Shooting Victoria by Paul Thomas Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

Edward’s eccentricity, claiming that his torment “had an effect upon her then situation by means of that species of secret sympathy of which there are many instances, and communicated to the unborn child the insanity with which the father was afflicted.”
    Edward was born on 9 April 1822, and, whether because of upbringing, or genetics, or even “secret sympathy,” his behavior eerily reflected his father’s. Edward for the first years of his life was a witness to his father’s excesses—though, by all accounts, father and son got on very well. After years of abuse, when Edward was five or six, Hannah finally separated from her husband. Oxford Senior died in 1829, on the 10th of June—a date that his son knew about and remembered: a date, perhaps, very much on his mind when he was living at West Place.
    From an early age, Edward had fits of unprovoked, maniacal laughter. Hannah later admitted that she attempted to cure him of this by beating him. Edward’s fits were extremely disruptive; Hannah supported herself in her widowhood first with a pastry shop, and then with a coffee-and-tea shop, both of which failed—because of young Edward, according to Hannah: “my customers complained of his conduct” of “crying out and bawling aloud,” sheclaimed, “and I lost my business.” Edward would have episodes of near-catatonia, and episodes of motiveless, violent rage, in which he would “knock and destroy anything he might have in his hand.” His fits were often directed against strangers, as when he positioned himself in the upper room of his house and rained household goods on the heads of passersby. “He was once taken to the station house for this,” said his mother, “and he did not seem conscious of having done wrong.” Another time, he was brought to the station house for leaping onto the back of the carriage of a woman he did not know, simply to torment her. Edward proved to be too much for his mother to handle, and she left much of his upbringing to others: he lived with his uncle Edward Marklew, Hannah’s brother, and with his maternal grandfather for some time; he stayed with a neighbor, George Sandon, for about a year; he boarded at schools in Birmingham and South London. His odd behavior continued at all of these places. Sandon recalled that he constantly beat other children, “very severely.” Sandon also remembered his “habit of throwing things out of the up-stairs upon children below.” And there were his laughing and crying fits. “When I asked him why he did so,” according to Sandon, “he gave me no straightforward answer, but ran out, which I thought was very singular for a boy of eight years of age.” Not surprisingly, as a boy, Oxford had very few friends.
    Coming from a family of publicans on his mother’s side, Edward was “brought up to the bar,” as he later joked, at the age of fourteen, working for his aunt Clarinda Powell at the King’s Head, in Hounslow, southwest of the metropolis. He proved to be a generally capable (though at times scatterbrained) employee. Still, he continued to attract trouble. He was arrested after a scuffle with a neighbor—he struck the man on the head with a chisel, was brought before a magistrate, and found guilty of assault. At the time, his aunt Clarinda defended him. But she certainly had serious doubts about the boy’s sanity. He seemed incapable of empathy. When, for example, Oxford overheard a customer at the King’sHead speak to his aunt Clarinda about the vicious assault he had suffered the night before, he could only laugh and “jeer” at the injuries the man had received. As he had done when he assisted his mother, Oxford tended to unnerve customers and cost his aunt business: his aunt remembered one time, when she was ill, leaving Edward to run a busy bar. At ten o’clock, hours before closing time,