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

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СКАЧАТЬ at the City of London Theatre in Bishopsgate, Eily O’Connor, or, The Foster Brother; another by Thomas Egerton Wilks, Eily O’Connor, or, The Banks of Killarney! at the Coburg, complete with the characters as they appeared in Griffin. (Wilks in places barely troubled to alter Griffin’s punctuation, much less his words.) Despite – or because of – its similarity to The Collegians (and despite lines like, ‘Yonder comes Mr. Hector Creagh, the polished duellist’), this play was the one to survive until Boucicault came and blew everyone else off stage (Queen Victoria loved it so much she went three times in a fortnight).

      There was recognition that Boucicault’s play was based on The Collegians, but much less that it was based on fact (the Manchester Times commented in 1860 that it was ‘a melodrama. founded on facts’, but that was a rarity). Boucicault started legal proceedings against the Britannia, claiming that C.H. Hazlewood’s Eily O’Connor was a lightly rewritten version of his play. The Britannia did not try to defend itself with reference either to The Collegians, or even to reality; instead it offered Boucicault a fee to allow them to continue the run, which he accepted. But he couldn’t sue everyone, and there was a positive lakeful of imitations: an anonymous The Colleen Bawn: or, The Collegian’s Wife; Cushla Ma Chree (also anonymous); and even a French adaptation, Le Lac du Glenaston (in which some of the characters head for the California goldfields).

      Parody versions of theatrical successes were a commonplace, but Eily O’Connor attracted more than her fair share. Within two years of The Colleen Bawn opening, there were at least three successful mainstream satirical takes: The very latest Edition of The Cooleen Drawn, from a novel source, or, The Great Sensation Diving Belle, an anonymous parody at the Surrey; Henry J. Byron’s Miss Eily O’Connor. A New and Original Burlesque, at Drury Lane; and Andrew Halliday Duff’s The Colleen Bawn Settled at Last. A Farcical Extravaganza, at the Lyceum. They all have renamed characters: Hardress is ‘Hard-up’, or ‘Heartless’, Kyrle Daly is naturally enough Curl Daily. The Surrey version was in verse, and filled with contemporary local jokes: ‘Callagain’, the Squire Corrigan figure, is a policeman, complete with puns:

      My name’s not Robert tho’ I Bobby am

      So about Bob I pray no Bobbery, Ma’am

      Tho’ in the Mayne force not the Royal Blues,

      I’ll use no force, but what I’m forced to use …

Eily and Danny appear in a washing tub, and she turns up alive for the finale, to join in the dancing and the singing. The West End versions were not much more sophisticated. In Byron’s version, when Danny tries to drown Eily, she pops back up repeatedly – ‘Here we are again!’ – before catching cold from her ducking. The Colleen Bawn Settled at Last was more of a West End play, its humour based on the exquisitely comic notion of an Irish peasant girl married into the gentry, and the hilarious mistakes she makes across the class divide. Lord Dundreary, a character from Tom Taylor’s 1858 play Our American Cousin,* wanders in, and Eily turns out to be his long-lost daughter and therefore a well-born heiress, something that happens frequently in melodrama, if not in life.

      There were also ‘narrative entertainments’ of The Colleen Bawn, for those who wouldn’t go to the theatre. Mr and Mrs German Reed,specialists in the genre, advertised a musical version. Upmarket, Julius Benedict wrote an opera version, The Lily of Killarney, in 1862. Downmarket, a penny version of the play appeared, for those who couldn’t afford the gallery seats, or who wanted a more permanent souvenir; this included Lowry Lobby [sic] and Michil [sic] O’Connor, misspelled characters from The Collegians who had failed to make the transfer to the stage, which is an indication of the source. The frontispiece is suitably dramatic, with Danny poised to wallop Eily, who sits with ferociously glowering eyebrows in a small boat. The play was popular at fairgrounds too: there is evidence of a marionette version being performed in Sunderland in the early 1860s; in the 1870s the D’Arc marionettes had a ‘Cave [i.e. lake] Scene [that] is a work of art’, according to the Era. In the 1880s, Bryant’s marionettes were performing the rescue scene at the Britannia.

      Ellen Hanley may have had a grim life and a worse death, but as Eily she lived on and saw the century out. By that time she had long left the world of murder and crime behind her. Others could not, and would be remembered only for how they changed crime – and crime policing – for ever.

* In George Borrow’s novel Lavengro (1851), Thurtell boasts that he is ‘Equal to either fortune’, which was said to be a quote from Aram’s defence speech. Most commentators have taken this to indicate that Thurtell was acquainted with the details of the murder of Daniel Clark. All it really means is that Borrow, the author who put these words into Thurtell’s mouth, was familiar with Aram’s defence, and since as a young man he had compiled a six-volume edition of Celebrated Trials, this is hardly a surprise.

* While Bulwer may have thought his novel a moral portrait, Pierce Egan was more clearsighted. After its publication he called on Bulwer to present him with his treasure, the caul of Thurtell, as a tribute to a man he obviously thought of fi rst and foremost as a murder specialist. Bulwer was appalled.

* Even in today’s size-zero world, I don’t think anyone has defended themselves against a charge of murder by claiming they were too thin to have done it.

† At first I thought this must be satire, but it doesn’t appear to be; the basic information was reprinted the following day in another context.

* Before 1832, copyright in a novel did not extend to other art forms: anyone could write and produce a play based on any fi ction. After 1832, legislation protected plays that had been published from being re-produced by other theatres, but if the play was staged without the script being published, then it too was fair game.

* Dickens is ‘literature’ now, and it takes an effort to see him through different eyes. Yet the number of murders and otherwise unnatural deaths that occur in his novels is astonishing: Oliver Twist has a murder, an accidental death by hanging, an execution, and a dog’s brains are smashed out for good measure; a murder, a violent riot leading to many deaths and a double execution appear in Barnaby Rudge; a murder, attempted murder and suicide by a murderer in Martin Chuzzlewit; while in A Tale of Two Cities there is a guillotining, and Madame Defarge shoots herself; David Copperfi eld has two accidental drownings and one suicide; a character falls down an abandoned mineshaft in Hard Times; Bleak House has two deaths from exhaustion, one suicide, one murder and one spontaneous combustion; in The Old Curiosity Shop there is one death by drowning, one from exhaustion; the fi rst person killed by a train in literature appears in Dombey and Son; Our Mutual Friend has a double, murderous drowning, another accidental death on the river, and two attempted murders; in Great Expectations there are two attempted murders and one death by drowning; in Little Dorrit a house crushes a self-confessed murderer. In the unfi nished Edwin Drood it is perfectly clear that the eponymous Drood has been murdered, but Dickens himself died before that murder was unravelled.

* Punch really had its knife out for Bulwer, and ran a series triggered by Eugene Aram, in which parallel columns compared Bulwer’s romanticized version of Aram’s life with the rather sordid facts. It later mocked Bulwer’s many names by referring to him as ‘Sir E. L. B. L. BB. LL. BBB. LLL.’

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