On the night of December 31, 1885, Thomas Edwin Bartlett returned from his dentist in good spirits. He ate well that evening. By all accounts, he was improving. Those who saw him that night noted he seemed his old self again, a man recovering, settling back into the rhythm of ordinary life.
Before four o’clock struck, his wife’s voice cut through the dark of the sleeping house, and Thomas Edwin Bartlett would never wake again. The first day of January 1886 found winter lying heavy over the Pimlico district of London. The streets around Claverton Street were quiet in the early hours, the stones slick with seasonal cold, and gas lamps cast faint amber circles into the dark while muffled sounds of late revelers drifted from livelier parts of the city. In the rooms above and below, the usual tenants slept as they always had.
But on the first floor of number 85, something had gone terribly wrong that night. Thomas Edwin Bartlett, forty-one years old, a prosperous grocer with interests in several London establishments, lay face down on the bed. He was already dead when his wife woke beside him. He had complained of nothing worth mentioning the night before.
In fact, he had eaten with appetite and gone to sleep in better spirits than he had been in for weeks. The winter damp clung to everything in that room. The coal fire was nearly spent, and the air was sharp with the cold of the new year. Yet the glass on the mantelpiece held something that had no business being there.
What that glass contained would change everything. Within weeks, it would bring all of London to a standstill. Thomas Edwin Bartlett was born in 1845. He was a man of trade and modest eccentricity, owner of a small chain of grocery shops across London and partner in ventures that brought him a comfortable income.
His peculiar views on health, marriage, and the nature of companionship would later be examined with great care in the courts of England. He had been a husband for more than a decade. His wife was a woman of a very different sort. Adelaide Blanche Bartlett, known simply as Adelaide, was born in France in 1855, most likely in the city of Orléans.
Her origins were complicated from the start. Her mother, Clara Nye Chamberlain, was an Englishwoman of modest standing. The identity of her father was a matter of hushed speculation before and after the trial. The name most often attached to him was Adolphe Collot d’Escury, a retired naval officer of French descent.
A man of standing whose connection to the young Adelaide was never publicly confirmed during her lifetime. What is recorded is that by 1860, Clara and her children had settled in London. By 1866, Clara was dead at thirty-three, leaving Adelaide to face a world that already demanded much of her. Adelaide, by the testimony of those who knew her, possessed great intelligence and striking appearance.
When she met Edwin Bartlett, she was a young woman of about twenty. They married on April 6, 1875. It was not a conventional marriage from its beginning. Edwin did not send his new wife to a marital home.
Instead, he sent her to a boarding school in Stoke Newington. From there, she was sent to a Protestant convent in Belgium where she was to make up for the education she had missed. Edwin, meanwhile, lived alone in his quarters above his shop. Adelaide did not return to England permanently and take her place beside her husband until 1878.
In their home at Herne Hill, she lived through moments of happiness, or something like it. Edwin’s business flourished. Adelaide was regarded by those who met her as cultured, devoted, and capable. But the household was not without trouble.
In 1881, after a long and difficult labor, one during which Edwin refused to call a doctor, reportedly because he did not wish another man present, Adelaide gave birth to a stillborn child. She later stated that in the aftermath of this loss, the marriage became entirely platonic by mutual consent. One small detail recorded in the trial testimony lingers in the mind. During his illness, in the months before his death, Adelaide would sit with her husband for long hours at night.
She told his doctor that she held his toe, because Edwin would not settle unless she did. It is, in its own way, the most human detail in the case. In early 1885, the Bartletts attended services at their local Wesleyan church and came to know the young minister there, the Reverend George Dyson, twenty-seven years old, a man of some learning and great personal warmth. The friendship that grew among the three was, by any ordinary measure of Victorian life, strange.
Edwin encouraged it. He employed George Dyson to teach his wife Latin, mathematics, history, and geography. The minister visited the Bartlett home regularly, often spending entire days there while Edwin was occupied with business. A servant would later testify that the two behaved toward each other like a couple in love.
Edwin, by an arrangement that appears to have been his own, did not object. He bought Dyson a season railway ticket so the minister could visit Adelaide more easily. He referred to Dyson, according to later testimony, as a kind of shared husband. He amended his will so that a prohibition on Adelaide remarrying was removed, a change made four months before his death.
He encouraged it. He continued to encourage it. In late 1885, Edwin’s health declined sharply. His teeth were in a ruinous state, the result of an incompetent dentist who had left rotting roots beneath his dentures.
His physician, Dr. Alfred Leach, was called in and diagnosed gastritis and diarrhea, conditions possibly complicated by the effects of mercury, which Edwin may have been taking as treatment for what he secretly believed to be a more serious illness. His breath was foul, and his condition grew worse. Adelaide moved from the shared bed to sleep at Edwin’s feet, so she could care for him better through the night.
On December 27, 1885, Adelaide made a request of George Dyson. She asked him to procure chloroform for her. The stated reason was that Edwin suffered from internal spasms his doctor did not understand, and that chloroform would give him relief. Dyson, puzzled but willing to help, visited chemists in Putney and Wimbledon over several days.
He bought small quantities from multiple establishments, telling the chemists on each occasion that he needed the substance to remove grease stains. On December 29, he gathered his purchases and gave Adelaide a four-ounce bottle. On December 31, Edwin returned from another dental appointment. He was said to be in good spirits.
He ate a substantial meal that evening. At some point before four in the morning on January 1, 1886, Adelaide Bartlett woke in the room she shared with her husband at 85 Claverton Street, Pimlico. The exact hour is unknown. What is known is that she first roused the servant and ordered her to fetch Dr.
Alfred Leach immediately. Then she went to the rooms of Mr. and Mrs. Doggett, the owners of the house, and knocked on their door.
She told them to come downstairs. She believed Mr. Bartlett was dead. Mr.
Doggett went down to the first floor and found Thomas Edwin Bartlett lying face down on the bed. The body was already growing cold. There were no signs of disturbance in the room. There was no evidence of violence.
On the mantelpiece, Mr. Doggett noticed a glass three-quarters full of a liquid that smelled of brandy and ether. He did not grasp its significance at first. However, he refused to register the death, insisting on a post-mortem examination before signing any certificate.
Dr. Leach arrived and examined the body. He found no obvious natural cause of death. Edwin had indeed been unwell, but not ill enough to justify such a sudden collapse.
When Dr. Leach asked Adelaide whether her husband might have taken poison of his own accord, she replied that she would have known. She was certain he had not. Edwin Bartlett’s father was summoned, a man who had always regarded his daughter-in-law with deep suspicion and had previously accused her of an improper relationship with his younger son, Frederick.
The father arrived, saw everything before him, and was not convinced. He pressed the authorities for an inquest. His pressure bore fruit. A post-mortem was ordered.
On January 9, 1886, officers came to the Claverton Street residence and found a small bottle in the Bartletts’ rooms. It was inverted inside a cup of Condy’s fluid, a common disinfectant, and it broke during extraction. The remains of its contents were preserved for analysis. The Pimlico community, which had been watching the Bartletts’ movements with quiet attention, now watched something else: the deliberate, unhurried machinery of a murder investigation.
When the post-mortem was conducted, the examining doctors immediately detected the pungent odor of chloroform upon opening the deceased’s stomach. Analysis confirmed a fatal quantity of liquid chloroform within. No other poison was identified. No natural disease sufficient to cause death was found.
What confounded the doctors, and would confound the greatest criminal minds of Victorian England for months to come, was one inexplicable result. Liquid chloroform is highly corrosive when swallowed. It burns. It causes immediate and violent damage to the soft tissues of the mouth, throat, and larynx.
Anyone taking a fatal dose by drinking it would show, according to ordinary medical principles, unmistakable evidence of that substance having passed through the body. But Thomas Edwin Bartlett showed none of these effects. His mouth and throat were carefully examined. There were no burns.
There were no lesions in the larynx. There was no inflammation in the trachea. The chloroform had reached the stomach without leaving any trace of the journey it must have taken to get there. The government’s official analyst examined the bottle found at the scene and confirmed it contained chloroform residue.
The Home Office toxicologist, Dr. Thomas Stevenson, one of England’s most eminent poison experts, was engaged to assist the prosecution. He studied the findings and stated that the cause of death was chloroform and that the dose was fatal. Yet he could not explain the absence of burns.
George Dyson, upon being informed of the post-mortem results, came forward and confessed his role in obtaining the chloroform. He told the authorities everything he knew. His confession ended his relationship with the widow and placed him at the center of a case that was now nothing less than a case of willful murder. Adelaide Bartlett offered her own account.
She stated that she had used the chloroform by waving it in front of her husband’s face to dissuade him from exercising his marital rights over her. She insisted she had not given it to him internally. She had shown him the bottle. She had placed it on the mantelpiece.
She did not know how the chloroform had entered his body. It was an account that could neither be proven nor entirely disproven. On February 11, 1886, Adelaide Bartlett was formally arrested. The coroner’s inquest concluded a verdict of willful murder against Adelaide, with George Dyson as an accessory.
Both were held. However, the charges against Dyson did not survive until the opening of the trial. The inquest concluded its proceedings. Warrants were signed, and Adelaide Bartlett, the French widow who had become the talk of England, was held in custody pending her appearance in court.
Adelaide Bartlett’s trial opened on April 12, 1886, at the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in the City of London. The case received coverage on both sides of the Atlantic. One entrance to the court was completely blocked by spectators. The galleries surrounding the building filled with attendees.
Additional barriers were hastily erected. Inside the courtroom, the atmosphere was charged with anticipation. The prosecution was led by the Attorney General for England and Wales, Sir Charles Russell. The defense was placed in the hands of Sir Edward Clarke.
By the consensus of those who knew the law, he was one of the most formidable barristers of the late Victorian era, and Clarke’s taking of the case was itself a matter of speculation. Rumors circulated that Adelaide’s mysterious father had arranged it, though the nature of his involvement was never publicly clarified. Whatever the source of the retainer, Clarke devoted everything he had to the case. At the opening of proceedings, the charges against George Dyson were formally withdrawn.
He was acquitted in court and immediately called as a witness for the prosecution, a position from which he proved more useful to the defense than the prosecution. Dyson testified that Adelaide had never attempted to conceal the purchase of chloroform. She had not asked him to be secretive. She had not behaved, as he observed, like a woman hiding guilt.
He confirmed that Edwin believed himself to be suffering from a fatal disease. Under the deft direction of Sir Edward Clarke, Dyson’s testimony as a whole strengthened the hypothesis of suicide rather than murder. Dr. Leach testified to the exceptional care Adelaide had given her husband during his illness.
He told the court that Edwin was, in his view, of a hysterical temperament, a man whose mental state could not be ignored when considering how he died. Adelaide herself was not permitted to take the witness stand. Under the law of the time, a defendant could not give sworn testimony in her own defense, a restriction not removed until the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898. The defense’s closing argument lasted six hours.
The jury withdrew to deliberate. They returned. The foreman spoke. Despite our belief that there are grave suspicions hanging over the prisoner, we do not see sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered, so she is not guilty.
The courtroom erupted in warm applause. Adelaide left the Old Bailey in her mourning clothes, watched by the people of London as she departed. Public opinion, divided at the start of the trial, had shifted steadily in Adelaide’s favor over the six days of proceedings. The crowds outside the court, whose presence had required additional barriers, received the verdict of not guilty as a kind of exoneration not only of the woman but of something harder to name: perhaps a collective unease about the certainty with which the prosecution had pursued her in the absence of any explanation of how the crime was committed, or whether it was a crime at all.
The newspapers of the time, both in the United Kingdom and across the Atlantic, had covered the case extensively. The details made it exceptional reading. The wife encouraged by a dying man. A Wesleyan minister buying chloroform from side-street chemists.
The unexplained absence of burns. The whispers of platonic marriages and secret arrangements. The Victorian public, accustomed to sensation, found in the Pimlico mystery something that exceeded even its great appetite. Among medical circles, the fascination was of a very different kind.
The celebrated surgeon Sir James Paget, confronting the criminal impossibility at the heart of the case, framed his response in terms that have endured since. He declared: Now that she has been acquitted of murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it. It was an admission from a bewildered profession, and the strongest possible acknowledgment that the question the trial had been convened to answer remained, after all its proceedings, entirely open. Dr.
Leach offered in a letter to The Lancet a theory that Edwin had taken the chloroform himself out of spite after Adelaide revealed her intention to use it to resist his advances. Edward Clarke, the man who had secured her acquittal, maintained publicly the view that it had been suicide. Neither theory was ever proven. Adelaide Bartlett disappeared from public life after her acquittal.
The novelist Julian Symons, in his account of the case, later suggested that she emigrated to the United States, settled in Connecticut, and lived until sometime after 1933. Whether that is true is not known. Whatever answers she carried with her, she took them into silence. George Dyson, the minister who bought the chloroform in four small bottles and told the chemists it was for removing stains, also vanished from public records.
Methodist church records indicate he emigrated to Australia. Other accounts suggest a different fate, though those accounts rest on no reliable source. The house at 85 Claverton Street still stands in Pimlico. The glass that sat on the mantelpiece, three-quarters full, smelling of brandy and something else, was noticed on the morning of January 1, 1886, by a man who did not realize what he was looking at.
What became of its contents was never recorded, nor whether anyone ever thought to ask the question before it was too late. Some mysteries do not ask to be solved. They only ask not to be forgotten.