The Cutprice Guignol

In the early hours of January 1st, 1886, in the Pimlico district of London, Adelaide Bartlett woke her landlord with an urgent message: “come down – I think Mr Bartlett is dead”. This revelation would form the basis for one of the most notorious and scandalous cases in Victorian London – involving a cuckolding reverend, an inexplicable murder, and, after a highly-publicised trial, a shocking acquittal.

Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoille was born in 1855 in Orleans to Clara Chamberlain – the true identity of her father remained the focus of many rumours over the course of her life, but most contemporary sources agreed she was likely the illegitimate daughter of Adolph dolphe Collot de la Tremouille, a French count, from whom she got her name. After spending her childhood in France, Adelaide was sent to live with her maternal aunt and uncle in Kingston-Upon-Thames, where, in 1875 at 19, she met her husband-to-be, Edwin Bartlett.

Bartlett, a modestly wealthy grocer, swiftly became infatuated with Adelaide, despite their eleven-year age-gap, and soon suggested marriage – Adelaide’s parents accepted the offer, and, by the end of the year, they were married.

Though the marriage, from initiation, was a strange one. Bartlett sent his new wife to a boarding school across the country to fill in the gaps he believed her education in France had left her with, with the new couple only spending time together during the school holidays; it wasn’t until 1877, after Adelaide had been sent to a finishing school in Belgium, that she finally returned to live with her husband above one of his grocery stores in Herne Hill, London.

Adelaide later claimed that their marriage was always intended to be a platonic one; there has been much debate in the years since Bartlett’s death as to whether this was true, and, if so, what his motivations might have been for this, with some speculating he may have been gay. Regardless, the relationship was consummated by the early 1880s, when Adelaide suffered a stillbirth – the trauma of the incident led her to lose interest in having children in future, and, by all accounts, the relationship remained chaste after that.

But Adelaide’s sexual encounters (real or imagined) outside the marriage began causing issues as early as 1878. After the death of Bartlett’s mother, his father moved in with the couple, and swiftly accused Adelaide of having an affair with Bartlett’s younger brother Frederick. Edwin Bartlett took this attack on his wife’s fidelity very seriously, and insisted that his father retract the claim in front of a solicitor, which his father eventually agreed to. During her pregnancy, Adelaide’s midwife had anticipated a difficult birth and had suggested involving a doctor (a position reserved for men at the time), which Bartlett had refused for fear of another man “interfering” with his wife.

Bartlett himself, by all accounts, was a man drawn to esoteric beliefs, particularly the theory of animal magnetism. Put forward by German physician Franz Mesmer in the 18th century, the theory puts forward the belief that all living things are imbued with an invisible energy which can be manipulated via hypnotism and other psychic manipulation to achieve physical effects such as healing. Bartlett may well have been drawn to the theory due to his own ongoing health problems, including painful dental issues caused by a botched dental surgery ten years earlier – instead of pulling his teeth out to replace them with dentures, a dentist sawed them down, and the remains of his teeth rotted, causing enormous pain over the following decade.

Despite Bartlett’s beliefs, though, another spiritual advisor would soon become a prominent feature of Edwin and Adelaide’s curious marriage: in 1885, the couple met twenty-seven-year-old George Dyson, a Wesleyan minister for a local congregation in Putney. Exchanging letters with the couple, Dyson soon developed a close friendship with them, and began spending more time at the residence. Bartlett hired Dyson to continue Adelaide’s studies in Latin, history, and geography, though the relationship quickly developed into something more intimate.

When the Bartletts moved to a new home in Pimlico in August 1885, Edwin purchased a season ticket for Dyson from Putney to the nearby Waterloo to make his visits easier. Dyson, in his late twenties, was closer to Adelaide’s age than her sickly husband, and the two developed a close relationship. Alice Fulcher, who worked as a maid for the couple’s landlord, recounted later that she had walked in on Dyson and Adelaide with the curtains “pinned shut”, while Adelaide had her head resting on Dyson’s knee; the pair made no attempt to move after Fulcher saw them together.

Perhaps more curiously, though, was the fact that Dyson and Adelaide allegedly showed this affection for one another in front of Bartlett. Several witnesses remarked on seeing Dyson and Adelaide kissing on the lips in front of Bartlett and showing other signs of mutual affection, though none were able to confirm whether their physical relationship had gone further than that. In September of 1885, Bartlett rewrote his will, removing the stipulation that his wife must not remarry in order to inherit his estate, and, though it was not included in the will, the understanding between the trio was that Adelaide would marry Dyson in the event of her husband’s death.

A death that, as it turned out, was closer than it seemed. Edwin Bartlett suffered from a number of medical complaints over the months before his death, and was diagnosed with gastritis by Doctor Edward Leach in December 1885. Adelaide, however, sought a second opinion, remarking to a friend that “If Mr
Bartlett does not get better soon, his friends and relations will accuse me of poisoning him”. A second doctor was called, who remarked that, other than inflamed gums after a recent dental surgery, Bartlett was recovering well (though his foul breath as a result had led to Adelaide sleeping in a cot at the end of their bed to avoid being caught in the miasma). Just past Christmas in 1885, it seemed as though Edwin would make a full physical recovery, and Dr Leach remarked on Adelaide’s apparently dedicated care for her ailing husband during this time.

On December 27th, Adelaide Bartlett requested that George Dyson purchase some chloroform for her; when Dyson expressed confusion about why she would not acquire it through Bartlett’s doctor, Adelaide explained that she administered it to her Bartlett with internal “paroxysms” that his doctor did not recognise. Dyson fulfilled her request, telling two separate chemists that he needed the chloroform for stain-removing in his home, and presented her with a four-ounce bottle of the substance on 29th December.

On New Year’s Eve of 1885, Bartlett had another dental surgery, and returned home with Adelaide afterwards. Adelaide, as usual, fell asleep at the cot at the end of their bed – but, a few hours later, she woke to find her husband dead.

Alerting her landlord, Adelaide claimed she had attempted to revive Edwin with brandy – Dr Leach was called to attend the scene, and found Edwin cold in bed, suggesting he’d been dead for several hours by the time Adelaide awoke. His cause of death was initially unclear, and, the next day, his body was removed to a local hospital for an autopsy.

And it was there that the reason for his sudden demise became obvious: in Edwin’s stomach, there were several drops of chloroform present, and, it was speculated, enough in his system to have constituted a lethal dose. After an inquest in February, during which George Dyson admitted to purchasing the chloroform for Adelaide, Adelaide Bartlett was charged with murder, and George Dyson with accessory before the fact.

The case instantly became a sensation; several poisoning cases with female defendants had proved to be excellent tabloid fodder in the previous few decades, perhaps most notably that of Christina Edmunds in 1872, during which newspapers speculated that women were attending the trial to share the recipes she used in her poisoned chocolates. Interest in the case reached a fever pitch by the time it was brought to trial at the Old Bailey in April 1886, with one entrance to the court entirely blocked by onlookers, and balconies surrounding the building filled with spectators watching those coming and going from the courtroom. Edward George Clarke, a prominent barrister, was hired (allegedly by Adelaide’s wealthy, mysterious father) to defend Adelaide against the charges of “wilful murder” in her husband’s death.

Things took a shocking turn, however, when the charges against George Dyson were entirely dismissed, and he was exonerated before the trial could get underway – allowing him to appear as a witness for the prosecution against Adelaide.

The story Adelaide Bartlett provided to explain her actions in the lead-up to her husband’s death was complicated, and reflective of their strange and unconventional marriage. According to Adelaide, after his health began to bolster, Edwin expressed interest in having sex with her again – Adelaide, reluctant due to her husband’s foul breath and what she viewed as her virtual engagement to Dyson, acquired the chloroform with the intention of administering a non-lethal dose to her husband in the event of sexual overtures in order to render him unable to engage with her sexually. Adelaide claimed that she had admitted her plan to her husband and left the small bottle of chloroform on the mantelpiece that evening, when she had gone to sleep at the foot of his bed as normal and woken to find him dead early that morning, a glass of brandy by his bedside.

The prosecution, led by attorney general Sir Charles Russel, posited another theory: that Adelaide had used a small amount of the chloroform to incapacitate Edwin, and then administered the lethal dose orally, leading to his death, before emptying and disposing of the bottle on January 6th. The defence called no witnesses, but the prosecution called more than two dozen witnesses and experts to support their case.

The relationship between Dyson and Adelaide was a subject of much discussion in the case, from domestic servants testifying to their physical closeness to one another, to Dyson himself revealing an “intimate” relationship with the couple, being made an executor of Bartlett’s will shortly before his death, and destroying a letter sent to him by Adelaide in the immediate aftermath of Edwin’s demise.

The motive for the murder, at least, seemed obvious: Adelaide apparently saw an opportunity to quickly escape her loveless marriage and begin a real relationship with George Dyson, and murdered her husband once she was sure she would inherit his estate after his death. Considering that Adelaide asked George to acquire chloroform that had not been prescribed to her husband, he had then died of chloroform poisoning several days later, and she had admitted to disposing of the bottle of chloroform in the days after her husband’s cause of death was identified, it seemed somewhat compelling.

But, over the course of the trial, other details were revealed about Bartlett and the nature of his death that cast doubt on this theory. Bartlett, according to several witnesses, was something of a hypochondriac, and was convinced in the year before his death that he was terminally ill, leading to speculation that he may have imbibed the chloroform as a means of suicide.

Crucially, Edwin Bartlett’s throat and larynx was devoid of the kind of chemical burns that would be expected from the forced consumption of chloroform, either while Bartlett was awake or after he had been incapacitated. It was on this evidence that Edward Clarke, in a six-hour speech in front of court, argued that Adelaide Bartlett could not have killed her husband, and that his death had been a suicide – that the lack of damage to his throat and larynx were due to him gulping down the chloroform so quickly that it couldn’t harm the tissues of his throat. He argued that Bartlett’s corpse had shown no evidence of chloroform inhalation to incapacitate him, and that Adelaide did not have the necessary medical skills to administer the chloroform to him while he slept.

After six days, on April 17th, the jury retired to consider the verdict. According to the jury, they “think grave suspicion is attached to the prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered”: they had found Adelaide Bartlett not guilty, to “immense cheers” from the gathered crowd. Sir James Paget, a surgeon, remarked in the aftermath of the verdict that “now that [Adelaide] has been acquitted for murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it!”.

With Adelaide Bartlett officially exonerated of the crime, other theories began to spring up as to what had killed Edwin Bartlett. Dr Leach, the physician who had treated Bartlett shortly before his death, posited in a letter to the Lancet that Bartlett had taken the chloroform out of spite when Adelaide had indicated that she intended to use it to avoid sexual intercourse with him; others suggested he may have taken the chloroform accidentally after mistaking it for his medicine, though this is generally viewed as an unlikely explanation due to the strong taste of chloroform. Edward Clarke remained convinced, at least publicly, that the cause of death was a suicide, and that Bartlett had poured the chloroform into the glass beside his bed before imbibing it willingly while his wife was out of the room, and, later, Adelaide had poured brandy into the same glass.

Michael Farrell, in the British Medical Journal in 1994, put forward a solid theory for murder that accounted for the apparent lack of burns in Bartlett’s throat. He suggested that Adelaide could have added chloroform to his brandy, using the strong taste of the alcohol to mask the burning of the chloroform, encouraged him to drink it in one gulp, and that Bartlett’s inflamed throat and mouth from his recent dental surgery would have masked the burning of the poison until it had already been consumed. Despite this, Farrell believed that the case for suicide was slightly more convincing than that for murder.

After the trial, Adelaide Bartlett returned to her hometown of Orleans in France, and Dyson was swiftly ejected from the Wesleyan church as a minister due to his unscrupulous behaviour. They never married, and, according to most sources, never had contact with each other after the trial for Edwin Bartlett’s murder.

The case of Adelaide Bartlett and the Pimlico Poisoning has engendered plenty of debate in the century and a half since it took pace, and much debate remains over the truth of Edwin Bartlett, the nature of his marriage to Adelaide, and how George Dyson fit into their lives as a couple. With Bartlett’s previous insistence that Adelaide was not unfaithful to him, it seems unlikely that infidelity with George Dyson would have been so easily overlooked – but Dyson and Adelaide certainly shared a relationship that several people viewed as uncharacteristically intimate given their circumstances, and the recent change to Bartlett’s will does seem to lend them both motive for the crime. That said, Adelaide administering chloroform orally as a fatal poison seems to be at least under some doubt, given the forensic evidence presented at trial. Personally, I think the evidence could be read as supporting a motive for murder from Adelaide’s side, or a suicide from Bartlett’s.

What do you think happened in this case? Did Adelaide murder her husband, and, if so, was George Dyson involved? Was the Not Guilty verdict in both of their cases the right call? Let me know in the comments!

Sources and Further Reading:

Transcript of Adelaide Bartlett’s Trial

Adelaide Bartlett and the Pimlico Mystery – Michael Farrell

The Female Crime: Gender, Class and Female Criminality in Victorian Representations of Poisoning – Alice Morton

If you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or buying my books! You can also check out my other longform content here.

(header image via Inside Morton)