“Strange alteration!”: The Victorian Milton and a Book Bound in Human Skin

Abstract

In the collections of the Devon Heritage Centre, located on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter, there is what at first appears to be an unremarkable, leather-bound, Victorian edition of Milton's poetry. On opening the volume, however, the reader finds an extraordinary inscription: "This Book is bound with a part of the skin of George Cudmore who with Sarah Dunn was committed to the Devon County Gaol on the 30th of October 1829 … for murdering & poisoning Grace Cudmore his Wife." In 1830, George Cudmore was tried, found guilty, and executed; his accomplice, Sarah Dunn, was acquitted. Cudmore was hanged, and dissected at the Devon and Exeter Hospital. Decades later, local bookseller William Clifford used Cudmore's tanned skin to bind an 1852 edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton, published by William Tegg. One of the mysteries that I seek to unravel here is what happened to Cudmore's skin between the dissection of his body and the binding of the book. There are, however, more fundamental questions prompted by the Cudmore Milton (as I will refer to it): why use human skin to bind a book, and why choose Milton's poems?The book itself offers no explanation beyond the inscription stating the details of Cudmore's crime and trial. There is a disjunction between the shocking inscription and the rest of the book, which contains little out of the ordinary: it begins with a "Life of the Author" followed by Milton's major and minor works, and features illustrations after George Romney, Richard Westall, and J. M. W. Turner. 1 The Cudmore Milton is regularly mentioned in studies of the unusual practice of "anthropodermic bibliopegy" (binding books in leather made from human skin), but it tends to appear as an addendum to discussion of more famous cases (see most recently Rosenbloom 124 and Brooke-Hitching 53). It has not been addressed specifically as an object of interest for studies of Milton's nineteenth-century reception or reputation. In mid-twentieth-century writing on books bound in human skin, descriptions of the origins of the Cudmore Milton often suggest the binding was somewhat happenstance: Lawrence S. Thompson writes in 1946 that Cudmore's "tanned skin fell into the hands of W. Clifford, a bookseller of Exeter, who used it for binding a copy of Tegg's 1852 edition of Milton" (96; my emphasis); in 1955, Walter Hart Blumenthal writes similarly that "the tanned skin came into the hands of W. Clifford" (83). The suggestion is that the circulation of this macabre souvenir was coincidental: if the tanned human leather merely "fell into the hands of" a bookseller, his choice of Milton's Poetical Works might be indiscriminate. But binding books in tanned human skinThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.