Contents
TO THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.
LECTURE.
SECOND PAPER ON MURDER,
THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS.
Sir,
- We have all heard of a Society for the Promotion of Vice, of
the Hell-Fire Club, &c. At Brighton, I think it was, that a Society was
formed for the Suppression of Virtue. That society was itself
suppressed—but I am sorry to say that another exists in London, of a
character still more atrocious. In tendency, it may be denominated a
Society for the Encouragement of Murder; but, according to their own
delicate [Greek here] it is styled—The Society of Connoisseurs
in Murder. They profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and
dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short,
Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police
annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a
picture, statue, or other work of art. But I need not trouble myself
with any attempt to describe the spirit of their proceedings, as you
will collect that much better from one of the Monthly Lectures read
before the society last year. This has fallen into my hands
accidentally, in spite of all the vigilance exercised to keep their
transactions from the public eye. The publication of it will alarm
them; and my purpose is that it should. For I would much rather put
them down quietly, by an appeal to public opinion through you, than by
such an exposure of names as would follow an appeal to Bow Street;
which last appeal, however, if this should fail, I must positively
resort to. For it is scandalous that such things should go on in a
Christian land. Even in a heathen land, the toleration of murder was
felt by a Christian writer to be the most crying reproach of the public
morals. This writer was Lactantius; and with his words, as singularly
applicable to the present occasion, I shall conclude:
Quid tam
horribile,' says he, tam tetrum, quam hominis trucidatio? Ideo
severissimis legibus vita nostra munitur; ideo bella execrabilia sunt.
Invenit tamen consuetudo quatenus homicidium sine bello ac sine legibus
faciat: et hoc sibi voluptas quod scelus vindicavit. Quod si interesse
homicidio sceleris conscientia est,—et eidem facinori spectator
obstrictus est cui et admissor; ergo et in his gladiatorum cadibus non
minus cruore profunditur qui spectat, quam ille qui facit: nec potest
esse immunis a sanguine qui voluit effundi; aut videri non
interfecisse, qui interfectori et favit et praemium postulavit.'
'Human life,' says he, 'is guarded by laws of the uttermost rigor, yet
custom has devised a mode of evading them in behalf of murder; and the
demands of taste (voluptas) are now become the same as those of
abandoned guilt.' Let the Society of Gentlemen Amateurs consider this;
and let me call their especial attention to the last sentence, which is
so weighty, that I shall attempt to convey it in English: 'Now, if
merely to be present at a murder fastens on a man the character of an
accomplice; if barely to be a spectator involves us in one common guilt
with the perpetrator; it follows of necessity, that, in these murders
of the amphitheatre, the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more
deeply imbrued in blood than his who sits and looks on: neither can he
be clear of blood who has countenanced its shedding; nor that man seem
other than a participator in murder who gives his applause to the
murderer, and calls for prizes in his behalf.' The 'praemia
postulavit' I have not yet heard charged upon the Gentlemen
Amateurs of London, though undoubtedly their proceedings tend to that;
but the 'interfectori favit' is implied in the very title of
this- association, and expressed in every line of the lecture which I
send you.
I am, &c.
X. Y. Z.
Gentlemen,
—I have had the honor to be appointed by your committee
to the trying task of reading the Williams' Lecture on Murder,
considered as one of the Fine Arts; a task which might be easy enough
three or four centuries ago, when the art was little understood, and
few great models had been exhibited; but in this age, when masterpieces
of excellence have been executed by professional men, it must be
evident, that in the style of criticism applied to them, the public
will look for something of a corresponding improvement. Practice and
theory must advance pari passu.. People begin to see that
something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two
blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane.
Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are
now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams has
exalted the ideal of murder to all of us; and to me, therefore, in
particular, has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like Eschylus or
Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his
art to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr. Wordsworth observes,
has in a manner 'created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.' To
sketch the history of the art, and to examine its principles
critically, now remains as a duty for the connoisseur, and for judges
of quite another stamp from, his Majesty's Judges of Assize.
Before I begin, let me say a word or two to certain prigs, who
affect to speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in
its tendency. Immoral! God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that
people mean? I am for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and
all that; and I do affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of
it,) that murder is an improper line of conduct, highly improper; and I
do not stick to assert, that any man who deals in murder, must have
very incorrect ways of thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and
so far from aiding and abetting him by pointing out his victim's
hiding-place, as a great moralist of Germany
declared it to be every good man's duty to do, I would subscribe one
shilling and sixpence to have him apprehended, which is more by
eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for that
purpose. But what then? Everything in this world has two handles.
Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it
generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and that, I
confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated esthetically, as
the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.
To illustrate this, I will urge the authority of three eminent
persons, viz., S. T. Coleridge, Aristotle, and Mr. Howship the surgeon.
To begin with S. T. C. One night, many years ago, I was drinking tea
with him in Berners' Street, (which, by the way, for a short street,
has been uncommonly fruitful in men of genius.) Others were there
besides myself; and amidst some carnal considerations of tea and toast,
we were all imbibing a dissertation on Plotinus from the attic lips of
S. T. C. Suddenly a cry arose of 'Fire—fire!' upon which all
of us, master and disciples, Plato and [Greek here], rushed out,
eager for the spectacle. The fire was in Oxford Street, at a
piano-forte maker's; and, as it promised to be a conflagration of
merit, I was sorry that my engagements forced me away from Mr.
Coleridge's party before matters were come to a crisis. Some days
after, meeting with my Platonic host, I reminded him of the case, and
begged to know how that very promising exhibition had terminated. ‘Oh,
Sir,' said he, 'it turned out so ill, that we damned it unanimously.'
Now, does any man suppose that Mr. Coleridge,—who, for all he is too
fat to be a person of active virtue, is undoubtedly a worthy Christian,
- that this good S. T. C., I say, was an incendiary, or capable of
wishing any ill to the poor man and his piano-fortes (many of them,
doubtless, with the additional keys)? On the contrary, I know him to be
that sort of man, that I durst stake my life upon it he would have
worked an engine in a case of necessity, although rather of the fattest
for such fiery trials of his virtue. But how stood the case? Virtue was
in no request. On the arrival of the fire-engines, morality had
devolved wholly on the insurance office. This being the case, he had a
right to gratify his taste. He had left his tea. Was he to have nothing
in return?
I contend that the most virtuous man, under the premises stated, was
entitled to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any
other performance that raised expectations in the public mind, which
afterwards it disappointed. Again, to cite another great authority,
what says the Stagyrite? He (in the Fifth Book, I think it is, of his
Metaphysics) describes what he calls [Greek here], i. e., a
perfect thief; and, as to Mr. Howship, in a work of his on
Indigestion, he makes no scruple to talk with admiration of a
certain ulcer which he had seen, and which he styles ‘a beautiful
ulcer.' Now will any man pretend, that, abstractedly considered, a
thief could appear to Aristotle a perfect character, or that Mr.
Howship could be enamored of an ulcer? Aristotle, it is well known, was
himself so very moral a character, that, not content with writing his
Nichomachean Ethics, in one volume octavo, he also wrote another
system, called Magna Moralia, or Big Ethics. Now, it is
impossible that a man who composes any ethics at all, big or little,
should admire a thief per se, and, as to Mr. Howship, it is well
known that he makes war upon all ulcers; and, without suffering himself
to be seduced by their charms, endeavors to banish them from the county
of Middlesex. But the truth is, that, however objectionable per se
, yet, relatively to others of their class, both a thief and an ulcer
may have infinite degrees of merit. They are both imperfections, it is
true; but to be imperfect being their essence, the very greatness of
their imperfection becomes their perfection. Spartam nactus es, hanc
exorna. A thief like Autolycus or Mr. Barrington, and a grim
phaegedenic ulcer, superbly defined, and running regularly through all
its natural stages, may no less justly be regarded as ideals after
their kind, than the most faultless moss-rose amongst flowers, in
its progress from bud to 'bright consummate flower;' or, amongst human
flowers, the most magnificent young female, apparelled in the pomp of
womanhood. And thus not only the ideal of an inkstand may be imagined,
(as Mr. Coleridge demonstrated in his celebrated correspondence with
Mr. Blackwood,) in which, by the way, there is not so much, because an
inkstand is a laudable sort of thing, and a valuable member of society;
but even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.
Really, gentlemen, I beg pardon for so much philosophy at one time,
and now let me apply it. When a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum
tense, and a rumor of it comes to our ears, by all means let us treat
it morally. But suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it, [
Greek here], or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) [Greek
here]; suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the
rascal that did it off like a shot, nobody knows whither; suppose
lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs to trip up
the fellow in his flight, but all to no purpose—'abiit, evasit
,' &c.—why, then, I say, what's the use of any more virtue? Enough
has been given to morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine
Arts. A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but we can't mend it.
Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is
impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purposes, let us
treat it aesthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way.
Such is the logic of a sensible man, and what follows? We dry up our
tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a
transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg
to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a
very meritorious performance. Thus all the world is pleased; the old
proverb is justified, that it is an ill wind which blows nobody good;
the amateur, from looking bilious and sulky, by too close an attention
to virtue, begins to pick up his crumbs, and general hilarity prevails.
Virtue has had her day; and henceforward, Vertu and
Connoisseurship have leave to provide for themselves. Upon this
principle, gentlemen, I propose to guide your studies, from Cain to Mr.
Thurtell. Through this great gallery of murder, therefore, together let
us wander hand in hand, in delighted admiration, while I endeavor to
point your attention to the objects of profitable criticism.
_____
The first murder is familiar to you all. As the inventor of murder,
and the father of the art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate
genius. All the Cains were men of genius. Tubal Cain invented tubes, I
think, or some such thing. But, whatever were the originality and
genius of the artist, every art was then in its infancy, and the works
must be eriticised with a recollection of that fact. Even Tubal's work
would probably be little approved at this day in Sheffield; and
therefore of Cain (Cain senior, I mean) it is no disparagement to say,
that his performance was but so so. Milton, however, is supposed to
have thought differently. By his way of relating the case, it should
seem to have been rather a pet murder with him, for he retouches it
with an apparent anxiety for its picturesque effect:
Whereat he inly raged; and, as they talk'd,
Smote him into the midriff with a stone
That beat out life.: he fell; and, deadly pale,
Groan'd out his soul with gushing blood effus'd.
Par. Lost, B. XI.
Upon this, Richardson, the painter, who had an eye for effect,
remarks as follows, in his
Notes on Paradise Lost, p. 497: It
has been thought,' says he, 'that Cain beat (as the common saying is)
the breath out of his brother's body with a great stone; Milton gives
in to this, with the addition, however, of a large wound.' In this
place it was a judicious addition; for the rudeness of the weapon,
unless raised and enriched by a warm, sanguinary coloring, has too much
of the naked air of the savage school; as if the deed were perpetrated
by a Polypheme without science, premeditation, or anything but a mutton
bone. However, I am chiefly pleased with the improvement, as it implies
that Milton was an amateur. As to Shakspeare, there never was a better;
as his description of the murdered Duke of Gloucester, in
Henry VI
., of Duncan's, Banquo's, &c., sufficiently proves.
The foundation of the art having been once laid, it is pitiable to
see how it slumbered without improvement for ages. In fact, I shall now
be obliged to leap over all murders, sacred and profane, as utterly
unworthy of notice, until long after the Christian era. Greece, even in
the age of Pericles, produced no murder of the slightest merit; and
Rome had too little originality of genius in any of the arts to
succeed, where her model failed her. In fact, the Latin language sinks
under the very idea of murder. 'The man was murdered;'- how will this
sound in Latin?
Interfectus est, interemptus est—which simply
expresses a homicide; and hence the Christian Latinity of the middle
ages was obliged to introduce a new word, such as the feebleness of
classic conceptions never ascended to.
Murdratus est, says the
sublimer dialect of Gothic ages. Meantime, the Jewish school of murder
kept alive whatever was yet known in the art, and gradually transferred
it to the Western World. Indeed the Jewish school was always
respectable, even in the dark ages, as the case of Hugh of Lincoln
shows, which was honored with the approbation of Chaucer, on occasion
of another performance from the same school, which he puts into the
mouth of the Lady Abbess.
Recurring, however, for one moment to classical antiquity, I cannot
but think that Catiline, Clodius, and some of that coterie, would have
made first-rate artists; and it is on all accounts to be regretted,
that the priggism of Cicero robbed his country of the only chance she
had for distinction in this line. As the
subject of a murder, no
person could have answered better than himself. Lord! how he would have
howled with panic, if he had heard Cethegus under his bed. It would
have been truly diverting to have listened to him; and satisfied I am,
gentlemen, that he would have preferred the
utile of creeping
into a closet, or even into a
cloaca, to the
honestum of
facing the bold artist.
To come now to the dark ages—(by which we, that speak with
precision, mean,
par excellence, the tenth century, and
the times immediately before and after)—these ages ought naturally to
be favorable to the art of murder, as they were to church architecture,
to stained glass, &c.; and, accordingly, about the latter end of this
period, there arose a great character in our art, I mean the Old Man of
the Mountains. He was a shining light, indeed, and I need not tell you,
that the very word 'assassin' is deduced from him. So keen an amateur
was he, that on one occasion, when his own life was attempted by a
favorite assassin, he was so much pleased with the talent shown, that
notwithstanding the failure of the artist, he created him a duke upon
the spot, with remainder to the female line, and settled a pension on
him for three lives. Assassination is a branch of the art which demands
a separate notice; and I shall devote an entire lecture to it.
Meantime, I shall only observe how odd it is, that this branch of the
art has flourished by fits. It never rains, but it pours. Our own age
can boast of some fine specimens; and, about two centuries ago, there
was a most brilliant constellation of murders in this class. I need
hardly say, that I allude especially to those five splendid works,—
the assassinations of William I., of Orange, of Henry IV., of France,
of the Duke of Buckingham, (which you will find excellently described
in the letters published by Mr. Ellis, of the British Museum,) of
Gustavus Adolphus, and of Wallenstein. The King of Sweden's
assassination, by the by, is doubted by many writers, Harte amongst
others; but they are wrong. He was murdered; and I consider his murder
unique in its excellence; for he was murdered at noon-day, and on the
field of battle, a feature of original conception, which occurs in no
other work of art that I remember. Indeed, all of these assassinations
may be studied with profit by the advanced connoisseur. They are all of
them
exemplaria, of which one may say,
Nocturna versata manu, versate diurne;
Especially nocturna.
In these assassinations of princes and statesmen, there is nothing
to excite our wonder; important changes often depend on their deaths;
and, from the eminence on which they stand, they are peculiarly exposed
to the aim of every artist who happens to be possessed by the craving
for scenical effect. But there is another class of assassinations,
which has prevailed from an early period of the seventeenth century,
that really
does surprise me; I mean the assassination of
philosophers. For, gentlemen, it is a fact, that every philosopher of
eminence for the two last centuries has either been murdered, or, at
the least, been very near it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a
philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is
nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think
it an unanswerable objection, (if we needed any,) that, although he
carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years,
no man ever condescended to cut it. As these cases of philosophers are
not much known, and are generally good and well composed in their
circumstances, I shall here read an excursus on that subject, chiefly
by way of showing my own learning.
The first great philosopher of the seventeenth century (if we except
Galileo) was Des Cartes; and if ever one could say of a man that he was
all
but murdered—murdered within an inch -one must say it of
him. The case was this, as reported by Baillet in his
Vie De M. Des
Cartes, tom. I. p. 102- 3. In the year 1621, when Des Cartes might
be about twenty-six years old, he was touring about as usual, (for he
was as restless as a hymena,) and, coming to the Elbe, either at
Gluckstadt or at Hamburgh, he took shipping for East Friezland: what he
could want in East Friezland no man has ever discovered; and perhaps he
took this into consideration himself; for, on reaching Embden, he
resolved to sail. instantly for
West Friezland; and being very
impatient of delay, he hired a bark, with a few mariners to navigate
it. No sooner had he got out to sea than he made a pleasing discovery,
viz., that he had shut himself up in a den of murderers. His crew, says
M. Baillet, he soon found out to be 'des scélérats,'—not
amateurs
, gentlemen, as we are, but professional men—the height of whose
ambition at that moment was to cut his throat. But the story is too
pleasing to be abridged; I shall give it, therefore, accurately, from
the French of his biographer: 'M. Des Cartes had no company but that of
his servant, with whom he was conversing in French. The sailors, who
took him for a foreign merchant, rather than a cavalier, concluded that
he must have money about him. Accordingly they came to a resolution by
no means advantageous to his purse. There is this difference, however,
between sea-robbers and the robbers in forests, that the latter may,
without hazard, spare the lives of their victims; whereas the other
cannot put a passenger on shore in such a case without running the risk
of being apprehended. The crew of M. Des Cartes arranged their measures
with a view to evade any danger of that sort. They observed that he was
a stranger from a distance, without acquaintance in the country, and
that nobody would take any trouble to inquire about him, in case he
should never come to hand, (
quand il viendroit à manquer.')
Think, gentlemen, of these Friezland dogs discussing a philosopher as
if he were a puncheon of rum. 'His temper, they remarked, was very mild
and patient; and, judging from the gentleness of his deportment, and
the courtesy with which he treated themselves, that he could be nothing
more than some green young man, they concluded that they should have
all the easier task in disposing of his life. They made no scruple to
discuss the whole matter in his presence, as not supposing that he
understood any other language than that in which he conversed with his
servant; and the amount of their deliberation was—to murder him, then
to throw him into the sea, and to divide his spoils.'
Excuse my laughing, gentlemen, but the fact is, I always do laugh
when I think of this case—two things about it seem so droll. One is,
the horrid panic or 'funk,' (as the men of Eton call it,) in which Des
Cartes must have found himself upon hearing this regular drama sketched
for his own death- funeral succession and administration to his
effects. But another thing, which seems to me still more funny about
this affair is, that if these Friezland hounds had been game, we should
have no Cartesian philosophy; and how we could have done without that,
considering the world of books it has produced, I leave to any
respectable trunk-maker to declare.
However, to go on; spite of his enormous funk, Des Cartes showed
fight, and by that means awed these Anti-Cartesian rascals. 'Finding,'
says M. Baillet, 'that the matter was no joke, M. Des Cartes leaped
upon his feet in a trice, assumed a stern countenance that these
cravens had never looked for, and addressing them in their own
language, threatened to run them through on the spot if they dared to
offer him any insult.' Certainly, gentlemen, this would have been an
honor far above the merits of such inconsiderable. rascals—-to be
spitted like larks upon a Cartesian sword; and therefore I am glad M.
Des Cartes did not rob the gallows by executing his threat, especially
as he could not possibly have brought his vessel to port, after he had
murdered his crew; so that he must have continued to cruise for ever in
the Zuyder Zee, and would probably have been mistaken by sailors for
the
Flying Dutchman, homeward bound. 'The spirit which M. Des
Cartes manifested,' says his biographer,' had the effect of magic on
these wretches. The suddenness of their consternation struck their
minds with a confusion which blinded them to their advantage, and they
conveyed him to his destination as peaceably as he could desire.'
Possibly, gentlemen, you may fancy that, on the model of Cesar's
address to his poor ferryman, -'
Caesarem vehis et fortunas ejus
,'- M. Des Cartes needed only to have said, 'Dogs, you cannot cut my
throat, for you carry Des Cartes and his philosophy,' and might safely
have defied them to do their worst. A German emperor had the same
notion, when, being cautioned to keep out of the way of a cannonading,
he replied, 'Tut! man. Did you ever hear of a cannon-ball that killed
an emperor?' As to an emperor I cannot say, but a less thing has
sufficed to smash a philosopher; and the next great philosopher of
Europe undoubtedly
was murdered. This was Spinosa.
I know very well the common opinion about him is, that he died in
his bed. Perhaps he did, but he was murdered for all that; and this I
shall prove by a book published at Brussels, in the year 1731,
entitled,
La Vie de Spinosa; Par M. Jean Colerus, with many
additions, from a MS. life, by one of his friends. Spinosa died on the
21st February, 1677, being then little more than forty-four years old.
This, of itself, looks suspicious; and M. Jean admits, that a certain
expression in the MS. life of him would warrant the conclusion, 'que sa
mort n' a pas été tout-a-fait naturelle.' Living in a damp country, and
a sailor's country, like Holland, he may be thought to have indulged a
good deal in grog, especially in punch, which was
then newly discovered. Undoubtedly he might have done so; but the fact
is, that he did not. M. Jean calls him 'extrêmement sobre en son boire
et en son manger.' And though some wild stories were afloat about his
using the juice of mandragora, (p. 140,) and opium, (p. 144,) yet
neither of these articles appeared in his druggist's bill. Living,
therefore, with such sobriety, how was it possible that he should die a
natural death at forty-four? Hear his biographer's account: -'Sunday
morning, the 21st of February, before it was church time, Spinosa came
down stairs and conversed with the master and mistress of the house.'
At this time, therefore, perhaps ten o'clock on Sunday morning, you see
that Spinosa was alive, and pretty well. But it seems 'he had summoned
from Amsterdam a certain physician, whom,' says the biographer, ‘I
shall not otherwise point out to notice than by these two letters, L.
M. This L. M. had directed the people of the house to purchase an
ancient cock, and to have him boiled forthwith, in order that Spinosa
might take some broth about noon, which in fact he did, and ate some of
the old cock with a good appetite, after the landlord and his wife had
returned from church.
'In the afternoon, L. M. staid alone with Spinosa, the people of the
house having returned to church; on coming out from which, they learnt,
with much surprise, that Spinosa had died about three o'clock, in the
presence of L. M., who took his departure for Amsterdam the same
evening, by the night-boat, without paying the least attention to the
deceased. No doubt he was the readier to dispense with these duties, as
he had possessed himself of a ducatoon, and a small quantity of silver,
together with a silver-hafted knife, and had absconded with his
pillage.' Here you see, gentlemen, the murder is plain, and the manner
of it. It was L. M. who murdered Spinosa for his money. Poor S. was an
invalid, meagre, and weak: as no blood was observed, L. M., no doubt,
threw him down and smothered him with pillows,—the poor man being
already half suffocated by his infernal dinner. But who was L. M.? It
surely never could be Lindley Murray; for I saw him at York, in 1825;
and besides, I do not think he would do such a thing; at least, not to
a brother grammarian: for you know, gentlemen, that Spinosa wrote a
very respectable Hebrew grammar.
Hobbes, but why, or on what principle, I never could understand, was
not murdered. This- was a capital oversight of the professional men in
the seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject
for murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny; for I can
prove that he had money, and (what is very funny,) he had no right to
make the least resistance; for, according to himself, irresistible
power creates the very highest species of right, so that it is
rebellion of the blackest die to refuse to be murdered, when a
competent force appears to murder you. However, gentlemen, though he
was not murdered, I am happy to assure you that (by his own account) he
was three times very near being murdered. The first time was in the
spring of 1640, when he pretends to have circulated a little MS. on the
king's behalf, against the Parliament; he never could produce this MS.,
by the by; but he says that, 'Had not his Majesty dissolved the
Parliament,' (in May,) 'it had brought him into danger of his life.'
Dissolving the Parliament, however, was of no use; for, in November of
the same year, the Long Parliament assembled, and Hobbes, a second
time, fearing he should be murdered, ran away to France. This looks
like the madness of John Dennis, who thought that Louis XIV. would
never make peace with Queen Anne, unless he were given up to his
vengeance; and actually ran away from the sea-coast in that belief. In
France, Hobbes managed to take care of his throat pretty well for ten
years; but at the end of that time, by way of paying court to Cromwell,
he published his Leviathan. The old coward now began to 'funk' horribly
for the third time; he fancied the swords of the cavaliers were
constantly at his throat, recollecting how they had served the
Parliament ambassadors at the Hague and Madrid.'
Tum,' says he,
in his dog-Latin life of himself,
'Tum venit in mentem mihi Dorislaus et Ascham;
Tanquam proscripto terror ubique aderat.'
And accordingly he ran home to England. Now, certainly, it is very
true that a man deserved a cudgelling for writing
Leviathan; and
two or three cudgellings for writing a pentameter ending so
villainously as-
'terror ubique aderat!' But no man ever thought
him worthy of anything beyond cudgelling. And, in fact, the whole story
is a bounce of his own. For, in a most abusive letter which he wrote
'to a learned person,' (meaning Wallis the mathematician,) he gives
quite another account of the matter, and says (p. 8,) he ran home
'because he would not trust his safety with the French clergy;'
insinuating that he was likely to be murdered for his religion, which
would have been a high joke indeed—Tom's being brought to the stake
for religion.
Bounce or not bounce, however, certain it is, that Hobbes, to the
end of his life, feared that somebody would murder him. This is proved
by the story I am going to tell you: it is not from a manuscript, but
(as Mr. Coleridge says) it is as good as manuscript; for it comes from
a book now entirely forgotten, viz. 'The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined;
in a Conference between him and a Student in Divinity,' (published
about ten years before Hobbes's death.) The book is anonymous, but it
was written by Tennison, the same who, about thirty years after,
succeeded Tillotson as Archbishop of Canterbury. The introductory
anecdote is as follows: 'A certain divine, it seems, (no doubt Tennison
himself,) took an annual tour of one month to different parts of the
island. In one of these excursions (1670) he visited the Peak in
Derbyshire, partly in consequence of Hobbes's description of it. Being
in that neighborhood, he could not but pay a visit to Buxton; and at
the very moment of his arrival, he was fortunate enough to find a party
of gentlemen dismounting at the inn door, amongst whom was a long thin
fellow, who turned out to be no less a person than Mr. Hobbes, who
probably had ridden over from Chattsworth. Meeting so great a lion, a
tourist, in search of the picturesque, could do no less than present
himself in the character of bore. And luckily for this scheme, two of
Mr. Hobbes's companions were suddenly summoned away by express; so
that, for the rest of his stay at Buxton, he had Leviathan entirely to
himself, and had the honor of bowsing with him in the evening. Hobbes,
it seems, at first showed a good deal of stiffness, for he was shy of
divines; but this wore off, and he became very sociable and funny, and
they agreed to go into the bath together. How Tennison could venture to
gambol in the same water with Leviathan, I cannot explain; but so it
was: they frolicked about like two dolphins, though Hobbes must have
been as old as the hills; and 'in those intervals wherein they
abstained from swimming and plunging themselves,' [i. e. diving,] 'they
discoursed of many things relating to the Baths of the Ancients, and
the Origin of Springs. When they had in this manner passed away an
hour, they stepped out. of the bath; and, having dried and clothed
themselves, they sate down in expectation of such a supper as the place
afforded; designing to refresh themselves like the
Deipnosophilae,
and rather to reason than to drink profoundly. But in this innocent
intention they were interrupted by the disturbance arising from a
little quarrel, in which some of the ruder people in the house were for
a short time engaged. At this Mr. Hobbes seemed much concerned, though
he was at some distance from the persons.' And why was he concerned,
gentlemen? No doubt you fancy, from some benign and disinterested love
of peace and harmony, worthy of an old man and a philosopher. But
listen—'For a while he was not composed, but related it once or twice
as to himself, with a low and careful tone, how Sextus Roscius was
murdered after supper by the Balneae Palatinae. Of such general extent
is that remark of Cicero, in relation to Epicurus the Atheist, of whom
he observed that he of all men dreaded most those things which he
contemned—Death and the Gods.' Merely because it was supper time, and
in the neighborhood of a bath, Mr. Hobbes must have the fate of Sextus
Roscius. What logic was there in this, unless to a man who was always
dreaming of murder? Here was Leviathan, no longer afraid of the daggers
of English cavaliers or French clergy, but 'fiightened from his
propriety' by a row in an ale-house between some honest clod-hoppers of
Derbyshire, whom his own gaunt scare-crow of a person that belonged to
quite another century, would have frightened out of their wits.
Malebranche, it will give you pleasure to hear, was murdered. The
man who murdered him is well known: it was Bishop Berkeley. The story
is familiar, though hitherto not put in a proper light. Berkeley, when
a young man, went to Paris and called on Pere Malebranche. He found him
in his cell cooking. Cooks have ever been a
genus irritabile;
authors still more so: Malebranche was both: a dispute arose; the old
father, warm already, became warmer; culinary and metaphysical
irritations united to derange his liver: he took to his bed, and died.
Such is the common version of the story: 'So the whole ear of Denmark
is abused.' The fact is, that the matter was hushed up, out of
consideration for Berkeley, who (as Pope remarked) had ' every virtue
under heaven:' else it was well known that Berkeley, feeling himself
nettled by the waspishness of the old Frenchman, squared at him; a
turn-up was the consequence: Malebranche was floored in the first
round; the conceit was wholly taken out of him; and he would perhaps
have given in; but Berkeley's blood was now up, and he insisted on the
old Frenchman's retracting his doctrine of Occasional Causes. The
vanity of the man was too great for this; and he fell a sacrifice to
the impetuosity of Irish youth, combined with his own absurd obstinacy.
Leibnitz, being every way superior to Malebranche, one might,
a
fortiori, have counted on
his being murdered; which,
however, was not the case. I believe he was nettled at this neglect,
and felt himself insulted by the security in which he passed his days.
In no other way can I explain his conduct at the latter end of his
life, when he chose to grow very avaricious, and. to hoard up large
sums of gold, which he kept in his own house. This was at Vienna, where
he died; and letters are still in existence, describing the
immeasurable anxiety which he entertained for his throat. Still his
ambition, for being
attempted at least, was so great, that he
would not forego the danger. A late English pedagogue, of Birmingham
manufacture, viz., Dr. Parr, took a more selfish course, under the same
circumstances. He had amassed a considerable quantity of gold and
silver plate, which was for some time deposited in his bed-room at his
parsonage house, Hatton. But growing every day more afraid of being
murdered, which he knew that he could not stand, (and to which, indeed,
he never had the slightest pretension,) he transferred the whole to the
Hatton blacksmith; conceiving, no doubt, that the murder of a
blacksmith would fall more lightly on the
salus reipublicae,
than that of a pedagogue. But I have heard this greatly disputed; and
-it seems now generally agreed, that one good horse-shoe is worth about
2 1/2 Spital sermons.
As Leibnitz, though not murdered, may be said to have died, partly
of the fear that he should be murdered, and partly of vexation that he
was not,—Kant, on the other hand—who had no ambition in that way—
had a narrower escape from a murderer than any man we read of, except
Des Cartes. So absurdly does fortune throw about her favors! The case
is told, I think, in an anonymous life of this very great man. For
health's sake, Kant imposed upon himself, at one time, a walk of six
miles every day along a highroad. This fact becoming known to a man who
had his private reasons for committing murder, at the third milestone
from K6nigsberg, he waited for his 'intended,' who came up to time as
duly as a mail-coach.
But for an accident, Kant was a dead man. However, on considerations
of 'morality,' it happened that the murderer preferred a little child,
whom he saw playing in the road, to the old transcendentalist: this
child he murdered; and thus it happened that Kant escaped. Such is the
German account of the matter; but my opinion is that the murderer was
an amateur, who felt how little would be gained to the cause of good
taste by murdering an old, arid, and adust metaphysician; there was no
room for display, as the man could not possibly look more like a mummy
when dead, than he had done alive
.
_____
Thus, gentlemen, I have traced the connection between philosophy and
our art, until insensibly I find that I have wandered into our own era.
This I shall not take any pains to characterize apart from that which
preceded it, for, in fact, they have no distinct character. The
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, together with so much of the
nineteenth as we have yet seen, jointly compose the Augustan age of
murder. The finest work of the seventeenth century is, unquestionably,
the murder of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, which has my entire approbation.
At the same time, it must be observed, that the quantity of murder was
not great in this century, at least amongst our own artists; which,
perhaps, is attributable to the want of enlightened patronage.
Sint
Macenates, non decrunt, Flacce, Merones. Consulting Grant's
'Observations on the Bills of Mortality,' (4th edition, Oxford, 1665,)
I find, that out of 229,250 who died in London during one period of
twenty years, in the seventeenth century, not more than eighty-six were
murdered; that is, about four three-tenths per annum. A small number
this, gentlemen, to found an academy upon; and certainly, where the
quantity is so small, we have a right to expect that the quality should
be first rate. Perhaps it was; yet, still I am of opinion that the best
artist in this century was not equal to the best in that which
followed. For instance, however praiseworthy the case of Sir Edmondbury
Godfrey may be (and nobody can be more sensible of its merits than I
am), still, I cannot consent to place it on a level with that of Mrs.
Ruscombe of Bristol, either as to originality of design, or boldness
and breadth of style. This good lady's murder took place early in the
reign of George III., a reign which was notoriously favorable to he
arts generally. She lived in College Green, with a single maid-servant,
neither of them having any pretension to the notice of history but what
they derived from the great artist whose workmanship I am recording.
One fine morning, when all Bristol was alive and in motion, some
suspicion arising, the neighbors forced in entrance into the house, and
found Mrs. Ruscombe murdered in her bed-room, and the servant murdered
in the stairs.: this was at noon; and, not more than two hours before,
both mistress and servant had been seen alive. To the best of my
remembrance, this was in 1764; upwards of sixty years, therefore, have
now elapsed, and yet the artist is still undiscovered. The suspicions
of posterity have settled upon two pretenders—a baker and a
chimney-sweeper. But posterity is wrong; no unpractised artist could
have conceived so bold an idea as that of a noon-day murder in the
heart of a great city. It was no obscure baker, gentlemen, or anonymous
chimney-sweeper, be assured, that executed this work. I know who it
was. (
Here there was a general buzz, which at length broke out into
open applause; upon which the lecturer blushed, and went on with much
earnestness.) For Heaven's sake, gentlemen, do not mistake me; it
was not I that did it. I have not the vanity to think myself equal to
any such achievement; be assured that you greatly overrate my poor
talents; Mrs. Ruscombe's affair was far beyond my slender abilities.
But I came to know who the artist was, from a celebrated surgeon, who
assisted at his dissection. This gentleman had a private museum in the
way of his profession, one corner of which was occupied by a cast from
a man of remarkably fine proportions .
'That,' said the surgeon, ‘is a cast from the celebrated Lancashire
highwayman, who concealed his profession for some time from his
neighbors, by drawing woollen stockings over his horse's legs, and in
that way muffling the clatter which he must else have made in riding up
a flagged alley that led to his stable. At the time of his execution
for highway robbery, I was studying under Cruickshank: and the man's
figure was so uncommonly fine, that no money or exertion was spared to
get into possession of him with the least possible delay. By the
connivance of the under-sheriff he was cut down within the legal time,
and instantly put into a chaise and four; so that, when he reached
Cruickshank's he was positively not dead. Mr.---, a young student at
that time, had the honor of giving him the
coup de grace, and
finishing the sentence of the law.' This remarkable anecdote, which
seemed to imply that all the gentlemen in the dissecting-room were
amateurs of our class, struck me a good deal; and I was repeating it
one day to a Lancashire lady, who thereupon informed me, that she had
herself lived in the neighborhood of that highwayman, and well
remembered two circumstances, which combined, in the opinion of all his
neighbors, to fix upon him the credit of Mrs. Ruscombe's affair. One
was, the fact of his absence for a whole fortnight at the period of
that murder: the other, that, within a very little time after, the
neighborhood of this highwayman was deluged with dollars: now Mrs.
Ruscombe was known to have hoarded about two thousand of that coin. Be
the artist, however, who he might, the affair remains a durable
monument of his genius; for such was the impression of awe, and the
sense of power left behind, by the strength of conception manifested in
this murder, that no tenant (as I was told in 1810) had been found up
to that time for Mrs. Ruscombe's house.
But, whilst I thus eulogize the Ruscombian case, let me not be
supposed to overlook the many other specimens of extraordinary merit
spread over the face of this century. Such cases, indeed, as that of
Miss Bland, or of Captain Donnellan, and Sir Theophilus Boughton, shall
never have any countenance from me. Fie on these dealers in poison, say
I: can they not keep to the old honest way of cutting throats, without
introducing such abominable innovations from Italy? I consider all
these poisoning cases, compared with the legitimate style, as no better
than wax-work by the side of sculpture, or a lithographic print by the
side of a fine Volpato. But, dismissing these, there remain many
excellent works of art in a pure style, such as nobody need be ashamed
to own, as every candid connoisseur will admit.
Candid, observe,
I say; for great allowances must be made in these cases; no artist can
ever be sure of carrying through his own fine preconception. Awkward
disturbances will arise; people will not submit to have their throats
cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and whilst
the portrait painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his
subject, the artist, in our line, is generally embarrassed by too much
animation. At the same time, however disagreeable to the artist, this
tendency in murder to excite and irritate the subject, is certainly one
of its advantages to the world in general, which we ought not to
overlook, since it favors the development of latent talent. Jeremy
Taylor notices with admiration, the extraordinary leaps which people
will take under the influence of fear. There was a striking instance of
this in the recent case of the M'Keands; the boy cleared a height, such
as he will never clear again to his dying day. Talents also of the most
brilliant description for thumping, and indeed for all the gymnastic
exercises, have sometimes been developed by the panic which accompanies
our artists; talents else buried and hid under a bushel to the
possessors, as much as to their friends. I remember an interesting
illustration of this fact, in a case which I learned in Germany.
Riding one day in the neighborhood of Munich, I overtook a
distinguished amateur of our society, whose name I shall conceal. This
gentleman informed me that, finding himself wearied with the frigid
pleasures (so he called them) of mere amateurship, he had quitted
England for the continent—meaning to practise a little
professionally. For this purpose he resorted to Germany, conceiving the
police in that part of Europe to be more heavy and drowsy than
elsewhere. His
debut, as a practitioner, took place at Mannheim;
and, knowing me to be a brother amateur, he freely communicated the
whole of his maiden adventure. 'Opposite to my lodging,' said he,
'lived a baker: he was somewhat of a miser, and lived quite alone.
Whether it were his great expanse of chalky face, or what else, I know
not—but the fact was, I " fancied " him, and resolved to commence
business upon his throat, which, by the way, he always carried bare—a
fashion which is very irritating to my desires. Precisely at eight
o'clock in the evening, I observed that he regularly shut up his
windows. One night I watched him when thus engaged—bolted in after
him—locked the door—and, addressing him with great suavity,
acquainted him with the nature of my errand; at the same time advising
him to make no resistance, which would be mutually unpleasant. So
saying, I drew out my tools; and was proceeding to operate. But at this
spectacle, the baker, who seemed to have been struck by catalepsy at my
first announce, awoke into tremendous agitation. "I will not be
murdered!" he shrieked aloud; "what for will I lose my precious
throat?" "'What for? " said I; " if for no other reason, for this—
that you put alum into your bread. But no matter, alum or no alum, (for
I was resolved to forestall any argument on that point,) know that I am
a virtuoso in the art of murder—am desirous of improving myself in
its details—and am enamored of your vast surface of throat, to which
I am determined to be a customer." "Is it so? "said he, "but I'll find
you a customer in another line;" and so saying, he threw himself into a
boxing attitude. The very idea of his boxing struck me as ludicrous. It
is true, a London baker had distinguished himself in the ring, and
became known to fame under the title of the Master of the Rolls; but he
was young and unspoiled: whereas, this man was a monstrous feather-bed
in person, fifty years old, and totally out of condition. Spite of all
this, however, and contending against me, who am a master in the art,
he made so desperate a defence, that many times I feared he might turn
the tables upon me; and that I, an amateur, might be murdered by a
rascally baker. What a situation! Minds of sensibility will sympathize
with my anxiety. How severe it was, you may understand, by this, that
for the first thirteen rounds the baker had the advantage. Round the
fourteenth, I received a blow on the right eye, which closed it up; in
the end, I believe, this was my salvation; for the anger it roused in
me was so great, that, in this, and every one of the three following
rounds I floored the baker.'
‘Round 18th. The baker came up piping, and manifestly the worse for
wear. His geometrical exploits in the four last rounds had done him no
good. However, he showed some skill in stopping a message which I was
sending to his cadaverous mug; in delivering which, my foot slipped,
and I went down.
‘Round 19th. Surveying the baker, I became ashamed of having been so
much bothered by a shapeless mass of dough; and I went in fiercely, and
administered some severe punishment. A rally took place—both went
down—baker undermost—ten to three on amateur.
'Round 20th. The baker jumped up with surprising agility; indeed, he
managed his pins capitally, and fought wonderfully, considering that he
was drenched in perspiration; but the shine was now taken out of him,
and his game was the mere effect of panic. It was now clear that he
could not last much longer. In the course of this round we tried the
weaving system, in which I had greatly the advantage, and hit him
repeatedly on the conk. My reason for this was, that his conk was
covered with carbuncles; and I thought I should vex him by taking such
liberties with his conk, which in fact I did.
'The three next rounds, the master of the rolls staggered about like
a cow on the ice. Seeing how matters stood, in round twenty-fourth I
whispered something into his ear, which sent him down like a shot. It
was nothing more than my private opinion of the value of his throat at
an annuity office. This little confidential whisper affected him
greatly; the very perspiration was frozen on his face, and for the next
two rounds I had it all my own way. And when I called time for the
twenty-seventh round, he lay like a log on the floor.
' After which, said I to the amateur,'It may be presumed that you
accomplished your purpose.' 'You are right,' said he mildly,' I did;
and a great satisfaction, you know, it was to my mind, for by this
means I killed two birds with one stone;' meaning that he had both
thumped the baker and murdered him. Now, for the life of me, I could
not see
that; for, on the contrary, to my mind it appeared that
he had taken two stones to kill one bird, having been obliged to take
the conceit out of him first with his fist, and then with his tools.
But no matter for his logic. The moral of his story was good, for it
showed what an astonishing stimulus to latent talent is contained in
any reasonable prospect of being murdered. A pursy, unwieldy, half
cataleptic baker of Mannheim had absolutely fought six-and-twenty
rounds with an accomplished English boxer merely upon this inspiration;
so l greatly was natural genius exalted and sublimed by, the genial
presence of his murderer.
Really, gentlemen, when one hears of such things as these, it
becomes a duty, perhaps, a little to soften that extreme asperity with
which most men speak of murder. To hear people talk, you would suppose
that all the disadvantages and inconveniences were on the side of being
murdered, and that there were none at all in not being murdered. But
considerate men think otherwise. 'Certainly,' says Jeremy Taylor, 'It
is a less temporal evil to fall by the rudeness of a sword than the
violence of a fever: and the axe' (to which he might have added the
ship-carpenter's mallet and the crow-bar) 'a much less affliction than
a strangury.' Very true; the bishop talks like a wise man and an
amateur, as he is; and another great philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, was
equally above the vulgar prejudices on this subject. He declares it to
be one of 'the noblest functions of reason to know whether it is time
to walk out of the world or not.' (Book III., Collers' Translation.) No
sort of knowledge being rarer than this, surely that man must be a most
philanthropic character, who undertakes to instruct people in this
branch of knowledge gratis, and at no little hazard to himself. All
this, however, I throw out only in the way of speculation to future
moralists; declaring in the meantime my own private conviction, that
very few men commit murder upon philanthropic or patriotic principles,
and repeating what I have already said once at least—that, as to the
majority of murderers, they are very incorrect characters.
With respect to Williams's murders, the sublimest and most entire in
their excellence that ever were committed, I shall not allow myself to
speak incidentally. Nothing less than an entire lecture, or even an
entire course of lectures, would suffice to expound their merits. But
one curious fact, connected with his case, I shall mention, because it
seems to imply that the blaze of his genius absolutely dazzled the eye
of criminal justice. You all remember, I doubt not, that the
instruments with which he executed his first great work, (the murder of
the Marrs,) were a ship-carpenter's mallet and a knife. Now the mallet
belonged to an old Swede, one John Peterson, and bore his initials.
This instrument Williams left behind him, in Marr's house, and it fell
into the hands of the magistrates. Now, gentlemen, it is a fact that
the publication of this circumstance of the initials led immediately to
the apprehension of Williams, and, if made earlier, would have
prevented his second great work, (the murder of the Williamsons,) which
took place precisely twelve days after. But the magistrates kept back
this fact from the public for the entire twelve days, and until that
second work was accomplished. That finished, they published it,
apparently feeling that Williams had now done enough for his fame, and
that his glory was at length placed beyond the reach of accident.
As to Mr. Thurtell's case, I know not what to say. Naturally, I have
every disposition to think highly of my predecessor in the chair of
this society; and I acknowledge that his lectures were unexceptionable.
But speaking ingenuously, I do really think that his principal
performance, as an artist, has been much overrated. I admit that at
first I was myself carried away by the general enthusiasm. On the
morning when the murder was made known in London, there was the fullest
meeting of amateurs that I have ever known since the days of Williams;
old bed-ridden connoisseurs, who had got into a peevish way of sneering
and complaining 'that there was nothing doing,' now hobbled down to our
club-room: such hilarity, such benign expression of general
satisfaction, I have rarely witnessed. On every side you saw people
shaking hands, congratulating each other, and forming dinner parties
for the evening; and nothing was to be heard but, triumphant challenges
of -' Well! will
this do?'' Is this the right thing? 'Are you
satisfied at last?' But, in the midst of this, I remember we all grew
silent on hearing the old cynical amateur, L. S, that
laudator
temporis acti, stumping along with his wooden leg; he entered the
room with his usual scowl, and, as he advanced, he continued to growl
and stutter the whole way—'Not an original idea in the whole piece—
mere plagiarism,—base plagiarism from hints that I threw out!
Besides, his style is as hard as Albert Durer, and as coarse as
Fuseli.' Many thought that this was mere jealousy, and general
waspishness; but I confess that, when the first glow of enthusiasm had
subsided, I have found most judicious critics to agree that there was
something
falsetto in the style of Thurtell. The fact is, he was
a member of our society, which naturally gave a friendly bias to our
judgments; and his person was universally familiar to the cockneys,
which gave him, with the whole London public, a temporary popularity,
that his pretensions are not capable of supporting; for
opinionum
commenta delet dies, naturae judicia confirmat. There was, however,
an unfinished design of Thurtell's for the murder of a man with a pair
of dumb-bells, which I admired greatly; it was a mere outline, that he
never completed; but to my mind it seemed every way superior to his
chief work. I remember that there was great regret expressed by some
amateurs that this sketch should have been left in an unfinished state:
but there I cannot agree with them; for the fragments and first bold
outlines of original artists have often a felicity about them which is
apt to vanish in the management of the details.
The case of the M'Keands I consider far beyond the vaunted
performance of Thurtell,—indeed above all praise; and bearing that
relation, in fact, to the immortal works of Williams, which the
Eneid
bears to the
Iliad.
But it is now time that I should say a few words about the
principles of murder, not with a view to regulate your practice, but
your judgment: as to old women, and the mob of newspaper readers, they
are pleased with anything, provided it is bloody enough. But the mind
of sensibility requires something more.
First, then, let
us speak of the kind of person who is adapted to the purpose of the
murderer;
secondly, of the place where;
thirdly, of the
time when, and other little circumstances.
As to the person, I suppose it is evident that he ought to be a good
man; because, if he were not, he might himself, by possibility, be
contemplating murder at the very time; and such 'diamond-cut-diamond'
tussles, though pleasant enough where nothing better is stirring, are
really not what a critic can allow himself to call murders. I could
mention some people (I name no names) who have been murdered by other
people in a dark lane; and so far all seemed correct enough; but, on
looking farther into the matter, the public have become aware that the
murdered party was himself, at the moment, planning to rob his
murderer, at the least, and possibly to murder him, if he had been
strong enough. Whenever that is the case, or may be thought to be the
case, farewell to all the genuine effects of the art. For the final
purpose of murder, considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as
that of tragedy, in Aristotle's account of it, viz., 'to cleanse the
heart by means of pity and terror.' Now, terror there may be, but how
can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?
It is also evident that the person selected ought not to be a public
character. For instance, no judicious artist would have attempted to
murder Abraham Newland. For the case was this: everybody read so much
about Abraham Newland, and so few people ever saw him, that there was a
fixed belief that he was an abstract idea. And I remember that once,
when I happened to mention that I had dined at a coffee-house in
company with Abraham Newland, everybody looked scornfully at me, as
though I had pretended to have played at billiards with Prester John,
or to have had an affair of honor with the Pope. And, by the way, the
Pope would be a very improper person to murder: for he has such a
virtual ubiquity as the father of Christendom, and, like the cuckoo, is
so often heard but never seen, that I suspect most people regard
him
also as an abstract idea. Where, indeed, a public character is in the
habit of giving dinners, 'with every delicacy of the season,' the case
is very different: every person is satisfied that
he is no
abstract idea; and, therefore, there can be no impropriety in murdering
him; only that his murder will fall into the class of assassinations,
which I have not yet treated.
Thirdly.
The subject chosen ought to be in good health: for it is
absolutely barbarous to murder a sick person, who is usually quite
unable to bear it. On this principle, no cockney ought to be chosen who
is above twenty-five, for after that age he is sure to be dyspeptic. Or
at least, if a man will hunt in that warren, he ought to murder a
couple at one time; if the cockneys chosen should be tailors, he will
of course think it his duty, on the old established equation, to murder
eighteen. And, here, in this attention to the comfort of sick people,
you will observe the usual effect of a fine art to soften and refine
the feelings. The world in general, gentlemen, are very bloody-minded;
and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood; gaudy
display in this point is enough for
them. But the enlightened
connoisseur is more refined in his taste; and from our art, as from all
the. other liberal arts when thoroughly cultivated, the result is—to
improve and to humanize the heart; so true is it, that —
'Ingenue didicisse fideliter artes,
Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.'
A philosophic friend, well known for his philanthropy and general
benignity, suggests that the subject chosen ought also to have a family
of young children wholly dependent on his exertions, by way of
deepening the pathos. And, undoubtedly, this is a judicious caution.
Yet I would not insist too keenly on this condition. Severe good taste
unquestionably demands it; but still, where the man was otherwise
unobjectionable in point of morals and health, I would not look with
too curious a jealousy to a restriction which might have the effect of
narrowing the artist's sphere.
So much for the person. As to the time, the place, and the tools, I
have many things to say, which at present I have no room for. The good
sense of the practitioner has usually directed him to night and
privacy. Yet there have not been wanting cases where this rule was
departed from with excellent effect. In respect to time, Mrs.
Ruscombe's case is a beautiful exception, which I have already
noticed;. and in respect both to time and place, there is a fine
exception in the annals of Edinburgh, (year 1805,) familiar to every
child in Edinburgh, but which has unaccountably been defrauded of its
due portion of fame amongst English amateurs. The case I mean is that
of a porter to one of the banks, who was murdered whilst carrying a bag
of money, in broad daylight, on turning out of the High Street, one of
the most public streets in Europe, and the murderer is to this hour
undiscovered.
'Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus,
Singula dum capti circumvectarnur amore
.'
And now, gentlemen, in conclusion, let me again solemnly disclaim
all pretensions on my own part to the character of a professional man.
I never attempted any murder in my life, except in the year 1801, upon
the body of a tom-cat; and
that turned out differently from my
intention. My purpose, I own, was downright murder. ‘
Semper ego
auditor tantumrn?' said I, '
nunquamne reponam?' And I went
down stairs in search of Tom at one o'clock on a dark night, with the
'animus,' and no doubt with the fiendish looks, of a murderer. But when
I found him, he was in the act of plundering the pantry of bread and
other things. Now this gave a new turn to the affair; for the time
being one of general scarcity, when even Christians were reduced to the
use of potato-bread, rice-bread, and all sorts of things, it was
downright treason in a tom-cat to be wasting good wheaten-bread in the
way he was doing. It instantly became a patriotic duty to put him to
death; and as I raised aloft and shook the glittering steel, I fancied
myself rising like Brutus, effulgent from a crowd of patriots, and, as
I stabbed him, I
‘called aloud on Tully's name,
And bade the father of his country hail!'
Since then, what wandering thoughts I may have had of attempting the
life of an ancient ewe, of a superannuated hen, and such 'small deer,'
are locked up in the secrets of my own breast; but for the higher
departments of the art, I confess myself to be utterly unfit. My
ambition does not rise so high. No, gentlemen, in the words of Horace,
- fungar vice cotis, acutum
Reddere quae ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi.'
Doctor North: You are a liberal man: liberal in the true classical
sense, not in the slang sense of modern politicians and
education-mongers. Being so, I am sure that you will sympathize with my
case. I am an ill-used man, Dr. North—particularly ill used; and,
with your permission, I will briefly explain how. A black scene of
calumny will be laid open; but you, Doctor, will make all things square
again. One frown from you, directed to the proper quarter, or a warning
shake of the crutch, will set me right in public opinion, which at
present, I am sorry to say, is rather hostile to me and mine—all
owing to the wicked arts of slanderers. But you shall hear.
A good many years ago you may remember that I came forward in the
character of a
dilettante in murder. Perhaps
dilettante
may be too strong a word.
Connoisseur is better suited to the
scruples and infirmity of public taste. I suppose there is no harm in
that at least. A man is not bound to put his eyes, ears, and
understanding into his breeches pocket when he meets with a murder. If
he is not in a downright comatose state, I suppose he must see that one
murder is better or worse than another in point of good taste. Murders
have their little differences and shades of merit as well as statues,
pictures, oratorios, cameos, intaglios, or what not. You may be angry
with the man for talking too much, or too publicly, (as to the too
much, that I deny -a man can never cultivate his taste too highly;) but
you must allow him to think, at any rate; and you, Doctor, you think, I
am sure, both deeply and correctly on the subject. Well, would you
believe it? all my neighbors came to hear of that little Aesthetic
essay which you had published; and, unfortunately, hearing at the very
same time of a club that I was connected with, and a dinner at which I
presided—both tending to the same little object as the essay, viz.,
the diffusion of a just taste among her majesty's subjects, they got up
the most barbarous calumnies against me. In particular, they said that
I, or that the club, which comes to the same thing, had offered
bounties on well conducted homicides- with a scale of drawbacks, in
case of any one defect or flaw, according to a table issued to private
friends. Now, Doctor, I'll tell you the whole truth about the dinner
and the club, and you'll see how malicious the world is. But first let
me tell you, confidentially, what my real principles are upon the
matters in question.
As to murder, I never committed one in my life. It's a well known
thing amongst all my friends. I can get a paper to certify as much,
signed by lots of people. Indeed, if you come to that, I doubt whether
many people could produce as strong a certificate. Mine would. be as
big as a table-cloth. There is indeed one member of the club, who
pretends to say that he caught me once making too free with his throat
on a club night, after every body else had retired. But, observe, he
shuffles in his story according to his state of civilisation.'When not
far gone, he contents himself with
saying that he caught me
ogling his throat; and that I was melancholy for some weeks after, and
that my voice sounded in a way expressing, to the nice ear of a
connoisseur,
the sense of opportunities lost—but the club all
know that he's a disappointed man himself, and that he speaks
querulously at times about the fatal neglect of a man's coming abroad
without his tools. Besides, all this is an affair between two amateurs,
and every body makes allowances for little asperities and sorenesses in
such a case. 'But,' say you, 'if no murderer, my correspondent may have
encouraged, or even have bespoken a murder.' No, upon my honor—
nothing of the kind. And that was the very point I wished to argue for
your satisfaction. The truth is, I am a very particular man in
everything relating to murder; and perhaps I carry my delicacy too far.
The Stagyrite most justly, and possibly with a view to my case, placed
virtue in the [
Greek here] or middle point between two extremes.
A golden mean is certainly what every man should aim at. But it is
easier talking than doing; and, my infirmity being notoriously too much
milkiness of heart, I find it difficult to maintain that steady
equatorial line between the two poles of too much murder on the one
hand, and too little on the other. I am too soft, Doctor, too soft; and
people get excused through me nay, go through life without an attempt
made upon them, that ought not to be excused. I believe if I had the
management of things, there would hardly be a murder from year's end to
year's end. In fact I'm for virtue, and goodness, and all that sort of
thing. And two instances I'll give you to what an extremity I carry my
virtue. The first may seem a trifle; but not if you knew my nephew, who
was certainly born to be hanged, and would have been so long ago, but
for my restraining voice. He is horribly ambitious, and thinks himself
a man of cultivated taste in most branches of murder, whereas, in fact,
he has not one idea on the subject, but such as he has stolen from me.
This is so well known, that the club has twice blackballed him, though
every indulgence was shown to him as my relative. People came to me and
said—'Now really, President, we would do much to serve a relative of
yours. But still, what can be said? You know yourself that he'll
disgrace us. If we were to elect him, why, the next thing we should
hear of would be some vile butcherly murder, by way of justifying our
choice. And what sort of a concern would it be? You know, as well as we
do, that it would be a disgraceful affair, more worthy of the shambles
than of an artist's
atelier. He would fall upon some great big
man, some huge farmer returning drunk from a fair. There would be
plenty of blood, and that he would expect us to take in lieu of taste,
finish, scenical grouping. Then, again, how would he tool? Why, most
probably with a cleaver and a couple of paving stones: so that the
whole coup d'œil would remind you rather of some hideous ogre or
cyclops, than of the delicate operator of the nineteenth century.' The
picture was drawn with the hand of truth;
that I could not but
allow, and, as to personal feelings in the matter, I dismissed them
from the first. The next morning I spoke to my nephew—I was
delicately situated, as you see, but I determined that no consideration
should induce me to flinch from my duty. 'John,' said I, you seem to me
to have taken an erroneous view of life and its duties. Pushed on by
ambition, you are dreaming rather of what it might be glorious to
attempt, than what it would be possible for you to accomplish. Believe
me, it is not necessary to a man's respectability that he should commit
a murder. Many a man has passed through life most respectably, without
attempting any species of homicide—good, bad, or indifferent. It is
your first duty to ask yourself,
quid valeant humeri, quid ferre
recusent? we cannot all be brilliant men in this life. And it is
for your interest to be contented rather with a humble station well
filled, than to shock every body with failures, the more conspicuous by
contrast with the ostentation of their prom. ises.' John made no
answer, he looked very sulky at the moment, and I am in high hopes that
I have saved a near relation from making a fool of himself by
attempting what is as much beyond his capacity as an epic poem. Others,
however, tell me that he is meditating a revenge upon me and the whole
club. But let this be as it may,
liberavi animam meam;
and, as you see, have run some risk with a wish to diminish the amount
of homicide. But the other case still more forcibly illustrates my
virtue. A man came to me as a candidate for the place of my servant,
just then vacant. He had the reputation of having dabbled a little in
our art; some said not without merit. What startled me, however, was,
that he supposed this art to be part of his regular duties in my
service. Now that was a thing I would not allow; so I said at once,'
Richard (or James, as the case might be,) you misunderstand my
character. If a man will and must practise this difficult (and allow me
to add, dangerous) branch of art—if he has an overruling genius for
it, why, he might as well pursue his studies whilst living in my
service as in another's. And also, I may observe, that it can do no
harm either to himself or to the subject on whom he operates, that he
should be guided by men of more taste than himself. Genius may do much,
but long study of the art must always entitle a man to offer advice. So
far I will go—general principles I will suggest. But as to any
particular case, once for all I will have nothing to do with it. Never
tell me of any special work of art you are meditating—I set my face
against it
in toto. For if once a man indulges himself in
murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing
he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to
incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you
never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from
some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
Principiis obsta — that's my rule.' Such was my speech, and I have
always acted up to it; so if that is not being virtuous, I should be
glad to know what is. But now about the dinner and the club. The club
was not particularly of my creation; it arose pretty much as other
similar associations, for the propagation of truth and the
communication of new ideas, rather from the necessities of. things than
upon any one man's suggestion. As to the dinner, if any man more than
another could be held responsible for that, it was a member known
amongst us by the name of
Toad-in-the-hole. He was so called
from his gloomy misanthropical disposition, which led him into constant
disparagements of all modern murders as vicious abortions, belonging to
no authentic school of art. The finest performances of our own age, he
snarled at cynically; and at length this querulous humor grew upon him
so much, and he became so notorious as a
laudator temporis acti,
that few people cared to seek his society. This made him still more
fierce and truculent. He went about muttering and growling; wherever
you met him he was soliloquizing and saying, 'despicable pretenderi—
without grouping—without two ideas upon handling—without'—and
there you lost him. At length existence seemed to be painful to him; he
rarely spoke, he seemed conversing with phantoms in the air, his
housekeeper informed us that his reading was nearly confined to
God's
Revenge upon Murder, by Reynolds, and a more ancient book of the
same title, noticed by Sir Walter Scott, in his
Fortunes of Nigel.
Sometimes, perhaps, he might read in the Newgate Calendar down to the
year 1788, but he never looked into a book more recent. In fact, he had
a theory with regard to the French Revolution, as having been the great
cause of degeneration in murder. 'Very soon, sir,' he used to say, 'men
will have lost the art of killing poultry: the very rudiments of the
art will have perished!' In the year 1811, he retired from general
society. Toad-in-the-hole was no more seen in any public resort. We
missed him from his wonted haunts—nor up the lawn, nor at the wood
was he. By the side of the main conduit his listless length at noontide
he would stretch, and pore upon the filth that muddled by. 'Even dogs
are not what they were, sir—not what they should be. I remember in my
grandfather's time that some dogs had an idea of murder. I have known a
mastiff lie in ambush for a rival, sir, and murder him with pleasing
circumstances of good taste. Yes, sir, I knew a tom-cat that was an
assassin. But now' and then, the subject growing too painful, he dashed
his hand to his forehead, and went off abruptly in a homeward direction
towards his favorite conduit, where he was seen by an amateur in such a
state that he thought it dangerous to address him. Soon after he shut
himself entirely up; it was understood that he had resigned himself to
melancholy; and at length the prevailing notion was, that
Toad-in-the-hole had hanged himself.
The world was wrong
there, as it had been on some other
questions. Toad-in-the-hole might be sleeping, but dead he was not; and
of that we soon had ocular proof. One morning in 1812, an amateur
surprised us with the news that he had seen Toad-in-the-hole brushing
with hasty steps the dews away to meet the postman by the conduit side.
Even that was something: how much more, to hear that he had shaved his
beard—had laid aside his sad-colored clothes, and was adorned like a
bridegroom of ancient days. What could be the meaning of all this? Was
Toad-in-the-hole mad? or how? Soon after the secret was explained—in
more than a figurative sense 'the murder was out.' For in came the
London morning papers, by which it appeared that but three days before
a murder, the most superb of the century by many degrees, had occurred
in the heart of London. I need hardly say, that this was the great
exterminating
chef-d'œuvre of Williams at Mr. Marr's, No. 29,
Ratcliffe Highway. That was the
début of the artist; at least
for anything the public knew. What occurred at Mr. Williamson's twelve
nights afterwards—the second work turned out from the same chisel—
some people pronounced even superior. But Toad-in-the-hole always
'reclaimed'- he was even angry at comparisons. 'This vulgar
goût de
comparaison, as La Bruyere calls it,' he would often remark, 'will
be our ruin; each work has its own separate characteristics—each in
and for itself is incomparable. One, perhaps, might suggest the
Iliad
—the other the
Odyssey: what do you get by such comparisons?
Neither ever was, or will be surpassed; and when you've talked for
hours, you must still come back to that.' Vain, however, as all
criticism might be, he often said that volumes might be written on each
case for itself; and he even proposed to publish in quarto on the
subject.
Meantime, how had Toad-in-the-hole happened to hear of this great
work of art so early in the morning? He had received an account by
express, dispatched by a correspondent in London, who watched the
progress of art on
Toady's behalf, with a general commission to
send off a special express, at whatever cost, in the event of any
estimable works appearing—how much more upon occasion of a
nec
plus ultra in art! The express arrived in the night-time;
Toad-in-the-hole was then gone to bed; he had been muttering and
grumbling for hours, but of course he was called up. On reading the
account, he threw his arms round the express, called him his brother
and his preserver; settled a pension upon him for three lives, and
expressed his regret at not having it in his power to knight him. We,
on our part—we amateurs, I mean—having heard that he was abroad,
and therefore had not hanged himself, made sure of soon seeing him
amongst us. Accordingly he soon arrived, knocked over the porter on his
road to the reading-room; he seized every man's hand as he passed him—
wrung it almost frantically, and kept ejaculating, 'Why, now here's
something like a murder!—this is the real thing—this is genuine—
this is what you can approve, can recommend to a friend: this—says
every man, on reflection—this is the thing that ought to be!' Then,
looking at particular friends, he said—'Why, Jack, how are you? Why,
Tom, how are you? Bless me, you look ten years younger than when I last
saw you.' 'No, sir,' I replied,' It is you who look ten years younger.'
'Do I? well, I should'nt wonder if I did; such works are enough to make
us all young.' And in fact the general opinion is, that
Toad-in-the-hole would have died but for this regeneration of art,
which he called a second age of Leo the Tenth; and it was our duty, he
said solemnly, to commemorate it. At present, and
en attendant
—rather as an occasion for a public participation in public sympathy,
than as in itself any commensurate testimony of our interest—he
proposed that the club should meet and dine together. A splendid public
dinner, therefore, was given by the club; to which all amateurs were
invited from a distance of one hundred miles.
Of this dinner, there are ample short-hand notes amongst the
archives of the club. But they are not 'extended,' to speak
diplomatically; and the reporter is missing—I believe, murdered.
Meantime, in years long after that day, and on an occasion perhaps
equally interesting, viz., the turning up of Thugs and Thuggism,
another dinner was given. Of this I myself kept notes, for fear of
another accident to the short-hand reporter. And I here subjoin them.
Toad-in-the-hole, I must mention, was present at this dinner. In fact,
it was one of its sentimental incidents. Being as old as the valleys at
the dinner of 1812, naturally he was as old as the hills at the Thug
dinner of 1838. He had taken to wearing his beard again; why, or with
what view, it passes my persimmon to tell you. But so it was. And his
appearance was most benign and venerable. Nothing could equal the
angelic radiance of his smile as he inquired after the unfortunate
reporter, (whom, as a piece of private scandal, I should tell you that
he was himself supposed to have murdered, in a rapture of creative
art:) the answer was, with roars of laughter, from the under-sheriff of
our county—'Non est inventus.' Toad-in-the-hole laughed outrageously
at this: in fact, we all thought he was choking; and, at the earnest
request of the company, a musical composer furnished a most beautiful
glee upon the occasion, which was sung five times after dinner, with
universal applause and inextinguishable laughter, the words being
these, (and the chorus so contrived, as most beautifully to mimic the
peculiar laughter of Toad-in-the-hole:)
-'Et interrogatum est' a Toad-in-the-hole—Ubi est ille reporter?
Et responsum est cum cachinno—Non est inventus.'
CHORUS.'
Deinde iteratum est ab omnibus, cum cachinnatione undulante—Non
est inventus.'
Toad-in-the-hole, I ought to mention, about nine years before, when
an express from Edinburgh brought him the earliest intelligence of the
Burke-and-Hare revolution in the art, went mad upon the spot; and,
instead of a pension to the express for even one life, or a knighthood,
endeavored to Burke him; in consequence of which he was put into a
strait waistcoat. And that was the reason we had no dinner then. But
now all of us were alive and kicking, strait-waistcoaters and others;
in fact, not one absentee was reported upon the entire roll. There were
also many foreign amateurs present.
Dinner being over, and the cloth drawn, there was a general call
made for the new glee of
Non est inventus; but, as this would
have interfered with the requisite gravity of the company during the
earlier toasts, I overruled the call. After the national toasts had
been given, the first official toast of the day was,
The Old Man of
the Mountains—drunk in solemn silence.
Toad-in-the-hole returned thanks in a neat speech. He likened
himself to the Old Man of the Mountains, in a few brief allusions, that
made the company absolutely yell with laughter; and he concluded with
giving the health of
Mr. Von Hammer
, with many thanks to him for his learned History of the Old Man
and his subjects the assassins.
Upon this I rose and said, that doubtless most of the company were
aware of the distinguished place. assigned by orientalists to the very
learned Turkish scholar Von Hammer the Austrian; that he had made the
profoundest researches into our art as connected with those early and
eminent artists the Syrian assassins in the period of the Crusaders;
that his work had been for several years deposited, as a rare treasure
of art, in the library of the club. Even the author's name, gentlemen,
pointed him out as the historian of our art- Von Hammer –
'Yes, yes,' interrupted Toad-in-the-hole, who never can sit still—
'Yes, yes, Von Hammer — he's the man for a
malleus hereticorum:
think rightly of our art, or he's the man to tickle your catastrophes.
You all know what consideration Williams bestowed on the hammer, or the
ship carpenter's mallet, which is the same thing. Gentlemen, I give you
another great hammer—Charles the Hammer, the Marteau, or, in old
French, the Martel—he hammered the Saracens till they were all as
dead as door-nails — he did, believe me.'
'Charles Martel,
with all the honors.'
But the explosion of Toad-in-the-hole, together with the uproarious
cheers for the grandpapa of Charlemagne, had now made the company
unmanageable. The orchestra was again challenged with shouts the
stormiest for the new glee. I made again a powerful effort to overrule
the challenge. I might as well have talked to the winds. I foresaw a
tempestuous evening; and I ordered myself to be strengthened with three
waiters on each side; the vice-president with as many. Symptoms of
unruly enthusiasm were beginning to show out; and I own that I myself
was considerably excited as the orchestra opened with its storm of
music, and the impassioned glee began -'
Et interrogatum est d
Toad-in-thle-hole — Ubi est ille Reporter?' And the frenzy of the
passion became absolutely convulsing, as the full chorus fell in -'
Et iteratum est ab omnibus—Non est inventus.' By this time I saw
how things were going: wine and music were making most of the amateurs
wild. Particularly Toad-in-the-hole, though considerably above a
hundred years old, was getting as vicious as a young leopard. It was a
fixed impression with the company that he had murdered the reporter in
the year 1812; since which time (viz. twenty-six years) 'ille reporter'
had been constantly reported 'Non est inventus.' Consequently, the glee
about himself, which of itself was most tumultuous and jubilant,
carried him off his feet. Like the famous choral songs amongst the
citizens of Abdera, nobody could hear it without a contagious desire
for falling back into the agitating music of 'Et interrogatum est a
Toad-in-thehole,' &c. I enjoined vigilance upon my assessors, and the
business of the evening proceeded.
The next toast was—
The Jewish Sicarii.
Upon which I made the following explanation to the company:—
'Gentlemen, I am sure it will interest you all to hear that the
assassins, ancient as they were, had a race of predecessors in the very
same country. All over Syria, but particularly in Palestine, during the
early years of the Emperor Nero, there was a band of murderers, who
prosecuted their studies in a very novel manner. They did not practise
in the night-time, or in lonely places; but justly considering that
great. crowds are in themselves a sort of darkness by means of the
dense pressure and the impossibility of finding out who it was that
gave the blow, they mingled with mobs everywhere; particularly at the
great paschal feast in Jerusalem; where they actually had the audacity,
as Josephus assures us, to press into the temple.—and whom should
they choose for operating upon but Jonathan himself, the Pontifex
Maximus? They murdered him, gentlemen, as beautifully as if they had
had him alone on a moonless night in a dark lane. And when it was
asked, who was the murderer, and where he was'—
'Why, then, it was answered,' interrupted Toad-in-the-hole,
'Non
est inventus.' And then, in spite of all I could do or say, the
orchestra opened, and the whole company began—Et interrogatum est a
Toad-in-the-hole—
Ubi est ille Sicarius? Et responsum est ab omnibus—
Non est inventus.'
When the tempestuous chorus had subsided, I began again: —
'Gentlemen, you will find a very circumstantial account of the Sicarii
in at least three different parts of Josephus; once in Book XX. sect.
v. c. 8, of his
Antiquities; once in Book I. of his Wars: but in
sect. 10 of the chapter first cited you will find a particular
description of their tooling. This is what he says—' They tooled with
small scymetars not much different from the Persian
acinacae,
but more curved, and for all the world most like the Roman sickles or
sicae.' It is perfectly magnificent, gentlemen, to hear the sequel
of their history. Perhaps the only case on record where a regular army
of murderers was assembled, a
justus exercitus, was in the case
of these
Sicarii. They mustered in such strength in the
wilderness, that Festus himself was obliged to march against them with
the Roman legionary force.'
Upon which Toad-in-the-hole, that cursed interrupter, broke out
a-singing-
' Et interrogatum est a. Toad-in-the-hole- Ubi est ille
exercitus? Et responsum est ab omnibus — Non
est inventus.'
No, no, Toad—you are wrong for once: that army
was found,
and was all cut to pieces in the desert. Heavens, gentlemen, what a
sublime picture! The Roman legions—the wilderness —
Jerusalem in the distance—an army of murderers in the
foreground!'
Mr. R., a member, now gave the next toast—'To the further
improvement of Tooling, and thanks to the Committee for their
services.'
Mr. L., on behalf of the committee who had reported on that subject,
returned thanks. He made an interesting extract from the report, by
which it appeared how very much stress had been laid formerly on the
mode of tooling, by the fathers, both Greek and Latin. In confirmation
of this pleasing fact, he made a very striking statement in reference
to the earliest work of antediluvian art. Father Mersenne, that learned
Roman Catholic, in page one thousand four hundred and thirty-one
[Literally, good reader, and no joke at all.] of his operose Commentary
on Genesis, mentions, on the authority of several rabbis, that the
quarrel of Cain with Abel was about a young woman; that, by various
accounts, Cain had tooled with his teeth, [Abelem fuisse
morsibus
dilaceratum a Cain;] by many others, with the jaw-bone of an ass;
which is the tooling adopted by most painters. But it is pleasing to
the mind of sensibility to know that, as science expanded, sounder
views were adopted. One author contends for a pitchfork, St. Chrysostom
for a sword, Irenius for a scythe, and Prudentius for a hedging-bill.
This last writer delivers his opinion thus:
-- Frater, probate sanctitatis aemulus,
Germana curve colla frangit sarculo:'
i.e. his brother, jealous of his attested sanctity, fractures his
brotherly throat with a curved hedging-bill.' All which is respectfully
submitted by your committee, not so much as decisive of the question,
(for it is not,) but in order. to impress upon the youthful mind the
importance which has ever been attached to the quality of the tooling
by such men as Chrysostom and Irenaeus.'
'Dang Irenaeus!' said Toad-in-the-hole, who now rose impatiently to
give the next toast:—'Our Irish friends; and a speedy revolution in
their mode of tooling, as well as everything else connected with the
art!'
'Gentlemen, I'll tell you the plain truth. Every day of the year we
take up a paper, we read the opening of a murder. We say, this is good,
this is charming, this is excellent! But, behold you! scarcely have we
read a little farther, before the word Tipperary or Ballina-something
betrays the Irish manufacture. Instantly we loath it; we call to the
waiter; we say, "Waiter, take away this paper; send it out of the
house; it is absolutely offensive to all just taste." 1 appeal to every
man whether, on finding a murder (otherwise perhaps promising enough)
to be Irish, he does not feel himself as much insulted as when Madeira
being ordered, he finds it to be Cape; or, when, taking up what he
takes to be a mushroom, it turns out what children call a toad-stool.
Tithes, politics, or something wrong in principle, vitiate every Irish
murder. Gentlemen, this must be reformed, or Ireland will not be a land
to live in; at least, if we do live there, we must import all our
murders, that's clear.' Toad-in-the-hole sat down growling with
suppressed wrath, and the universal 'Hear, hear!' sufficiently showed
that he spoke the general feeling.
The next toast was—'The sublime epoch of Burkism and Harism!'
This was drunk with enthusiasm; and one of the members, who spoke to
the question, made a very curious communication to the company:
'Gentlemen, we fancy Burkism to be a pure invention of our own times:
and in fact no Pancirollus has ever enumerated this branch of art when
writing
de rebus deperditis. Still I have ascertained that the
essential principle of the art was known to the ancients, although like
the art of painting upon glass, of making the myrrhine cups, &c., it
was lost in the dark ages for want of encouragement. In the famous
collection of Greek epigrams made by Planudes is one upon a very
charming little case of Burkism: it is a perfect little gem of art. The
epigram itself I cannot lay my hand upon at this moment, but the
following is an abstract of it by Salmasius, as I find it in his notes
on Vopiscus: "Est et elegans epigramma Lucilii, (well he might call it
'elegans!') ubi medicus et pollinctor de compacto sic egerunt, ut
medicus aegros omnes curae suae commissos occideret:' this was the
basis of the contract, you see, that on the one part the doctor, for
himself and his assigns, doth undertake and contract duly and truly to
murder all the patients committed to his charge: but why? There lies
the beauty of the case -" Et ut pollinctori amico suo traderet
pollingeados." The
pollinctor, you are aware, was a person whose
business it was to dress and prepare dead bodies for burial. The
original ground of the transaction appears to have been sentimental:
"He was my friend," says the murderous doctor; " 'he was dear to me,"
in speaking of the pollinctor. But the law, gentlemen, is stern and
harsh: the law will not hear of these tender motives: to sustain a
contract of this nature in law, it is essential that a "consideration"
should be given. Now what was the consideration? For thus far all is on
the side of the pollinctor: he will be well paid for his services; but,
meantime, the generous, the noble-minded doctor gets nothing. What was
the little consideration again, I ask, which the law would insist on
the doctor's taking? You shall hear: "Et ut pollinctor vicissim [
Greek here] quos furabatur de pollinctione mortuorum medico
mitteret doni ad alliganda vulnera eorum quos curabat." Now, the case
is clear: the whole went on a principle of reciprocity which would have
kept up the trade for ever. The doctor was also a surgeon: he could not
murder
all his patients: some of the surgical patients must be
retained intact;
re infecta. For these he wanted linen bandages.
But, unhappily, the Romans swore woollen, on which account they bathed
so often. Meantime, there
was linen to be had in Rome; but it
was monstrously dear; and the [
Greek here] or linen swathing
bandages, in which superstition obliged them to bind up corpses, would
answer capitally for the surgeon. The doctor, therefore, contracts to
furnish his friend with a constant succession of corpses, provided, and
be it understood always, that his said friend in return should supply
him with one half of the articles he would receive from the friends of
the parties murdered or to be murdered. The doctor invariably
recommended his invaluable friend the pollinctor, (whom let us call the
undertaker;) the undertaker, with equal regard to the sacred rights of
friendship, uniformly recommended the doctor. Like Pylades and Orestes,
they were models of a perfect friendship: in their lives they were
lovely, and on the gallows, it is to be hoped, they were not divided.
'Gentlemen, it makes me laugh horribly, when I think of those two
friends drawing and redrawing on each other: "Pollinctor in account
with Doctor, debtor by sixteen corpses: creditor by forty-five
bandages, two of which damaged." Their names unfortunately are lost;
but I conceive they
must have been Quintus Burkius and Publius
Harius. By the way, gentlemen, has anybody heard lately of Hare? I
understand he is comfortably settled in Ireland, considerably to the
west, and does a little business now and then; but, as he observes with
a sigh, only as a retailer—nothing like the fine thriving wholesale
concern so carelessly blown up at Edinburgh. " You see what comes of
neglecting business," -is the chief moral, the [
Greek here], as
Aesop would say, which he draws from his past experience.'
At length came the toast of the day—
Thugdom in all its branches.
The speeches
attempted at this crisis of the dinner were past
all counting. But the applause was so furious, the music so stormy, and
the crashing of glasses so incessant, from the general resolution never
again to drink an inferior toast from the same glass, that my power is
not equal to the task of reporting. Besides which, Toad-in-the-hole now
became quite ungovernable. He kept firing pistols in every direction;
sent his servant for a blunderbuss, and talked of loading with
ball-cartridge. We- conceived that his former madness had returned at
the mention of Burke and Hare; or that, being again weary of life, he
had resolved to go off in a general massacre. This we could not think
of allowing; it became indispensable, therefore, to kick him out, which
we did with universal consent, the whole company lending their toes
uno pede, as I may say, though pitying his gray hairs and his
angelic smile. During the operation the orchestra poured in their old
chorus. The universal company sang, and (what surprised us most of all)
Toad-in-the-hole joined us furiously in singing—
'Et interrogatum est ab'omnibus—Ubi est ille Toad-in-the-hole?
Et responsum est ab omnibus—Non est inventus.'
It is impossible to conciliate readers of so saturnine and gloomy a
class, that they cannot enter with genial sympathy into any gaiety
whatever, but, least of all, when the gaiety trespasses a little into
the province of the extravagant. In such a case, not to sympathize is
not to understand; and the playfulness, which is not relished, becomes
flat and insipid, or absolutely without meaning. Fortunately, after all
such churls have withdrawn from my audience in high displeasure, there
remains a large majority who are loud in acknowledging the amusement
which they have derived from a former paper of mine, 'On Murder
considered as one of the Fine Arts;' at the same time proving the
sincerity of their praise by one hesitating expression of censure.
Repeatedly they have suggested to me, that perhaps the extravagance,
though clearly intentional, and forming one element in the general
gaiety of the conception, went too far. I am not myself of that
opinion; and I beg to remind these friendly censors, that it is amongst
the direct purposes and efforts of this bagatelle to graze the brink of
horror, and of all that would in actual realization be most repulsive.
The very excess of the extravagance, in fact, by suggesting to the
reader continually the mere aeriality of the entire speculation,
furnishes the surest means of disenchanting him from the horror which
might else gather upon his feelings. Let me remind such objectors, once
for all, of Dean Swift's proposal for turning to account the
supernumerary infants of the three kingdoms, which, in those days, both
at Dublin and at London, were provided for in foundling hospitals, by
cooking and eating them. This was an extravaganza, though really bolder
and more coarsely practical than mine, which did not provoke any
reproaches even to a dignitary of the supreme Irish church; its own
monstrosity was its excuse; mere extravagance was felt to license and
accredit the little
jeu d'esprit, precisely as the blank
impossibilities of Lilliput, of Laputa, of the Yahoos, &c., had
licensed those. If, therefore, any man thinks it worth his while to
tilt against so mere a foam-bubble of gaiety as this lecture on the
esthetics of murder, I shelter myself for the moment under the
Telamonian shield of the Dean. But, in reality, my own little paper may
plead a privileged excuse for its extravagance, such as is altogether
wanting to the Dean's. Nobody can pretend, for a moment, on behalf of
the Dean, that there is any ordinary and natural tendency in human
thoughts, which could ever turn to infants as articles of diet; under
any conceivable circumstances, this would be felt as the most
aggravated form of cannibalism—cannibalism applying itself to the
most defenceless part of the species. But, on the other hand, the
tendency to a critical or aesthetic valuation of fires and murders is
universal. If you are summoned to the spectacle of a great fire,
undoubtedly the first impulse is to assist in putting it out. But that
field of exertion is very limited, and is soon filled by regular
professional people, trained and equipped for the service. In the case
of a fire which is operating upon private property, pity for a
neighbor's calamity checks us at first in treating the affair as a
scenic spectacle. But perhaps the fire may be confined to public
buildings. And in any case, after we have paid our tribute of regret to
the affair, considered as a calamity, inevitably, and without
restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle. Exclamations
of How grand! how magnificent! arise in a sort of rapture from the
crowd. For instance, when Drury Lane was burned down in the first
decennium of this century, the falling in of the roof was signalized by
a mimic suicide of the protecting Apollo that surmounted and crested
the centre of this roof. The god was stationary with his lyre, and
seemed looking down upon the fiery ruins that were so rapidly
approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below him gave way; a
convulsive heyve of the billowing flames seemed for a moment to raise
the statue; and then, as if on some impulse of despair, the presiding
deity appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the fiery deluge,
for he went down head foremost; and in all respects, the descent had
the air of a voluntary act. What followed? From every one of the
bridges over the river, and from other open areas which commanded the
spectacle, there arose a sustained uproar of admiration and sympathy.
Some few years before this event, a prodigious fire occurred at
Liverpool; the Goree, a vast pile of warehouses close to one of the
docks, was burned to the ground. The huge edifice, eight or nine
stories high, and laden with most combustible goods, many thousand
bales of cotton, wheat and oats in thousands of quarters, tar,
turpentine, rum, gunpowder, &c., continued through many hours of
darkness to feed this tremendous fire. To aggravate the calamity, it
blew a regular gale of wind; luckily for the shipping, it blew inland,
that is, to the east; and all the way down to Warrington, eighteen
miles distant to the eastward, the whole air was illuminated by flakes
of cotton, often saturated with rum, and, by what seemed absolute
worlds of blazing sparks, that lighted up all the upper chambers of the
air. All the cattle lying abroad in the fields through a breadth of
eighteen miles, were thrown into terror and, agitation. Men, of course,
read in this hurrying overhead of scintillating and blazing vortices,
the annunciation of some gigantic calamity going on in Liverpool; and
the lamentation on that account was universal. But that mood of public
sympathy did not at all interfere to suppress or even to check the
rudimentary bursts of rapturous admiration, as this arrowy sleet of
many-colored fire rode on the wings of hurricane, alternately through
open depths of air, or through dark clouds overhead.
Precisely the same treatment is applied to murders. After the first
tribute of sorrow to those who have perished, but, at all events, after
the personal interests have been tranquillized by time, inevitably the
scenical features (what Esthetically may be called the comparative
advantages) of the several murders are reviewed and valued. One murder
is compared with another; and the circumstances of superiority, as, for
example, in the incidence and effects of surprise, of mystery, &c., are
collated and appraised. I, therefore, for my extravagance, claim an
inevitable and perpetual ground in the spontaneous tendencies of the
human mind when left. to itself. But no one will pretend that any
corresponding plea can be advanced on behalf of Swift.
In this important distinction between myself and the Dean, lies one
reason which prompted the present writing. A second purpose of this
paper is, to make the reader acquainted circumstantially with three
memorable cases of murder, which long ago the voice of amateurs has
crowned with laurel, but especially with the two earliest of the three,
viz., the immortal Williams' murders of 1812. The act and the actor are
each separately in the highest degree interesting; and, as forty-two
years have elapsed since 1812, it can. not be supposed that either is
known circumstantially to the men of the current generation.
Never, throughout the annals of universal Christendom, has there
indeed been any act of one solitary insulated individual, armed with
power so appalling over the hearts of men, as that exterminating
murder, by which, during the winter of 1812, John Williams in one hour,
smote two houses with emptiness, exterminated all but two entire
households, and asserted his own supremacy above all the children of
Cain. It would be absolutely impossible adequately to describe the
frenzy of feelings which, throughout the next fortnight, mastered the
popular heart; the mere delirium of indignant horror in some, the mere
delirium of panic in others. For twelve succeeding days, under some
groundless notion that the unknown murderer had quitted London, the
panic which had convulsed the mighty metropolis diffused itself all
over the island. I was myself at that time nearly three hundred miles
from London; but there, and everywhere, the panic was indescribable.
One lady, my next neighbor, whom personally I knew, living at the
moment, during the absence of her husband, with a few servants in a
very solitary house, never rested until she had placed eighteen doors
(so she told me, and, indeed, satisfied me by ocular proof), each
secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own
bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her
drawing-room, was like going, as a flag of truce, into a beleaguered
fortress; at every sixth step one was stopped by a sort of portcullis.
The panic was not confined to the rich; women in the humblest ranks
more than once died upon the spot, from the shock attending some
suspicious attempts at intrusion upon the part of vagrants, meditating
probably nothing worse than a robbery, but whom the poor women, misled
by the London newspapers, had fancied to be the dreadful London
murderer. Meantime, this solitary artist, that rested in the centre of
London, self-supported by his own conscious grandeur, as a domestic
Attila, or 'scourge of God;' this man, that walked in darkness, and
relied upon murder (as afterwards transpired) for bread, for clothes,
for promotion in life, was silently preparing an effectual answer to
the public journals; and on the twelfth day after his inaugural murder,
he advertised his presence in London, and published to all men the
absurdity of ascribing to him any ruralizing propensities, by striking
a second blow, and accomplishing a second family extermination.
Somewhat lightened was the provincial panic by this proof that the
murderer had not condescended to sneak into the country, or to abandon
for a moment, under any motive of caution or fear, the great
metropolitan
castra stativa of gigantic crime, seated for ever
on the Thames. In fact, the great artist disdained a provincial
reputation; and he must have felt, as a case of ludicrous
disproportion, the contrast between. a country town or village, on the
one hand, and, on the other, a work more lasting than brass—a [
Greek here]—a murder such in quality as any murder that he would
condescend to own for a work turned out from his own studio.
Coleridge, whom I saw some months after these terrific murders, told
me, that, for his part, though at the time resident in London, he had
not shared in the prevailing panic; him they effected only as a
philosopher, and threw him into a profound reverie upon the tremendous
power which is laid open in a moment to any man who can reconcile
himself to the abjuration of all conscientious restraints, if, at the
same time, thoroughly without fear. Not sharing in the public panic,
however, Coleridge did not consider that panic at all unreasonable;
for, as he said most truly in that vast metropolis there are many
thousands of households, composed exclusively of women and children;
many other thousands there are who necessarily confide their safety, in
the long evenings, to the discretion of a young servant girl; and if
she suffers herself to be beguiled by the pretence of a message from
her mother, sister, or sweetheart, into opening the door, there, in one
second of time, goes to wreck the security of the house. However, at
that time, and for many months afterwards, the practice of steadily
putting the chain upon the door before it was opened prevailed
generally, and for a long time served as a record of that deep
impression left upon London by Mr. Williams. Southey
[1] , I may add,
entered deeply into the public feeling on this occasion, and said to
me, within a week or two of the first murder, that it was a private
event of that order which rose to the dignity of a national event. But
now, having prepared the reader to appreciate on its true scale this
dreadful tissue of murder (which as a record belonging to an era that
is now left forty-two years behind us, not one person in four of this
generation can be expected to know correctly), let me pass to the
circumstantial details of the affair.
Yet, first of all, one word as to the local scene of the murders.
Ratcliffe Highway is a public thoroughfare in a most chaotic quarter of
eastern or nautical London; and at this time (viz., in 1812), when no
adequate police existed except the detective police of Bow Street,
admirable for its own peculiar purposes, but utterly incommensurate to
the general service of the capital, it was a most dangerous quarter.
Every third man at the least might be set down as a foreigner. Lascars,
Chinese, Moors, Negroes, were met at every step. And apart from the
manifold ruffianism, shrouded impenetrably under the mixed hats and
turbans of men whose past was untraceable to any European eye, it is
well known that the navy (especially, in time of war, the commercial
navy) of Christendom is the sure receptacle of all the murderers and
ruffians whose crimes have given them a motive for withdrawing
themselves for a season from the public eye. It is true, that few of
this class are qualified to act as 'able' seamen: but at all times, and
especially during war, only a small proportion (or nucleus) of each
ship's company consists of such men: the large majority being mere
untutored landsmen. John Williams, however, who had been occasionally
rated as a seaman on board of various Indiamen, &c., was probably a
very accomplished seaman. Pretty generally, in fact, he was a ready and
adroit man, fertile in resources under all sudden difficulties, and
most flexibly adapting himself to all varieties of social life.
( Williams was a man of middle stature, five feet seven and a-half, to
five feet eight inches high, slenderly built, rather thin, but wiry,
tolerably muscular, and clear of all superfluous flesh.) A lady, who
saw him under examination (I think at the Thames Police Office),
assured me that his hair was of the most extraordinary and vivid color,
viz., bright yellow, something between an orange and lemon color.,
Williams had been in India; chiefly in Bengal and Madras: but he had
also been upon the Indus. Now, it is notorious that, in the Punjaub,
horses of a high caste are often painted—crimson, blue, green,
purple; and it struck me that Williams might, for some casual purpose
of disguise, have taken a hint from this practice of Scinde and Lahore,
so that the color might not have been natural.'In other respects, his
appearance was natural enough; and, judging by a plaster cast of him,
which I purchased in London, I should say mean,. as regarded his facial
structure. One fact, however, was striking, and fell in with the
impression of his natural tiger character, that his face wore at all
times a bloodless ghastly pallor. 'You might imagine,' said my
informant, 'that in his veins circulated not red life-blood, such as
could kindle into the blush of shame, of wrath, of pity—but a green
sap that welled from no human heart.' His eyes seemed frozen and
glazed, as if their light were all converged upon some victim lurking
in the far background. So far his appearance might have repelled; but,
on the other hand, the concurrent testimony of many witnesses, and also
the silent testimony of facts, showed that the oiliness and snaky
insinuation of his demeanor counteracted the repulsiveness of his
ghastly face, and amongst inexperienced young women won for him a very
favorable reception. In particular, one gentle-mannered girl, whom
Williams had undoubtedly designed to murder, gave in evidence—that
once, when sitting alone with her, he had said, 'Now, Miss R.,
supposing that I should appear about midnight at your bedside, armed
with a carving knife, what would you say?' To which the confiding girl
had replied, 'Oh, Mr. Williams, if it was anybody else, I should be
frightened. But, as soon as I heard your voice, I should be tranquil.'
Poor girl! had this outline sketch of Mr. Williams been filled in and
realized, she would have seen something in the corpse-like face, and
heard something in the sinister voice, that would have unsettled her
tranquillity for ever. But nothing short of such dreadful experiences
could avail to unmask Mr. John Williams.
Into this perilous region it was that, on a Saturday night in
December, Mr. Williams, whom we suppose to have long since made his
coup d'essai, forced his way through the crowded streets, bound on
business. To say, was to do. And this night he had said to himself
secretly, that he would execute a design which he had already sketched,
and which, when finished, was destined on the following day to strike
consternation into 'all that mighty heart' of London, from centre to
circumference. It was afterwards remembered that he had quitted his
lodgings on this dark errand about eleven o'clock P. M.; not that he
meant to begin so soon: but he needed to reconnoitre. He carried his
tools closely buttoned up under his loose roomy coat. It was in harmony
with the general subtlety of his character, and his polished hatred of
brutality, that by universal agreement his manners were distinguished
for exquisite suavity: the tiger's heart was masked by the most
insinuating and snaky refinement. All his acquaintances afterwards
described his dissimulation as so ready and so perfect, that if, in
making his way through the streets, always so crowded on a Saturday
night in neighborhoods so poor, he had accidentally jostled any person,
he would (as they were all satisfied) have stopped to offer the most
gentlemanly apologies: with his devilish heart brooding over the most
hellish of purposes, he would yet have paused to express a benign hope
that the huge mallet, buttoned up under his elegant
surtout,
with a view to the little business that awaited him about ninety
minutes further on, had not inflicted any pain on' the stranger with
whom he had come into collision. Titian, I believe,-but certainly
Rubens, and perhaps Vandyke, made it a rule never to practise his art
but in full dress — point ruffles, bag wig, and diamond-hilted sword;
and Mr. Williams, there is reason to believe, when he went out for a
grand compound massacre (in another sense, one might have applied to it
the Oxford phrase of going out as Grand Compounder), always assumed
black silk stockings and pumps; nor would he on any account have
degraded his position as an artist by wearing a morning gown. In his
second great performance, it was particularly noticed and recorded by
the one sole trembling man, who under killing agonies of fear was
compelled (as the reader will find) from a secret stand to become the
solitary spectator of his atrocities, that Mr. Williams wore a long
blue frock, of the very finest cloth, and richly lined with silk.
Amongst the anecdotes which circulated about him, it was also said at
the time, that Mr. Williams employed the first of dentists, and also
the first of chiropodists. On no account would he patronize any
second-rate skill. And beyond a doubt, in that perilous little branch
of business which was practised by himself, he might be regarded as the
most aristocratic and fastidious of artists.
But who meantime was the victim, to whose abode e was hurrying? For
surely he never could be so indiscreet as to be sailing about on a
roving cruise in search of some chance person to murder? Oh, no: he had
suited himself with a victim some time before, viz., an old and very
intimate friend. For he seems to have laid it down as a maxim—that
the best person to murder was a friend; and, in default of a friend,
which is an article one cannot always command, an acquaintance:
because, in either case, on first approaching his subject, suspicion
would be disarmed: whereas a stranger might take alarm, and find in the
very countenance of his murderer elect a warning summons to place
himself on guard. However, in the present case, his destined victim was
supposed to unite both characters: originally he had been a friend; but
subsequently, on good cause arising, he had become an enemy. Or more
probably, as others said, the feelings had long since languished which
gave life to either relation of friendship or of enmity. Marr was the
name of that unhappy man, who (whether in the character of friend or
enemy) had been selected for the subject of this present Saturday
night's performance. And the story current at that time about the
connection between Williams and Marr, having (whether true or not true)
never been contradicted upon authority, was, that they sailed in the
same Indiaman to Calcutta; that they had quarrelled when at sea; but
another version of the story said—no: they had quarrelled after
returning from sea; and the subject of their quarrel was Mrs. Marr, a
very pretty young woman, for whose favor they had been rival
candidates, and at one time with most bitter enmity towards each other.
Some circumstances give a color of probability to this story. Otherwise
it has sometimes happened, on occasion of a murder not sufficiently
accounted for, that, from pure goodness of heart intolerant of a mere
sordid motive for a striking murder, some person has forged, and the
public has accredited, a story representing the murderer as having
moved under some loftier excitement: and in this case the public, too
much shocked at the idea of Williams having on the single motive of
gain consummated so complex a tragedy, welcomed the tale which
represented him as governed by deadly malice, growing out of the more
impassioned and noble rivalry for the favor of a woman. The case
remains in some degree doubtful; but, certainly, the probability is,
that Mrs. Marr had been the true cause, the
causa teterrima, of
the feud between the men. Meantime, the minutes are numbered, the sands
of the hour-glass are running out, that measure the duration of this
feud upon earth. This night it shall cease. To-morrow is the day which
in England they call Sunday, which in Scotland they call by the Judaic
name of 'Sabbath.' To both nations, under different names, the day has
the same functions; to both it is a day of rest. For thee also, Marr,
it shall be a day of rest; so is it written; thou, too, young Marr,
shalt find rest—thou, and thy household, and the stranger that is
within thy gates. But that rest must be in the world which lies beyond
the grave. On this side the grave ye have all slept your final sleep.
The night was one of exceeding darkness; and in this humble quarter
of London, whatever the night happened to be, light or dark, quiet or
stormy, all shops were kept open on Saturday nights until twelve
o'clock, at the least, and many for half an hour longer. There was no
rigorous and pedantic Jewish superstition about the exact limits of
Sunday. At the very worst, the Sunday stretched over from one o'clock,
A. M. of one day, up to eight o'clock A. M. of the next, making a clear
circuit of thirty-one hours. This, surely, was long enough. Marr, on
this particular Saturday night, would be content if it were even
shorter, provided it would come more quickly, for he has been toiling
through sixteen hours behind his counter. Marr's position in life was
this: he kept a little hosier's shop, and had invested in his stock and
the fittings of his shop about £ 180. Like all men engaged in trade, he
suffered some anxieties. He was a new beginner; but, already, bad debts
had alarmed him; and bills were coming to maturity that were not likely
to be met by commensurate sales. Yet, constitutionally, he was a
sanguine hoper. At this time he was a stout, fresh-colored young man of
twenty-seven; in some slight degree uneasy from his commercial
prospects, but still cheerful, and anticipating—(how vainly!)—that
for this night, and the next night, at least, he will rest his wearied
head and his cares upon the faithful bosom of his sweet lovely young
wife. The household of Marr, consisting of five persons, is as follows:
First, there is himself, who, if he should happen to be ruined, in a
limited commercial sense, has energy enough to jump up again, like a
pyramid of fire, and soar high above ruin many times repeated. Yes,
poor Marr, so it might be, if thou wert left to thy native energies
unmolested; but even now there stands on the other side of the street
one born of hell, who puts his peremptory negative on all these
flattering prospects. Second in the list of his household, stands his
pretty and amiable wife, who is happy after the fashion of youthful
wives, for she is only twenty-two, and anxious (if at all) only on
account of her darling infant. For, thirdly, there is in a cradle, not
quite nine feet below the street, viz., in a warm, cosy kitchen, and
rocked at intervals by the young mother, a baby eight months old.
Nineteen months have Marr and herself been married; and this is their
first-born child. Grieve not for this child, that it must keep the deep
rest of Sunday in some other world; for wherefore should an orphan,
steeped to the lips in poverty, when once bereaved of father and
mother, linger upon an alien and murderous earth? Fourthly, there is a
stoutish boy, an apprentice, say thirteen years old; a Devonshire boy,
with handsome features, such as most Devonshire youths have*; satisfied
with his place; not overworked; treated kindly, and aware that he was
treated kindly, by his master and mistress. Fifthly, and lastly,
bringing up the rear of this quiet household, is a servant girl, a
grown-up young woman; and she, being particularly kind-hearted,
occupied (as often happens in families of humble pretensions as to
rank) a sort of sisterly place in her relation to her mistress. A great
democratic change is at this very time (1854), and has been for twenty
years, passing over British society. Multitudes of persons are becoming
ashamed of saying, 'my master,' or 'my mistress:' the term now in the
slow process of superseding it is, 'my employer.' Now, in the United
States, such an expression of democratic hauteur, though disagreeable
as a needless proclamation of independence which nobody is disputing,
leaves, however, no lasting bad effect. For the domestic 'helps' are
pretty generally in a state of transition so sure and so rapid to the
headship of domestic establishments belonging to themselves, that in
effect they are but ignoring, for the present moment, a relation which
would at any rate dissolve itself in a year or two. But in England,
where no such resources exist of everlasting surplus lands, the
tendency of the change is painful. It carries with it a sullen and a
coarse expression of immunity from a yoke which was in any case a light
one, and often a benign one. In some other place I will illustrate my
meaning. Here, apparently, in Mrs. Marr's service, the principle
concerned illustrated itself practically. Mary, the female servant,
felt a sincere and unaffected respect for a mistress whom she saw so
steadily occupied with her domestic duties, and who, though so young,
and invested with some slight authority, never exerted it capriciously,
or even showed it at all conspiciously. According to the testimony of
all the neighbors, she treated her mistress with a shade of unobtrusive
respect on the one hand, and yet was eager to relieve her, whenever
that was possible, from the weight of her maternal duties, with the
cheerful voluntary service of a sister.
[* An artist told me in this year, 1812, that having accidentally
seen a native Devonshire regiment (either volunteers or militia), nine
hundred strong, marching past a station at which he had posted himself,
he did not observe a dozen men that would not have been described in
common parlance as ' good looking.' ]
To this young woman it was, that, suddenly, within three or four
minutes of midnight, Marr called aloud from the head of the stairs—
directing her to go out and purchase some oysters for the family
supper. Upon what slender accidents hang oftentimes solemn lifelong
results! Marr occupied in the concerns of his shop, Mrs. Marr occupied
with some little ailment and restlessness of her baby, had both
forgotten the affair of supper; the time was now narrowing every
moment, as regarded any variety of choice; and oysters were perhaps
ordered as the likeliest article to be had at all, after twelve o'clock
should have struck. And yet, upon this trivial circumstance depended
Mary's life. Had she been sent abroad for supper at the ordinary time
of ten or eleven o'clock, it is almost certain that she, the solitary
member of the household who escaped from the exterminating tragedy,
would not have escaped; too surely she would have shared the general
fate. It had now become necessary to be quick. Hastily, therefore,
receiving money from Marr with a basket in her hand, but unbonneted,
Mary tripped out of the shop. It became afterwards, on recollection, a
heart-chilling remembrance to herself that, precisely as she emerged
from the shop-door, she noticed, on the opposite side of the street, by
the light of the lamps, a man's figure; stationary at the instant, but
in the next instant slowly moving. This was Williams; as a little
incident, either just before or just after (at present it is impossible
to say which), sufficiently proved. Now, when one considers the
inevitable hurry and trepidation of Mary under the circumstances
stated, time barely sufficing for any chance of executing her errand,
it becomes evident that she must have connected some deep feeling of
mysterious uneasiness with the movements of this unknown man; else,
assuredly, she would not have found her attention disposable for such a
case. Thus far, she herself threw some little light upon what it might
be that, semiconsciously, was then passing through her mind; she said,
that, notwithstanding the darkness, which would not permit her to trace
the man's features, or to ascertain the exact direction of his eyes, it
yet struck her, that from his carriage when in motion, and from the
apparent inclination of his person, he must be looking at No. 29.
The little incident which I have alluded to as confirming Mary's
belief was, that, at some period not very far from midnight, the
watchman had specially noticed this stranger; he had observed him
continually peeping into the window of Marr's shop; and had thought
this act, connected with the man's appearance, so suspicious, that he
stepped into Marr's shop, and communicated what he had seen. This fact
he afterwards stated before the magistrates; and he added, that
subsequently, viz., a few minutes after twelve (eight or ten minutes,
probably, after the departure of Mary), he (the watchman), when
re-entering upon his ordinary half-hourly beat, was requested by Marr
to assist him in closing the shutters. Here they had a final
communication with each other; and the watchman mentioned to Marr that
the mysterious stranger had now apparently taken himself off; for that
he had not been visible since the first communication made to Marr by
the watchman. There is little doubt that Williams had observed the
watchman's visit to Marr, and had thus had his attention seasonably
drawn to the indiscretion of his own demeanor; so that the warning,
given unavailingly to Marr, had been turned to account by Williams.
There can be still less doubt, that the bloodhound had commenced his
work within one minute of the watchman's assisting Marr to put up his
shutters. And on the following consideration: that which prevented
Williams from commencing even earlier, was the exposure of the shop's
whole interior to the gaze of street passengers. It was indispensable
that the shutters should be accurately closed before Williams could
safely get to work. But, as soon as ever this preliminary precaution
had been completed, once having secured that concealment from the
public eye it then became of still greater importance not to lose a
moment by delay, than previously it had been not to hazard any thing by
precipitance. For all depended upon going in before Marr should have
locked the door. On any other mode of' effecting an entrance (as, for
instance, by waiting for the return of Mary, and making his entrance
simultaneously with her), it will be seen that Williams must have
forfeited that particular advantage which mute facts, when read into
their true construction, will soon show the reader that he must have
employed. Williams waited, of necessity, for the sound of the
watchman's retreating steps; waited, perhaps, for thirty seconds; but
when that danger was past, the next danger was, lest Marr should lock
the door; one turn of the key, and the murderer would have been locked
out. In, therefore, he bolted, and by a dexterous movement of his left
hand, no doubt, turned the key, without letting Marr perceive this
fatal stratagem. It is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue
the successive steps of this monster, and to notice the absolute
certainty with which the silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us
the whole process and movements of the bloody drama, not less surely
and fully than if we had been ourselves hidden in Marr's shop, or had
looked down from the heavens of mercy upon this hell-kite, that knew
not what mercy meant. That he had concealed from Marr his trick, secret
and rapid, upon the lock, is evident; because else, Marr would
instantly have taken the alarm, especially after what the watchman had
communicated. But it will soon be seen that Marr had not been alarmed.
In reality, towards the full success of Williams, it was important, in
the last degree, to intercept and forestall any yell or shout of agony
from Marr. Such an outcry, and in a situation so slenderly fenced off
from the street, viz., by walls the very thinnest, makes itself heard
outside pretty nearly as well as if it were uttered in the street. Such
an outcry it was indispensable to stifle. It was stifled; and the
reader will soon understand how. Meantime, at this point, let us leave
the murderer alone with his victims. For fifty minutes let him work his
pleasure. The front-door, as we know, is now fastened against all help.
Help there is none. Let us, therefore, in vision, attach ourselves to
Mary; and, when all is over, let us come back with her, again raise the
curtain, and read the dreadful record of all that has passed in her
absence.
The poor girl, uneasy in her mind to an extent that she could but
half understand, roamed up and down in search of an oyster shop; and
finding none that was still open, within any circuit that her ordinary
experience had made her acquainted with, she fancied it best to try the
chances of some remoter district. Lights she saw gleaming or twinkling
at a distance, that still tempted her onwards; and thus, amongst
unknown streets poorly lighted
[2] , and on a night of peculiar darkness,
and in a region of London where ferocious tumults were continually
turning her out of what seemed to be the direct course, naturally she
got bewildered. The purpose with which she started, had by this time
become hopeless. Nothing remained for her now but to retrace. her
steps. But this was difficult; for she was afraid to ask directions
from chance passengers, whose appearance the darkness prevented her
from reconnoitring. At length by his lantern she recognized a watchman;
through him she was guided into the right road; and in ten minutes
more, she found herself back at the door of No. 29, in Ratcliffe
Highway. But by this time she felt satisfied that she must have been
absent for fifty or sixty minutes; indeed, she had heard, at a
distance, the cry of past one o'clock, which, commencing a few seconds
after one, lasted intermittingly for ten or thirteen minutes.
In the tumult of agonizing thoughts that very soon surprised her,
naturally it became hard for her to recall distinctly the whole
succession of doubts, and jealousies, and shadowy misgivings that soon
opened upon her. But, so far as could be collected, she had not in the
first moment of reaching home noticed anything decisively alarming. In
very many cities bells are the main instruments for communicating
between the street and the interior of houses: but in London knockers
prevail. At Marr's there was both a knocker and a bell. Mary rang, and
at the same time very gently knocked. She had no fear of disturbing her
master or mistress; them she made sure of finding still up. Her anxiety
was for the baby, who being disturbed, might again rob her mistress of
a night's rest. And she well knew that, with three people all anxiously
awaiting her return, and by this time, perhaps, seriously uneasy at her
delay, the least audible whisper from herself would in a moment bring
one of them to the door. Yet how is this? To her astonishment, but with
the astonishment came creeping over her an icy horror, no stir nor
murmur was heard ascending from the kitchen. At this moment came back
upon her, with shuddering anguish, the indistinct image of the stranger
in the loose dark coat, whom she had seen stealing along under the
shadowy lamp-light, and too certainly watching her master's motions:.
keenly she now reproached herself that, under whatever stress of hurry,
she had not acquainted Mr. Marr with the suspicious appearances. Poor
girl!—she did not then know that, if this communication could have
availed to put Marr upon his guard, it had reached him from another
quarter; so that her own omission, which had in reality arisen under
her hurry to execute her master's commission, could not be charged with
any bad consequences. But all such reflections this way or that were
swallowed up at this point in over-mastering panic. (That her double
summons could have been unnoticed—this solitary fact in one moment
made a revelation of horror. One person might have fallen asleep, but
two—but three—that was a mere impossibility. And even supposing all
three together with the baby locked in sleep, still how unaccountable
was this utter — utter silence! Most
naturally at this moment something like hysterical horror overshadowed
the poor girl, and now at last she rang the bell with the violence that
belongs to sickening terror. This done, she paused: self-command enough
she still retained, though fast and fast it was slipping away from her,
to bethink herself—that, if any overwhelming accident had compelled
both Marr and his apprentice-boy to leave the house in order to summon
surgical aid from opposite quarters—a thing barely supposable—
still, even in that case Mrs. Marr and her infant would be left; and
some murmuring reply, under any extremity, would be elicited from the
poor mother. To pause, therefore, to impose stern silence upon herself,
so as to leave room for the possible answer to this final appeal,
became a duty of spasmodic effort. Listen, therefore, poor trembling
heart; listen, and for twenty seconds be still as death. Still as death
she was: and during that dreadful stillness, when she hushed her breath
that she might listen, occurred an incident of killing fear, that to
her dying day would never cease to renew its echoes in her ear. She,
Mary, the poor trembling girl, checking and overruling herself by a
final effort, that she might leave full opening for her dear young
mistress's answer to her own last frantic appeal, heard at last and
most distinctly a sound within the house. Yes, now beyond a doubt there
is coming an answer to her summons. What was it? On the stairs, not the
stairs that led downwards to the kitchen, but the stairs that led
upwards to the single story of bed-chambers above, was heard a creaking
sound. Next was heard most distinctly a footfall: one, two, three,
four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly descended. Then the
dreadful footsteps were heard advancing along the little narrow passage
to the door. The steps—oh heavens! whose steps?—have paused at the
door. The very breathing can be heard of that dreadful being, who has
silenced all breathing except his own in the house. There is but a door
between him and Mary. What is he doing on the other side of the door? A
cautious step, a stealthy step it was that came down the stairs, then
paced along the little narrow passage—narrow as a coffin—till at
last the step pauses at the door. How hard the fellow breathes! He, the
solitary murderer, is on one side the door; Mary is on the other side.
Now, suppose that he should suddenly open the door, and that
incautiously in the dark Mary should rush in, and find herself in the
arms of the murderer. Thus far the case is a possible one—that to a
certainty, had this little trick been tried immediately upon Mary's
return, it would have succeeded; had the door been opened suddenly upon
her first tingle-tingle, headlong she would have tumbled in, and
perished. But now Mary is upon her guard. The unknown murderer and she
have both their lips upon the door, listening, breathing hard; but
luckily they are on different sides of the door; and upon the least
indication of unlocking or unlatching, she would have recoiled into the
asylum of general darkness.
What was the murderer's meaning in coming along the passage to the
front door? The meaning was this: separately, as an individual, Mary
was worth nothing at all to him. But, considered as a member of a
household, she had this value, viz., that she, if caught and murdered,
perfected and rounded the desolation of the house. The case being
reported, as reported it would be all over Christendom, led the
imagination captive. The whole covey of victims was thus netted; the
household ruin was thus full and orbicular; and in that proportion the
tendency of men and women, flutter as they might, would be helplessly
and hopelessly to sink into the all-conquering hands of the mighty
murderer. He had but to say—my testimonials are dated from No. 29
Rateliffe Highway, and the poor vanquished imagination sank powerless
before the fascinating rattlesnake eye of the murderer. There is not a
doubt that the motive of the murderer for standing on the inner side of
Marr's front-door, whilst Mary stood on the outside, was a hope that,
if he quietly opened the door, whisperingly counterfeiting Marr's
voice, and saying, What made you stay so long? possibly she might have
been inveigled. He was wrong; the time was past for that; Mary was now
maniacally awake; she began now to ring the bell and to ply the knocker
with unintermitting violence. And the natural consequence was, that the
next door neighbor, who had recently gone to bed and instantly fallen
asleep, was roused; and by the incessant violence of the ringing and
the knocking, which now obeyed a delirious and uncontrollable impulse
in Mary, he became sensible that some very dreadful event must be at
the root of so clamorous an uproar. To rise, to throw up the sash, to
demand angrily the cause of this unseasonable tumult, was the work of a
moment. The poor girl remained sufficiently mistress of herself rapidly
to explain the circumstance of her own absence for an hour; her belief
that Mr. and Mrs. Marr's family had all been murdered in the interval;
and that at this very moment the murderer was in the house.
The person to whom she addressed this statement was a pawnbroker;
and a thoroughly brave man he must have been; for it was a perilous
undertaking, merely as a trial of physical strength, singly to face a
mysterious assassin, who had apparently signalized his. prowess by a
triumph so comprehensive. But, again, for the imagination it required
an effort of self-conquest to rush headlong into the presence of one
invested with a cloud of mystery, whose nation, age, motives, were all
alike unknown. Rarely on any field of battle has a soldier been called
upon to face so complex a danger. For if the entire family of his
neighbor Marr had been exterminated, were this indeed true, such a
scale of bloodshed would seem to argue that there must have been two
persons as the perpetrators; or if one singly had accomplished such a
ruin, in that case how colossal must have been his audacity! probably,
also, his skill and animal power! Moreover, the unknown enemy (whether
single or double) would, doubtless, be elaborately armed. Yet, under
all these disadvantages, did this fearless man rush at once to the
field of butchery in his neighbor's house. Waiting only to draw on his
trousers, and to arm himself with the kitchen poker, he went down into
his own little back-yard. On this mode of approach, he would have a
chance of intercepting the murderer; whereas from the front there would
be no such chance; and there would also be considerable delay in the
process of breaking open the door. A brick wall, nine or ten feet high,
divided his own back premises from those of Marr. Over this he vaulted;
and at the moment when he was recalling himself to the necessity of
going back for a candle, he suddenly perceived a feeble ray of light
already glimmering on some part of Marr's premises. Marr's back-door
stood wide open. Probably the murderer had passed through it one half
minute before. Rapidly the brave man passed onwards to the shop, and
there beheld the carnage of the night stretched out on the floor, and
the narrow premises so floated with gore, that it was hardly possible
to escape the pollution of blood in picking out a path to the
front-door. In the lock of the door still remained the key which had
given to the unknown murderer so fatal an advantage over his victims.
By this time, the heart-shaking news involved in the outcries of Mary
(to whom it occurred that by possibility some one out of so many
victims might still be within the reach of medical aid, but that all
would depend upon speed) had availed, even at that late hour, to gather
a small mob about the house. The pawnbroker threw open the door. One or
two watchmen headed the crowd; but the soul-harrowing spectacle checked
them, and impressed sudden silence upon their voices, previously so
loud. The tragic drama read aloud its own history, and the succession
of its several steps—few and summary. The murderer was as yet
altogether unknown; not even suspected. But there were reasons for
thinking that he must have been a person familiarly known to Marr. He
had entered the shop by opening the door after it had been closed by
Marr. But it was justly argued—that, after the caution conveyed to
Marr by the watchman, the appearance of any stranger in the shop at
that hour, and in so dangerous a neighborhood, and entering by so
irregular and suspicious a course, (i. e., walking in after the door
had been closed, and after the closing of the shutters had cut off all
open communication with the street), would naturally have roused Marr
to an attitude of vigilance and self-defence. Any indication,
therefore, that Marr had
not been so roused, would argue to a
certainty that
something had occurred to neutralize this alarm,
and fatally to disarm the prudent jealousies of Marr. -But this
'something' could only have lain in one simple fact, viz., that the
person of the murderer was familiarly known to Marr as that of an
ordinary and unsuspected acquaintance. This being presupposed as the
key to all the rest, the whole course and evolution of the subsequent
drama becomes clear as daylight. The murderer, it is evident, had
opened gently, and again closed behind him with equal gentleness, the
street-door. He had then advanced to the little counter, all the while
exchanging the ordinary salutation of an old acquaintance with the
unsuspecting Marr. Having reached the counter, he would then ask Marr
for a pair of unbleached cotton socks. In a shop so small as Marr's,
there could be no great latitude of choice for disposing of the
different commodities. The arrangement of these had no doubt become
familiar to the murderer; and he had already ascertained that, in order
to reach down the particular parcel wanted at present, Marr would find
it requisite to face round to the rear, and, at the same moment, to
raise his eyes and his hands to a level eighteen inches above his own
head. This movement placed him in the most disadvantageous possible
position with regard to the murderer, who now, at the instant when
Marr's hands and eyes were embarrassed, and the back of his head fully
exposed, suddenly from below his large surtout, had unslung a heavy
ship-carpenter's mallet, and, with one solitary blow, had so thoroughly
stunned his victim, as to leave him incapable of resistance. The whole
position of Marr told its own tale. He had collapsed naturally behind
the counter, with his hands so occupied as to confirm the whole outline
of the affair as I have here suggested it. Probable enough it is that
the very first blow, the first indication of treachery that reached
Marr, would also be the last blow as regarded the. abolition of
consciousness, The murderer's plan and
rationale of murder
started systematically from this infliction of apoplexy, or at least of
a stunning sufficient to insure a long loss of consciousness. This
opening step placed the murderer at his ease. But still, as returning
sense might constantly have led to the fullest exposures, it was his
settled practice, by way of consummation, to cut the throat. To one
invariable type all the murders on this occasion conformed: the skull
was first shattered; this step secured the murderer from instant
retaliation; and then, by way of locking up all into eternal silence,
uniformly the throat was cut. The rest of the circumstances, as
self-revealed, were these. The fall of Marr might, probably enough,
cause a dull, confused sound of a scuffle, and the more so, as it could
not now be confounded with any street uproar—the shop door being
shut. It is more probable, however, that the signal for the alarm
passing down to the kitchen, would arise when the murderer proceeded to
cut Marr's throat. The very confined situation behind the counter would
render it impossible, under the critical hurry of the case, to expose
the throat broadly; the horrid scene would proceed by partial and
interrupted cuts; deep groans would arise; and then would come the rush
up-stairs. Against this, as the only dangerous stage in the
transaction, the murderer would have specially prepared. Mrs. Marr and
the apprentice boy, both young and active, would make, of course, for
the street door; had Mary been at home, and three persons at once had
combined to distract the purposes of the murderer, it is barely
possible that one of them would have succeeded in reaching the street.
But the dreadful swing of the heavy mallet intercepted both the boy and
his mistress before they could reach the door. Each of them lay
stretched out on the centre of the shop floor; and the very moment that
this disabling was accomplished, the accursed hound was down upon their
throats with his razor. The fact is, that, in the mere blindness of
pity for poor Marr, on hearing his groans, Mrs. Marr had lost sight of
her obvious policy; she and the boy ought to have made for the back
door; the alarm would thus have been given in the open air; which, of
itself, was a great point; and several means of distracting the
murderer's attention offered upon that course, which the extreme
limitation of the shop denied to them upon the other.
Vain would be all attempts to convey the horror which thrilled the
gathering spectators of this piteous tragedy. It was known to the crowd
that one person had, by some accident, escaped the general massacre:
but she was now speechless, and probably delirious; so that, in
compassion for her pitiable situation, one female neighbor had carried
her away, and put her to bed. Hence it had happened, for a longer space
of time than could else have been possible, that no person present was
sufficiently acquainted with the Marrs to be aware of the little
infant; for the bold pawnbroker had gone off to make a communication to
the coroner; and another neighbor to lodge some evidence which he
thought urgent at a neighboring police-office. Suddenly some person
appeared amongst the crowd who was aware that the murdered parents had
a young infant; this would be found either below-stairs, or in one of
the bedrooms above. Immediately a stream of people poured down into the
kitchen, where at once they saw the cradle—but with the bedclothes in
a state of indescribable confusion. On disentangling these, pools of
blood became visible; and the next ominous sign was, that the hood of
the cradle had been smashed to pieces. It became evident that the
wretch had found himself doubly embarrassed—first, by the arched hood
at the head of the cradle, which, accordingly, he had beat into a ruin
with his mallet, and secondly, by the gathering of the blankets and
pillows about the baby's head. The free play of his blows had thus been
baffled. And he had therefore finished the scene by applying his razor
to the throat of the little innocent; after which, with no apparent
purpose, as though he had become confused by the spectacle of his own
atrocities, he had busied himself in piling the clothes elaborately
over the child's corpse. This incident undeniably gave the character of
a vindictive proceeding to the whole affair, and so far confirmed the
current rumor that the quarrel between Williams and Marr had originated
in rivalship. One writer, indeed, alleged that the murderer might have
found it necessary for his own safety to extinguish the crying of the
child; but it was justly replied, that a child only eight months old
could not have cried under any sense of the tragedy proceeding, but
simply in its ordinary way for the absence of its mother; and such a
cry, even if audible at all out of the house, must have been precisely
what the neighbors were hearing constantly, so that it could have drawn
no special attention, nor suggested any reasonable alarm to the
murderer. No one incident, indeed, throughout the whole tissue of
atrocities, so much envenomed the popular fury against the unknown
ruffian, as this useless butchery of the infant.
Naturally, on the Sunday morning that dawned four or five hours
later, the case was too full of horror not to diffuse itself in all
directions; but I have no reason to think that it crept into any one of
the numerous Sunday papers. In the regular course, any ordinary
occurrence, not occurring, or not transpiring until fifteen minutes
after 1 A. M. on a Sunday morning, would first reach the public ear
through the Monday editions of the Sunday papers, and the regular
morning papers of the Monday. But, if such were the course pursued on
this occasion, never can there have been a more signal oversight. For
it is certain, that to have met the public demand for details on the
Sunday, which might so easily have been done by cancelling a couple of
dull columns, and substituting a circumstantial narrative, for which
the pawnbroker and the watchman could have furnished the materials,
would have made a small fortune. By proper handbills dispersed—
through all quarters of the infinite metropolis, two hundred and fifty
thousand extra copies might have been sold; that is, by any journal
that should have collected exclusive materials, meeting the public
excitement, everywhere stirred to the centre by flying rumors, and
everywhere burning for ampler information. On the Sunday se'ennight
(Sunday the
octave from the event), took place the funeral of
the Marrs; in the first coffin was placed Marr; in the second Mrs.
Marr, and the baby in her arms; in the third the apprentice boy. They
were buried side by side; and thirty thousand laboring people followed
the funeral procession, with horror and grief written in their
countenances.
As yet no whisper was astir that indicated, even conjecturally, the
hideous author of these ruins—this patron of grave-diggers. Had as
much been known on this Sunday of the funeral concerning that person as
became known universally six days later, the people would have gone
right from the churchyard to the murderer's lodgings, and (brooking no
delay) would have torn him limb from limb. As yet, however, in mere
default of any object on whom reasonable suspicion could settle, the
public wrath was compelled to suspend itself. Else, far indeed from
showing any tendency to subside, the public emotion strengthened every
day conspicuously, as the reverberation of the shock began to travel
back from the provinces to the capital. On every great road in the
kingdom, continual arrests were made of vagrants and trampers, who
could give no satisfactory account of themselves, or whose appearance
in any respect answered to the imperfect description of Williams
furnished by the watchman.
With this mighty tide of pity and indignation pointing backwards to
the dreadful past, there mingled also in the thoughts of reflecting
persons an under-current of fearful expectation for the immediate
future. 'The earthquake,' to quote a fragment from a striking passage
in Wordsworth
-' The earthquake is not satisfied at once.'
All perils, specially malignant, are recurrent. A murderer, who is
such by passion and by a wolfish craving for bloodshed as a mode of
unnatural luxury, cannot relapse into
inertia. Such a man, even
more than the Alpine chamois hunter, comes to crave the dangers and the
hairbreadth escapes of his trade, as a condiment for seasoning the
insipid monotonies of daily life. But, apart from the hellish instincts
that might too surely be relied on for renewed atrocities, it was clear
that the murderer of the Marrs, wheresoever lurking, must be a needy
man; and a needy man of that class least likely to seek or to find
resources in honorable modes of industry; for which, equally by haughty
disgust and by disuse of the appropriate habits, men of violence are
specially disqualified. Were it, therefore, merely for a livelihood,
the murderer whom all hearts were yearning to decipher, might be
expected to make his resurrection on some stage of horror, after a
reasonable interval. Even in the Marr murder, granting that it had been
governed chiefly by cruel and vindictive impulses, it was still clear
that the desire of booty had cooperated with such feelings. Equally
clear it was that this desire must have been disappointed: excepting
the trivial sum reserved by Marr for the week's expenditure, the
murderer found, doubtless, little or nothing that he could turn to
account. Two guineas, perhaps, would be the outside of what he had
obtained in the way of booty. A week or so would see the end of that.
The conviction, therefore, of all people was, that in a month or two,
when the fever of excitement might a little have cooled down, or have
been superseded by other topics of fresher interest, so that the
newborn vigilance of household life would have had time to relax, some
new murder, equally appalling, might be counted upon.
Such was the public expectation. Let the reader then figure to
himself the pure frenzy of horror when in this hush of expectation,
looking, indeed, and waiting for the unknown arm to strike once more,
but not believing that any audacity could be equal to such an attempt
as yet, whilst all eyes were watching, suddenly, on the twelfth night
from the Marr murder, a second case of the same mysterious nature, a
murder on the same exterminating plan was perpetrated in the very same
neighborhood.
It was on the Thursday next but one succeeding to the Marr murder
that this second atrocity took place; and many people thought at the
time, that in its dramatic features of thrilling interest, this second
case even went beyond the first. The family which suffered in this
instance was that of a Mr. Williamson; and the house was situated, if
not absolutely in Ratcliffe Highway, at any rate immediately round the
corner of some secondary street, running at right angles to this public
thoroughfare, Mr. Williamson was a well-known and respectable man, long
settled in that district; he was supposed to be rich; and more with a
view to the employment furnished by such a calling, than with much
anxiety for further accumulations, he kept a sort of tavern; which, in
this respect, might be considered on an old patriarchal footing—that,
although people of considerable property resorted to the house in the
evenings, no kind of anxious separation was maintained between them and
the other visiters from the class of artisans or common laborers.
Anybody who conducted himself with propriety was free to take a seat,
and call for any liquor that he might prefer. And thus the society was
pretty miscellaneous; in part stationary, but in some proportion
fluctuating. The household consisted of the following five persons:—
1. Mr. Williamson, its head, who was an old man above seventy, and was
well fitted for his situation, being civil, and not at all morose, but,
at the same time, firm in maintaining order; 2. Mrs. Williamson, his
wife, about ten years younger than himself; 3. a little grand-daughter,
about nine years old; 4. a housemald, who was nearly forty years old;
5. a young journeyman, aged about twenty-six, belonging to some
manufacturing establishment (of what class I have forgotten); neither
do I remember of what nation he was. It was the established rule at Mr.
Williamson's, that, exactly as the clock struck eleven, all the
company, without favor or exception, moved off. That was one of the
customs by which, in so stormy a district, Mr. Williamson had found it
possible to keep his house free from brawls. On the present Thursday
night everything had gone on as usual, except for one slight shadow of
suspicion, which had caught the attention of more persons than one.
Perhaps at a less agitating time it would hardly have been noticed; but
now, when the first question and, the last in all social meetings
turned upon the Marrs, and their unknown murderer, it was a
circumstance naturally fitted to cause some uneasiness, that a
stranger, of sinister appearance, in a wide surtout, had flitted in and
out of the room at intervals during the evening; had sometimes retired
from the light into obscure corners; and, by more than one person, had
been observed stealing into the private passages of the house. It was
presumed in general, that the man must be known to Williamson. And, in
some slight degree, as an occasional customer of the house, it is not
impossible that he was. But afterwards, this repulsive stranger, with
his cadaverous ghastliness, extraordinary hair, and glazed eyes phowing
himself intermittingly through the hours from 8 to 11 P. Bi., revolved
upon the memory of all who had steadily observed him with something of
the same freezing effect as belongs to the two assassins in.'Macbeth,'
who present themselves reeking from the murder of Banquo, and gleaming
dimly, with dreadful faces, from the misty background, athwart the
pomps of the regal banquet.
Meantime the clock struck eleven; the company broke up; the door of
entrance was nearly closed; and at this moment of general dispersion
the situation of the five inmates left upon the premises was precisely
this: the three elders, viz., Williamson, his wife, and his female
servant, were all occupied on the ground floor—Williamson himself was
drawing ale, porter, &c., for those neighbors, in whose favor the
housedoor had been left ajar, until the hour of twelve should strike;
Mrs. Williamson and her servant were moving to and fro between the
back-kitchen and a little parlor; the little grand-daughter, whose
sleeping-room was on the
first floor (which term in London means
always the floor raised by one flight, of stairs above the level of the
street), had been fast asleep since nine o'clock; lastly, the
journeyman artisan had retired to rest for some time. He was a regular
lodger in the house; and his bedroom was on the second floor. For some
time he had been undressed, and had lain down in bed. Being, as a
working man, bound to habits of early rising, he was naturally anxious
to fall asleep as soon as possible. But, on this particular night, his
uneasiness, arising from the recent murders at No. 29, rose to a
paroxysm of nervous excitement which kept him awake. It is possible,
that from somebody he had heard of the suspicious-looking stranger, or
might even personally observed him slinking about. But, were it
otherwise, he was aware of several circumstances dangerously affecting
this house; for instance, the ruffianism of this whole neighborhood,
and the disagreeable fact that the Marrs had lived within a few doors
of this very house, which again argued that the murderer also lived at
no great distance. These were matters of
general alarm. But
there were others peculiar to this house; in particular, the notoriety
of Williamson's opulence; the belief, whether well or ill founded, that
he accumulated, in desks and drawers, the money continually flowing
into his hands; and lastly, the danger so ostentatiously courted by
that habit of leaving the house-door ajar through one entire hour—and
that hour loaded with extra danger, by the well-advertised assurance
that no collision need be feared with chance convivial visiters, since
all such people were banished at eleven. A regulation, which had
hitherto operated beneficially for the character and comfort of the
house, now, on the contrary, under altered circumstances, became a
positive proclamation of exposure and defencelessness, through one
entire period of an hour. Williamson himself, it was said generally,
being a large unwieldy man, past seventy, and signally inactive, ought,
in prudence, to make the locking of his door coincident with the
dismissal of his evening party.
Upon these and other grounds of alarm (particularly this, that Mrs.
Williamson was reported to possess a considerable quantity of plate),
the journeyman was musing painfully, and the time might be within
twenty-eight or twenty-five minutes of twelve, when all at once, with a
crash, proclaiming some hand of hideous violence, the house-door was
suddenly shut and locked. Here, then, beyond all doubt, was the
diabolic man, clothed in mystery, from No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway. Yes,
that dreadful being, who for twelve days had employed all thoughts and
all tongues, was now, too certainly, in this defenceless house, and
would, in a few minutes, be face to face with every one of its inmates.
A question still lingered in the public mind—whether at Marr's there
might not have been two men at work. If so, there would be two at
present; and one of the two would be immediately disposable for the
upstairs work; since no danger could obviously be more immediately
fatal to such an attack than any alarm given from an upper window to
the passengers in the street. Through one half-minute the poor
panic-stricken man sat up motionless in bed. But then he rose, his
first movement being towards the door of his room. Not for any purpose
of securing it against intrusion—too well he knew that there was no
fastening of any sort neither lock, nor bolt; nor was there any such
moveable furniture in the room as might have availed to barricade the
door, even if time could be counted on for such an attempt. It was no
effect of prudence, merely the fascination of killing fear it was, that
drove him to open the door. One step brought him to the head of the
stairs: he lowered his head over the balustrade in order to listen; and
at that moment ascended, from the little parlor, this agonizing cry
from the woman-servant, 'Lord Jesus Christ! we shall all be murdered!'
What a Medusa's head must have lurked in those dreadful bloodless
features, and those glazed rigid eyes, that seemed rightfully belonging
to a corpse, when one glance at them sufficed to proclaim a
death-warrant.
Three separate death-struggles were by this time over; and the poor
petrified journeyman, quite unconscious of what he was doing, in blind,
passive, self-surrender to panic, absolutely descended both flights of
stairs. Infinite terror inspired him with the same impulse as might
have been inspired by headlong courage. In his shirt, and upon old
decaying stairs, that at times creaked under his feet, he continued to
descend, until he had reached the lowest step but four. The situation
was tremendous beyond any that is on record. A sneeze, a cough, almost
a breathing, and the young man would be a corpse, without a chance or a
struggle for his life. The murderer was at that time in the little
parlor—the door of which parlor faced you in descending the stairs;
and this door stood ajar; indeed, much more considerably open than what
is understood by the term ‘ajar.' Of that quadrant, or 90 degrees,
which the door would describe in swinging so far open as to stand at
right angles to the lobby, or to itself, in a closed position, 55
degrees at the least were exposed. Consequently, two out of three
corpses were exposed to the young man's gaze. Where was the third? And
the murderer—where was he? As to the murderer, he was walking rapidly
backwards and forwards in the parlor, audible but not visible at first,
being engaged with something or other in that part of the room which
the door still concealed. What the something might be, the sound soon
explained; he was applying keys tentatively to a cupboard, a closet,
and a scrutoire, in the hidden part of the room. Very soon, however, he
came into view; but, fortunately for the young man, at this critical
moment, the murderer's purpose too entirely absorbed him to allow of
his throwing a glance to the staircase, on which else the white, figure
of the journeyman, standing in motionless horror, would have been
detected in one instant, and seasoned for the grave in the second. As
to the third corpse, the missing corpse, viz., Mr. Williamson's,
that
is in the cellar; and how its local position can be accounted for,
remains a separate question much discussed at the time, but never
satisfactorily cleared up. Meantime, that Williamson was dead, became
evident to the young man; since else he would have been heard stirring
or groaning. Three friends, therefore, out of four, whom the young man
had parted with forty minutes ago, were now extinguished; remained,
therefore, 40 per cent (a large percentage for Williams to leave);
remained, in fact, himself and his pretty young friend, the little
grand-daughter, whose childish innocence was still slumbering without
fear for herself, or grief for her aged grand-parents. If
they
are gone for ever, happily one friend (for such he will prove himself,
indeed, if from such a danger he can save this child) is pretty near to
her. But alas! he is still nearer to a murderer. At this moment he is
unnerved for any exertion whatever; he has changed into a pillar of
ice; for the objects before him, separated by just thirteen feet, are
these:—The housemaid had been caught by the murderer on her knees;
she was kneeling before the firegrate, which she had been polishing
with black lead. That part of her task was finished; and she had passed
on to another task, viz., the filling of the grate with wood and coals,
not for kindling at this moment, but so as to have it ready for
kindling on the next day. The appearances all showed that she must have
been engaged in this labor at the very moment when the murderer
entered; and perhaps the succession of the incidents arranged itself as
follows: -From the awful ejaculation and loud outcry to Christ, as
overheard by the journeyman, it was clear that then first she had been
alarmed; yet this was at least one and a-half or even two minutes after
the door-slamming. Consequently the alarm which had so fearfully and
seasonably alarmed the young man, must, in some unaccountable way, have
been misinterpreted by the two women. It was said, at the time, that
Mrs. Williamson labored under some dullness of hearing; and it was
conjectured that the servant, having her ears filled with the noise of
her own scrubbing, and her head half under the grate, might have
confounded it with the street noises, or else might have imputed this
violent closure to some mischievous boys. But, howsoever explained, the
fact was evident, that, until the words of appeal to Christ, the
servant had noticed nothing suspicious, nothing which interrupted her
labors. If so, it followed that neither had Mrs. Williamson noticed
anything; for, in that case, she would have communicated her own alarm
to the servant, since both were in the same small room. Apparently the
course of things after the murderer had entered the room was this—
Mrs. Williamson had probably not seen him, from the accident of
standing with her back to the door. Her, therefore, before he was
himself observed at all, he had stunned and prostrated by a shattering
blow on the back of her head; this blow, inflicted by a crow-bar, had
smashed in the hinder part of the skull. She fell; and by the noise of
her fall (for all was the work of a moment) had first roused the
attention of the servant; who then uttered the cry which had reached
the young man; but before she could repeat it, the murderer had
descended with his uplifted instrument upon her head, crushing the
skull inwards upon the brain. Both the women were irrecoverably
destroyed, so that further outrages were needless; and, moreover, the
murderer was conscious of the imminent danger from delay; and yet, in
spite of his hurry, so fully did he appreciate the fatal consequences
to himself, if any of his victims should so far revive into
consciousness as to make circumstantial depositions, that, by way of
making this impossible, he had proceeded instantly to cut the throats
of each. All this tallied with the appearances as now presenting
themselves. Mrs. Williamson had fallen backwards with her head to the
door; the servant, from her kneeling posture, had been incapable of
rising, and had presented her head passively to blows;, after which,
the miscreant had but to bend her head backwards so as to expose her
throat, and the murder was finished.
It is remarkable that the young artisan, paralyzed as he had been by
fear, and evidently fascinated for a time so as to walk right towards
the lion's mouth, yet found himself able to notice everything
important. The reader must suppose him at this point watching the
murderer whilst hanging over the body of Mrs. Williamson, and whilst
renewing his search for certain important keys. Doubtless it was an
anxious situation for the murderer; for, unless he speedily found the
keys wanted, all this hideous tragedy would end in nothing but a
prodigious increase of the public horror, in tenfold precautions
therefore, and redoubled obstacles interposed between himself and his
future game. Nay, there was even a nearer interest at stake; his own
immediate safety might, by a probable accident, be compromised. Most of
those who came to the house for liquor were giddy girls or children,
who, on finding this house closed, would go off carelessly to some
other; but, let any thoughtful woman or man come to the door now, a
full quarter of an hour before the established time of closing, in that
case suspicion would arise too powerful to be checked. There would be a
sudden alarm given; after which, mere luck would decide the event. For
it is a remarkable fact, and one that illustrates the singular
inconsistency of this villain, who, being often so superfluously
subtle, was in other directions so reckless and improvident, that at
this very moment, standing amongst corpses that had deluged the little
parlor with blood, Williams must have been in considerable doubt
whether he had any sure means of egress. There were windows, he knew,
to the back; but upon what ground they opened, he seems to have had no
certain information; and in a neighborhood so dangerous, the windows of
the lower story would not improbably be nailed down; those in the upper
might be free, but then came the necessity of a leap too formidable.
From all this, however, the sole practical inference was to hurry
forward with the trial of further keys, and to detect the hidden
treasure. This it was, this intense absorption in one overmastering
pursuit, that dulled the murderer's perceptions as to all around him;
otherwise, he must have heard the breathing of the young man, which to
himself at times became fearfully audible. As the murderer stood once
more over the body of Mrs. Williamson, and searched her pockets more
narrowly, he pulled out various clusters of keys, one of which
dropping, gave a harsh gingling sound upon the floor. At this time it
was that the secret witness, from his secret stand, noticed the fact of
Williams's surtout being lined with silk of the finest quality. One
other fact he noticed, which eventually became more immediately
important than many stronger circumstances of incrimination; this was,
that the shoes of the murderer, apparently new, and bought, probably,
with poor Marr's money, creaked as he walked, harshly and frequently.
With the new clusters of keys, the murderer walked off to the hidden
section of the parlor. And here, at last, was suggested to the
journeyman the sudden opening for an escape. Some minutes would be lost
to a certainty trying all these keys; and subsequently in searching the
drawers, supposing that the keys answered—or in violently forcing
them, supposing that they did
not. He might thus count upon a
brief interval of leisure, whilst the rattling of the keys might
obscure to the murderer the creaking of the stairs under the
re-ascending journeyman. His plan was now formed: on regaining his
bedroom, he placed the bed against the door by way of a transient
retardation to the enemy, that might give him a short warning, and in
the worst extremity, might give him a chance for life by means of a
desperate leap. This change made as quietly as possible, he tore the
sheets, pillow-cases, and blankets into broad ribbons; and after
plaiting them into ropes, spliced the different lengths together. But
at the very first he descries this ugly addition to his labors. Where
shall he look for any staple, hook, bar, or other fixture, from which
his rope, when twisted, may safely depend? Measured from the window-
sill—i. e., the lowest part of the window architrave—there
count but twenty-two or twenty-three feet to the ground. Of this length
ten or twelve feet may be looked upon as cancelled, because to that
extent lie might drop without danger. So much being deducted, there
would remain, say, a dozen feet of rope to prepare. But, unhappily,
there is no stout iron fixture anywhere about his window. The nearest,
indeed the sole fixture of that sort, is not near to the window at all;
it is a spike fixed (for no reason at all that is apparent) in the
bed-tester; now, the bed being shifted, the spike is shifted; and its
distance from the window, having been always four feet, is now seven.
Seven entire feet, therefore, must be added to that which would have
sufficed if measured from the window. But courage! God, by the proverb
of all nations in Christendom, helps those that help themselves. This
our young man thankfully acknowledges; he reads already, in the very
fact of any spike at all being found where hitherto it has been
useless, an earnest of providential aid. Were it only for himself that
he worked, he could not feel himself meritoriously employed; but this
is not so; in deep sincerity, he is now agitated for the poor child,
whom he knows and loves; every minute, he feels, brings ruin nearer to
her; and, as he passed her door, his first thought had been to take
her out of bed in his arms, and to carry her where she might share his
chances. But, on consideration, he felt that this sudden awaking of
her, and the impossibility of even whispering any explanation, would
cause her to cry audibly; and the inevitable indiscretion of one would
be fatal to the two. As the Alpine avalanches, when suspended above the
traveller's head, oftentimes (we are told) come down through the
stirring of the air by a simple whisper, precisely on such a tenure of
a whisper was now suspended the murderous malice of the man below. No;
there is but one way to save the child; towards
her deliverance,
the first step is through his own. And he has made an excellent
beginning; for the spike, which too fearfully he had expected to see
torn away by any strain upon the half-carious wood, stands firmly when
tried against the pressure of his own weight. He has rapidly fastened
on to it three lengths of his new rope, measuring eleven feet. He
plaits it roughly; so that only three feet have been lost in the
intertwisting; he has spliced on a second length equal to the first; so
that, already, sixteen feet are ready to throw out of the window; and
thus, let the worst come to the worst, it will not be absolute ruin to
swarm down the rope so far as it will reach, and then to drop boldly.
All this has been accomplished in about six minutes; and the hot
contest between above and below is steadily but fervently proceeding.
Murderer is working hard in the parlor; journeyman is working hard in
the bedroom. Miscreant is getting on famously downstairs; one batch of
bank-notes he has already bagged; and is hard upon the scent of a
second. He has also sprung a covey of golden coins. Sovereigns as yet
were not; but guineas at this period fetched thirty shillings a-piece;
and he has worked his way into a little quarry of these. Murderer is
almost joyous; and if any creature is still living in this house, as
shrewdly he suspects, and very soon means to know, with that creature
he would be happy, before cutting the creature's throat, to drink a
glass of something. Instead of the glass, might he not make a present
to the poor creature of its throat? Oh no! impossible ! Throats are a
sort of thing that he never makes presents of; business, business must
be attended to. Really the two men, considered simply as men of
business, are both meritorious. Like chorus and semi-chorus, strophe
and antistrophe, they work each against the other. Pull journeyman,
pull murderer! Pull baker, pull devil! As regards the journeyman, he is
now safe. To his sixteen feet, of which seven are neutralized by the
distance of the bed, he has at last added six feet more, which will be
short of reaching the ground by perhaps ten feet—a trifle which man
or boy may drop without injury. All is safe, therefore, for him: which
is more than one can be sure of for miscreant in the parlor. Miscreant,
however, takes it coolly enough: the reason being, that, with all his
cleverness, for once in his life miscreant has been over-reached. The
reader and 1 know, but miscreant does not in the least suspect, a
little fact of some importance, viz., that just now through a space of
full three minutes he has been overlooked and studied by one, who
(though reading in a dreadful book, and suffering under mortal panic)
took accurate notes of so much as his limited opportunities allowed him
to see, and will assuredly report the creaking shoes and the
silk-mounted surtout in quarters where such little facts will tell very
little to his advantage. But, although it is true that Mr. Williams,
unaware of the journeyman's having 'assisted' at the examination of
Mrs. Williamson's pockets, could not connect any anxiety with that
person's subsequent proceedings, nor specially, therefore, with his
having embarked in the rope-weaving line, assuredly he knew of reasons
enough for not loitering. And yet he did loiter. Reading his acts by
the light of such mute traces as he left behind him, the police became
aware that latterly he must have loitered~ And the reason which
governed him is striking; because at once it records—that murder was
not pursued by him simply as a means to an end, but also as an end for
itself. Mr. Williams had now been upon the premises for perhaps fifteen
or twenty minutes; and in that space of time he had dispatched, in a
style satisfactory to himself, a considerable amount of business. He
had done, in commercial language, 'a good stroke of business.' Upon two
floors, viz., the cellar-floor and the ground-floor, he has 'accounted
for' all the population. But there remained at least two floors more;
and it now occurred to Mr. Williams that, although the land. lord's
somewhat chilling manner had shut him out from any familiar knowledge
of the household arrangements, too probably on one or other of those
floors there must be some throats. As to plunder, he has already bagged
the whole. And it was next to impossible that any arrear the most
trivial should still remain for a gleaner. But the throats—the
throats—there it was that arrears and gleanings might perhaps be
counted on. And thus it appeared that, in his wolfish thirst for blood,
Mr. Williams put to hazard the whole fruits of his night's work, and
his life into the bargain. At this moment, if the murderer knew all,
could he see the open window above stairs ready for the descent of the
journeyman, could he witness the life-and-death rapidity with which
that journeyman is working, could he guess at the almighty uproar which
within ninety seconds will be maddening the population of this populous
district-no picture of a maniac in flight of panic or in pursuit of
vengeance would adequately represent the agony of haste with which he
would himself be hurrying to the street-door for final evasion.
That mode of escape was still free. Even at this moment, there yet
remained time sufficient for a successful flight, and, therefore, for
the following revolution in the romance of his own abominable life. He
had in his pockets above a hundred pounds of booty; means, therefore,
for a full disguise. This very night, if he will shave off his yellow
hair, and blacken his eyebrows, buying, when morning light returns, a
dark-colored wig, and clothes such as may co-operate in personating the
character of a grave professional man, he may elude all suspicions of
impertinent policemen; may sail by any one of a hundred vessels bound
for any port along the huge line of sea-.board (stretching through
twenty-four hundred miles) of the American United States; may enjoy
fifty years for leisurely repentance; and may even die in the odor of
sanctity. On the other hand, if he prefer active life, it is not
impossible that, with his subtlety, hardihood, and unscrupulousness, in
a land where the simple process of naturalization converts the alien at
once into a child of the family, he might rise to the president's
chair; might have a statue at his death; and afterwards a life in three
volumes quarto, with no hint glancing towards No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway.
But all depends on the next ninety seconds. Within that time there is a
sharp turn to be taken; there is a wrong turn, and a right turn. Should
his better angel guide him to the right one, all may yet go well as
regards this world's prosperity. But behold! in two minutes from this
point we shall see him take the wrong one: and then Neme. sis will be
at his heels with ruin perfect and sudden.
Meantime, if the murderer allows himself to loiter, the ropemaker
overhead does
not. Well he knows. that the poor child's fate is
on the edge of a razor: for all turns upon the alarm being raised
before the murderer reaches her bedside. And at this very moment,
whilst desperate agitation is nearly paralyzing his fingers, he hears
the sullen stealthy step of the murderer creeping up through the
darkness. It had been the expectation of the journeyman (founded on the
clamorous uproar with which the street-door was slammed) that Williams,
when disposable for his up-stairs work, would come racing at a long
jubilant gallop, and with a tiger roar; and perhaps, on his natural
instincts, he would have done so. But this mode of approach, which was
of dreadful effect when applied to a case of surprise, became dangerous
in the case of people who might by this time have been placed fully
upon their guard. The step which he had heard was on the staircase—
but upon which stair? He fancied upon the lowest: and in a movement so
slow and cautious, even this might make all the difference; yet might
it not have been the tenth, twelfth, or fourteenth stair? Never,
perhaps, in this world did any man feel his own responsibility so
cruelly loaded and strained, as at this moment did the poor journeyman
on behalf of the slumbering child. Lose but two seconds, through
awkwardness or through the self-counteractions of panic, and for her
the total difference arose between life and death. Still there is a
hope: and nothing can so frightfully expound the hellish nature of him
whose baleful shadow, to speak astrologically, at this moment darkens
the house of life, than the simple expression of the ground on which
this hope rested. The journeyman felt sure that the murderer would not
be satisfied to kill the poor child whilst unconscious. This would be
to defeat his whole purpose in murdering her at all. To an epicure in
murder such as Williams, it would be taking away the very sting of the
enjoyment, if the poor child should be suffered to drink off the bitter
cup of death without fully apprehending the misery of the situation.
But this luckily would require time: the double confusion of mind,
first, from being roused up at so unusual an hour, and, secondly, from
the horror of the occasion when explained to her, would at first
produce fainting, or some mode of insensibility or distraction, such as
must occupy a considerable time. The logic of the case, in short, all
rested upon the ultra fiendishness of Williams. Were he likely to be
content with the mere fact of the child's death, apart from the process
and leisurely expansion of its mental agony—in that case there would
be no hope. But, because our present murderer is fastidiously finical
in his exactions—a sort of martinet in the scenical grouping and
draping of the circumstances in his murders—therefore it is that hope
becomes reasonable, since all such refinements of preparation demand
time. Murders of mere necessity Williams was obliged to hurry; but, in
a murder of pure voluptuousness, entirely disinterested, where no
hostile witness was to be removed, no extra booty to be gained, and no
revenge to be gratified, it is clear that to hurry would be altogether
to ruin. If this child, therefore, is to be saved, it will be on pure
esthetical considerations
[3] .
But all considerations whatever are at this moment suddenly cut
short. A second step is heard on the stairs, but still stealthy and
cautious; a third—and then the child's doom seems fixed. But just at
that moment all is ready. The window is wide open; the rope is swinging
free; the journeyman has launched himself; and already he is in the
first stage of his descent. Simply by the weight of his person he
descended, and by the resistance of his hands he retarded the descent.
The danger was, that the rope should run too smoothly through his
hands, and that by too rapid an acceleration of pace he should come
violently to the ground. Happily he was able to resist the descending
impetus: the knots of the splicings furnished a succession of
retardations. But the rope proved shorter by four or five feet than he
had calculated: ten or eleven feet from the ground he hung suspended in
the air; speechless for the present, through long-continued agitation;
and not daring to drop boldly on the rough carriage pavement, lest he
should fracture his legs. But the night was not dark, as it had been on
occasion of the Marr murders. And yet, for purposes of criminal police,
it was by accident worse than the darkest night that ever hid a murder
or baffled a pursuit. London, from east to west, was covered with a
deep pall (rising from the river) of universal fog. Hence it happened,
that for twenty or thirty seconds the young man hanging in the air was
not observed. His white shirt at length attracted notice. Three or four
people ran up, and received him in their arms, all anticipating some
dreadful annunciation. To what house did he belong? Even that was not
instantly apparent; but he pointed with his finger to Williamson's
door, and said in a half-choking whisper: ‘
Marr's murderer, now at
work!'
All explained itself in a moment: the silent language of the fact
made its own eloquent revelation. The mysterious exterminator of No. 29
Ratcliffe Highway had visited another house; and, behold! one man only
had escaped through the air, and in his night-dress, to tell the tale.
Superstitiously, there was something to check the pursuit of this
unintelligible criminal. Morally, and in the interests of vindictive
justice, there was everything to rouse, quicken, and sustain it. Yes,
Marr's murderer—the man of mystery—was again at work; at this
moment perhaps extinguishing some lamp of life, and not at any remote
place, but here—in the very house which the listeners to this
dreadful announcement were actually touching. The chaos and blind
uproar of the scene which followed, measured by the crowded reports in
the journals of many subsequent days, and in one feature of that case,
has never to my knowledge had its parallel; or, if a parallel, only in
one case—what followed, I mean, on the acquittal of the seven bishops
at Westminster in 1688. At present there was more than passionate
enthusiasm. The frenzied movement of mixed horror and exultation—the
ululation of vengeance which ascended instantaneously from the
individual street, and then by a sublime sort of magnetic contagion
from all the adjacent streets, can be adequately expressed only by a
rapturous passage in Shelley:
The transport of a fierce and monstrous gladness
Spread through the multitudinous streets, fast flying
Upon the wings of fear:- From his dull madness
The starveling waked, and died in joy: the dying,
Among the corpses in stark agony lying,
Just heard the happy tidings, and in hope
Closed their faint eyes: from house to house replying
With loud acclaim the living shook heaven's cope,
And fill'd the startled earth with echoes.' [4]
There was something, indeed, half inexplicable in the instantaneous
interpretation of the gathering shout according to its true meaning. In
fact, the deadly roar of vengeance, and its sublime unity, could point
in this district only to the one demon whose idea had brooded and
tyrannized, for twelve days, over the general heart: every door, every
window in the neighborhood, flew open as if at a word of command;
multitudes, without waiting for the regular means of egress, leaped
down at once from the windows on the lower story; sick men rose from
their beds; in one instance, as if expressly to verify the image of
Shelley (in v. 4, 5, 6, 7), a man whose death had been looked for
through some days, and who actually
did die on the following
day, rose, armed himself with a sword, and descended in his shirt into
the street. The chance was a good one, and the mob were made aware of
it, for catching the wolfish dog in the high noon and carnival of his
bloody revels -in the very centre of his own shambles. For' a moment
the mob was self-baffled by its own numbers and its own fury. But even
that fury felt the call for self-control. It was evident that the massy
street-door must be driven in, since there was no longer any living
person to co-operate with their efforts from within, excepting only a
female child. Crowbars dexterously applied in one minute threw the door
out of hangings, and the people entered like a torrent. It may be
guessed with what fret and irritation to their consuming fury, a signal
of pause and absolute silence was made by a person of local importance.
In the hope of receiving some useful communication, the mob became
silent. 'Now listen,' said the man of authority, ‘and we shall learn
whether he is above-stairs or below.' Immediately a noise was heard as
if of some one forcing windows, and clearly the sound came from a
bedroom above. Yes, the fact was apparent that the murderer was even
yet in the house: he had been caught in a trap. Not having made himself
familiar with the details of Williamson's house, to all appearance he
had suddenly become a prisoner in one of the upper rooms. Towards this
the crowd now rushed impetuously. The door, however, was found to be
slightly fastened; and, at the moment when this was forced, a loud
crash of the window, both glass and frame, announced that the wretch
had made his escape. He had leaped down; and several persons in the
crowd, who burned with the general fury, leaped after him. These
persons had not troubled themselves about the nature of the ground; but
now, on making an examination of it with torches, they reported it to
be an inclined plane, or embankment of clay, very wet and adhesive. The
prints of the man's footsteps were deeply impressed upon the clay, and
therefore easily traced up to the summit of the embankment; but it was
perceived at once that pursuit would be useless, from the density of
the mist. Two feet ahead of you, a man was entirely withdrawn from your
power of identification; and, on overtaking him, you could not venture
to challenge him as the same whom you had lost sight of. Never, through
the course of a whole century, could there be a night expected more
propitious to an escaping criminal: means of disguise Williams now had
in excess; and the dens were innumerable in the neighborhood of the
river that could have sheltered him for years from troublesome
inquiries. But favors are thrown away upon the reckless and the
thankless. That night, when the turning-point offered itself for his
whole future career, Williams took the wrong turn; for, out of mere
indolence, he took the turn to his old lodgings—that place which, in
all England, he had just now the most reason to shun.
Meantime the crowd had thoroughly searched the premises of
Williamson. The first inquiry was for the young grand-daughter.
Williams, it was evident, had gone into her room: but in this room
apparently it was that the sudden uproar in the streets had surprised
him; after which his undivided attention had been directed to the
windows, since through these only any retreat had been left open to
him. Even this retreat he owed only to the fog and to the hurry of the
moment, and to the difficulty of approaching the premises by the rear.
The little girl was naturally agitated by the influx of strangers at
that hour; but otherwise, through the humane precautions of the
neighbors, she was preserved from all knowledge of the dreadful events
that had occurred whilst she herself was sleeping. Her poor old
grandfather was still missing, until the crowd descended into the
cellar; he was then found lying prostrate on the cellar floor:
apparently he had been thrown down from the top of the cellar stairs,
and with so much violence, that one leg was broken. After he had been
thus disabled, Williams had gone down to him, and cut his throat. There
was much discussion at the time, in some of the public journals, upon
the possibility of reconciling these incidents with other
circumstantialities of the case, supposing that only one man had been
concerned in the affair. That there was only one man concerned, seems
to be certain. One only was seen or heard at Marr's: one only, and
beyond all doubt the same man, was seen by the young journeyman in Mrs.
Williamson's parlor; and one only was traced by his footmarks on the
clay embankment. Apparently the course which he had pursued was this:
he had introduced himself to Williamson by ordering some beer. This
order would oblige the old man to go down into the cellar; Williams
would wait until he had reached it, and would then 'slam' and lock the
street-door in the violent way described. Williamson would come up in
agitation upon bearing this violence. The murderer, aware that he would
do so, met him, no doubt, at the head of the cellar stairs, and threw
him down; after which he would go down to consummate the murder in his
ordinary way. All this would occupy a minute, or a minute and a half;
and in that way the interval would be accounted for that elapsed
between the alarming sound of the street-door as heard by the
journeyman, and the lamentable outcry of the female servant. It is
evident also, that the reason why no cry whatsoever. had been heard
from the lips of Mrs. Williamson, is due to the positions of the
parties as I have sketched them. Coming behind Mrs. Williamson, unseen
therefore, and from her deafness unheard, the murderer would inflict
entire abolition of consciousness while she was yet unaware of his
presence. But with the servant, who had unavoidably witnessed the
attack upon her mistress, the murderer could not obtain the same
fulness of advantage; and she therefore had time for making an
agonizing ejaculation.
It has been mentioned, that the murderer of the Marrs was not for
nearly a fortnight so much as suspected; meaning that, previously to
the Williamson murder, no vestige of any ground for suspicion in any
direction whatever had occurred either to the general public or to the
police. But there were two very limited exceptions to this state of
absolute ignorance. Some of the magistrates had in their possession
something which, when closely examined, offered a very probable means
for tracing the criminal. But as yet they had not traced him. Until the
Friday morning next after the destruction of the Williamsons, they had
not published the important fact, that upon the ship-carpenter's mallet
(with which, as regarded the stunning or disabling process, the murders
had been achieved) were inscribed the letters 'J.P.' This mallet had,
by a strange oversight on the part of the murderer, been left behind in
Marr's shop; and it is an interesting fact, therefore, that, had the
villain been intercepted by the brave pawnbroker, he would have been
met virtually disarmed. This public notification was made officially on
the Friday, viz., on the thirteenth day after the first murder. And it
was instantly followed (as will be seen) by a most important result.
Meantime, within the secrecy of one single bedroom in all London, it is
a fact that Williams had been whisperingly the object of very deep
suspicion from the very first—that is, within that same hour which
witnessed the Marr tragedy. And singular it is, that the suspicion was
due entirely to his own folly. Williams lodged, in company with other
men of various nations, at a public-house. In a large dormitory there
were arranged five or six beds; these were occupied by artisans,
generally of respectable character. One or two Englishmen there were,
one or two- Scotchmen, three or four Germans, and Williams, whose
birth-place was not certainly known. On the fatal Saturday night, about
half-past one o'clock, when Williams returned from his dreadful labors,
he found the English and Scotch party asleep, but the Germans awake:
one of them was sitting up with a lighted candle in his hands, and
reading aloud to the other two. Upon this, Williams said, in an angry
and very peremptory tone,' Oh, put that candle out; put it out
directly; we shall all be burned in our beds.' Had the British party in
the room been awake, Mr. Williams would have roused a mutinous protest
against this arrogant mandate. But Germans are generally mild and
facile in their tempers; so the light was complaisantly extinguished.
Yet, as there were no curtains, it struck the Germans that the danger
was really none at all; for bed-clothes, massed upon each other, will
no more burn than the leaves of a closed book. Privately, therefore,
the Germans drew an inference, that Mr. Williams must have had some
urgent motive for withdrawing his own person and dress from
observation. What this motive might be, the next day's news diffused
all over London, and of course at this house, not two furlongs from
Marr's shop, made awfully evident; and, as may well be supposed, the
suspicion was communicated to the other members of the dormitory. All
of them, however, were aware of the legal danger attaching, under
English law, to insinuations against a man, even if true, which might
not admit of proof. In reality, had Williams used the most obvious
precautions, had he simply walked down to the Thames (not a
stone's-throw distant), and flung two of his implements into the river,
no conclusive proof could have been adduced against him. And he might
have realized the scheme of Courvoisier (the murderer of Lord William
Russell)—viz., have sought each separate month's support in a
separate well-concerted murder. The party in the dormitory, meantime,
were satisfied themselves, but waited for evidences that might satisfy
others. No sooner, therefore, had the official notice been published as
to the initials J. P. on the mallet, than every man in the house
recognized at once the well-known initials of an honest Norwegian
ship-carpenter, John Petersen, who had worked in the English dockyards
until the present year; but, having occasion to revisit his native
land, had left his box of tools in the garrets of this inn. These
garrets were now searched. Petersen's tool-chest was found, but wanting
the mallet; and, on further examination, another overwhelming discovery
was made. The surgeon, who examined the corpses at Williamson's, had
given it as his opinion that the throats were not cut by means of a
razor, but of some implement differently shaped. It was now remembered
that Williams had recently borrowed a large French knife of peculiar
construction; and accordingly, from a heap of old lumber and rags,
there was soon extricated a waistcoat, which the whole house could
swear to as recently worn by Williams. In this waistcoat, and glued by
gore to the lining of its pockets, was found the French knife. Next, it
was matter of notoriety to everybody in the inn, that Williams
ordinarily wore at present a pair of creaking shoes, and a brown
surtout lined with silk. Many other presumptions seemed scarcely called
for. Williams was immediately apprehended, and briefly examined. This
was on the Friday. On the Saturday morning (viz., fourteen days from
the Marr murders) he was again brought up. The circumstantial evidence
was overwhelming; Williams watched its course, but said very little. At
the close, he was fully committed for trial at the next sessions; and
it is needless to say, that, on his road to prison, he was pursued by
mobs so fierce, that, under ordinary circumstances, there would have
been small hope of escaping summary vengeance. But upon this occasion a
powerful escort had been provided; so that he was safely lodged in
jail. In this particular jail at this time, the regulation was, that at
five o'clock, [P. M.] all the prisoners on the criminal side should be
finally locked up for the night, and without candles. For fourteen
hours (that is, until seven o'clock on the next morning) they were left
unvisited, and in total darkness. Time, therefore, Williams had for
committing suicide. The means in other respects were small. One iron
bar there was, meant (if I remember) for the suspension of a lamp; upon
this he had hanged himself by his braces. At what hour was uncertain:
some people fancied at midnight. And in that case, precisely at the
hour when, fourteen days before, he had been spreading horror and
desolation the quiet family of poor Marr, now was he forced into
drinking of the same cup, presented to his lips by the same accursed
hands.
The case of the M'Keans, which has been specially alluded to, merits
also a slight rehearsal for the dreadful picturesqueness of some two or
three amongst its circumstances. The scene of this murder was at a
rustic inn, some few miles (I think) from Manchester; and the
advantageous situation of this inn it was, out of which arose the two
fold temptations of the case. Generally speaking, an inn argues, of
course, a close cincture of neighbors as the original motive for
opening such an establishment. But, in this case, the house
individually was solitary, so that no interruption was to be looked for
from any persons living within reach of screams; and yet, on the other
hand, the circumjacent vicinity was eminently populous; as one
consequence of which, a benefit club had established its weekly
rendezvous in this inn, and left the peculiar accumulations in their
club-room, under the custody of the landlord. This fund arose often to
a considerable amount, fifty or seventy pounds, before it was
transferred to the hands of a banker. Here, therefore, was a treasure
worth some little risk, and a situation that promised next to none.
These attractive circumstances had, by accident, become accurately
known to one or both of the two M'Keans; and, unfortunately, at a
moment of overwhelming misfortune to themselves. They were hawkers;
and, until lately, had borne most respectable characters: but some
mercantile crash had overtaken them with utter ruin, in which their
joint capital had been swallowed up to the last shilling. This sudden
prostration had made them desperate: their own little property had been
swallowed up in a large social catastrophe, and society at large they
looked upon as accountable to them for a robbery. In preying,
therefore, upon society, they considered themselves as pursuing a wild
natural justice of retaliation. The money aimed at did certainly assume
the character of public money, being the product of many separate
subscriptions. They forgot, however, that in the murderous acts, which
too certainly they meditated as preliminaries to the robbery, they
could plead no such imaginary social precedent. In dealing with a
family that seemed almost helpless, if all went smoothly, they relied
entirely upon their own bodily strength. They were stout young men,
twenty-eight to thirty-two years old; somewhat undersized as to height;
but squarely built, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, and so beautifully
formed, as regarded the symmetry of their limbs and their
articulations, that, after their execution, the bodies were privately
exhibited by the surgeons of the Manchester Infirmary, as objects of
statuesque interest. On the other hand, the household which they
proposed to attack consisted of the following four persons:—1. the
landlord, a stoutish farmer—but
him they intended to disable
by a trick then newly introduced amongst robbers, and termed
hocussing, i. e., clandestinely drugging the liquor of the victim
with laudanum; 2. the landlord's wife; 3. a young servant woman; 4. a
boy, twelve or fourteen years old. The danger was, that out of four
persons, scattered by possibility over a house which had two separate
exits, one at least might escape, and by better acquaintance with the
adjacent paths, might succeed in giving an alarm to some of the houses
a furlong distant. Their final resolution was, to be guided by
circumstances as to the mode of conducting the affair; and yet, as it
seemed essential to success that they should assume the air of
strangers to each other, it was necessary that they should preconcert
some general outline of their plan; since it would on this scheme be
impossible, without awaking violent suspicions, to make any
communications under the eyes of the family. This outline included, at
the least, one murder: so much was settled; but, otherwise, their
subsequent proceedings make it evident that they wished to have as
little bloodshed as was consistent with their final object. On the
appointed day, they presented themselves separately at the rustic inn,
and at different hours. One came as early as four o'clock in the
afternoon; the other not until half-past seven. They saluted each other
distantly and shyly; and, though occasionally exchanging a few words in
the character of strangers, did not seem disposed to any familiar
intercourse. With the landlord; however, on his return about eight
o'clock from Manchester, one of the brothers entered into a lively
conversation; invited him to take a tumbler of punch; and, at a moment
when the landlord's absence from the room allowed it, poured into the
punch a spoonful of laudanum. Some time after this, the clock struck
ten; upon which the elder M'Kean, professing to be weary, asked to be
shown up to his bedroom: for each brother, immediately on arriving, had
engaged a bed. On this, the poor servant girl had presented herself
with a bed-candle to light him upstairs. At this critical moment the
family were distributed thus: the landlord, stupefied with the horrid
narcotic which he had drunk, had retired to a private room adjoining
the public room, for the purpose of reclining upon a sofa: and he,
luckily for his own safety, was looked upon as entirely incapacitated
for action. The landlady was occupied with her husband. And thus the
younger M'Kean was left alone in the public room. He rose, therefore,
softly, and placed himself at the foot of the stairs which his brother
had just ascended, so as to be sure of intercepting any fugitive from
the bed-room above. Into that room the elder M'Kean was ushered by the
servant, who pointed to two beds—one of which was already half
occupied by the boy, and the other empty: in these, she intimated that
the two strangers must dispose of themselves for the night, according
to any arrangement that they might agree upon. Saying this, she
presented him with the candle, which he in a moment placed upon the
table; and, intercepting her retreat from the room threw his arm round
her neck with a gesture as though he meant to kiss her. This was
evidently what she herself anticipated, and endeavored to prevent. Her
horror may be imagined, when she felt the perfidious hand that clasped
her neck armed with a razor, and violently cutting her throat. She was
hardly able to utter one scream, before she sank powerless upon the
floor. This dreadful spectacle was witnessed by the boy, who was not
asleep, but had presence of mind enough instantly to close his eyes.
The murderer advanced hastily to the bed, and anxiously examined the
expression of the boy's features: satisfied he was not, and he then
placed his hand upon the boy's heart, in order to judge by its beatings
whether he were agitated or not. This was a dreadful trial: and no
doubt the counterfeit sleep would immediately have been detected, when
suddenly a dreadful spectacle drew off the attention of the murderer.
Solemnly, and in ghostly silence, uprose in her dying delirium the
murdered girl; she stood upright, she walked steadily for a moment or
two, she bent her steps towards the door. The murderer turned away to
pursue her; and at that moment the boy, feeling that his one solitary
chance was to fly while this scene was in progress, bounded out of bed.
On the landing at the head of the stairs was one murderer, at the foot
of the stairs was the other: who could believe that the boy had the
shadow of a chance for escaping? And yet, in the most natural way, he
surmounted all hindrances. In the boy's horror, he laid his left hand
on the balustrade, and took a flying leap over it, which landed him at
the bottom of the stairs, without having touched a single stair. He had
thus effectually passed one of the murderers: the other, it is true,
was still to be passed; and this would have been impossible but for a
sudden accident. The landlady had been alarmed by the faint scream of
the young woman; had hurried from her private room to the girl's
assistance; but at the foot of the stairs had been intercepted by the
younger brother, and was at this moment struggling with him. The
confusion of this life-and-death conflict had allowed the boy to whirl
past them. Luckily he took a turn into a kitchen, out of which was a
back-door, fastened by a single bolt, that ran freely at a touch; and
through this door he rushed into the open fields. But at this moment
the elder brother was set free for pursuit by the death of the poor
girl. There is no doubt, that in her delirium the image moving through
her thoughts was that of the club, which met once a week. She fancied
it no doubt sitting; and to this room, for help and for safety she
staggered along; she entered it, and within the doorway once more she
dropped down, and instantly expired. Her murderer, who had followed her
closely, now saw himself set at liberty for the pursuit of the boy. At
this critical moment, all was at stake; unless the boy were caught, the
enterprise was ruined. He passed his brother, therefore, and the
landlady without pausing, and rushed through the open door into the
fields. By a single second, perhaps, he was too late. The boy was
keenly aware, that if he continued in sight, he would have no chance of
escaping from a powerful young man. He made, therefore, at once for a
ditch. into which he tumbled headlong. Had the murderer ventured to
make a leisurely examination of the nearest ditch, he would easily have
found the boy—made so conspicuous by his white shirt. But he lost all
heart, upon failing at once to arrest the boy's flight. And every
succeeding second made his despair the greater. If the boy had really
effected his escape to the neighboring farm-house, a party of men might
be gathered within five minutes; and already it might have become
difficult for himself and his brother, unacquainted with the field
paths, to evade being intercepted. Nothing remained, therefore, but to
summon his brother away.
Thus it happened that the landlady, though mangled, escaped with
life, and eventually recovered. The landlord owed his safety to the
stupefying potion. And the baffled murderers had the misery of knowing
that their dreadful crime had been altogether profitless. The road,
indeed, was now open to the club-room; and, probably, forty seconds
would have sufficed to carry off the box of treasure, which afterwards
might have been burst open and pillaged at leisure. But the fear of
intercepting enemies was too strongly upon them; and they fled rapidly
by a road which carried them actually within six feet of the lurking
boy. That night they passed through Manchester. When daylight returned,
they slept in a thicket twenty miles distant from the scene of their
guilty attempt. On the second and third nights, they pursued their
march on foot, resting again during the day. About sunrise 6n the
fourth morning, they were entering some village near Kirby Lonsdale, in
Westmoreland. They must have designedly quitted the direct line of
route; for their object was Ayrshire, of which county they were
natives; and the regular road would have led them through Shap,
Penrith, Carlisle. Probably they were seeking to elude the persecution
of the stage-coaches, which, for the last thirty hours, had been
scattering at all the inns and road-side
cabarets hand-bills
describing their persons and dress. It happened (perhaps through
design) that on this fourth morning they had separated, so as to enter
the village ten minutes apart from each other. They were exhausted and
footsore. In this condition it was easy to stop them. A blacksmith had
silently reconnoitred them, and compared their appearance with the
description of the hand-bills. They were then easily overtaken, and
separately arrested. Their trial and condemnation speedily followed at
Lancaster; and in those days it followed, of course, that they were
executed. Otherwise their case fell so far within the sheltering limits
of what would now be regarded as extenuating circumstances—that,
whilst a murder more or less was not to repel them from their object,
very evidently they were anxious to economize the bloodshed as much as
possible. Immeasurable, therefore, was the interval which divided them
from the monster Williams. They perished on the scaffold: Williams, as
I have said, by his own hand; and, in obedience to the law as it then
stood, he was buried in the centre of a quadrivium, or conflux of four
roads (in this case four streets), with a stake driven through his
heart. And over him drives for ever the uproar of unresting London!
END
End Notes
[1]
[ I am not sure whether Southey held at this time his appointment
to the editorship of the' Edinburgh Annual Register.' If he did, no
doubt in the domestic section of that chronicle will be found an
excellent account of the whole.]
[2] [ I do not remember, chronologically, the history of gas-lights.
But in London, long after Mr. Winsor had shown the value of
gas-lighting, and its applicability to street purposes, various
districts were prevented, for many years, from resorting to the new
system, in consequence of old contracts with oil-dealers, subsisting
through long terms of years. ]
[3]
[Let the reader, who is disposed to regard as exaggerated or
romantic the pure fiendishness imputed to Williams, recollect that,
except for the luxurious purpose of basking and revelling in the
anguish of dying despair, he had no motive at all, small or great, for
attempting the mulrder of this young girl. She had seen nothing, heard
nothing—was fast asleep, and her door was closed; so that, as a
witness against him, he knew that she was as useless as any one of the
three corpses. And yet he was making preparations for her murder, when
the alarm in the street interrupted him.]
[4] [Revolt of Islam,' canto xii. ]
