The Suicide of George Victor Townley

Abstract

Certainly it would have been more agreeable to those gentler feelings which the occurrence of death rarely fails to produce in men, and more in harmony with that charity which willingly covers over the sins and evil behaviour of an erring creature, once he has paid the last debt of nature, to have made no mention more’ of the convicted murderer, George Victor Townley, but to have allowed him to pass in silence to his suicidal rest. That he whom an audacious intrigue saved from the extreme penalty which the law metes out to the murderer should have become his own executioner, was, perhaps, the last small act of justice which he could do to outraged society; and of him, therefore, it may not untruly be said that nothing in his life became him so well as the leaving of it. But it has been the misfortune of Townley–a misfortune which pursues him even after death–to have been cursed with injudicious friends, and to be the helpless victim of some who, after the manner of parasites, would feed upon his notoriety and make to themselves capital out of his crime. It becomes then a duty not to keep silence under these circumstances, but truthfully to expose the passionate, though unsuccessful, attempt which has been made, by taking advantage of his suicide, and the vulgar prejudice in regard to such act, to set up a sort of justification of that foul disgrace into which, not the medico-psychological speciality only, but the whole medical profession, was mercilessly dragged on the occasion of his trial, and subsequently to it. Furthermore, since Townley's eventful life now constitutes a pathological fact in the annals of great crimes, and since tender feelings of compassion can have no place in pathological investigation of a felon's nature, it is necessary, in the cause of science, however much we may regret the necessity, to present the issue of a case the previous course of which has been recorded and discussed in the numbers of this Journal for January and April, 1864, and more fully in a special pamphlet on ‘Insanity and Crime’ by the Editors. The following is the account of his death and of the inquest upon his body as given in the daily papers: