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

Some moral truth, before he cuts a throat.* (#ulink_2ca0db86-1d66-5807-83c0-4e52bbe2228e)

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,* (#ulink_6444c780-b917-5380-a7f3-4ff59023aa34)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.* (#ulink_3984cc39-71c1-5494-b4f2-163e986daef5) 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’.* (#ulink_2193506d-de1f-59b6-ad2b-a7d73aebbd93)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’.* (#ulink_1359852d-cefd-5755-850f-f3b77ec095ef) 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?’† (#ulink_fb154c3c-50b3-5e1b-841b-0ae920bd732d)

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).

And then there was a final, extraordinarily derivative theatrical version. After All (1895) was written by Freeman C. Wills, W.G. Wills’ brother. Aram was played by Martin Harvey (later Sir John MartinHarvey), who had worked for Irving for fourteen years, and Ruth (the Madeline character) by Mabel Terry-Lewis, Ellen Terry’s niece. It had, remarkably, a happy ending: Houseman denounces Aram, Aram defends himself, and Walter in a gentlemanly way accepts his apology. It is not surprising that no one chose to follow this.

The constant renewal of Aram’s story contrasts sharply with another eighteenth-century murder case that also achieved a blaze of interest in the nineteenth century, but as quickly sputtered out. In 1739, a Mr Hayes stopped at Jonathan Bradford’s Oxfordshire inn. In conversation Hayes disclosed that he was carrying a great deal of money, and, two guests overhearing this, a robbery was planned. That night the two men entered his room, only to find Hayes dead and Bradford standing over the body, bloody knife in hand. Bradford’s defence was that he had gone in to rob his guest, but had found him already dead, and had just picked up the knife that was lying beside the corpse when the two men discovered him. This unlikely story was given short shrift at his trial, and Bradford was found guilty and hanged. Eighteen months later, so the story goes, Mr Hayes’ servant confessed on his deathbed: he had murdered and robbed his master, and Bradford had appeared just as he fled. There is little contemporary material to allow a balanced assessment of the case, but four inhabitants of an inn all set on robbery on the same night sounds more like art than life.

Kirby’s Wonderful Magazine, a hodgepodge miscellany which reprinted the story in 1804, felt it needed an injection of realism, so it made the two guests enter the room because they heard a noise, not because they too were planning robbery. Several newspapers picked up the story, although with no great sense of urgency – the Ipswich Journal ran it two years later, mixed in with paragraphs on the slave trade and on the reported death of the explorer Mungo Park, and a report that a pointer had had a litter of seventeen pups.

The novelist Amelia Opie used the basic scenario for a short story in 1818. In ‘Henry Woodville’, Woodville is a clerk to a prosperous merchant. At an inn he and David Bradford, an ex-colleague who had been sacked for dissipation, quarrel. That night the inn’s waiter robs and murders Bradford, knowing that Woodville will be suspected because of the quarrel. Woodville is found guilty, but as he is about to be executed the waiter, now repentant and dying, appears at the foot of the scaffold to assure the crowd, ‘I – I murdered Bradford! – I am the real murderer!’ before collapsing. There were no detective, suspense or procedural motifs in this version – none of the elements that, half a century later, would be the main purpose of any similar tale.

It was perhaps the still undeveloped nature of detective fiction that made Bradford of more interest to theatre. There was a token nod in 1811 in Killing No Murder, by Thomas Hook. One of the characters is named Bradford, the play is set in an inn, and another character is told to report his own pretended death. Otherwise it is a standard farce, with everyone in love with someone else, all at the same time pretending to be their own cousins or uncles or valets. In 1826 Drury Lane’s The Murder’d Guest had a very Jonathan Bradford-like set-up, with an Oxfordshire inn, a guest who arrives with his servant and is put in a room next to two strangers, and a murderer who is preempted. This was followed in 1830 by The Murderers of the Round Tower Inn, a ‘Nautical Drama’ at the Royal West London Theatre. It too had a Bradford-like innkeeper, whose stepdaughter innocently wonders, ‘What can be the reason of his always sending me to bed so early, whenever Travellers sleep in the house?’ ‘Dreadful groans and noises in the night’, combined with the travellers’ complete absence in the morning, fail to enlighten her.

It was in 1833 that the story of Jonathan Bradford finally found fame, when David Osbaldiston, the manager of the Surrey Theatre, turned to Edward Fitzball for a new work. Many years later, Fitzball claimed that a theatre manager had once advised him: ‘Look into the papers’ for a subject; the daily crime-sheets had ‘incident enough invented there’. This was standard procedure for many dramatists. For most of the century, playwrights barely scratched out a living, while churning out vast quantities of work. For authors, drama did not pay. A century earlier, Dr Johnson had received nearly £300 for the performing and publishing rights for a play that ran nine nights. By 1829 Douglas Jerrold was paid £5 a week as house author at the Surrey, and was expected to write at least one play a month; George Dibdin Pitt, the man who brought Sweeney Todd and his murderous barber-chair to the stage in 1841, produced twenty-six plays in 1847 alone. Dickens claimed that W.T. Moncrieff had written seven melodramas for £5 each.* (#ulink_d66fbee9-f57b-5d5d-93c5-73e42f921e9f)

In terms of content, the result, Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Roadside Inn, was not much different from earlier evilinnkeeper melodramas. Fitzball definitely knew Mrs Opie’s story, because two years earlier he had adapted another story from the same collection. He also used some standard elements from stage and penny-bloods: there was an underground crypt borrowed from gothic romance, a devil-may-care Irish highwayman and a comic Cockney apprentice. The key to the play’s extraordinary success was the completely novel staging devised by Fitzball. He set the four rooms of the inn all onstage at once, in cross-section, and wrote the murder scene so that the action took place simultaneously across them. Or, as one advertisement had it, ‘In this peculiar scene an effort will be made (never yet attempted on any stage) so to harmonize four actions as to produce one striking effect! Fitzball later remembered how the mutinous actors petitioned Osbaldiston ‘to insist on my leaving out this perplexing, unexampled, undramatic, unactable four-roomed scene’. Osbaldiston too was unenthusiastic, but finally agreed to let Fitzball make the attempt. On the opening night, ‘the audience looked at each other exactly in the same fashion as the actors had done’. But then, ‘as if convinced, on reflection, that there was something original to applaud. they took the lenient side, and applauded unanimously’* (#ulink_a301de39-de7c-5687-b9bd-7da5cb022906).

The play was a smash. Its hundredth performance, or ‘centenary’, got a notice in The Times.† (#ulink_d783e84a-2266-5933-9ad2-8ec474d20463) Ultimately the play closed in December, after a run of 161 consecutive performances (excluding Sundays). It was the first play ever to achieve this, and the record that was held for over two decades. Smaller populations had produced a repertorybased system reliant on the repeated attendance of the same people, rather than the infrequent attendance of different ones. In the 1840s, only four plays ran in London for more than a hundred nights and they were not consecutive. Short runs in 1833 did not necessarily signify failure, only the small theatregoing population. Jonathan Bradford was staged in Dublin in November and, at least according to the advertisements, was received with ‘rapturous and unbounded applause’, but it only appears to have had three performances. The play was revived over and over again – advertisements for different versions continued to appear as late as the 1880s.

Within months of the London opening, there were productions across the country – Edinburgh, Oxford, Liverpool, Ipswich, Dublin and Belfast newspapers all carried advertisements, although only the Hampshire Telegraph mentioned the novel staging, the original selling point. Instead, many theatres interpolated local speciality acts. In Portsmouth, audiences were promised ‘a Parody on the popular Song of “The Sea, the Sea, the open Sea”,’ as well as the appearance of Miss Parker to sing ‘A Kind Old Man Came Wooing’.

By 1839, the novelty staging was used in other plays. A production of Jack Sheppard at Sadler’s Wells had a similar compartment set to show Sheppard’s escape from Newgate: ‘Four Cells, two above and two below … doors, leading from one cell to the other – a fire-place at the back’. As the audience watches, Sheppard frees himself from his fetters, scrapes away at the brickwork until he can wrench out the bar blocking the chimney flue, which he then climbs into and vanishes from sight. In a moment, a hole opens in the cell above, and Sheppard appears once more. He then breaks down the cell door and vanishes through it, to reappear above, on the flat roof of the prison. This was very obviously of enormous drama, for at that moment, instead of escaping, Sheppard says, ‘Ah! my blanket! I had forgotten it,’ and makes the entire trip in reverse: through the two cells, down the hole in the chimney and back into the condemned cell. He collects his blanket, and the audience watches as he makes the trip a third time. On the roof he then tears up the blanket and is finally seen through the cell window abseiling down the side of the gaol.

Given Fitzball’s triumphant success, it is a surprise to see almost no subsequent fiction based on Bradford’s story. The only adaptations of any repute are three versions all by Sheridan Le Fanu, the Irish novelist and ghost-story writer.* (#ulink_79d2813d-8dc2-575e-8d64-12f8469ab85e) He approached it first in 1848, in ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston’, then again three years later in The Evil Guest. A third version, A Lost Name, appeared in 1868. All were variants on the same story: a man of bad character is found dead at a friend’s house. A faithful servant is suspected (and in one of these versions confesses), but it was the friend who killed him, after which the servant came into the room to find him dead, as in Bradford. When a memory of the penny-blood version cropped up in Dickens’ ‘The Holly Tree Inn’ (1855), it was as ‘a sixpenny book with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four incidents of the tragedy’. What had lingered in Dickens’ memory was the staging.

Instead, it was the penny publications that picked up the story, following the stage version closely, rather than inventing facts or characters to beef up the eighteenth-century story on their own. The real crime had by now been almost entirely forgotten. In the 1850s, in publishers’ lists of penny-bloods, Jonathan Bradford appeared together with fictional titles like The Poisoner, or, The Perils of Matrimony. Jonathan Bradford, or, The Murder at the Road-side Inn. A Romance of Thrilling Interest was published in eighteen parts, attributed to ‘the author of “The Hebrew Maiden”, “The Wife’s Secret”, &c. &c.’, who is thought to be Thomas Peckett Prest, a prolific penny-writer who had had a hand in the original version of Sweeney Todd. This was very much a story aimed at the working classes, in that throughout it is the petty bourgeoisie who thwart the good honest working people. An unpleasant, officious lawyer casts suspicion on all the good characters, while Dan Macraisy, the highwayman, although condemned in somewhat perfunctory fashion for being a murderer, offers the justification that ‘perhaps if this Mr. Hayes had not gone about with so much gold in his pocket, he might have been alive at this moment’. It was the victim’s fault for being rich while others were poor.

And finally, Jonathan Bradford cropped up regularly in police reports when penny-gaffs were raided, or booth-theatre proprietors were prosecuted for performing without a licence. Household Words also published a reminiscence of childhood ½d. peepshows, describing a showman who carried a box on his back. ‘The interior was lighted up with a candle in the middle of the day, and the different highly-coloured tableaux were let down with a heavy flop by strings at the side. wonderful atmospheric effects were introduced at the back, by lifting a lid, and the whole was made more interesting by a running description. by the proprietor.’ The shows that were mentioned by title were Mazeppa (Astley’s most popular hippo–drama) and Jonathan Bradford.

The most lasting, and most important, contribution of the Jonathan Bradford story was to extend our ways of seeing. In 1852, the playwright Dion Boucicault adapted a French play as The Corsican Brothers. Originally it had been a very ordinary melodrama of a murdered man and his brother’s revenge. Two elements, both descendants of Fitzball’s Jonathan Bradford, lifted the piece out of basic genre and made audiences see anew. Acts I and II of the play were to be understood to occur simultaneously, seen from the perspective of each brother; furthermore, at the end of Act I, the actions that would take place at the climax of Act II were, with the aid of new stage technology, played out at the back of the stage as a ghostly pre-vision.

In 1858 the idea of simultaneity of view was taken further by the painter Augustus Egg. His Past and Present triptych is a morality tale, set, like a theatrical melodrama, in a middle-class home. And, like Jonathan Bradford, it shows in its tripartite structure actions that take place in different – and simultaneous – times. The centre panel shows the moment a wife’s adulterous liaison has been discovered by her husband. Egg’s depiction could be a tableau from any melodrama, with the husband holding the telltale letter, the woman in a swoon at his feet. (Over his shoulder is a painting of a shipwreck by Clarkson Stanfield, a noted set designer, tying the story even more tightly to the theatre.) It is the outer wings of the triptych, however, that make the work so innovative. Both are set some time after the central scene. On the left, the adulterous woman, reduced to destitution, sits under the arches by the river, contemplating suicide as she gazes at the moon. On the right, her two soon-to-be-motherless children are alone in their attic room, also staring at the moon, which is covered with the identical cloud formation that the mother is staring at, indicating that the two panels are depicting the identical moment in time. As both the children and their mother face inwards, to the central panel, Egg also conveys that they are, simultaneously, all thinking of that day when their world collapsed.

By 1871, The Book of Remarkable Trials gave only one page to Bradford (Jack Sheppard had twenty, Eugene Aram seventeen), and the author excused the scanty coverage: ‘The details of this case reach us in a very abridged form; and we have been unable to collect any information on which any reliance can be placed.’ The next murderer, John Scanlan, was even more completely subsumed into his dramatic doppelganger.

Dion Boucicault had had a huge success with The Corsican Brothers in 1852, that play of double identities and duels, revenge and apparitions, with a famous double role for the actor-manager Charles Kean. But the two men quarrelled, and Boucicault and his actress wife went to New York, where in 1860 he wrote and they both starred in The Colleen Bawn. In triumph, they returned to London, to produce an amazing ten-month run of the play at the Adelphi Theatre.

The Colleen Bawn tells the story of Hardress Cregan, a young Irish squire who is smitten by the beautiful but poor Eily O’Connor, the ‘Colleen Bawn’, or fair maid (played by Agnes Robertson, Mrs Boucicault). In the face of her purity and goodness, Cregan is unable to seduce her, and agrees to marry her. His mother, meanwhile, is being wooed by the evil Squire Corrigan. When she repudiates him (‘Contemptible hound, I loathe and despise you!’), he threatens to foreclose on her mortgage. She sees a way out of her money troubles by marrying Hardress to Anne Chute, the daughter of the local landowner; Anne, however, loves Cregan’s college friend Kyrle Daly. Hardress is now regretting his marriage: Eily speaks in dialect, is poor, and has ‘low’ friends, including Myles-na-Coppaleen (played by Boucicault), once a horse dealer, but now, brought down by unrequited love for the Colleen Bawn, a smuggler and poacher. The crippled Danny Mann, Hardress’ loyal servant, tells him: ‘do by Eily as wid the glove there on yer hand … if it fits too tight, take the knife to it … Only gi’ me the word, an’ I’ll engage that the Colleen Bawn will never throuble ye any more.’ Hardress is shocked, but Mrs Cregan overhears and tells Danny that Hardress has agreed to Eily’s death. Danny takes Eily out in his boat at night, and tries to get the marriage licence from her, but she refuses. ‘Then you’ve lived too long. Take your marriage lines wid ye to the bottom of the lake.’ He tosses her overboard and rows off. Myles, who is out checking on his illegal still, shoots wildly at Danny, before dramatically leaping from the cliff to rescue Eily. In the last act, Danny thinks Eily is dead, and confesses all to Father Tom. Meanwhile, Hardress has agreed to marry Anne, but on their wedding day Corrigan, who overheard Danny’s confession, arrives to arrest him for murder. In the nick of time, Myles appears with Eily. Mrs Cregan asks forgiveness, and Hardress, transformed by this trauma, swears eternal love for the Colleen Bawn. Anne and Kyrle Daly find each other, Corrigan is thrown in the horsepond, Myles is acclaimed a hero and everyone is happy in time for the final curtain.

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.* (#ulink_12618dcc-31cd-5f3c-ae5a-5785a3a1f21d)

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