Shooting Victoria by Paul Thomas Murphy Read Free Book Online

this. The correspondence is almost certainly a complete coincidence, unless one of the Tory Young Englanders recalled news accounts of Oxford’s society when formulating his own.

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    B RAVOS
    H annah Oxford did not know, and would never know, whether the pistol her son had thrust into her face was loaded or not. But she had seen this sort of violent and irrational behavior many times before—from Edward, and from Edward’s father (also named Edward) before him. The elder Edward Oxford’s behavior suggested what we would diagnose today as extreme bipolarity: he cycled regularly between episodes of frantic mania, followed by tremendous bouts of depression. More than once, neighbors discovered him riding indoors on horseback, and at another time throwing his entire dinner (“both meat and vegetables”) out the window. When Edward was an infant, he sold every stick of furniture in his house without telling his wife, and decamped to Dublin to spend the money. He repeatedly threatened to harm himself, and at least twice attempted to kill himself with an overdose of laudanum.
    His marriage to Hannah was a nightmare. As their son was to do, he threatened her with pistols. He abused her mentally, threw things at her, regularly beat her. The two had met when they were both twenty, in the Birmingham public-house that Hannah’s father owned. From the start, the elder Oxford intimidated her. Their six-week courtship—if courtship is the proper term for the torment Hannah experienced—consisted of his beating down her will: he repeatedly and unsuccessfully pressed her to marry him, and “on those occasions,” according to Hannah, “he would pull a razor out of his side pocket, and bare his throat, saying he would cut his throat in my presence if I refused him.” Eventually, he showed her a double-barreled pistol and threatened to blow her and then his brains out if she refused him. She accepted.
    Oxford’s father was, by profession, a gold-chaser, or engraver—a highly skilled and remunerative craft, one that earned him £20 for a good week—the same amount his son later earned in a year. According to his wife, he was skillful and quick, “the best workman in Birmingham.” He was, however, an outsider. He was reportedly ethnically distinct: the son or grandson of a black father. * (Hannah Oxford, however, denied this.) Moreover, the man’s inner demons destroyed any hope of worldly success, and any hope of a successful marriage. On the day before their wedding, Hannah confronted him with a letter she had received, detailing his bad character. He responded by pulling a large roll of banknotes from his pocket and setting them afire. Intimidated again, Hannah married him.
    Her husband’s abuse only increased with time. He tormented his wife when she was pregnant with Edward’s older brother: starving her, throwing things at her, making faces at her: “jumping about like a baboon, and imitating their grimaces.” This sort of behavior to a pregnant woman would strike most Victorians as particularlyominous, as many at the time believed that a woman’s extreme emotional shock during pregnancy could physically and mentally imprint itself upon the child. The superstition is perhaps best remembered today in the celebrated case of Joseph Merrick, popularly and cruelly known as the Elephant Man, whose deformities, his mother believed, were a direct result of her stumbling into the path of a parading elephant while she was pregnant.
    Oxford’s brother was born, in the terminology of the day, an idiot, and died at two. When Hannah was pregnant with Edward, his father repeated his abusive behavior: the grimaces, the threats—and the physical abuse: he knocked Hannah unconscious with a quart pot, and a local surgeon treated her frequently at this time for head injuries. Hannah herself believed her husband’s abuse the cause of her son