Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  MURDER by

  CANDLELIGHT

  The Gruesome Crimes Behind

  Our Romance with the Macabre

  MICHAEL KNOX BERAN

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To my wife

  Very few can boast of hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, and of which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a distinct and continued view. . . .

  —Dr. Johnson

  Contents

  Romantic Murder

  PROLOGUE: Horror’s Romance: From the Gothic Donjon

  to the Metropolitan Blood-Sacrifice

  PART ONE: The Murder in the Dark Lane

  PART TWO: The Mystery of the Mutilated Corpse

  PART THREE: The Butler Didn’t Do It: A Murder in Mayfair

  PART FOUR: Toward the Ripper

  EPILOGUE: The Decay of Murder

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  Index

  About the Author

  Romantic Murder

  Lately I have found it a nocturnal refuge to read books of the early and middle nineteenth century: Skeats’s edition of Chatterton, Dickens’s Life of Grimaldi, Collins and Cruikshank’s Punch and Judy, Dyce’s edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. . . . I like the atmosphere of English antiquities, the Gothic churches and the slang of old London, the clotted and cobwebbed prose . . . the murkiness and tangledness of texts that leave so much of the past mysterious.

  —Edmund Wilson

  In his essay “The Decline of the English Murder,” George Orwell opined that the classic period of English homicide began about 1850 and died away circa 1925. Reading the piece some years ago, I found myself inclined to disagree. Orwell conceived the classic murderer to be, like Dr. Palmer of Rugeley, Major Armstrong of Cusop Dingle, and that curious figure Dr. Crippen, a respectable, middle-class figure, the follower, perhaps, of a learned profession, who brings about the death of an inconvenient person by means of poison. But surely the hygienic, frock-coated neatness of Orwell’s classic murders, so far from marking them as masterpieces of the genre, was indicative of a degeneration of the form, the triumph of a bloodless, attenuated species of killing over the wilder and more impassioned varieties, with all their sanguinary élan. Also, the victim of a poisoner is often unaware that he or she is being murdered, a circumstance which deducts materially from the amount of horror such a case can excite.

  Like a diamond, a murder shows best by candlelight. It seems to me that the age when murder was most “classical”—that is, when it was most macabre—fell somewhat earlier than Orwell would have us think. The golden age of murder (if it is not unseemly to use such an expression in connection with such a subject) is, I am convinced, to be found in and around the quarter-century that elapsed between 1811 and 1837, an era bounded on the one side by the commencement of the regency of Prince George, afterwards King George IV, and on the other by the accession of his niece, Queen Victoria.

  But how to justify this, what is to my thinking the saeculum aureum of murder, its Age of Gold? Certainly the atmosphere of the period has something to do with it, the ghastly, Gothic, and peculiarly English quality of an age in which candlelight gave way to gaslight and the mail coach to railways—an age of chop-houses and hackney coaches, when watchmen called “Charlies” cried the hours of the night and young harlots cursed like sailors in streets daubed with the soot of hell. Other ages, however, have scenes as ghastly to show; and if the murders of this period seem to me to have been especially lurid, the reason is perhaps to be found less in the acts themselves than in the impression they made, at the time, on sensitive and imaginative minds. It is less the quality of the crimes than the attitude of the age which determines the gruesomeness of its murders.

  The killings described in this book took place in the high noon of Romanticism, when the most vital spirits were in revolt against the eighteenth-century lucidity of their fathers and grandfathers, those powdered, periwigged gentlemen who had been bred up in the sunshine of the Enlightenment, and who were as loath to descend to the Gothic crypt as they were to contemplate the Gothic skull beneath the skin. The Romantic Age, by contrast, was more than a little in love with blood and deviltry. It was an age that delighted in the clotted gore of the seventeenth-century dramatists, the bloody poetry of Webster and Tourneur and Middleton. “To move a horror skillfully,” Charles Lamb wrote in his 1808 book Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, “to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do.” Inferior geniuses, Lamb said, may “terrify babes with painted devils,” but they “know not how a soul is to be moved.”

  The keenest spirits of this epoch in murder history—Sir Walter Scott, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Carlyle among them—knew a good deal about the horror that moves the soul. In their contemplations of the most notorious murders of their time, they saw “strange images of death” and discovered dreadfulnesses in the act of homicide that we, in an age in which murder has been antiseptically reduced to a problem of social science on the one hand and skillful detective work on the other, are only too likely to have overlooked.

  For the student of history, the murders of a vanished time have this other value. An eminent historian has said that were he limited, in the study of a particular historical period, to one sort of document only, he would choose the records of its murder trials as being the most comprehensively illuminating. A history of the murders of an age will in its own way reveal as much of human nature, caught in the Minotaur-maze of evil circumstance, as your French Revolutions, Vienna Congresses, and German Unifications. What a vision of the past rises up before us in these dark scenes, illumined by wax-lights and tallow-dips: and what an uncanny light do they throw upon our own no less mysterious, no less sinful present.

  PROLOGUE

  Horror’s Romance: From the Gothic Donjon to the Metropolitan Blood-Sacrifice

  A corpse, a bloody piteous corpse,

  Pale, pale as ashes, all bedaubed in blood,

  All in gore-blood. . . .

  —Shakespeare

  All over England, people were looking to be scared out of their wits. The rage for being frightened to death began in the middle of the eighteenth century, when, in the high noon of the Age of Reason, Horace “Horry” Walpole, dilettante son of the Whig Prime Minister Sir Robert, grew bored of neo-classical sweetness and light. He was from an early age drawn to Gothic corpses and cobwebbery, and in 1764 he published, under a pen name, a novel called The Castle of Otranto, in which he whimsically evoked the very Gothic ghoulishness the reformers of his time were trying to forget.

  The book created a new appetite, and England was soon awash in shudder novels. Tiring of the orderly parterres of Pope and Dr. Johnson, readers were drawn to the wilder literary gardens of such writers as Ann Radcliffe and William Beckford. Books like Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, in which the innocent heroine is cruelly immured in an Italian castle, and Beckford’s Vathek, the story of the descent of an eastern potentate into a lurid hell, offered the reader glimpses of the exotic and the forbidden, and at the same time satisfied his craving for romances in which the sensuous and voluptuous passions were artfully mingled with the vicious and depraved ones.

  Horror, after all, is scarcely horror without a tincture of warped eroticism, and as a rule the Gothic novelists laid their tales in the Gothic castle, and more especially in the Gothic donjon. Their readers ate it up, for they instinctively associated the castle with the more blood-curdling varieties of vice and licentious deviancy. A very pardonable
assumption: castle pride has long been closely interwoven with castle perversity. From Caligula to Colonel Charteris, the “Rape-Master General of Britain,” the castle has been the locus classicus of erotic horror. The Marquis de Sade himself, blond scion of the Frankish knightage which in the Dark Ages gave aristocracy to Europe, could never have existed but for the rank luxuriance of his château, with its hereditary right of domination; the feudal morbidities of the marquis who made a fetish of his pedigree were the whip and spur of the manias that drove the zealot of sadistic copulation.

  In time, however, the Gothic formulas grew stale, and by 1817 the Gothic castle, with its trapdoors and spy-holes cut out of the eyes of ancestral portraits, had become insipid. In that year, Jane Austen published Northanger Abbey, a novel in which she mocked the Gothic genre as unreal. “Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works,” she wrote, “and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for.”

  Another assault, far more comprehensive than that of the eighteenth-century Gothicists, was by this time under way against the complacencies of the Age of Reason. A new generation had arisen to seek what Cardinal Newman called “a deeper philosophy” of the soul. The Romantic rebels sought to penetrate the depths of human nature less by means of analytical intelligence than through feeling and force of soul; and indeed one of their number, the East Prussian sage Johann Georg Hamann, went so far as to say that only “love—for a person or an object—can reveal the true nature of anything.”

  The Romantics brought this ideal of sympathetic insight to bear on nearly every aspect of human life. In politics and statecraft, the Romantic revolution was inaugurated by Edmund Burke, who taught his disciples to perceive the hidden beauty of ancient customs and institutions, and to dread the “new conquering empire of light and reason” that threatened to destroy them. William Wordsworth ushered in a corresponding revolution in poetry, inculcating through his poems qualities of feeling and sentiment at odds with the artificiality of a society which he believed had grown deaf to the mystic language of nature and truth. Not less valuable was the Romantic effort to understand the nature of evil and to reinstate it in all its dark majesty as a fact of the human soul. To be sure, not a few of the Romantic poets dallied, in the first ebullience of youth, with the belief that man is born good and corrupted by institutions; but the push and thrust of the movement was always toward a recognition that sin is real and ineradicable. The demon-lovers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems, the witches and gremlins and occult gramayre (magic) that haunted Sir Walter Scott’s imagination, the young Thomas Carlyle’s Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (“Devilsdung”), the protagonist of the dark fantasy Sartor Resartus, all bear witness to the Romantic conviction that the devil lives in each of us, feeding on the worms that fester in the vitals of our spirit.

  “He hath a demon,” the essayist William Hazlitt said of George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron. Inferior, as a poet, to Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the author of reams of verse that largely bore the modern reader, Lord Byron was yet more scrupulous than his poetical coevals in his investigations of human nastiness. He resembled nothing so much as one of the holy fanatics of Russia who believed that if they were to know the truth of evil, they must descend in their own persons to the lowest pits of depravity. Byron could scarcely bear to be outstripped in the competition for malignant experience. The French writer Chateaubriand had been beguiled by a dream of incest; Byron must out-scandal him by making love to his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. The eighteenth-century roué Sir Francis Dashwood had instituted a mock religious order, the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, consecrated to voluptuous debauchery; Byron must surpass him by establishing, at Newstead Abbey, his own Order of the Skull, and by drinking claret from a defunct human cranium. Casanova had, in a long career of incessant ribaldry, shown himself a notable son of Priapus; Byron, at Venice, must try to out-wench him, with what success we cannot be sure.

  As the man, so the verse. It is morbid. “The flowers that adorn his poetry,” Hazlitt writes, “bloom over charnel-houses and the grave.” And yet there was a deeper stratum of horror that Byron could not penetrate, assiduously though he tried. In June 1816, having exiled himself from a too-respectably bourgeois England, he was living in the Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva. His friend, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, had taken a house nearby and, during a long spell of rain, Shelley and his traveling companions—Mary Godwin, the young lady who was soon to become his wife, and her stepsister Claire, Byron’s girlfriend at the time—spent much time in the Villa Diodati. Byron’s physician, John William Polidori (a lugubrious young man whom Stendhal mistook for the poet’s pimp) recalled how one evening about midnight the group “really began to talk ghostly.” A volume of German horror stories lay to hand, and the wine and laudanum (opium) flowed freely. At one point, Byron recited part of Coleridge’s poem Christabel. The innocent Christabel, having undressed and gotten into bed, is reclining on her elbow as her new-found friend Lady Geraldine (who is in fact a lamia, or anthropophagic demon) begins to disrobe:

  Then drawing in her breath aloud,

  Like one that shuddered, she unbound

  The cincture from beneath her breast:

  Her silken robe, and inner vest,

  Dropt to her feet, and in full view,

  Behold! her bosom and half her side—

  Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue—

  O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

  The silence that followed was broken when Shelley, “suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle.” He afterwards said that as he listened to Coleridge’s lines, he “thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples.”

  The participants in the synod in the Villa Diodati agreed that each would write a ghost story. Byron began to compose a vampire tale, but he soon tired of it. Polidori turned the fragment into a novella, The Vampyre, in which his cloven-footed patron (Byron had a clubfoot) figures as the bloodsucking villain. Touché! But in other respects The Vampyre was a weak book, and Byron himself was soon absorbed in the composition of another work, his dramatic poem Manfred. But like the other Byronic heroes—like Count Lara, the Corsair, and the Giaour—Manfred is merely a facsimile of Byron himself: he can disturb no one’s sleep. His pose is worse than his bite; he is yet another villain on the model of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Montoni, the more tedious, as he mopes about the alpine peaks, on account of his penchant for extended soliloquies in which he ponders his own mysterious agony and laments the untimely death of his sister, Astarte. (“I loved her, and destroy’d her.”)

  Of all the books produced under the inspiration of the symposium in the Villa Diodati, only Mary Godwin’s Frankenstein* represented a real advance in the quest for a subtler horror, a truer Gothic. This was because she grounded her castle more firmly in reality than the other Gothic writers did theirs. She converted her demonic hero into a modern laboratory scientist, and she portrayed his diabolic progeny—the monster himself—as a rebel against an oppressive social order, ready to stand at the next by-election in the Radical interest. Yet it was not Mary but her seducer, Shelley himself, who in 1816 bid fair to be the new master of the macabre. A butterfly spirit, the poet had abandoned his first wife, Harriet, to run away, in 1814, with Mary, who was then a girl of sixteen. He was from an early age preoccupied with witches, sprites, and demons, and he grew up “a kind of ghastly object, colourless, pallid, without health, or warmth, or vigour; the sound of him shrieky, frosty, as if a ghost were trying to sing. . . .” As he matured, Shelley became conscious of realms of experience that seemed to him to lie beyond the limits of ordinary sense-perception, and he was bedeviled by mental phantoms that haunted him like “vampire bats before the glare of the tropic sun”—nightmarish visions of friends lacerated, a wife strangled, a dead child reanimated.

  But Shelley never found a literary form that ad
equately conveyed the peculiar terror he felt merely in being alive. The “foul fiends,” “pale snakes,” and “semivital worms” of his poems are growths of the Gothic hothouse; they haunt a world too different from the one we know to make us afraid in the way he was afraid. His horror-poetry is in its own way as unreal as the horror-prose of Mrs. Radcliffe and William Beckford; in it we find the same old Gothic castle, only now perceived hallucinogenically.†

  Shelley drowned in 1822 when his sailboat sank in the Gulf of Spezia; Byron died two years later at Missolonghi, where he had gone to help the Greek patriots in their struggle against the Turks. The breakthrough that eluded the Romantic poets would instead be made by their cousins, the Romantic prose-masters—by writers who, like the two Toms, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Carlyle, found the essence of horror not in the castle, that fabulous and remote place, but in the real if commonplace streets of the modern city. They saw that the daily life of the metropolis, if studied closely and sympathetically, yielded scenes as strange, as pregnant with mysterious terror, as the myths and romances on which the Romantic poets fed. Nowhere did the prose-masters come closer to distilling the essence of this living Gothicism than in their studies of the modern blood-sacrifice, that crime with the “primal eldest curse” upon it, the living hell of the modern metropolitan murder.

  * By the time the book was completed, Mary had wed Shelley: the volume was published anonymously in London in 1818.

  † Shelley’s hallucinogenic vision may have been heightened by an encounter with the tenth muse, Syphilis. Shelley was convinced that he had contracted the disease when he was a student at Oxford, and he told Leigh Hunt that the memory of this tainted lust inspired the lines in Epipsychidion in which he describes an enchantress “whose voice was venomed melody,” whose touch was “electric poison.”