MEET THE AUTHOR
REBECCA GOWERS tells the riveting story of the scandalous life and shocking death of her 3x great uncle in her new book
What inspired you to write this book?
I knew that there was a letter sent to England in 1857 by my 3x great grandmother, who was killed in the Cawnpore Massacre in the Indian Mutiny. About four years ago, I found online a theory that one of her children, Henry Larkins, might be the mysterious Harry Larkyns who’d been murdered by Eadweard Muybridge. I got in touch with somebody who’d put the theory into a book, who said that one of the few hard facts about Harry Larkyns was that he’d claimed to have a brother-in-law called Cutler. And I knew that Henry Larkins had a brother-in-law called Cutler. It was a real eureka moment. That’s what kickstarted the writing of the book, marrying the beginning of this poor young boy’s story whose family was massacred in India with the fact that he became a young man who was himself murdered. Rather a lot of gore at either end!
Harry lived on three continents and there are all sorts of stories about him – some true, some false. How did you piece his life together?
It was an incredible challenge in one way because he had such an extraordinarily diverse life, partly because he was on the run a lot, because he was, as I call him in the title, a scoundrel. I had to trace him through his schooling and then he became a cadet in India, which was extremely complicated to unravel. He then had this louche life pursuing actresses in London and Paris. He actually stole diamonds and ended up in prison in Paris, and then he tried to redeem himself by volunteering in the Franco-Prussian War, where he fought with valour and won the Légion d’Honneur. And then he went off to America and had this whole other adventure of falling in love with Muybridge’s wife, which eventually got him murdered.
How do you feel about Harry now?
He had such a terrible start. He lived life to the full, involved in some very dubious behaviour, but I have a sort of sympathy for how he might have arrived at that. Also, in the last year of his life – and he was killed when he was only 30 – he had really fought to keep on the straight and narrow, apart from the fact that he was madly in love and having an affair with somebody else’s wife. However, Muybridge himself was a really awful husband, so I guess it’s not morally straightforward. If he’d lived – and he was a very good writer – who knows what he might have made of his life? It’s a painful thought.