The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Read Online Free PDF

with some difficulty and that there was some sort of bubbling around his lips.
    MR. GREATOREX : And what did you do then?
    ELIZABETH CREE : I called for our maid, Aveline, to watch him while I went for the doctor.
    MR. GREATOREX : So you left the house?
    ELIZABETH CREE : Yes.
    MR. GREATOREX : And did you not say, to a neighbor whom you passed, “John has destroyed himself”?
    ELIZABETH CREE : I was in such a hot haste, sir, I do not know what I might have said. I had even forgotten my bonnet.
    MR. GREATOREX : Go on.
    ELIZABETH CREE : I returned with our doctor as quickly as ever I could, and together we went into my husband’s room. Aveline was bent over him, but I could see then that he had expired. The doctor smelt his lips and said that we must inform the police, or the coroner, or some such.
    MR. GREATOREX : And why did he say that?
    ELIZABETH CREE : He believed from the odor that my husband must have consumed some prussic acid, or other poison, and that there would have to be a post-mortem examination. I was naturally very shocked at this, and I am told that I fainted away.
    MR. GREATOREX : But why had you shrieked out in the street, a few minutes before, and told your neighbor that your husband had destroyed himself? How could you possibly have reached that conclusion if, as you still then believed, he was merely suffering from a gastric illness?
    ELIZABETH CREE : As I explained to Inspector Curry, sir, he had threatened self-murder before. He was of a very morbid disposition and, in my anxiety at the time, my mind must have carried me back to those threats. I know that, by his bedside, there was a book on laudanum by Mr. De Quincey.
    MR. GREATOREX : I think Mr. De Quincey is immaterial on this occasion.

NINE
    A young man sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum and, as he opened the pages of that month’s
Pall Mall Review
, noticed that his hand was trembling slightly. He put it up to his straggling mustache, smelled the faint traces of sweat upon it, and then composed himself to read; he wished to savor and to remember this moment when he first saw his own words printed between the thick covers of an intellectual London journal. It was as if some other and more glorious person were addressing him from the page but, yes, this was his essay: “Romanticism and Crime.” After quickly scanning some opening remarks on the lurid melodrama of the popular press, which he had written at the request of the editor, he read his own argument with great pleasure:
    “I might turn for a suggestive analogy to Thomas De Quincey’s essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ which is justly celebrated for its postscript on the extraordinary theme of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1812 when an entire family was butchered in a hosier’s shop. The publication of this essay in
Blackwood’s
provoked criticism from those members of the reading public who believed that he had sensationalized, and therefore trivialized, a peculiarly brutal series of murders. It is true that De Quincey, like certain other essayists from the early part of this century (Charles Lamb and Washington Irving spring immediately to mind), could on occasion introduce passages of levity and even whimsicality into the most serious arguments; there are moments in his essay where he excessively glamorizesthe short career of the murderer John Williams, for example, and seems somewhat unsympathetic to the suffering of that man’s unfortunate victims. Yet it would hardly be fair to assume, on this evidence alone, that the mere tendency to sensationalize these sanguineous events did in any pronounced way trivialize or demean them. Quite the opposite case might be inferred—the Marr murders of 1812 reached their apotheosis in the prose of Thomas De Quincey, who with purple imagery and soaring cadence has succeeded in immortalizing them. Indeed the readers of
Blackwood’s
would also have recognized the presence of beliefs and preoccupations just