The Invention of Murder (17 page)

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 the body. The bare wounded head and clutched hand protrude through the shrinking leaves.’ The story had evidently evolved: a fourteen-years-dead body still showing a wound? What wood? Yet a wood, and a recently murdered victim, had become the dominant pictorial image: at the 1872 International Exhibition praise was given to Alfred Elmore’s picture of Aram in a wood, ‘startled by the half-revealed body of the murdered man lying among the treacherous leaves’. There were further versions on the same subject over the next decades, by A. Dixon, John Pettie (whose murderer was condemned by the
Era
as looking like a ‘country clergyman … telling the little boy to be sure and come to church next Sunday’) – there was even an image by Thackeray.

The story was now part of middle-class moral education, and Hood’s poem became a favoured party piece for children: Aubrey Beardsley recited it at school in the 1880s, and Lord Alfred Douglas even claimed that Oscar Wilde’s
Ballad of Reading Gaol
‘owed something to that fine poem’ too. A vicar in Sunderland lectured on ‘Eugene Aram: his life, trial, condemnation, and execution’ ‘under the auspices of the Baker-street Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society’.
*
A Social Reform Society’s weekly entertainment included a reading of Hood’s ballad. The poem was regarded by some as a bit suspect, though, smacking too much of theatre, and too little of moral uplift. The Revd J.C.M. Bellew was condemned by the
Birmingham Post
for performing it too dramatically: ‘A less demonstrative reading would have been. more suitable.’ Others disagreed:‘Penny Readings for the People’ at Mechanics’ Institutes frequently included the poem.

There were also professional performances of the work. In 1858 ‘Mr Walter Montgomery’ appeared at the Music Hall, Broad Street, Birmingham. On the first night he recited ‘from Memory, the whole of SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDY OF “MACBETH”, ASSISTED BY AN EFFICIENT CHOIR’. The next night too was devoted to ‘the BEAUTIES of SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER CELEBRATED AUTHORS’, including ‘Little Jim: a Tale of the Collieries (by desire)’, Poe’s ‘The Raven’, and Hood’s ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. Hood seemed not to work in music hall: I have found only one reference to a performance, and the review says the choice was ‘very injudicious’, being ‘long’ and ‘heavy … altogether out of place’. For those who wanted theatre, but could not attend because of religious or moral scruples, Aram was available elsewhere. The Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street staged one-man entertainments from 1850, and in 1873, when a new theatrical adaptation of
Eugene Aram
opened at the Lyceum with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the
Era
reviewed the Gallery’s last night of the season, which included ‘a new drama, performed for the first time on any stage, entitled
Impeached,
written apparently [‘apparently’ is wonderful] in blank verse, and in artistic style, by Miss H.L. Walford, who takes for her plot the leading incidents of Eugene Aram’.

Ultimately Henry Irving took over as the supreme reciter of Hood’s poem. At a time when it was still the norm to have two plays on the bill every evening, he performed it in the break between the two; he also frequently performed it separately in mixed programmes. He also had years of success in
The Bells,
an adaptation of a French play called
Le Juif polonais,
in which he played a burgomaster who, fifteen years before, had robbed and murdered a man. This long-undiscovered secret is threatened by his guilty conscience, which transforms some passing sleigh-bells into those on the murdered man’s sleigh. Shrieking, ‘The bells! The bells!’ he falls into a fit, is later hypnotized and betrays himself. To follow this success, in 1873 the playwright W.G. Wills took the story of Aram, as glamorized by Bulwer, and turned it into classy West End fare by removing the melodrama: there is no trial, no criminal awaiting execution; Aram is not only not executed, he doesn’t even kill himself. Instead, he just somehow dies, romantically, in a moonlit churchyard in his fiancée’s arms. Perhaps, mocked the
Saturday Review
critic, ‘he caught cold by sleeping in a damp churchyard’.
*
By the 1890s, Irving was reciting Hood’s verses with ‘Dr. Mackenzie’s incidental music’. (Alexander Campbell Mackenzie was the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, as well as a conductor and composer.) In 1896, Granville Bantock wrote a four-act opera based on Bulwer’s novel.

Opera was the logical culmination of music and melodrama. Initially, music had been essential to melodrama, as licensing laws barred spoken dialogue in the minor theatres. After speech was reintroduced, music continued to play a major part, not only in the form of songs, but to underscore the emotions of the characters. Every theatre orchestra had its own ‘agits’ (that is,
agitatos,
music indicating fear or distress), ‘slows’ (slow music for grave moments), ‘hurries’, ‘pathetics’, ‘struggles’ and more. As late as 1912, the catalogue of Samuel French, the theatrical publisher, listed: ‘Incidental Music Suitable for Lively Rise of Curtain, Entrance of Characters, &c., Hurry, Combat, Apparitions, Pathetic Situations, Martial, &c.’ The critic Percy Fitzgerald, who had been one of Irving’s assistants, noted that at transpontine theatres, ‘what so natural as that when smugglers, or robbers, or captives trying to make their escape should, when moving lightly on tiptoe past the unnatural tyrant’s chamber, be kept in time by certain disjointed and jerking music?’
†

As late as 1890, Aram was still attracting novelists. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (author of one of the first sensation-novels,
Lady Audley’s Secret,
pp.296–7), now with nearly sixty novels to her name, and an invalid husband to support, produced
One Life, One Love.
In it she repeats the long-hidden-murder motif, enmeshed in a story of the Paris Commune, double-identity, heroines regularly going mad and a plot so confusing that there is no real resolution, because, I strongly suspect, the author could not quite work out what had happened, and understandably did not want to read it over again. The Aram theme was briefly touched on in 1894, in Catherine Louise Pirkis’s ‘The Murder at Troyte’s Hill’, in which a lodgekeeper is murdered after decades of blackmail, and the case is solved by the lady detective Loveday Brooke. The murderer is writing a treatise on Aram’s legendary subject, philology, ‘a stupendous work. a work that will leave its impress upon thought in all the ages to come’ (for more on this story, see p.402).