Aram in Literature
Thomas Hood's ballad, The Dream of Eugene Aram centres on Aram's activity as a schoolteacher, contrasting his scholarship with his hidden murderous urges. Bulwer-Lytton's novel Eugene Aram creates a Romantic figure torn between violence and visionary ideals, an image that is also portrayed in W.G. Wills's play Eugene Aram, in which Henry Irving took the principal role.
The spirit of Aram "possessed" Derek Acorah during Most Haunted Live in 2004 while they were in search of the ghost of Dick Turpin.
Eugene Aram is also referenced in antepenultimate stanza of George Orwell's 1935 poem "A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been".
| “ | I am the worm who never turned, The eunuch without a harem; |
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P.G. Wodehouse's character Bertie Wooster recalls in the story "Jeeves Takes Charge", first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916, that he memorized a poem about Eugene Aram when he was a boy. He says that he cannot remember much of the poem, and the words he does remember are not in Hood's ballad. Bertie has stolen his uncle's manuscript memoir and is worried about hiding it when he recalls the story of Aram.
| “ | Fellows who know all about that sort of thing — detectives, and so on — will tell you that the most difficult thing in the world is to get rid of the body. I remember, as a kid, having to learn by heart a poem about a bird by the name of Eugene Aram, who had the deuce of a job in this respect. All I can recall of the actual poetry is the bit that goes:
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tumty-tum, I slew him, tum-tum tum! But I recollect that the poor blighter spent much of his valuable time dumping the corpse into ponds and burying it, and what not, only to have it pop out at him again. It was about an hour after I had shoved the parcel into the drawer when I realized that I had let myself in for just the same sort of thing. |
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Bertie references the poem again in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves when he recalls being recently "entertained" in Totleigh Towers.
| “ | 'The word "entertained" is not well chosen, Jeeves. If locking a fellow in his bedroom, as near as a toucher with gyves upon his wrists, and stationing the local police force on the lawn below to ensure that he doesn't nip out of the window at the end of a knotted sheet is your idea of entertaining, it isn't mine, not by a jugful.' | ” |
In Summer Lightning, Ronnie Fish is compared to Aram:
| “ | A morning spent in solitary wrestling with a guilty conscience had left Ronnie Fish thoroughly unstrung. By the time the clock over the stable struck the hour of one, his mental condition had begun to resemble that of the late Eugene Aram. | ” |
Wodehouse referenced Aram even earlier, 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, and notes, when it reappears, that:
| “ | He had been expecting the cap to turn up, like the corpse of Eugene Aram’s victim, at some inconvenient moment. | ” |
Much later, in Chapter 6 of the 1954 Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (American title: Bertie Wooster Sees it Through) after being hauled before the Vinton Street Magistrate, Bertie tells his butler:
| “ | 'A little trouble last night with the minions of the Law, Jeeves,' I said. 'Quite a bit of that Eugene-Aram-walked-between-with-gyves-upon-his-wrists stuff.'
'Indeed, sir? Most vexing.' |
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Eugene Aram is also referenced in the eighth chapter of E. Phillips Oppenheim's novel, The Great Impersonation:
| “ | 'Roger Unthank was a lunatic,' Dominey pronounced deliberately. 'His behaviour from the first was the behaviour of a madman.'
'The Eugene Aram type of village schoolmaster gradually drifting into positive insanity,' Mangan acquiesced. |
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Read more about this topic: Eugene Aram
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)