradford story was to extend our ways of seeing. In 1852, the playwright Dion Boucicault adapted a French play as The Corsican Brothers. Originally it had been a very ordinary melodrama of a murdered man and his brother’s revenge. Two elements, both descendants of Fitzball’s Jonathan Bradford, lifted the piece out of basic genre and made audiences see anew. Acts I and II of the play were to be understood to occur simultaneously, seen from the perspective of each brother; furthermore, at the end of Act I, the actions that would take place at the climax of Act II were, with the aid of new stage technology, played out at the back of the stage as a ghostly pre-vision.

      In 1858 the idea of simultaneity of view was taken further by the painter Augustus Egg. His Past and Present triptych is a morality tale, set, like a theatrical melodrama, in a middle-class home. And, like Jonathan Bradford, it shows in its tripartite structure actions that take place in different – and simultaneous – times. The centre panel shows the moment a wife’s adulterous liaison has been discovered by her husband. Egg’s depiction could be a tableau from any melodrama, with the husband holding the telltale letter, the woman in a swoon at his feet. (Over his shoulder is a painting of a shipwreck by Clarkson Stanfield, a noted set designer, tying the story even more tightly to the theatre.) It is the outer wings of the triptych, however, that make the work so innovative. Both are set some time after the central scene. On the left, the adulterous woman, reduced to destitution, sits under the arches by the river, contemplating suicide as she gazes at the moon. On the right, her two soon-to-be-motherless children are alone in their attic room, also staring at the moon, which is covered with the identical cloud formation that the mother is staring at, indicating that the two panels are depicting the identical moment in time. As both the children and their mother face inwards, to the central panel, Egg also conveys that they are, simultaneously, all thinking of that day when their world collapsed.

      By 1871, The Book of Remarkable Trials gave only one page to Bradford (Jack Sheppard had twenty, Eugene Aram seventeen), and the author excused the scanty coverage: ‘The details of this case reach us in a very abridged form; and we have been unable to collect any information on which any reliance can be placed.’ The next murderer, John Scanlan, was even more completely subsumed into his dramatic doppelganger.

      Dion Boucicault had had a huge success with The Corsican Brothers in 1852, that play of double identities and duels, revenge and apparitions, with a famous double role for the actor-manager Charles Kean. But the two men quarrelled, and Boucicault and his actress wife went to New York, where in 1860 he wrote and they both starred in The Colleen Bawn. In triumph, they returned to London, to produce an amazing ten-month run of the play at the Adelphi Theatre.

      The Colleen Bawn tells the story of Hardress Cregan, a young Irish squire who is smitten by the beautiful but poor Eily O’Connor, the ‘Colleen Bawn’, or fair maid (played by Agnes Robertson, Mrs Boucicault). In the face of her purity and goodness, Cregan is unable to seduce her, and agrees to marry her. His mother, meanwhile, is being wooed by the evil Squire Corrigan. When she repudiates him (‘Contemptible hound, I loathe and despise you!’), he threatens to foreclose on her mortgage. She sees a way out of her money troubles by marrying Hardress to Anne Chute, the daughter of the local landowner; Anne, however, loves Cregan’s college friend Kyrle Daly. Hardress is now regretting his marriage: Eily speaks in dialect, is poor, and has ‘low’ friends, including Myles-na-Coppaleen (played by Boucicault), once a horse dealer, but now, brought down by unrequited love for the Colleen Bawn, a smuggler and poacher. The crippled Danny Mann, Hardress’ loyal servant, tells him: ‘do by Eily as wid the glove there on yer hand … if it fits too tight, take the knife to it … Only gi’ me the word, an’ I’ll engage that the Colleen Bawn will never throuble ye any more.’ Hardress is shocked, but Mrs Cregan overhears and tells Danny that Hardress has agreed to Eily’s death. Danny takes Eily out in his boat at night, and tries to get the marriage licence from her, but she refuses. ‘Then you’ve lived too long. Take your marriage lines wid ye to the bottom of the lake.’ He tosses her overboard and rows off. Myles, who is out checking on his illegal still, shoots wildly at Danny, before dramatically leaping from the cliff to rescue Eily. In the last act, Danny thinks Eily is dead, and confesses all to Father Tom. Meanwhile, Hardress has agreed to marry Anne, but on their wedding day Corrigan, who overheard Danny’s confession, arrives to arrest him for murder. In the nick of time, Myles appears with Eily. Mrs Cregan asks forgiveness, and Hardress, transformed by this trauma, swears eternal love for the Colleen Bawn. Anne and Kyrle Daly find each other, Corrigan is thrown in the horsepond, Myles is acclaimed a hero and everyone is happy in time for the final curtain.

It is hard to know quite what made The Colleen Bawn such a smash. Partly, it was its Irishry, which made the characters foreign but not too foreign; The Times noted with approval that the rogue Myles-na-Coppaleen was a ‘plebeian Irishman of scampish propensities, who alternates native shrewdness and pathos after a fashion familiar’. Partly it was the balance of melodrama and comedy. And mostly, as with Jonathan Bradford, it was the sensational staging. The attempted drowning of Eily, with Myles’ dramatic leap, routinely stopped the show. It is not entirely clear how this was done: the lake was blue gauze, manipulated by twenty boys standing in the wings, through which the drowning Eily dropped into an open trapdoor. Boucicault’s leap from the cliff, routinely described as a ‘header’, was probably carefully aimed between the gauzes at an open trap lined with a mattress or padding, onto which he would somersault. However it was done, it was thrilling enough that the Boucicaults had to stop and take a bow each night before proceeding.*

      Only infrequently had theatres been sites of subsidiary commercial activities: at performances of Jack Sheppard handcuffs for children, and bags holding ‘a few pick-locks. a screw driver, and iron lever’ were offered for sale; The Woman in White, the staging of Wilkie Collins’ 1859–60 novel, had produced Woman in White bonnets and Woman in White perfume. But it was The Colleen Bawn that developed the commercial merchandising opportunity. Sheet music had been sold in conjunction with popular shows before, but this was something else again. In 1861 alone Mr William Forde’s popular Irish airs were dedicated to Mrs Boucicault and illustrated with ‘a well-designed sketch of the most striking episode in the drama’; there were at least another dozen similar pieces, including a ‘Morceau de salon sur des mélodies Irlandaises’. Later there was the Colleen Bawn Polka, the Eily O’Connor Polka, Your Colleen Bawn, the Colleen Bawn Overture and the Colleen Bawn Quick-Step.

      That was only the beginning. ‘Colleen cabs’ stood outside the theatre on the Strand, waiting to collect playgoers. Fashion adored the Colleen Bawn: by the spring of 1861 the women’s papers were filled with advertisements for ‘THE COLLEEN BAWN, the Mantle of the Season, price 3s. 6d.’; the ‘Colleen Bawn cloak’, which is ‘simple, but very pretty’; even the ‘Colleen Bawn manteau’, ‘trimmed at the bottom by five rows of narrow black velvet; the hood is ornamented by two agrafes [clasps] in silk passementerie, also black’ – not precisely what a poor Irish girl might be expected to wear. Closer to reality was the adoption by the fashionable of the Irish countrywoman’s red cloak, made from better-quality fabric and renamed the Colleen Bawn. The Colleen Bawn also permeated the leisure world. Mr Sydney Hodges exhibited his pair of paintings, the Colleen Bawn and the Colleen Ruadh (the red-headed girl). A greyhound at the Worcester Club Croome Meeting in 1861 was named the Colleen Bawn, as was a four-oared boat that raced at the Victoria Rowing Club. There was also a racehorse, but this was a three-year-old in 1861, which meant either that its name had been changed, or that it had been named for an earlier Colleen Bawn – which was not as odd as it may sound today.

      For Dion Boucicault did not dream up the Colleen Bawn. The origins of Eily O’Connor are to be found in 1819, when the real Eily was drowned, with no Myles-na-Coppaleen to perform a header to save her. Eily was in reality Ellen Hanley, aged fifteen, the orphaned niece of a shoemaker (in some accounts, a rope-maker). She СКАЧАТЬ