A BOOK OF
REMARKABLE
CRIMINALS
BY
H.B. IRVING
TO MY FRIEND
E. V. LUCAS
"For violence and hurt tangle every man in their toils,
and for the most part fall on the head of him from whom
they had their rise; nor is it easy for one who by his
act breaks the common pact of peace to lead a calm
and quiet life."
Lucretius on the Nature of Things.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE LIFE OF CHARLES PEACE:
I. HIS EARLY YEARS
II. PEACE IN LONDON
III. HIS TRIAL AND EXECUTION
THE CAREER OF ROBERT BUTLER:
I. THE DUNEDIN MURDERS
II. THE TRIAL OF BUTLER
III. HIS DECLINE AND FALL
M. DERUES:
I. THE CLIMBING LITTLE GROCER
II. THE GAYE OF BLUFF
DR. CASTAING:
I. AN UNHAPPY COINCIDENCE
II. THE TRIAL OF DR. CASTAING
PROFESSOR WEBSTER
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. HOLMES:
I. HONOUR AMONGST THIEVES
II THE WANDERING ASSASSIN
PARTNERSHIP IN CRIME:
I. THE WIDOW GRAS
1. THE CHARMER
2. THE WOUNDED PIGEON
II. VITALIS AND MARIE BOYER
III. THE FENAYROU CASE
IV. EYRAUD AND BOMPARD
A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS
A BOOK OF
REMARKABLE CRIMINALS
Introduction
"The silent workings, and still more the explosions, of human
passion which bring to light the darker elements of man's nature
present to the philosophical observer considerations of intrinsic
interest; while to the jurist, the study of human nature and
human character with its infinite varieties, especially as
affecting the connection between motive and action, between
irregular desire or evil disposition and crime itself, is equally
indispensable and difficult."--_Wills on Circumstantial
Evidence_.
I REMEMBER my father telling me that sitting up late one night
talking with Tennyson, the latter remarked that he had not kept
such late hours since a recent visit of Jowett. On that occasion
the poet and the philosopher had talked together well into the
small hours of the morning. My father asked Tennyson what was
the subject of conversation that had so engrossed them.
"Murders," replied Tennyson. It would have been interesting to
have heard Tennyson and Jowett discussing such a theme. The fact
is a tribute to the interest that crime has for many men of
intellect and imagination. Indeed, how could it be otherwise?
Rob history and fiction of crime, how tame and colourless would
be the residue! We who are living and enduring in the presence
of one of the greatest crimes on record, must realise that trying
as this period of the world's history is to those who are passing
through it, in the hands of some great historian it may make
very good reading for posterity. Perhaps we may find some little
consolation in this fact, like the unhappy victims of famous
freebooters such as Jack Sheppard or Charley Peace.
But do not let us flatter ourselves. Do not let us, in all the
pomp and circumstance of stately history, blind ourselves to the
fact that the crimes of Frederick, or Napoleon, or their
successors, are in essence no different from those of Sheppard or
Peace. We must not imagine that the bad man who happens to
offend against those particular laws which constitute the
criminal code belongs to a peculiar or atavistic type, that he is
a man set apart from the rest of his fellow-men by mental or
physical peculiarities. That comforting theory of the Lombroso
school has been exploded, and the ordinary inmates of our prisons
shown to be only in a very slight degree below the average in
mental and physical fitness of the normal man, a difference
easily explained by the environment and conditions in which the
ordinary criminal is bred.
A certain English judge, asked as to the general characteristics
of the prisoners tried before him, said: "They are just like
other people; in fact, I often think that, but for different
opportunities and other accidents, the prisoner and I might very
well be in one another's places." "Greed, love of pleasure,"
writes a French judge, "lust, idleness, anger, hatred, revenge,
these are the chief causes of crime. These passions and desires
are shared by rich and poor alike, by the educated and
uneducated. They are inherent in human nature; the germ is in
every man."
Convicts represent those wrong-doers who have taken to a
particular form of wrong-doing punishable by law. Of the larger
army of bad men they represent a minority, who have been
found out in a peculiarly unsatisfactory kind of misconduct.
There are many men, some lying, unscrupulous, dishonest, others
cruel, selfish, vicious, who go through life without ever doing
anything that brings them within the scope of the criminal code,
for whose offences the laws of society provide no punishment.
And so it is with some of those heroes of history who have been
made the theme of fine writing by gifted historians.
Mr. Basil Thomson, the present head of the Criminal Investigation
Department, has said recently that a great deal of crime is due
to a spirit of "perverse adventure" on the part of the criminal.
The same might be said with equal justice of the exploits of
Alexander the Great and half the monarchs and conquerors of the
world, whom we are taught in our childhood's days to look up to
as shining examples of all that a great man should be. Because
crimes are played on a great stage instead of a small, that is no
reason why our moral judgment should be suspended or silenced.
Class Machiavelli and Frederick the Great as a couple of rascals
fit to rank with Jonathan Wild, and we are getting nearer a
perception of what constitutes the real criminal. "If," said
Frederick the Great to his minister, Radziwill, "there is
anything to be gained by it, we will be honest; if deception is
necessary, let us be cheats." These are the very sentiments of
Jonathan Wild.
Crime, broadly speaking, is the attempt by fraud or violence to
possess oneself of something belonging to another, and as such
the cases of it in history are as clear as those dealt with in
criminal courts. Germany to-day has been guilty of a perverse
and criminal adventure, the outcome of that false morality
applied to historical transactions, of which Carlyle's life of
Frederick is a monumental example. In that book we have a
man whose instincts in more ways than one were those of a
criminal, held up for our admiration, in the same way that the
same writer fell into dithyrambic praise over a villain called
Francia, a former President of Paraguay. A most interesting work
might be written on the great criminals of history, and might do
something towards restoring that balance of moral judgment in
historical transactions, for the perversion of which we are
suffering to-day.
In the meantime we must be content to study in the microcosm of
ordinary crime those instincts, selfish, greedy, brutal which,
exploited often by bad men in the so-called cause of nations,
have wrought such havoc to the happiness of mankind. It is not
too much to say that in every man there dwell the seeds of crime;
whether they grow or are stifled in their growth by the good that
is in us is a chance mysteriously determined. As children of
nature we must not be surprised if our instincts are not all that
they should be. "In sober truth," writes John Stuart Mill,
"nearly all the things for which men are hanged or imprisoned for
doing to one another are nature's everyday performances," and in
another passage: "The course of natural phenomena being replete
with everything which when committed by human beings is most
worthy of abhorrence, anyone who endeavoured in his actions to
imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen
and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men."
Here is explanation enough for the presence of evil in our
natures, that instinct to destroy which finds comparatively
harmless expression in certain forms of taking life, which is at
its worst when we fall to taking each other's. It is to check an
inconvenient form of the expression of this instinct that we
punish murderers with death. We must carry the definition of
murder a step farther before we can count on peace or
happiness??{in}??this world. We must concentrate all our
strength on?? fighting criminal nature, both in ourselves and in
the world around us. With the destructive forces of nature we
are waging a perpetual struggle for our very existence. Why
dissipate our strength by fighting among ourselves? By enlarging
our conception of crime we move towards that end. What is antisocial, whether it be written in the pages of the historian or
those of the Newgate Calendar, must in the future be regarded
with equal abhorrence and subjected to equally sure punishment.
Every professor of history should now and then climb down from
the giddy heights of Thucydides and Gibbon and restore his moral
balance by comparing the acts of some of ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Go to the beginning of the document
Go to previous page
Go to next page
Go to the end of document
