The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders

Author:Judith Flanders
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperPress
Published: 2011-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

Adelaide Bartlett had a background that sounds suspiciously like that of a penny-dreadful heroine. Some contemporary crime historians have suggested that she was the illegitimate daughter of a son of the Duc de la Tremoille and an Englishwoman; others gave her an English father and a French mother. Whatever the case, she was born in about 1855, in Orléans, and by 1874 she was living in Kingston, in Surrey. In 1875 she married Thomas Edwin Bartlett, a devout Methodist grocer more than ten years her senior. The marriage may well have been arranged, and Adelaide’s dowry appeared to have been used to purchase another grocery shop, in East Dulwich. At this point, as was not unusual at the time, the young girl, still not nineteen, returned to school for another two years. After her education had been completed, she moved in with Bartlett, living above his shops, which now numbered six, in different districts of south London. In 1883 or 1884 the couple moved to Merton, near Wimbledon, where they became close friends with the Revd George Dyson, a Wesleyan minister. Soon Dyson was spending long days tutoring Mrs Bartlett in Latin and mathematics, with her husband’s approval, while he was at work. Bartlett also paid for Dyson to go on holiday with them, and when the couple moved to Pimlico, Dyson continued his tutorials, although, noted the parlour maid, he brought no books with him. He also kept a house jacket and a pair of slippers in their house, indicating a shocking level of intimacy. In December 1885 Bartlett began to be unwell, and became convinced that the cause was an infected tooth, although one doctor thought it was mercury poisoning, perhaps from the numerous patent remedies Bartlett was dosing himself with. By the end of the month, whether owing to medical supervision or because he had had a number of his teeth extracted, Bartlett was much improved. On the evening of 31 December he felt well enough to eat some jugged hare, oysters, fruit cake, mango chutney and bread and butter, and to request haddock for his breakfast. He did not live to enjoy it; during the night he swallowed a lethal amount of liquid chloroform, and died.

Mrs Bartlett, like any good wife, had been sitting up by her ailing husband’s bedside; she had dozed off, she said, and when she awoke, he was dead. However, it was quickly revealed that Dyson had recently purchased chloroform at the request of Mrs Bartlett, who had wanted it for her husband’s ‘bad spells’. Bartlett’s father, who very obviously detested his daughter-in-law, revived an allegation he had made some years before: that Adelaide had had an affair with his second son, her brother-in-law. When he had first made this accusation, Thomas Bartlett had been enraged, and had forced his father to apologize to his wife in writing, and to sign a legal document stating that there was no truth in the story. Now Mr Bartlett reaffirmed his original statement, and both Mrs Bartlett and Dyson were arrested.

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