The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns and His Pitiless Killing by the Photographer Eadweard Muybridge, by Rebecca Gowers
The Scoundrel Harry Larkyns and His Pitiless Killing by the Photographer Eadweard Muybridge By Rebecca Gowers Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20
Who was Harry Larkyns? Since his death, he has been reduced to a footnote in the life of his famous killer, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
The story of film places Muybridge as one of its most important precursors: his invention of stop-motion photography is held to be a breakthrough moment in the journey towards moving images. The history of his erratic and eccentric progress towards this innovation is often accompanied by the fact that he shot dead a Major Harry Larkyns who was having an affair with his wife.
Gowers has taken the cold embers of Harry’s life and rekindled them to
create a portrait of a fascinating, contradictory figure.
Harry was an orphan and a doomed lover, an opera rake and a war hero, a bon viveur who did not take anything very seriously, whose misfortune it was to be pursued without mercy by those who did.
He was born in India in 1843 to colonial parents, who sent him to England before they were killed in the massacre at Cawnpore. Orphaned at 14, Harry, who had spent most of life isolated in boarding schools, followed his father’s footsteps and was enlisted in the East India Company as a cadet.
In India, Harry developed the two skills that were to support and dog him for the rest of his life: his genial capacity to win the respect and affection of anyone he spent time with; and his incurable fondness for spending other people’s money.
Forced to resign from the army at 23, Harry returned to London, where he became embroiled in the first of many legal suits, charged with non-payment of £196 for opera tickets. (At the time, entitlement to vote required an annual income of £96.)
He was acquitted and reappeared in Paris, where his taste for opera and its leading ladies landed him in the Mazas, a notorious new model prison. Acquitted, re-arrested in London and acquitted again, Harry had seen his life fall into a predictable pattern for any young, impoverished rake.
The Prussian invasion of France in 1870 offered Harry a different road. He enlisted in the irregular militia, or francs-tireurs. Gowers pieces his war years together from official reports and the letters of other volunteers. Harry worked behind Prussian lines, sabotaging supply lines and kidnapping informers. When his unit was enfolded into the regular army under Garibaldi, he was wounded and received the Légion d’honneur – a tale he would dine out on for the rest of his short life.
With France undergoing the convulsions of occupation and the Paris Commune, and with London closed to him, Harry moved to Nevada among the silver prospectors of the Comstock Lode. Apparently falling back into old habits, he was arraigned in San Francisco in 1872 on the familiar charge of having too liberally spent a friend’s money, organising banquets for acquaintances and presents for stage divas. The case was dropped, but Harry’s name was dragged through the mud by the San Francisco Chronicle. Despite this, he stayed in the city and thrived, becoming the theatre critic for the Evening Post, a surveyor for the Stock Report and a founding member of the local Bohemian Club.
At this point, Gowers introduces her second protagonist as Harry encounters his angel of death, Eadweard Muybridge.
A jealous and taciturn man, Muybridge had suffered a serious head injury years before in a carriage accident, a fact his defence would make much use of at his trial. He came to believe that Harry was the father of the boy he knew as his son, uncovering the affair between Harry and his wife, Flora, by terrifying the midwife into furnishing him with evidence. He tracked Harry to the Yellow Jacket Mine, where Harry was compiling maps and, calling him to come out of his cabin, shot him as he stood in the doorway. Night-blind and unarmed, Harry was killed a day shy of his 31st birthday.
Gowers’s biography has been constructed through painstaking research. It links together the many sources where Harry can be glimpsed, drifting through the late-19th century like a wraith, appearing in a war letter here, a court deposition there.
Apart from in his theatre reviews, he appears entirely in the words of others, remembered as a wonderful drinking companion or maligned as a serial fraudster or seducer. Gowers knits these accounts into a whole – a complete portrait of this forgotten scoundrel, whose melancholy downward trajectory is contrasted with his generosity, his happy-go-lucky attitude and his irrepressible appetite for a good time, whatever the cost.