Through a murder, darkly

Scandal that toppled a prominent N.Y. family offers a snapshot of America at the turn of 19th century

August 01, 2010|Glenn C. Altschuler, Globe Correspondent

In 1897, Clarence Walworth published “The Walworths of America.’’ Eager to breathe life into his ancestors, the author offered readers “a Walworth standing in his own doorway, the children smiling through the window-panes, or chasing the dog in the orchard.’’ Clarence didn’t mention the act of parricide that haunted the Walworth family: On June 3, 1873, Clarence’s brother, Mansfield Walworth, a novelist, was murdered by Frank Walworth, his 19-year-old son.

In “The Fall of the House of Walworth,’’ Geoffrey O’Brien, poet, cultural historian, and editor in chief for the Library of America, tells the story of the implosion of a once-prominent family. Exquisitely written, by turns sad, surprising, and suspenseful, the book illuminates the rapidly changing world of 19th-century America, with its visions of virtue, codes of honor, class conflicts, and culture of aspiration.

O’Brien sets the crime — and the public scandal that followed — in the context of the rise and fall of Saratoga, N.Y., the home of Chancellor Reuben Walworth, a jurist, one-term congressman, and unsuccessful candidate for governor, whose will, essentially disinheriting his son Mansfield, helped set the tragedy in motion. In the 1830s, O’Brien writes, Saratoga, with its spas and patriotic pageants, was a “public space where superior specimens from all over — what passed for the best in the nation — could parade themselves,’’ where a tourist could mingle with senators, soldiers, and singers “and feel part of their world.’’

By the end of the Civil War, however, Saratoga was past its prime, its bubble world of cultivated elegance burst by petty thieves, confidence men, industrial accidents, robberies, rapes, and murders. In 1873, O’Brien observes, New York City tabloid reporters dismissed the resort as yesterday’s news and delighted in exposing the secret decadence of the self-nominated patricians who held court in its parlors and ballrooms. No longer politically potent, the once revered chancellor, who had flaunted his “tee-totaling virtue in the face of the vibrant Gomorrah at the mouth of Hudson,’’ could now be derided as a pretentious, faux-aristocrat, “ ‘vain, conceited, loquacious, irascible, always overbearing, often grossly partial’ and given to citing absurd precedents from Arabian and Hindu law.’’ Mansfield was indicted as a ne’er-do-well, a monster and a madman; and Frank was sneered at as a foppish mama’s boy, decked out in sideburns and boots, the spoiled product of boarding schools.