The Not of an English Opium-Eater | Page 3

all the children of
Cain. It would be absolutely impossible adequately to describe the
frenzy of feelings which, throughout the next fortnight, mastered the
popular heart; the mere delirium of indignant horror in some, the mere
delirium of panic in others. For twelve succeeding days, under some

groundless notion that the unknown murderer had quitted London, the
panic which had convulsed the mighty metropolis diffused itself all
over the island. I was myself at that time nearly three hundred miles
from London; but there, and everywhere, the panic was indescribable.
One lady, my next neighbor, whom personally I knew, living at the
moment, during the absence of her husband, with a few servants in a
very solitary house, never rested until she had placed eighteen doors (so
she told me, and, indeed, satisfied me by ocular proof), each secured by
ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and
any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing-room,
was like going, as a flag of truce, into a beleaguered fortress; at every
sixth step one was stopped by a sort of portcullis. The panic was not
confined to the rich; women in the humblest ranks more than once died
upon the spot, from the shock attending some suspicious attempts at
intrusion upon the part of vagrants, meditating probably nothing worse
than a robbery, but whom the poor women, misled by the London
newspapers, had fancied to be the dreadful London murderer.
Meantime, this solitary artist, that rested in the centre of London,
self-supported by his own conscious grandeur, as a domestic Attila, or
'scourge of God;' this man, that walked in darkness, and relied upon
murder (as afterwards transpired) for bread, for clothes, for promotion
in life, was silently preparing an effectual answer to the public journals;
and on the twelfth day after his inaugural murder, he advertised his
presence in London, and published to all men the absurdity of ascribing
to him any ruralizing propensities, by striking a second blow, and
accomplishing a second family extermination. Somewhat lightened was
the provincial panic by this proof that the murderer had not
condescended to sneak into the country, or to abandon for a moment,
under any motive of caution or fear, the great metropolitan castra
stativa of gigantic crime, seated for ever on the Thames. In fact, the
great artist disdained a provincial reputation; and he must have felt, as a
case of ludicrous disproportion, the contrast between a country town or
village, on the one hand, and, on the other, a work more lasting than
brass--a [Greek: _chtaema es aei_]--a murder such in quality as any
murder that he would condescend to own for a work turned out from
his own studio.
Coleridge, whom I saw some months after these terrific murders, told

me, that, for his part, though at the time resident in London, he had not
shared in the prevailing panic; him they effected only as a philosopher,
and threw him into a profound reverie upon the tremendous power
which is laid open in a moment to any man who can reconcile himself
to the abjuration of all conscientious restraints, if, at the same time,
thoroughly without fear. Not sharing in the public panic, however,
Coleridge did not consider that panic at all unreasonable; for, as he said
most truly in that vast metropolis there are many thousands of
households, composed exclusively of women and children; many other
thousands there are who necessarily confide their safety, in the long
evenings, to the discretion of a young servant girl; and if she suffers
herself to be beguiled by the pretence of a message from her mother,
sister, or sweetheart, into opening the door, there, in one second of time,
goes to wreck the security of the house. However, at that time, and for
many months afterwards, the practice of steadily putting the chain upon
the door before it was opened prevailed generally, and for a long time
served as a record of that deep impression left upon London by Mr.
Williams. Southey, I may add, entered deeply into the public feeling on
this occasion, and said to me, within a week or two of the first murder,
that it was a private event of that order which rose to the dignity of a
national event. [2] But now, having prepared the reader to appreciate on
its true scale this dreadful tissue of murder (which as a record
belonging to an era that is now left forty-two years behind us, not one
person in four of this generation can be expected to know correctly), let
me pass to the circumstantial details of the affair.
Yet, first of all, one word as to the local scene of the murders. Ratcliffe
Highway is a public thoroughfare in a most