Description
Meet Edward Oxford, who allegedly tried to assassinate the young Queen Victoria in 1840, but whose supposed madness was cured after he learned languages including Latin and Greek in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Bethlem. In the 2009 film The Young Victoria, he is played by the actor Josef Altin (above).
Oxford was born in Birmingham in 1822, became a barman as a teenager and by 1840 was working in the Hog in the Pound pub just off Oxford Street, London. On 10th June he fired two shots from separate pistols at the pregnant young monarch as her carriage was driven out of Buckingham Palace.
Although no bullets were ever found, and Oxford insisted that the pistols had only contained gunpowder, he was arrested and tried for treason at the Old Bailey. His family gave evidence that he was insane and he was committed to the Bethlem Asylum, then in Southwark. He was a model student, learned several languages including Greek and Latin, and became a fine violinist. The doctors remarked on his intelligence and aptitude for chess. When he was transferred to Broadmoor in 1864 a doctor described him as ‘a well conducted industrious man, apparently sane.’ Three years later he was released on condition that he emigrated forever to a colony, and he sailed for Australia.
He lived out the remainder of his life in Melbourne, serving as a church warden, marrying, and wrote a book under the name of John Freeman, entitled Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life (1888). This is an amusing and highly class-conscious piece of social analysis. It bears several traces of Oxford’s classical education in the asylum, including his comparison of a travelling winkle-seller to ancient ascetic philosophers, and his discussion of a wealthy snobbish female under the soubriquet ‘Volumnia’.
The movie makes far more of the assassination attempt than Victoria and Albert ever did; they regarded Oxford’s stunt as merely ‘amusing; and ‘theatrical.’ Perhaps he was just bored and needed the greater mental stimulation that he was fortunate enough to get access to under Bedlam’s apparently liberal educational regime.
