The subtitle of this biography is "and his pitiless killing by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge" and the cover shows a sequence of photographs, in the style of the famous pioneer photographer Muybridge, which show a man being shot. These are what the author is using to 'hook' the reader. But the killing itself only happens at the 75% mark and the book is already half-over before Muybridge even makes an appearance. In this situation, I sometimes feel disappointed. But this book is an exception because the early life of Larkins/ Larkyns is so interesting.
He was born Harry Larkins in India; his father was in the military wing of the East India Company. Aged 4 months his family went home on leave to England; they left him behind aged three when they returned to India. He never saw them again. Contact was limited to letters: his mother regularly told him to be good. Harry was orphaned at the age of thirteen when his parents were killed during the Indian Rebellion ('Indian Mutiny') of 1857. Almost immediately he was sent to a cheap boarding school in Belgium and later Wimbledon.
With few prospects, at the age of sixteen, Harry pulled a few strings to become an officer cadet with the newly nationalised East India Company army, serving in, eventually, seven regiments. Like most officers, he lived beyond his salary and got into debt. And trouble. He was 'permitted to resign' and returned to London aged 23.
In London he continued his extravagant lifestyle. Aged 25 he went to Paris, staying in the Grand Hotel, going to the theatre and wooing courtesans. He funded this by buying jewellery on credit or with fraudulent bankers' drafts and then pawning it. He was arrested and throne into prison but at the subsequent court case he managed to persuade his friends to cough up for him and talked himself into an acquittal. He then returned to London ... and more or less repeated the same dodge with the same consequences ... and again talked himself out of trouble.
Aged 26, Harry returned to France to sign up with the 'franc-tireurs', an international troop of guerrilla fighters who fought for the French during the Franco-Prussian war. This was where he finally shone. He clearly enjoyed the hardships and the dangers and meeting Garibaldi. He ended up with the rank of Major (technically its French equivalent) and the Legion d'Honneur. Harry became the model for one of the young heroes of The Young Francs-Tireurs by G A Henty.
Harry then went to San Francisco where, following yet another court case over a debt he incurred, probably by fraud, he became a journalist in the town which was still expanding from the aftermath of the Gold Rush (now diversifying into silver and mercury mining). He worked for Henry George, radical economist and author of Progress and Poverty, as a hugely popular theatre reviewer and columnist. He also met Eadweard Muybridge and, more particularly, Flora his wife. He wanted to run away with Flora after she had given birth to a son whom Harry believed to be his but Muybridge discovered the affair and shot and killed Harry. Harry died a few minuted before his 31st birthday.
Muybridge was then acquitted at the trial by the jury on the (wholly extra-legal) grounds that he was defending his honour.
The story of this young man who packed so much into his nearly thirty-one years is told clearly and with verve; I found it rattled along.
Selected quotes:
- "With notable poetic justice, Bagot had just died on a tiger-hunting expedition after his cook accidentally made breakfast chupatties using the arsenic meant for curing the animal skins." (Ch 4)
- "Frederick Hankey, infamous pornographer, unkindly described as 'a second de Sade without the intellect'." (Ch 7)
- "Pixley was 'furiously sincere', and something of a kangaroo: 'you never know which way he is going to jump'." (Ch 9)
- "When a reporter wrote that Woodhull had made him blush a joke went around that he had been 'promptly discharged' from his job for 'conduct unbecoming to a journalist'." (Ch 13)
Great fun and packed with incident. Names dropped include (as well as those above) Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and William Gladstone.
October 2023; 310 pages
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