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

This fiction quickly displaced fact. In 1832, the Trial and Life of Eugene Aram; several of his Poems, and his plan and specimens of an Anglo-Celtic Lexicon, with copious notes … worked backwards from the novel, using Bulwer’s fictional account of the trial as though it were a verbatim court report. The Leeds Mercury commented admiringly on Aram as ‘a man of most extraordinary talents and character’, and the Gentleman’s Magazine agreed that he was entirely innocent. It was widely reported that Archdeacon Paley had pronounced Aram’s defence to be one ‘of consummate ability’. (A modern scholar has noted that Paley was an adolescent at the time, so if he had made the remark at all, it wasn’t a hugely mature judgement; later in life he said that Aram had ‘got himself hanged by his own cleverness’.) The journalist Leigh Hunt went even further in his praise: ‘Had Johnson been about him, the world would have attributed the defence to Johnson.’ Bulwer’s biographer later claimed that Bulwer’s creation, Madeline Lester, was also based on reality, ‘taken word for word, fact for fact, from Burney’s notes’. As Burney had been eight years old at the time, we might assume that his memories of an impoverished usher yearning after the local squire’s daughter might not be terribly reliable, if they ever existed.

Of the success of Bulwer’s novel, however, there could be no doubt. Within its first year, the Morning Chronicle noted, as well as French and German translations, the book sold over 30,000 copies in the USA. The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle published a plea from the Library and Reading Room in Queen Street, Portsea, in which it ‘earnestly requested that their subscribers who have [borrowed] the first volumes … of Eugene Aram … will return them forthwith. as detaining them so long prevents that accomodation [sic] which they wish should be received by all’.

Others rushed to elaborate the subject. Although he would have been disgusted to have his work categorized as fiction, there is nowhere else to put Norrisson Scatcherd’s highly coloured Memoirs of the Celebrated Eugene Aram … Scatcherd, a barrister who devoted his life to antiquarian and local-history research, claimed to have become interested in Aram in 1792, when he was about twelve, on a visit to Harrogate, and he says it was then that he began to interview locals who had known Aram thirty-three years before. In his version, Aram was ‘modest’, ‘amiable’, ‘beloved and admired’. His wife, however, was ‘a low, mean, vulgar woman, of extremely doubtful character’, who was unfaithful, and thus Aram’s doubts of their children’s paternity made it perfectly natural that he should be ‘disposed. to neglect them’. According to Scatcherd, Clark was Mrs Aram’s lover, and in addition he and Houseman were planning to rob and kill a pedlar boy. Aram helped Clark dishonestly order plate and goods, but only because he was ‘wretchedly poor, having a family to support’. The three men went to St Robert’s Cave, but it was obvious to Scatcherd that it was Houseman who murdered Clark, because Aram was ‘a man of moral habits, delicate health, prepossessing countenance, slender form,* and unassuming deportment’.

Scatcherd’s account was well-received. A review in the Leeds Mercury said he had ‘corrected some important errors’, and Aram could now be seen as an ‘amiable and accomplished murderer’. There appears to be no irony intended in that phrase: the newspaper repeated Scatcherd’s views on the justice of the killing owing to Mrs Aram’s infidelity, and implied that as both Clark and Houseman were robbers and murderers themselves, the killing of Clark was really not so very terrible. As late as 1870, Scatcherd was still commended for having ‘done much to … rescue’ Aram’s name; the murderer was now merely ‘imprudent’ for having ‘associat[ed] himself with persons beneath his own standing’. In the Daily News in 1856, the Metropolitan Board of Works considered the possibility of renaming some London streets to avoid multiple streets with the same names, and some alternatives are suggested: Ainsworth, Keats, Southey and Bulwer are among them, as are Richard Mayne (the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police) and Eugene Aram.†

The great success of these accounts of Aram’s case brought theatrical adaptations in their wake. W.T. Moncrieff’s version opened at the Surrey in February 1832; within a month it was advertising additional performances, ‘Owing to the complete overflows’. Soon the Royal Pavilion and Sadler’s Wells had their own versions, with another at the Royal Grecian by the end of the year. There were also productions in Edinburgh, Wakefield and Sheffield. The Surrey version continued the Bulwer/Scatcherd trend of turning Aram into an anguished, noble and excessively learned murderer: he ‘perfected himself in … Hesiod, Homer, Theocritus, Herodotus, Thucydides’ before he ‘began to study Hebrew’, not to mention ‘the Chaldee and Arabic’ and ‘Celtic. through all its dialects’. He is introduced to the audience as ‘Master Aram, the great scholar’, while Houseman is ‘guilty-like’, and so repellent that all who see him ‘turn aside – as from a thing infect [sic]’. Aram confesses that ‘poverty and pride’ had led him to commit the crime: ‘I yearned for knowledge but had no means to feed that glorious yearning.’ Madeline dies of grief at his feet, promising to wait for him in heaven, and Aram then kills himself, as ‘I have been no common criminal; – Eugene Aram renders to the scaffold! his – lifeless body – pardon – pity – all.’ This was an authorized adaptation of Bulwer’s novel, and he himself attended the first night.* The New Monthly Magazine highly recommended the production, although by an astonishing coincidence the editor of this magazine was one E.L. Bulwer, author of Eugene Aram.

Two years after these theatre adaptations, the young novelist Harrison Ainsworth published Rookwood, which was very much the love child of Eugene Aram and Paul Clifford crossed with gothic tales, and this led the way to a new kind of fictional criminal-hero. Ainsworth was not concerned, as Bulwer claimed to be, with examining the motivation of criminals, and society’s responsibilities. He was not even terribly concerned with facts: it was in Rookwood that Dick Turpin first made his epic ride from London to York on Black Bess, although the historical Turpin had only ridden as far as Lincolnshire – a sixty-mile trip instead of two hundred. Ainsworth wanted to entertain, and his highwaymen are debonair and dashing, usually men of rank cheated out of their birthrights. As Ainsworth’s Turpin says, ‘It is as necessary for a man to be a gentleman before he can turn highwayman, as it is for a doctor to have his diploma, or an attorney his certificate.’

Turpin, hanged in 1739 for horse-stealing, had from about 1800 been turned into popular entertainment in coarse and inexpensive chapbooks, and in 1818 in an onstage incarnation, as Richard Turpin, The Highwayman. By 1823 his name was already a byword for a dashing, brave criminal. Thurtell had boasted to his brother, ‘We are Turpin-like lads, and have done the trick.’ From the 1830s penny-bloods returned again and again to his story. One of the most popular was Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, which appeared in 254 numbers over five years: Turpin was not executed until page 2,207. Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, Eugene Aram and others made up the subjects for series like Purkess’s Library of Romance and Purkess’s Penny Plays. These publications were so popular, the police complained, that vagrant boys spent their leisure time playing cards and dominoes and reading Jack Sheppard and Oliver Twist ‘and publications of that kind’, the implication being that this reading material would in and of itself lead to crime.

Rookwood was filled with songs – twenty-three in the first edition, and more later. Ainsworth may have been thinking of theatrical adaptations from the first: they certainly followed quickly, and nearly every one of them included the song he had written in ‘flash’, or thieves’ slang, which ‘travelled everywhere. It deafened us in the streets, where it was. popular with the organ-grinders and German bands … it was whistled by every dirty guttersnipe, and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips.’

In the box of the Stone Jug [prison] I was born

Of a hempen widow [my father was hanged] the kid forlorn.

Fake away [Go on, steal].

My noble father as I’ve heard say

Was a famous merchant of capers gay.

Nix my dolly, palls [Nothing, friends], fake away.

The knucks in quod [thieves in prison] did my school-men play

And put me up to the time of day.

Fake away.

No dummy hunter had forks so fly [pickpocket had fingers so nimble]

No knuckler so deftly could fake a cly [pick a pocket]

Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

But my nuttiest lady one fine day

To the beaks did her gentleman betray.

Fake away.

And thus was I bowled out at last,

And into the Jug for a lag was cast [and was sent to prison].

Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

But I slipp’d my darbies [fetters] one morn in May

And gave to the dubsman [turnkey] a holiday.

Fake away.

And here I am, palls, merry and free,

A regular rollocking Romany.

Nix my dolly, palls, fake away.

In 1835 Rookwood was adapted for Astley’s Amphitheatre, which specialized in staging hippodramas – spectaculars with vast numbers of horses, riders and extras. It was retitled Turpin’s Ride to York and the Death of Black Bess, taking the element that people had enjoyed the most. (It is notable, two years after Cold Bath Field, that Black Bess no longer dies of exhaustion after her epic journey, but is shot by the wicked Bow Street Runners.)

The success of Rookwood, both onstage and as fiction, led to even more novels in which criminals were glamorized, with Ainsworth’s next book revolving entirely around a historical criminal: the eighteenth-century thief and gaol-breaker Jack Sheppard. Serialization began in Bentley’s Miscellany just as another story in that magazine, also about a boy-criminal, also illustrated by Cruikshank, was ending, and for four episodes they overlapped, so it was natural to think of them together. The second tale was Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. Today it is surprising to think of Oliver Twist as a crime novel, but stripped down to its bare bones, the plot is very similar to Bulwer’s Paul Clifford: the orphan who is, unknown to himself, from a ‘good’ family but is left to be raised by criminals. Similarly, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard is the story of an apprentice who becomes a thief, with a parallel story of a good apprentice cheated out of his inheritance by an evil relative; Oliver Twist is an apprentice who has ostensibly gone bad by joining Fagin’s gang, while he is unlawfully kept from his inheritance by his evil half-brother. (The name ‘Twist’ in the title would also have tipped off contemporary readers that this was a book about crime and criminals: ‘to twist’ was underworld slang for ‘to hang’.)* These books were classed together as ‘Newgate novels’, connecting the stories both to the Newgate Calendar and also to the gaol from which Sheppard himself so famously escaped.

Some critics left Dickens out of their discussions of Newgate novels, which were condemned for portraying criminals sympathetically. As the Edinburgh Review summed up, Dickens ‘never endeavours to mislead our sympathies – to pervert plain notions of right and wrong – to make vice interesting in our eyes. We find no. creatures blending with their crimes the most incongruous and romantic virtues.’ This praise of Dickens was, very obviously, also a poke at Bulwer. Punch magazine, too, condemned Newgate fiction in its drawing of ‘The Literary Gentleman’ surrounded by thoughts of ‘Murder’, ‘Gallows heroism’, ‘Burglary’ and ‘Robbery’. On his desk is a dagger, a gallows, a broadside printed with a ‘Dying Speech’, a copy of the Newgate Calendar and another of the Annals of Crime. The verse that follows mocks:

… you, great scribe, more greedy of renown,

From Hounslow’s gibbet drag a hero down.

Embue his mind with virtue; make him quote

Some moral truth, before he cuts a throat.*

Bulwer was a punchbag for everyone. For now Eugene Aram’s name – even without reference to Bulwer – was being used for anything, even a toothache cure. This advertisement appeared regularly in both the London and the provincial papers, making a segue from a murderer to a patent medicine seem bizarrely normal:

EUGENE ARAM. – It will be in the recollection of most of our readers that after the murder of Daniel Clarke, Eugene Aram resided many years at Lynn, in Norfolk, in fancied security and seclusion. – Sweeting’s Tooth Ache Elixir has also found its way to the same place. In the advertisement in another part of this paper respecting this deservingly popular medicine, will be found a letter from the agent at Lynn, from which we may conclude that while it is giving peace and ease from pain to many, yet (like Eugene Aram), it will not be allowed any rest for itself.

To dissociate himself from this type of thing, in 1840 Bulwer produced a second edition of Eugene Aram, with numerous changes, blandly assuring his readers that ‘the legal evidence against [Aram] is very deficient’. The most important alteration was that Aram was no longer a murderer, but had simply fretted himself to a shadow for fourteen years over a murder committed by another man, Bulwer’s response to the fear that, as with Thurtell and Turpin, Newgate novels would lead the young to emulate their heroes. This was of even more concern with stage versions, which had larger audiences than the printed word. Oliver Twist’s huge popularity – there were six stage adaptations in London even before the end of the book was serialized, and the Surrey alone claimed that 300,000 people had seen its production in its first year – meant that most people’s ideas of the story were based not on the novel, but on stage versions speedily mounted in small theatres. From 1839 to 1859 there were at least sixteen productions of Jack Sheppard,*and a dozen of Oliver Twist. Eugene Aram was not particularly popular in London, but was a perennial favourite outside the capital: at least thirty productions appeared in those two decades. Plays that were performed by fairground companies, fit-up companies and booth theatres (travelling companies that carried their own stages with them) have little recorded history, but they were what most people saw. Today we can only record their existence from rare survivals (like the Maria Marten marionettes), or from moments when the theatre companies met the authorities, as when in 1857 the Leeds Mercury reported that in Great Horton, outside Bradford, the owner of a booth theatre had been charged with performing Eugene Aram without a licence.

There were probably many dozens of productions like this, and in 1859 the Lord Chamberlain decided that enough was enough. Jack Sheppard was considered to be the worst offender: Oliver Twist, after all, featured a middle-class child who didn’t want to be a thief, while Eugene Aram was a gentrified, remorseful murderer. Sheppard was working-class and repeatedly escaped from gaol, thumbing his nose at authority. All stage productions of Jack Sheppard were therefore banned, apart from the one that had first been licensed. Not coincidentally, this version had originated in the West End, where the respectable middle-class audience could be counted on not to take away an inappropriately immoral lesson. Yet the Oliver Twist productions, at least the non-West End versions, perhaps did not have the moral content the Lord Chamberlain assumed. The manager of the Gaiety Theatre remembered seeing Oliver Twist at the Victoria in the 1840s: ‘Nancy was always dragged round the stage by her hair, and after this effort Sikes always looked up defiantly at the gallery. He was always answered by one loud and fearful curse, yelled by the whole mass. Finally when Sikes, working up to a well-rehearsed climax, smeared Nancy with red-ochre, and taking her by the hair (a most powerful wig) seemed to dash her brains out on the stage. A thousand enraged voices, which sounded like ten thousand. filled the theatre.’

It was commonly assumed that different audiences would take different messages from the entertainment, depending on their class 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.