Authors' Eye
Before a word was ever typed, we kept coming back to the question of perspective. Through whose glasses might we peer? The accused murderer’s steel-rimmed ones that often were rose-tinted? Or the eyes of a body-procurer who some described as shifty?
Most scholars have chosen to go to the thickest record, to listen to the person who said the most. That would be Ephraim Littlefield, the handyman at the medical school where body parts were discovered. Seemingly everyone who has delved into this Parkman affair did so through the vision of that glib caretaker. To be fair, we must point out that an 1850 jury did go along with the argument based on the maintenance man’s testimony. In our view, though, as historian Simon Schama might have predicted, Littlefield’s particular veracity has prejudiced readers, attorneys, and investigators—back then, and now.1 And we all have experienced how an injustice, once institutionalized, can take on a life of its own.
We have opted to look at the events in a new way: to examine all the intricacies for ourselves—not aided by the eager voice of the janitor. It was he,after all, who benefited from the verdict, collecting the reward offered by the missing man’s wealthy family. It was Littlefield who allegedly felt discriminated against by both the disappeared George Parkman and the defendant John Webster.
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- In Dead Certainties, Schama used this event to show that the historical record depends upon the person who documented it. Jake Mishkin in Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows says there are 3 histories: what happened, forever lost; what people thought occurred, maybe recoverable; and what the people in power wanted the future to think happened—90% of the history in books.