Read Murder by Candlelight Online
Authors: Michael Knox Beran
| 83 | “womb that never bare” : The Annotated Book of Common Prayer (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), 283. |
| 83â84 | “remarkable peculiarity” : Patriot , 13 April 1837. |
| 87 | “an ocean that no” : Honoré de Balzac in Twenty-Five Volumes (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier & Son, 1900), XV, 350. |
| 87 | “ghosts in the open air” : Baudelaire, “Les Sept vieillards.” |
| 87 | his sister's landlady : Max Décharné, Capital Crimes: Seven Centuries of London Life and Murder (London: Arrow, 2013), 214. |
| 88 | Mr. Gay's inquiries : Décharné, Capital Crimes , op. cit., 214. |
| 89 | north wind : New Letters of Thomas Carlyle , op. cit., I, 48. |
| 90 | “countenance presented” : The Chronicles of Crime (London: Reeves and Turner, 1886), II, 433. |
| 92 | “Babel din” : Wordsworth, The Prelude , quoted in John Williams, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 123. |
| 92 | “such a silence” : New Letters of Thomas Carlyle , op. cit., I, 48. |
| 93 | “enlightened Philosophism” : Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896), I, 4. |
| 93 | “algebraic spectralities” : James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London 1834â1881 (London: Longmans, Green, 1890), II, 359. |
| 93 | “sometimes insane” : Richard Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (London: Walter Scott, 1888), 66. |
| 93 | “Gorgons, and Hydras” : Charles Lamb, “Witches, and Other Night Fears,” in The Works of Charles Lamb (New York: Crowell, 1882), III, 114. |
| 94 | “What are you about” : Lives of the Most Notorious and Daring Highwaymen, Robbers, and Murderers (London: Milner, n.d.), 270. |
| 98 | “seemed quite unconcerned” : Chronicles of Crime , op. cit., II, 432. |
| 99 | some few sages : When James Boswell said that the philosopher David Hume professed to contemplate his own mortality with equanimity, Dr. Johnson replied, “Sir, if he really thinks so, his perceptions are disturbed; he is mad: if he does not think so, he lies.” Boswell then said that the actor Samuel Foote told him that “he was not afraid to die.” “It is not true, sir,” Johnson said. “Hold a pistol to Foote's breast, or to Hume's breast, and threaten to kill them, and you'll see how they behave.” |
| 100 | “for this fraud” : Lives of the Most Notorious and Daring Highwaymen, Robbers and Murderers Compiled from Authentic Sources (Manchester: S. Johnson, 1844), 349. |
| 101 | “injured Englishman” : Ibid., 353. |
| 101 | “generous public” : Ibid., 351. |
| 101 | “Wanted, a partner” : Chronicles of Crime , op. cit., II, 450. |
| 103 | resumed their walks : The Spectator (1 April 1837) (London: Joseph Clayton, 1837), X, 291. |
| 104 | “command at any time” : Chronicles of Crime , op. cit., II, 435. |
| 104 | “feigned laugh” : Ibid. |
| 104 | “alarmed me” : Ibid. |
| 104 | “I thought it might” : Ibid. |
| 104 | “safest and most prudent” : The Spectator (1 April 1837), op. cit., X, 291. |
| 105 | Sarah Gale : Chronicles of Crime , op. cit., II, 452. |
| 105 | “bucket and mop” : Joseph Forster, Studies in Red and Black (London: Ward and Downey, 1896), 205. |
| 106 | “This female” : Chronicles of Crime , op. cit., II, 435. |
| 106 | “eleven sovereigns” : Lives of the Most Notorious (1844), op. cit., 365. |
| 108 | “truly right-minded” : “Memoir of Mr. Justice Coltman,” in The Law Magazine (London: W. Benning, 1849), XI, 298. |
| 108 | John Adolphus : “Mr. J. Adolphus,” The Illustrated London News , 26 July 1845, 64; James Grant, Portraits of Public Characters (London: Saunders and Otley, 1841), 217 et seq.; The Gentleman's Magazine (September 1845) (London: John Bower Nichols, 1845), XXIV, 315; William Ballantine, Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1882), 71. |
| 109 | “perfectly indifferent” : Chronicles of Crime , op. cit., II, 439. |
| 111 | Blackstone : Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (New York: Banks and Brothers, 1884), 1035 et seq. |
| 112 | “cared nothing for death” : Chronicles of Crime , op. cit., II, 445. |
| 112 | “enraged at the deception” Even after his admission to the sheriffs, Greenacre continued to insist that he was not guilty of murder. When the Rev. Dr. Cotton, the Newgate chaplain, spoke of him as a murderer (in the “condemned sermon” he preached in Newgate chapel two days before the execution), Greenacre took offense and denied that the term could with justice be applied to him. In this he was certainly mistaken. A man who, without a considerable provocation, beats a person so that the person dies is guilty of murder whether or not he intended the person's death: “he is guilty,” says Blackstone, “of murder by express malice; that is, by an express evil design,” for “no person, unless of an abandoned heart, would be guilty of such an act, upon a slight or no apparent cause.” If, however, the killer can prove that he acted upon a sufficient provocation, he is not guilty of murder. A man so provoked that he kills another man “by beating him in such a manner as shewed only an intent to chastise and not to kill him” is not a murderer in the eyes of the law, which “so far considers the provocation of contumelious behaviour, as to adjudge it only manslaughter, and not murder.” The provocation in question, however, must be something more than hard or taunting words : “No affront, by words or gestures only, is a sufficient provocation, so as to excuse or extenuate such acts of violence as manifestly endanger the life of another.” |
| 112 | told the sheriffs : : Ibid., 441. |
| 113 | “pain which is essential” : Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea , trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, 1906â07), I, 406. |
| 114 | “summoned enchantment” : Ibid., II, 9. |
| 114 | “renunciation” : “Autobiography of a Mystic,” in The Church Quarterly Review (October 1898) (London: Spottiswoode, 1899), XLVII, 186. |
| 114 | “be given” : Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea , op. cit., III, 423. |
| 115 | “cadaverous perfume” : Nietszche, Ecce Homo , op. cit., 270. |
| 115 | “a place of quite” : Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea , op. cit., III, 456. |
| 116 | “kissed the rope” : Ibid., III, 457. |
| 116 | “Still more remarkable” : Ibid., III, 456â57. |
| 116 | “fanatical delusion” : Ibid., III, 457. |
| 116 | “presence of a violent” : Ibid., III, 455â56. |
| 118 | “state of beastly ”: The Spectator (6 May 1837), op. cit., X, 416. |
| 118 | “smoking, drinking” : Diary of Sir Michael Connal (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1895), 9. |
| 119 | “Gentlemen” : George Tancred, Rulewater and Its People (Edinburgh: Constable, 1907), 129. |
| 120 | “The dog died game” : John Heneage Jesse, George Selwyn and His Contemporaries (London: Richard Bentley, 1843), I, 354. |
| 120 | “was death's counterfeit” : Arthur Griffiths, The Chronicles of Newgate (London: Chapman and Hall, 1884), 425. |
| 120â121 | “became as abject” : Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin, The New Newgate Calendar (London: Gunder, n.d.), III, 165. |
| 121 | “Encore un moment” : “She was so terrified,” Dostoevsky has Lebedev say in The Idiot , “that she did not understand what was happening. But when Samson [Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner] seized her head, and pushed her under the knife with his foot, she cried out: âWait a moment! wait a moment, monsieur!' Well, because of that moment of bitter suffering, perhaps the Saviour will pardon her other faults, for one cannot imagine a greater agony.” |
| 122 | “'Neath the timbers” : Punch (London: Punch, 1849), XVII, 210. |
| 123 | “was totally unmanned” : “Execution of Greenacre,” in Annual Register (May 1837) (London: Rivington, 1838), 45. |
| 123 | “great self-possession” : See the entry on Greenacre in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . |
| 123 | “Don't leave me” : Ibid. |
| 123 | “Ten different witnesses” : Carlyle, French Revolution , op. cit., III, 110. |
| 125 | “quivering in mortal” : Charles Kingston, Remarkable Rogues (London: John Lane, 1921), 195. |
| 125 | “The question of motive” : The Trial of Mary Blandy , ed. William Roughead (Project Gutenberg, 2004). |
| 129 | essay on Sir Walter Scott : Thomas Carlyle, “Sir Walter Scott,” in Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), IV, 22â24. |
| 130 | “Veneration of great men” : Ibid., IV, 24. |
| 131 | lion-soirées : Ibid., IV, 23. |
| 131 | “I was charmed” : The Collected Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1990), XVI, 19â24. |
| 131 | “he never had a first love” : Hershel Parker, The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man Amok among the Anglo-American Literati (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 276. |
| 132 | “first beloved” : Plato, Lysis 219c-d. |
| 132 | “was more to be pitied” : Parker, Powell Papers , op. cit., 276. |
| 132â133 | “one of those persons” : Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Norton, 1996), 182. |
| 133 | “trenchant opinions” : Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1987), 13. And yet if Jane was not indeed the victim Carlyle made her out beâif she was not in fact laid a sacrifice on the altar of his geniusâthe fact that he should portray her as such argues a degree of self-absorption in Carlyle himself that might well have made for strains in a marriage. That he should transform the ordinary ups and downs of wedded life into a Greek tragedy that it wasn't suggests that he was less interested in what his wife actually was than what, in his idealized conception of himself, she should have been. What a dereliction, in a hero-prophet, to have had a happy domestic life! |
| 134 | “entirely miserable” : James Anthony Froude, My Relations with Carlyle (London: Longman's Green, 1903), 11. |
| 134 | “The chief interest” : Jane Welsh Carlyle's Journal, October 1855âJuly 1856, in The Collected Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle , op. cit., XXX, 259. |
| 134 | “realised what a tragedy” : Froude, My Relations with Carlyle , op. cit., 13. |
| 135 | Through the agency of Froude : A leaf from Jane Carlyle's diary for June 1856 and four lines from the succeeding leaf are missing from the manuscript; they were possibly removed by Carlyle's niece, Mary Aitken. The story of the “bluemarks” did not appear during Froude's life; he related it in an essay, “Relations with Carlyle,” which was published by his children as a book, My Relations with Carlyle , op. cit., after his death. |