In May 1823, Hazlitt published his own confessions, Liber Amoris. One of the strangest books ever written, Hazlitt’s subject was his obsessive love for a servant girl, and De Quincey, who knew about obsession and had married his servant, was one of the book’s few sympathetic readers. The two men occasionally walked home together after a late-night party, and in their only recorded conversation (recorded by De Quincey) their talk turned to the Duke of Cumberland’s servant, who had been found with his throat cut. The coroner’s jury concluded that the victim had tried to kill the duke and then killed himself, but rumour had it that the duke himself had murdered the servant, who had discovered him in bed with his valet. De Quincey the royalist stood by the official verdict, while Hazlitt the Jacobin ‘would hear no reason’, insisting that ‘all the princely houses of Europe have the instinct of murder running through their blood’.
After eight months in London, De Quincey scraped together the fare back to Grasmere where he arrived in time to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday in August 1823. In September, the London ran his magical essay on ‘Walking Stewart’, the ‘sublime visionary’ last seen by De Quincey in 1812 when he had been overtaken by three simulacra of Walking Stewarts on his way through Soho. That same month, from the chaos of Fox Ghyll, De Quincey wrote a paper on Malthus’s ‘Essay on Population’. Malthus described a populace veering out of control. The human race was doubling, trebling, quadrupling itself and hurtling towards extinction: it was a theory calculated to thrill De Quincey. Much of what he said in his essay, however, had been anticipated by Hazlitt himself, who complained to the editors that while he did ‘not wish to bring any charge of plagiarism’, ‘credit’ was due. In two sweating pages of self-defence, published in the London, De Quincey drew on the question of ‘“running away” with the credit of another’. The concept of credit was close to his heart, he teasingly explained, and ‘Mr. Hazlitt must permit me to smile when I read that word used in that sense: I can assure him that not any abstract consideration of credit, but the abstract idea of a creditor. . . has for some time past been the animating principle of my labours.’
Having brushed Hazlitt’s accusation aside, De Quincey broached the subject that had long been on his mind. It came through his reflections on Macbeth.
‘From my boyish days,’ he began, ‘I had always felt a great perplexity on one point of Macbeth: it was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan.’ ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, as this next paper was called, focused on Act 2, Scene 3, where, hungover, the porter grumpily responds to the early morning arrival of Macduff:
[knocking within]
PORTER: Here’s a knocking, indeed! If a man were Porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key. [knocking] Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there, i’th’ name of Beelzebub?
Readers of the London would be all too familiar with the scene, which has come down to us as the first ‘knock, knock’ joke: while productions of King Lear had been cancelled because of King George III’s madness, Macbeth, warning of the dangers of regicide, had been a staple of the war years. The knocking, De Quincey went on, ‘reflected back to the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity: yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect’. It was only when John Williams ‘executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation’ that De Quincey at last understood his childhood perplexity. Eleven years had passed since Williams ‘made his debut on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway’, and De Quincey reminded his readers that preceding the servant girl’s discovery of the bodies of the Marr household, this ‘same incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur’. Through the coincidence of Coleridge’s lectures, the Ratcliffe Highway murders had, for De Quincey, segued from the very start into scenes from Shakespeare, and so it was perhaps inevitable that he would blend the figure of John Williams into that of Macbeth.
Shakespeare needed to create a device, De Quincey suggested, by which the familiar, work-a-day human world disappeared for a moment to allow for the appearance of a ‘fiendish’ world in which Lady Macbeth was unsexed and Macbeth forgot that he was born of woman: ‘The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated – cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs – locked up and sequestered in some deep recess: we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dead armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion.’
With the knocking, the ‘pulses of life’ begin to ‘beat again’ as ‘the world of darkness’ passes away ‘like a pageantry in the clouds’ and we are made ‘profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis’ which has taken place. This parenthesis had allowed us to access the mind of the murderer. It is Macbeth rather than Duncan with whom the audience is asked to sympathise – ‘of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into [Macbeth’s] feelings, and are made to understand them – not a sympathy of pity or approbation’. And to encourage our sympathy, the murderer must have an interior existence. There must be ‘some great storm of passion, – jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred, – which will create a hell within him’.
A certain ‘amateur’ on the subject of sudden death, De Quincey went on, had recently commented on the current absence of any good murders, ‘but this is wrong: for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr Williams’. De Quincey’s sympathy had always been with Williams. He spared no pity for the Marrs and their young apprentice, or the Williamsons and their ageing servant, all of whom were figures without faces. His reverence for Williams was presented as ironic but his irony tapped into a truth, the full force of which would be realised later in the century in the distinction accorded to Jack the Ripper, whose own debut took place not far from the Ratcliffe Highway.
The Opium-Eater, Charles Lamb conceded when he finished reading ‘On Knocking’, had ‘written a better thing about Macbeth than anything I could write; – no – not better than anything I could write, but I could not write anything better.’
‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ appeared in the October 1823 edition of the London Magazine, and one week later a very good murder indeed took place in the Hertfordshire town of Radlett. Few murders, in fact, would create a greater sensation. The Ratcliffe Highway murders had generated panic because the killer remained at large, but the response to the Radlett murder, whose perpetrators were instantly apprehended, was undisguised pleasure in sensation. For three months the newspapers indulged in the story with such abandon that, for the first time in legal history, it was feared that a jury would be swayed by the media.
John Thurtell, the son of a Norwich alderman, was a failed cloth merchant turned prize-fighter and gambler. Tall and athletic, he had pockmarked skin and feline eyes. William Weare was a well-known cardsharp who reputedly carried a sum of £2,000 on his person. Thurtell, who believed himself cheated of £300 by Weare, invited him to Radlett for a weekend of shooting and gaming; they were to be the guests of a friend of Thurtell’s, called William Probert, who was renting a cottage called Gill’s Hill.
On the night of Friday 24 October, Thurtell and Weare set off together from London in a hired gig. The plan was for Thurtell to meet Probert and a third party called Joseph Hunt at the cottage, where they would murder Weare: like Macbeth, this was a tale of lethal hospitality. But before the two men had reached their destination, Thurtell took out his pistol and shot Weare in the face. The bullet only grazed the cheekbone; jumping from the gig, Weare ran screaming down the lane. Thurtell finished the job by dashing his gun through his victim’s skull until his brains stuck to the nozzle, and slitting his throat in two places.
Dumping the body and the murder weapons in a field, he continued his journey to Gill’s Hill Cottage where he boasted to Probert and Hunt that the deed was done. The three men then removed Weare’s corpse from its present position, stripped it of clothes and valuables (the £2,000 turned out to be only £15), tied it in a sack, dragged it to the cottage garden and threw it in the pond where it refused to sink until being weighed down by stones. Thurtell presented the blushing Mrs Probert with a gold chain taken from the corpse, after which the party enjoyed a supper of pork chops followed by a sing-song and a round of cards. The next day they thought better of leaving their quarry so close to home, and so Weare was fished out of the pond and carted to another pond, this time on the road to Elstree.
The murder of William Weare opened the door to an underworld of fallen privilege, thuggery and gaming. Between the discovery of his corpse and the conviction of his killers, no other news story was worth following. While Probert and Hunt were described in the papers as possessing only ‘the lineaments of human beings’, Thurtell was granted the glamour of a vampire. His thirst for blood was seen as insatiable; he was implicated by the press in the deaths of any number of women, clergymen and business associates. The body count grew by the day as Thurtell-mania took over the country. The son of the journalist William Cobbett learned to read by following the news on Thurtell; for those who could not afford a paper, Weare’s murder was vividly recorded in broadsides such as The Hertfordshire Tragedy; or, the Fatal Effects of Gambling:
The hapless man sprung from the gig,
And strove the road to gain,
But Thurtell pounc’d on him, and dashed
His pistol through his brains.
Then pulling out his murderous knife,
As over him he stood,
He cut his throat, and, tiger-like,
Did drink his reeking blood.
For Londoners, a documentary drama called The Gamblers, which re-enacted the events, opened on 17 November. It included, in Act 2, the appearance of ‘THE IDENTICAL HORSE AND GIG Alluded to by the Daily Press’; after Thurtell’s trial, the props extended to the ‘TABLE AT WHICH THE PARTY SUPPED, the SOFA as DESCRIBED to having been SLEPT on, with the Other Household Furniture’. In the play’s final scene, when Thurtell and his accomplices were depositing the body in the pond, the audience watched as Weare, not quite dead, rose out of the water to condemn his killer.
The gloomy cottage itself became a tourist site, despite the fact that the murder took place elsewhere. A pilgrimage, which took in the various locations in which Weare’s body had been dumped and the grave in which it now lay, attracted further crowds. Kitchen utensils and other household goods were sold by the Gill’s Hill landlord as souvenirs; murder tourists could also purchase maps, books, pottery figures of Thurtell and Weare, plates and mugs illustrating Weare’s death, and scraps of the sack in which his corpse had been stuffed. Those unable to afford such relics took home twigs from the cottage shrubbery.
The trial took place on 4 and 5 January 1824, and Thurtell took the stand in a plum-coloured frock coat. Blaming the murder on Hunt and Probert, he defended himself with what the London Magazine described as ‘theatrical’ eloquence. ‘I have been presented by the Press,’ Thurtell began, having learned his speech by heart,
– as a man more depraved, more gratuitously and habitually profligate and cruel, than has ever appeared in modern times. I have been held up to the world as the perpetrator of a murder, under circumstances of greater aggravation, or more cruel and premeditated atrocity, than it ever fell to the lot of man to have seen or heard of. I have been held forth to the world as a depraved, heartless, remorseless, prayer-less villain, who had seduced my friend into a sequestered path, merely in order to dispatch him with the greater security – as a snake who has crept into his bosom only to strike a sure blow – as a monster, who, after the perpetration of a deed from which the hardest heart recoils with horror, and at which humanity stands aghast, washed away the remembrance of my guilt in the midst of riot and debauchery.
Thurtell went on to tell the courtroom, now warming to his presence much as they had warmed to that of John Bellingham, the story of his life: how he came from a respectable and God-fearing family; how he shed blood for his country in the war; how he was incapable of an ignoble act. It was, said Charles Dickens, ‘a capital speech’. He had, in the words of the London Magazine’s reporter Edward Herbert, ‘worked himself up into a great actor. . . such a performance, for a studied performance it assuredly was, has seldom been seen on the stage, and certainly never off’. Thurtell was commonly understood to be an artist possessed of a certain genius. The previous year, De Quincey had noted in his ‘Letters to A Young Man Whose Education has been Neglected’, that no man speaks better than when he is on the scaffold because, like the journalist, his faculties are sharpened by the advancing deadline.
Thus the serpentine Thurtell was metamorphosed into the strong, desperate, heroic Thurtell. The analogy between the noble Othello and the ham-fisted killer of Gill’s Hill cottage was noted by a number of writers, including Edward Herbert himself. When the jury reluctantly sentenced Thurtell to death, the condemned man drew gasps of admiration by taking a pinch of snuff.
During Thurtell’s trial, the Morning Chronicle had extended its pages from four to eight. After the verdict, the Observer and Bell’s Illustrated London Life each ran an ‘execution’ double bill. Fifteen thousand people turned out to see Thurtell’s neck broken, some of whom went on to the theatre afterwards for a performance of The Gamblers. He appeared on the scaffold dressed in a great brown coat with a velvet collar, light breeches and gaiters, and a waistcoat glistening with gilt buttons. Before the noose was put around his neck, Thurtell ‘looked at the crowd, and made a slight bow; instantly every head was uncovered, and many muttered “what a Gentleman”’. His appearance at that moment, reported Edward Herbert, was ‘affecting beyond description’. The nation mourned for the murderer. ‘Thurtell being hanged last week,’ wrote Carlyle, ‘we grew duller than ever.’
Thurtell’s posthumous confession, A Warning from the Tomb, or J. Thurtell’s Caution to the Youth of Great Britain, was sold on the streets as a tale about the dangers of gambling; his skeleton was stored in the Royal College of Surgeons; his likeness was exhibited in Madame Tussaud’s; his name turned up in novels by George Eliot, William Thackeray and Robert Louis Stevenson. Dickens was haunted by Thurtell (the murder of Montague by Jonas Chuzzlewit bears a striking resemblance to the murder of Weare), and a hundred years later the repetition of ‘Thurtell was a murdered man’ was used in schools for handwriting practice.
De Quincey had written to James Hessey in November, remarking that ‘the murder is a good one, as you observe, and truly gratifying to every man of correct taste: yet it might have been better, if [Thurtell] would have thrown in a few improvements that I could have suggested – I speak aesthetically – as the Germans say, of course: morally, it is a damnable concern. You must allow me to look at these things in 2 lights. Perhaps it is yet too recent to be looked at by the aesthetic critic.’ Hessey clearly agreed. Edward Herbert, who covered the Thurtell story for the London Magazine, was not an aesthetic critic. His exhaustive report appeared in the issue for February 1824, following De Quincey’s translation of ‘Analects of Jean Paul Richter’. ‘I fear you will have become heartily wearied of the names of Thurtell, Probert and Hunt,’ Herbert began before noting how, apart from the solitary natures of the location and the victim, everything else associated with the crime – the ‘actors, the witnesses, the murderers, the merry party at the cottage. . . the gigs, the pistols, even the very knives, were in clusters!’ The irrelevance of the observation inevitably found its way into the ‘Noctes’ where the party in Ambrose’s Tavern enjoyed a discussion of ‘Tims’, as Herbert was named (Tobias Tims the barber is a recurring figure in the ‘Noctes’) over a tripe supper.
‘Tims on Thurtell!!’ mocked Timothy Tickler. ‘What a most ludicrous thing it would have bee
n had Thurtell assassinated Tims!. . . What small, mean, contemptible Cockney shrieks would he have emitted! ’Pon my honour, had Jack bona fide Thurtellised Tims, it would have. . . thrown such an air of absurdity over murder.’ ‘That’s ae way indeed,’ replied the surly Shepherd, ‘o’ making murder ridiculous. . . What kind o’ a Magazine can that o’ Taylor and Hessey be, to take sic writers as Tims? I hope they don’t run in clusters.’
The clusters non sequitur was the cause of great mirth, and the response to Edward Herbert’s praise of Thurtell’s courtroom speech was unanimous: ‘Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!’ ‘I dinna ken the time,’ concluded the Shepherd, ‘I hae laucht so muckle.’
In a story written in 1838 called ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’, Edgar Allan Poe has the editor propose to a would-be contributor, Signora Psyche Zenobia, that she kill herself in order to describe ‘the sensations’. William Blackwood refers Miss Zenobia to an article called ‘The Dead Alive’, which contains a record, ‘full of tastes, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition’, of a man who was buried while still breathing: ‘You would have sworn,’ he says admiringly, ‘that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin.’ Alternatively, Blackwood suggests that she use as a model ‘The Man in the Bell’, the record of the writer’s ‘sensations’ as he was driven slowly mad by the tolling of the church bell under which he was sleeping.
The Thurtell case allowed Blackwood’s to indulge its love of the macabre. ‘We are certainly a blood-thirsty people,’ noted Tickler, ‘and the scaffold has been mounted, in this country, by first-rate criminals.’ Some of the more recent ‘malefactors’, Christopher North agreed, included butlers ‘quite unaccountably’ cutting the throat of their masters (a reference to the Duke of Cumberland case), magistrates throwing their wives over bridges and into coal pits, ‘blue-eyed young maidens’ poisoning their families ‘with a mess of pottage’ (in 1815, servant girl Eliza Fenning was hanged for putting arsenic in her employers’ dumplings), and any ‘decent well-dressed person’ you might meet on an evening stroll, who ‘after knocking out your brains with a bludgeon, pursues his journey’. Tickler noted the ‘beautiful variety of disposition and genius’ which saved the ‘simple act of slaughter’ from accusations of sameness. You might be killed by a knife, dagger, pistol, club, mallet, hatchet, or apothecary’s phial; you might find yourself huddled out of a garret window, impaled on spikes, put in a hot oven, ‘gagged with a floor-brush till your mouth yawns like a barn-door’, boiled in lime in your back court, cut up like bacon, and pickled, salted and barrelled. You might escape from ‘the murderer of the Marrs’, Christopher North added, ‘through a common sewer’. The wonder of it all was ‘that in a country where murder has thus been carried to such a pitch of cultivation, its 14 million inhabitants would have been set agape and aghast by such a pitiful knave as Jack Thurtell killing and bagging one single miserable sharper’.
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