“Strange alteration!”: The Victorian Milton and a Book Bound in Human Skin
2021; Wiley; Volume: 55; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/milt.12395
ISSN1094-348X
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoIn the collections of the Devon Heritage Centre, located on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter, there is what at first appears to be an unremarkable, leather-bound, Victorian edition of Milton's poetry. On opening the volume, however, the reader finds an extraordinary inscription: “This Book is bound with a part of the skin of George Cudmore who with Sarah Dunn was committed to the Devon County Gaol on the 30th of October 1829 … for murdering & poisoning Grace Cudmore his Wife.” In 1830, George Cudmore was tried, found guilty, and executed; his accomplice, Sarah Dunn, was acquitted. Cudmore was hanged, and dissected at the Devon and Exeter Hospital. Decades later, local bookseller William Clifford used Cudmore's tanned skin to bind an 1852 edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton, published by William Tegg. One of the mysteries that I seek to unravel here is what happened to Cudmore's skin between the dissection of his body and the binding of the book. There are, however, more fundamental questions prompted by the Cudmore Milton (as I will refer to it): why use human skin to bind a book, and why choose Milton's poems? The book itself offers no explanation beyond the inscription stating the details of Cudmore's crime and trial. There is a disjunction between the shocking inscription and the rest of the book, which contains little out of the ordinary: it begins with a “Life of the Author” followed by Milton's major and minor works, and features illustrations after George Romney, Richard Westall, and J. M. W. Turner.1 The Cudmore Milton is regularly mentioned in studies of the unusual practice of “anthropodermic bibliopegy” (binding books in leather made from human skin), but it tends to appear as an addendum to discussion of more famous cases (see most recently Rosenbloom 124 and Brooke-Hitching 53). It has not been addressed specifically as an object of interest for studies of Milton's nineteenth-century reception or reputation. In mid-twentieth-century writing on books bound in human skin, descriptions of the origins of the Cudmore Milton often suggest the binding was somewhat happenstance: Lawrence S. Thompson writes in 1946 that Cudmore's “tanned skin fell into the hands of W. Clifford, a bookseller of Exeter, who used it for binding a copy of Tegg's 1852 edition of Milton” (96; my emphasis); in 1955, Walter Hart Blumenthal writes similarly that “the tanned skin came into the hands of W. Clifford” (83). The suggestion is that the circulation of this macabre souvenir was coincidental: if the tanned human leather merely “fell into the hands of” a bookseller, his choice of Milton's Poetical Works might be indiscriminate. But binding books in tanned human skin is rarely an arbitrary act. In this essay I explore the interpretive possibilities that this troubling object makes available when its creation is treated as intentional and revelatory. Pamela K. Gilbert writes in Victorian Skin that “On the one hand, [flayed human] skins promise to tell us something about history, about human savagery, while on the other, their meaning is obscure. They are objects that speak to us, but we cannot understand” (215). The Cudmore Milton speaks to us in precisely this way: the gruesome volume seems to offer some insight into Milton's place in nineteenth-century culture, while simultaneously raising more questions than it answers. What has Milton to do with George Cudmore and the murder he committed? As far as such a task is possible, I will make some suggestions about how we might understand this book, how we might read Milton's poetry as inflected by Cudmore's crime and his body, and vice versa. The disturbing envelopment of Milton's text in Cudmore's skin forces us to think about the materiality of the text, and particularly the presence of the body and bodily violence in Milton's poetry; both body and text here have a relationship to sin and punishment, and even more specifically a sin shared between husband and wife; the binding suggests an association of Milton with revolutionary violence; and finally, the object makes manifest a power relation bound up in class, literacy, and the body. There are two matters to deal with before examining the Cudmore Milton in relation to these ideas. First, I turn to Milton's own body parts to briefly address accounts of his reception in the nineteenth century, and to compare the treatment of Milton's body parts with those of Cudmore. I then provide an overview of the practice of binding books in human skin to identify patterns of meaning that may shape our interpretation of the Cudmore Milton. Laming and Taylor went home to get scissors to cut-off some of the hair: they returned about ten; when Mr. Laming poked his stick against the head, and brought some of the hair over the forehead; but, as they saw the scissors were not necessary, Mr. Taylor took up the hair, as it laid on the forehead, and carried it home. The water, which had got into the coffin, on the Tuesday afternoon, had made a sludge at the bottom of it, emitting a nauseous smell, and which occasioned Mr. Laming to use his stick to procure the hair, and not to lift up the head a second time. Mr. Laming also took out one of the leg bones, but threw it in again. (18–19) Body parts were variously picked up, knocked out, tossed back, and pocketed. The pieces retrieved from the coffin were sold as relics, with much joking in the press that Milton must have been blessed with an uncommon number of teeth: the English Chronicle reported that “Milton's teeth are now hawked about … in every part of the town. Several thousands have already been purchased—by the curious!” (Read 1053). This essay focuses on Cudmore's skin, but Milton's body parts can be seen as key to understanding his reception in the nineteenth century, both literally and metaphorically: consider Walter Savage Landor's claim in 1846 that “A rib of Shakespeare would have made a Milton: the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since” (246). (Six years later, B. B. of Pembroke writes in Notes and Queries that “it may not be out of place to tell you that I have handled one of Milton's ribs” [368; see Howell 17]). At the turn of the nineteenth century, during a period of intense cultural response to his poetics and politics, Milton's body was disassembled. Jayne Lewis suggests that “it would be hard to find an incident more thick with matter—or, at the time, more generative of literary material—than the apparent opening of Milton's coffin” (798).3 The accounts of this violation of Milton's remains—at once morbid and humorous—provoked some public controversy in the years that followed, feeding into the varied ways that Romantic writers understood their relationship to Milton through both his body parts and his disembodied spirit. Romantic writers and readers of Milton declared the value of his circulating body parts, associating them with his poetic power. They expressed a desire to keep him whole, to guard Milton from attempts to disrupt his legacy through disturbing his remains. They both struggled with the never-slumbering spirit who refused to stay dead and proclaimed a contemporary need for Milton's revivified revolutionary spirit: “return to us again,” as Wordsworth petitions in “London, 1802” (l. 7). Two brief examples illustrate the range of responses to Milton's disassembled body parts in the Romantic period. William Cowper's poem “Stanzas on the Late Indecent Liberties Taken with the Remains of the Great Milton, Anno 1790” expresses similar concerns to Neve's pamphlet, exclaiming that it is a disgrace for Milton's resting place to have been disturbed and implying that it is a point of honor to divulge and circulate disgust at the act and its perpetrators. In Cowper's oft-quoted words, “Ill fare the hands that heaved the stones / Where Milton's ashes lay, / That trembled not to grasp his bones / And steal his dust away!” (ll. 17-20; qtd. in Howell 23). Cowper respectfully sanitizes Milton's remains here by drying them out: “ashes” and “dust” are not quite what Neve describes—Milton's bones sitting in “sludge … emitting a nauseous smell” (19). In John Keats's “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair” (1818), the speaker has a transcendental experience, is physically affected (perhaps aroused) by the sight of a Miltonic relic, his “forehead hot and flush'd” (l. 34). The lock prompts a revelation: Milton's “Spirit never slumbers, / But rolls about our ears” (ll. 3–4). As Deborah Lutz notes, “What makes a relic a relic is its closeness not only to a once-alive human body, but also to a still-alive body that venerates its tactility” (4). It matters that the hair that Keats gazed upon was thought not to have been taken from the coffin disinterred in 1790, but rather had been in circulation since Milton's lifetime.4 That the lock was cut from the living Milton both brings the beholder closer to Milton in the act of composition and avoids the moral problem of taking inspiration from a relic stolen from Milton's resting place. The anecdote of Milton's disinterment has been used by scholars in various ways: two relevant works that take this event as a starting point are Michael Lieb's Milton and the Culture of Violence and Erik Gray's Milton and the Victorians. Lieb argues that a “sparagmatic mentality”—an investment in the idea of generative violence, bodily dismemberment that leads to renewal—is “fundamental to the Miltonic point of view” (16). He introduces this by dwelling on the ironic contrast between the events of August 1790 with the conclusion of Milton's poem to Manso, in which Milton imagines the reverential treatment of his own body after his death (Cowper makes reference to this in his “Stanzas”). I return to Lieb's identification of Miltonic sparagmos in my consideration of the Cudmore Milton. Through the same anecdote, Gray unearths a metaphor for Milton's paradoxical influence in the Victorian period and the workings of literary influence more broadly. Following Lucy Newlyn, who frames the Romantic Milton as dual—at once overtly figured as the deified patriarchal Milton, and covertly recognized as a “negatively capable” Milton through poetic allusion—Gray identifies a different kind of duality as the defining feature of the Victorian Milton. Gray argues that Milton is at once invisible and omnipresent in Victorian culture, “direct” and “incalculably diffusive” (Milton and the Victorians 161); this second phrase is borrowed from George Eliot's Middlemarch). Hair, Gray suggests, aptly represents this duality: it both belongs to us and is the body part most easily separated from us. It is both “intensely personal or peculiar and also interpersonal and alienable” (163). My discussion of the Cudmore Milton draws on Gray's claim that Milton's mixed significance and absence are key to his Victorian legacy. It is partly because of his cultural significance in the nineteenth century that Milton is subject to the visual and material interventions that in turn disrupt his authority. The Cudmore Milton echoes the responses to the disinterment of Milton's remains, in both undermining and underscoring his cultural authority. How does one tell the difference between human and animal leather? Carolyn Marvin notes that since “there is nothing perceptibly obvious about a book bound in human skin to suggest its composition, in this literature the magical nature of the subject matter makes it especially difficult to distinguish fantasy from fact” (133). The most precise test we currently have uses peptide mass fingerprinting to analyze the proteins present in leather samples to determine whether the material was once the skin of a primate. At the time of writing, this technique has been used by the Anthropodermic Book Project to test 31 books thought to be bound in human skin, around two thirds of which have been confirmed cases.5 In Megan Rosenbloom's recent account of the project's findings, Dark Archives, the Cudmore Milton gets a one-sentence mention (124); it has not been tested.6 For my purposes, it does not matter much if the book is or is not actually bound in tanned human skin. Either way, a relation is established between Cudmore and Milton, so that the story of the former's crime envelops the poetry of the latter. We still need to address the binding of and inscription in the volume as a disconcerting paratext that presents the book in a particular way and shapes our response to it. As noted above, there are only a small number of books that claim to be bound in human skin, and an even smaller number that have been tested and verified. In accounts of this practice, the examples given generally fall into three main categories: first, the criminal or retributive; second, the medical or anatomical; and third, the memorial (though of course these categories are not always distinct from each other). The books that do not quite fit into these categories tend to be those only rumored: anecdotally, the practice of anthropodermic bibliopegy is associated with the Nazi regime, but to date the Anthropodermic Book Project has not verified any books clearly linked to Nazi Germany (Rosenbloom 173). The binding of the Cudmore Milton in the skin of a man executed for murder aligns it most clearly with that first category, the criminal. The most famous British examples are from the first half of the nineteenth century, when several human-skin books were created as a result of changes in law and medical practice. Most of these examples also cross into the second medical category, but in the stories told about them criminality takes precedence. The Murder Act of 1752 mandated post-mortem dissection (a substitute for gibbeting) as part of the punishment for murder: “better Preventing the horrid Crime of Murder” required a punishment that would constitute a “further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy,” since trivial crimes could often lead to hanging in the mid-eighteenth century (Richardson 35–37). As Rosenbloom writes, “By dissecting murderers, doctors became agents of state punishment, and dissection a public performance of humiliation” (137). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the demands of medical scholars for bodies to dissect had outgrown the number of people being executed, which led to the practice of body-snatching and resurrection men taking fresh bodies from graves. The Anatomy Act of 1832 aimed to curb these activities. By recommending that the bodies of the poorest in society, those who died in the workhouses, be made available for anatomical study, “What had for generations been a feared and hated punishment for murder became one for poverty,” as Ruth Richardson notes (xv). Most of the examples of British criminal anthropodermic bibliopegy are made with the skin of criminals executed in that last decade, between 1820–30. Two of the most famous British examples are books bound in the skin of John Horwood and William Burke. Burke, of the infamous Edinburgh body-snatching partnership Burke and Hare, was executed the year before George Cudmore. His remains were put to a variety of uses, including the construction of a pocketbook using a portion of his skin, inscribed with the date of his execution. This must have seemed like a fitting punishment for someone whose crime was supplying bodies for dissection. Horwood's skin, meanwhile, was used to bind a record of his crime and the subsequent case: the front of the volume is inscribed with the words “Cutis Vera Johannis Horwood”—“the genuine skin of John Horwood”—framed within embossed gallows. Steven Connor notes that the increase in the availability of criminal bodies in combination with the “long-established popularity of the genre of gallows confessions … suggests the aptness of binding criminal testaments in the skin of the reprobate” (43). The typical aptness of these criminal cases does not apply straightforwardly in the case of the Cudmore Milton. We might also include in the criminal category those rumored volumes associated with the French Revolution, where tanneries for human skin were alleged to be in use during the Terror, though the existence of such objects is indeterminate. In these cases, the retributive violence of revolution takes the place of sanctioned capital punishment. A newspaper cutting enclosed with the Cudmore Milton, titled “Exeter Curiosity,” notes that “in most cases the use of human skin for binding has been due to a grim sense of humour, especially during the French Revolution, when the bodies of aristocrats provided material for making women's gloves as well as coverings for books.” Though there are rumors of a specific tannery and even particular objects, such as an edition of Rousseau's The Social Contract bound in the skin of French aristocrats (Connor 43) and “a copy of the French Constitution of 1793 which is contained in a piece of human skin dyed a light green” (Thompson, “Tanned” 94), Rosenbloom notes that so far “any books … tested with an alleged French Revolution pedigree have all turned out to be made from nonhuman animals” (46). Rosenbloom suggests the lack of concrete examples may be explained by strict French laws about the sale of human remains: if there are extant books bound in human skin from the period of the French Revolution, they exist only in private collections, out of sight. The second identifiable category of books bound in human skin, the medical or anatomical, is connected to the criminal through dissection as punishment. There are a clear number of examples of books about the body that have been bound in human skin by medical scholars and physicians, which often make a clear connection between binding and book; the skin, removed from the body, is still conceptually linked to the corporeal. Thompson notes that the beginning of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of any “systematic interest … taken by the medical profession in the practical uses of human leather” (“Tanned” 94), but anatomical volumes have a longer history: a book on virginity and female anatomy from 1663, De Integritatis et Corruptionis Virginum Notis, is bound in the skin of a woman, with a note stating it has “a binding appropriate to its subject” (Connor 44). I will return to the power imbalance implicit in these bindings below. Both criminal and medical examples seem to result from easy access to the organs of the dead. The third category, memorial skin books, is different; they can fulfill a similar role to locks of hair exchanged between lovers, though are perhaps not so gratefully received. There are stories of admirers arranging for their own skin—either after death or an amputation—to be used to bind volumes as gifts for lovers (Blumenthal 81–82; Connor 45). Books have also been bound in human skin to ensure a place in cultural memory, rather than personal: in the early nineteenth century Ernst Kauffmann supposedly collected hundreds of woodcuts and arranged to have them bound in his own skin after death, so that he would be “remembered to posterity” after a disappointing writing career (Thompson, “Tanned” 98). One example of a verified cultural-memorial skin book, comparison with which may be illuminating for understanding the Cudmore Milton, is Phillis Wheatley's 1773 collection Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Not one but two copies of Wheatley's Poems have been proven to be bound in human skin by the Anthropodermic Book Project: Rosenbloom argues that the motivation to bind these books was “to create collector's items using the rarest materials to bind one of the most important works in African American literature” (109). The impulse is comparable to Kauffmann's, to make sure Wheatley is appropriately “remembered to posterity.” Wheatley's collection is an exception, but in most of these examples—the criminal, medical, and memorial—the relationship between the text and its binding, when the latter is human skin, is a strong one of aptness. This leads me to suggest a fourth broader category, including some of those mentioned above, which presents the relationship between text and cover as a kind of emblematic pun. For example, Thompson mentions a case of a customer “especially fond of tattooed human skins” who “managed to get hold of a human skin on which were tattooed two knights from the age of Louis XIII in single combat, and he ordered a copy of The Three Musketeers bound in it” (“Tanned” 99–100). There are many cases where the aptness of the binding for the book treads the fine line between humor and horror: anecdotally, a 1793 edition of the Marquis de Sade's Justine et Juliette was “bound in female breasts” with a nipple in the very center of the cover (Thompson, “Tanned” 98). What most of these examples suggest, in all four categories, is that the act of binding books in human skin is anything but arbitrary. What are the implications, then, of the binding of Milton's poetry in Cudmore's flesh? Why use Milton's poetry in this way? Can this binding be understood as an interpretive act, offering us a kind of pun, or suggesting aptness? The Cudmore Milton doesn't fit neatly into any of the four categories outlined above, but it can be read through each: we can consider the object from the perspective of criminality and punishment; anatomy and the body; reverence and the memorial; and as perhaps declaring a kind of emblematic referentiality. Let us turn first to the criminal. As I have suggested, we might include in this category rumors of skin books made during the Terror: the tanning of aristocratic skin is part of a retributive punishment of the powerful. Regardless of whether the rumors of the human tanneries of the French Revolution are true, Gilbert suggests that “for many Victorians, the supposed flaying and tanning of humans came to symbolise the radical recent break with civilisation that the Terror represented” (181). If, as Gilbert argues, this association of flayed human skin and revolution was present in the minds of the Victorians, given Milton's own association with revolution, might the binding of an 1852 edition of Milton's Poetical Works in human leather be read in the context of the revolutionary events across Europe at the end of the 1840s? Or does the creation of the Cudmore Milton suggest a broader association between Milton's poetry and revolutionary “break[s] with civilisation”? Thomas Carlyle discusses the rumors of human leather in his 1837 work on the French Revolution: “Alas then, is man's civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial” (3.317). Carlyle identifies civilization with the fragile containment of skin, which is ruptured in revolution. There is much here that might make us think of Milton and “infernal” revolution: Carlyle's language recalls the image of the birth of Milton's Sin, bursting from Satan's head (Paradise Lost 2.746–58), and in turn Death “breaking violent way” from the womb of Sin (2.782).7 Joseph Crawford links the disinterment of Milton's coffin to a renewed engagement with his republicanism in the revolutionary context of the 1790s, arguing it is “fitting that the fragments of Milton's body should have been unearthed and circulated in the very year that his political pamphlets began to be reprinted, some of them for the first time in one-and-a-half centuries” (26–27); the binding of Milton's poetry in Cudmore's skin may be likewise recalling this connection between Milton and revolution. When a criminal's skin is used to bind the book in which he appears to give his own admonitory account of his wicked life and deserved death, the anthropodermic binding enables a kind of graphic ventriloquism, a garbing of the book in the body of the criminal that corresponds to the garbling appropriation of his tongue. . . . Normally, it is the legal document that is binding upon the bodies it concerns; here the body's own binding seems to underwrite and circumscribe the power of the official record. (43) Does the Cudmore Milton also involve “a kind of graphic ventriloquism”? The leather is made from the skin of a criminal, but not to bind his own story or testimony. In place of a confession, the Cudmore Milton contains only the inscription giving a brief description of his crime. Perhaps, then, the binding of this volume is a prompt to think about Milton's poetry in terms of crime and punishment. Are we to make a connection between Cudmore's crime and man's first disobedience? We might better understand the relationship between the text and its binding by attending to the particulars of Cudmore's crime. Grace Cudmore was poisoned; after burial, she was disinterred, and arsenic was found in her stomach. Some accounts suggest the poison was administered by George Cudmore in elder blossom tea, and then in pills offered as medicine for the stomach ache caused by the tea. In other accounts he accused Sarah Dunn of poisoning his wife with arsenic-laced apples and milk, a strikingly domestic method. What are we to make of the claim that Cudmore tried to blame his female accomplice for their supposedly joint crime? The Southampton Herald notes that “each laid the blame upon the other of having instigated the deed” (“Multiple News”). One local newspaper reports that the wife of the constable heard Dunn ask Cudmore “if he forgave her”: “He said it was her who caused him to do the deed. Dunn replied they were both equally guilty, and she hoped that they would both be equally punished” (“Assize Intelligence”). Other newspapers report that it was Cudmore who asked Dunn for her forgiveness, with Dunn responding “You are a bad man, and I am as bad as you, and deserve the same punishment, and I hope I shall have it” (“Devon Lent”). Some accounts note that Dunn's admission of guilt referred only to her living in sin with Cudmore, and not to any part played in the murder. Several local newspapers mention the detail that Cudmore requested Dunn be made to watch his execution; others add that she miscarried a child while she was being held in prison. The lines that might be drawn between this narrative and Milton's poetry are many, if indistinct, like the crisscross markings in the human leather binding of the book. Victorian writers make use of Milton's Paradise Lost as a marker and reminder of humanity's fallen nature. This is one way that Milton is, in Gray's sense, “dual”—he is kept present and distant through a consistent acknowledgement of the inescapably postlapsarian state of human existence. Victorian literature often recreates the events of Milton's etiological epic in a world that is distinctly marked by the grief of history. We see this in poetry in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “A Drama of Exile” (1844), which declares itself a response to Milton overtly and takes as its subject “the new and strange experience of the fallen humanity, as it went forth from Paradise into the wilderness; with a peculiar reference to Eve's allotted grief” (102). In fiction, the inhabitants of Thomas Hardy's Wessex are repeatedly compared to Adam and Eve to mark their fallen nature and the inevitability of their failings: Milton's ambivalent expulsion is recast as simply unhopeful at the end of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891).8 The Victorian acknowledgement of Milton's duality appears frequently in this pattern of recollection and departure: Anna K. Nardo calls this “Miltonic reverberation”—Milton is “recalled and cancelled simultaneously”—in her examination of George Eliot's uses of Milton (25). My suggestion is that as the Victorians seem to be both particularly concerned with their fallen nature and regularly make use of Milton to articulate that awareness, the Cudmore Milton might be functioning in the same way, to draw our attention to the complex horror of two lovers bringing death into the world and being punished for it. If approaching this volume as an object associated with criminality leads us to sin and punishment, considering it in relation to books about the body offers a different perspective. Perhaps the Cudmore Milton makes a connection between the skin of its binding and Milton's distinctive poetic engagements with skin. Milton's descriptions of permeable, blushing, angelic skin in Paradise Lost (and the density of human skin in comparison) become intensified when the book containing these lines is itself encased in human skin. The fact that the leather, according to Thompson, “looks something like pigskin” indicates a particular softness: the nineteenth-century doctor and bibliophile John Stockton-Hough charmingly reports that “On the basis of his extensive experience … skin from the human back [is generally] coarse-grained[, but] skin from a woman's thigh could be almost indistinguishable from pigskin” (Thompson, “Tanned” 96–98). We might then attune ourselves more to the distinctive importance of softness and skin in Paradise Lost. Softness in Milton's epic is bound up with angelic androgyny and queerness, as “spirits when they please / Can either sex assume, or both; so soft / And uncompounded is their essence pure” (1.423–25). “Soft” is a key word for binding Adam and Eve's bodies together, and for drawing the reader into their intimacy. Christopher Ricks revels in the ambiguity of the word in Milton's separation scene—“Thus saying, from her husband's hand her hand / Soft she withdrew” (9.385–86)—noting that “soft” can be both adverb and adjective: the soft hand softly withdraws, “with a delicate fusion of two points of view, since the adverb has the neutrality of an onlooker, while the adjective puts us in the place of Adam as he feels Eve's hand” (Ricks 90). We also see this when Adam wakes Eve from her “unquiet rest” (5.11) by whispering “Awake / My fairest” while “Her hand soft touching” (17–18). All elements of touch are soft here, as softness belongs to both “hand” and
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