The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. Judith Flanders
The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime
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 who specialized in reports from the wilder shores of the underclasses called the bloods a ‘plague of poisonous literature. packets of. poison’.
What was left unspoken was that the audience for these ‘packets of poison’ could read. In Oliver Twist, as early as 1837, Dickens had simply taken for granted that Oliver, brought up in a workhouse, would be literate, as were all the underworld characters (Fagin even reads the Hue and Cry), unlike Garside, the murderer of Thomas Ashton, a skilled factory operative but illiterate. In a survey in Edinburgh Gaol in 1846, out of 4,513 prisoners, only 317 could not read at all, while 379 could read well or very well, and presumably the rest were somewhere in between. Even the upper echelons of the police were struggling. Originally Richard Mayne had planned that all divisional superintendents would be responsible for their own correspondence, but to his shock he found that illiteracy frequently made this impossible. Lower down the ranks, the rules had originally permitted entry to the force only for men under thirty years old, over 5 feet 7 inches, ‘intelligent’ and able to read and write ‘plainly’. But from 1869, when promotions were won by competitive examination, it was found that many of the entrants could not read or write well enough to sit the exams, and classes had to be instituted across the force.
Those who could read well, the middle classes, were considered immune to the ‘packets of poison’. Oliver Twist continued on its successful way, as did the licensed Jack Sheppard. (Although Lord Melbourne had complained that Oliver Twist was all about ‘workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets. I don’t like them in reality, and therefore I don’t wish them represented.’ Queen Victoria, by contrast, thought the novel ‘excessively interesting’.) Furthermore, from the 1830s, prosperous children were happy consumers of paper toy theatres, sheets of coloured card printed with sets and various characters, with abridged play texts that were remarkably similar to the penny texts published for the working classes. The main difference was that these sheets initially cost up to 6d. for a set (although by the 1850s the toy theatre price had dropped to as little as a *Vd.). Jack Sheppard was as popular in toy theatres as it was in real ones: one version had sixty-four sheets of characters and sets. There were also many versions of Oliver Twist, with a good range of characters. In one set, ‘Sykes’ [sic] looks rather gentlemanly, in a blue jacket and dashing yellow tie. ‘Fagan’ [also sic] has a very big nose, a red cap, a black beard and a dressy knee-length purple coat. Nancy looks sweetly pretty in red and green with a prim apron, and a ‘Pauper’ woman wears a nice red dress, blue apron, cap and shawl: without the label under her figure it would be impossible to know she was a pauper. By contrast, the thieves are all smoking pipes, a clear indication of bad character.
Now that Jack Sheppard was banned, the Bulwer-influenced Aram story, with its comforting gentrified elements, began to dominate. Knaresborough became a sort of Eugene Aram theme park, and was even considered suitable for Sunday-school outings: a group of Wesleyan ‘Sunday scholars’ from Hunslet, near Leeds, went on an excursion to St Robert’s Cave, ‘where Daniel Clarke [sic] was said to have been murdered’, before going to Harrogate to take the waters and go donkey-riding. Even the Penny Magazine, published by the improving Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, described St Robert’s Cave primarily as ‘the scene of the murder’ in an article on the beauties of the region. Similarly, at least one racehorse was named Eugene Aram after Hood’s poem was published, while greyhounds with the same name appeared after both Bulwer’s novel and, later, the stage adaptations appeared.
There was also a second wave of novels based on Aram-like themes. The first was Amy Paul in 1852, an anonymous novel of orphans, inheritances, blackmail and a long-suppressed crime, all wrapped up in a love story and a depiction of genteel middle-class life. It had almost nothing to recommend it, but John Bull noted ‘a family likeness to Eugene Aram, and thought ‘The moral is well worked out.’ It is certainly very moral, but not very interesting: ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means,’ said Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism, and she would have had no trouble with Amy Paul.
The next novel, in 1855, is a much better book: Caroline Clive’s Paul Ferroll is the story of a squire whose bad-tempered wife is found murdered. A gardener is accused, but Ferroll nobly hires a lawyer to defend him, and he is acquitted. Ferroll meanwhile remarries, this time to his childhood sweetheart, whom he had dearly loved before he had foolishly married his first wife. Years pass; in a cholera epidemic Ferroll shows his true worth by working heroically to save lives. During a bread riot he is threatened by a mob and kills a man; given the circumstances, his magistrate neighbours can do nothing but praise his action, but he asks his much-loved wife, ‘Suppose they were to make it out that I had committed a murder; suppose I were called a murderer … could you be faithful still, love me, no matter what I was …?’ It turns out that the noble man murdered his first wife for love of his second.* Unlike in Bulwer’s novel, neither the murderer nor the narrator attempts to explain or justify the crime. This may be why the reviews praised the work, and failed to mention its Aram-like murderer.
The next to reflect Aram influence, however, was not simply a fairly good book, but was a masterpiece – Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Here Bradley Headstone has Aram-like features, although Dickens is more influenced by Thomas Hood than by Bulwer. Headstone is a poor schoolmaster, as Aram had been, and as Hood’s poem had represented him. Dickens can therefore stay close to reality as he describes the frustrations of a man whose intelligence and abilities have lifted him out of his original class, but have left him stranded and socially ambiguous, in the middle class but not of it. There are other parallels. The name Eugene is transferred from the murderer to his intended victim, Eugene Wrayburn: from the schoolmaster to the gentleman he wanted to be. Headstone attacks Wrayburn with a stick, as Hood has Aram deal Clark ‘Two sudden blows with a ragged stick’. The chapter in which Headstone attempts to shift the blame for his crime is entitled ‘Better to be Abel than Cain’, just as Hood’s pupil reads ‘The Death of Abel’, and his Aram says ‘murderers walk the earth/Beneath the curse of Cain’. Headstone cools his fevered head in a stream, as Hood’s Aram ‘washed my forehead cool’, and he returns to his schoolroom, as Hood’s Aram ‘sat among the urchins young,/That evening in the school’. There are differences too. Hood’s Aram deeply regrets the crime; Headstone simply regrets that his murderous attack failed. In Hood, the schoolboys sense something wrong, and gaze wonderingly at their master; in Dickens, the schoolboys are as self-absorbed as children usually are, and notice nothing. Instead of the single schoolboy looking sorrowingly on at Aram’s remorse, here Headstone’s favoured pupil thinks only of what Headstone’s disgrace will mean to his own ambitions.
Hood’s version also held sway in the visual arts, with a number of paintings based on his work, from Alfred Rankley’s 1852 Royal Academy piece Eugene Aram in the Schoolroom and Eugene Aram’s Dream, a bas-relief by Matthew Noble that was chosen to represent British Art at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. (As late as 1889, reproductions of this work were still being advertised.) Rankley’s piece was praised in the Athenaeum for its depiction of an Aram ‘gnawed by the conscience-worm that never dies’, and the same publication was even more enthusiastic about ‘two weird drawings’ on the subject by Mr Rossiter, which show ‘the scared murderer coming to the well-known place in the wood, and finding that a mighty wind has laid bare