Eccentric Life
Dieses Mal stellen wir einen viktorianischen Teenager vor, der als Stalker von Königin Victoria in die Geschichte einging.
Edward “the Boy Jones” — royal stalker
You may have heard of Michael Fagan, who broke into Buckingham Palace in 1982 and entered the Queen’s bedroom. But did you know that a very similar thing happened almost 150 years earlier, during the reign of Queen Victoria?
The 19th-century celebrity stalker was a teenager obsessed with the Queen. Known to the police as “the Boy Jones”, 14-year-old Edward Jones entered the palace many times through open doors and windows, stole food from the kitchens and sat on the throne. He was finally caught while walking the corridors with Victoria’s silk underwear hidden in his trousers.
“If he had come into my bedroom, how frightened I would have been,” wrote Victoria in her private journal, after Jones had been dragged out from under a sofa in her dressing room.
A DICKENSIAN LIFE
The two protagonists in this extraordinary story couldn’t have been more different. It was 1838 and Queen Victoria (then only 19) had been on the throne for a year. Young, well educated and the richest woman in the world, she had made Buckingham Palace in London her official royal residence.
Victorian London was the world’s largest city at the heart of what was to become the largest empire in history. But although the city was obsessed with money, ambition and power, about a third of its urban population lived in poverty and misery — best described by the novelist Charles Dickens.
His novel Oliver Twist, published in 1838, brought to life the plight of London’s poor. These days, we would call the life of Edward Jones “Dickensian”; he could so easily be a character in a novel of the times. When he first broke into the palace, Jones was just 14. Unwashed and living in destitution, his life was characterized by poverty, inequality and deprivation.
THE ORIGINAL CELEBRITY STALKER
Born in 1824, Jones was apparently obsessed with the Queen and broke into the palace at least three times between 1838 and 1841. The Queen’s advisers and the British authorities didn’t know what to do with him. They were concerned that he might go to the newspapers, give away state secrets or tell lies about what he had seen in the palace — or perhaps carry a weapon the next time he broke in.
Jones was sentenced to three months in prison, but continued to enter the palace and “stalk” the Queen after his release. The government therefore decided to take
more extreme measures, having him kidnapped and put on a ship that sailed to Brazil.
Versions of Jones’s story vary at this point. We know that he returned to England and continued his stalking, and that the government organized another kidnapping. While some accounts suggest that he was kept on a prison ship, others say he joined the Royal Navy. Either way, it was only five or six years later that he finally received a trial — a secret one — and was deported to the British colonies in Australia.
Edward Jones found various jobs there and possibly returned to England once more before going back to the colonies for good. But he couldn’t escape his story. In the 1880s, he even changed his name to Thomas Jones, but his notoriety continued to follow him. He died in 1893 after falling off a bridge while drunk.