Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     Oscar Wilde's article "Pen, Pencil and Poison" (1889) is the first important essay on the artist as criminal. In this piece, Wilde reviewed the career of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright as poet, painter, art-critic -- and poisoner. From his study of Wainewright's life, Wilde drew a characteristic conclusion: "The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose."
     With all due respect to the accomplishments of Wainewright in the varied fields of his endeavor, his case must be judged a poor second to that of the brilliant Swedish writer and "Renaissance man," Carl Jonas Love Almquist. Almquist, who was born in 1793 and died in 1866, was a novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, composer and musical theoretician, civil servant, educator, clergyman, journalist, and religious and social reformer. His career ended in fifteen years of disgrace and exile, after he fled Sweden to escape charges of theft, fraud, and attempted arsenic poisoning. The lasting significance of Almquist's varied literary and intellectual activities justifies our putting him far ahead of Wainewright in the list of artist-criminals. He was one of the leading European writers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and has been called, according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, "the only Swedish novelist of genius in the period 1830-1850." His work is in the mainstream of European Romanticism, showing strong affinities to Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Victor Hugo, and Sir Walter Scott. Only because he wrote in the Swedish language and few of his books have been translated has he been denied the international readership his best work deserves. Although he had no professional training as a musician and his music is little known abroad, Almquist also was a talented song composer and his musical career receives a respectful summary in Grove's Dictionary.
     In Sweden Almquist's name remains a household word. His novella It Will Do is still studied in secondary schools as an example of early realism, and his two principal romantic novels, Amorina and The Queen's Jewel, were given successful dramatic presentations in the 1950s. His music has been arranged and imitated by modern Swedish composers, and the international opera star Elisabeth Soderstrom uses Almquist's songs as her personal trademark in recital programs.

     In addition to Almquist's permanent creative achievements, we find in his case a feature that makes it of greater criminological interest than that of Wainewright: throughout his life, Almquist was fascinated by the study of crime, criminal responsibility, and penology. The comic purpose of Wilde's linkage of Wainewright's artistic and criminal careers was to demonstrate a typical Wildean paradox -- that art is amoral and that murder can be aesthetic. However, a study of Almquist's literary career and its criminal aftermath, though certainly not devoid of comedy, leaves room for more serious speculation about the relationship between intellectual activity and criminal impulses. Many of the ideas about death, crime, and personality that developed and recurred in his literary work later seemed to cast a sinister light on Almquist's own code of conduct when he stood charged with serious crimes.
     Almquist came from a family of scholars, clergymen, and civil servants. His father Carl Gustav apparently was a practical businessman with little inclination for literature or aesthetics. It is hard to conceive of a more oddly matched couple than Carl Gustav and his wife, Brite-Louise. She was brought up in the religion of the Moravian Brotherhood by her father; with his support she fostered in the young Almquist a great and permanent affinity for the introspective religious feelings of the Moravians, to which he later gave a highly personal expression in his short lyrical poems, the Songes. Brite-Louise's devotion to nature was reinforced by her reading of Rousseau. Her son was to write of her that she loved nothing better than to daydream in the woods, "either alone or with Rousseau."
     Almquist detected a duality in his own personality which he attributed to split inheritances from his father and mother. He said that he had two souls -- the soul of a clerk, inherited from his father, and the soul of a poet, with which his mother had endowed him. Whether or not Almquist had correctly defined the source of the elements of his character, there is no doubt that in his literary work and his own life there constantly recurs the theme of multiplexity and fluidity of personality. The most striking example in his novels is the androgynous Tintomara, one of the principal characters in his novel, The Queen's Jewel. Tintomara represents not the bisexual but rather the Platonic unification (and neutralization) of the male and female. She is the complete being free of the emotional and sexual cravings of the male or female. Tintomara also symbolizes the transcendence of the human soul by what Almquist referred to as the "celestial animal" soul, a soul that moves in graceful accord with the rhythm of nature and is indifferent to considerations of convention and morality. It is tempting to relate to Almquist's preoccupation with duality and change in personality his delight (no doubt also partly linguistic and antiquarian in origin) with 

the alteration of names as an emblem of shifts in identity. Thus, the chimerical Tintomara was never baptized. She is identified first merely as "She" and then as "the girl." In subsequent pages of The Queen's Jewel, she bears a bewildering succession of names, "Azouras," "Lazuli," "Tintomara," "Tourne-rose." The last name is particularly significant since it is a gallicized form of the name of the fourteen-volume work in which the bulk of Almquist's writings appeared, the Book of the Briar Rose. This collection is itself a mirror of multiplexity and change in literary expression and form: its poems, essays, and dramatic and narrative forms jangle against each other, often within the same work, creating the impression of what Almquist was to call a "fugue." Thus, the changeable and amoral Tintomara was consciously taken by Almquist as the symbol of his own work.
     The heroine of Almquist's drama-novel Amorina is first known as Henrika, but her name changes to Amorina when she becomes a religious pilgrim. Here again, Almquist makes a strenuous effort to associate the heroine's name with the author. The name Amorina linguistically suggests the Latin word for "love," amor, and this association is appropriate to the heroine in her role as preacher of the gospel of love. But the name also is linked to the name of the fictional author of the work, who is identified in the introduction as Andreas Morin Anderson. This imaginary author rather oddly was accustomed to substitute initials for his first and last names; thus he was A. Morin A., which is a cryptogram for the name of his heroine. It will also be recalled that Almquist's third Christian name was "Love" (pronounced Loo-vuh in Swedish). Surely, no more elaborate linguistic trick has ever been played to identify an author with his character.
     Were these changeable fictional creatures with the kaleidoscopic names also the symbol of Almquist's life? It is remarkable how often a change in name is associated with critical junctures in his life. The first was his change of his name to Love Carlsson when he decided in 1824 to live the life of a Rousseauist peasant and to marry a peasant girl. An equally dramatic instance was the later charge that he had been guilty of counterfeiting (the crime most closely resembling the craft of the writer, according to Gide) through alteration of his name on promissory notes.
     Almquist's mother died in 1806, when he was only twelve. That this loss had a strong impact on Almquist we have from his own words, but he apparently made an effort to suppress any outward display of his grief. It is, of course, risky to attempt to assay the effect of this early loss of love on his later development, but some have related this trauma to his lack of success in marriage. Since other diurnal problems may intervene in these matters (such as poor housekeeping, of which he accused 

his peasant wife), it is perhaps safer to follow the traces in his literary work. Here we find that the death of a mother often plays an important role -- the death of the mother of the Lowenstjerna children in The Hunting Lodge, the death of Henrika's mother in Amorina, the death of Tintomara's mother in The Queen's Jewel.
     Perhaps more significant is the death of Sara Videbeck's mother in It Will Do. Almquist wrote this novella to illustrate the viability of "free marriage," which he also advocated in his essays and tracts, that is, a relationship of man and woman, unblessed by clergy, dissoluble at will, and without sharing of property (or even of permanent living quarters). Almquist's marriage theories were to find their fullest development in his reformist work, The Grounds of European Discontent, published around the same time as It Will Do, in which he argued that children should belong to the woman alone and that child support payments should be provided from a children's insurance fund.
     The novella It Will Do describes the origin of a free marriage between Sara Videbeck and a young sergeant named Albert, whom she meets by chance on a boat journey. During the voyage it appears that the couple have become lovers but the physical side of their relationship is not completely clear, for Sara spends most of her time elucidating Almquist's marriage theories. In fact, one begins to feel that poor Albert may have fallen in love with Almquist in female disguise. However, the emotional tone of the book changes at the end, when Sara returns home several days late because of detours taken with Albert and learns of the death of her mother, who had long been ill. The expression of her grief at her mother's burial far surpasses any tokens of love that she had bestowed on Albert during their voyage, and it may be that there is also more than a tinge of guilt that the romantic voyage had been responsible for her not being with her mother during her last hours.
     During his early years Almquist came under the influence of Swedenborgian teachings, an influence that was to continue to be felt strongly in his life and writings. He was particularly affected by the Swedenborgian belief that the earthly life was an experimental preparation for a personal life in eternity; that earthly marriage was a reflection of the celestial marriage of truth and beauty. Although, as noted before, Almquist was also attracted by the Moravians' inwardness, he did not follow them in their indifference to dogma, but instead, to his eventual downfall, followed the Swedenborgians in their aggressive assault on established church doctrine.
     All the intellectual influences we have noted -- his mother's Rousseauist preference for the countryside and nature, his grandfather's Moravianism, and his own interest in Swedenborgian doctrine -- are joined together in shaping Almquist's doctrine of love which underlies 

his marriage theory and much of his fiction and poetry as well. This doctrine was expounded in his first published work, What is Love?, which appeared in 1819. In this essay he argued that genuine love is found only in the truly religious and arises out of emotion. This concept of love had nothing to do with conventional morality. In What is Love? we hear the first expression of his opposition to contractual, religiously sanctioned marriage. Wedlock to him was immoral except when sanctioned by love. The man who falsified a vow of love in a wedding ceremony was, in his view, far worse than a counterfeiter of notes. He wrote:

The law hangs the forger of notes, no doubt rightly for the public good, but he who falsifies love, that is, he who for a thousand reasons other than love unites with a person whom he does not love and thereby creates an evil domestic circle, does not he commit a crime the magnitude of which and incalculable consequences of which, both present and future, occasion much more terrible misfortune than does the forging of millions of notes?

portrayed scenes to the wildest shores of fantasy, so in his life the borders of imagination and reality sometimes became blurred. Thus, the attempt of Almquist to carry out the life of the idealized peasant lasted only about a year, and his selection of a peasant girl for his wife doomed him to an unhappy marriage. He is said to have been happy with his wife only when he was away from her and his imagination could go to work again.
     In his private relations, too, we see the signs of a personality frequently passing between fantasy and fact. It was observed that there was in the man a love of mystification for its own sake. He would regale his friends and acquaintances with outrageous fabrications to no apparent purpose except creative enjoyment. His son, at the time of Almquist's legal difficulties, was to write that Almquist had the ability to come to believe firmly in his own inventions.
     Throughout his career, both in his fiction and in his essays and journalism, Almquist showed a keen interest in crime. One of his earliest works (published around 1820) is a treatise on the treatment of criminals, in which, without attempting to resolve the question of freedom of will, he concludes that the criminal is to be regarded as sick. The purposes of treatment of the criminal should be rehabilitation, and, if he is incorrigible, he should be separated from society to prevent him from doing further harm. This theme is echoed in his later novel, Three Wives in Småland, which appeared in 1842-43. Here Almquist's advocacy of the penal colony as an appropriate mode of punishment is given a Kafkaesque religious basis by one of the characters in the novel, who observes that, since the fall of Man, the whole world is a penal colony.
     In addition to his theoretical interest in crime, it is known that while in Paris in 1840 Almquist mentioned in letters to the Aftonbladet the famous arsenic poisoning trial of Marie Lafarge, which was then proceeding in a small French town. Later, he was to write an article for the Aftonbladet comparing the Lafarge case with a sensational Swedish arsenic poisoning case, the Attarp murder.
     Almquist's treatment of murder in his novels raises certain disturbing questions in light of his subsequent history. One wonders whether his Swedenborgian belief in the afterlife and the tentative quality of earthly existence made him rank murder (as he had rated counterfeiting) relatively low on the scale of crime when compared with what he proclaimed to be the greatest sin, the failure to love. In Almquist's prose epic Murnis, the spirit of a man named Albion unhappily confesses to a group of angels in heaven that while on earth Albion has accidentally caused the death of his best beloved. The angels reply: "Have you murdered your best beloved? Then you have murdered her unto life." In The Hunting Lodge, Richard Furumo, a poet reminiscent of Almquist himself, 

pushes Magdalena over a cliff at just the moment in which she is filled with religious ecstasy. His action is a criminal application of the Swedenborgian idea that a person wakes up to the new life in the same spiritual state in which he departed the earthly life. Almquist was himself later accused of having caused the death of a young couple in a suicide pact by the inculcation of his Swedenborgian views.
     It is also striking that Almquist's fiction tends to displace responsibility for murder from the murderer to outside influences -- inheritance, society or nature. Thus, in Amorina (written in 1822 and published in 1839), the crimes of Johannes, a mass murderer, are attributed to an inherited bloodlust, to misuse of his criminal tendencies by corrupt nobles, and to rejection of his demand for absolution by a materialistic clergyman. Strangely enough, we end up sympathizing with him, much as we sympathize with King Kong as the fighter planes close in. Tintomara in The Queen's Jewel (1834) is completely indifferent to the fact that she was used by the assassins of King Gustave III to lure him to death at the famous masked ball celebrated by Verdi. To her, as a "celestial animal," all death is a part of nature. When she is asked whether she has seen how it looks when a person dies, she replies: "My mother died and I saw it." Again, the theme of the death of a mother. Can Almquist's early loss have paradoxically prepared the way both for his ready acceptance of Swedenborgian belief in the afterlife -- and the underestimation of the significance of murder?
     Hugo Hamilcar Lowenstjerna, one of the principal characters of the Book of the Briar Rose, claims in Academic Thoughts, published together with the novel Three Wives in Småland, to have penetrated "the mystery of crime." He maintains that it is "through crime that humanity progresses, and each new stage of development consists of the foremost mortal sin that the preceding form of social development most of all forbad and with all its might, its wisdom, and its legislation sought to prevent." Hugo proceeds to explain that each society considers as the most dangerous crimes such actions as would tend to break down the structure of existing society and prepare the way for the next stage of development. When asked whether there were not also acts that were perpetually crimes against God, regardless of the stage of social development, Hugo replies, in Almquist's familiar formula, that the greatest crime against God was "not to love everyone and everything."
     But as novelist, if not as theorist, Almquist doubtless recognized that, despite Hugo's dictum, the mystery of crime is impenetrable. At least at times he must have recognized the ambiguity that marks not only external evidence of guilt and innocence but also the nature and origin of crime and the criminal impulse. Certainly, some of this ambiguity is expressed in the famous paradox that Tintomara's mother leaves 

her as a final bequest in a dramatic scene in The Queen's Jewel: "Tintomara," she cries, "two things are white: innocence and arsenic."
     From 1841 on, Almquist's fortunes deteriorated. After public controversy over the publication of his fictional tract on free marriage, It Will Do, he was dismissed from his position with the New Elementary School and had to attempt to support himself with his journalistic work and his small income as a regimental chaplain. It is at this point that his literary career ends, and his career as a suspected criminal begins.
     In early June 1851, rumors began to spread that indicated he might have been supplementing his income by defrauding elderly ex-Captain Johan Jacob von Scheven. Von Scheven was an eccentric and miserly recluse who tried to support himself by usury. But he made profits on paper and losses in fact because of his excessive credulity and because he was more interested in high interest than the reliability of the borrower. Almquist had been on close terms with von Scheven, and served him in some of his business dealings as well as sharing cultural interests. It was rumored that Almquist had stolen back from the old man a number of promissory notes evidencing substantial personal borrowings. It was also said that, in order to avoid discovery of his theft, Almquist had attempted to poison the captain. The belief in the rumors was strengthened by Almquist's flight from Sweden before his arrest could be effected.
     The charges with respect to both the notes and the poisoning attempt were put before a military court that had jurisdiction over Almquist as a regimental chaplain. Under Swedish law at that time attempted poisoning was a capital offense and the court had authority to pass judgment on Almquist despite his absence, since he was a fugitive from justice. However, the court, while making a finding of probable guilt on all counts, merely deferred the matter for further consideration and contented itself with stripping Almquist of his post as chaplain. Later, a bankruptcy court, on the petition of the understandably annoyed Captain von Scheven, sentenced Almquist in absentia to be pilloried and imprisoned as an embezzler.
     The evidence at the trial (considered at length by A. Hemming-Sjoberg in A Poet's Tragedy, which appeared in English translation in 1932) reads like a plot from one of Almquist's novels, but certainly not from his best years -- more like one of the thrillers of his last period which he wrote in the French style. The first event in the strange case was a mysterious disappearance (around May 31, 1851) of the bearer notes that Almquist had issued to Captain von Scheven. The captain prodded Almquist to replace them with new notes and Almquist finally did so on June 3. The substitution of the notes was accomplished in a manner worthy of the comic artist. Almquist signed the new notes in a 

hand so faint that the feeble-sighted captain protested he could not read them. Yielding to the captain's complaints, Almquist rewrote the notes but placed them in a closed envelope. The next day von Scheven's good friend and landlord, Alderman Lorentz, examined the notes and pointed out that they were signed "Almgren." The novelist, on being confronted with this variation of his surname, protested that this was his usual manner of signing, but he changed the final letters to a more regular "quist." However, what the eyes of captain and friends did not catch was that Almquist had sealed the new notes with a seal that he did not customarily use.
     The purpose of all this was apparently to prepare the way for a claim, on presentation of the notes for payment, that they were not genuine. But how much more convenient to make such a claim to representatives of Captain von Scheven's estate than to the captain, who could testify as to the original loan and the circumstances of the substitution of the notes? For this to be possible, of course, the captain had to die before the collection effort began in earnest.
     The evidence with respect to the poisoning charge was that Almquist had put arsenic into the von Scheven's brandy bottle and also mixed it with his gruel. The transactions relating to the substitution and signing of the promissory notes were punctuated by unhappy encounters (or near-misses) between the captain and his gruel. The first gruel episode, which set the pattern for others, went like this: on Sunday, June 1, after discovery of the disappearance of the original notes and the requests to Almquist for new notes, the captain felt unwell and ordered some gruel from his servant, Hedda. Almquist arrived at this point, and when von Scheven renewed his request for new notes, Almquist offered to slip into the kitchen to see how the gruel was coming along. Hedda testified at the trial that Almquist had sent her out of the kitchen to fetch him the bathroom key. He was now alone with the gruel. When Hedda returned she noticed some white grains floating on the surface of the gruel. At Hedda's suggestion, the captain threw the stuff away, but more whitish gruel was served up to him two days later. On Saturday, June 7, when the captain, by now understandably in need of a stiff drink, poured himself some brandy, the sharp-eyed Hedda observed "that the brandy was cloudy and that several white grains had lain in the bottom of the bottle."
     And so Almquist's life, which had resounded so often to the themes of his writing, was to center now on the determination of the quality of a white substance in the gruel and the brandy. Was this white substance innocent or was it arsenic? The chemists said arsenic.
     There was also testimony indicating that Almquist had tried to obtain poisons other than arsenic, which, he knew from his familiarity

with the Lafarge and Attarp cases, was easy to trace. Here, the hand of the artist appears. Most classic poisoners of the nineteenth century acquired poisons for the avowed purpose of improving their complexions or killing rats, but Almquist, in asking a chemist for the poison nux vomica, explained that he wanted to see what it looked like, so that he could describe it in a novel he was working on.
     There is also evidence of energetic efforts to plant clues pointing the finger of guilt in every possible direction. He had a problem here. The first suspects in a domestic crime are usually the close relatives. But Captain von Scheven was alienated from his wife and son. Almquist apparently made an attempt to reconcile them with the captain shortly before the poisoning attempts began. He also attempted to throw suspicion on a young girl who was living in von Scheven's home (under equivocal circumstances) by sending her an anonymous letter urging her to flee. And then, for good measure, he left room for the possibility of a suicide by claiming to have found a lump of arsenic behind a book in the captain's bookcase. In fact, the police did find a lump of arsenic in the bookcase -- right behind a volume of Swedenborg that Almquist was fond of reading to the captain.
     The poisoning attempts failed, and Almquist made a dash for abroad, after pretending to von Scheven (who was pressing for payment) and to his family and friends that he was leaving on a brief trip. On his way out of the country, he added another name alteration to his skein, changing his initials on his first passport application.
     Unfortunately, in his haste he left behind several memoranda setting forth in detail the factual and legal arguments he would make in the face of criminal charges. Almquist claimed from overseas that the memoranda were prepared after the rumors of his crimes arose and not in advance. Particularly damning, however, were references in the memoranda to the arguments which he would make to contest the existence of any debt to von Scheven in the event of the captain's death.
     In his letters from abroad Almquist indicated that it was his intention to praise the captain, not to bury him. But the praise was decidedly faint. He wrote: "as on one occasion he rendered me considerable monetary assistance without usury (for which he was otherwise notorious), I conceived a certain attachment to him and considered him much better than most people's judgment of him." And he added in another letter: "Why should I hate the old man, who, though he certainly was unpleasant on various occasions and is unwilling to wash himself, yet cannot possibly be the object of hatred on that account?" This was the practical application of Almquist's doctrines of love.
     Almquist lived abroad for fifteen years after his flight from Sweden. His escape route took him through Denmark, Germany, and England to 

the United States. He stopped in St. Louis, New Orleans, and Texas, and lived in Cincinnati in 1853 and 1854. He finally settled in Philadelphia, where he lived from 1854 until 1865. Then, driven by homesickness, he left for Bremen, Germany, where he died the following year.
     Posthumous study of the final years of Almquist's life has yielded suggestive evidence of the persistence of certain personal traits with which we have already become familiar. There is first that curious preoccupation with the alteration of names, as, Zorba-like, he wandered through the United States, first as Abraham Jacobson, and then as Lewis Gustawi. During his last days in Bremen he was successively known as Professor Jules Charles and then as the presumably equally scholarly Professor Carl Westermann. In Philadelphia, while he was still Lewis Gustawi, he entered a bigamous marriage with his landlady, Emma Nugent, apparently obtaining his amatory success on the basis of his misrepresentations that he was a wealthy man. Again, as in the von Scheven case, he found refuge from his crime in literature, preparing a memorandum setting forth the defense he would make to the charge that the marriage was fraudulently induced. He wrote that he did not tell Emma that he possessed property, but rather that he had an expectation of the receipt of property. His defense against the charge that these great expectations were also imaginary presumably was deferred for a later memorandum which was never written.
     His powers of imagination remained unimpaired, if we may judge by a Munchausen-like letter which he wrote describing his personal attendance as spectator at the Battle of Gettysburg. He claims to have retrieved as a souvenir of the battle the hat of one of his best friends who evidently had a less favorable spot along the sidelines and, according to Almquist, fell "in one of the hottest melees."
     It is a matter of speculation whether Almquist ever recognized himself as a criminal. It is ironic to note that if this recognition ever came to him, he had meted out to himself through his exile the punishment that his penological theory accorded to incorrigible criminals -- separation from the society of his fellow-citizens.
     However, research has never uncovered any evidence of a confession by Almquist of any of the criminal charges against him. In fact, his own final estimate of his life may have been that he had in all respects complied with the following credo which he avowed in a poem he wrote shortly before his death:

I will . . . never do the slightest harm
to the smallest creature in the world.

     I have relied upon the following Swedish editions of the principal works of Almquist in the preparation of this essay: Amorina, eller Historien om de Fyra [Amorina, or The History of the Four] (Stockholm, 1903); Sune Martinson (ed.), Det gar an [It Will Do] (Stockholm, 1965); Drottningens juvelsmycke, eller Azouras Lazuli Tintomara [The Queen's Jewel, or Azouras Lazuli Tintomara] (Stockholm, 1966)(foreword by Bertil Romberg). Det gar an is available in English translation under the title Sara Videbeck (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972)(Adolph Burnett Benson trans.)
     For an account of the trial of Almquist, see A. Hemming-Sjoberg, A Poet's Tragedy: The Trial of C.J.L. Almqvist (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1932)(E. Classen trans.) For additional biographical and critical sources see: Fredrik Book, Analys och Portratt: litteraturhistoriska studier 151-63 (Stockholm, 1962); Henry Olsson, Tornrosdiktaren och andra portratt [The Poet of the Briar Rose and Other Portraits] 35-213 (Stockholm, 1956); Bertil Romberg, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977)(Sten Liden trans.); Henrik Schuck & Karl Warburg, Illusterad Svensk Litteraturhistoria 213-374 (Stockholm, 3rd rev. ed., 1926-49)(vol. 6).
     For studies of the Attarp and Lafarge murder cases, respectively, see Yngve Lyttkens, Attarpsmorden (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1953) and Edith Saunders, The Mystery of Marie Lafarge (New York: Morrow, 1952).

* This article was previously published in 9 (1) Armchair Detective 17-22 (1975) and A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives 21-33.