The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Read Online Free PDF Page B

beneath the surface of De Quincey’s ornate prose which are manifestly at odds with any desire to trivialize the deaths along the Ratcliffe Highway.” He stopped for a moment and inserted his finger between his neck and the stiff collar of his shirt; there was something chafing him, but then he ceased to feel the irritation as he read on.
    “It is well known that murders, and murderers, are variously considered in various periods. There are fashions in murder just as there are fashions in any other form of human expression; in our own period of privacy and domestic insularity, poisoning is the favored means of dispatching someone into eternity, for example, while in the sixteenth century stabbing was considered to be a more masculine and combative form of vengeance. But there are various forms of cultural expression, as the recent work of Hookham has suggested, and this essay by Thomas De Quincey may be studied more appropriately in a quite different setting. It is perhaps worth remarking that the writer was associated with that generation of English poets who have by common consent been labeled ‘the Romantics’—Coleridge and Wordsworth had been his close friends. The term hardly seems appropriately attached to a man obsessed with murder and violence, and yet there is a network of most curious associations which brings the foul butcheries of Limehouse into the same world asthat of
The Prelude
or ‘Frost at Midnight.’ Thomas De Quincey has, for example, created a narrative out of the Marr murders in which the killer himself emerges as a wonderful Romantic hero. John Williams is seen to be an outcast who enjoys a secret power, a pariah whose exclusion from social conventions and civilization itself actually invests him with fresh strength. In truth the man was a nondescript ex-seaman forced to live in a mean lodging house, whose own absurd stupidity led to his eventual capture, but in the pages of De Quincey’s account he is transformed into an avenger whose bright yellow hair and chalk-white countenance afforded him the significance of some primeval deity. At the center of the Romantic movement was the belief that the fruits of isolated self-expression were of the greatest importance and were capable of discovering the highest truths; that is why Wordsworth was able to construct an entire epic poem out of his private observations and beliefs. In De Quincey’s account John Williams becomes an urban Wordsworth, a poet of sublime impulse who rearranges (one might say, executes) the natural world in order to reflect his own preoccupations. Writers such as Coleridge and De Quincey were also heavily influenced by German idealistic philosophy, as were all men of culture at the beginning of this century, and they were as a consequence peculiarly interested in the concept of ‘genius’ as the epitome of the intense, isolated mind. So it is that John Williams is transformed into a genius of his own particular sphere, with the advantage that he is also associated with the ideas of death and eternal silence: one has only to recall the example of John Keats, who was seventeen at the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, to understand how potent that image of oblivion might become.” An attendant brought two books over to his desk; the young man did not thank him, but glanced down at the titles before smoothing his hair with thepalm of his hand. Then he put his hand to his nose again, and sniffed at his fingers as he continued to read.
    “There are other very suggestive currents which swirl across the surface of De Quincey’s prose. He is primarily concerned with the fatal figure of John Williams, of course, but he takes care to place his creation (for that is what the murderer essentially becomes) before the scenery of a massive and monstrous city; few writers had so keen and horrified a sense of place, and within this relatively short essay he evokes a sinister, crepuscular London, a haven for strange powers, a city of