The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  It was the spring of 1850, and Ted had just turned twenty. It may have been that London Printing & Publishing offered him a job if he would go to New York; it may have been something more. Whatever the source of his desire (and he never wrote about it), things came to a head in early 1850. Ted’s cousin Maybanke, in her memoir, puts a romantic spin on the moment he left. “He wanted to see the world and ‘to make a name for himself’ and at last he came to say ‘Goodbye,’ he was going to America.” Ted went to his grandmother Susanna Smith, the autocrat, who offered him money. “With her usual kindliness, she put a little pile of sovereigns beside him and said, ‘you may be glad to have them Ted.’ He pushed them back to her and said ‘No, thank you, Grandma, I’m going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear of me again.’ ”8

  If he had come from a richer family, Ted might have made a different exit. The British Empire, with its colonies, trading companies, and military, extended around the world. A young man from the gentry who wanted to leave home might become a naval officer or join the diplomatic corps. These routes did not open to a boy who fell below the threshold of entitlement, a boy from bargemen and maltsters.

  In June he packed three trunks and took one of the new trains to Liverpool. Ted made an unusual emigrant to America. He was not poor. He was not going to California to find gold. The steamship Liverpool, moored at the dock, would fill up with Irish passengers. Ted was English, another anomaly. His trunks went onto the luggage wagon.

  In summer 1850, Ted Muggeridge boarded the steamship Liverpool and sailed to New York, emigrating to America at age twenty. (Illustration Credit c11.6)

  On the water it looked like a hybrid beast, a steam-powered ship fitted on the sides with paddlewheels and with two smokestacks, but also three masts planted in the deck and sails. The steamship Liverpool, like many long-distance carriers of the time, used sail power to bolster its feeble steam. Unfortunately for its passengers, the Liverpool had a spotty record. Four years earlier, it had run aground off Spain, after which the Peninsular and Oriental Line had patched the hull and sent it back out. On this crossing from England to America, however, there were no incidents. Captain John Eldridge had taken particulars from every passenger, 414 immigrants slotted, squeezed, and jammed into his 225-foot ship, and written them into the manifest. Passenger 91 said he was twenty years old. He said his name was Edward Muggeridge.9

  Almost all the Liverpool’s passengers were Irish refugees, like the passengers on most ships from Britain to America during these years. The great potato famine had killed close to a million people in Ireland, and nearly a million more were in the midst of emptying the island’s western counties. Plenty aboard the Liverpool were single men, at least some of them on the first leg of a journey to California. The previous year someone had found gold in the American West at a place called Sutter’s Mill, and it was common belief, based on the best hearsay, that young men who could make it to California would be rich soon after arrival. Ted Muggeridge was one of the few passengers not from Ireland. He had boarded the Liverpool in the city of the same name, after which the ship had stopped in Ireland to load everybody else.

  At the slow pace of the ship, less than eight knots, the crossing to New York took about three weeks. One of the Irish passengers, a forty-year-old woman named Ellen Dunn, eight months pregnant, had come aboard with her five young children. In the middle of the ocean, Dunn’s six-year-old daughter Mary fell sick of something and died; a week later Dunn gave birth to a new baby. Captain Eldridge wrote it all down in his report to customs. On the passenger list, Eldridge had labeled nearly everyone a “laborer,” “servant,” or “farmer.” There were two “gentlemen.” Ted Muggeridge told the captain he was a “merchant,” a salesman of merchandise. The Liverpool docked near the southern tip of Manhattan on July 16, 1850—another cargo of immigrants, the diet of America.

  Most of his fellow passengers would have marked Ted Muggeridge, the Englishman, as the comparatively rich one among them. Whereas nearly everyone else had registered a single bag, the Englishman carried three trunks. Most passengers did not know what awaited them, but Muggeridge had a job lined up in New York. He would be a sales representative for a British publishing company. Perhaps the trunks carried inventory, samples of the books and engravings he was coming to America to sell.

  Muggeridge wrote down many things over the next fifty years, but in his letters and published articles, he never spoke about immigrating to the United States. He never wrote about his decision to leave behind an antique village west of London, where he had grown up, or about his feelings of being an expatriate. His reticence might have been part of his culture, but perhaps the episode itself had too little form to remember. He was young, with raw appetites. Like everyone else aboard, he would soon become wood for the blaze of the American marketplace.

  In New York, Muggeridge would be a salesman of books and art. After ten years, he would renounce this life and become an inventor, and after that an artist, before rebranding himself as a murderer, and then as a scientist. He would be many different men, but on the Liverpool, he was not yet any of them. His bags hurtling onto the dock, Ted Muggeridge stepped off to the customs house.

  MARITAL RIGHTS

  Edward Muybridge sat in jail far from his adopted city, San Francisco. The town of Napa, no more than three thousand people and just incorporated, stood at the center of the long, narrow valley of the same name. Tanneries lay outside of it, plus a swirl of vineyards and farms. Thanks to the train line, which Leland Stanford had lately bought, you could get to San Francisco in five hours. It would have occurred to Muybridge, awaiting his trial, that he might not see it again.

  He now had three lawyers—Wirt Pendegast, Stanford’s friend, who had a reputation for blinding the courtroom with clouds of metaphor; Pendegast’s partner F. E. Johnston; and a San Francisco attorney, Cameron King. Pendegast visited often, King came to the jail when he could. William Wirt Pendegast had been born in Kentucky, the son of an attorney who had given up the law to become an evangelist with a fundamentalist sect, the Disciples of Christ. Pendegast had grown up hearing his father preach and push crowds close to weeping, and he drew lessons from it. His parents had named him after William Wirt, attorney general under presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, and a man famous for his courtroom soliloquies. After his parents moved their family west, to Sacramento, Wirt Pendegast studied law and then went into politics, becoming the youngest legislator elected to the California Senate. Cameron King, Muybridge’s other lawyer, was another attorney with political connections. A solo practitioner in San Francisco, age thirty, King had trained in the law firm of his uncle, Governor Henry Haight, the man who succeeded Stanford in that office.1

  Pendegast and King told Muybridge that they would prefer not to get him out on bail before the trial. If Muybridge posted bail, then his lawyers would be obliged to share their evidence and the substance of their case with the prosecutor, and Pendegast and King preferred to keep all that hidden. As for a defense, there could be no denying the killing. Not only had several people witnessed it, and not only had Muybridge admitted shooting Larkyns, he had gone out of his way to take credit for it. When the Chronicle ran a story that said Muybridge had merely wanted to maim Harry Larkyns and not to kill him, two days later the paper had to run a retraction, because Muybridge had written the editor to complain. (“The defendant,” said the paper, “denies that he intended only to maim the deceased, but avers that his intention was to kill him.”) Muybridge liked people to know he was meticulous.2

  His lawyers wanted to keep Muybridge off the gallows, but how? They could try “justifiable homicide.” A killing shown to be an act of justice meant a verdict of not guilty. Justifiable homicide worked, most often, in cases of self-defense: a murder might be justified if the accused could show, for example, he had been threatened with a gun. The justifiable argument, which also went under another name, the “provocation defense,” allowed a killer to admit the act and sti
ll be absolved. With Muybridge, the provocation defense looked like a difficult fit. Harry Larkyns had been unarmed; Muybridge had traveled seventy-five miles to find him, and he had shot without giving Larkyns a chance to defend himself. On the other hand, lawyers like Pendegast and King knew that juries sometimes accepted a version of the provocation defense not readily acknowledged by the law—the “marital rights” argument. For many men (and juries were all male), the fact that Flora Muybridge had been sleeping with Harry Larkyns could be construed as a provocation. In this view, self-defense translated into the husband’s prerogative to retaliate, because he was “provoked” by his sexual rival. When adultery was involved, juries sometimes let men go free for killings.

  The marital rights defense appeared nowhere in the legal code, and it had dubious standing. Judges didn’t care for it. The argument forced them to tell juries that seduction did not constitute a mortal threat, that a stronger warrant for self-defense was necessary. And there was another fact about the marital rights claim. It worked for men but did not commonly apply to women. If a wife discovered her husband having sex with another woman, she did not, by custom, have the go-ahead to kill her competitor in defense of the marriage bed. No jury, at least, had ever seen it that way. You could say the precedent favored men and not women, but that was neither Muybridge’s nor his lawyers’ problem.

  Talking it through, Pendegast and King decided they would tread lightly around the argument for justifiable homicide. Pendegast suspected the judge in the case, likely to be a man called William Wallace, would not let the adultery argument in the front door of his courtroom. On the other hand, the lawyers could play on the feelings of the jury. To begin with, they could try to stack the jury with sympathetic men—married men, if possible, who might identify with the defendant. And perhaps Pendegast could insinuate that his client had the right to kill Larkyns, without claiming it.

  The only other defense that came to mind, disagreeable and not much used, was insanity. Pendegast and King could argue that Muybridge had been in a mad fugue when he tracked down and shot Larkyns. The insanity argument had two problems, however, the first being that the defendant objected to it. Not only did Muybridge not think of himself as mad; to be called insane by his lawyer (and presumably by witnesses), even as a piece of theater in the courtroom, would be an insult he did not want to entertain. The second problem with the insanity defense involved a hypothetical. Suppose it worked? Suppose a jury found Muybridge not guilty by reason of insanity—would he not then have to submit to treatment meted out to the insane? As it happened, one mile from the county courthouse where the trial was to take place, the state of California had begun to erect the new Napa State Asylum for the Insane. The redbrick building, a giant castle of a compound with four corner turrets, would be ready to receive inmates in a few months, just as the trial ended. Everyone knew that jail in an asylum did not differ much from jail in a prison. If a jury pronounced him mad and California’s new asylum was finished, Muybridge might have to check into it. Another insult he did not want to entertain.

  In early December 1874, a grand jury indicted Edward Muybridge for murder. A few days later, on December 14, Flora Muybridge filed for divorce from her husband, accusing him of “extreme cruelty” and demanding alimony and child support. The murder case was referred to the district court and a trial date set for the first week of February 1875. Following these developments, the Chronicle sent a reporter from San Francisco to Napa to conduct a jailhouse interview with Edward Muybridge and to pick his mind.

  The photographer had been in jail two months when the reporter, George H. Smith, arrived to talk. It was five days before Christmas. In a full-page story published December 21, Smith’s descriptions of the prisoner depict a man pleased with himself. Muybridge was “in excellent spirits,” Smith said, though “confinement and care have made him paler than usual.” With his “quiet and reserved manner,” his “unkempt beard and mild blue eyes,” the reporter thought the photographer “looked like a good-natured old farmer.” There was one often-noticed problem. Muybridge’s “plain clothes” seemed “somewhat out of keeping with his profession and standing.”3

  Muybridge knew how to work the press and for years had befriended newspaper editors, so it is possible to read his appearance in the Chronicle as something of a performance, maybe an audition for the murder trial. “Many of my friends have visited me,” he told Smith, “and I have received a great many letters from others—piles of them—expressing sympathy with me, and many offers of assistance.” Muybridge spun out his story. People were not surprised by what he had done, he said. They understood it. Furthermore, they approved of it. His corncob pipe in his hand, his beard shaking as he nodded for emphasis, Muybridge made his case in the papers before the court convened. Referring to Harry Larkyns, who had died within a minute of being shot, he said, “I would have wished that he could have lived long enough at least to acknowledge the wrong he had done me—that his punishment was deserved, and that my act was a justifiable defense of my marital rights.” It was a calculated reference, the mention of marriage, the allusion to “justification” and “rights.” Muybridge knew the traditional notion of self-defense would not be part of the trial.

  He was proud of what he had done with himself since immigrating to America, and easy with his conscience. “I have lived in California over twenty years, and am well known. They may ransack my record as much as they please, and I defy them to bring anything against me,” he said.

  At first Muybridge showed himself to be cold about his wife. He and Flora were “completely estranged,” he said, “and I do not desire to see her again.” Then he reversed direction, letting himself look vulnerable. “I loved the woman with all my heart and soul,” he said about Flora, “and the revelation of her infidelity was a cruel, prostrating blow to me, shattering my idol and blighting the bright affection of my life.” It was a fine performance, a scene from the playbook of a man who knew how to use the mass medium of the newspaper. Muybridge understood that he was talking to all of California, and for that matter, to readers who might include members of his jury.

  “I have no fear of the result of the trial,” Muybridge said, guiding the reporter back to the marital rights defense. “I feel I was justified in what I did, that all right-minded people will justify my action.”

  Since the early summer, Flora Muybridge and her son, Florado, had been staying in Oregon with Flora’s aunt and uncle, the closest thing she had to parents of her own. When her husband killed her lover, five hundred miles to the south, the news went up and down the West—she probably read about it in the Portland newspaper. Harry Larkyns was “the only one I love,” she had said. We can imagine that Flora, a twenty-three-year-old mother, felt panic and revulsion when she heard the news. She would have been stunned by grief and helplessness, perhaps filled with self-pity and, before long, loathing for her husband. Then, when her own name appeared in the news stories—when she was called a central character in the murder drama—the small Oregon town of The Dalles would have heated up with gossip. Flora would have been the subject of speculation and muttering, and she would have found it difficult to go out of the house. It is less easy to imagine what she might have said to her aunt and uncle. Whatever that script, Flora decided she had to leave Oregon and get back to California. In San Francisco she had a few friends but no family, and her world had just collapsed.

  Several weeks after the murder, taking Florado with her, Flora returned to San Francisco. Except a few words from her divorce pleadings, asking for alimony, nothing she said or wrote during this period survives. Her life could not have been simple. She would have been recognized and talked about around the city. She was the adulteress. She was the wife of the killer. She was the victim of a seducer, a fallen woman, undone by her desire for love.

  There is evidence she saw some friends, but it is possible that Flora spent much of her time out of sight, in hiding from gossip. The prosecutor in Muybridge’s case, Napa district a
ttorney Daniel Spencer, paid a visit to her. The two talked about the upcoming trial, but in the end Flora did not participate in it. Those who knew her said she sympathized with the prosecution, but by law she could testify neither against Muybridge nor in his behalf. She occupied an impossible position: supporting her husband, she was damned; condemning him, she was also damned.

  From court filings it is possible to guess at her feelings. Flora sued Muybridge for divorce, and later, several times, she asked a judge for alimony. She appears to have turned her grief at losing her lover into contempt for her husband. She appears also to have turned her sadness into some kind of illness. It would surface months later—nature’s justice, people said.

  The county courthouse should be replaced, people said. (A year later, it was judged too far gone to repair, and torn down.) The beat-up brick building, with its nearly square footprint, stood in the center of a square in the center of Napa. Two stories high, it had four pilasters on its face and a cupola on the roof. Muybridge occupied a jail cell on the second floor; he was brought downstairs, through the crowded hall, and entered a courtroom in which every seat had a spectator. A full house, with spillover out onto the street. In a county where the entire practicing bar consisted of ten lawyers, including the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney, it was an unprecedented sight, as was the special section of the courtroom set aside for newswriters, who were inclined to jump from their seats and trot down to the Western Union office every so often to dictate a story that might end up in the Chicago Tribune or New York Times.4