right|thumb|Portrait of Eugene Aram, from [[The Newgate Calendar]]
Eugene Aram (c. September 17046 August 1759) was an English philologist, but also infamous as the murderer celebrated by Thomas Hood in his ballad The Dream of Eugene Aram, and by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1832 novel Eugene Aram.
Early life
Aram was born in September 1704 in Ramsgill, Yorkshire, England,
He had a "fair school education": reading and arithmetic. At 13 he started working with his father Peter on the Newby estate.
While still young, he married "unfortunately" (a term then used for impregnating a woman before marriage) and settled as a schoolmaster at Netherdale; during his years there he taught himself Hebrew.
In 1734 he moved to Knaresborough, and was a schoolmaster by 1745. In that year Daniel Clark, an intimate friend of Aram in Knaresborough, came into ownership of a significant number of goods from tradesmen. writing that there was a relation between the Celtic language and other languages in Europe (a proposal that was at the time not agreed by other scholars), and disputing the idea that Latin was derived from Greek (a generally accepted idea at the time).
There is a reference to the case in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1879 novel The Cloven Foot, when the character Celia claims that John Treverton's gloomy moods must mean he committed a murder in his early youth:
Aram is also referenced in George Orwell's 1935 poem "A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been":
P. G. Wodehouse references Aram in several of his fictional works and often quotes from the last two lines of Hood's poem: "And Eugene Aram walk'd between, / With gyves upon his wrist."
- In Chapter 21 of his 1905 novel The Head of Kay's, when the hero Fenn loses his school cap in a possibly incriminating situation, he relates, upon its reappearance, that:
- In Wodehouse's story Jeeves Takes Charge (1916), again quotes The Dream of Eugene Aram;
- In 1929's Summer Lightning, Ronnie Fish is compared to Aram:
- In Chapter 8 of his 1946 novel Joy in the Morning, Bertie recalls:
- In Chapter 6 of the 1954 novel Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (American title: Bertie Wooster Sees it Through) after being hauled before the Vinton Street Magistrate, Bertie tells his valet:
Aram is referenced in the eighth chapter of E. Phillips Oppenheim's novel, The Great Impersonation:
Aram is mentioned by Dr. Thorndyke in Chapter 11 of the R. Austin Freeman 1911 novel The Eye of Osiris, where Thorndyke expounds on the difficulty of disposing of the human body:
Aram is referenced in Chapter 6 of the 1947 novel Love Among the Ruins by Angela Thirkell: "at which Mr. Marling went so purple in the face that his wife and son, closing in on him, walked him away like Eugene Aram."
See also
- Edward H. Rulloff, another philologist-murderer
- William Chester Minor, paranoid murderer and self-mutilator, prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary
Notes
References
Attribution: