Broadsides; Chapbooks; Street literature -- Great Britain
I have stated already, that I have _been_ hanged and _am_ alive. I
can gain nothing now by misrepresentation--I was GUILTY of the act
for which I suffered. There are individuals of respectability whom
my conduct already has disgraced, and I will not revive their shame
and grief by publishing my name. But it stands in the list of capital
convictions in the Old Bailey Calendar for the Winter Sessions of 18--
Hodges, Printer (from the late J. Pitt’s) Wholesale Toy Warehouse, 31,
Dudley Street, 7 Dials.
THE LIVERPOOL TRAGEDY.
Showing how a Father and Mother barbarously Murdered their own Son.
[Illustration]
A few days ago a sea-faring man, who had just returned to England
after an absence of thirty years in the East Indies, called at a
lodging-house, in Liverpool, for sailors, and asked for supper and a
bed; the landlord and landlady were elderly people, and apparently
poor. The young man entered into conversation with them, invited them
to partake of his cheer, asked many questions about themselves and
their family, and particularly of a son who had gone to sea when a
boy, and whom they had long given over as dead. At night the landlady
shewed him to his room, and when she was leaving him he put a large
purse of gold into her hand, and desired her to take care of it till
the morning, pressed her affectionately by the hand, and bade her good
night. She returned to her husband and shewed him the accursed gold:
for its sake they mutually agreed to murder the traveller in his sleep.
In the dead of the night, when all was still, the old couple silently
creaped into the bed room of their sleeping guest, all was quiet: the
landlady approached the bedside, and then cut his throat, severed his
head from his body; the old man, upwards of seventy years of age,
holding the candle. They put a washing-tub under the bed to catch his
blood. And then ransacking the boxes of the murdered man they found
more gold, and many handsome and costly articles, the produce of the
East Indies, together, with what proved afterwards, to be a marriage
certificate.
In the morning, early, came a handsome and elegantly dressed lady and
asked, in a joyous tone, for the traveller who had arrived the night
before. The old people seemed greatly confused, but said he had risen
early and gone away. “Impossible!” said the lady, and bid them go to
his bed-room and seek him, adding, “you will be sure to know him as he
has a mole on his left arm in the shape of a strawberry. Besides, ’tis
your long lost son who has just returned from the East Indies, and I
am his wife, and the daughter of a rich planter long settled and very
wealthy. Your son has come to make you both happy in the evening of
your days, and he resolved to lodge with you one night as a stranger,
that he might see you unknown, and judge of your conduct to wayfaring
mariners.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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