Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  The recollection was inspired by a visit in 1926 to the area where Browne had lived, and some inquiries he made there as to whether ancient locals had information about her. In a letter, at the same time, Hardy’s second wife, Florence, recorded that watching Browne’s execution gave ‘a tinge of bitterness and gloom to his life’s work’.

  More than a tinge, one ventures. The circumstances of Browne’s crime and execution – the last public hanging of a woman in Dorset – were memorable. Her hanging was in Dorchester, where the young Thomas had just begun his apprenticeship as an architect. The structure on which the scaffold was erected was the new archway to the prison, facing the North Square, in whose construction the young man’s eye would have taken a professional interest (he describes it in detail in Far from the Madding Crowd). There was a long tradition of public hangings in Dorchester. They were the occasion of what were bluntly called ‘hang fairs’. As with other fairs, open spaces were required. Eventually the prison gateway was settled on as ideal, to give a better view for the crowd. In mid-Victorian cities, such as Glasgow, the crowds could be vast – as many as 100,000. Martha Browne pulled some 4,000, effectively a full house.

  The town had been the scene of an orgy of hangings following the Monmouth uprising in 1685: some seventy-five locals were hanged by Judge Jeffreys on his Bloody Assizes. There were those still living in Hardy’s day who retailed the legends of these primeval hangings which took place in the amphitheatre, Maumbury Rings, where Henchard summons Farfrae for a gladiatorial struggle, to the death if necessary. Mary Channing, who had poisoned her husband, was hanged, drawn and quartered in the ring in 1705. The event is recalled in The Mayor of Casterbridge:

  in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that.

  Hardy claimed to have had the story from an ‘ancestor’. His father (another Thomas) recalled seeing four rick-burners, convicted after the Swing riots, hanged all together, like apples on the bough. There had, however, been no public hangings between 1833 (a fifteen-year-old, feeble-minded arsonist) and Martha Browne in 1856. The revival of the hanging fair added to the excitement. So too did the fact that she was a local woman, whose story was well known and argued over. Martha had been a housekeeper at a local farm. She had married a fellow servant, John Browne, twenty years her junior. She was forty-four years old, beyond childbearing, but generally agreed to be a handsome woman, with a fine head of hair. She brought £30 to the marriage, on the proceeds of which she and her husband set up a small shop. It was a violent marriage – particularly after she found him in bed with a younger woman. Rows followed in which Martha was quite likely beaten. Finally, she caved in her husband’s head with an axe. Like Tess (who used a carving knife to similar effect on Alec), the weapon argued a degree of premeditation rather than self-defence. Fatally, Martha insisted that John had been kicked in the head by one of his horses (he had a sideline as a tranter, or carter), although medical evidence contradicted this.

  There was sympathy for Martha in the town. The mid-Victorian mood was less vengeful, and less jubilant, about hanging than in earlier times. When the ‘other woman’ in the affair, Mary Davies, turned up to view the execution, the crowd hissed the hussy away. After the event, the Dorset County Chronicle went so far as to argue for the abolition of the death penalty – something that would not happen for a century, after the not dissimilar execution of Ruth Ellis.

  Browne’s execution was set for 9 o’clock on 9 August. It turned out a drizzly day. Browne had dressed herself in her best black Sunday gown, and her hair was shown to good effect. Accompanied by two (friendly) wardresses, and her clergyman (an antiquarian, who may have inspired Tringham in Tess), she shook hands with the officials and displayed a marble-calm composure. Having ascended the eleven steps of the scaffold, over the gateway, her gown was tied round the ankles, to prevent indecent exposure (of, among other things, the special underwear to soak up involuntary defecation). A white hood was placed over her head. The rain (as Hardy noted) meant that her facial features, as she attempted to suck in breath, were clearly visible through the muslin.

  In charge of the spectacle was William Calcraft, the most famous hangman in England since Jack Ketch. Calcraft specialised in ‘the short drop’, which meant death by strangulation rather than a mercifully snapped spine. The dangling victim could take up to four minutes to stop ‘dancing’. For the further delectation of the crowd, the body was left, at the end of the rope, for an hour. Calcraft had the right to the victim’s clothes and rope, which he routinely sold on to Madame Tussaud’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’. This state-appointed sadist also earned a second income as prison flogger, wherever he happened to be passing.

  The sixteen-year-old Hardy, with a friend, got an early place, virtually under the gallows. Given the thousands’ strong crowd, he presumably arrived hours before. He was, he later said, close enough to hear the ‘rustle’ of Martha’s ‘thin black gown’. In conversation, sixty years later, he recalled: ‘The hanging itself did not move me at all. But I sat on after the others went away, not thinking, but looking at the figure … turning slowly round on the rope. And then it began to rain, and then I saw they had put a cloth over the face how as the cloth got wet, her features came through it. That was extraordinary. A boy had climbed up into a tree nearby, and when she dropped he came down in a faint like an apple dropping from a tree. It was curious the two dropping together.’

  Was it more than ‘curiosity’ which anchored him to the spot? Biographers quarrel on the subject. Some, like Robert Gittings and Michael Millgate, deduce that hanging was for Hardy obscurely ‘erotic’. Gittings, for example, points to ‘Hardy’s obvious sense of enjoyment and anticipation, followed by a sensation of calm that seems to give the whole experience a sexual character.’ Orgasm, in other words. This perverse ‘enjoyment’ is connected, it is suggested, with Hardy’s supposed ‘impotence’ (another area of hot dispute). Claire Tomalin protests that there was nothing sexually exciting for Hardy in the hanging of Martha Browne. His comments on her dress (the ‘rustling gown’, ‘fine’ figure, writhing, etc.) merely observe that – stoic woman that she was – Martha Browne intended to leave the world head held high and ‘respectable’. It was ‘touching’, not aphrodisiac.

  Browne’s was the last public execution of a woman in England, and the last but one public execution in Dorchester. Hardy went out of his way to watch that as well. James Seale was hanged on 10 August 1858, for cutting the throat of a young woman, and attempting to disguise the act by arson. It was a squalid crime. On the morning of the execution, Hardy rushed home and picked up his father’s telescope. He then took up a position on one of the hills around Dorchester from where he could observe Seale, clad in a white smock, drop and ‘dance’. As the body fell, Hardy, in his shock, involuntarily dropped the telescope.

  There were no more executions in Dorchester, public or secluded. In 1868 the Capital Punishment Amendment Act ended public hanging altogether. If Tess had been set in the historical period of The Mayor of Casterbridge (mid-1840s) rather than the 1870s, she – like her progenitor Martha Browne – would have swung, danced and dangled in front of a crowd of thousands. It is odd, and perhaps significant, that Angel does not take up his right, as husband of the condemned woman, to be a witness. As it is, he and Liza-Lu (his deceased wife’s sister and future bedmate, we apprehend) attend the execution outside Wintoncester prison’s walls. Victorian fiction’s love affair with public execution had come to an end.

  FN

  Thomas Hardy

  MRT

  Tess of the d’Urbervilles

  Biog

  C. Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, The Time-torn Man (2007)

  69. Ambrose Bierce 1842–1915?

  Philosophy: A
route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. One of the definitions from The Devil’s Dictionary

  The eccentricity in Bierce’s life and works begins with his name. His father Marcus Aurelius gave all his children (of whom Ambrose was the tenth) names beginning with ‘A’. Ambrose was, perhaps, lucky not to get ‘Aristodemus’. Bierce Sr could trace his pedigree back to the American Revolution. The family had long-established maverick political views. Ambrose was born in Ohio but brought up in Indiana. He earned his first dollar working on an abolitionist newspaper, The Northern Indianan. For a short period in his late youth he attended the Kentucky Military Institution, and on the outbreak of the Civil War, Bierce enlisted, serving as an engineer. He saw action in a number of bloody battles and was wounded; on another occasion he was captured and escaped. This inspired ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ (1890), his best-known short story. It opens with Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate spy, being sentenced to death by hanging. The opening is done in Bierce’s masterly sketch-stroke fashion:

  A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners – two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.

  As Peyton drops, however, the rope breaks. He swims away, bullets pinging into the water around him. He scrambles ashore, evades capture and makes his way south – through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape. Finally he reaches home – his wife, smiling, is waiting to greet him at the door:

  As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon – then all is darkness and silence!

  Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

  Major Ambrose Bierce was honourably discharged from the service, a more bitter man than when he had put on his blue uniform, as an idealistic private, in 1861. He went west, where the war had been least traumatic, working as a journalist in San Francisco.

  In 1871, Bierce married and in the same year he published his first story, ‘The Haunted Valley’, in a journal edited by Bret Harte. It was an auspicious start. Bierce’s marriage was a ‘good’ one, as the world judged such things, and brought him money and status. The couple spent some years in England, where he wrote for British papers, and their first two children were born in the country. Bierce returned to San Francisco in 1875, becoming, over time, a senior figure in that dynamic city’s newspaper world. In this capacity he formed what would be the most important relationship of his life, with William Randolph Hearst (whom he cordially loathed), joining the magnate’s San Francisco Examiner, in 1887.

  At this point, personal troubles crowded on Bierce. He separated from his wife and one son committed suicide; another would later die of drink. Bierce was increasingly obsessed by the ‘Octopus’ – the railroad barons, notably Collis P. Huntington, whose steely tentacles, he believed (along with other San Francisco writers like Frank Norris), were strangling the West. Over the next few years, during his relationship with Hearst, Bierce produced the vivid, and often savagely anti-war, Civil War short stories, on which his posthumous reputation rests. The bulk of them are collected as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). Bierce’s majestic exercise in ‘cynicism’, The Devil’s Dictionary, was published in 1906. In his seventies, Bierce toured the Civil War battlefields where he had fought and bled as a young man. He then crossed the border into Mexico and was never heard of again – perhaps he went to fight again in that country’s then raging civil war, perhaps simply to die as an ‘unknown soldier’.

  This final act has crowned Bierce’s career with romantic legend (see, for example, Carlos Fuentes’s fantasy of the unchronicled Mexican years, The Old Gringo, subsequently filmed, with Gregory Peck in the title role.) There are less dramatic hypotheses. Glenn Willeford speculates that: ‘Since his best fiction writing had been the war stories, the old writer wanted to obtain more war material in order to continue in his profession. The only way to accomplish that was to go and experience another war.’ Less Old Gringo than Old Hack.

  FN

  Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

  MRT

  ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’

  Biog

  Carey McWilliams, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (1929)

  70. Lewis Wingfield 1842–1891

  I was told by my lamented friend George Eliot that she would never read critiques. One of Wingfield’s Prefaces, dated from the Garrick Club

  ‘The Honble. Lewis Wingfield’, as he insisted on being credited on his title pages, is living, and travelling, proof that interesting lives can result in interesting – if not necessarily great – fiction. Most great fiction, as a general rule, is created in a condition of cloistered retreat from what Conrad called ‘the destructive element’. But, occasionally, a novelist hurls himself in – and none plunged more recklessly into the element than Wingfield.

  Lewis Wingfield was born the youngest son of the sixth Viscount Powerscourt and educated at Eton and in Bonn. He gave up the army at the request of his mother, who feared for his health, though his subsequent career was anything but mollycoddled. During 1865, he was for a while an actor – and throughout life he was fascinated by the question of how Shakespeare should best be staged. As his ODNB entry notes: ‘Wingfield has left many examples of his eccentric behaviour, such as going to the Derby as a “negro minstrel”, spending nights in workhouses, and pauper lodgings, and becoming an attendant in a madhouse. He travelled in various parts of the East and was one of the first Englishmen to journey in the interior of China.’ This last visit inspired his novel, The Lovely Wang (1887).

  Wingfield was stationed in Paris during the siege by the Prussians in 1870, communicating with the Daily Telegraph and The Times by balloon. For a while he was a painter (renting Whistler’s studio) and later a theatrical costume designer – a subject on which he wrote a book which is still consulted. However, Wingfield’s health never recovered from a tour with the British Army in the Sudan in 1884.

  In the course of this extraordinary life, Wingfield found time to write a dozen novels. They manifest the same brio as do his exploits. The Curse of Koshiu (1888) is among the best things he did in fiction. ‘A Chronicle of Old Japan’, based manifestly on personal acquaintance with the new Japan, it recounts the fall of the House of Hojo, in the fourteenth century. They can claim to be the bloodiest clan in the country’s bloody history, as the reader is lip-smackingly informed: ‘When the first of the line erected a strong fortress – the Castle of Tsu, which will serve as background to many scenes in this our chronicle, he gave to it a bloody baptism, by burying beneath the foundations two hundred living men.’

  The plot is simple, and strong. Two half brothers, Sampei and No-Kami, one the son of a concubine, the other a spouse, head the Hojo family – so strong an entity, that it dominates even the imperial Mikado himself. The history of Japan, as Wingfield observes, is constructed around fraternal strife: in this case, the cause is a woman. The more savage of the brothers, No-Kami, sentences a righteously rebellious farmer, Koshiu, to be publicly crucified with his wife – his children being beheaded in front of him as he dies. It takes place during ‘a beautiful and still evening in autumn, with the opalescent sky of crystalline clearness, which so often in Japan, gives us a hint of the infinite.’ During the execution, described lingeringly over a whole chapter, Koshiu curses the Hojo. So it comes to pass. The narrative ends with battle, hara-kiri and the destruction of the Castle of Tsu by cataclysmic earthquake. The Hojo are no more.

  It is made clear, from numer
ous asides, that Wingfield is among the very few Englishmen of his time who have actually seen Japan. And, by many decades, the first to describe, for example, the ‘hibachi’ barbecue. He had also read his sensation fiction. The novel, which is replete with sex and violence, rattles along. As action fiction goes, The Curse of Koshiu is quite as good as Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, or James Clavell’s Shogun.

  Supposedly, W.S. Gilbert came by the idea for The Mikado in 1884, when a Japanese sword clattered down from his wall. One may suspect that Wingfield is also in the mix somewhere. He did not, alas, write any novel about his minstrel experiences at the Derby.

  FN

  Lewis Strange Wingfield

  MRT

  The Curse of Koshiu: A Chronicle of Old Japan

  Biog

  ODNB (Joseph Knight, revised by J. Gilliland)

  71. Henry James 1843–1916

  I am that queer monster the artist. Henry James writing to Henry Adams

  Henry James Jr was born in New York. Henry James Sr was a religious philosopher in the Carlyle-Emerson mould – something he passed on to Henry Jr’s gifted elder brother, William, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Henry was never much taken with religion. On either side, his grandfathers were emigrants to America who had struck it very rich: in dry goods on his father’s side, cotton on his mother’s. James’s heroes, such as Newman in The American (whose wealth comes from we know not where) and Strether in The Ambassadors (whose wealth comes from the manufacture of ‘a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use’, mischievously supposed to be the chamber pot) are similarly placed. Money has to be made before culture can happen.