The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841Pelham, Camden
History
The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841
Pelham, Camden
Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England)
Young Scanlan, on his way to Limerick, where he proposed residing,
stopped for some time in Dublin; and he there found an opportunity of
ingratiating himself into the favour of a thoughtless but lovely girl of
fifteen years of age, the niece of a Mr. Conery, a ropemaker. The
gentlemanly appearance and polished address of Scanlan, aided by his
protestations of love and tenderness, flattered the vanity of the poor
girl; but she would not listen to him on any but honourable terms. She
acknowledged her partiality for him, and charged him, if he was sincere,
to make her his wife; and to this proposal he affected to consent, after
a condition had been agreed on: which was, that she was to keep her
marriage a secret from her uncle, lest his friends should hear of it--an
event which he seemed to regard as pregnant with ruin to him.
The foolish girl consented to all he chose to enjoin, and in an evil
hour quitted the roof of her kind uncle, carrying off with her one
hundred pounds in notes, and twelve guineas in gold. Her lover pretended
to act honourably, and carried her before an excommunicated priest, who
joined their hands in wedlock. In resorting to what he conceived a means
of escaping from the importunities of Miss Conery, as his wife, he was
under the impression that the marriage would not be binding; but the
knot had scarcely been tied, when he learned that the marriage was valid
by the law of Ireland.
When the fugitive lovers quitted Dublin, they took up their abode in the
romantic village of Glin, situated on the banks of the river Shannon, on
the Limerick side. Scarcely, however, had the honeymoon passed over
their heads, when Scanlan formed the dreadful resolution of getting rid
of his wife. Her beauty, her love, her innocence, appealed to him in
vain; he persisted in his resolution, and too fatally carried it into
effect.
It appears that he was prompted to the dreadful deed by avarice and
ambition: his sister, who had been married to a nobleman in the county
of Limerick, apprized him of a match she was forming for him with an
heiress of wealth and beauty, and requested his acquiescence. Knowing
that he could not avail himself of the proposed advantage while his wife
(for he knew that that was the real character of the woman he had
seduced from her home) was alive, he determined that she should not long
remain an obstacle to his advancement to rank and opulence. Sullivan was
his confidant throughout the whole affair, and to him was intrusted the
execution of his atrocious plan. Scanlan had purchased a pleasure-boat,
in which they used to take excursions on the Shannon. Of this amusement
his wife was very fond; and it was during one of these moments of
recreation, while she should be impressed with the beauty of the
scenery, that the monsters resolved to rob her of that life which
bloomed so exquisitely on her youthful and animated cheek.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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