Letter V.—To Mrs Barbara Wilcox, at Philadelphia.
Dear Sister,—It gave me much pleasure to learn from your letter that yourself, husband, and baby got safe and sound to your present home. You ask me to send you my portrait. It isn’t in my power to do so at present; but if I should be unfortunate enough to kill anybody, or set a dockyard a-fire, or bamboozle the Bank—or, in short, do anything splashy to get a front place in the dock at the Old Bailey—you may then have my portrait at next to nothing. Then, I can tell you, it will be drawn in capital style—at full length, three quarters, half length, and I know not what.
I’ve read somewhere, that in what people call the good old times—as times always get worse, what a pretty state the world will be in a thousand years hence!—when there were dead men’s heads on the top of Temple Bar, grinning down, what people call an example, on the folks below, that there used to be fellows with spyglasses; and, at a penny a peep, they showed to the curious all the horror of the aforesaid heads, not to be discovered by the naked eye. Well, the heads are gone, and the spyglass traders too; but for all that, there’s the same sort of show going on, and a good scramble to turn the penny by it, only after a different fashion. Murderers are now shown in newspapers. They are no longer gibbeted in irons; no, that was found to be shocking, and of no use: they are now nicely cut in wood, and so insinuated into the bosoms of families. The more dreadful the murder, the greater value the portrait; which, for a time, is made a sort of personal acquaintance to thousands of respectable folks who pay the newspaper owner—the spyglass-man of our time—so much to stare at it as long as they like. I am certain that the shortest cut to popularity of some sort is to cut somebody’s throat. A dull, stupid fellow, that pays his way and does harm to nobody, why, he may die off like a fly in November and be no more thought of. But only let him do some devil’s deed—do a bit of murder as coolly as he’d pare a turnip—and what he says, whether he takes coffee, or brandy-and-water “cold without;” when he sleeps, and when he wakes; and when he smiles, and when he grinds his teeth,—all of this is put down as if all the world went upon his movements, and couldn’t go on without knowing ’em. To a man who wants to make a noise, he doesn’t care how, all this is very tempting. I hope I mayn’t come to be cut in wood, but still one would like to make a rumpus some way before one died.
There’s commonly an Old Bailey fashion, the same as a St James’s fashion. Just now—as you want to know all the domestic news—poison’s carrying everything before it. ’Twould seem as if people suddenly thought their relations rats, and treated ’em accordingly. I never yet tried my hand upon a book, but I do think that I could throw off a nice little story with lots of arsenic in it—a sort of genteel guide to Newgate. I’ve been reading about a lady, one Tofana, who made a great stir some years ago. She could give arsenic in such a manner that she set people for death as you’d set an alarum. She got a good many pupils, young married ladies, about her, who all of ’em put their husbands aside like an old-fashioned gown. Now, I do think that a novel called “The Ladies’ Poisoning Club,” or “Widowhood at Will,” would just now make a bit of a stir. I don’t mean to say that I could write a book, that is, what folks call write; but I’ve a knack: I know I could imitate writing, just as an ape imitates a man. The subject grows upon me. I certainly think I shall make a beginning. However, of this you shall hear more by the next packet. I do think I could make a hit in what I call arsenicated literature. There’s arsenicated candles, why shouldn’t there be arsenicated books?—In haste, your affectionate brother,
Juniper Hedgehog.
P.S.—If I do the book, I shall follow it up with a sort of moral continuation, to be called “The Stomach-Pump.”