In the early hours of January 1, 1886, the winter cold lay heavy over the Pimlico district of London. The streets around Claverton Street were silent, the gas lamps casting pale amber circles into the darkness while the muffled sounds of late revellers drifted from the livelier parts of the city. In the first-floor rooms of number 85, the ordinary tenants slept as they always did. But in one of those rooms, something had gone terribly wrong.
Thomas Edwin Bartlett, a prosperous 41-year-old grocer with interests in several London businesses, lay face down on the bed, already dead when his wife awoke beside him. He had not complained of anything the previous night. He had eaten with appetite and gone to sleep in better spirits than he had shown for weeks. The coal fire had burned low and the air was sharp with the cold of the new year.
On the mantelpiece sat a tumbler containing something that had no business being there. What that glass contained would bring all of London to a standstill within weeks. Bartlett was born in 1845, a man of trade, modestly eccentric, owner of a small chain of grocery shops across the city and partner in ventures that gave him a comfortable income. His wife was a woman of a very different kind.
Adelaide Blanche Bartlett, known simply as Adelaide, was born in France in 1855, most likely in Orleans. Her origins were complicated from the start. Her mother, Clara Nye Chamberlain, was an Englishwoman of modest means. The identity of her father was a matter of whispered speculation before and after the trial.
The name most often attached to her was Adolphe Coullot de Thersac, a retired naval officer of French origin, a man of standing whose connection to the young Adelaide was never publicly confirmed during her lifetime. By 1860 Clara and her children had settled in London. In 1866 Clara died at 33, leaving Adelaide to face a world that already demanded much from her. Those who knew Adelaide described her as highly intelligent and striking in appearance.
She was about twenty when she met Edwin Bartlett. They married on April 6, 1875. From the start it was not a conventional marriage. Edwin did not send his new wife to a family home.
He sent her to a boarding school in Stoke Newington, and from there to a Protestant convent in Belgium where she was to make up for the education she had missed. Edwin lived alone above his shop. Adelaide did not return to England permanently until 1878, finally taking her place beside her husband in their home at Herne Hill. Those years brought moments that resembled happiness.
Edwin’s business flourished. Adelaide was regarded by those who met her as educated, loyal, and capable. But the household was not free of trouble. In 1881, after a long and difficult labour, during which Edwin refused to call a doctor, saying he did not want another man present, Adelaide gave birth to a stillborn child.
She later testified that after this loss the marriage became entirely platonic by mutual consent. One small detail recorded in the trial testimony lingers. 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 big toe because Edwin could not settle unless she did.
It remains one of the most human details in the whole affair. In early 1885 the Bartletts attended services at their local Wesleyan church and met the young minister there, the Reverend George Dyson, a man of 27 with some learning and great personal warmth. The friendship that grew between the three of them was, by any ordinary measure of Victorian life, strange. Edwin encouraged it.
He employed Dyson to teach his wife Latin, mathematics, history, and geography. The minister visited the Bartlett home regularly, often spending the whole day there while Edwin attended to business. One servant later testified that the two behaved toward each other like a pair of lovers. Edwin, by an arrangement that appears to have been his own doing, 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 co-husband. He revised his will so that a bar preventing Adelaide from marrying again 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 and diagnosed gastritis and diarrhoea, conditions possibly complicated by the effects of mercury, which Edwin may have been taking for what he secretly believed to be a more serious illness.
The smell from his mouth was foul and his condition worsened. Adelaide moved from the shared bed to sleep at Edwin’s feet so she could care for him through the night. On December 27, 1885, Adelaide made a request to George Dyson. She asked him to obtain chloroform for her.
The stated reason was that Edwin was suffering internal spasms his doctor did not understand, and that chloroform would give him relief. Dyson, puzzled but willing, visited chemists in Putney and Wimbledon over several days. He bought small quantities from multiple establishments, telling the chemists each time that he needed the substance to remove grease stains. On December 29 he combined his purchases and gave Adelaide a four-ounce bottle.
On December 31, Edwin returned from another visit to the dentist in good spirits. He ate a large meal that evening. At some point before four in the morning on January 1, 1886, Adelaide woke in the room she shared with her husband at 85 Claverton Street. The exact hour is unknown.
What is known is that she woke the servant first and ordered her to fetch Dr Leach at once. Then she went to the room of Mr and Mrs Doggett, the owners of the house, and knocked. She told them to go downstairs, that she thought Mr Bartlett was dead. Mr Doggett went down to the first floor and found Edwin lying face down on the bed.
The body was already cold. There were no signs of disturbance in the room. On the mantelpiece he noticed a glass three-quarters full of a liquid that smelled strongly of brandy and ether. He did not understand its significance at first.
Nevertheless, he refused to register the death, insisting on a medical examination before signing any certificate. Dr Leach arrived and examined the body. He found no obvious natural cause of death. Edwin had been unwell, yes, 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 sure he had not. Edwin’s father, a man who had always regarded his daughter-in-law with deep suspicion and had once accused her of an improper relationship with his younger son Frederick, arrived. When he saw what was before him, he was not convinced.
He pressured the authorities to hold an inquest. His pressure bore fruit. A post-mortem was ordered. On January 9, 1886, officers came to the Claverton Street flat and found a small bottle in the Bartletts’ room.
It had been turned upside down inside a cup of Condy’s fluid, a common disinfectant, and had broken during removal. 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 slow, deliberate machinery of a murder investigation. When Edwin’s stomach was opened during the post-mortem, the examiners immediately detected the pungent smell of chloroform.
Analysis confirmed a lethal quantity of liquid chloroform within the stomach. No other poison was found. No natural disease sufficient to cause death was discovered. But one result baffled the doctors, and would baffle the greatest criminal minds of Victorian England for months to come.
Liquid chloroform is highly corrosive when swallowed. It burns. It causes immediate and violent damage to the soft tissues of the mouth, throat, and gullet. Anyone who took a fatal dose by drinking it would show undeniable evidence of the substance having passed through the body.
Thomas Edwin Bartlett showed none of it. His mouth and throat were examined carefully. There were no burns. There was no scarring of the larynx.
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 and confirmed traces of chloroform. The Home Office toxicologist, Dr Thomas Stevenson, one of England’s foremost experts in poisons, was brought in to assist the prosecution. He studied the findings and stated that chloroform was the cause of death and that the dose was fatal.
He could not explain the absence of burns. George Dyson, informed of the autopsy results, came forward and confessed his part in obtaining the chloroform. He told the authorities everything he knew. His confession ended his relationship with the widow and placed him at the centre of a case that was now nothing less than a case of wilful murder.
Adelaide gave her own account. She said she had used the chloroform to wave before her husband’s face to dissuade him from exercising his marital rights. She insisted she had never 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 gotten inside his body. It was an account that could be neither proven nor wholly disproved. On February 11, 1886, Adelaide was formally arrested.
The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder against Adelaide, with George Dyson considered an accomplice. Both were detained. The charges against Dyson, however, did not survive until the opening of the trial. Warrants were issued and Adelaide, the French widow who had become the talk of England, was held in custody awaiting court.
Her 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 onlookers. The galleries surrounding the building filled with spectators.
Extra barriers were hastily erected. Inside the courtroom the atmosphere was charged. The prosecution was led by the Attorney General for England and Wales, Sir Charles Russell. The defence was placed in the hands of Sir Edward Clarke, by general agreement of those who knew the law, one of the most formidable advocates of the late Victorian era.
Rumours circulated that Adelaide’s mysterious father had arranged it, though the nature of his involvement was never publicly made clear. In the opening 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 it became evident his testimony would serve the defence more than the prosecution. Dyson testified that Adelaide had never tried to hide the purchase of the chloroform.
She had not asked him to be secretive. She had not behaved, as far as he observed, like a woman concealing guilt. He confirmed that Edwin believed he was suffering from a fatal illness. Under Clarke’s direction, Dyson’s testimony as a whole strengthened the hypothesis of suicide, not murder.
Dr Leach testified about the exceptional care Adelaide had given her husband during his illness. He told the court that Edwin was, in his view, of a hysterical character, a man whose mental state could not be ignored when considering the manner of his death. Adelaide herself was not permitted to take the witness stand. Under the law of the time, a defendant could not give sworn evidence in his or her own favour, a restriction not lifted until the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898.
The defence’s closing argument lasted six hours. The jury withdrew to deliberate. They returned. The foreman spoke.
Despite our belief that there are suspicious circumstances surrounding the prisoner, we do not see sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered, and therefore she is not guilty. The courtroom burst into 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 her favour over the six days of proceedings.
The crowds outside the courthouse received the verdict as a kind of exoneration, not merely of a woman but of something harder to name: 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 had been a crime at all. Among medical circles the fascination was of a different kind. The famous surgeon Sir James Paget, confronting the criminal impossibility at the heart of the case, framed his response in words that have endured ever since. Now that she has been acquitted of murder and cannot be tried again, he declared, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it.
It was an admission from a baffled profession, 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 the theory that Edwin himself had taken the chloroform out of spite after Adelaide revealed her intention to use it against his advances. Edward Clarke, the man who had saved her, maintained publicly his view that it had been suicide. Neither theory was ever proven.
Adelaide disappeared from public life after her acquittal. The novelist Julian Symons later suggested she emigrated to the United States and settled in Connecticut, living until some time after 1933. Whether that is true is not known. Whatever answers she carried with her, she took into silence.
George Dyson, the minister who had bought the chloroform in small bottles and told the chemists it was for removing stains, also vanished from the public record. Methodist church records suggest he emigrated to Australia. Other accounts propose 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 understand what he was looking at. What became of its contents was never recorded. Some mysteries do not ask to be solved.
They only ask not to be forgotten.