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

It is hard to know quite what made The Colleen Bawn such a smash. Partly, it was its Irishry, which made the characters foreign but not too foreign; The Times noted with approval that the rogue Myles-na-Coppaleen was a ‘plebeian Irishman of scampish propensities, who alternates native shrewdness and pathos after a fashion familiar’. Partly it was the balance of melodrama and comedy. And mostly, as with Jonathan Bradford, it was the sensational staging. The attempted drowning of Eily, with Myles’ dramatic leap, routinely stopped the show. It is not entirely clear how this was done: the lake was blue gauze, manipulated by twenty boys standing in the wings, through which the drowning Eily dropped into an open trapdoor. Boucicault’s leap from the cliff, routinely described as a ‘header’, was probably carefully aimed between the gauzes at an open trap lined with a mattress or padding, onto which he would somersault. However it was done, it was thrilling enough that the Boucicaults had to stop and take a bow each night before proceeding.*

Only infrequently had theatres been sites of subsidiary commercial activities: at performances of Jack Sheppard handcuffs for children, and bags holding ‘a few pick-locks. a screw driver, and iron lever’ were offered for sale; The Woman in White, the staging of Wilkie Collins’ 1859–60 novel, had produced Woman in White bonnets and Woman in White perfume. But it was The Colleen Bawn that developed the commercial merchandising opportunity. Sheet music had been sold in conjunction with popular shows before, but this was something else again. In 1861 alone Mr William Forde’s popular Irish airs were dedicated to Mrs Boucicault and illustrated with ‘a well-designed sketch of the most striking episode in the drama’; there were at least another dozen similar pieces, including a ‘Morceau de salon sur des mélodies Irlandaises’. Later there was the Colleen Bawn Polka, the Eily O’Connor Polka, Your Colleen Bawn, the Colleen Bawn Overture and the Colleen Bawn Quick-Step.

That was only the beginning. ‘Colleen cabs’ stood outside the theatre on the Strand, waiting to collect playgoers. Fashion adored the Colleen Bawn: by the spring of 1861 the women’s papers were filled with advertisements for ‘THE COLLEEN BAWN, the Mantle of the Season, price 3s. 6d.’; the ‘Colleen Bawn cloak’, which is ‘simple, but very pretty’; even the ‘Colleen Bawn manteau’, ‘trimmed at the bottom by five rows of narrow black velvet; the hood is ornamented by two agrafes [clasps] in silk passementerie, also black’ – not precisely what a poor Irish girl might be expected to wear. Closer to reality was the adoption by the fashionable of the Irish countrywoman’s red cloak, made from better-quality fabric and renamed the Colleen Bawn. The Colleen Bawn also permeated the leisure world. Mr Sydney Hodges exhibited his pair of paintings, the Colleen Bawn and the Colleen Ruadh (the red-headed girl). A greyhound at the Worcester Club Croome Meeting in 1861 was named the Colleen Bawn, as was a four-oared boat that raced at the Victoria Rowing Club. There was also a racehorse, but this was a three-year-old in 1861, which meant either that its name had been changed, or that it had been named for an earlier Colleen Bawn – which was not as odd as it may sound today.

For Dion Boucicault did not dream up the Colleen Bawn. The origins of Eily O’Connor are to be found in 1819, when the real Eily was drowned, with no Myles-na-Coppaleen to perform a header to save her. Eily was in reality Ellen Hanley, aged fifteen, the orphaned niece of a shoemaker (in some accounts, a rope-maker). She had somehow met John Scanlan, a retired lieutenant of the marines, and substantially above her in social status: the Scanlans probably belonged to Munster’s Catholic semi-gentry. On 29 June 1819, the couple eloped – in some accounts, they were married, in others, married by an excommunicated priest, which Scanlan (wrongly) believed would not be binding. Or Scanlan may simply have seduced Ellen, and she may have called herself ‘Mrs Scanlan’ in hope rather than fact. In any case, she stole her uncle’s savings and ran off. A few days later, Ellen Walsh, a local woman, took passage in a boat crossing the Shannon near Kilrush, with Scanlan, his boatman/servant Steven Sullivan and a woman who called herself Mrs Scanlan. They all stayed overnight at Mrs Walsh’s, where Mrs Scanlan showed off her fine new clothes. The next day Ellen Walsh saw Sullivan pull a ring off Mrs Scanlan’s finger, and the day after she noticed the trunk in which Mrs Scanlan’s new clothes had been packed sitting in Sullivan’s lodgings. Scanlan told her that Mrs Scanlan had run away with a ship’s captain, and she later overheard the two men arguing, with Sullivan saying, ‘Mr. John, I have as good a right to the money as you have.’

On 6 September, a body washed up on shore; it had been in the water for weeks, and was badly decomposed, with no hair or flesh on the skull, and with a broken arm and leg. Ellen Walsh, before she saw the body, described the missing Ellen Hanley, her clothes, and the fact that she had a curious pair of double eye teeth. She was shown the stays that had been found on the body (the remainder of the clothes had probably been lost during its prolonged immersion), and thought they resembled Ellen Hanley’s, but could not say more. All the teeth in the head had been knocked out, whether before or after death was not known, but on examination it was found that there were double sockets where the eye teeth would have been. Another woman came forward with clothes that matched Ellen Walsh’s description, which she had purchased from Sullivan. Sullivan ran away before an arrest could be made, and Scanlan was charged with murder.

Scanlan’s family had some influence and money, and he was represented by Daniel O’Connell, who would one day be ‘the Liberator’ of the Irish, but who was in 1819 one of the county’s most successful barristers. There are barely any newspaper reports of the trial itself, and later the Pall Mall Gazette claimed that family influence had hushed up the scandal. The Belfast News-Letter in its report omitted Scanlan’s name altogether, and most of the papers covered the case only when Sullivan was caught and tried, in July 1820. It is therefore difficult to put together an account of the trial, but even with a barrister of O’Connell’s abilities, there was not much defence to be made. The circumstantial evidence was unanswerable: the two men were the last people to be seen with Ellen Hanley, Scanlan was identified as the purchaser of the rope that was found tied to the body, Sullivan’s sister still had some of her clothes, and his landlady had others, received from Sullivan in lieu of rent. A local minister said that within a few days of the elopement, Scanlan was already obviously bored with his young ‘wife’. Scanlan blamed the missing Sullivan, saying he himself had had nothing to do with Ellen Hanley’s disappearance and death, that Sullivan had taken her out in a boat and returned without her. But he wasn’t believed. He was quickly found guilty, and even his own lawyer was untroubled by the verdict: ‘It is very unusual with me to be so satisfied,’ O’Connell wrote his wife, ‘but he is a horrid villain.’

Some months later, Sullivan was picked up for passing forged banknotes. In prison he was recognized as Scanlan’s servant, and he was brought to Limerick for trial. Unlike Scanlan, he had no legal representation. When he was asked if he had counsel, he replied: ‘I have no money to fee counsel or attorney, my Lord, and have nobody to look to but you and the great God to give fair play for my life.’ The prosecution simply proceeded, calling its first witness, not an unusual situation for a working-class defendant. Sullivan’s ‘defence’ consisted of him asking one witness two questions of no seeming relevance at all, and after fifteen minutes he was found guilty. Before his execution he confessed, saying that Scanlan had wanted to get rid of Miss Hanley because ‘she always called him her husband’, and he had asked Sullivan to take care of it. Sullivan claimed that it was ‘some days’ before he agreed – as though that made it better – and then he ‘bought a boat for the express purpose of destroying her, and got an iron chain and ring made by a smith in Kilrush, to tie around her neck. Scanlan settled the rope, and spliced a loop to it, which he put round a large stone, in order that I should lose no time, and left everything ready for me.’ On the water, Sullivan hit Ellen with his musket, missing her head and breaking her arm, ‘then beat her with the gun till she was quite dead. tied her right leg to her neck, to which a large stone was attached’, and threw her overboard.

So, no pretty, scenically-painted death in a red cape. Just two brutal men who used and threw away a child because they thought she didn’t matter. Romanticization quickly set in, however. First was M.J. Whitty in 1824. His Tales of Irish Life included a story based fairly accurately on Ellen Hanley’s life. Sally is the daughter of a humble but hardworking peasant. She is, of course, wonderfully beautiful, intelligent and ‘docile’. She works hard, gives her father her earnings, and his ‘approving kiss was the best reward of duty’. One day a stranger stops to ask for a drink of water, and tips her; she takes her first step on the downward slope by not handing the cash over to her father, but spending it on fashionable fripperies. She runs off with the stranger, and he marries her, choosing a ‘rejected’ priest whom he thinks will accidentally-on-purpose forget to register the marriage; but unfortunately he has not chosen well, and the marriage is valid. Within weeks he tires of her, takes her boating with his servant, and that is the end of her. Sally’s father and abandoned fiancé are on his trail, however, and see the murder take place, although they are too far away to prevent it. The husband is arrested and found to be ‘allied to some families of the highest respectability in Ireland, whose interest with the executive was so powerful, that the judge who tried him, acting in a manner which would have immortalized a Roman, ordered his immediate execution lest a reprieve might be obtained’. (Summary execution as a civic good?)

Gerald Griffin, a struggling journalist, may have read this story, but it was Griffin’s novel The Collegians that marked the real beginning of the legend. Now Ellen Hanley becomes Eily O’Connor, while Myles Murphy, a farmer who sells Kerry ponies, is nicknamed Myles-na-Coppaleen, Miles of the Ponies. Here is Hardress Cregan, who has run through his inheritance and is sponging off his friends; Danny Mann appears too, although here he has a sister, ‘Fighting Poll of the Reeks’, ‘a fearless, whisky-drinking virago, over six feet in her stocking vamps’, whom Boucicault wisely decided would be too much for delicate West End sensibilities. Anne Chute and Kyrle Daly appear for the first time, and Daly is equipped with a comic servant named Lowry Looby. Mrs Cregan pushes her son to marry Anne: ‘If you wed as I desire, you shall have all the happiness that rank, and wealth, and honour, and domestic affection, can secure you. If against my wish. whether I live or die. you shall never possess a guinea of your inheritance.’ Hardress omits to tell his mother that he is already married. But as weeks go past (not the mere days that it took the real Scanlan), he tires of Eily, and Danny has a number of suggestions: sending her back to her father, shipping her off to Quebec, or killing her. Hardress spurns them all, then gives a series of contradictory orders, until it appears he barely knows what he wants. Danny however understands, and takes Eily out on the water, returning alone. Hardress confesses to his mother, and when the body is found, and Danny flees, she plans to buy her son’s way out of trouble. Danny refuses to betray his master until, thinking Hardress has double-crossed him, he confesses all. Hardress is arrested, but is not considered entirely culpable – did he or did he not tell Danny to kill her? He is transported, Danny is hanged, and Mrs Cregan lives on to do ‘austere and humiliating works of piety, which her church prescribes for the observance of the penitent’.

The novel was hugely successful – Griffin was said to have made £800 from it – perhaps because he set the story in the eighteenth century, a distancing effect that made the details appear less brutal. He also prettied things up: Eily doesn’t steal from her guardian, and she definitely marries. She and her family are classed-up, too: her uncle is no longer a rope-maker, but the parish priest, ‘educated at the university of Salamanca’; she speaks in standard English, not dialect, and is as ‘superior in knowledge as she was in beauty’ – no double teeth for Eily – as well as being a regular churchgoer.

With these adjustments, the theatre took Eily to its heart. By 1832 two Eily O’Connor plays had appeared in London: one by J.T. Haines 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.’

* After the success of the play, the grave of a completely unrelated Jack Sheppard, who had been buried in Willesden cemetery two centuries before the gaol-breaker, was overrun with visitors, and the cemetery’s wily sexton chipped off bits of the headstone to sell. (The criminal Jack Sheppard was buried in the workhouse of St Martin-in-the-Fields, now under the site of the National Gallery. In 1866 the remains of the cemetery’s inhabitants were transferred to Brookwood, in Surrey.)

* In case someone else was accused of the crime after his death, Ferroll had deposited a confession in his fi rst wife’s coffi n. How, the reader asks, was anyone supposed to know to exhume his fi rst wife in the hope that a confession might have been buried with her? Answer comes there none.

* Vicars had a penchant for the story. A sale of autographs collected by the late Revd F.W. Joy included a letter from Aram after his arrest, as well as a letter from Bulwer authenticating it (although why Bulwer, born more than half a century after Aram died, should be an expert on his handwriting, is unclear). There were also ‘relics’: a box made from the wood of Aram’s gibbet, a bone from his skeleton, another box made from a beam from Daniel Clark’s house, as well as a portion of his skull (this time authenticated by the governor of York Castle), and there was a letter from Aram ‘relating to a recent tour on the Continent’. The idea of a poor school usher making a grand tour is so risible that it is hard to take the rest of the collection seriously, but people did. It was estimated to sell for £19, while a letter from Robert Burns was valued at £13, and an entire manuscript in Carlyle’s hand a sad little £3.

* Wills had a knack for turning theatrical fi ction into untheatrical theatre: his adaptation of Jane Eyre drops the novel’s dramatically interrupted wedding scene; instead, Jane is informed of Rochester’s previous marriage in a letter.

† Gilbert and Sullivan parodied this in Ruddigore (1887), which had dialogue accompanied in melodrama fashion. (The West End audiences were bemused, failing to recognize the convention.)

* Dickens had a history with Moncrieff and stage adaptations, however. In 1837 Moncrieff had written an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers before the serialization had reached its conclusion. Dickens took his revenge in Nicholas Nickleby, with a depiction of a ‘literary gentleman’ who had ‘dramatized … two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out – some of them faster than they had come out’. Given this type of speedy hackwork, it is not surprising that many authors stuck to newspapers. C.H. Hazlewood, the house author at the Britannia, regularly fi lleted the newspapers, magazines and pennydreadfuls, précising the stories and fi ling ‘sundry axioms, aphorisms, and moral sentiments’ alphabetically under headings such as ‘Ambition’ or ‘Kindness of Heart’. When he began a new melodrama, he merely took one of his précis and fi lled it in with relevant quotations. Fitzball, receiving his commission from the Surrey, similarly went back to an old story.

* So popular was this novelty that it was quickly turned to satire. Only two weeks later, Figaro in London announced that Sadler’s Wells was planning a play ‘in which there is to be a scene showing twenty rooms at once, with a different tragedy acting in ten of them, operas in fi ve, and the remaining fi ve representing as many perfect comedies’.

† Another way of measuring the play’s success was the appearance of racehorses named after the murderer. The Earl of Burlington ran a gelding named Jonathan Bradford at the 1834 Derby, and on the second day of the meeting a Mr Breary was listed as the owner of another horse with the same name.