Eugene Aram

In 1720 he went to work as a book-keeper in a counting house in London run by Christopher Blackett, a relative of Sir Edward.

[2] Whilst still young, he married "unfortunately" (a term then used for impregnating a woman before marriage) and settled as a schoolmaster at Netherdale, and during the years he spent there, he taught himself Hebrew.

In that year a man named Daniel Clark, a shoemaker in Knaresborough, and an intimate friend of Aram, was rumoured to have come into money through his wife.

Then, after obtaining a considerable quantity of goods from some of the tradesmen in the town, and rumours starting to spread that he could not repay the debts, Clark suddenly disappeared on 8 February 1744.

In London he found employment as an usher in a school at Piccadilly and learned the Syriac language, Chaldee (Aramaic) and Arabic.

During his travels he had amassed considerable materials for a work he had projected on etymology, entitled A Comparative Lexicon of the English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Celtic Languages.

In February 1758 a skeleton was dug up at Thistle Hill in Knaresborough, while men were digging to find stone for building.

On being pressed he gave information as to the place where the body had been buried in St Robert's Cave, a well-known spot near Knaresborough.

Aram had made no attempt to change his name and was tracked down in the school at King's Lynn and arrested on 21 August 1758.

While in his cell he confessed his guilt, and threw new light on the motives for his crime, by asserting that he had discovered an affair between Clark and his own wife.

There is a reference to the case in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1879 novel The Cloven Foot, when the character Celia claims that John Treverton's gloomy moods must mean he committed a murder in his early youth: "now positively, Laura, he is like Eugene Aram; and I feel convinced that somebody’s bones are bleaching in a cave ready to be put together like the pieces of a puzzle, and to appear against him at the predestined moment.

"Aram is also referenced in George Orwell's 1935 poem "A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been":[6] I am the worm who never turned, The eunuch without a harem; Between the priest and the commissar

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.Note: the phrase 'I slew him', does not occur in Hood's poem.

'Aram is referenced in the eighth chapter of E. Phillips Oppenheim's novel, The Great Impersonation: 'Roger Unthank was a lunatic,' Dominey pronounced deliberately.

'The Eugene Aram type of village schoolmaster gradually drifting into positive insanity,' Mangan acquiesced.Aram is mentioned by Dr. Thorndyke in Chapter 11 of the R. Austin Freeman 1911 novel The Eye of Osiris, where Thorndyke expounds on the difficulty of disposing of the human body: The essential permanence of the human body is well shown in the classical case of Eugene Aram; but a still more striking instance is that of Sekenen Ra the Third, one of the last kings of the seventeenth Egyptian dynasty.Aram is referenced in Chapter 6 of the 1947 novel Love Among the Ruins by Angela Thirkell : "at which Mr. Marling went so purple in the face that his wife and son, closing in on him, walked him away like Eugene Aram.