The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (4 page)

I did not want a drop of her blood upon my clothes and so I took off my ulster, jacket, waistcoat and trousers; hanging upon the back of her door was a faded coat, bordered with thin fur, and I wrapped it around myself before taking out my knife. That knife is a lovely object with a carved ivory handle; I purchased it at Gibbon’s in the Haymarket for fifteen shillings and the pity of it was that, after I had entered her, its shine would be lost forever. I remember in my schooldays how I mourned when my first line of ink spotted the purity of a new book of exercises—now I was about to write my name again, but with a different instrument. She only began to stir after I had taken out a piece of intestine and blown softly upon it; there was a moan or sigh coming from her although, on looking back and surveying the scene in my mind’s eye, I believe that it might have been her spirit leaving the earth. Her eyes had opened, and I had to take them out with my knife for fear that my image had been seared upon them. I dipped my hands into the chamber pot and washed off her blood with her gin; then, out of sheer delight, I shat into it. It was over. She had been evacuated from the world, and I had evacuated. We were both now empty vessels, waiting for the presence of God.

S
EPTEMBER
8, 1880: Rain all day. Read some Tennyson to my dear wife, Elizabeth, before we retired.

A
young man sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum and, as he opened the pages of that month’s
Pall Mall Review
, noticed that his hand was trembling slightly. He put it up to his straggling mustache, smelled the faint traces of sweat upon it, and then composed himself to read; he wished to savor and to remember this moment when he first saw his own words printed between the thick covers of an intellectual London journal. It was as if some other and more glorious person were addressing him from the page but, yes, this was his essay: “Romanticism and Crime.” After quickly scanning some opening remarks on the lurid melodrama of the popular press, which he had written at the request of the editor, he read his own argument with great pleasure:

“I might turn for a suggestive analogy to Thomas De Quincey’s essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ which is justly celebrated for its postscript on the extraordinary theme of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1812 when an entire family was butchered in a hosier’s shop. The publication of this essay in
Blackwood’s
provoked criticism from those members of the reading public who believed that he had sensationalized, and therefore trivialized, a peculiarly brutal series of murders. It is true that De Quincey, like certain other essayists from the early part of this century (Charles Lamb and Washington Irving spring immediately to mind), could on occasion introduce passages of levity and even whimsicality into the most serious arguments; there are moments in his essay where he excessively glamorizes
the short career of the murderer John Williams, for example, and seems somewhat unsympathetic to the suffering of that man’s unfortunate victims. Yet it would hardly be fair to assume, on this evidence alone, that the mere tendency to sensationalize these sanguineous events did in any pronounced way trivialize or demean them. Quite the opposite case might be inferred—the Marr murders of 1812 reached their apotheosis in the prose of Thomas De Quincey, who with purple imagery and soaring cadence has succeeded in immortalizing them. Indeed the readers of
Blackwood’s
would also have recognized the presence of beliefs and preoccupations just beneath the surface of De Quincey’s ornate prose which are manifestly at odds with any desire to trivialize the deaths along the Ratcliffe Highway.” He stopped for a moment and inserted his finger between his neck and the stiff collar of his shirt; there was something chafing him, but then he ceased to feel the irritation as he read on.

“It is well known that murders, and murderers, are variously considered in various periods. There are fashions in murder just as there are fashions in any other form of human expression; in our own period of privacy and domestic insularity, poisoning is the favored means of dispatching someone into eternity, for example, while in the sixteenth century stabbing was considered to be a more masculine and combative form of vengeance. But there are various forms of cultural expression, as the recent work of Hookham has suggested, and this essay by Thomas De Quincey may be studied more appropriately in a quite different setting. It is perhaps worth remarking that the writer was associated with that generation of English poets who have by common consent been labeled ‘the Romantics’—Coleridge and Wordsworth had been his close friends. The term hardly seems appropriately attached to a man obsessed with murder and violence, and yet there is a network of most curious associations which brings the foul butcheries of Limehouse into the same world as
that of
The Prelude
or ‘Frost at Midnight.’ Thomas De Quincey has, for example, created a narrative out of the Marr murders in which the killer himself emerges as a wonderful Romantic hero. John Williams is seen to be an outcast who enjoys a secret power, a pariah whose exclusion from social conventions and civilization itself actually invests him with fresh strength. In truth the man was a nondescript ex-seaman forced to live in a mean lodging house, whose own absurd stupidity led to his eventual capture, but in the pages of De Quincey’s account he is transformed into an avenger whose bright yellow hair and chalk-white countenance afforded him the significance of some primeval deity. At the center of the Romantic movement was the belief that the fruits of isolated self-expression were of the greatest importance and were capable of discovering the highest truths; that is why Wordsworth was able to construct an entire epic poem out of his private observations and beliefs. In De Quincey’s account John Williams becomes an urban Wordsworth, a poet of sublime impulse who rearranges (one might say, executes) the natural world in order to reflect his own preoccupations. Writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey were also heavily influenced by German idealistic philosophy, as were all men of culture at the beginning of this century, and they were as a consequence peculiarly interested in the concept of ‘genius’ as the epitome of the intense, isolated mind. So it is that John Williams is transformed into a genius of his own particular sphere, with the advantage that he is also associated with the ideas of death and eternal silence: one has only to recall the example of John Keats, who was seventeen at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, to understand how potent that image of oblivion might become.” An attendant brought two books over to his desk; the young man did not thank him, but glanced down at the titles before smoothing his hair with the
palm of his hand. Then he put his hand to his nose again, and sniffed at his fingers as he continued to read.

“There are other very suggestive currents which swirl across the surface of De Quincey’s prose. He is primarily concerned with the fatal figure of John Williams, of course, but he takes care to place his creation (for that is what the murderer essentially becomes) before the scenery of a massive and monstrous city; few writers had so keen and horrified a sense of place, and within this relatively short essay he evokes a sinister, crepuscular London, a haven for strange powers, a city of footsteps and flaring lights, of houses packed close together, of lachrymose alleys and false doors. London becomes a brooding presence behind, or perhaps even within, the murders themselves; it is as if John Williams had in fact become an avenging angel of the city. It is not difficult to understand the force of De Quincey’s obsession. In his most notorious work,
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
, he recounts a period in his life (before he began to take laudanum) when he was an outcast upon the streets of London; he was then just seventeen, and had absconded from a private school in Wales. He traveled to the city, and at once became a prey of its relentless, powerful life. He starved, and began to sleep in a derelict house near Oxford Street where he found ‘a poor, friendless child, apparently ten years old’ who ‘had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came.’ Her name was Ann, and she lived with a perpetual and inextinguishable fear of the ghosts who might surround her in that crumbling dwelling. But it is the great thoroughfare, Oxford Street itself, which haunts De Quincey’s imagination. In his
Confessions
it becomes a street of sorrowful mysteries, of ‘dreamy lamplight’ and the sounds of the barrel organ; he remembers the portico where he fainted away from hunger, and the corner where he and Ann would meet in order to console each other among ‘the mighty
labyrinths of London.’ That is why the city and his suffering within it became—if we may borrow a phrase from that great modern poet Charles Baudelaire—the landscape of his imagination. It is this interior world which he places within ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’—a world in which suffering, poverty and loneliness are the most striking elements. By chance it was in Oxford Street, also, that he first purchased laudanum—it could be said that the old highway led him directly to those nightmares and fantasies which turned London into some mighty vision akin to that of Piranesi, a labyrinth of stone, a wilderness of blank walls and doors. These were the visions, at least, which he recounted many years later when he lodged in York Street off Covent Garden.