Description
Meet Eugene Aram (1704-59) the self-taught philologist from Ramsgill, Yorkshire, who despite his humble origins and scanty education became a philologist of the highest order. He compiled extensive evidence for the Indo-European roots of the Celtic languages almost a century before J.C. Prichard’s Eastern Origin of the Celtic Languages (1831). Throughout his life Aram taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldee. One of his major feats as a philologist was to dispute the then accepted notion that Latin was derived from Greek.
As well as being a gifted etymologist, Aram was a murderer, a thief, and reportedly lived incestuously with his daughter. In 1744 when he had been working as a schoolmaster in Netherdale, Aram was arrested in connection to the disappearance of his close friend Daniel Clarke. Although the local authorities found Clarke’s possessions in Aram’s garden, they did not have sufficient evidence to convict the teacher of his murder. Newly freed, Aram quickly abandoned his wife and began a new life in London, where he continued his philological research and taught Latin and writing at a school in Piccadilly.
Fourteen years passed before Aram would pay for his crime. During that time, in some kind of attonement—it is thought—he was unusually conscientious in keeping animals out of harm’s way. If he found a worm underfoot, for example, he would pick it up and place it in some safe place. In 1759, however, Clarke’s body was found in a cave. On the discovery Aram admitted his crime and attempted suicide by slitting his arm above the elbow. He failed in the attempt and was hanged without delay from the gallows in York before his dead body was suspended in chains in Knaresborough forest, where his friend’s body was discovered.
The dark philologist’s infamy lives on in Thomas Hood‘s ballad The Dream of Eugene Aram, a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton called Eugene Aram, a play by W.G. Wills of the same name, and sundry allusions to his exploits in the works of P.G. Woodhouse.
n.b. around 1750
