The House on Claverton Street

Previously: Edwin Bartlett was found dead on New Year's Day 1886 with chloroform in his stomach and no evidence of how it got there. Every medical expert said forced administration was nearly impossible. Adelaide was acquitted — but "how did she do it" has haunted the cold case aficionados for 140 years. Last time, I suggested that question is a trap. Here's why.

The Platonic Marriage

Edwin and Adelaide married around 1875. Then Edwin sent her to boarding school.

She lived there for roughly a year, staying with him only during holidays, and didn't move in permanently until about 1878. In 1881, she had a stillbirth. A midwife attended because Edwin refused to let a doctor (all male back then) see his wife, and only relented when the midwife insisted, by which time the child was born dead. Both Edwin and Adelaide told the midwife that sexual intercourse had happened only once, on a Sunday afternoon, and that "there was always some preventive used."

A book called Esoteric Anthropology; or, The Mysteries of Man — which contained “instructions on how married people could live together without having children” — sat openly displayed in the Bartlett home.

This is a marriage with its own private logic. It wasn’t necessarily loveless. Edwin might have been asexual. And there's no evidence of hostility between the couple. But it was not a conventional marriage.

In early 1885, the Bartletts met Reverend George Dyson through his chapel at Merton. Dyson was a young Wesleyan minister earning £100 a year. And Edwin began engineering an intimacy that went beyond friendship.

He asked Dyson to visit more often. He asked him to supervise Adelaide's studies in Latin, history, geography, and mathematics. He paid Dyson's train fare to visit them at Dover. He gave him a season ticket from Putney to Waterloo. A coat and a pair of slippers were kept for Dyson in the house.

By October, when the Bartletts moved to Claverton Street, Dyson was visiting two or three times a week, sometimes arriving at 9:30 in the morning after Edwin left for business.

The servant once found Adelaide sitting with her head on Dyson's knee. Neither moved when the servant walked in.

I know what you’re thinking. Dyson was Adelaide’s lover. But wait.

Here’s a quote from one of Edwin's letters to Dyson:

"My heart going out to you... Who can help loving you... Looking towards the future with joyfulness."

In the Victorian era, it wasn’t unusual for close friends to tell one another, “I love you.” Yes, men, too. But wait.

Edwin told Dyson he'd made him executor of his will. When Dyson nervously confessed he was growing attached to Adelaide and offered to withdraw, Edwin said, "Why should you?" He told Dyson, his own father, and anyone who'd listen that men should have two wives: "one to take out and one to do the work." He asked Dyson whether the Bible permitted more than one partner. He described the ideal companion as someone "educated and intelligent and his confidante in all matters."

Edwin and Adelaide privately called Dyson "Georgius Rex."

The doctor treating Edwin in his final illness, a man named Leach, asked Edwin about all of this. Edwin said he was under "mesmeric influence" from a friend he did not name. "I am doing absurd things," he told Leach. "Things against my common sense. Both my wife and I are doing so."

Leach probed for coercion, exploitation, and financial manipulation. He found nothing. Edwin wasn't afraid of the "mesmerist." He liked him.

During his final days, Edwin sat in his chair and cried for an hour at a time. When asked why, he said it was because he was so happy.

Think about that for a moment.

A man who has arranged his entire domestic life around an unconventional structure, who has finally created something that works, and that gives everyone companionship and security. A man who knows that the exposure of this arrangement would destroy the minister's career, his own reputation, and everything he's built.

He cries because he's happy. Which might be the truest thing anyone says in this entire case.

If you walked into this story assuming a wife poisoned her inconvenient husband to run off with the minister, you now have a problem. Edwin wasn't an obstacle to Adelaide and Dyson's relationship. He was its architect. He brought Dyson into the household, funded his access, wrote him love letters, and planned for Adelaide and Dyson to marry after his death.

Remove Edwin, and the entire structure collapses, which is exactly what happened. After Edwin's death, Dyson panicked. He threw away evidence, returned gifts, and tried to recover his letters. The man who'd been "never so perfectly happy" as when possessing the Bartletts' confidence turned into a man desperate to erase every trace of the arrangement.

So the question "why would Adelaide kill her husband?" suddenly doesn’t have the clean “because she had a lover” answer. And neither does the question of what, exactly, was happening in that house.

Nobody at the trial in 1886 asked the obvious question about Edwin's letter. Nobody in the courtroom, or in the 140 years of commentary since, seems to have considered that "my heart going out to you" might mean exactly what it says.

Next time: Adelaide lied. Repeatedly and provably. But again, once you start picking apart her lies and truths, things change.

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