UBC: Lost Prince / Little Charley Ross

[truepenny]

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. New York: The Free Press-Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Zierold, Norman. Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967.

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I wasn't going to blog about Lost Prince, because Kaspar Hauser is clearly one of THOSE topics, like Jack the Ripper or the "Authorship Question" (which I put in quotes because there is no question, just a lot of people trying to make a fire out of smoke), about which the situation rapidly devolves into otherwise perfectly rational researchers [...] yelling at one another "WHAT PART OF PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH WGAH'NAGHL CTHULHU FHTAGN DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?" as rushthatspeaks so beautifully puts it. I don't know enough about Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Kaspar Hauser, or Kaspar Hauser scholarship to make an informed judgment about Lost Prince, so I was just going to leave it alone, but then I read Little Charley Ross and realized that Charley and Kaspar make a very weird, very sad pair: the little boy who vanished and the young man who appeared, both out of thin air.

Charley Ross was kidnapped from outside his Philadelphia home in July 1874. His kidnappers wrote to his father, and wrote some of the longest and most bizarre letters in the history of crime. Negotiations about paying the ransom went on for months, and at least twice the kidnappers failed to show up to take payment. And then the two men believed to be the kidnappers were killed trying to rob a house in Bay Ridge, New York.

Charley Ross was never found, although his father, mother, and siblings investigated quite literally thousands of possible Charley Rosses. (One of the very few bright spots in the story is the number of boys, either orphans or kidnap victims themselves, who were rescued from abusive situations--one of whom was reunited with his father in exactly the way Charley Ross never was.) No one knows what happened to him.

(Yes, "Listening to Bone" is based very loosely on the mystery of Charley Ross.)

Zierold's is pretty much the only book on the subject. It's fine, although I wouldn't go farther than that. He doesn't footnote, and there's no sign that his research dug very deeply beyond the obvious sources (although he gets massive props for sorting out the newspaper coverage). And whereas many true crime books suffer from excessive authorial intrusion in the form of whacked out theories, this book could actually have used a little bit of meta discussion. What happened to Charley Ross?

I can see four basic possibilities:

1. Like the Lindbergh baby, Charley Ross was dead before his kidnappers first communicated with his father.

2. The kidnappers kept Charley alive for a while, but he died (whether of neglect or murder) before Mosher and Douglas were killed.

3. Charley was still alive when Mosher and Douglas died, but was then killed by the (unknown) people who had been holding him.

4. Charley survived, but for some reason was never found.

Given the national obsession with Charley Ross (which Zierold does do a very good job of demonstrating), I find #4, sadly, the least plausible of the bunch. If he had been alive after December 1874, someone would have put him forward as a candidate for his own identity. #3 has nothing either pro or con (although I would like to believe it implausible based on common human decency, the rest of the story of the kidnapping indicates strongly otherwise). My personal feeling is that it's either #1 or #2, as this explains the excruciatingly drawn out correspondence and the kidnappers' failure ever to follow through on their plans, even though, since they died in committing a burglary, they obviously needed/wanted money.

Mosher and Douglas were clearly amateurs (the rest of their criminal career was based on burglary, and mostly burglary of opportunity). They worked out a quite good plan for the actual kidnapping (they made friends with Charley and his older brother Walter over the course of a week before kidnapping Charley), but they failed: (1) to confirm that they were kidnapping the son of a wealthy man (they weren't), (2) to work out an equally good plan for collecting the ransom, and (3) to keep control of Charley's father. Also, as their own letters demonstrate, they had no more sense than to believe the things they saw in the newspapers. Their persistent refusal to offer any tokens of Charley's continued survival, and the fact that the things they reported him saying (worried that he wouldn't get home in time to be taken to visit his mother in Atlantic City) were always things that he would have said in the first twenty-four hours, plus their obsessive, repetitive anxiety that Charley's father, Christian Ross, would not keep faith with them and their equally obsessive insistence that though they were bad men, he could trust them, suggests to me that Charley didn't survive very long in their custody.

But I don't know. It seems unlikely anyone ever will.

I'm not going to write the time-travel story in which Charley Ross, having been kidnapped in Philadelphia in 1874, falls through a wormhole and ends up as a young man called Kaspar Hauser in Nuremberg in 1828. It seems disrespectful to both Charley and Kaspar. But it would, at least, explain both of their stories.*

As I said, I don't know enough about Kaspar Hauser to talk knowledgeably about Lost Prince. I can see that Masson believes passionately that Kaspar Hauser was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that he was murdered on the orders of the earl of Stanhope because he was the true heir of Charles, Grand Duke of Baden. But I can also see, even from Masson's biased account, why some people at the time, and other people ever since, have been suspicious of Kaspar and his story and especially of the idea that he was a lost prince. Too much of Masson's evidence (for example, the discovery of the dungeon where Kaspar was kept, including his toy horse) looks like the kind of thing you see in forgery cases, where A says, "I could prove X theory if only I had Y evidence," and B says obligingly, "Oh, you mean like this?"

What's really frustrating about Masson's book is that I know work has been done on the effects of isolation on childhood development and that Masson never refers to such work, even though it is pretty directly relevant. (I.e., Kaspar's ability to learn language indicates that he must have been isolated after he learned to talk.) This failure makes me uncomfortably suspicious about Masson's scholarship, and leaves me feeling that the case of Kaspar Hauser is a morass into which I do not want to wade any farther.

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*There's also a sad, creepy, horrible similarity between how Charley Ross' kidnappers described his imprisonment and how Kaspar Hauser described his own.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I've never looked into the Kasper Hauser case, but I have to admit to a certain interest in the dauphin and also the man in the iron mask. And Richard III and the princes in the tower. History. Can't make it tell you everything.

[marycatelli]

I once read an interesting book on the man in the iron mask. . . though what made it most interesting was his theory that that man was someone of complete insignificance who had stumbled on some secret information, and the mask (velvet in the earliest accounts) was his jailor's melodramatic efforts to make his own job look more important.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i've had a longstanding professional interest in language deprivation and its possible reversals. two sources i'd recommend are jones (1995) on genie, and schaller and sacks "a man without words". (i apologize for their age; like i said it's a longstanding interest, but not currently in my research purview :/ ) anyway, i think taken together they present some data indicating that kaspar hauser's eventual language proficiency needn't indicate early exposure, although it certainly doesn't render the alternative any less plausible.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I've read that one, too. One of the most sensible suggestions out there. (A recent book here insists it's d'Artagnan, which is unlikely for all sorts of reasons.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!