14 
A flamboyant dandy virtually forgotten by history, Edward Bulwer Lytton was once a towering figure in British letters. Before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 turned public tastes against almost everything Victorian, the sales of Lord Lytton’s books had rivaled those of his friend Charles Dickens. Born in 1803 at No. 31 Baker Street in London, just a few doors down the street from the fictional residence of the future Sherlock Holmes, Lytton was educated at Cambridge. Supported by his heiress mother’s allowance, he had lived a playboy’s life of extravagance and notoriety before storming into the London literary scene with the 1828 publication of his novel Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman. Featuring a hero who was the epitome of wit and dandyism, Pelham was a huge commercial smash, enabling Lytton to receive enormous sums in advance for his future books. Riding the wave of success, Lytton went on to write a book of verse about the exotic sensation that was the rage of London, the Siamese boys.1
Prior to the publication of Lytton’s book, Chang and Eng, though the talk of the town everywhere they went, had inspired only bits of doggerel as ephemeral as the reputation of their obscure authors, such as this one that had appeared in the Berkshire Chronicle in 1829:
My yellow friends! and are you come,
As some have done before,
To show the sign of “two to one,”
And hang it o’er your door?
How do you mean your debt to pay?
Will one discharge the other’s?
Or shall you work by subterfuge,
And say, “Ah, that’s my brother’s”?2
Published in England in January 1831, just as Chang and Eng were leaving the country, Lytton’s new work, The Siamese Twins: A Satirical Tale of the Times with Other Poems, would become the first book-length portrayal. In the ensuing decades and even centuries, the incredible story of Chang and Eng would spawn countless representations—fictional, biographical, satirical, scholarly, dramatic, operatic, and cinematic. It is a cultural tradition set in motion by Lytton as a representative man of Victorian letters, whose poetic wit filled every page of his light-footed narrative verse.
Running more than 250 pages, The Siamese Twins took much liberty with facts and tailored them to fit a Molière-like romantic comedy full of farce and satire. For comic and metrical effects, Lytton changed the twins’ names to Chang and Ching, and their father’s to Fiam to rhyme with Siam. To counterbalance fictionalization, Lytton drew heavily on the canon of British travel narratives for ethnographic details and stereotypes, such as the flat noses and blackened teeth of the Siamese. The following portrait of Fiam was hardly flattering:
Our Fiam was a handsome fellow,
His nose was flat, his skin was yellow;
Tho’ black his locks, with truth you’d swear
His teeth were blacker than his hair.3
References to the Finlayson Mission, the Crawfurd account, and other travel journals littered the footnotes in this book of light verse. Lytton recast Robert Hunter as a Mr. Hodges, “the member of a mission, / To probe the Siam trade’s condition.” Hodges was so shocked by his first sight of the conjoined twins that he passed out:
He lay so flat, he lay so still,
He seem’d beyond all farther ill.
They pinch’d his side, they shook his head,
And then they cried, “The man is dead!”
Regaining consciousness, Hodges, like Hunter, immediately saw a business opportunity. The twins were subsequently brought to England. After undergoing an examination by the eminent doctor Sir Astley Cooper, as they did in real life, they were put on display and became a sensation:
From ten to five o’clock each day,
There thronged to see them such a bevy,
Such cabs and chariots blocked the way,
The crowd was like a new King’s levée.
Money flowed into Hodges’s pocket. But the youthful twins resented being treated like animals by their owner and seen as freaks by the audience, as Chang put it to Ching:
How hard a thing it is to be
Teased, worried, questioned, pulled about,
Stared at and quizzed by every lout,
And give a right to all the town
To laugh at us for half-a-crown.
In response, Ching suggested a radical change to their predicament:
Tomorrow, ’gad, we’ll make them all dumb
By cutting this confounded thraldom.
We’ll claim old Hodges’s account,
Keep house upon our share’s amount.
It is a bold idea that was never put into practice in the fictional narrative by Lytton, but it strangely foreshadowed what was to come in the real life of the Siamese Twins. At times, fiction makes a claim on reality and conjures it into being.
Chang, the dandy of the two, fell in love with Hodges’s daughter Mary, and he also attracted the interest of some society ladies who took a fancy to his exoticism. But his conjoined state presented quite a dilemma for romance. When a Lady Gower invited Chang to a rendezvous, she wondered if “he would not bring / His vulgar brother, Mr. Ching”—an impossible request, of course, but juicy fodder for Lytton’s satire.
Absurdities, as in a Sheridan comedy, abounded. The twins got into a fistfight with a fellow at a bar one night and were arrested by a Peeler. The next morning, Ching took all the blame in court and made a passionate plea to exonerate his twin brother, a tactful maneuver actually adopted by Chang and Eng whenever they had a run-in with the law:
But he—my brother—no offence
Committed; you must let him hence!
Take me to prison, if you please,
But first this gentleman release.
The bond might save them from the wrath of the law, but it proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to Chang’s pursuit of love. In the depths of melancholy and depression, Chang carried a knife into their room. But he did not have the courage to do the unthinkable. Sympathetic to his painful plight, Mary went to Chang’s assistance. Like the biblical Eve tempting Adam with the forbidden fruit, she slipped opium into the twins’ wine cups. When the twins fell under the influence of the drug, a surgeon entered the room and severed their tie forever.
Their rude awakening the next morning was not their separation, however, but the horrific truth Mary revealed—that she did not love Chang and that she was already engaged to someone else. While Ching would never regain his former self in spirit, let alone in body, Chang paid the ultimate price for unrequited love, falling victim to a seductive plot. Brokenhearted, he disappeared from London, wandered around the world, and was never heard from again. This was, as the satirical narrator summarized the moral of the tale, “what Liberty hath cost.”
The handful of scholars who have studied the rise and fall of Lytton’s literary career agree that The Siamese Twins possesses an autobiographical relevance to the contradictions that plagued this enigmatic Victorian man of letters: Lytton was deeply tied to his mother and to his wife, but he also desperately and repeatedly tried to sever those bonds. As they would do for future generations of writers ranging from Herman Melville and Mark Twain in the nineteenth century to Mark Slouka and Darin Strauss in the twenty-first century, the Siamese boys gave Lytton perfect raw material to work out his own issues or to fathom the mystery of the human bond, physical or metaphysical.
Published around the time of Chang and Eng’s departure from England in January 1831, Lytton’s book literally chased its eponymous protagonists across the Atlantic. It hit American bookstands in March, just in time for the opening of the twins’ exhibition in New York. Newspapers reprinted long excerpts of the book, along with rave reviews. “As a whole,” opined one reviewer, The Siamese Twins was “an excellent satirical poem.” Even though this reviewer for the Connecticut Mirror found fault with the “Don Juan abruptness” with which Lytton closed lines and reversed sentences, he agreed with the editor of the Philadelphia Gazette in maintaining that “we regard [Lytton’s] works, flowing as they have freshly and spontaneously forth, with something akin to the feelings of beholding the sorceries of a magician. The human heart, with all its countless springs of love, avarice, and ambition, is to him, like the leaves of an open book.”4
Many of these reviews and reprints appeared in the newspapers that closely followed the movements of the Siamese Twins or carried advertisements for their shows. A popular book-length treatment of their story, albeit fictional, by a major author, went a long way toward cementing the twins’ position in the Anglo-American imagination. Pretty soon, the fictional plot of Lytton’s book became entangled with journalistic reports on the twins, as evidenced by this short article in the Eastern Argus Semi-Weekly: “The Siamese Twins have lately, each of them, drawn a prize in a lottery in Philadelphia. These young fellows will, by and by, be enabled to cut a splash in society—be the ‘observed of all observers’—and possibly realize some of the scenes written down for them by Bulwer [Lytton] in his late poem. Young, charming and rich! They may make many a fair damsel’s heart to palpitate.”5
No verisimilitude, however, could prepare us for the dramatic turns that the conjoined life of Chang and Eng would take. Reality sometimes eclipses the wildest imagination.