{"product_id":"it-was-me-that-did-it-a-rare-early-victorian-18ct-gold-percussion-pistol-commemorative-propelling-pencil-on-the-first-attempted-assassination-of-queen-victoria","title":"\"It was me that did it!\": A Rare Early-Victorian 18ct Gold 'Percussion Pistol' Novelty Propelling Pencil on the First Attempted Assassination of Queen Victoria","description":"\u003ch2 style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e“...t\u003cspan\u003ehe flash of the pistol came almost immediately over the Queen’s head\u003c\/span\u003e...” \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0);\"\u003e(The Trial of Edward Oxford)\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eAt around six o'clock on the evening of 10 June 1840, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were driving in a low open carriage along Constitution Hill. Her Majesty was four months married and conspicuously pregnant with the Princess Royal. A young man stepped forward from the railings of Green Park and fired two pistols at them in quick succession. Mercifully, neither shot found its mark. The young man made no attempt to flee. Seized almost immediately by the crowd, he offered no resistance and no denial. \u003cem\u003e\"It was I,\"\u003c\/em\u003e he said. \u003cem\u003e\"It was me that did it.\"\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eHis name was Edward Oxford. He was eighteen years old, recently dismissed from his position as a pot-boy at a public house in Oxford Street, and had spent the preceding weeks purchasing pistols, ammunition and percussion caps, and practising in his lodgings. Whether either weapon was loaded with ball — or whether, as some suspected, the whole affair was a desperate piece of theatre by a disturbed young man craving notoriety — was never conclusively established. What was established, beyond any doubt, was that the Queen and her husband had been fired at on a public road in broad daylight, and that the shock to the nation was profound.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eCharles Greville, recording the event in his diary two days later, caught the tone of barely suppressed alarm beneath the official composure: \u003cem\u003e\"it is marvellous he should have missed his aim\". \u003c\/em\u003eOxford, he noted, had been \u003cem\u003e\"only a few yards from the carriage\"\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003e\"very cool and collected.\"\u003c\/em\u003e The Queen, for her part, drove immediately to the Duchess of Kent's to spare her mother the distress of hearing the news second-hand, and then continued her drive. The composure was genuine; Victoria was not a woman who frightened easily.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eLondon in the summer of 1840 was already saturated with a particular kind of violent sensation. On the morning of 6 May, Lord William Russell — elderly, aristocratic, uncle to the Prime Minister — had been found in his bed at his house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane, his throat cut so deeply as to be nearly decapitated. The murderer proved to be his Swiss-born valet, François Benjamin Courvoisier, 23 years old, who had killed his employer in a rage after being reprimanded for a trivial domestic oversight. Courvoisier's trial had concluded on 18 June with a guilty verdict — he had, on the eve of the verdict, confessed privately to his counsel — and his execution was set for the morning of 6 July, outside Newgate Prison.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eIt was one of the great public spectacles of the Victorian era. Forty thousand people gathered to watch. Among them, having taken the precaution of renting a window with a clear view of the scaffold, were Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, attending independently. Neither was edified. Thackeray could not bring himself to look at the final moment and suffered flashbacks for a fortnight. Dickens, typically more controlled in the immediate aftermath, was nonetheless profoundly affected — the experience would find its way into \u003cem\u003eBarnaby Rudge\u003c\/em\u003e the following year, and a decade later into a celebrated series of letters to the press urging that public executions be abolished. What he saw that morning, he wrote, was \u003cem\u003e\"nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes.\"\u003c\/em\u003e Over a million and a half penny broadsides about Courvoisier's crime and death were sold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eIt was against this extraordinary backdrop — a Queen fired upon on Constitution Hill, a valet hanged before forty thousand at Newgate, and a city gripped by the peculiar excitement of a summer in which violence had pressed repeatedly against the surface of respectable life — that Sampson Mordan produced the pencil now offered.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eThe date engraved on the barrel — \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e6 July 1840\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e — has puzzled students of this model, since it corresponds neither to Oxford's attack on the Queen (10 June) nor to his trial (9-11 July). It does, however, correspond precisely to the date of Courvoisier's public execution — the single most attended event of the London summer, witnessed by the two most celebrated novelists in England. The most plausible explanation is an act of contemporary confusion, or conflation: a manufacturer working at speed to capitalise on the national mood of the preceding weeks, and stamping the most vividly memorable recent date — the one that had drawn forty thousand to Newgate that very morning — rather than the date of the specific incident the object commemorated. In a summer so dense with public sensation, the dates had blurred together in the popular imagination. They blur still.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eThe form chosen by Mordan is itself a commentary. A percussion pistol — the very mechanism Oxford had used — rendered in 18-carat gold and made to write: the weapon transformed into the writing instrument, violence into record, sensation into keepsake. The pencil was a popular souvenir of a national moment, but it was also, in its small way, an act of civilisation. Catalogued as no. 353 in the Mordan pattern book, and illustrated by Deborah Crosby in her foundational study of the firm, it is among the most historically charged objects the company ever produced — a miniature monument to a summer when London held its breath.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eOxford himself, acquitted on grounds of insanity, spent twenty-four years at Bethlem and then Broadmoor before accepting release on the condition of transportation to Australia. He settled in Melbourne under the name John Freeman, married, joined his local church, and wrote occasional pieces about the seedier aspects of colonial life for \u003cem\u003eThe Argus\u003c\/em\u003e. He died in April 1900, aged seventy-eight, failing to outlive the Queen he had fired at by less than a year.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"SHOP | SPINK","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58272286638464,"sku":"63352\/5","price":1795.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0560\/8243\/2198\/files\/Pistol_2.jpg?v=1783431575","url":"https:\/\/shop.spink.com\/products\/it-was-me-that-did-it-a-rare-early-victorian-18ct-gold-percussion-pistol-commemorative-propelling-pencil-on-the-first-attempted-assassination-of-queen-victoria","provider":"SHOP | SPINK","version":"1.0","type":"link"}