1856 No financial crook has inspired better literature than John Sadleir (1813–56). The Irish-born (distantly related through his father to Shakespeare), Catholic and Clongowes College-educated Sadleir began life as a lawyer with his brother William in Dublin. In 1839 – a period of wild railway speculation – he and another brother, James, founded the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank. It expanded rapidly. In 1846, Sadleir moved to London. He was now wealthy, and set up house, magnificently, in Gloucester Square. He joined the best clubs, the Reform and White’s. He rode to hounds and kept a stable of hunters. He did not marry – although he had liaisons of a fashionable kind.
It was the railway boom which buoyed him up. He took shares in many speculative ventures, and sat on boards of the innumerable companies spawned by the mania. He also became chairman of the London and County Joint Stock Bank, which had 60 branches and 20,000 accounts.
By 1847, he was grand enough to be elected to Parliament, for Carlow. Five years later, his brother James and three cousins joined him in the House. They were active in the prosecution of Catholic emancipation, as part of the ‘papal brigade’. It was the period of the so-called ‘papal aggression’ – the setting-up of a Catholic hierarchy in Britain.
Sadleir over-extended himself, and neglected his primary business. By February 1856 his bank was insolvent, largely owing to Sadleir’s personal overdraft of £288,000. He was driven to fraud and wild financial gambles, in a desperate attempt to keep afloat. He ran up debts of £1.5 million for the banks over which he had power – an unimaginably large figure at the time.
In the face of inevitable disgrace and criminal prosecution he disposed of himself with prussic acid on the night of 17 February 1856, on Hampstead Heath, near Jack Straw’s Castle, the tavern. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Highgate cemetery.
There had never been a financier as spectacularly criminal as Sadleir. He inspired a string of wicked fictional ‘Napoleons of the City’: Merdle in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857); Davenport Dunn in Charles Lever’s 1858 novel of that name; Jabez Morth in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent (1861); and Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875).
One can almost forgive Sadleir the thousands of ruined widows and children for passages, such as the following, which his malefactions inspired:
Mr Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, President of the other. The weightiest of men had said to projectors, ‘Now, what name have you got? Have you got Merdle?’ And, the reply being in the negative, had said, ‘Then I won’t look at you.’