Eugene Aram ... Copyright edition

Front matter

room Furr.it u 1000 and Iron B< 100 i: lbO S AXMiH TAPESTRy, TURKEY WILLIAMS and BACH, TREE" ■ !_X_ -V.IPE: R EUGENE ARAM g. Œalc BY THE RIGHT HON. LORD LYTTON " Our acts our angels arc, or good or ill, Our fatal Shadows that walk by us still. • * _■ * * * * All things that are Ai .de for general uses, are ac war — Ev'n we among ourselves ! " John Fletchek, upon An Honest A/ati's Fortune. A NEW EDITION LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL YORK: 416 BROOME STREET Cheap Edition of Dickens's Works FORM WITH THIS VOLUME. SKETCHES BY BOZ. OLIVER TWIST. THE PICKWICK PAPERS.

Part I. The Pickwick Papers

I NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. Part i. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. Part 2. TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, Bart., &c, &c. Sir. — It has long been my ambition to add some humble tribute to the offerings laid upon the shrine of your genius. At each succeeding book that I have given to the world, I have paused to consider if it were worthy to be inscribed with your great name, and at each I have played the pro crastinator, and hoped for that morrow of better desert which never came. But defluat amnis, the time runs on — and I am tired of waiting for the ford which the tides refuse. I seize, then, the pre sent opportunity, not as the best, but as the only one I can be sure of commanding, to express that affectionate admiration with which you have inspired me in common with all your contemporaries, and which a French writer has not ungracefully termed " the happiest prerogative of genius."

As a Poet, and as a Novelist, your fame has attained to that height in which pr_ise has become super fluous ; but in the character of the writer there seems to me a yet higher claim to veneration than in that of the writings. The example your genius sets us, who can emulate ? — the example your moderation bequeaths to us, who shall forget ? That nature must indeed be gentle which has con ciliated the envy that pursues intellectual greatness, and left without an enemy a man who has no living equal in renown. You have gone for a while from the scenes you have immortalised, to regain, we trust, the health which has been impaired by your noble labours, or by the manly struggles with adverse fortunes, which have not found the frame as indomitable as the mind. Take with you the prayers of all whom your genius, with playful art, has soothed in sickness — or has strengthened, with generous precepts, against the calamities of life.* " Navis quce tibi creditura Debes Virgilium Rcddas ineolumem !

" t You, I feel assured, will not deem it presumptuous in one, who, to that bright and undying flame which now streams from the grey hills of Scotland, — the last halo with which you have crowned her literary glories, — has turned from his first childhood with a deep and unrelaxing devo tion ; you, I feel assured, will not deem it presumptuous in him to inscribe an idle work with your illustrious name : — a work which, however worthless in itself, assumes something of value in his eyc-s when thus rendered a tribute of respect to you. The Author of " Eugene Aram." London, December 22, 1831. 7 Written at the time of Sir W. Scott's visit to Italy— after the great blow to his health and fortunes. t O ship, thou owest to us Virgil — restore in safety him whom we entrusted to thee.

Preface

TO THE EDITION OF 1831. Since, dear Reader, I last addressed thee, in Paul Clifford, nearly two years have elapsed, and somewhat more than four years since, in Pelham, our familiarity first began. The Tale which I now submit to thee differs equally from the last as from the first of those works ; for, of the two evils, perhaps it is even better to disappoint thee in a new style, than to weary thee with an old. With the facts on which the tale of Eugene Aram is founded, I have exercised the common and fair license of writers of fiction : it is chiefly the more homely parts of the real story that have been altered ; and for what I have added, and what omitted, I have the sanction of all established authorities, who have taken greater liberties with characters yet more recent, and far more pro tected by historical recollections.

The book was, for the most part, written in the early part of the year, when the interest which the task created in the Author was undivided by other subjects of excitement, and he had leisure enough not only to be nescio quid meditans nugarum, but also to be totus in illis ! * I originally intended to adapt the story of Eugene Aram to the Stage. That design was aban doned when more than half completed : but I wished to impart to this Romance something of the nature of Tragedy, — something of the more transferable of its qualities. Enough of this : it is not the Author's wishes, but the Author's books that the world will judge him by. Perhaps, then (with this I conclude), in the dull monotony of public affairs, and in these long winter evenings, when we gather round the fire, prepared for the gossip's tale, willing to indulge the fear, and to believe the legend, perhaps, dear Reader, thou mayest turn, not reluctantly, even to these pages, for at least a newer excitement than the Cholera, or for a momentary relief from the everlasting discussions on "the Bilir \ London'- December 22, iSji.

PREFACE.

TO TFIE EDITION OF 1840. The strange history of Eugene Aram had excited my interest and wonder long before the present work was composed or conceived. It so happened, that during Aram's residence at Lynn, his reputation for learning had attracted the noticj of my grandfather — a country gentleman living in the same county, and of more intelligence and accomplishments than, at that day, usually charac terised his class. Aram frequently visited at Heydon (my grandfather's house), and gave lessons, probably in no very elevated branches of erudition, to the younger members of the family. This I chanced to hear when I was on a visit in Norfolk, some two years before this novel was published, and it tended to increase the interest with which I had previously speculated on the phenomena of a trial which, take it altogether, is perhaps the most remarkable in the register of English crime.

I endeavoured to collect such anecdotes of Aram's life and manners as tradition and hearsay still kept afloat. These anecdotes were so far uniform that they all concurred in representing him as a person who, till the detection of the crime for which he was sentenced, had appeared of the mildest character and the most unexceptionable morals. An invariable gentleness and patience in his mode of tuition— qualities then very uncommon at schools — had made him so beloved by his pupils at Lynn, that, in aster life, there was scarcely one of them who did not persist in the belief of his innocence. His personal and moral peculiarities, as described in these pages, are such as were related to me by persons who had heard him described by his contemporaries : the calm benign countenance— the delicate health — the thoughtful stoop — the noiseless step — the custom, not uncommon with scholars and absent men, of muttering to himself— a singular eloquence in conver sation, when once roused from silence— an active tenderness and charity to the poor, with whom he was always ready to share his own scanty means— an apparent disregard to money, except when employed in the purchase of books— an utter indifference to the ambition usually accompanying self-taught talent, whether to better the condition or to increase the repute ;— these, and other traits of the character portrayed in the novel, are, as far as I can rely on my information, faithful to the features of the original.

That a man thus described— so benevolent that he would rob his own necessities to administer to those of another, so humane that he would turn aside from the worm in his path— should have been guilty of the foulest of human crimes, viz. — murder for the sake of gain; that a crime thus committed should have been so episodical and apart from the rest of his career, that, however it • Not only to be meditating I know not what of trifles, but also to b. wholly engaged ou them t The year ol the Relorm Bill,

PREFACE.

. V might rankle in his conscience, it should never have hardened his nature ; that, through a life of some duration none of the errors, none of the vices, which would seem essentially to belong to a character capable of a deed so black from motives apparently so sordid,* should have been dis covered or suspected ;— all this presents an anomaly in human conduct so rare and surprising, that it would be difficult to find any subject more adapted for that metaphysical speculation and analysis, m order to indulge which, Fiction, whether in the drama, or the higher class of romance, seeks its materials and grounds its lessons in the chronicles of passion and crime. The guilt of Eugene Aram is not that of a vulgar ruffian : it leads to views and considerations vitally and wholly distinct from those with which profligate knavery and brutal cruelty revolt and displease Us in the literature of Newgate and the Hulks.

His crime does, in fact, belong to those startling paradoxes which the poetry of all countries, and especially of our own, has always delighted to contemplate and examine. Whenever crime appears the aberration and monstrous product of a great intellect, or of a nature ordinarily virtuous, it becomes not only the subject for genius, which deals with passions, to describe ; but a problem for philosophy, which deals with actions, to investigate and solve : — hence, the Macbeths and Richards, the Iagos and Othellos. My regret, therefore, is not that I chose a subject unworthy of elevated fiction, but that such a subject did not occur to some one capable of treating it as it deserves; and I never felt this more strongly than when the late Mr. Godwin (in conversing with me after the publication of this romance) observed that " he had always thought the story of Eugene Aram peculiarly adapted for fiction, and that he had more than once entertained the notion of making it the foundation of a novel."

I can well conceive what depth and power that gloomy record would have taken from the dark and inquiring genius of the author of Caleb Williams. In fact, the crime and trial of Eugene Aram arrested the attention and engaged the conjectures of many ofthe most eminent men of his own time. His guilt or innocence was the matter of strong contest ; and so keen and so enduring was the sensation created by an event thus completely distinct from the ordinary annals of human crime, that even History turned aside from the sonorous narrative of the struggles of parties, and the feuds of kings, to commemorate the learning and the guilt of the humble school master of Lynn. Did I want any other answer to the animadversions of commonplace criticism, it might be sufficient to say that what the historian relates, the novelist has little right to disdain.

Before entering on this romance, I examined with some care the probabilities of Aram's guilt ; for I need scarcely perhaps observe, that the legal evidence against him is extremely deficient — furnished almost entirely by one (Houseman) confessedly an accomplice of the crime, and a partner in the booty ; and that, in the present day, a man tried upon evidence so scanty and suspicious would unquestionably escape conviction. Nevertheless, I must frankly own that the moral evidence appeared to me more convincing than the legal ; and, though not without some doubt, which, in common with many7, I still entertain of the real facts of the murder, f I adopted that view which, at all events, was the best suited to the higher purposes of fiction. On the whole, I still think that if the crime were committed by Aram, the motive was not very far removed from one which led recently to a remarkable murder in Spain.

A priest in that country, wholly absorbed in learned pursuits, and apparently of spotless life, confessed that, being debarred by extreme poverty from prosecuting a study which had become the sole passion of his existence, he had reasoned himself into the belief that it would be admissible to rob a very dissolute, worthless man, if he applied the money so obtained to the acquisition of a knowledge which he could not otherwise acquire, and which he held to be profitable to mankind. Unfortunately, the dissolute rich man was not willing to be robbed for so excellent a purpose : he was armed and he resisted — a struggle ensued, and the crime of homicide was added to that of robbery. The robbery was premeditated : the murder was accidental. But he who would accept some similar interpretation of Aram's crime, must, to comprehend fully the lessons which belong to so terrible a picture of frenzy and guilt, consider also the physical circumstances and condition of the criminal at the time : severe illness — intense labour of the brain — poverty bordering upon famine — the mind preternaturally at work, devising schemes and excuses to arrive at the means for ends ardently desired.

And all this duly considered, the reader may see the crime bodying itself out from the shades and chimeras of a horrible hallucination — the awful dream of a brief but delirious and convulsed disease. It is thus only that we can account for the contradiction of one deed at war with a whole life — blasting, indeed, for ever the happiness; but making little revolution in the pursuits and disposition of the character. No one who has examined with care and thoughtfulness the aspects of Life and Nature, but must allow that, in the contemplation of such a spectacle, groat and most moral truths must force themselves on the notice and sink deep into the heart. The entanglements of human reasoning ; the influence of circumstance upon deeds ; the perversion that may be made, by one self-palter with the Fiend, of elements the most glorious ; the secret effect of conscience in frustrating all for which the crime was done — leaving genius without hope, knowledge without fruit — deadening benevolence into mechanism — tainting love itself with terror and sus picion ; — such reflections — leading, with subtler minds, to many more vast and complicated theorems in the consideration of our nature, social and individual — arise out of the tragic moral which the story of Eugene Aram (were it but adequately treated) could not fail to convey.

Brussels, August, 1840. * For I put wholly out of question the excuse of jealousy, as unsupported by any evidence — never hinted at by Aram himself (at least on any sufficient authority) — and at variance with the only fact which the trial establishes, viz., that the robbery was the crime planned, aud the cause, whether accidental or otherwise, of the murder. . t See Preface to the Present Edition, p. vi.

PREFACE.

TO THE PRESENT EDITION. If none of my prose works have been so attacked as Eugene Aram, none have so completely triumphed over attack. It is true that, whether from real or affected ignorance of the true morality of fiction, a few critics may still reiterate the old commonplace charges of " selecting heroes from Newgate,'" or " investing murderers with interest ;" but the firm hold which the work has established in the opinion of the general public, and the favour it has received in every country where English literature is known, suffice to prove that, whatever its faults, it belongs to that legitimate class of fiction which illustrates life and truth, and only deals with crime as the recognised agency of pity and terror, "in the conduct of tragic narrative. All that I would say farther on this score has been said in the general defence of my writings which I put forth two years ago ; and I ask the indulgence of the reader if I repeat myself : — " Here, unlike the milder guilt of Paul Clifford, the author was not to imply reform to society, nor open in this world atonement and pardon to the criminal.

As it would have been wholly in vain to disguise, by mean tamperings with art and truth, the ordinary habits of life and attributes of character, which all record and remembrance ascribed to Eugene Aram, as it would have defeated every end of the moral inculcated by his guilt, to portray in the caricature of the murderer of melodrame, a man immersed in study, of whom it was noted that he turned aside from the worm in his path, so I have allowed to him whatever contrasts with his inexpiable crime have been recorded on sufficient authority. But I have invariably taken care that the crime itself should stand stripped of every sophistry, and hideous to the perpetrator as well as to the world. Allowing all by which attention to his biography may explain the tremendous paradox of fearful guilt in a man aspiring after knowdedge, and not generally inhumane — allowing that the crime came upon him in the partial insanity, produced by the combining circumstances of a brain overwrought by intense study, disturbed by an excited imagination, and the fumes of a momentary disease of the reasoning faculty, consumed by the desire of knowledge, unwholesome and morbid, because coveted as an end, not a means, added to the other physical causes of mental aberration — to be found in loneliness, and want verging upon famine ; — all these, which a biographer may suppose to have conspired to his crime, have never been used by the novelist as excuses for its enormity, nor indeed, lest they should seem as excuses, have they ever been clearly presented to the view.

The moral consisted in showing more than the mere legal punishment at the close. It was to show how the consciousness of the deed was to exclude whatever humanity of character preceded and belied it from all active exercise — all social confidence ; how the knowledge of the bar between the minds of others and his own deprived the criminal of all motive to ambition, and blighted knowdedge of all fruit : Miserable in his affections, barren in his intellect — clinging to solitude, yet accursed in it — dreading as a danger the fame he had once coveted — obscure in spite of learning, hopeless in spite of love, fruitless and joyless in his life, calamitous and shameful in his end; — surely such is no palliative of crime, no dalliance and toying with the grimness of evil! And surely to any ordinary comprehension, any candid mind, such is the moral conveyed by the fiction of Eugene Aram." * In point of composition Eugene Aram is, I think, entitled to rank amongst the best of my fictions.

It somewhat humiliates me to acknowdedge, that neither practice nor study has enabled me to surpass a work written at a very early age, in the skilful construction and patient development of plot ; and though I have since sought to call forth higher and more subtle passions, I doubt if I have ever excited the two elementary passions of tragedy, viz., pity and terror, to the same degree. In mere style, too, Eugene Aram, in spite of certain verbal oversights, and defects in youthful taste (some of which I have endeavoured to remove from the present edition), appears to me unexcelled by any of my later writings, at least in what I have always studied as the main essential of style in narrative, viz., its harmony with the subject selected, and the passions to be moved ; — while it exceeds them all in the minuteness and fidelity of its descriptions of external nature.

This indeed it ought to do, since the study of external nature is made a peculiar attribute of the principal character whose fate colours the narrative. I do not know whether it has been observed that the time occupied by the events of the story is conveyed through the medium of such descriptions. Each description is introduced, not for its own sake, but to serve as a calendar marking the gradual changes of the seasons as they bear on to his doom the guilty worshipper of Nature. And in this conception, and in the care with which it has been followed out, I recognise one of my earliest but most successful attempts at the subtler principles of narrative art. In this edition I have made one alteration, somewhat more important than mere verbal correction. On going, with maturer judment, over all the evidences on which Aram was condemned, I have convinced myself, that though an accomplice in the robbery of Clarke, he was free both from the premeditated design and the actual deed of murder.

The crime, indeed, would still rest on his conscience, and insure his punishment, as necessarily incidental to the robbery in which he was an accomplice, with Houseman; but finding my convictions, that in the murder itself he had no share, - A Word to the Public, 18(7.

PREFACE.

. VII borne out by the opinion of many eminent lawyers, by whom I have heard the subject discussed, I have accordingly so shaped his confession to Walter. Perhaps it will not be without interest to the reader, if I append to this preface an authentic specimen of Eugene Aram's composition, for whicii I am indebted to the courtesy of a gentleman by whose grandfather it was received, with other papers (especially a remarkable ' Outline of a New Lexicon'), during Aram's confinement in York Prison. The essay I select is, indeed, not without value in itself as a very curious and learned illustration of Popular Antiquities, and it serves also to show not only the comprehensive nature of Aram's studies, and the inquisitive eagerness of his mind, but also the fact that he was completely self-taught ; for in contrast to much philological erudition, and to passages that evince considerable mastery in the higher resources of language, we may occasionally notice those lesser inaccuracies from which the writings of men solely self educated are rarely free ; indeed, Aram himself, in sending to a gentleman an elegy on Sir John Armitage, which shows much but undisciplined power of versification, says, " I send this elegy, which, indeed, if you had not had the curiosity to desire, I could not have had the assurance to offer, scarce believing I, who was hardly taught to read, have any abilities to write."

THE MELSUPPER AND SHOUTING THE CHURN. These rural entertainments and usages were formerly more general all over England than they are at present; being become by time, necessity, or avarice, complex, confined, and altered. They are commonly insisted upon by the reapers as customary things, and a part of their due for the toils of the harvest, and complied with by their masters perhaps more through regards of interest, than inclination. For should they refuse them the pleasures of this much-expected time, this festal night, the youth especially, of both sexes, would decline serving them for the future, and employ their labours for others, who would promise them the rustic joys of the harvest supper, mirth and music, dance and song. These feasts appear to be the relics of Pagan ceremonies, or of Judaism, it is hard to say which, and carry in them more meaning and are of far higher antiquity than is generally apprehended.

It is true the subject is more curious than important, and I believe altogether untouched; and as it seems to be little understood, has been as little adverted to. I do not remember it to have been so much as the subject of a conversation. Let us make then a little excursion into this field, for tbe same reason men sometimes take a walk. Its traces are discoverable at a very great distance of time from ours, nay, seem as old as a sense of joy for the benefit of plentiful harvests and human gratitude to the eternal Creator for his munificence to men. We hear it under various names in different counties, and often in the same county ; as, melsupper, churn sujrper, harvest supper, harvest home, feast of in-gathering, _vc. And perhaps this feast had been long observed, and by different tribes of people, before it became preceptive with the Jews.

However, let that be as it will, the custom very lucidly appears from the following passages of S. S., Exod. xxiii. 16, " And the feast of harvest, the first fruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in the field." And its institution as a sacred rite is commanded in Levit. xxiii. 39 : " When ye have gathered in the fruit ot the land, ye shall keep a feast to the Lord." The Jews then, as is evident from hence, celebrated the feast of harvest, and that by precept ; and though no vestiges of any such feast either are or can be produced before these, yet the obla tion of the Primitiæ, of which this feast was a consequence, is met with prior to this, for we sind that " Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to the Lord." — Gen. iv. 3. Yet this offering of the first-fruits, it may well be supposed, was not peculiar to the Jews, either at the time of, or after, its establishment by their legislator ; neither the feast in consequence of it.

Many other nations, either in imitation of the Jews, or rather by tradition from their several patri archs, observed the right of offering their Primitiæ, and of solemnising a festival after it, in religious acknowledgment for the blessing of harvest, though that acknowledgment was ignorantly misapplied in being directed to a secondary, not the primary, fountain of this benefit ; — namely, to Apollo or the Sun. For Callimachus affirms that these Primitiæ were sent by the people of every nation to the temple of Apollo in Delos, the most distant that enjoyed the happiness of corn and harvest, even by the Hyperboreans in particular, Hymn to Apol., Ot j-a-rot KaXa^v re ko.l i-pa _p_Y/-a _p_toi outtokvuv, " Bring the sacred sheafs, and the mystic offerings." Herodotus also mentions this annual custom of the Hyperboreans, remarking that those of Delos talk of 'I.p_ .j.,.,7,-,.- cv KaXaur, _vp_i/ ej 'Y-rep/Sop.-., " Holy things tied up in sheaf of wheat conveyed from the Hyperboreans."

And the Jews, by the command of their law, offered also a sheaf: " And shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye shall bring sheaf of the first fruits of the harvest unto the priest." This is not introduced in proof of any feast observed by the people who had harvests, but to show the universality of the custom of offering the Primitiæ, which preceded this feast. But yet it may be looked upon as equivalent to a proof ; for as the offering and the feast appear to have been always and intimately connected in countries affording records, so it is more than probable they were connected too in countries which had none, or none that ever survived to our times. An entertainment and gaiety were still the concomitants of these rites, which with the vulgar, one may pretty truly suppose, were esteemed the most acceptable and material part of them, and a great reason of their having subsisted through such a length of ages, when both the populace and many pf the learned too, have lo^t sight of the object to which they had been originally directed. This,

PREFACE.

. among many other ceremonies of the heathen worship, became disused in some places and retained in others, but still continued declining after the promulgation of the Gospel. In short, there seems great reason to conclude, that this feast, which was once sacred to Apollo, was constantly main tained, when a far less valuable circumstance, i.e., shouting the churn, is observed to this day by the reapers, and from so old an era ; for we read of this acclamation, Isa. xvi. 9. " For the shouting for thy summer fruits and for thy harvest is fallen ; " and again, ver. 10 : " And in the vineyards there shall be no singing, their shouting shall be no shouting." Hence then, or from some of the Phœnician colonies, is our traditionary " shouting the churn." But it seems these Orientals shouted both for joy of their harvest of grapes, and of corn.

We have no quantity of the first to occasion so much joy as does our plenty of the last ; and I do not remember to have heard whether their vintages abroad are attended with this custom. Bread or cakes compose part of the Hebrew offering (Levit. xxiii. 13), and a cake thrown upon the head of the victim was also part of the Greek offering to Apollo (see Horn. II. -), whose worship was formerly celebrated in Britain, where the May-pole yet continues one remain of it. This they adorned with garlands on May-day, to welcome the approach of Apollo, or the sun, towards the north, and to signify that those flowers were the product of his presence and influence, Bt:., upon the progress of Christianity, as was observed above, Apollo lost his divinity again, and the adoration of his deity subsided by degrees.