Description

Victorian publishers of murder broadsides and ballads were sometimes forced to draw on old tales of death and crime when times were particularly ‘slow’. In this single sheet published by George Smeeton in Southwark (from around the late 1820s or early 1830s), the writer retells a story of murder that was probably committed over 200 years previously. In the piece readers are told the tale of a Cornwall family whose sailor son (long presumed dead) returns from sea after a 15-year absence. His mother is now dead and his father remarried, the latter of whom is visited by the son, but at first is not recognised. The old man offers a bed to his son who intends revealing his identity in the morning. Meanwhile the father and step-mother creep into his room at night and murder their sleeping guest for his money. Only when the sailor’s sister arrives at the house the next morning is the truth of the deed uncovered. Overcome with grief at the murder of his returned son, the old man kills himself, followed in turn by the step-mother’s own suicide.