Old men forget, as we know from Shakespeare; but they also remember. Indeed, I discover that one of the significant pleasures of aging—there are a few--is the license, indeed the invitation, to unapologetic mental retrospection. I have spent my life as a teacher, so I suppose it is unsurprising that I now find myself thinking a good deal about the many teachers of my own whose talents have become legendary in my imagination. This is particularly true of the faculty with whom I worked in my one year of residence in the Princeton doctoral program in1961. Among them was the elegant scholar of Victorian literature, E. D. H. Johnson. Dudley, who was later chair of the department, had been a Rhodes Scholar in the 1930s, and his pre-War Anglophilia had its distinct texture. It was at times as though Matthew Arnold were lecturing to us, except that Dudley’s seminars included occasional asides about Victorian kinkiness, especially sex crimes. This subject has remained for me a minor amateur specialty.
The case with which Dudley got me started was that of Charles Bravo, a prosperous lawyer and classic male chauvinist pig who died of antimony poisoning in 1876. Bravo’s wife Florence, a woman of independent mind and means, fell under suspicion, especially when it became rumored (accurately) that before marrying Bravo she had had an affair with the fashionable physician, Dr. James Gully, nearly forty years her senior and a practitioner of “hydro-therapy,” who had also aborted the fetus of their love-child. There never was an official criminal finding of guilt, but Florence had broken so many taboos that no official finding was necessary to satisfy the schadenfreude of the respectable classes. In fact, it is more probable that Bravo, who was trying to poison Florence to get her stubbornly held independent money, had killed himself by accident. As you may recall from Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester, you really do have to know the difference between the chalice from the palace and the flagon with the dragon.* Charles Bravo got confused. This case, celebrated among true crime afficionados, has been the subject of several books and at least one TV mini-series, and is reflected in several writers of twentieth-century crime fiction.
This case also introduced me to Yseult Bridges (1888-1970), a British writer and author of several books about Victorian crimes, including one on the Bravo affair. After reading her posthumous autobiography (Child of the Tropics: Victorian Memoirs)** I very much wished I could have known her. It’s not just that any woman named Yseult has to be very cool. You can tell from her writing that she’s cool, a straddler of two centuries who gets the Victorian vibe and can write about it with both affection and distanced amusement. And since she is a modern as opposed to a post-modern, she writes elegant and intelligible English prose.
So many Victorian social conventions frustrated the aspirations of the human heart that the wonder is not that so many English wives bumped off their husbands but that comparatively few did. Money was at the heart of the Bravo case, but kinky sex (or kinky sexual abstinence) makes the famous Pimlico Mystery (1886) even more interesting to me than that of Charles Bravo. This (in my opinion) is another instance of the wife who didn’t do it. Well, not exactly do it.
Adelaide
In Pimlico (a neighborhood in central London) lived a prosperous grocer, Thomas Edwin Bartlett, and his wife Adelaide. Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoille was a high-born French woman—so high that her birth was out of wedlock. Her unknown father was rumored to be Somebody Big in Victoria’s court. But Adelaide’s illegitimacy cancelled her class privilege, and she was probably lucky to snag a rich tradesman. The Bartletts’ marriage was somewhat bizarre. It was founded on the agreement that sexual intercourse was not on the table—or anywhere else, for that matter. This agreement had once, but apparently only once been violated, with unhappy results, a stillborn infant. Adelaide may not have been entirely disappointed with the arrangement. Edwin (the grocer’s preferred name) was a man with dramatic and smelly dental problems and worms in his stool. The Bartletts became friendly with a young Methodist preacher, the Rev. George Dyson. Indeed, the three became very close friends. Presumably Edwin explained the ascetic character of his marital arrangements to his clerical friend. In any event, he encouraged George to make love to his wife, and one must presume that he did so. The clerical connection made things doubly kinky. So when things came out in court, as they eventually had to, Adelaide Bartlett was the object of even greater social shock and awe than Florence Bravo had been—if that were possible.
The reason that things had to come out in court was because someone administered a fatal poison to Edwin Bartlett. It seemed very likely that this was murder. The suspicions of the police were hardly surprising. The poison ingested was chloroform. The chloroform had been purchased in a suspicious manner by the preacher at the behest of the wife. When the prosecution got serious, the ignobly innocent Dyson barely avoided prosecution himself by throwing his girlfriend to the wolves. Adelaide’s preposterous explanation for the chloroform was that she thought a nostril whiff from the bottle would have a chilling effect on her husband’s strangely reappearing end-of-life sexual appetite. In passing, one marvels at the casual attitudes of the nineteenth-century pharmacy in the matter of deadly poisons. You could buy stuff like arsenic and laudanum right off the shelf. You’ve probably read Madame Bovary, or seen the classic film Arsenic and Old Lace. For all I know, you could buy strychnine as though it were Alka Seltzer. I had not known that chloroform could be ingested, but it apparently could be if you were really, really thirsty. On the way down, before it killed you, according to the medical experts, it would necessarily inflict damage to your tongue, mouth, throat, and esophagus. The considerable forensic science that thrilled the first readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories is of the same date as the real-life “Pimlico Mystery.” But it only stumped the jurors charged with resolving the murder case brought against Adelaide Bartlett. The corpse of Thomas Edwin Bartlett had been subjected to a thorough and efficient forensic autopsy. The grocer’s stomach was full of chloroform, but there was no evidence of any insult to the mouth or channels to the stomach. Everybody “knew” that Adelaide had done it, but nobody knew how she had done it. That’s more or less just what the jury said in acquitting her of a charge of capital murder in a fashion that imposed a life sentence of opprobrium and suspicion. I think the more obvious conclusion is that she had not done it, only devoutly wished for and engineered it. All three of the principals in this particular ménage were oddballs, but the really kinky one was the husband. It was barely conceivably a case of suicide with ingestion through a feeding tube to the stomach, possibly with the collusion of a domestic servant. Edwin liked rubber devices. More likely the befuddled hypochondriac took it under the belief, encouraged by his wife, that it was a wholesome tonic. But how did it arrive in the stomach without causing inflammation en route? That is the real Pimlico mystery, and the prosecution’s inability to explain it is what saved Adelaide’s own neck. Concentrating on this issue was the strategy of Adelaide’s brilliant celebrity lawyer, Sir Edward Clarke. He also presented the eccentricities of Edwin Bartlett as being so numerous and so extreme that even the most implausible scenarios were the daily stuff of life in his household. It is possible that Clarke was being covertly retained by Adelaide’s mysterious and anonymous patrician father, the rumored Lord Bigwig. Among Clarke’s other celebrated clients was Oscar Wilde in his contest with the Marquis of Queensbury. As Dudley Johnson used to tell us, the idea that Victorian society was boring is a popular fallacy.
E.D.H. (Dudley) Johnson
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzmnSyqv37A
**Child of the Tropics (London : Collins : Harvill Press, 1980). The other two of her books to which I allude are How Charles Bravo Died: A Chronicle of a Cause Célèbre (London: Jarrolds, 1956) and Poison and Adelaide Bartlett: the Pimlico Poisoning Case (London: Hutchinson, 1962)
