Джудит Фландерс – The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (страница 23)

* The Hue and Cry was the offi cial police publication, founded in 1786 by a Bow Street magistrate, a bi-weekly four-page paper which itemized crimes, described wanted criminals, listed stolen property and publicized government rewards.

* The wadding clue in the Ashton case spawned a number of fi ctional descendants. In Bleak House (1852–53) Dickens has his police detective, Inspector Bucket, recognize the wadding found near the murdered lawyer Tulkinghorn as ‘a bit of the printed description of your house at Chesney Wold’. In Andrew Forrester’s early 1860s story ‘The Judgment of Conscience’, Miss G., his female detective, builds her entire case around wadding made from a page of Johnston’s Chemistry of Common Life, an East End cobbler’s constant companion (for more on Miss G., see pp. 300–301). Reality only caught up with fi ction in 1884, when John Toms was convicted of murder on the evidence of a piece of wadding recovered from the body of his victim, which was identifi ed as matching a broadside in his possession.

* A patterer sold broadsides – ‘pattering’, or reading from them, and teaching the tunes to the songs. A standing patterer had a fi xed pitch; a running patterer roamed a district with his goods.

THREE Entertaining Murder

One of the most influential stories of murder throughout the Victorian age was not Victorian at all, but had taken place while Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandfather was on the throne. Yet this 1745 crime resonated as late as the 1880s, when the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry toured in a heavily romanticized version of the life and death of Eugene Aram.

Eugene Aram was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1704, the son of a gardener. He received a fairly good education, and by the 1730s he was living in the town of Knaresborough, Yorkshire (today on the edge of Harrogate), married, with four or five children, and employed as steward to a local landowner. Daniel Clark was a shoemaker, about twenty-three years old, doing well in business, and with a fiancée who was known to have some money. He was thus able to order plate and silver on credit for his forthcoming wedding breakfast, to be held on the night of 7 February 1745. He also ordered other goods, probably more than he should have, but nothing sinister. Not sinister, that is, until the night before his wedding, when he told his brother-in-law he was going to visit his fiancée, and vanished. It was quickly discovered that £200 in cash and plate had gone with him, although his horse had not. Two men had been seen with him earlier that evening: Richard Houseman, a flax-dresser (someone who wove linen), and Eugene Aram. Their reputations were poor, and when their houses were searched, goods identified by the creditors were found. Aram said Clark had asked him to keep the things for him, and he was released, although it was noted that he had recently paid off a mortgage, and was unusually flush with cash. Soon afterwards, he abandoned both Knaresborough and his family. And that was the way things remained. He got a succession of jobs, first in London, ultimately in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, as an usher in a school (an usher was a junior teacher, with little respect attached to the position, and even less money).

Fourteen years later, a labourer digging in a field outside Knaresborough found a skeleton. Daniel Clark’s abandoned fiancée’s brother claimed that it must be that of Clark, as no one else had gone missing from the area in the previous two decades. Eugene Aram’s wife Anna gave evidence at the inquest on the bones, and said quite straightforwardly that she believed her husband and Houseman had murdered Clark. The jury’s verdict was that ‘from all apparent circumstances, the said skeleton is the skeleton of Daniel Clark’. Houseman protested: an eye-witness had seen Clark a few days after his disappearance. When questioned, however, this witness turned out only to have heard from a third person that yet a fourth person had said that he had once seen someone who resembled Clark. Houseman was arrested, and evidently began to think of how to save himself. He said that the skeleton was not Clark’s, because he knew where Clark’s body really was, and he sent officials to a local beauty spot called St Robert’s Cave, where another skeleton was duly found. Houseman claimed that he had last seen Clark heading off to Eugene Aram’s house on the night of his disappearance, while he, Houseman, had been left with the goods Clark had ordered, which they planned to fence. The next day his story had altered: he now said that he, Aram and Clark had all gone to St Robert’s Cave together to divide up the goods, and Aram had killed Clark there. At the reconvened inquest Mrs Aram testified to seeing the three men set out in the early hours of the morning, after which Aram and Houseman had returned alone and burnt some clothing in the fire. The jury found that Daniel Clark had been murdered by Eugene Aram and Richard Houseman.

There are many versions of how Aram was found, usually involving the miraculous workings of providence. In reality, the speed of his arrest suggests that everyone had known where he was, but for the previous fourteen years hadn’t much cared. Later rumour said he was living with a woman whom he passed off as his niece; others suggested it was his daughter; still others that he was living incestuously with his daughter. It could simply be that his daughter or niece was keeping house for him, and that that was how he was located. The warrant was delivered to the King’s Lynn Justice of the Peace and MP, and he accompanied the constables to the school where Aram was employed. Aram denied knowing Clark at all, and claimed never to have been to Knaresborough. He was arrested nonetheless. By the time he was taken to York Castle (the nearest gaol to Knaresborough), he recalled that he had known Clark, but otherwise amnesia ruled his life: he couldn’t remember when he had last seen Clark, nor that he had been friends with Houseman, nor what they were doing on the night Clark vanished, nor that he had paid off his debts afterwards. The only thing he could remember was that both his brothers had seen Clark after his disappearance, but, like Houseman’s eye-witness, this came to nothing. Later his memory improved: Houseman and Clark had planned the fraud with another man, he said, and the four of them had gone to St Robert’s Cave, but he had remained outside the cave, and when the others came out without Clark, they had told him that he had gone away.

Either Houseman or Aram was going to have to turn king’s evidence if the prosecution was to succeed. Houseman was the logical choice, as Mrs Aram’s testimony was crucial. Later accounts claimed that Houseman was found not guilty, but in fact the prosecution against him was withdrawn in order for him to testify against Aram. Houseman claimed pretty much what Aram had at the magistrates’ hearing, just shifting the characters around: they had all gone to the cave, but now it was Aram who killed Clark, while Houseman remained outside. At the trial there were fourteen witnesses against Aram, while his defence, in later legend held up as a model of its kind, was in actuality poor.* In an age when character – reputation – meant a great deal to perceptions of guilt and innocence, Eugene Aram could not find a single witness to vouch for him. And a legal historian has noted that he could think of no other defence that ‘condescends so little to any notice of so vulgar a thing as evidence’. Most defendants, he suggested, ‘do make some endeavour to meet the case against them’, but Aram did – or could – not. Instead, in his defence he set out his life history, trying to act as his own character witness; then he claimed he had been too ill at the time, too ‘enfeebled’, to commit murder (perhaps he hoped no one would remember the witnesses who had seen him walk several miles to St Robert’s Cave two nights in a row); then he simply stressed the unreliability of circumstantial evidence. To no one’s surprise, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Initially his body was to be anatomized after his execution, as was standard, but such was local feeling that the jury asked to have the punishment increased: Aram would be gibbeted – hanged in chains after death, for his body to decay slowly in front of the local population.

That was the end of Eugene Aram, but only the beginning of the romance. In 1794, thirty-five years after the trial, the philosopher William Godwin published Caleb Williams, planned as a fictional counterpart to his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice. This endeavoured to show how those who lived in an unequal society were victimized by it, but it is Godwin’s links to Aram that matter here. Godwin grew up only twenty-five miles from King’s Lynn, and later studied at the Hoxton Academy under Andrew Kippis, who was working on a Biographia Britannica which included an entry for Eugene Aram, taking the standard eighteenth-century view that he was a thief and murderer. But when the story reappeared later in the Newgate Calendar it focused more on Aram’s self-education, sliding over the fact that he was a receiver of stolen goods, and concentrating instead on the picture of a man with a thirst for learning, oppressed by a rigidly hierarchical society. In Caleb Williams, Godwin expands this theme: when hiding from his unjust persecutors, Caleb finds ‘a general dictionary of four of the northern languages’ and determines ‘to attempt, at least for my own use, an etymological analysis of the English language’. This is the earliest linkage of Aram to linguistics or philology, and thereafter virtually no recounting of the story was complete without a breathless recapitulation of his brilliance as a scholar.