True Crime

Rogue Scholar by Richard W. Bailey

Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff

Richard W. Bailey

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

This is the story of the insalubrious and utterly failed life of Edward Rulloff, notorious nineteenth-century linguist, thief, murderer, and professional impostor, condemned to die and hanged for his crimes.

The life of Rulloff makes a plot worthy of a Sherlock Holmes mystery: adultery, murder, a public hanging, two missing bodies, and the secret of the origin of language. With one important exception—it really happened.

Rulloff's crimes were unextraordinary—thievery, fraud, murder. And on the face of it, Bailey's treatment is calm and factual, calling on newspaper accounts, interviews, and eyewitness reports of the day. Yet the slow, quiet accumulation of details builds to a story that transcends its individual events to touch on the universal themes of any age. Edward Rulloff lived a life of deception, posing on several occasions as a professor, doctor, and lawyer—anything to keep the gallows at bay and to validate his autobiography-of-the-moment. Yet in a larger sense Rulloff's story is also a stark portrait of a condemned man in his final hours, an examination of the death penalty, and a reminder that media sensationalism is nothing new. Finally, it is a story of the mystery of the human heart, and how each of us is alone in the end.

Richard W. Bailey has been a faculty member in the University of Michigan English Department since 1965. He is currently Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century English and Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language.

August 2003
275 pages