The Dream – Or, An Unthinkable History

Written in Memory of Women Transported to Botany Bay1787-1788

Joan Contessa Phillip

PhD 2008

UNSW

Supervisor: Dr Paul Dawson

School of English, Media and Performing Arts

Abstract

Written in memory of the first women convicts transported to Botany Bay, this unthinkable history, a concept posed by the historian, Paul Carter, is an experiment in extending the boundaries of academic remembering, so that the complex lives of those resilient women might be given recognition.

Researching the women’s lives required an ethnographic method, or ‘spatialized’ history, based on original archival research, together with research of rituals, art, literature, newspapers and music; and, importantly, the laws which circumscribed their behaviour. A research focus was thus the administration of criminal codes, including the development of the adversarial court and the characters of prominent judges, most especially the role and character of the Recorder of London. Theories of history based on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Foucault and the ethical philosophy of Wyschogrod, with her feminist perspective, have influenced narrative themes and tropes.

This experimental hybridization of historical methods and the poetics of fiction might be classified as fictocritical historiography, where fictocritical functions as an epithet, not a polarity, as is the case with ficto-historiography and the coinage, faction. The semi-omniscient, intrusive voice of the narrator and dialogic placement of other ‘voices’, variously contrary, affirmative, informative or philosophical are ways in which the experiment enters debates about the relationship between history and fiction and the function of remembering. The incompleteness of records, their silences and partialities, the forensic reading required to contextualize them, the perspective from which the narrative is told, together with the metaphorical levels of all writing, are explicitly acknowledged.

Fundamental to that acknowledgement is the narrative trope of simulacra: assemblages of surfaces and linkages drawn from multiple sources. The narrative figures are thus copies without originals; they are an acknowledgement of the absence which haunts memories, while avoiding scepticism or relativism. Simulacra are the innovative element in the grammar of this transgressive act of remembering with its footnotes and phantoms.

Contents

Acknowledgements i

Illustrations iii

Abbreviations iv

Preface v

1 The Dream 1

2 Towards an Unthinkable History: Setting the Compass 10

3 Vignettes — Selected Introductions 36

4 Pilgrimage 50

5 Exploring London 2004: The Gordon Riots and the Enlightenment 68

6 31 December 1786: The Law in the Age of Reason 107

7 London July 2004: Seeking Elizabeth Needham 136

8 Elizabeth Needham 150

9 Of Jolly Damsels: Seeking Susannah Trippet 176

10 (H)Ánna(h) Mullens, An Irish Cailín: Encounters in Newgate, 1786 190

11 Uaigneas: Towards the Scaffold and Stake 224

12 From the Norfolk Broads 260

13 A Stourbridge Apprentice: Sarah Davis from Old Swinford 299

14 Sarah Bellamy of Belbroughton Parish: A Poor Prisoner Speaks With Her Own Breath 328

15 Martha Eaton and Newgate Mysteries 359

16 The Twelfth Day of Christmas, 1787: A Farewell Masque 373

Bibliography 393

Acknowledgements

There are many people who have supported me during the processes of researching and writing this thesis, and to whom I shall always be indebted. In the first place, my thanks are due to my supervisor, Dr Paul Dawson. Paul’s theoretical breadth, his incisive comments at just the right time, his unerring eye for stylistic flaws, and the ways in which he has challenged my thinking, are deeply appreciated.

My appreciation is also due to the Graduate Research School at the University of New South Wales for the opportunities extended to me, including a travel grant to further my research in England. To the School of English, as it was when I began this project, I could not be more grateful. The model of postgraduate collegiality fostered by the School is outstanding. The organization of seminars, review processes and the postgraduate colloquium, are some of the ways in which the School has facilitated my academic research. I shall always have fond memories of the depth and variety of the intellectual exchanges we shared at postgraduate seminars, and shall value the friendships which developed there.

Thanks are also due to those who have been in the position of postgraduate co-ordinator, Professor Sue Kossew, Dr Anne Brewer and Dr Paul Dawson. A special thanks to my readers at the annual reviews, Professor Kossew, Professor Bill Ashcroft and Professor Peter Kuch. The balance between constructive criticism and encouragement was ideal. I am also grateful to Dr Suzanne Eggins for her advice and faith in me.

The person to whom I owe special thanks is my husband, Rod Allan. His encouragement and unstinting devotion, through every hour of the day, were exceptional. He has made my study possible, sustaining my sometimes shaky progress, intellectually, emotionally and practically. His knowledge of, and commitment to, historical research, education, literature and social justice, inspires and nourishes ideas. I thank him for being the best of companions, and for all the time he has given to reading my drafts; for spending a day of his holiday in England at the British Library seeking elusive magazine and newspaper references; and for visiting sites at Belbroughton and meeting with the local Belbroughton historian, Madge Gibson-Jones.

I shall always be indebted to my mentor and guide in the West Midlands, Dora Stephens, for her great interest in my endeavours, and for her generous gifts of books and clippings. Appreciation is also due to Dora’s daughter, Mary Jordan, for her delight in my research, for her loving hospitality, for driving me around villages to familiarize me with the landscapes, and for taking photographs of churches and inns. To the extended Stephens family I am also grateful. During my research in England, Catharine Parkes and my niece Genevieve Phillip-Towzell, and their families, also offered hospitality and support which I deeply appreciate. I also appreciate the generosity of the researchers, such as Richard Clark, Gillian Nott and David Fisher, who have made their work available on the internet, kindly answered a stranger’s queries and gave permission to reproduce their images. Special thanks also to Dr Raingard Esser of the University of West of England and Simon Carter, Director, Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, who also extended help to a stranger.

i My admiration and thanks are also warmly extended to Dr Anne Beaumont, for her long and loyal friendship, and for the shining example of her adventurous and brave research. I am also grateful to Dr. Samantha Holland, another adventurous researcher, for her warm encouragement during the critical weeks prior thesis submission; and to my dear friend and archivist, Dr Louise Atherton, at the National Archives, Kew. Also many thanks to my dear Bathurst friends, of whom I shall mention just a few: Jan Woolley and Judith Parker, for their abiding friendship, integrity and intellectual wisdom, and for the opportunities Judith gave me when she was my Head of School; Professor Bob Meyenn, who also gave me many educational opportunities and encouraged challenging endeavours; Dr Barbara Hill, for blazing the way and for her intelligent humour and optimism; Dr Ruth Bacchus for her faith in me and the subtlety of her thinking; Professor Bill Green for his academic knowledge, for his insightful advice, for recommending references, and sending me the gift of an article or a book at just the right time; Dr Michael Gard for his probing questions and faith in me; Judy Taylor for her vivacious intelligence; Ian Kirkby for all his patient technical help and maintenance of my computer; Dr Joy Wallace, for her erudition and research companionship; and Deb Lee for her supportive interest. I extend many thanks to my other Bathurst friends, who have been my university and teaching colleagues and who always offer me the comforts of family: Denise and Warwick Franks, John and Denise Payne, Val and Bob Nimmo, and Dr Ron Sinclair and Gillian Baldwin, all of whom have nurtured my aspirations. I also extend warm thanks to Paula Clifford for introducing me to the Irish language and for wading into a river to gather rushes to demonstrate the making of a St Brigid’s Cross. There are, of course, many others who have shaped my social and intellectual life, and who have been enthusiastic about this research project including, Dr Julie Martello, Professor John Carroll, Professor Jo-Anne Reid; and Shona and Jack Thomson, a great role model who gave me my first academic opportunities.

Appreciation is due to my extended family, including my sons, Andrew and Jonathan and their families; my stepsons and their families; the Boulter-Metcalf family; my cousins and grandchildren; my mother-in-law, Coral Allan; and my brother-in-law Robert Phillip, all of whom have been willing me onwards, and were ever gracious about my reduced participation in family activities. In addition, I offer special thanks to Carrie-Anne Boulter for the time she devoted to final proof-reading before the work was delivered to be bound; and special thanks to my sister-in-law, Dr Ann Stephenson, who accompanied me to significant convict sites in England, during the early stages of my interest in the First Fleet women.

Lastly, I wish to acknowledge the creative benefit of a Masterclass at Varuna, The Writers’ House, at Katoomba, offered by Varuna’s Director, Peter Bishop. The Masterclass was a week of writing and reflection, nurtured by Peter’s careful readings and insightful comments, and by discussions with a small group of writers of the most varied interests. During the week we were joined by Charlotte Wood, who responded sympathetically to our writing and in shared her experiences as a writer and novelist. The gentle conversations, together with the privileged circumstances of living in Eleanor Dark’s rooms, writing at her sunny desk, or standing at her bedroom window in early evening, watching the full moon rise above silhouetted trees, created a contemplative space which enabled me to identify ways of solving narrative problems inherent in the aim of dramatizing the lives of women convicts while also contributing to the corpus of eighteenth century historical research. ii Illustrations

1. Tyburn Plaque 52

2. Detail from a stylized woodcut used in many execution broadsides 64

3. Finch Coat of Arms 167

4. Door of Newgate 194

5. Dead Man’s Walk 218

6. Exterior of Conisford Gate, Norwich Walls (1789) 273

7. Interior of Conisford Gate, Norwich Walls (1789) 273

8. Church of St Mary, the Virgin 299

9. Badger-Davis Marriage and Children’s Baptisms 303

10. Illustrated Capital: Honi soit qui qui mal y pense 304

11. Sarah Davis: Indenture Certificate 327

12. Staunton-Bellamy Marriage and Children’s Baptisms 329

13. Baptismal Font, Belbroughton 330

14. 4 and 8 Queens Hill, Belbroughton 331

15. Stooking the Sheaves 334

16. Staffordshire Knot 335

17. The Bell of Bell Inn 346

18. A Worcestershire Icehouse 348

iii Abbreviations

ADNB Online Australian Dictionary of Biography: consulted at http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/adbonline.htm

B and T, and S and Z Being and Time and Sein and Zeit

OBPOnline Old Bailey Proceedings, London 1674 to 1834: consulted at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

ODNB Online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: consulted at http://www.oxforddnb.com/

iv Preface

The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers … … remembering and awakening are most intimately related. Walter Benjamin1

This narrative is a fictocritical historiography: an experimental generic form which hybridizes fiction, theory and historiography. While the hybrid form of fictocriticism now has a recognized place in academic studies, a fictocritical historiography does not: it is unthinkable, beyond epistemic regularities. It is for this reason that I make these prefatory remarks. Fictocriticism, as a term, applies to innovative literary forms written against the restrictions of traditional epistemologies which were characterized by a disembodied omniscient voice marked by middle-class, white, masculinist perspectives. My experimental form emerged as I encountered various problems, aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological, in the processes of writing a narrative, or narratives, about the first convict women transported to Botany Bay. The problems arose, initially, from the seeming impossibility of writing about women for whom records were slight. Further, those which did exist, written by people in positions of power, were frequently damning; and yet other records suggested that many convicts, men and women, led successful, respectable, lives in New South Wales. How might such discrepancies be clarified, mediated? Who were the women? What memories did they bring which would have shaped their points of view, needs and concerns? The historical glimpses available in biographical dictionaries suggested some remarkable lives.

Historical fiction was, of course, an option. However, fiction would not have explicitly identified the evidential basis for characterization and narrative episodes. It would not, therefore, have directly commemorated the historical women; yet that was my aim. The innovations of fictocriticism did suggest the possibilities of drawing upon the poetics of fiction to dramatically engage with gendered embodiment and classed, religious and,

1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Convolutes’, The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, this Edn 1st publ., 1999 (The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press 2002), p. 389. v perhaps, racial experiences of eighteenth century female convicts, while critically framing those fictional elements to explore the nature of remembering and historiography.

I knew that trespassing into the discipline of history, while introducing dramatizations derived from the poetics of fiction, would potentially entail the ethical problem of seeming to conflate historiography and fiction, and thus risk devaluing the important work of history as a discipline. Fiction is clearly not historiography, in spite of the critical identification of various rhetorical features which historiography shares with fiction; and in spite of a general recognition that language can never directly, transparently, represent ‘what happened’, which was once an unquestioned belief about the nature of ‘history’. The difficult relationship of history and fiction provoked many questions. Could the boundaries of fiction and historiography be productively transgressed through attention to the complex inter-relatedness of the author’s embodiment, her psycho-social positions and the processes of historical research? I came to the view that such transgressions might dismantle subjective-objective dichotomies, thus facilitating a reflexive historiography which would be a variant of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology.

Towards contextualizing the women’s biographies, I have assembled original archival research, together with research of rituals, art, literature, newspapers and music, enlightenment thought and criminal justice administration, as both historical novelists and historians might. However, my representations of the historical figures and settings, while carefully based on historical ethnography and fully referenced, are always acknowledged as illusions, phantoms: effects of my obsession with almost vanished lives. Following Gilles Deleuze I understand my historical figures as assemblages, surfaces and linkages. They are, thus, simulacra: copies of copies without originals; and their linkages are always open to dismantling and re-assemblage by historians. They are figments, ‘virtualities’, projected from my all-consuming desire ‘to know’ through the prism of critical theory and philosophy. The trope of simulacra functions to highlight the question of writing, with its propensity to hide its abstraction from the material world. Simulacra are the sign of absence, an acknowledgement of textual constructedness and contingency of all historiography. This acknowledgement counters the notion that this narrative is ‘faction’, a

vi coinage which sets ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in opposition and privileges ‘fact’: the simulacra trope critiques that opposition and its privilege, displacing simplistic notions of ‘facts’.

As assemblages, the historical figures bear more resemblance to the phantoms of dreams, or to the fantoccini, the Italian Columbine and Harlequin marionettes, which beguiled eighteenth century audiences in the Pleasure Gardens of London, than they do to the ‘realism’ of characters in an historical novel. Readers who expect sustained ‘realism’ will be disappointed; or even confounded and annoyed. Neither does the narrative follow novelistic structures. It is not a novel; rather, it is a narrative about seeking traces of places and events which were indices to the historical spaces in which the women lived. These historical spaces would, inevitably, have shaped the women’s memories, their “back stories”, which made them who they were, as Salman Rushdie’s character, Malik Solanka, designated our “little storehouse of anecdotes” which we bring “across oceans, beyond frontiers”. The searching involved the shadows of monuments and country lanes, the silence of churches, and encounters with the echoes of voices from books and archives, some of which introduce and end chapters, in the manner of a Greek chorus, guiding, affirmative, or contradictory.

Initially the idea of a contemporary woman narrating the story of historical research seemed a cliché to be avoided. However, that judgment was displaced by Martin Heidegger’s insistence that understanding, including understanding of the past, is shaped by a particular time, and thus the position from which the past is interpreted should be carefully identified. Remembering, trawling the enigma of the past, is always about the present. Approaching history as the art of experiencing the present as the “waking world”, “to which that dream we name the past refers”, was Walter Benjamin’s illumination of the enigmatic processes of remembering, acknowledged in my title. At its most intense, remembering is also about mourning, obsessive longing, for that which remains forever irrecoverable. Derrida called such obsessions, Mal d’Archive, ‘Archive Fever’. This narrative is forged from archive fever. (Joan Phillip, December 2008)

vii The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 1

The Dream

*

In recognizing the power of literary critiques of historical methodology and the depth of the problem for historians created in the process, this book [Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London] attempts to recast the conundrum of fictionality as part of the solution. Tim Hitchcock1

… time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room. Gabriel Garcia Márquez 2

*

Months after the dream its disturbing details remained. In the beginning I was on a beach standing before a curved iron wall inscribed with unreadable names. At the horizon there was a fleet of square-riggers running before the wind under a crowd of sails. I was trying to scream, to warn someone, but the sea wind blew against my mouth with a hollow noise, like a hand clamping on a bottle; and then, in one of those dream-slips, the beach became tropical. I squinted against the dazzle of sea and sky, knowing the topography without really observing it. What I did observe on the sand were scattered bones, skulls, thighs, ribs, and broken vertebrae. Somewhere at the edge of the dream men were in a rowing boat and beyond that was another square-rigger, also carrying a crowd of sails. Horrified, I began to

1 Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London (Hambledon and London 2004), p. 234. 2 Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Harper and Row 1970), p. 322. — 1 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______crawl forward, labouring through heavy air, crying and gathering bones into a canvas bag, sand clinging to the sticky shreds of roasted flesh. With increasing urgency I sought the delicate structures of fingers and toes, counting, naming … brachium, humerus, radius, ulna … while avoiding the discarded plantain leaves, greasy and blackened, and the sandy hollows lined with stones which opened into chasms as the tide washed the sand from beneath me.

We live in the first inland city in New South Wales, but it remains a country town, so quiet at 2 a.m. that I could hear the regular expulsion of my husband’s breath and the blood shushing in my ears. Moonlight shone across the corner of the room marked with shadows from the crab apple. On that night the tree was heavy with pink and white blossom. For a few moments I summoned memories of it, first as a dense wall of green, then with falling leaves and blackbirds rummaging, scattering faded sepia and bleached yellow patterns across the path. Perhaps our time of greatest comfort is a rain-soft winter morning when we curl together staring at the red camellias glowing behind darkened branches. Recalling those images muted the panic of the dream.

It was not difficult to understand the source of the nightmare for it came from a deepening obsession with recovering the occluded history of the ‘first fleet’ convict women. Later I was to learn that this was an obsession Derrida identified as archive fever. The specific source of the dream lay in the folder dedicated to Elizabeth Evans, alias Jones. I had been reviewing it before succumbing to sleep. Elizabeth Evans had first drawn my attention because she was one of the women accompanied by a child, her eight year old daughter,

Jane Jones, recorded on the voyage muster lists as Jenny, the eighteenth century diminutive — 2 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______of Jane. Although there was available information about Jane Jones’s marriage in May

1800 to Thomas Rose II,3 the son of an early free settler in Wilberforce, and some details of her later life and death in Wollongong,4 there were very few snippets of information about

Elizabeth Evans/Jones. Her life was hidden in shadow which, at that time, I had no compass for exploring. The Old Bailey transcript of her case was brief, suggesting it was the most perfunctory of trials. A last minute policy to boost the numbers of healthy young women for transportation could explain the brevity. The transcript revealed no more than that she had been in the company of another woman in a shop in King Street (there were multiple

King Streets in London) and that she had stolen three pounds of tea valued at twelve shillings.5 In addition to these details Arthur Bowes Smyth, Surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn, recorded in his journal entry Friday, 24 May 1787 … This day Elizth. Evans miscarried.6

That Elizabeth had productively farmed her land grant, which she received in 1794, and the lease and freehold properties which she later purchased,7 indicated her good sense and practicality. That she had brought her child with her suggested maternal care. Then, in an early biographical dictionary of ‘first fleeters’, I came upon a citation raising the possibility that in the colony Elizabeth Evans had given birth to a son, Louis, whose life had ended tragically in a South Sea massacre. Significantly, Don Chapman had concluded his entry

3 Marriage Certificate of Thomas Rose and Jane Jones, 24 May 1800, NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages, Vol. 475, No. 3A. 4 Death Certificate of Jane Rose, Farmer, 29 August 1849, Parish of Wollongong, in the County of Camden, burial performed by P. Young, Roman Catholic, NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages, Vol. 565, No.117. 5 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org, (hereafter OBPOnline) 13 Dec. 1786, trial of Elizabeth Evans, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17861213-131. 6 Arthur Bowes Smyth, The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn 1787-1789, edited by Paul Fidlon and R. J. Ryan (Australian Documents Library 1979), p. 17. 7 Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (Library of Australia 1989), p. 120. — 3 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______for Elizabeth Evans with a quotation from the work of George Mackaness who had written

… amongst those killed and eaten by cannibals at Fiji in 1813 was Louis Evans, a native of

Port Jackson and said to be the son of Governor Phillip. In the first fleet there was a convict woman by the name of Elizabeth Evans, sent out for seven years, who, if [Chevalier

Captain] Peter Dillon is to be believed, may have been the mother of this young man.8

This rarely mentioned reference — it was missed by Mollie Gillen in her comprehensive and essential dictionary of ‘first fleet’ biographies — suggested another possible dimension to Elizabeth Evans’ character. Setting aside Elizabeth’s grief should she have learnt of a son’s barbaric death, an intimate relationship with the Commodore would indicate some special quality in her demeanour, some quality that set her apart from the other convict women. Arthur Phillip was, after all, a man who lived by Enlightenment principles and was widely respected; a man who endeavoured to administer justice and to treat others with humanity, circumscribed as that humanity might have been by the British penal code he was transplanting, and the unpredictable situation of having invaded a land without being conscious of having done so.

A few days prior to the dream I had at last read the primary source to which the two historians referred, and the Chevalier’s graphic images of the dreadful massacre at Feejee

Islands, 19 February 1813,9 would not be dispelled. Dillon recorded that the perpetrators

8 Don Chapman, 1788: The People of the First Fleet, 1st publ., 1981 (Doubleday 1986), p.85. Mackaness’s source was Peter Dillon, ‘Chapter 1’, Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage to the South Seas Performed by Order of the Government of British India to Ascertain the Actual Fate of La Pérouse’s Expedition…Vols. 1 and 2 (St Paul’s Churchyard 1829). 9 Peter Dillon, Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage to the South Seas Performed by Order of the Government of British India to Ascertain the Actual Fate of La Pérouse’s Expedition…Vols. 1 and 2 (St Paul’s Churchyard 1829), p. 24. — 4 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______were his Captain’s old and faithful allies whose stomachs he had so often helped to glut with the flesh of their enemies.10 The massacre was a retribution provoked by the European

Captain’s punishment of those faithful allies for failing to deliver a full cargo of sandalwood. The punishment had been ordered in spite of the Chief’s claim that sandalwood stocks were already badly depleted.11

Some things, once they are read, known, remain forever. So it was that my reading of

Dillon’s record of the massacre became one of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s moments when time splinters leaving an eternalized fragment,12 not just in my university’s small archive room, tucked in the basement of the library, but in the soft tissue of my brain.

After the descriptions, Dillon gave a list of those who were killed. Sixth on the list was the name of a seaman, Louis Evans, and the brief note: This young man was said to be the son of Governor Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales.13 Dillon made no reference to

Elizabeth Evans. George Mackaness had drawn the connection between the young sailor and the identity of his convict mother. Further, Mackaness wrote if Dillon is to be believed, whereas Dillon had acknowledged that the only verification for the young sailor’s parentage was common knowledge — or gossip. There was, then, slippage between the historical source and Mackaness’s citation, a slippage which indicates the need for historiographical vigilance. It is possible that Elizabeth Evans was the seaman’s mother, and although two women called Sarah Evans, one from Worcester and one from

10 Peter Dillon (1829), p. 8. 11 Ibid., p. 7. 12 Gabriel Garcia Márquez (1970), p. 322. 13 Dillon (1829), p.24. — 5 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Denbighshire, were respectively included on the second and third fleet embarkations lists, at least one woman may be discounted as she married a James Stewart/d in 1791.14

*

On a summer morning after the dream I travelled by bus and train to Wollongong and followed vague hand directions towards the site of an old cemetery on South Wollongong beach. The name Jane Rose, 29 August 1849, is carved on a dark iron wall, overshadowed by a brewery and entertainment centre built on the original burial site. Jane Jones was buried as Jane Rose, in the Catholic portion of the cemetery. A few eroded headstones are set in the wall and protected from vandals by steel mesh, the past not quite erased on the palimpsest of the present.

Although Jane Rose’s death certificate identified her ship as the Recovery,15 this neither corresponds with the chronologies of the arrivals of the Recovery nor with the geographical movements of Jane Jones-Rose as recorded in census documents. Mollie Gillen also wrote that in 1848 Jane was recorded as the wife of James Walsh of Airds, both Catholics.16 It is possible that because Jane’s first husband, Thomas Rose, had departed from the colony in

1803, she thought he had died, or would never return to the colony, and thus she re-married.

At the time of her death a deposition with the Supreme Court noted that she was commonly known as Jane Walsh, and had been separated from her husband for upwards of twenty years. Certainly Jane Jones/Rose was not always truthful, as can be seen in her application

14 Marriage of Sarah Evans and James Stewart/d, St John’s Church, Parramatta, NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, No/s, V1791164 3A/1791 and V179143 14A/1791. These would be the same marriage; for some reason multiple registrations do occur in the online records. 15 Death of Jane Rose, see Footnote 4, p. 3, above. 16 Gillen (1989), p. 198. — 6 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______to the Governor for a land grant in which she claimed to have been two years old when she arrived on the First Fleet, and that her parents were Elizabeth Jones and William Faddy

(Lady Penrhyn). The claim was no doubt meant to give her respectability: Faddy was a 2nd

Lieutenant of the Marines.17

Should Jane Jones and her mother have been watching the coastline from the deck of the

Lady Penrhyn as the fleet sailed northward in January 1788, and that is a likelihood, then they would have seen Jane’s eventual burial place as a watercolour smudge of white and green before a distant escarpment. From the tops’l yards of the mainmast, stirred by a summer wind, strands of seaweed fluttered like shrivelled pennants: mementoes of storms and avalanching waves in the Southern Ocean when the women, clutching babies and children, were washed from their berths and flung around in the darkness with their belongings and, inevitably, the contents of an easing chair.18 There were days and nights of storms, of thunder, lightning and hail, of fears that the ship was going over, of bruisings, of kneeling at prayer; and then the startled-eyed wonder that, yet again, old and young, they had all survived, that limbs were whole and babies still exercised in swollen bellies. The sudden joy was followed by amazed imprecations which went leaping from their mouths like relieved toads, shocking the Ship’s Surgeon. Then nine days later the women would have arisen to a balmy summer morning and the sailors getting up the Cables and

17 For copies of the two documents related to Jane Rose’s estate, one from William Taylor, Clerk of Petty Sessions and a deposition from James Arphin see The Rose Family of the Bellona: Australian Free Settlement Begins16 January 1793 (Thomas and Jane Rose Family Society 1990), pp. 89-91. 18 The women were washed from their berths 31 December 1787 and Surgeon Smyth wrote that it seem’d as if the ship was going over. There followed a series of storms, the most dangerous of which occurred 10 January 1788. The Surgeon recorded that the women were so terrified that most of them were down on their knees at prayer followed by his criticisms of their later imprecations and curses. See Arthur Bowes Smyth (1979), pp. 52 and 55. — 7 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______preparing all things for Anchoring.19 On that day, the wind filling the sails and fluttering the Lady Penrhyn’s seaweed pennants would have been much the same as the one which slid under my skirt, warm as a breath, as I stood before the memorial wall, gazing towards the horizon where the ships had passed.

Telling the story of Elizabeth Evans, and those of her companions, had been a vague idea as

I randomly read and collected books and journals about square-rigger voyages and

Australia’s convict history. It had become an imperative. The question centred on how those stories might be justly written from the fragments of historical evidence, which were, at best, partial, random, and dubious — as instanced in gathering some of the research for the story of Elizabeth Evans. Historians who live with these problems no doubt would wonder why I was making them an issue. Then I am not an historian. Yet my original intention to write an historical novel was no longer satisfactory either. The remnant narratives of the women’s lives were astonishing, and if they were presented as fiction, readers would accept the characters and their experiences were my invention, as would be proper.

The trouble was my intensifying obsession with knowing, with finding details of the women’s lives. I reminded myself yet again that I was not an historian. A lack-lustre undergraduate major completed forty years previously would not qualify. Then again, the past, the nature of memory, had always held fascinations; my reading had been eclectic, had included many histories and philosophies of histories. In honesty, I had sufficient experience with the discipline of history to know of the development of its juridical

19 Smyth (1979), p. 56. — 8 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______foundations in ‘the rules of evidence’,20 to know about historiographical changes, to know the debates about the relationship of historiography with the rhetorical features of literature,21 to know of the problems which have arisen with the blurring of the borders between history and fiction,22 and to accept the dictum: you cannot just make it up.23 I did not want to just make it up, for that would not be faithful to the women’s lives in the way that I had come to wish to be faithful to them.

Just, of course, is a slippery word; as slippery as an embryo.

*

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some prankster at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet. Julian Barnes24

20 For an introduction to the traditional ‘craft of history’ using the juridical procedures of ‘the rules of evidence’ as the method of establishing ‘facts’ and causation/s of ‘events’ see Mark Cousins, ‘The Practice of Historical Investigation’ in Post-structuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, (Cambridge University Press 1987), pp.126-136. 21 An early contribution to these debates was Hayden White’s theory that historical arguments are given coherence through the use of the emplotments based on the rhetorical structures and tropes of fictional narratives. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, 1st publ., 1973 (The Johns Hopkins University Press 1975). For a sound, but brief overview and critique of White’s contribution to debates about historiography, including his failure to note the dominance in historiography of the traditions of omniscient author of nineteenth century realist novels, see Anne Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (UNSW Press 2006), pp.191-194; Curthoys and Docker also outline the way debates about the relationship of historiography and fiction unsettled the foundations of the discipline, allowing extremists to deny the possibility of any ‘truth-value’ in historical studies, paving the way for such blatant claims that the Jewish Holocaust did not occur under the regime of the Third Reich. See Curthoys and Docker (2006) pp. 209-219. 22 For a careful statement of these problems, including the context of issues related to colonial treatments of the Indigenous population, see Iain McCalman, ‘Flirting with Fiction’, in the Historian’s Conscience, edited by Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne University Press 2004), pp.151-161. 23 This comment was made by Iain McCalman during a panel discussion at the History Writing Festival, NSW Writers Centre, Rozelle (18 September 2004) and reiterated in a radio interview, ‘When Fiction Meets History’, ABC Radio National: The Deep End (22 September 2004). 24 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (Picador 1984), p. 14. — 9 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 2

Towards an Unthinkable History — Setting the Compass

*

To draw attention to the lost history of the convicts is to engage in a genuinely dialectical activity: it not only reflects critically on the dominant historical tradition, but also gives the convicts a place within it, a place from which to speak and be heard. To have let the convicts speak for themselves would have been to entertain the unthinkable: mutiny, another history. Paul Carter25

… it is always necessary to be more than one in order to speak, several voices are necessary for that … Jacques Derrida26

Is there anything at all like an observation of history that is not one-sided but omni-sided? Must not every particular present always examine and interpret the past in terms of its own horizon? Won’t its historiographical knowledge be more ‘alive’ the more decisively the given horizon of that particular present is taken as a guide? Martin Heidegger27

*

Paul Carter’s words, unthinkable … another history crackled on the page, luring me, summoning a faith in the possibility of finding what Enlightenment logic of cause and effect… suppressed,28 setting the challenge of finding ways of ‘letting’ the convict women transported from England to Botany Bay, 13 May 1787, speak for themselves. To do this,

25 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (Faber and Faber 1988), p. 295. 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Sauf le Nom (Post-Scriptum)’, in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford University Press 1995), p.35. 27 Martin Heidegger, ‘Nietzsche’s Interpretation of History’, in Nietzsche: Nihilism Vol. 4, edited by David Farrell Krell, 1st publ., 1940 (HarperSanFrancisco 1991), p. 71. 28 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (1988), p. 295. — 10 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Carter later said, it is necessary to listen to aspects of the language that written records may contain, but which rationalizing history leaves out … [and then] … their meaning must be revealed, and this involves recreating a context in which they once again speak and signify.29

The historian did not mean this challenge in any simplistic way; rather he was questioning the methodological assumptions which have dominated historical studies. That is, an unthinkable history would be beyond the epistemic regularities of traditional academic historiography. The unthinkable, Pierre Bourdieu argued, is usually excluded by a kind of immediate submission to order that inclines agents to make a virtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anyway denied and to will the inevitable.30 An unthinkable history would thus be, as Paul Carter suggested, a methodological mutiny.31 The mutiny he recommended was spatial history which, concerned with intentions and the plurality of historical directions,32 offers a way of recreating the social contexts of suppressed voices.

Deriving from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, spatial history, Carter continued, undermines the stability of roads and buildings.33 For Heidegger, ‘space’, as in a room or

29 Paul Carter, 'Culture of Coincidence: Notes on a Performance Piece Called Mirror States, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol. 3 No 1 (1990), http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/3.1/Carter.html. As the article title suggests, these are Carter’s notes for a new genre in radio plays, developed in Germany in the 1950s, which the Australian Broadcasting Commission was producing. A performance text for seven voices and four environmental sound tracks, Mirror States, was an acoustic sculpture about relationships between Aborigines and white colonists on the Yarra River. The ‘performance piece’, Carter described it as a local history, was developed from ideas in The Road to Botany Bay. 30 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, 1st published in French, 1980 (Polity Press with Basil Blackwell 1990), p. 54. 31 Paul Carter (1988), p. 295. 32 Ibid., p. 294. 33 Ibid., p. 294. — 11 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the distance to a cathedral, was not geometrical, and not quantitative;34 rather it was about the investment of value, of involvement, of concern,35 and the associations accrued to objects, equipment, through everyday dealings.36 The significance of the table is not its physical dimensions, but, rather, how it is invested with value through memories and meanings associated with its use: who sat around it; who marked it; whether or not it was a sign of status or poverty.37 Spatial history is a way of mapping time, place and ways of being, in terms of what is of concern. That mapping is centrally about what Heidegger once called Da-sein: there-being, being-there.38 What was of concern, of value, what was ready- to-hand for the convicts?

The other aspect of Heidegger’s Being-there was Mitsein: Being-with-Others or Mit-

Dasein: the world-I share-with-Others.39 The philosopher noted that being-with-others could be characterized by solicitude and considerateness; or by forbearance, through perfunctory indifference, to not wanting to ‘have anything to do’ with them.40 While these

34 Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy (1918 Lecture Series), translated by Ted Sadler (Continuum Impacts 2008), p. 67. 35 See ‘Spatiality of Being-in-the-World’, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, (hereafter B and T), translated by Edward Robinson and John Macquarrie (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 138-145; Sein and Zeit, (hereafter S and Z) (Max Niemeyer, 11th edition, 1967), pp. 105-110. Although I have identified specific references, these central themes of concern and equipment recur throughout B and T and other works, as indicated below. 36 See Martin Heidegger, B and T (1977), pp. 102-105; S and Z (1967), pp. 72-75. See also Stuart Elden (2001), pp. 8-28; see especially pp. 15-19. 37 See Martin Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, transl. by John van Buren (Indiana University Press 1999), pp. 68-69; Heidegger, pp.88-89. While the specific mention of the family table is made in Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, the notions of equipment, everydayness and ready-to-hand are central themes in Heidegger’s works. See J. Hillis Miller, ‘Derrida Enisled’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33 (Winter 2007), pp. 251-252. In this article Miller analyses the complex and changing ways in which Heidegger used these concepts. In addition the analysis includes different ways the concepts, and Heidegger’s work more generally, have been understood by philosophers, most particularly through Derrida’s careful readings. See also Stuart Elden’s discussion (2001), pp. 18-19. 38 See Heidegger, B and T (1977), p 27, Note 1; S and Z (1967), p. 7. See also Elden (2001), p. 15. The complexity of Dasein, or Da-sein cannot be easily defined; it is usually translated as Being. 39 Heidegger, B and T (1977), p. 155; S and Z (1967), p. 118. 40 Ibid., p. 125. — 12 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______are not, now, profound insights, they do suggest a frame for exploring significant aspects of the spatial world in which the convicts lived. Further, Heidegger discerned the exercise of a constant care as to the way one differs from others, noting that such attention to difference might derive from wanting to catch up, or to possessing some priority over others, and wanting, therefore, to keep them suppressed. The care about difference from the others is disturbing, Heidegger argued, because it is hidden.41 That ‘hidden’, unconscious,

‘suppression’ was, Heidegger’s words would suggest, a function of prejudice derived from inequalities and the distribution of power. Stuart Elden, drawing on the works of Nietzsche,

Heidegger and Foucault stressed that spatializing history means critically examin[ing] the power relations at play in the ways space is effected and effects.42

One aspect of writing unthinkable history would thus entail reading historical sources from what Pierre Macherey identifies as their margins, the silences, the vanishing points.43

Macherey indicated that it is the area of incompleteness from which we can observe [a text’s] birth and its production.44 That birth and production, he continued, echoing

Heidegger, are in our unconscious prejudices: that which is not judged in language but before it, but which is nevertheless offered as a judgment. Prejudice, the pseudo-judgment, is the utterance which remains imperceptibly beyond language.45 [M]eaning is in the relation [he emphasized the word, ‘relation’] between the implicit and the explicit.46 .

41 Ibid., pp. 163-164; S and Z (1967), p. 126. 42 Elden, p. 7. 43 Pierre Macherey, ‘The Text Says What It Does Not Say’, translated by G. Wall, 1st publ., 1966, reprinted in Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, edited by Dennis Walder (Oxford University Press with the Open University 1991), pp. 217. 44 Ibid., p. 220. 45 Ibid., p. 219. 46 Ibid., p. 218. — 13 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

As difficult, as elusive, as the silences of a text might be, as impossible to dispel, Macherey argued the silences are a ground on which it [the text] traces a figure.47 And that ground,

Macherey concluded, is the space of history.48 The space of history against which the

Enlightenment records were traced, Carter indicated, were the intentions, reasons, values and interests of those who were powerless, the poor, who were judged as irrational and reprehensible; that is, the records excluded what being-there, and being-with-others, meant for the convicts, whether in England, or the colony.

An unthinkable history, therefore, begins with the shadows of written records; it begins with the unconscious intentions and prejudices of their authors which constrained the convicts’ historical spaces. It then moves towards how the convicts made a place for themselves49 within those constraints; and how, and why, they resisted them. While there may be few direct records of the individual women’s occupation of historical space,

Carter’s proposition that even our inviolable ‘personal space’ expresses a community of historical interests,50 suggests that through researching general records and artefacts there is a possibility of exploring the women’s attitudes and beliefs. There is the possibility of exploring what they would have valued, what their horizons might have been, how they would have lived.

Importantly the conceptual ground of spatialized history which posits ‘personal space’ as expressions of a community of historical interests is reinforced and amplified through

47 Ibid., p. 217. 48 Ibid., p. 222. 49 Carter (1988), p. 295. 50 Ibid., p. 294. — 14 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts, habitus, field, practice, cultural capital, symbolic practices, including symbolic and legitimated (judicial) violence. It should be noted that there have been many critical assessments of Bourdieu’s work and his attempts to resolve the epistemological problems of social science research. This criticism is well represented in the work of Richard Jenkins who, nevertheless, argues that Bourdieu is supremely good to think with,51 identifying the concepts of practice, habitus and field as Bourdieu’s most important ‘thinking tools’.52 Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field augment Carter’s argument that Enlightenment logic suppressed convict ‘voices’ as irrational because they indicate how the dichotomy of ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ might be historically established. Bourdieu wrote that the habitus produces individual and collective practices — more history — in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time … .53 He continued: the habitus tends to generate all the ‘reasonable’,

‘common sense’, behaviours (and only these) which are possible within the limits of these regularities ….54 Significantly, Bourdieu identified the habitus as embodied history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history.55 This attention to embodiment is an addition to the parameters of a spatialized history for it opens the possibility of the body as archive, an idea which Derrida also poses in his work, Archive Fever, to which I shall give attention in a later chapter.

51 Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, Rev. Edn (Routledge 2002), p. x. 52 Ibid., p. 67. 53 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, (1990), p. 54. 54 Ibid., p. 55. 55 Ibid., p. 56. — 15 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Our collective practices, our community of interests, precede us, not in a deterministic way, rather in a shaping way; or, as Bourdieu explained: the singular habitus of members of the same class are united in a relationship of homology, that is, of diversity within homogeneity reflecting the diversity within homogeneity characteristic of their social conditions of production.56 That is, the individual is located within discernible social and historical regularities. ‘Personal’ style, the particular stamp marking all the products of the same habitus, whether practices or works, Bourdieu argued, is never more than a deviation in relation to the style of a period or class, so that it relates back to the common style … .57

However, in his comprehensive categorization of social spaces Bourdieu also stressed the singularity of their social trajectories, to which there correspond series of chronologically ordered determinations which are, in turn, mutually irreducible to each other.58 To meet

Paul Carter’s challenge of finding the historical spaces from which convict voices might be

‘heard’, it will be necessary to set the traces of the women’s individual social trajectories within the context of their habitus, discernible in social regularities, including beliefs and ways of perceiving and behaving evident in documents and cultural artefacts.

In further outlining how Bourdieu’s work contributes to a work in spatial history it is necessary to mention, at least briefly, the relationship between the concepts of habitus and field. Bourdieu loosely defined the latter as a vocation to which an appropriate habitus will allow tacit entry through a long dialectical process.59 That process enables an unthought commitment to the interests of the field. This is applicable to all fields, whether the field is

56 Ibid., p. 60. 57 Ibid., p. 60. 58 Ibid., p. 60. 59 Ibid., p. 67. — 16 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______an eighteenth century royal court, the law, politics, media, German philosophy, or academic disciplines in which traditions and conventions become definitive, ‘thinkable’, and in which there are deferrals to position and struggles to make explicit principles of vision and division, and to have them recognized as legitimate categories of construction of the social world.60 The field amounts to more than professional training; it includes the implicit

‘rules’, the tacit presuppositions which frame what is appropriate and ‘reasonable’.

Bourdieu used the extended metaphor of a feel for the game.61 Not that he meant anything light-hearted by the metaphor: every field, he said, tacitly ‘sanctions’ and ‘debars’ those who would destroy the game while operations of selecting and shaping new entrants (rites of passage, examinations, etc.), obtain undisputed, pre-reflexive, naïve, native compliance with the fundamental presuppositions of the field ….62 And so the boundaries of epistemologies, the ‘thinkable’, the ‘reasonable’, are institutionalized.

Considering that European philosophy was Bourdieu’s initial academic field and that he was familiar with Heidegger’s work, it is not surprising to find there are echoes of the tenets of spatial history in his concepts. Bourdieu, however, sought to explain the hidden, unconscious beliefs and presuppositions which maintain social and economic circumstances in terms of a continuous, unconscious conditioning that is exerted through conditions of existence, which carry the illusion of innateness.63 In this way, positions of wealth and power (and subjection) become reasonable, without being a product of

60 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Political Field, the Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field’, Chapter 2 in Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, edited by Rodney Benson, Erik Neveu (Polity Press 2005), p. 36. 61 Bourdieu, (1990), pp. 67-68, 81-82, 103-104. 62 Ibid., p. 68. 63 Ibid., p. 50. — 17 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______reasoned design, or rational calculation.64 Applying Bourdieu’s work to interpreting historical spaces of eighteenth century London clarifies how the ‘logic’ of social and economic conditions made it ‘reasonable’ for a workhouse committee to advise that poor children should have the fear of God before their eyes because they must be inured to labour, and thus become useful to their country.65 Even when poor children were allowed limited access to education, the prevailing argument was that they should have no more writing than would be useful in the meanest situation ….66 Understanding the function of such pre-suppositions, Bourdieu criticized the reliance on interviewing in ethnomethodology because these ‘hidden’ aspects of social spaces were beyond local consciousness: answers would offer the ‘taken for granted’. This position is illustrated through Bourdieu’s critique of Heidegger’s ontology in which he argued that because

Heidegger’s ontology was a product of prevailing Germanic philosophy and the popular

Zeitgeist,67 Heidegger’s taxonomies were based on ordinary class racism … likely to pass unnoticed before the eyes of a philosophy professor.68

In addition, Bourdieu criticized structural anthropologists’ epistemologies, arguing their collective categorizations reduced social relationships and regularities (as in kinship and marriage beliefs) to logical, closed practices. Mirroring Heidegger’s spatial metaphors, he likened the effects of structural anthropologists’ epistemologies to the geometrical space of a map, a representation of all possible routes for all possible subjects, which he contrasted

64 Ibid., p. 50. 65 Account of Several Workhouses, 2nd Ed (1732), p. ix, cited by M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 1st publ., 1925 (Academy Chicago Publishers 2000), p. 216. 66 A sermon by E. Pickard (for the benefit of the orphan Working School of Hoxton, erected the same year) (1760), p. 23, cited M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, (2000), p. 216. 67 Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford University Press 1991), pp, 6, 9-17, passim. 68 Bourdieu, ‘The Political Field, the Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field’ (2005), p. 38. — 18 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______with the network of pathways that are really maintained and used, ‘beaten tracks’ that are really practicable for a particular agent.69 Drawing a clear distinction between social regularities and rules, Bourdieu stressed the strategies which agents might be observed deploying within those social regularities, giving the example of the temporal freedom which could be exercised in the matter of gift-giving and the unspoken duties of reciprocation, loyalty and obligation (which he identified as a form of symbolic violence).70

Bourdieu argued that taking account of the temporal structure of practice function[s] … as a screen preventing totalization.71 Importantly his readings of structural anthropology led to his insistence on the need for a critical awareness of the epistemological effects of categories and of the role of the researcher. Such reflexiveness would offer the desired screen against totalization by acknowledging the indiscernible, the ambiguous and collective repressions, suppressions and illusions with which ethnologists and sociologists

— I would add spatial historians — inevitably work. That is, although Bourdieu used the term social spaces, rather than historical spaces, his epistemological categories offer productive ways of understanding past social spaces. Obviously, the historical data sources would be documents and artefacts, rather than the observable behaviours and artefacts of a contemporary community or culture.

So, Bourdieu’s work indicates that we are born into historical spaces, ways of behaving and thinking, and so into stories already partially told. From traces of the women’s individual social trajectories and historical regularities indicative of eighteenth century habitus and fields, I might fashion historical figures and associated narratives. Establishing the

69 Bourdieu, (1990), p. 35. 70 Ibid., p. 126-127. 71 Ibid., p. 107. — 19 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______epistemological value of those figures and narratives would be the challenge. Indirectly

Bourdieu’s work again is suggestive. He was concerned with what he called the ruinous and artificial divide between objectivism and subjectivism,72 arguing that the curse of objectivism is that it cannot include, in the model it produces to account for practice, the individual or collective, private or official, subjective illusion against which it has had to win its truth.73 Bourdieu’s statement indicating that ‘truth’ is inevitably circumscribed, rather than denied — or relative — suggests the value of designing an epistemological model which acknowledges in some way the problems of subjective illusions, not just of the researched, but of the researcher.

While illuminating central concerns of spatial history by positing how what is ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ are historically established and maintained, Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology also reinforces an obvious link between spatial history and ethnographic history.

Ethnographic history, like all ethnography, is concerned with networks of social and cultural meanings, relations and interests, in a specific location and a specific historical context. For Bourdieu the modes of exchanges in ‘space’ and ‘time’ which maintain a disposition inculcated in early education … [are] … constantly demanded and reinforced by the group, and inscribed in the postures and gestures of the body (in a way of using the body or the gaze, a way of talking, eating or walking) as in the automatisms of language and thought …74 Similarly, Alan Atkinson wrote that ethnographic history is highly

72 Ibid., p. 25. 73 Ibid., p. 107. 74 Ibid., p. 103. — 20 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______sensitive to nuances of gesture, habit, dress, and behaviour.75 Ethnographic history thus offers a way of reading the silences of past: there will be remnants, traces, from the margins which were the women’s historical spaces. Peter Burke advised that the researcher of ‘lost lives’ should take an oblique approach by exploring records of popular rituals, art, literature, newspapers and music as well as the laws set to circumscribe their behaviour.76

This is supported by Greg Dening’s defining the task as one founded on reading the status in a colour, authority in a shape, aesthetics in a form, technology in a structure, law and morality in property.77 He identified such reading, with what Gilbert Ryle called thick description.78

In his essay on ‘Thick Description’ Clifford Geertz began with Ryle’s distinction between thick description and thin description, citing Ryle’s illustrations of different ways of

‘describing’ a wink: a thin description would note a rapid movement of one eyelid. A thick description might note the wink was meant to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion; or that it was a burlesque of a friend faking a wink; or that it was a rehearsal for a fake wink.79 There are multiple ways a wink might mean, just as there are multiple meanings for why someone was arrested, or transported, or hanged — or burned.

The deceptive wink is a play of power at a petty individual level; a justice system is a

75Alan Atkinson, The Commonwealth of Speech: An Argument about Australia's Past, Present and Future (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2002), p. xv. 76 For an introduction to oblique methods of recovering and reconstructing lost lives see Peter Burke, 'Oblique Approaches to the History of Popular Culture', in Approaches to Popular Culture, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby (Bowling Green University Popular Press 1976), p.69-84. 77Greg Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge University Press 1993), p. 99. 78 Ibid., pp. 6-10. 79 See Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, Ch. 1, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1st publ., 1973 (Hutchinson 1975), p. 5-7.

— 21 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______demonstration of power at a social level. A thick description would aspire to account for the play of a culture’s multiple meanings. Two women, Mary Harrison and Charlotte

Springmore, throw acid on another woman’s cotton dress and they are transported. That is a thin description. It is what might be thought of as ‘fact’. What are the meanings secreted in those surface details? Were the women just abandoned characters, as the judge said? Why is the fabric of the dress mentioned? Why did a correspondent to The Times refer to the fabric as muslin? Was it significant that the accused were silk-winders and that the crime was committed in Catherine-Wheel-Alley, home to London’s impoverished silk-workers?

Were the women two prostitutes, frightening away competition? Such questions are a way of exploring the historical space, the cultural context in which the incident occurred.

Most recorded descriptions of England’s first Sydney Cove convicts are ‘thin’.

Enlightenment gentlemen usually gave judgments inflected by their own social background. So Surgeon Smyth wrote, This day Elizth. Evans miscarried.80 How might ‘the fact’ be transformed into a thick description, a description that was contextually nuanced?

In many ways thick description is the fiction writer’s modus operandi. It is probably why some writers of historical fiction have claimed historical veracity for their novels: they know their central concerns are the tensions of daily life, tensions arising from conflicting values and beliefs, and they know the centrality of the material world and that human relations are emotional, passionate. They understand the importance of historical space: the best fiction writers create the illusion of being-there. For example, reading Kate Grenville’s novel, The Secret River (Text Publishing 2005), can lead to an appreciation of the

80 Smyth (1979), p. 17. — 22 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______landscape and the ambiguities, conflicts and cruel passions of the colonial world along the

Hawkesbury River in Eastern New South Wales, in a way that reading a history text usually does not. The best fiction writers understand what Paul Carter called a community of historical interests;81 and they understand the points of conflict and disagreement, as well as the dynamics of intentions, and of the unconscious. In many ways the novelist’s interest in the depths and complexities of the social world is the lacuna of conventional historiography. But then, fiction has its own lacuna: frequently there is an omission of what

Derrida calls the Proper Name; and there is usually no referencing of the research. I might be absorbed in the fictional world, but that experience is emotional and aesthetic, not epistemological. It may not be fair to want all three features, but sometimes it would be satisfying to know what was made up for the sake of dramatic tension, and what might be verifiable, or at least have some identifiable ‘archival’ parameters — even in the broadest sense of the word ‘archival’.

These were issues raised by Ann Curthoys and John Docker in an article, in which they acknowledged that history and fiction have some similarities, noting that while there are historians who have been influenced by post-structural theories, nevertheless, [a]mongst those who see themselves as ‘working historians’ there continues to be little discussion of language, genre, or form and many historians cling to a transparent notion of writing remote from the way most other writers think about their craft.82 The authors also cited a number of experimental literary texts with disrupted chronologies, multiple viewpoints and

81 Carter (1988), p. 294. 82 Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Is History Fiction?’ in The UTS Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1996), pp.32-33. In their text of the same title, Is History Fiction? (University of New South Wales Press 2006) the authors contextualized the issues raised in this article within the history of historiographies, beginning with Herodotus. — 23 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______unreliable narrators, which critique the transparency of writing. These, they argued, have not been taken up by historians.

However, Curthoys and Docker did establish a boundary around the discipline of history.

They argued, after identifying a range of hybrid texts, some of which were historical in content, that these hybrid genres, lacking as they do a system or set of conventions for indicating how the stories they tell may relate to any historical sources, do not meet the needs of those of us who still want to write history. History as a cultural practice retains its specificity through its continuing relationship with sources, signalled by conventions of quotation and citation, which allow and invite someone else, a future historical interlocutor, to check and challenge those sources, and the use the historian has made of them.83

Now, as the boundary has been specified, there is the possibility of maintaining it, respecting it, while introducing elements from the poetics of fiction, so that an ethnographic, or spatialized, history might be used as the basis for a dramatic contextualizing of the lost lives of the convict women. From that dramatized context, traces of the women’s speaking and signifying might echo. The resulting hybridized text would necessarily include a system, or set of conventions, for indicating how the stories are related to historical sources. Unlike traditional historical fiction, such a text would make archival records available to others, and whatever transformations the future might make of them.

83 Curthoys and Docker, ‘Is History fiction?’ (1996), p. 34. — 24 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Contravening the assumptions of traditional historiography and the conventions of historical fiction, this unthinkable history would be within the genre of fictocriticism.

Fictocriticism, often seen as a product of feminism with which the names of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous are associated, is the hybridizing of fiction and theory. Through that hybridization, the silences, the prejudices, of academic writing, its concerns and conventions, its disembodied, omniscient voice, have been scrutinized, tested, evaluated and its parameters, if not transformed, at least breached. In some academic research, the subjective and corporeal have been acknowledged, although such work is probably still resisted, marginalized. This is not surprising, considering the advent of fictocriticism was an engagement with the unthinkable: it was demonstrably a refusal to submit to the given order. The richness of fictocritical possibilities is suggested in Amanda Nettelbeck’s definition: Fictocriticism might most usefully be defined as hybridized writing that moves between the poles of fiction (‘invention’/ ‘speculation’) and criticism (‘deduction/

‘explication’), of subjectivity (‘interiority’) and objectivity (‘exteriority’). It is writing that brings the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’ together, not simply in the sense of placing them side by side, but in the sense of mutating both, of bringing the spotlight to bear upon the known forms in order to make them ‘say’ something else.84 To this complex genre I am proposing to include features of historiography (‘evidence’/ ‘interpretation’).

Because a fictocritical historiography would include the element of subjectivity (interiority) it is well suited to disrupting the transparent notion of writing to which, as Curthoys and

84 Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Notes Towards an Introduction’, in The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism, edited by Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettelbeck (University of Western Australia Press 1998), pp.3-4. — 25 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Docker regretfully noted, many historians cling. Further, fictocriticism is a particularly appropriate genre because its self-conscious flexibility opens dialogic and heteroglossic possibilities: it allows for the inclusion of multiple perspectives, beyond usual historiographical conventions; it allows for my use of quotations to introduce and conclude chapters in the manner of a Greek chorus. As chapter introductions, the ‘chorus’ offers traces of sources which influenced the content of a chapter, thus suggesting a reading orientation. Those which conclude chapters are often elaborations, or representative of contrary positions. They function as signs to unanswered questions, to what is unsaid, to an excess of sources against which the shape of the narrative has been drawn. They are open edges in the text. As Susan Hawthorne said, When you have something different to say then you are forced to say it in different ways and so you have to seek out a form that’s going to suit your needs, suit the needs of the text and of the content and the themes that you’re dealing with.85

The flexibility of fictocritical historiography offers a way of showing how the assemblage of historical evidence is a creative, selective, act. It thus disrupts the writing conventions, noted by Curthoys and Docker, and by Keith Jenkins, which suggest an actual correspondence between historiography and a separate non-historiographical constituted past..86 That is, it has the potential to disrupt what Roland Barthes identified as the reality effect of traditional historical writing.87 And it has the potential to disrupt what Catherine

Waldby identified as the assumption that the scholar is simply a properly trained mind,

85 Susan Hawthorne, ‘Interview with Susan Hawthorne’, in Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women Writers, edited by Alison Bartlett, (Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1998), p. 225. 86 Keith Jenkins, On What is History? From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (Routledge 1995), p.11 87 Roland Barthes, ‘Historical Discourse’ (1967/1970), p. 154. — 26 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______unlocated in the specific historical experience and social position of a sexed, classed or racially marked body. The device of the bodiless scholar allows knowledge the apparent ability to transcend any particular point of view and the limits of any particular experience.88

Of course, historians have taken into account Barthes’ critique, and Hayden White’s explication of how emplotments based on the rhetorical structures and tropes of fictional narratives have given coherence to historical arguments; at the same time, historians remain

alert to any hint of a conflation of novelistic fiction and historiography which might endanger the credibility, of historians’ work.89 Disquiet over such conflation has been evident since the publication of Sophia Lee’s gothic tale, The Recess: Or a Tale of Other

Times (1785). Lee’s narrative, about fictional twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots, brought up in chambers beneath a ruined abbey, unaware of their identity, is credited with having launched historical gothic fiction in England.90 What some critics consider innovative about Lee’s novel was that for the first time, the data of Gothic romance are successfully blended with the facts of history.91 At the time of the novel’s publication, a reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine noted that the peculiarities of Elizabeth and James

88 Catherine Waldby, ‘Feminism and Method’, in Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, edited B. Caine and R. Pringle (Allen & Unwin 1995), p. 17, cited by Alison Bartlett in ‘Dear Regina: Formative Conversations About Feminist Writing’, FemTAP: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Practice (Summer 2006), http://www.femtap.com/id14.html. 89 As indicated in Footnotes 21 and 22, p. 9, above, historians fear that the discipline is endangered by what many of them understand as ‘post-modern’ positions which would allow them no recourse against those who might, for example, deny the Holocaust in Europe; or the horrors of white colonists’ treatments of the Indigenous populations of Australia. 90 See April Alliston, ‘Introduction’, Sophia Lee, The Recess: Or a Tale of Other Times, edited by April Alliston, 1st publ., 1785 (University Press of Kentucky 2000), p. xxxix, End Note, 14. 91 J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘Preface’ to Sophia Lee’s, The Recess, edited with Introduction by Devendra Varma (Arno Press 1972), pp. iv-v, cited by April Alliston (2000), p. xxxix, End Note, 14. Tompkins’ unqualified use of the phrase, facts of history, has to be viewed as naïve; however, the author is noting that Lee was respected for the way she drew upon acknowledged historical sources. Alliston argues those sources were evaluated in terms of characterization rather than incident. — 27 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______are not delineated with more exactness in [David] Hume [1711-1776] and [William]

Robertson [1721-1793]. However, the reviewer also noted that he could not entirely approve the custom of interweaving fictitious incident with historic truth.92 And so began the tension between ‘history’ and fiction, and the fear that fiction would contaminate historic truth.

History, as a discipline, may now, generally, be accepted as a non-teleological epistemology, and the transparency of facts may have been questioned; but that does not make it fiction. Of history as a non-teleological epistemology, Tim Hitchcock wrote, [t]his does not mean an abandonment of the attempt to accurately depict what we can know of the past, but it does recognise that each depiction is partial and distorted.93 Further, historiography’s ethical and philosophical roles are more crucial than ever, because its domain is the relationship of the past, present and future. Paul Carter suggested that history is about our future: how we remember the past invents (his word) who we are becoming.94

Walter Benjamin, a witness to the horrors of the Nazi regime, identified the role of history with grasping a moment of danger.95 Remembering the past, the nature of our historiographies, is ethically charged.

Thus, in setting out to meet Paul Carter’s challenge, I am not claiming that historical fiction is historiography; and I understand Inga Clendinnen’s stricture that historians can’t do

92 Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, Part 1 (April 1786) p. 327, cited by April Alliston, ‘Introduction’, Sophie Lee, The Recess (1785/2000), pp. pp. xvi. Again, it is important to note that in the eighteenth century historical writing was judged on the veracity of characterizations, rather than accuracy of incidents. See Footnote 91 above. 93 Tim Hitchcock (2004), p. 234. 94 Carter (1988), pp. 294-295. 95 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Theses II, translated by Dennis Redmond, 2005, first written 1940, Walter Benjamin Archive, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. — 28 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______conversation at all.96 However, Clendinnen does concede that historians occasionally compose monologues out of formal speeches or secret diaries. In eighteenth century archives there are records of courtroom exchanges, depositions, journals and letters, which might be contextualized as ‘memories’, or presented dramatically, which would be to write from the border of historiography and the poetics of fiction. Clendinnen warns that this

‘border’ is a ravine, because of the moral issues at stake in the different ways fictions and histories are read.97 A text written from this border thus requires new ways of reading.

Iain McCalman was surprised when a reviewer criticized him for inventing conversation in his historical narrative, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro, (Random House 2003), because those conversations were drawn from records, their sources discreetly hidden at the end of the book.98 McCalman’s experience is one of the reasons I have used italics to clearly signal conversations, phrases and words, which have been derived from archival sources, such as depositions, transcripts of trials and eighteenth century letters. Further, from their blackened, shrivelled and fused edges, it was apparent that some of the convict archival records have been unopened since they were filed in the eighteenth century, and identifying them graphically within the narrative was a way of honouring the women’s memories by making the documentation of their lives available for other researchers.

Contrary to usual conventions, citations from historiographies are also marked by italics, partly to maintain a narrative flow, and partly to indicate a close dialogic relationship between the emergent narrative and my sources. On the other hand, fictionalized speech,

96 Inga Clendinnen, ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’ (2006), p. 18. 97 Ibid., p. 34. 98 Iain McCalman (2004), p. 157. — 29 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______invented within parameters of ethnographic research, and my contemporary personal exchanges, are identified by quotation marks.

Original archival research and extensive historical and philosophical reading, italicized, referenced and footnoted, are the foundation of this unthinkable history. They have been combined with aspects of narrative fiction as a way of exploring the affective dynamics of the convict women’s cultural and social contexts: the historical spaces, into which they were born. This affective space, or more rightly spaces, suppressed by Enlightenment logic, inevitably includes point of view which is an important element in the grammar of fiction. It is also a way, perhaps paradoxically, of following Carter’s advice that we should, unlike their judges and guards, assume the convicts were rational. Point of view allows the exploration of reasons, of motivations, and of the emotions and necessities which shaped them. Point of view is about intentions, both conscious and unconscious.

This is to extend Tim Hitchcock’s methods of recasting the conundrum of fictionality as part of the solution to those problems which literary critiques have caused for historians. It is also to enter what Javier Marías, echoing Shakespeare, called the dark back of time, an impossible place of people and things that disappear or never appear and yet are known because they have been spoken of.99 For the first women convicts to New South Wales being spoken of, as Paul Carter argued, usually meant being decried as prostitutes by the male journal writers of the first fleet. Beyond that there was little more than the storing of facts (names, ages, crimes, depositions, trials and sentences) in archive records which hide

99 Javier Marías, Dark Back of Time, translated by Esther Allen (Chatto and Windus and Vintage 2004), p. 333. — 30 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______more than they reveal. Who were they, those one hundred and ninety three women, and how might the traces of their voices and lives be recovered? Then, perhaps ‘recovered’ was not the right word. Surely there is something intractable about the past, something resistant to any form of ‘recovery’.

Undaunted by that semantic barrier, and inspired by Amitav Ghosh’s belief that every life leaves behind an echo that is audible to those who take the trouble to listen,100 I accepted

Paul Carter’s impossible challenge of exploring the erasures which shadow words. So I would ultimately succumb to the enticement of a forever receding horizon,101 seeking traces of the women’s lives as they flickered like phantasms, like holograms, from cultural artifacts and small historical traces, pursuing them into the silences, the vanishing points, of records; and so into that dark back of time, a labyrinthine place of the revenant: the ghost, the returned. It was to be, as Jacques Derrida would have warned me, a place of mourning.

And it is the place of mourning, encountered in the impossible silences of the past, in the intractability of absences, which impels the desire to make stones speak,102 as Derrida noted in his meditation on the nature of archive fever.

100 Amitav Ghosh, ‘Author’s Notes’, in The Glass Palace (Harper Collins Publishers 2001), p. 552. 101 A foundational metaphor used in spatial history. It is drawn from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of history and his complex and difficult exploration of the nature of Dasein and temporality: future, past and present. For an introduction to Heidegger’s concept of the horizon see Barbara Dalle Pezze, ‘Heidegger on Gelassenheit’, Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10 (2006), pp 104-111, http://www.mic.ul.ie/stephen/vol10/Heidegger.pdf. (Gelassenheit: meditative thinking, openness to the mystery, openness to where the dialogue leads, non-calculative thinking.) 102 Derrida was meditating upon Freud’s psychoanalytical reading of the delusions of the archaeologist, Hanold, a character in the novel, Gravida: A Fancy, by Wilhelm Jensen. Derrida was exploring what Hanold’s delusions about a buried woman in Pompey meant for researching the trace, the archive, and what Freud’s analysis meant for the concept of archivization. (This is to grossly over simplify). See the chapter, ‘Theses’, in Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz, originally published as Mal d'Archive: une impression freudienne (Editions Galilee 1995), translation first published in Diacritics, Summer 1995 (University of Chicago Press 1996), pp. 83-95. — 31 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

There is much about making stones speak, albeit without just making it up, in this unthinkable history. As such, it is an experiment in finding an ethical approach to remembering the convict women which will give readers a deeper understanding of their lives, in ways which conventional historiography usually does not allow. Foundational to the experiment is acknowledgement of the impassable barrier, the aporia, which crosses all research.103 The aporia is not a cause, Derrida said, for the paralysis of scepticism or relativism; rather, acknowledging the aporia carries the promise of the future, allowing a passion for the im/possible, not as the opposite of possible but as the trace of the possible which haunts the impossible. This Derrida identified as what Nietzsche called the "maybe”

… … [which] would not be merely empirical.104

For over two centuries, Western historians, wary of contaminating historiography with fiction, have resisted going beyond the ‘empirical’, have set barriers around archival silences, arguing that they cannot go beyond what is known. But perhaps they have set epistemological barriers which are unnecessary, and may even allow injustices to prevail in our academic remembering. For example, Tim Hitchcock suggests that many eighteenth century sources have been used to create new information while at the same time they distance us from the humanity of the people being studied.105

103 A sound definition of the meanings and etymology of aporia is given by Graham Allen, University of Cork, ‘Aporia’, The Literary Encyclopedia (20 July 2005), The Literary Dictionary Company, (15 January 2008), http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1578. 104 Explorations of the play of the im/possible at the deepest levels of human experiences and relationships, such as forgiveness, the gift, hospitality and mourning are central to Jacques Derrida’s philosophical work and feature in one form or another many different books, articles and interviews. An accessible summation is to be found in Jacques Derrida, ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, translated by Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry Vol. 33, No. 2, 1st. publ. in French, 2003 (Winter 2007), pp. 441-461. 105 Hitchcock (2004), p. 237. — 32 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

So that we might be brought closer to the humanity of the women of the ‘first fleet’, the aspiration of this unthinkable history, this exploration of the “maybe”, is an experiment with ways of transgressing the discursive regularities of historiography, regularities which

Michel Foucault identified as the episteme: discursive practices, sets of relations and articulations which give rise to epistemological figures in a given era.106 The episteme, as

Foucault explicates it, is a constantly moving set of articulations, shifts, and coincidences that are established, only to give rise to others.107

The method used in this experiment owes much to Gilles Deleuze’s reversal of Platonic philosophy. Thus, the main trope which emphasises the “maybe”, the aporia, is that of the simulacrum. The simulacrum is not the copy of a model, or even of a false model; rather,

Deleuze argued, it places in question the very notations of copy and model,108 because it is built upon difference, while producing an effect of resemblance.109 Plato sought to identify, and exile, false copies, simulacra understanding them as illusions, phantasms, deceiving shadows; whereas Deleuze argued that simulacra harbour a positive power because they rupture the possibility of representation as identity.110 The trope of the simulacrum is a way of including what Bourdieu called subjective illusions in my epistemological model. Or, as

Deleuze explained, simulacra are constructions which include the angle of the observer, so that illusion is produced at the very point at which the observer is found … It is not really

106 This is an oversimplified summary of what is an illuminating concept. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse of Language, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books 1972), pp. 190-192. 107 Ibid., p. 192. 108 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy: Plato and the Simulacrum ‘, in The Logic of Sense, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, 1st publ., 1990 (Continuum 2004), p. 294. See also, pp 291-301, for Deleuze’s critique of Plato’s determination to separate essences from appearances and models from false copies (simulacra). 109 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1990/2004), p. 95. 110 Ibid., p. 299. — 33 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______on the status of nonbeing that the accent is placed, but rather on the slight gap, this slight distortion of the real image, which happens at the point of view occupied by the observer, and makes possible the constitution of the simulacrum … 111

The simulacrum is a costume, as Deleuze says of Nature: it is a Harlequin’s cloak, made of solid patches and empty spaces, in which the parts cannot be totalized.112 The solid patches of this narrative are based on archival research and extensive historical reading, which locate it at the boundary of historiography. So, too, the empty spaces are ‘cloaked’, with equally carefully referenced philosophical and ethnographic reading; that is, with the oblique method of ‘thick descriptions’ based on the cultural dynamics of specific historical spaces: on the markers of status and power; on what was valued by whom and why; on what and who were shunned, despised and controlled, by whom and why. Simulacra are, as

Deleuze would argue, surfaces and linkages, assembled from multiplicities, which might be re-assembled with other linkages.113 Rather than being illusions simulacra are the cloak, the masque, of absences, phantasms, drawn from the layered shadows of words, landscapes and buildings; and the tensions and detours of obsessive searching: of desire.114 Simulacra identify the point on the horizon, upon which the observer pivots; or, as Deleuze said, the observer becomes part of the simulacrum itself.115

111 Deleuze’s quotation is from X. Audouard, ‘Le Simulacre’ in Cahiers pour l’analyse, No. 3, see Deleuze, (2004), Note 5, p. 317. 112 Ibid., p. 304. 113 These concepts are also derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who also use the trope of the rhizome, which has no beginning or end, to suggest heterogeneity, and open-endedness, which are features of my nomadic narrative. Deleuze and Guattari wrote lengthily, and obscurely, on rhizomes, assemblages, surfaces, linkages, multiplicities. Probably, their most accessible introductory explanations can be found in the work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1st publ., 1987 (Continuum 2004), pp. 4, 7, 8-11. See, too, their leaning towards multiple narratives, like plateaus of variable dimensions which they contrast to sedentary history which follows unitary State apparatus, p. 25. 114 Ibid., p. 440. Deleuze and Guattari suggest assemblages are compositions of desire. 115 Deleuze (1990/2004), p. 296; see, too, Note 5, p. 317. — 34 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Not knowing what to do does not mean that we have to rely on ignorance and to give up knowledge and consciousness. A decision, of course, must be prepared as far as possible by knowledge, by information, by infinite analysis. At some point, however, for a decision to be made you have to go beyond knowledge, to do something that you don’t know, something which does not belong to, or is beyond, the sphere of knowledge. Jacques Derrida116

*

116 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by R. Kearney and M. Dooley (Routledge 1999), p. 66, cited by Mark Mason, ‘Exploring 'the Impossible': Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and the Philosophy of History’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Vol. 10, No. 4 (December 2006), p. 508. — 35 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 3

Vignettes — Selected Introductions

*

As their self-appointed interpreters, we must try to understand what our historical subjects were about, to grasp their intended meanings and unintended effects, to comprehend their contexts and subjectivities, to enter their world. But we need to write about our subjects in this world … Paradoxically, historians are required to make sense of the difference and strangeness of people in the past through a process of identification. Marilyn Lake117

*

Available records show the women plied trades and crafts, that they were weavers, glove- makers, silk winders, mantua-makers and milliners. We know they were servants, mid- wives, mothers, lovers and spouses; and that they were city girls and country girls, like

Sarah Bellamy, who would one day ensure that her children were taught to read. The youngest female convict was an apprenticed clog-maker, Elizabeth Hayward.118 She was thirteen years old when she embarked on the Lady Penrhyn, a few months older than Jane

Austen, who had recently returned to the Rectory at Steventon from the Abbey School at

Reading with its monastery ruins haunted by King John’s grandchildren, unearthed skeletons and the shrivelled hand said to be that of St James the Apostle.119

117 Marilyn Lake, ‘History and Politics’ in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, edited by Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne University Press 2004), p. 95. 118 OBPOnline, 10 January 1787, trial of Elizabeth Hayward, Sarah Phillips otherwise Constant, theft: simple grand larceny: receiving stolen goods, Ref: t17870110-60. 119 David Nokes, Jane Austen (Fourth Estate 1997), p. 83. — 36 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

In London Elizabeth Needham, yet another Elizabeth — for the names repeat, chiming and echoing, confounding the mind — grew up within the family of Lady Charlotte Finch, governess to the royal children. ‘I can see her as a child standing in Kew Palace Gardens watching the royal children, princesses and princes, tending their wheat garden or playing hockey or cricket,’120 I told my husband, for we would often find our conversations turning to my research. He had laughed. ‘Cricket? You’re going to write about cricket?’ We both laughed. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Well, Lady Charlotte’s son, George would have taught the children how to play cricket.’ Many years later Elizabeth told Lady Elizabeth Macarthur that George Finch, Fourth Earl of Nottingham and Ninth Earl of Winchilsea, was her foster brother… that she was born in the family, brought up in it and remained until some unhappy occurrence led her astray …121

Like Elizabeth Needham, Isabella Rosson, a laundress at Gray’s Inn, could write as well as read, and with her husband she began the first school in the colony. An examination of significant dates in the records of her trial reveals she was trapped by pregnancy;122 it was too common a story. Her day would have begun soon after midnight, carrying water, setting the great coppers, soaking clothes and at times filtering urine through ash to make the essential lye, or buck-wash.123 Then there was Ann Smith, a nurse, a feisty determined woman who always intended to escape, and did so; although her fate, thereafter is unknown. An old offender, the judge said, sentencing her to transportation for purloining a

120 Jill Shefrin, Such Constant Affectionate Care: Lady Charlotte Finch: Royal Governess and the Children of George III (The Cotsen Occasional Press 2003), p. 64. 121 Mollie Gillen (1989), p. 263. 122 OBPOnline, 10 January 1787, trial of Isabella Rosson theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17870110-72. 123 For sketches of typical laundry duties see Bridget Hill Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth Century England, 1st publ., 1989 (McGill-Queen’s University Press 1994), pp. 110-112, 155-160. The latter pages are particularly informative. — 37 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______pewter mug worth sixpence from a tavern.124 A name search through the Old Bailey

Proceedings Online does show that Ann Smith had appeared before that judge, James

Adair, Recorder of London, on previous occasions — and before several other judges as well. She was incorrigible. A search also suggests she had a suspicious connection with organized pewter robberies, probably in company with her family. When Ann Smith was given fresh slops125 before disembarking at Port Jackson, she threw them on the deck and stamped on them.126 Shortly afterwards, meaning to escape, this Ann Smith, for there were three convicts of that name, apparently made her way back to Botany Bay where Captain

La Pérouse’s French ships had anchored.127

Of a different story was a young Irish woman from Dublin, Hannah Mullens, or so she was indicted, although in the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages her first name was variously registered as Ann (on her marriage record, 22 February 1788),

Anna (when she witnessed the marriage of another couple, 26 February 1792) and then in the records of the children’s births and baptisms she was Ann, Hannah, Johanna and

Joannah.128 Another variation was ‘Susannah’ which was most probably a mistake.129 It appeared in an advertisement requesting anyone with claims against the family to present

124 OBPOnline, 30 August 1786, trial of Ann Smith theft: petty larceny, Ref: t17860830-49. Note: There are two other women by the name of Ann Smith transported on the ‘first fleet’; one was sentenced in Winchester; the other was sentenced with Catherine Johnson, at the Old Bailey, April 1787 and embarked on the Prince of Wales. The Ann Smith who sailed on the Lady Penrhyn is the one who is likely to have been associated with several pewter robberies. 125 Slops: clothes 126 Smyth (1979), p. 66. 127 The two French ships came into Botany Bay 26 January 1788 and departed 9 March. 128 See respectively, NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages: marriage of Charles Peat and Ann Mullan (sic), Reg. No. V178829 4/1788; marriage of Thomas Allan and Elizabeth Saverne (recorded as Saverne, but probably Taverner); birth of Charles Peat, Reg. No V178982/1789; birth of Nancy Peat, Reg. No. V1791182/1791; birth of Mary Peat, Reg. No. V1792162 4/1792; birth of George Peat, Reg. No. V1794251 4/1794; birth of William Peat, Reg. No. V1799801 1A/1799; birth of Elizabeth Peat, Reg. No. V1797642 1A/1797; second birth registration of Elizabeth Peat, Reg. No. V1797479 4/1797. 129 See Gillen (1989), p. 280. — 38 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______themselves because the couple and their son, William, were permanently leaving the colony for India.130 In the play of names there might be heard the flickering ghost of an Irish accent confusing the listener. Then I recalled how ‘pet’ names flourished in my own family.

At different times and with different friends and relatives I have been Noni, Joanne, Joanna,

Jo and Polly. The last was the name used by my father. These variations were according to something in excess of an official identification which was given by my mother; or so I think Derrida would explain it.131 It seems to be what informed his position on

“signatures”, which he conflated with the proper name, suggesting that “signature” was perhaps best left in the plural, as recognition of the secret multiplicity of the self.132

So even after the identity of a figure has been established, names multiply, obfuscating the way of those researching the past. At times, facing the multiplicities and transformations of names was like being confused in a mirror maze; yet to enter that maze was to enter a special kind of archive in which small narratives are secreted.

It was not surprising that the surname of the woman indicted as Hannah Mullens was also unstable. It was registered as Mullan when she married Charles Peat,133 a polite highwayman who, according to his prosecutor, behaved with remarkable civility, asking for

130 Gillen wrote that Charles Peat is believed to have gone to India where he died on 1 June 1813 at Calcutta. His son George Peat remained in Sydney, an owner and master of colonial vessels, a shipwright in 1828, he died in 1870, see Gillen (1989), p.280. 131 See Thomas Dutoit’s comments on the various senses of “sur-naming’ and “re-naming”[which were] part of the task of translating and reading the three essays that make up On the Name, in Thomas Dutoit, ‘Translating the Name’ in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford University Press 1995), pp. xi-xii. 132 I think this is a fair summary of a position held by Derrida. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering”’, in Jacques Derrida, On the Name (1995), p. 3. 133 See Registry of NSW Births Deaths and Marriages, Marriage of Charles Peat and Ann Mullan, Reg. No. V178829 4/1788 (Footnote 128, p. 38, above). The marriage which took place 22 February 1788 was thus one of the earliest in New South Wales. See Gillen (1989), p. 280. — 39 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the contents of the purse he had taken while returning it to its owner saying, if you value your purse, you will please to take it back.134 Thereafter his story was convoluted with dramas, beginning with a death sentence, a reprieve, further arrests and involvement in a convict mutiny on the Mercury voyaging to America. The twists of his story also highlight the instability of names: at one of his trials Justice Rose said to the Jury, Gentlemen, in favour of the prisoner's life, it is very fair to presume that prisoners take many names, and we may very fairly presume that another man of the name of Charles Peat has been tried at the sessions.135 However, in spite of the Not Guilty verdict which followed that trial, in later Old Bailey Supplementary Materials, 23 February 1785, Peat was listed with those whose transportation destination was changed from America to Africa.136 There are no records of an intervening trial.

At her Old Bailey trial Hannah Mullens was sentenced to death for fraud: she forged a sailor’s will; or rather, she presented a forged will to claim the sailor’s pay, for at that time she could neither read nor write.137 That she could not write is verified by the use of her mark at the registration of her marriage to Charles Peat, 22 February 1788.138 However, by

26 December 1792 Hannah Mullens had at least learned to sign her name, for on that day she and her husband were witnesses to a marriage.139 The name she chose, in what seems to

134 OBPOnline, 5th December, 1781 trial of Charles Peat theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17811205-1. 135 OBPOnline, 7 July 1784, trial of Charles Peat, miscellaneous: returning from transportation, Ref: t17840707-6. 136 OBPOnline, 23rd February, 1785, Supplementary Material: Trial Summary, Ref: s17850223-1. 137 OBPOnline, 26 Apr 1786 trial of Hannah otherwise Hannah Mullens [as indicted], deception: fraud, Ref: t17860426-10. 138 Gillen (1989), Signature 53, p. 555. 139 See Footnote 128, p. 38 above. Also see Gillen (1989); see Signatures 146, Gillen (1989), p. 562. Note Gillen transcribes the signature of Saverne as Taverner, (p. 567). It would be difficult to be certain whose transcription is the accurate one. I am inclined towards ‘Taverner’. — 40 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______be the one surviving example of her signature, was ‘Anna’; and for that reason I have favoured the name ‘Anna’, rather than ‘Hannah’ for the woman indicted as Hannah

Mullens: ‘Anna’ is the name of the face which smiles over the signature of ‘Anna Peat’ on a friend’s wedding day at Sydney Cove, 26 December 1792.

We have no visual images, no portraits or sketches of Anna Mullens/Peat and her husband, and yet their relationship flickers across the transition from her mark to her signature.

There would have been his demonstrations, his simplification of letters on a horn-book model (remembered or on the table before them), followed by his observations as he bent over his wife’s shoulder, frowning, nodding approval, encouraging, his cheek close against her hair. In Anna’s signature we can still read the tension of muscle and tendon and the careful movement of the hand, for the traces of bodily pressure are visible on the page with the thickening of ink in the formation of the ‘P’, and the almost blot at the base of the ‘t’.

There is, too, a small tilde-like flourish marking the precise crossing of the ‘t’ which hints at the lift of her hand, the raising of eyes, the indrawn breath of satisfaction: a moment of small pleasure. Javier Marías writes of handwriting as the voice that speaks:140 the marks of

Anna Peat’s moving hand upon the page leave a palpable sense of her passing.

This is the same woman who spent months in a capital cell with her three-year-old daughter. What might Anna have said about those months in a tiny cell in Newgate under sentence of death? About her life in the Irish rookeries of St Giles-in-the-Fields where she lived at the time of her arrest? And about her companion in the cells and at trial, Phoebe

140 Javier Marías, Dark Back of Time, (2004), p. 126. — 41 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Harris, having been burnt at the stake for coining?141 At least five times she and little Mary

– Mary Óg, in Irish – would have awakened at midnight to the bellman slowly ringing his handbell twenty times142 and chanting as, accompanied by a phantom black dog, he paced outside the cells and in the streets: All you that in the condemned hold do lie/ Prepare you, for tomorrow you will die …!143

*

Dorothy Handland was intriguing too. Surgeon Bowes Smyth recorded her age as eighty- two in his muster list made at the beginning of the voyage,144 and yet she returned to

England on the Kitty in 1793. The Judge Advocate, David Collins, wrote that she … had

not a doubt of weathering Cape Horn.145 ‘Mrs Handland must have been as tough as old boots,’ I had told my husband as he set a ritual cup of tea on my desk. ‘One of the witnesses for her prosecution said she always called herself a woman of great spirit.’146

Robert Hughes thought that in a fit of befuddled despair, she was to hang herself from a

141 OBPOnline, 26 April 1786 trial of Joseph Yelland, otherwise Holman, Phebe Harris, Elizabeth Yelland, offences against the king: coining, Ref: t17860426-9). Note: Phoebe Harris was indicted as Phebe, both spellings are used in other documents. 142 Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (Faber and Faber 1997), p. 12. 143 These lines are from a verse the bellman repeated three times as he paced outside the condemned cells at midnight ringing the 'execution bell'. The bell was also rung through neighbouring streets and prior to services for condemned prisoners. A merchant tailor, Robert Dowe, gave £40 to the parish in 1605 to ensure that this was done, in the hope that the prisoners would seek redemption. See Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, ‘St. Sepulchre’s and its Neighbourhood: Condemned Prayer,’ Old and New London, Vol. 2, (1878), pp. 477- 491, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45116. 144 Smyth (1979), p. 6. Note: She was indicted as Dorothy Handland, 22 February 1786, OBPOnline, Ref: t17860222-131; but indicted as Dorothy Henly in the prior trial, 14 December 1785, OBPOnline, Ref: t17851214-47, from which the 1786 charge arose. Also known as Mrs Grey/Gray: the name of her first husband. See Footnote 481, p. 197 below for further explanation of this woman’s various names. 145 David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, With Remarks on the Disposition Customs, Manners, etc, of the Native Inhabitants of the Country, Vol. 1, 1st publ., 1798, edited by Brian H. Fletcher (A. H. Reed and A. W. Reed in assoc. with the Royal Australian Historical Society 1975), p. 244. 146 See OBPOnline, 22 February 1786, trial of Dorothy Handland; see Footnote 144, above. — 42 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______gum tree at Sydney Cove. He wrote that she was Australia’s first recorded suicide.147 It was not so: she disembarked at the Nores, an anchorage at the mouth of the Thames,148 17

February, 1794, after a very tedious passage. The Captain was forced to detour to the Cove of Cork (5 February 1794) because there was not another days supply of provisions on the ship.149

And then, there was Susannah Trippet. Late in August 1786, the time of St Bartholomew’s

Fair, at two o’clock in the morning (the watchman was crying the hour), Susannah sashayed towards a man coming through St Margaret’s Church Yard, behind Westminster

Abbey. And then she paused, all enticement, on a path shadowed by angel wings, saying,

My dear are you going home without a sweetheart?150 She stole his watch. Just imagine her, back scraping on a tombstone, marble angels glistening, as she slipped away his watch while he struggled with his erection — he was almost certainly drunk at that hour. Perhaps she thought he would try to escape without paying, in which case she had the protection of three male friends. One of them came to her aid when she called, and she passed the watch to him. In court, her prosecutor actually said that he believed he might make free with her; however, that did not weaken his prosecution; and so Susannah was transported for seven years.

147 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (Collins Harvill 1987), p. 73. 148 Peter Kemp (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (Oxford University Press 1979), p. 601. 149 See Copies of Despatches to Governor Phillip 1792-1794 (Official Letter Book), PRO 3555, Naval Office, PRO T1/ 718-733, pp. 128, 129, 130 (list of those on board the Kitty, 5 Feb, 1794 and at the Nores, p. 198). 150 See OBPOnline, 30 August 1786, trial of Susannah Trippett: theft: pick-pocketing Ref: t17860830-43. — 43 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Not to be forgotten was Mary Pile from Bethnal Green, a cross-dressing female highwayman, or so she was designated in her indictment.151 Late one spring evening, wearing her brother’s clothes on a return journey to her parents’ tavern, The Five Bells, she spent the night at The Plough, Mile End, paying sixpence to share a male lodger’s bed. This was a common arrangement: the man had informed the inn keeper’s wife that if she was straitened for beds, she might put a decent person into my bed. Mary Pile arose early to return home. When Mary’s night-time companion awoke he claimed the ‘gentleman’ had stolen his property and later prosecuted Mary for theft, for which she was sentenced to transportation to Africa: a virtual death sentence. Admittedly, the theft of twenty-nine shillings and sixpence was not a small amount and there must have been some reason for

Mary Pile having been identified as the female highway man when her indictment was read; yet I was dubious about her prosecutor. My doubts were confirmed when a name search of the Old Bailey Proceedings revealed he had later prosecuted another woman, using the same story he had used in his prosecution of Mary Pile; namely, that he had not the least suspicion about the woman’s restless behaviour in the night.152

*

Mary Harrison, the silk-winder already mentioned, also compelled my attention, partly because she had chosen not to leave her fifteen year old son in London when, with a companion silk-winder, Charlotte Springmore, she was transported to Botany Bay for throwing acid on another woman’s dress. The Court interpreted the act as a matter of

151 The name is sometimes given as Piles, although the woman was indicted as Pile, see OBPOnline, 6 April 1785, trial of Mary Pile, theft: burglary, Ref: t17850406-68. 152 OBPOnline, 9 January 1788, trial of Eleanor Hinton, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17880109-52. — 44 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______rivalry between prostitutes;153 but surely there was more to the story, something silenced in that prosecution which vibrated with the long and difficult history of London’s silk workers. I returned to the Old Bailey transcript of their trial. Seeking what was unsaid, I followed the women under the sign of The Black Swan, a gin shop in Rose Lane. Why should anyone believe that a woman would be carrying a slop bason of acid on her way for an evening gin? Afterwards I found that some sixty years previously throwing acid on gowns of printed calico and imported silk had been practised by silk workers because they had been impoverished by low import tariffs on silks and the production of cheap printed calico. After a series of petitions, riots and repressions, the silk workers’ actions and desperation achieved the 1721 Act which protected them from cheap imports.154

*

Weavers Riots: Large numbers of Huguenots took part in a demonstration by 4,000 Spitalfields weavers in the city this year. Women wearing India calicoes and linens were attacked and doused with ink, aqua fortis [nitric acid] and other liquids. The Annals of London (1719)155

The wicked practice of burning muslin, cotton, and linen gowns, has not subsided. On Sunday and Monday evenings several ladies had their cloaths destroyed in the Park. The Times, 5 July1785156

153 OBPOnline, 19th October 1785, trial of Charlotte Springmore and Mary Harrison, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17851019-57. 154 For a detailed, feminist, overview of the social tensions which arose because of the importation of cheap ‘Callico’ from India, see Chloe Wigston Smith, ‘‘Callico Madams”: Servants, Consumption and the Calico Crisis’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring 2007), pp. 29-55. Also Robert Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (Hambledon and London 2004), pp. 114-115, 119, 137, 263-165, 277. See, Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1st publ., 2003 (Verso, 2006), pp. 19-20. The plight of the silk workers, the effects of mechanization and the executions of selected rioters are significant themes in Linebaugh’s history of crime and civil society, across the century. ‘Silk Makes the Difference’, Chapter 8, pp. 256-287. He outlines the effects of calico imports and the 1721 Act to protect the silk industry. 155 John Richardson, The Annals of London: A Year-by-Year Record of a Thousand Years of History, 1st publ., 2000, (Cassell Paperbacks 2001), p. 179. — 45 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

The Judge, James Adair, Recorder of London, remarked that it was the first instance of a trial of this kind in my remembrance here, although the correspondent to The Times indicated there had been several recent instances. The prosecution case against the two women was very contradictory, which the Judge acknowledged; however, he decided the contradictions were unimportant, because such an act was of great malignity and evil consequence and should be discouraged. That the women were most probably not guilty apparently mattered not at all. The criminal code was about deterrence, not justice.

*

Also intriguing was the young East Anglian mother, Susannah Holmes, who so inspired her

Turnkey’s devotion that, carrying her baby, he travelled seven hundred miles in three days by mail coach so that mother and child might be re-united.157 And I was drawn to the brief biographies of Sarah Bellamy from Belbroughton and Sarah Davis from nearby

Stourbridge, for their circumstances, like those of Susannah Holmes, were very different from the historical spaces of the Londoner convicts; further, the Worcestershire women had both been child apprentices.

*

156 The Times, 5 July, 1785, Issue 163, Col. C, p. 3, The Times Digital Archive, UNSW Library, http://info.library.unsw.edu.au. 157 See John Simpson’s letter from Plymouth to a gentleman in Bath, 16 November 1786, in Robert Holden, Orphans of the First Fleet (Text Publishing 1999), p. 96; quoted in full, p. 297 below. — 46 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

‘Why are you smiling?’ my husband asked as we lay side by side half chatting in the time between waking and rising.

‘I was thinking about Martha Eaton,’ I said. ‘She was not a convict — there are no trial records and she was not included in the Orders in Council. Well, there are some records of her once having been arrested and released without charge. She must have smuggled herself on board The Lady Penrhyn. I have an idea …’ I paused. ‘An idea that she posed as a convict for love of a man called Edward Jones. He was transported on the Alexander and they married within six weeks of disembarking at Port Jackson.158 I would like to find some evidence that they knew each other before sailing.’ I paused again. ‘Then of course there would be the problem of how she smuggled herself on board — she surely could not have done that without friends.’

My husband laughed. ‘I hope he was worth it,’ he said.

Who could tell? I hoped so, too. Certainly, the couple had three children and became prosperous in the colony; in spite of a prosecution witness at his Old Bailey trial saying that

Edward Jones kept bad company, and is turned out one of your fighting Gentlemen.159 And apparently, Jones was already married and had three children at the time he was arrested, although he was only twenty-one. In any case I went on nurturing ideas of a romantic drama; and every time I thought of Martha Eaton planning how she would embark on the

158 The basic information about Martha Eaton and Edward Jones is given in Gillen (1989), pp. 115; 197-198. 159 OBPOnline, 15 Sep 1784, trial of Edward Jones, theft: simple grand larceny, theft: receiving stolen goods, Ref: t17840915-70. — 47 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______dangerous voyage to Botany Bay I recalled that verse from the Song of Songs, about many waters not being able to quench love and neither could the floods drown it.

*

In Dark Back of Time Javier Marías meditated on the borders of fact and fiction and the vagaries of memory. He wrote of becoming a kind of unexpected and distant posterity to several dead men, real ones, whom [he] did not know…and that he had decided he would be their ghost.160 The women, and men, of these tales haunted, haunt, me. For a moment I was drawn by the charm of Marias’ reversal, but it was his assumption of the role of a kind of unexpected and distant posterity which inspired my aspiration to win that mantle. It was a possibility suggested by Walter Benjamin’s thesis that past generations have a claim upon us, a secret appointment (Verabredung) with us.161

‘I have to go to England,’ I told my husband. ‘I’m going to apply for a travel grant.’

He peered over his glasses which were slightly askew; he was reading a book on the Third

Reich, one of his obsessions. ‘You should, you should. Do it now. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

*

She trusted you with the story of her life. I hope that I can do it justice. Beverley Farmer162

160 Marías (2004), p. 12. 161 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin Archive (1940/2005), http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 162 Beverley Farmer, ‘Home Time’ in Home Time (McPheeGribble/Penguin 1985), p. 80. — 48 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

What is it that must precede the conveying of history? Must there not be the declaration of a double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak? To convey that which-was in the light of this passion is to become a historian. Because the past is irrecoverable and the others in whose stead the historian speaks are dead, unknowable, she cannot hope that her passion will be reciprocated. To be a historian then is to accept the destiny of the spurned lover — to write, photograph, film, televise, archive, and simulate the past not merely as its memory bank but as binding oneself by a promise to the dead to tell the truth about the past. … … The historian's responsibility is mandated by another who is absent, cannot speak for herself, one whose actual face the historian may never see, yet to whom "giving countenance" becomes a task. … … How is she to breach the unsayability of what must be said? Must she not devise strategies to trick language into revealing its limits so that she can at once respect and defy them, artifices that are exhibited not in a straightforward manner but by resorting to other artifices? Edith Wyschogrod 163

*

163 Edith, Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (University of Chicago Press 1998), pp. ix-xii.

— 49 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 4

Pilgrimage

*

All ‘wheres’ are discovered and circumspectly interpreted as we go our ways…they are not catalogued by the observational measurements of space. Martin Heidegger 164

It is not down in any map; true places never are. Herman Melville165

*

So it was that I arrived in England to search sites and archives to piece together traces of the women’s lives, to seek what Salman Rushdie might have called their back stories: what

[the women] brought with [them] on [their] journey across oceans, beyond frontiers, through life: [their] little storehouse of anecdote and what-happened-next, [their] private once-upon-a-time.166 The London women’s back-stories would necessarily have included what was known as the Tyburn Fair: the public executions conducted at least eight times a year and which attracted thousands.

I had thought of my journey as a quest but stepping from the Underground at Marble Arch in the early evening peak hour and turning towards the site where felons were once hanged

164 Martin Heidegger, B and T (1977), p. 137; S and Z (1967), p. 103. 165 Herman Melville, ‘Biographical’, Chapter 12, Moby-Dick (Collector’s Library 2004), p. 99. 166 Salman Rushdie Fury (Jonathan Cape 2001), pp. 50-51. — 50 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______at Tyburn, carried a sense of pilgrimage. Every step intensified the gravitational pull of the place which most of the London women could not have resisted.

Those who have felt the need to stand on the site where the scaffold was dismantled stretch back to the vanishing point of centuries like the infinite regression of figures multiplied in mirrors. Vic Gatrell, who set me on the path to Tyburn with his book The Hanging Tree:

Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford University Press, 1994), wrote that the need to stand before the place of the scaffold was part of the same mysterious need to buy the execution broadsheets, with their crude illustrations. He said the images were totemic, a kind of image magic … [through which] these ritually inflicted deaths … [could] be tamed and possessed and fitted within a moral framework.167 Similarly the ethnographer,

Clifford Geertz, wrote that such compulsions are to make…the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable.168 Perhaps this is so. There can be no doubt that those who inflicted the deaths set their judgments within a moral framework, and that the regular public display of executions was generally accepted as part of the common order. However, there were dissenting voices as represented by a news item in The Times,

21 April 1786:

If the great end of human punishments be example how far do executions answer this desirable purpose? —The daily increase of them is here the best answer. —

‘Tis true, the avenue to this mode of going out of life, is inconceivably ignominious and awful: —The terror-striking bell— the officers of justice in their habiliments – the admonitory clergyman— the fabled cart, preceded by a

167 V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 175. For a critique of Vic Gatrell’s text see Peter Linebaugh, (Review) 'To the teeth and forehead of our faults': V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford University Press, 1994), Issue 68 (Autumn 1995), International Socialism Journal, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj68/linebaugh.htm. 168 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 1st publ., 1973 (Hutchinson, 1975), p. 23. — 51 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

squalid figure, in the shape of a man, called the executioner— all environed by a multitude of sympathizing spectators — among whom are females at intervals bursting into tears and praising the “comeliness of his person!” — the whole moving, as one body, in flow and silent pace, towards the fatal tree — present a picture of solemnity and horror, indescribable. W. C.169

Now at the site of ‘the Tree’ all that marks those centuries of sorrow, suffering, anger, and unexpected black humour, is a circular plaque set in lichened cobblestones in a traffic island at the meet of Edgeware Road and Oxford Street — a small seal hinged to the past.

1. Tyburn Plaque170

Standing at the plaque I was almost overtaken by a long disused habit of kneeling. I closed my eyes; and with that slight quaver of balance which sometimes occurs without the cues of sight, the labyrinth of time twisted and the pressure of the past split the present, opening upon a scene of long ago crowds come to witness the ritual of executions. The events, scheduled every six weeks, usually on a Monday, were commonly known as the Tyburn

Fair. Thousands upon thousands were gathered, stretching into the autumn fields, climbing on rough ladders, sitting on stands around the triple tree where four bodies already hanged, pointed white caps — night-caps they were called — tied over their heads, nosegays fallen

169 The Times, 21 April 1786, Issue 414, Column B, p. 3. 170Copyright Free Pictures, http://www.copyright-free-pictures.org.uk/london-england/42-tyburn-tree- gallows.htm (n.d.) [Accessed 1 December 2006]. — 52 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______to the earth, sullied, feet still quivering. There were another four convicts still sitting in coffins in their tumbrels. The executioner began struggling with a large woman who suddenly lashed out, punching him so that he staggered backwards and almost overbalanced from the cart. There was a moment’s silence and then echoes of the crowd’s huzzas rippled outwards to the horizon of tiny heads. About the tree, the circle of staves and pikes held by the soldiers bristled against the swell of voices. She was quickly subdued and denied the courtesy of a rope tied about her skirts.

It seemed impossible, but in the last cart was a young woman, not twenty years old, suckling her baby.171 She did not weep, but looked down as any breastfeeding mother bewitched by her gulping child looks down.172 Then her face crumpled as she turned her gaze to her struggling toddler held by an elderly woman. The child began to scream, grasping for the sideboard of the cart. The young mother knelt, reached out to the child with one hand, attempting to kiss her without upsetting the baby. The old woman, aided by a bystander, lifted the clutching child towards her mother for that last embrace before she must carry her away. The crowds opened a small path so that the weeping woman and wailing child might quickly pass. The young woman re-settled the baby to her breast, rocking, cradling. Beneath the baby’s thin cap the delicate fontanelle pulsed steadily. If her husband had not been pressed they would not have come to this. She would not have been reduced to beggary and theft: theft of eight yards of muslin… eight yards of muslin … from

171 OBPOnline, 15 September 1779, trial of Mary Jones otherwise Wood, (with Ann Taylor otherwise Forbes), theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17790915-12. Mary Jones Guilty: Death; Ann Taylor: Not Guilty. 172 R. Jerrard, Newgate (online) wrote: Mary Jones, aged 19, mother of 2 children, convicted at the Old Bailey of shoplifting in Ludgate Hill and hanged. She had her baby at the breast while being taken from Newgate to Tyburn. Her case was used in Parliament in an attempt by Sir William Meredith to reduce the number of offences carrying the death penalty, which totalled about 190; and to make the sentence more commensurate with the crime, http://www.rjerrard.co.uk/law/city/ccc2.htm. — 53 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______a wealthy shopkeeper … lest I be poor and steal … Oh Lord, what would become of her babies now? Babies died under parish care with some wet nurses claiming their fees long after the child had perished. Even in the Foundling Home they died. Her own mother was old, too old to raise two children. Tears dripped from Mary Jones’ chin, fell on the baby’s forehead. She lifted the child, clumsily tugged her shawl across her flaccid breast and kissed the autumn cool skin where her tears had fallen.

Then, as a priest stepped into the cart, she relinquished the baby to another woman, relative or parish worker, I could not know. The priest, it had to be the Reverend Mr John Villette,

Ordinary of Newgate, for so the prison chaplain was termed, steadied her as they were manoeuvred under the scaffold by the Sheriff’s officers. The woman stood quietly, head bowed as the man prayed about mercy and repentance. She did not move as the executioner untied the end of the halter coiled around her and tossed it to his assistant straddling the crossbeam. Inside the hood she whispered prayers for her babies; for her husband lost to the army, her breath close and hot on the fabric; she would not faint, would not cry out …

Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death … She closed her eyes and an after- image of her baby’s hands appeared printed in light, the fingers opening and closing like small translucent flowers sensitive to sun and shade. The snap of a whip on the rump startled the horse and the gallows cart lurched forward. A great silence fell across the multitudes.173

173 By 1779 the Infant Bills of Mortality had greatly improved, but the young mother committing crime to provide for her children would have grown up hearing stories of times when 90% of infants younger than twelve months died under parish care. See Jonas Hanway, Letters on the Importance of the Rising Generation of the Laboring Part of Our Fellow-Subjects; Being an Account of the Miserable State of the Infant Parish Poor; ... Vol. II (London, 1767), p. 136. Hanway stressed that the Bills of Mortality averages did not represent the vulnerability of children less than one year. The Foundling Hospital itself had many struggles, especially during the period of open reception (1756-1760) when resources were overstretched. Between the — 54 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Then the scene shifted, there were people fighting to retrieve a body before it was carried away to the anatomizers, a woman lifting a sick baby to touch a body and a man stroking a dead hand against a large tumescence on his throat. Someone was selling shreds of rope from a halter174 and seven young women wearing white (they claimed to be virgins) stood

weeping, white wands in their hands,175 their sobs an undercurrent rising with voices of the street criers selling their wares.

The voices of the criers rose, resonating in a thin canopy of discordant glees carrying the refrain, Come buy … Come buy …The fragments echoed on the air … last roses … come buy … finest thread … two pennies … fresh mack-mack-mackereel … four pennies … come buy … fine carrots …silk flowers … pennies … last dying speeches … a penny … four pair

Holland socks …a shilling … last dying speeches … come buy … Horses jostled in their harness, the coffins slid a little in the carts. And there, a few paces from the scaffold, was one of the criers drawn by the social artist, Paul Sandby (1730-1809),176 selling her penny copies of Last Dying Speeches (1759). She was a large-boned woman, clad in layers of

years 1758-1760 the death rate of hospital foundlings rose by 81%; whereas in the preceding four years it had been much reduced. After the disastrous period of General Reception, admission was again based on ballots. Overall, between March 1741 and September 1760, 86% of children died before they were a year old. See Ruth K. McLure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press 1981), p. 102. See also Gillian Pugh, London’s Forgotten Children: Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital (The History Press 2007), pp.39-55. Especially poignant were the tokens, messages and promises which were left with the infants. In 1765 there was a Mary Jones, a Foundling Hospital apprentice, cruelly beaten by her mistress, Mrs Brownrigg, who would, in 1767, be executed at Tyburn, for murdering another apprentice. Mary Jones had escaped and run back to the Foundling Hospital. See Ruth K. McLure, (1981), p. 135. Could that have been Mary Jones who nursed her baby under the scaffold? It is, of course, a common name. 174 For details of superstitious beliefs about executions, including the healing powers of hanged corpses, see Peter Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons’, in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, 1st publ., 1975 (Peregrine/Penguin Books 1977), pp. 106ff. 175 See Peter Linebaugh (1977), p.114. 176 See Hitchcock, Illustration 16 (2004), p. 105. — 55 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______rags, surely old curtains, old sheets and torn hessian bags, wrapped around in semblance of petticoat and shawl, every edge frayed and tattered above her wrinkled stockings and crumpled shoes. Under her left arm she held a roll of speeches while in that same hand she proffered a page. Beneath the lopsided brim of her hat her right hand was cupped against her ear, almost as if her ear and cheek were aching and not a posture to carry her cries. Her face, with a strong mouth stretched square and eyes and brows contracted with anxiety or sorrow, halted me; as her pain and necessity must have halted the artist.

She faded to be replaced by Sandby’s Sock Vendor (1759).177 If the woman with her speeches looked away into the distance, her feet placed uncertainly, the sock vendor stood firmly, looking directly at me, barring my way: challenging me from under the shadow of his tricorn. It was as if he were staring down his humiliation for he was well-dressed, his bearing military. His face, with its strong nose, was stern, frowning; his mouth, clamped shut, turned grimly down. He was stamped with pride and fierceness. It was likely he had been discharged from the services because of a lull between wars. Perhaps he was from the navy for he wore petticoat trousers, black stockings and smartly buckled shoes. He proffered a clean white sock, partly unrolled from the neat bundle in his right hand, but unlike the woman selling the ‘Speeches’ his arm was not outstretched, but pressed against his body, his hand turned outwards. His scarf was tied with a debonair flourish, his coat well cut with many buttons. His left hand, tucked under the opened front of his jacket, shielded his heart in an elegant gesture claiming the status of a gentleman.178 As I stared I realized that the Sock Vendor was standing at Charing Cross, not at Tyburn, that he stood

177 Hitchcock, Illustration 4 (2004), p. 20. 178 Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth Century Europe (Yale University Press 2002), p. 133. — 56 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______before a pillory and that behind him two lads had climbed the statue of King Charles I mounted on a horse, so that they were on a level with the pillory. A little to the right a woman, carrying a small child on her hip, looked up at the man whose hands and shaven head dangled pathetically through the wooden punishment. The child was wearing an adult’s coat which fell to the end of the woman’s petticoat.

Behind me Tim Hitchcock, an historian whose work is essential reading for those interested in eighteenth century London, remarked that … Paul Sandby’s ‘Cries’ form the most individualized and humane depictions of the poor of London ever created…he possessed a humanity and sense of purpose that is missing from the London created by Hogarth and

Canaletto and from the work of many historians ever since.179 Tim Hitchcock, with Robert

Shoemaker, is a director of the Old Bailey online project which has set two centuries of Old

Bailey court transcripts circulating in cyber space, freeing remnant voices of the poor, their accusers and their judges. I turned to acknowledge the historian’s comment, thinking that in his book Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London he had disturbed imperial history’s assumptions with his attention to fiction, art and poetry as illuminations of an age. Then I was back at Tyburn and there, moving like a joyful flame through the crowds was a small boy sitting in a bread tray carried on a man’s head. The boy was snatching hats and wigs as they passed.180 I almost laughed, but above it all the baffled bells of London were lamenting. Then the lights changed on the intersection of Edgeware Road and Oxford Street and the past was swallowed in the traffic roar of the present.

179 Hitchcock, p. 21. 180 This was an old way of robbing according to Sylvanus Urban (Edward Cave) in The Gentleman’s Magazine (March 1764), cited by Liza Picard in Dr. Johnson’s London: Coffee Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education (St Martin’s Press 2000), pp.132-133. — 57 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

In the few moments of time divisions and transitions, another of those moments when time stumbled I understood that the desire to write of the convict women’s lives was not just a matter of creating an admittedly constructed, but convincing, vision of the past,181 as historians ‘from below’ such as Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, working in the traditions of Edward P. Thompson,182 aim to do. Although I had gathered those phantoms from the hushed reading rooms in the National Archives at Kew, from journals and books, even from cyber space, and carried them to the corner of Edgeware Road and Oxford Street towards that end, something else was driving my obsession with archival delving; something else had brought me carrying phantoms like flowers to that plaque as though it were some sacrificial altar. Perhaps, as Margaret Atwood said, it is not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality — by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead. You may find the subject a little peculiar. It is a little peculiar. Writing itself is a little peculiar.183

The strange compulsion to bring something back from the dead is central to what Derrida called archive fever, the nature of which he negotiated in hard to follow lectures184 about the archive and psychoanalysis. Appropriately, the lectures were delivered at the Freudian

Museum in London, once Freud’s house. Derrida suggested that mal d’archive is a passion

181 Hitchcock, p. 234. 182 E. P. Thompson established the concern with ‘history from below’ with his work, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin 1968). 183 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge University Press 2002), p.156. 184 I mean hard to follow in all its ambiguities as explored by Derek Attridge in ‘Following Derrida’, in Khoraographics for Jacques Derrida, edited by Dragan Kujundzic, Tympanum 4 – Special Issue (15 July 2000), http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/khora.html. — 58 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______which occurs at the moment the archive slips away185 and he linked that passion to the seductions of death.186 Thus for Derrida entering the unspoken margins, the silences, of archival memory, carried a deeper, more visceral and obsessive dimension than that which

Pierre Macherey called the unspoken margins, the silences of a text. Although the ways of reading are related, they are, it seems, of a different order. Derrida also said the archive is about the future, a pledge … a token of the future,187 as the bodily inscription of circumcision is an archive signifying a Covenant.188 Perhaps this is Walter Benjamin’s secret appointment between past generations and those of now, recognized in a moment of danger.189 So, perhaps the compulsion to make the pilgrimage to Tyburn, the desire to bring these people back from the dead, has something to do with ‘lest we forget and do it again’, as well as arising from a deeper, unconscious, fascination with mortality, both a defiance of it and a submission to it. Appositely, Edith Wyschogrod, evaluating the nature and ethics of remembering the past, wrote that … without the necrophilia of the historian who gives herself over to overcoming the past’s passing into oblivion, there would be only the finality of death.190

*

On summer evenings Edgeware Road is dominated by Islamic families, shopping, chattering, shepherding children, the women aswirl with veils and long dark skirts as they

185 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1996), p 91. 186 Ibid., p. 29. 187 Ibid., p. 18. 188 Ibid., pp. 8, 20, 26, 30, 56. 189 Benjamin, 1940/2005, Walter Benjamin Archive, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 190 Wyschogrod’s comment is in the context of an odd misunderstanding, or oversimplification, of Nietzsche’s view of history; nevertheless her general exposition of the nature and ethics of historical work is relevant. See Edith Wyschogrod (1998), p. ix. — 59 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______ease their strollers over the gutters or gather up a dawdling toddler. Perhaps because of a childhood and youth nurtured by nuns, including my Italian great aunt who gave me a tiny green glass book holding stories strung on beads, more magical than a glass slipper, I felt very safe and comforted in the presence of those women who wear yards of flowing black fabric honouring a religious commitment. Yet on that walk, after visiting the site of the

Tyburn Tree, I was only vaguely aware of their passing as the eighteenth century phantoms, released from the archives, released from what Derrida has called their house arrest,191 followed me, circling in the air.

Hovering close also, their breath chilling the nape of my neck, were women destined for

Botany Bay, carrying their multiple memories of London’s historical spaces, from its grandeur to its hanging tree. Old Mrs Handlyn, or Handland,192 the woman noted for her great spirit, hurried along, her wooden barrow emptied of second hand clothes, trundling in the air. She had seen it all: the joyful frost fairs; the velvet and gold splendour of royal barges and fireworks bursting above Handel’s Water Music on the Thames; and the disembowellings and the piked heads, par-boiled in salt and spice against the ravens, set high above the stone violins on Temple Bar in ’45. ‘London can be a dark and bloody place’ she said. ‘Only the strong and the rich make old bones.’ I heard her laughing, a strange little braying sound. ‘Hap’ly ’twere my lot to be strong; but though I be a woman of great spirit — even my enemies know that — I would that I had been gamer. Then I’d’ve

191 Derrida (1996), p. 2. 192 The convict was indicted as Handland, but recorded by Surgeon Bowes as Handlyn. See Footnote 144, p. 42, above, and Footnote 481, p. 197, below. — 60 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______strutted the stage telling tales, riv’ling our female Marine, Hannah Snell.’193 And she began to hum the ballad of Hannah Snell:

Hannah in britches behaved so well That none her softer sex could tell; Nor was her policy confounded When near the mark of gender wounded194

‘Ah well, with my bubbies and buttocks ’twere not to be that I pass myself as a man, on land or sea…oh that poor, poor young mother, with the babe … I sailed up Holborn Hill in a cart, in a cart, I sailed up Holborn Hill in a cart. I sailed up Holborn Hill, at St Giles’s drunk my fill, And at Tyburn made my will in a cart, in a cart. Oh, that poor, poor damsel, such a shame, such a shame ….’ So she faded, lamenting and singing snatches of a

Tyburn ballad as she returned to the yard where she lived adjoining the Robin Hood and the

Black Boy in Leather Lane.195

Only two phantoms remained, that of Susannah Trippet, bright, insouciant child of twelve sent to sell artificial flowers at the Fair, walking slowly with her empty basket, comforting a little baby-sitter, Mary Branham who was shivering convulsively and wishing she had not crept away secretly to Tyburn; wishing, not for the last time, she had listened to her mother.

Then the girls were overtaken, jostled, by a band of lads, about ten years old, jaunty, shoeless, their legs stick-thin below outgrown trousers, all bare-footed, all sooty faced,

193 Matthew Stephens Hannah Snell: The Secret Life of a Female Marine 1723-1792 (Ship Street Press 1997); for a short introduction to Dorothy Handlyn/Handland/Henley/Grey/ see Cleland, J. B., ‘The Old Woman of Botany Bay’, Journal of Royal Australian History Society, Vol. 43, Part 3, No. 47 (1957), pp. 137-139. 194 Joan Druett, She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea (Simon and Schuster 2000), p. 106. 195 Gillen (1989), pp. 158-159. — 61 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______amongst them two chimney sweeps, already hobbling, difficult to distinguish from the others, even the little negro lad. The boys waving their small prizes pilfered at Tyburn — a bun, a handkerchief, a pencil — clapped and chanted, limping and capering about the girls,

Home again, home again market is done … pray do tell me the time, for I have let my watch run down … Answering themselves still laughing ... Why, ‘tis half an hour past hanging- time, and time to hang again …196 They nudged at the girls with their elbows, laughed in their faces. Susannah good-humouredly swung her basket at them. I was mistaken, it was not empty: in the basket was a last unsold flower, a papier-mâché gardenia painted with white lead. Glowing, luminous, it spiralled into the air, was caught by a lad who laughed and tossed it to another. Imperiously Susannah stood with a hand on her hip — there are some would call her a little hussy — before setting her basket on the cobbles, carefully avoiding the muck of the kennels, and making chase. So the children ran, even little Mary

Branham, laughing and circling, faster and faster, with the girls reaching for the gardenia as it spun through the air until Susannah snatched it in flight and they were gone — the girls to their alleys and the boys, singing We are the Black Guard boys, gone to sleep in the warm ashes of an annealing yard where the bottles cool in the Glass Houses behind the

Minories, that expensive arcade where at the sign of the Sphere and the Sundial they might have found any number of horary instruments,197 if they had knowledge, or use, of such things. Daniel Defoe’s voice followed them articulating my sadness, ‘Tis scarce credible what a black throng they are … many of them indeed perish young, and dye miserable …

196 For a brief introduction to children’s rhymes see Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography, 1st publ., 2000 (Vintage 2001), pp. 644-646. 197 See Trevor Phillips, Newsletter, Fifty One Thirty, Issue 8 (British Association of Antique Dealers), http://www.trevorphilip.com/media/TrevorPhilipTremedia/newsletter/8/news8.htm, (n.d.) [Accessed 14 October 2006]. — 62 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______many are found frozen in the streets and fields, some drowned before they are old enough to be hang’d.198

Then his voice too had vanished and my hand was cold as I swiped my key into the lock of the student house and the heavy door clicked open. That evening it was the dining room, with its generous sash windows and French doors opening into the walled garden and its clatter of trays, cutlery and voices, which seemed insubstantial.

I chose a place where I might eat alone and stare into the garden. There was a lush tangerine rose blooming against the wall. Two women students sat together on a garden seat, busy with notepads and pens. It was a time of summer courses. The young women were American nurses upgrading their qualifications: inventing their futures, as Paul Carter would say in his philosophical reflections on the shifting historical meanings of Botany Bay as it was imagined as a future prison, colony, or place of escape: once Botany Bay was rejected as unsuitable for a settlement it became for some convicts, Ann Smith was one, a site from which they might escape by joining a French ship.199

Gilles Deleuze saw the present as infinitely divided, fissured, by the past and the future.

Foucault wrote that it is a dangerous fissure always open to the return of difference.200

Those phrases, which I knew were simplistic when taken from their context, associated with my thoughts that evening. Vic Gatrell said that what fired him to write The Hanging

198 From Daniel Defoe, Some Considerations upon Street-Walkers, pamphlet cited by Hitchcock, p. 40. 199 Carter (1988), p. 294. 200 Michel Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited with an Introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. from the French by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 1st publ., 1977 (Cornell 1980), pp. 166, 194. — 63 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Tree were the plights of lives told in the petitions for mercy; plights which criminal justice historians have meanly served ... He said that these lives, in spite of the petitions which quivered with emotion… as they pleaded for the fair hearing denied to them in court, for life itself, or for reprieve from exile across the world, often ended on the public scaffold

… [and that] ... People did not die on it neatly. Watched by thousands, they urinated, defecated, screamed, kicked, fainted, and choked as they died. Gatrell said, I was nauseated to realize this obscenity and wondered if it should be exposed. Just as polite people learnt not to look in those days, so we shrink away now.201

Removal of 2. Detail from a stylized woodcut used to image required 202 under copyright embellish many execution broadsides. agreement.

The useless profusion of punishments, which has never made men better induces me to inquire, whether the punishment of death be really just or useful in a well governed state? What right, I ask, have men to cut the throats of their fellow- creatures? Cesare Bonesana, Marchese Beccaria, 1764 203

*

It seems impossible that once people have understood, and rejected, such obscenity it could be allowed again. The death penalty remained in the legal code of England, Scotland and

Wales until 16 December 1969, which was the culmination of a five year suspension period from 13 August 1964. In 1969 the House of Commons had voted 343 to 185 in favour of

201 V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, (1994), pp. vi-vii. 202 Ibid., p. 191. 203 Cesare Bonesana, (Marchese Beccaria), ‘Of the Punishment of Death’, from Of Crime and Punishment, 1st publ., in Italian 1764 (R. Bell, next door to St. Paul's Church, in Third-Street 1778), transl. from the French by Edward D. Ingraham, 2nd American Edn (Philip H. Nicklin: A. Walker, printer 1819), (Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics), http://www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun.htm. — 64 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Abolition. Yet, in 1973, Four years after capital punishment was abolished in Britain, 85 per cent of people wanted it back.204 Months afterwards I discovered Walter Benjamin’s

(1892-1940) Angel of History who saw the past as an accumulation of catastrophes and, with horrified gaze fixed on the wreckage, was caught in a storm and blown backwards into the future: The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.205

It is plain why some historians have taken a cyclic view of history, but as I closed Vic

Gatrell’s book I was reminded of Derrida’s lecture on the meaning of Freud’s theory of the unconscious for the public archive. The public archive, wrote Derrida, is domiciled at the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded, and there it is held under house arrest.206 So the archive, public memory, is subject to the Law of the

Father, subject to the play of suppression and repression and thus vulnerable to the return of the repressed. Of course there is also Foucault’s memory of advice from Deleuze: The circle must be abandoned as a faulty principle of return; abandon our tendency to organize everything into a sphere…207 In his own exegesis of Nietzsche’s work on the play of chance in history, the throw of the dice, Deleuze in turn said, we must not make of the eternal return a return of the same…it is not the same that comes back…208

204 Gatrell (1994), p. 12. 205 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Theses IX, (1940/2005), http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 206Derrida (1996), pp. 1-2. 207 Michel Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’ (1977/1980), pp. 165-166. 208 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, introduced by John Rajchman, transl. by Anne Boyman, 1st publ., in this Edn, 2001 (Zone Books 2005), p. 87. — 65 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The philosopher’s contention would seem to be confirmed by fractal geometry, the geometry of non-linear dynamic systems, of clouds, rivers and of history, for while fractal images maintain a recognizable pattern, they transform unpredictably in an infinite series of iterations.

Perhaps the most significant gift the writer brings back from conversations with the dead is the gift of remembering as a small protection against the eternal return of cruelty and injustice, in whatever form of catastrophe that cruelty and injustice are transmogrified through time and space.

In this light, our compulsions for re-telling the past may be understood; and like an infinite series of transforming fractal images generated on axes of real and imaginary numbers, so historical narratives written from fragments and traces transform the irrecoverable past to an artefact in each act of remembering. At most, these narratives will incandesce momentarily like altar candles signifying, as do pilgrimages, a longing for something beyond the limits of self. What are narratives of remembrance but the eternal return of the ghost flickering against mortality?

*

… it is quite likely that the approach of death — its sovereign gesture, its prominence within human memory — hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which we speak. Michel Foucault 209

209 Michel Foucault ‘Language to Infinity’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977/1980), p. 53. — 66 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. Walter Benjamin210

*

210 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Theses VI (1940/2005), http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. — 67 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 5

Exploring London 2004 — The Gordon Riots and the Enlightenment

*

… Above all the British Museum pleased me best. It is a grand building, consisting of a great many rooms, all filled with curiosities. First we saw the skull of an elephant, and the Queen of Otaheite’s hat. Next the Egyptians that had been dead three thousand years ago. John Coltman Aged 12 1780211

… a fare access to it, and the collections therein contained shall be given to all studious and curious persons. British Museum Act 1753

We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life: for it is possible to value the study of history to such a degree that life becomes stunted and degenerate — a phenomenon we are now forced to acknowledge, painful though this may be, in the face of certain striking symptoms of our age.

Friedrich Nietzsche212

*

The eighteenth century lad who was delighted at seeing the Egyptians that had been dead three thousand years ago could not have imagined the early twenty-first century Egyptian exhibition, Mummy: The Inside Story. The exhibition was described on the Museum’s

211 Displayed in the overview of Museum History, Reading Room, British Museum. 212 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, edited by Daniel Breazeale and translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Chapter 1st publ., in German,1874, and in Untimely Meditations, 1886, this edition 1st publ. 1997 (Cambridge University Press 2004), p. 59. — 68 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______website as a virtual reality film.213 The film was a visceral experience and included a downward rushing, stomach-plunging sequence which steadied into focus on a young priest moving through his temple rituals. The images of the young man and the temple were reconstructed from the sweat and sand of archaeological digs, MRI scans of his sarcophagus, computer graphics and little cardboard glasses with red and green cellophane lenses. The glasses were exactly like those included in a Pix Magazine my father brought home in the early 1950s. He knew that I would be engrossed by their effects when used to view a supplement of images in which, without the glasses, the overlays of green and red on shades of grey appeared misaligned. The introduction of the Museum film focused on the sarcophagus study, beginning with the decorations and hieroglyphs which whizzed off the surface to stand in front of our faces in bright blue light, as untouchable and as unreadable as air. Then the film charted the forensic reconstruction of the young priest’s face, the scientist moulding layers of plaster until the head turned on a plinth complete with lustrous eyes and dark lashes.

What does applying the physics of splitting light and the electronic magic which whipped up a mirage of Egyptians who had been dead three thousand years mean for the archive?

Derrida asked a similar question in his lecture on Freud’s archive. How would computers have changed the Freudian archive? How does it, will it, change that archive now? What do digital technologies mean for changes in historical consciousness? What do they mean for our conventional ways of communicating about the past, of representing it? The transparent blend of science and illusion in that Egyptian exhibition carried a promise of ways of

213 Mummy: The Inside Story, Collections, Multimedia Public Access System, The British Museum, http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/ixbin/goto?id=ENC12806&tour=lin (2000). — 69 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______writing about the irrecoverable past, of stretching conventional expository writings on the subject.

*

After my day in the British Museum, dazed from the diversity of the displays, I stood in

Bloomsbury Square listening for the long gone trampling of six hundred mounted troops on gravel. During what became known as the Gordon Riots, which occurred on the first week of June 1780, those troops had been deployed to protect what was then Montagu House, repository of the original British Museum. Screened by the traffic noise, the fumes and the tocking of the walk signal at the pedestrian lights, were the smashing of glass, the splintering of wood and the clamour and huzzas of what has been described as the mob, or mobile vulgus, ‘the movable, excitable crowd’.214 Some rioters wore blue cockades, and waved banners emblazoned with No Popery, others, the ‘captains’, some of whom were collecting for the poor mob, were on horseback. I listened for the amazed cheers of the young man on the horse who had that moment been given a half crown. Although those walking beside the horse said God bless this gentleman, he is always generous, within two weeks their ‘captain’, who for moments had stared with wonder at the coins given into his hands, would be prosecuted by his donor and executed.215 Others wielding beams, iron railings from the fence, hammers and carrying flaring torches stinking of burning tallow and smoke destroyed the house and law books of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and his wife, Lady Charlotte Finch’s sister-in-law.

214 Robert Shoemaker, ‘The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July 1997), p. 273. 215 See OBPOnline, 28 June 1780, trial of Thomas Taplin, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17800628-18. — 70 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Perhaps it was the compelling quality of the Museum’s ‘Enlightenment’ artefacts which set me listening for the phantom sounds of hooves, for the sounds of musket shots and cheers; and then the whispered and confused prayers of the two men216 who were later turned off on the portable gallows before the site of the judge’s ruined home. Invisible visibility

Derrida called such figments, concluding there is always some mourning work in this incorporation of interiority.217

It is also possible the moment spent acknowledging destruction and violence was a gesture at countering a rush of enthusiasm for the monumental and antiquarian enshrined in the museum. All three histories, the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical have their time and place, Nietzsche said,218 his words both a warning and a comfort. Nietzsche’s historical categories fit common approaches towards historical research and preservations and are a quick evaluative frame, though not an impediment, for my own emotionally wayward impulses towards the past.

So, teased by approaches to the history and images of that first week of June 1780, I turned towards Holborn and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, site of one of the Inns of Court and the home of

James Adair, Recorder of London (1779-1789). Several days before the attack on Lord

216 For information about the Gordon Riots see Peter Ackroyd, London (2000/ 2001), pp. 484-485; Linebaugh, ‘The Delivery of Newgate, 6 June 1780’, Ch. 10 (2003/ 2006), pp. 333-370; Peter Linebaugh includes Letitia Holland in the group; she was arrested and sentenced to death for possessing two of Lady Mansfield’s petticoats, however she was respited and on 30 April, 1781 she was given a conditional sentence; see also OBPOnline, 28 June 1780, trial of Charles Kent and Letitia Holland, breaking the peace: riot, Ref: t17800628-81 and Associated Records: PRO SP44/95 f.2 (21 July 1780), f. 110 (4 April 1781). 217 Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Routledge, 1994), pp.126-127. 218 For explanations of these different approaches to the study of the past, see Friedrich Nietzsche (1997/2004), pp. 67-72. — 71 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Mansfield’s home the rioters, bearing their banners, heavy beams, iron bars and flaming links, had surged towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields on streets long since re-configured. The mayhem, widespread and extended, known as the Gordon Riots, had begun as a relatively orderly protest march assembled by Sir George Gordon at St George’s Fields in Lambeth, 2

June 1780, to demand Parliament repeal the Catholic Relief Act (1778).219 The protest spawned mobs, catalyzed by whatever vengeful biochemicals are stimulated, fusing disaffections and hatreds when crowds gather. The Annual Register (1781) suggested perhaps the fierce heat of the day had intensified the anger.220 During that week in London disorder was no longer merely spectral and, although I have found various estimates, it seems hundreds died in the streets, apart from the later executions. Across London the homes first targeted were those of papists and the parliamentarians who had supported the

Act which allowed Catholics the right to own and inherit land, subject to a loyalty oath to the Crown.221

Given that some parliamentarians were also judges it was almost inevitable that resentments against the legal system, probably felt most keenly by the disaffected poor, would coalesce with religious antagonisms. The silver–tongued William Murray, Earl of

Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice — he was taught elocution by Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

— had not only supported the Catholic toleration, he was also a hard judge, the most powerful jurist in the world; he was a hanging judge who prided himself that few escaped

219 OBPOnline, 28 June 1780, trials: riot: breaking the peace, Ref: T17800628 and trials 13 September 1780, riot: breaking the peace, Ref: f17800913-1; Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, ‘Newgate’ in Old and New London, Vol. II (1878), pp. 441-461, British History Online, http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=45114 . 220 Peter Ackroyd (2000/2001), p. 384. 221 For a comprehensive history of the character, roles and motivations of the eighteenth century English mob see Robert Shoemaker (2004). — 72 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______him.222 Junius, the pseudonym of a letter-writer whose social criticisms appeared in the

Public Advertiser, called the Lord Chief Justice the very worst and most dangerous man in the Kingdom.223 The rioters, journeymen, apprentices, sailors, former slaves, servants, weavers, deliverers, market-men and women, were mostly employed but non-propertied.224

They were of the class who would have felt, or known, the bite of Lord Mansfield’s Teeth, as the spikes on the wall of the King’s Bench Prison were called.225 It was to this class the convicts later transported to Botany Bay belonged. No property was the common note in dark ink on their sentence records.

*

The people seldom or never assemble in any riotous or tumultuous Manner, unless they are oppressed, or at least imagine they are oppressed. Lord Carteret226

*

Where were the Botany Bay convict women during those six days of riots when London shone with an unearthly light,227 as prisons and buildings were burnt, including a Catholic brewery in Fetter Lane where casks holding 120,000 gallons of gin exploded and flames flooded into the streets?228 No-one, no-one, could have been cocooned from events so widespread and fierce, neither the judges, nor the besieged members of parliament nor the

222 Peter Linebaugh (2006), p. 357. 223 Ibid., p. 357-360. 224 For an overview of the composition of ‘the mob’, together with the sources upon which the analysis is based see George Rudé, ‘The London “Mob” in the Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1959), pp.1-18. 225 Linebaugh (2006), p. 360. 226 A report of Lord Carteret’s speech to the House of Lords in February 1737, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1737), p.374, cited by George Rudé, ‘The London “Mob” in the Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1959), p. 8. Carteret was referring to riots against Irish immigrant workers, who were blamed for taking Londoners’ jobs. 227 Ackroyd, p. 489. 228 Ibid., p. 232. — 73 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______smallest most damaged chimney sweep. Not even those incarcerated in the deepest holds of

Newgate could remain ignorant of the conflagration, for after the homes of “papists”, parliamentarians and some judges, were ruined, the mob arrived at the house of Mr.

Richard Akerman, Keeper of Newgate. The house with its floors of large sash windows was set directly in the centre of the massive blind walls of the new prison structure designed by

George Dance the Younger. By that night, Wednesday 6 June 1780, Dance’s apparently impregnable prison, described as architecture parlante, or narrative architecture which

‘told’ both [its] purpose and [its] character, 229 had been almost completed. The magnitude of Newgate’s grim façade belonged to what Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) designated the aesthetics of the Sublime … [: an aesthetics designed] … to excite the ideas of pain, and danger … [that is], whatever is in any sort terrible … is a source of the sublime.230 Yet, that night Dance’s symbol of grim power was breached.

‘Captains’ on horseback and three men carrying flags — a green silk with a coat of arms, another of blue with a red cross, which was so dirty it may have been black, and a Union

Standard — led the crowd towards that prison,231 designed to inspire dread. The crowd undeterred was a motley crew, and of every colour a trial witness said, describing the five hundred or so gathered, including sailors with cutlasses and marlin spikes. The witness said she observed a black sailor better-dressed than the rest, in a dark brown coat and round hat

…[who] rapped three times, and … pulled the bell [on the Keeper’s House] as often, or so a

229 See Harold D. Kalman, ‘Newgate Prison’, Architectural History, Vol. 12 (1969), p.55. 230 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, edited by J. T. Bolton, 1st publ., 1757 (New York, 1958), pp. 39, 58, cited by Harold K. Kalman (1969), p.55. Kalman, citing Farington Diary, British Museum typescript, 3 March 1797, also noted that Dance later praised Burke’s treatise as ‘a very excellent work’, Note 37, p. 60. 231 See OBPOnline, 28 June 1780, trial of James Jackson, breaking the peace: riot, (Guilty: Death), Ref: t17800628-112. — 74 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______witness at the trial of Benjamin Bowsey believed, and when there was no answer he bowed to the crowd and gestured to the door.232 Sailors, a group who would be the New South

Wales convict women’s companions for more than a year, had difficult lives with a long history of protest, led the fray against the house while others attacked the felons’ and debtors’ doors. One of those who had forced entry emerged with the two large keys and a padlock aloft on the tines of a pitch-fork. It seemed one key was later thrown into the

Thames from Westminster Bridge, while Mr. Akerman would identify his own remarkable key, inscribed with his name and finished with a crown on the handle at the trial of

Benjamin Bowsey, the better-dressed black sailor.233

George Crabbe, aspiring poet, newly arrived in London, wrote that others lit the house which became red hot with the doors and windows like the entrance to so many volcanoes.234 The young and radical William Blake was present too, right in the mêlée when Mr. Akerman’s furniture was massed before the Debtors’ Door and bon-fired. The

Door, with its beaten nails, the last exit through which those condemned always passed, was transformed into a sheet of flames. So Newgate became an inferno with prisoners

‘delivered’ by men descending on ladders from the torn and fiery roof. George Crabbe wrote in amazement: Not Orpheus himself had more courage or better luck. Flames all around them, and [with] a body of soldiers expected, they defied and laughed at all

232 The Old Bailey Session Papers are the significant source of information about the evening of 6 June 1780. See, in this instance, OBPOnline, 28 June 1780, trial of Benjamin Bowsey, breaking the peace: riot, Guilty: Death, Ref: t17800628-33. 233 See Linebaugh (2006), p. 344. The tripe-man accused of carrying the keys from the Keeper’s House was found not guilty at his trial because his identify was not established. See OBPOnline, trial of George Sim, breaking the peace: riot, 28 June 1780, Ref: t17800628-93. 234 Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, ‘Newgate’, pp. 441-461, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=45114. — 75 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______opposition … like Milton’s infernals.235 Although William Blake also thought of Milton his was a vision of Samson Agonistes — O Glorious strength … 236

The ‘delivery’ of prisoners from burning Newgate may have been described in apocalyptic terms; however, the destruction of prisons and the freeing of inmates, some borne away on horseback with their fetters chinking, also carried a more earthly symbolism. ‘Mad Tom’

Haycock, a wine waiter at a tavern, said at his trial it was The Cause … There should not be a prison standing on the morrow in London.237 Peter Linebaugh suggested Haycock’s answer indicated he identified the attack on Newgate with the motivations of the Peasant

Revolt against the barons led by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw four hundred years before. As the memory of that event had been maintained, archived, we could say, in the open-air theatres of Bartholomew’s Fair and in inexpensive chapbooks, the idea is not far-fetched.

Besides, Lord George Gordon himself had mentioned his fear that another Wat Tyler might emerge should he relinquish leadership of the protests.238 Horace Walpole, the following week, writing to a friend asked, Who is secure against Jack Straw and a whirlwind?239

In jubilation at breaching the great prison walls and burning that monumental stone prison some of the liberators, on the swell of momentum against penal symbols, targeted Lord

Mansfield’s House and as part of its destruction burnt his records and law library.

235 Ibid. 236 See Linebaugh (2006), p. 368. 237 For this interpretation see Linebaugh (2006), pp. 345-348. 238 Ibid., p. 347. 239 Horace Walpole, Letter 196, Strawberry Hill, June 15, 1780: To The Rev. Mr. Cole, The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, Including Numerous Letters Now First Published, From The Original Manuscripts, Vol. 4, 1770-1797 (Lea and Blanchard 1842), p. 253. Reprinted in Project Gutenberg, EBook of Letters of Horace Walpole, Vol. 4, by Horace Walpole, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/lthw410.txt. — 76 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

For protection against the six days of riot many people emblazoned their houses with No

Popery, hung blue flags and ribbons and illuminated their windows with candles. What else could residents do? It was the only way to avoid smashed windows and the bon-firing of household furniture. Susan Burney reported further shock when her family household came to the attention of the mob which, from the vantage of a window, they had witnessed demolishing and burning Justice Hyde’s house: [O]ne of the Men sd. to the rest pointing to us, "They are all 3 papists."— "for God sake, cried poor Etty, Mr. Burney call out no

Popery or anything’’ — Mr. B — accordingly got his Hat & Huzza'd from the window — It went against me to hear him … “God bless your Honour,’’ they then cried, & went away very well satisfied.240

*

There was particular consternation in the Jewish communities for although safety and protection were imperative they were unwilling to use the slogan No Popery, perhaps because of all communities they recognized the necessity of toleration. Some community members, especially in streets of greatest dangers, chalked on their houses, This House is

True Protestant.241 In one of those houses, protected by that ambiguous sign and shadowed behind deep curtains the nine year old Esther Abrahams would have witnessed the passing of the ‘rioters’. On the table behind her were hat moulds, bags of lace, ribbon trimmings

240 Susan Burney, Letter Extract 2: The Gordon Riots, St. Martin's Lane, London, 8 June 1780: The Susan Burney Letters Project (University of Nottingham), http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/hrc/projects/burney/letters/gordon.phtml, (Last Updated: 15th June 2006). 241 Cecil Roth, History of the Great Synagogue, London, Chapter XI, The Synagogue of 1766-1790, The Susser Archive: Jewish Communities and Records, http://www.jewishgen.org/JCR-UK/susser/roth/. — 77 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______and spools of thread. Six years later, 27 July 1786, Esther, newly pregnant, counting the days since her first missed menses, would be brought to the Younger George Dance’s restored Newgate. At the end of August, having submitted her petitions for mercy against her sentence of transportation to James Adair, she would have been fretting for an answer.

*

The Recorder of London, James Adair, living in No 46 Portuguese Row, was fortunate to be spared. As Recorder he was not only a judge, he was also responsible for reporting to the

King on Old Bailey Sessions and making recommendations on those petitions which quivered with emotion, begging for mercy, for life, which so often ended on the scaffold — or in transportation, as Vic Gatrell observed. For some time the question of the identity of the Recorder, remained a mystery to me. Who was Mr Justice Recorder before whom so many convicts were tried? Perhaps the mystery was solved through internet searches or perhaps it was through references to his decisions made by Siân Rees in The Floating

Brothel (Hodder 2001). Reading Rees’ few brief paragraphs referring to Adair set me tingling with antipathy. His role in the life of Esther Abrahams, who sailed on the Lady

Penrhyn with her two month old baby Rosanna, was reprehensible. The mother and child were at Port Jackson for six months before he even bothered to respond to Esther’s petition for mercy.242 And apart from the judgments he passed upon the convicts transported to New

South Wales there was the young mother, Mary Jones, hanged in 1779, Adair’s first year of office and, later, in 1786 and 1788, two women, Phoebe Harris and Margaret Sullivan,

242 See Letter from James Adair, Recorder of London, enclosing Reports on Thomas Davis, John Montague, John Cook, Esther Abrahams, Robert Broughton and Richard Stewart, HO47/7/78, folios 296-297. See Also HO47/7/81, 26 June 1788, folios 300-307. — 78 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______would be burnt at the stake, largely upon his determining. That is, upon his recommendation to George III that the Court judgement should stand.

*

Yet crossing into Kingsway, an early twentieth century development, thoughts of both

Adair’s role in the lives of felons and the Gordon Riots faded as I succumbed to reviewing the glamour of the Museum’s permanent exhibition, Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century.243 Sir Hans Sloane had offered the original collection to the nation, at a fraction of its appraised value, for the use of all persons. Sir Hans was the man from whom we inherited the use of quinine against malaria, and the restorative powers of milk chocolate, which, at that time, was sold by apothecaries. The milk chocolate recipe eventually passed to Cadbury’s.244 Sir Hans also gave his Chelsea Physick Garden, into the care of the Society of Apothecaries; it may still be visited.245

Some of the original collection is in the King’s Library, a neo-classical room with high galleries, lined with glazed book shelves and set about with sculptures and busts of classical figures, royalty, scientists — Sir Isaac Newton, of course — and explorers such as Captain

Cook and Sir Joseph Banks. These original collections gathered in Montagu House were, of course, the paean of Enlightenment faith in the possession of knowledge through empiricism, exploration, artefact, and classification. Curiosity, gathering and naming would make the horizon of knowledge reachable. However, horizons are as subject to infinite

243 For the scope of this exhibition see Kim Sloan (ed.) with Andrew Burnett, Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (The British Museum Press 2003). 244 Robert Huxley, ‘Natural History Collectors and Their Collections: ‘Simpling Macaronis’ and Instruments of Empire’ in Kim Sloan (ed.) (2003), p. 88. 245 See ‘Chelsea Physic Garden: History’, http://www.chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk/garden . — 79 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______deferral and mirages as the meanings of the word public/k are slippery: there was an apparently natural distinction between the semantics of the word public and what a twenty- first century researcher would understand by Sir Hans Sloane’s classification, all persons.

Thus, almost immediately entrance to the museum was hedged by so many restraints it is likely that most, if not all, the convicts destined for Botany Bay in 1787 would have been excluded. They would have been judged to be of ... low degree & rude or ill behaviour and would thus have intruded upon such who were designed to have free Access to the

Repository Viz. for the Sake of Learning or Curiosity tending to the Advancement &

Improvement of Natural Philosophy & other Branches of Speculative knowledge & in

Order to render the said Repository of such Use to the Publick as by the Act for that purpose was meant & Intended.246

Perhaps, (another slippery word) Elizabeth Gore (later Needham) — as previously mentioned, born and brought up in Lady Charlotte Finch’s household — would have been included in a Finch family visit to Montagu House, there to admire and wonder at the specimens of natural history, art and science, to be surprised that ground amethysts were a cure for drunkenness, that the ground finger of a mummy was efficacious for contusions,247 and to be amazed at the stuffed platypus (ornithorhynchus anatinus) and the curious

246 John Ward, Papers Relating to the British Museum, Add. MS 6, 179, fol. 63-65; Thomas Birch, A Collection of Papers Relating to the Establishment and Government of the British Museum, Add. MS 4, 449, fol. 115, cited by Derek Cash, Chapter III: The Trustees and Officers of the British Museum: Their Attitudes and Practices During the Eighteenth Century in Access to Museum Culture: the British Museum from 1753 to 1836, http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/researchpublications/electronicPDF/133/133.html (The British Museum, 2004), p. 37. 247 Kim Sloan, ‘‘Aimed at Universality and Belonging to the Nation’: The Enlightenment and the British Museum’ in Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Kim Sloan (2003), p. 17. — 80 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______shingle-back lizard from a continent beyond the seas. The short thick lizard

(trachydosaurus rugosus), its skin resembling a dark pine-cone, was the old boggi scrabbling in mallee scrub leaf-litter and crawling across red dusty roads in the western

New South Wales of my childhood. It was surprising to see its ordinariness in that grand exhibition: suddenly to see it, as Elizabeth Needham and her contemporaries would have seen it, as wonderfully exotic.

Also in the display was a hand-coloured botanical engraving illustrating the A-Z of Carl

Linnaeus’s (1707-1778) method of binomial classification of plants according to a sexual system. As arbitrary and unsatisfactory, as shocking, as the Swedish naturalist’s system may have been, its use was widespread and fostered by his student, Dr Daniel Solander

(1753-1782), a companion to Sir Joseph Banks on James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to

Tahiti and New South Wales. So it happened that the Linnean system was inherited in the nomenclature of Australian flora and fauna. Besides a dignified brass bust of the mature

Sir Joseph Banks, square chin settled firmly into his collar, mouth straight, hair waved smoothly back from his forehead and across his ears, there was also a mezzotint depicting him as a young man clad in a Maori cape and surrounded by items he had gathered on the

Endeavour voyage. This was the young man — half-smiling, holding the border of the cape to display the ingenuity truly surprising of the design and weaving — who, as the rich patron of the voyage, had claimed the Captain’s Great Cabin, requiring the area for his many specimens. In the re-fit of the Endeavour the head-space of the accommodation for the marines, servants and boys was lowered to accommodate the specimens and additional crew. My knees had grated as spondylitis-bent I passed through that deck on the Endeavour replica anchored at Darling Harbour back in Sydney. Another historian of the eighteenth — 81 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______century, Edward Duyker, claims the first tool of the historian is a stout pair of boots248 — in that space I needed a walking stick. Directly off the Endeavour’s Great Cabin the naturalist’s greyhounds, sleek-flanked and almond-eyed, stretched on the comforts of what would have been the Captain’s sleeping berth.

Banks’ knowledge and influence were important to felons languishing under sentence of transportation in Newgate and in hulks and county gaols for it was his advice to the Home

Office which saved them from almost certain death in Africa, a destination to which many of them had already been sentenced. While he deemed Botany Bay a suitable site for their exile, Banks would neither have allowed the kith nor the kin of most of them near the

Museum for he attempted to introduce a fee to keep the uneducated from entering, because he thought they did not know how to behave in a museum.249 He was not successful: that the

Museum would be free was enshrined in the terms of Sloane’s bequest and in the Act.

*

It was there, viewing the original collection, flickering at the top of the stairs in vanished

Montagu House, that Elizabeth Needham, then Elizabeth Gore, might have been seen.

Elizabeth was not just a pretty, good-tempered girl, as Lady Elizabeth Macarthur would write from the colony — well, Lady Macarthur wrote she was rather pretty 250 —

Elizabeth Gore was fortunate to have been born into one of those ‘enlightened’ aristocratic families which treated servants with respect, had faith in education, shaped in part by the

248 Edward Duyker, ‘A Stout Pair of Boots, Reflections of an Historian in the Field’, Theo Barker (1919- 2003) Memorial Lecture, Charles Sturt University, 12 August 2004. 249Derek Cash, Access to Museum Culture: the British Museum from 1753 to 1836, Introduction and Ch. 1, http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/researchpublications/electronicPDF/133/Ch1.pdf. 250 Gillen (1989), p. 263. — 82 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______writings of John Locke, and was not overly constrained by protocol within the household.

Jill Shefrin noted that in her wide research the one vestige of criticism made of Lady

Charlotte was that she encouraged her grandchildren to socialize with the princesses when they were under her supervision, criticism which was made by another member of Queen

Charlotte’s household. That woman in turn was the daughter of the Queen’s hairdresser.251

So although as fanciful as a blue hologram standing on air, it would at least be metaphorically in keeping with the nature of Lady Charlotte’s household to visualize

Elizabeth at the top of the stairs in Montagu House waiting with Miss Harriet Finch. Harriet was ten years old when Elizabeth was born, the right age to take delight in the girl baby, to watch over her and help her with her first steps, to play at teaching, at being a governess like her mother, Lady Charlotte. Much loved, kind Harriet Finch … whimsical … original

… amusing … always eccentric … uttering whatever comes uppermost … or so Fanny

Burney wrote.252

*

They waited, Miss Harriet and Elizabeth, for the guide and for Miss Harriet’s sister, Miss

Sophia and for George, the Earl, their escort, the godson of George II, Lord of the

Bedchamber (1777-1812), Groom of the Stole (1804-1812), Lord Lieutenant of Rutland

(1779-1826): the man who would be Elizabeth’s life-long patron. What the woman and her young companion desired most to see was the work of the Swiss naturalist, entomologist,

251 Shefrin, Such Constant Affectionate Care (2003), p. 41-42; see also Hester Davenport, The Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court of King George III, 1st publ., 2000 (Sutton Publishing 2003), p.44. 252 Fanny Burney’s Diary, 25 September, 1786, edited by Charlotte Barrett, quoted by Jill Shefrin, (2003), p. 40. — 83 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______and scientific illustrator, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717)253 — such a courageous woman. Had she not with her youngest daughter travelled across the seas from Amsterdam to Surinam in 1699? Harriet and Elizabeth had studied the map and would embroider

Surinam on a silk handkerchief as a memento of the day. Elizabeth’s first attempt at embroidering a map — on cotton, not silk — was completed under the guidance of her own mother and Miss Harriet. She had traced the Holy Land from Lady Charlotte’s dissected map of Asia; the simplest one in Lady Charlotte’s Puzzle Cabinet. The Holy Land, which had attracted the child, required too much writing.254 In simple stitches Elizabeth outlined an apple for the Garden of Eden, an ark for Mt Ararat and a tower for Babel, its crenellations achieved in tiny knots.

Elizabeth whispered the word, Surinam. It shaped her lips like a kiss. She wanted to see the

Spectacled Caiman with its captured snake and, of course, the bird-eating spider. Could there be a bird-eating spider? What spider would have a jaw — a mandible, Harriet had said — large enough to open upon a bird?

At last they were all gathered and the guide opened the first book of flowers, many decorated with the life cycles of small garden creatures: snails, beetles, ants, moths and butterflies. The guide paused at one with a frog, a pale golden-brown coloured frog nestled

253 For a sound overview of Merian’s life with a critique of misreadings and misappropriations of her work see, Sharon Valiant, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: Recovering an Eighteenth-Century Legend’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring 1993), pp. 467-479. For further reading about the woman described by a contemporary male as verunderns – “amazing” – see Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: Metamorphoses’, in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, 1st publ. 1995 (Harvard University Press 2001), pp.140-202. Davis’s biography takes account of the spiritual/religious aspects of Merian’s life, with explicit attention to her ambivalence towards aspects of colonial life. Both writers note the openness and atypical quality of Merian’s exchanges with the non-European women. 254 Shefrin, pp. 122-123. — 84 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______on ferns with its mouth agape and black eggs flowing behind its tail. That hardly seemed proper. The Spectacled Caiman255 — or Surinam crocodile, as Elizabeth learnt — did not disappoint. It was drawn in the act of snapping a black and reddish striped snake which was flung high, looping about the curl of the monster’s lifted tail.

The guide shook his head at the bird-eating spider, for it was merely the figment of a woman’s imagination, strange creatures that women were. George smiled noncommittally; after all, his mother was as rational as any man he knew. Had she not raised her eyebrows when he recited Dr Johnson’s definition of ‘man’? It was perhaps his first vacation after he entered Eton when his voice still piped that he had read the definition: a. ‘Man: (1) a human being (2) not a woman’? 256 He could still see his mother settled in the old horse- bone chair from the family home — Burley on the Hill — the blue and white wall-paper behind her. She had tilted her head and smiled before replying, ‘So my young scholar, does that mean a woman is not a human being?’

*

The male belief that Maria Sibylla Merian’s bird-eating spider was a female fantasy endured until late in the nineteenth century when a man reported observing a spider which sucked the blood of hummingbirds in the Amazon jungle.257

255 See Kim Sloan, ‘Aimed at Universality and Belonging to the Nation’, in Sloan (ed.) (2003), p.19. 256 Liza Picard (2000), p. 199. 257 See The Columbia Encyclopedia, ‘Merian, Maria Sibylla’, 6th Edn (Columbia University Press, 2004). For an idea of the ignorant attacks upon Merian’s work in Surinam, including her information on the bird-eating tarantula see Sharon Valiant, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: Recovering an Eighteenth-Century Legend’ Eighteenth- Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 474-475. On the other hand, Natalie Zemon Davis doubts that Merian actually saw the spider with the hummingbird as she drew the bird’s nest with four eggs instead of the usual two — Merian did note there were times when she relied on local information. Davis implies the spider was a figment of African beliefs about the Anansi creation spider. She does acknowledge that a male — 85 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Of the many marvels in the “Enlightenment Exhibition” it was the flower collages of stained paper created by Mrs Delany which were the most mesmerizing.258 As friend of the novelist Fanny Burney, Sir Joseph Banks, Queen Charlotte, Lady Charlotte Finch and others of that circle, Mrs Delany would have been at least known to Elizabeth Gore-

Needham. On the occasion of the Prince of Wales’ birthday 12 August 1778 the Royal

Family were breakfast guests of the Duchess of Portland; at the time Mrs Delany was in permanent residence with the Duchess. Later, Mrs Delany wrote to her niece, describing the visit and the order in which the entourage had travelled. Included in that entourage was [a] coach and six horses, in which were Princess Augusta, Princess Elizabeth, Lady Charlotte

Finch, the Governess to the Royal children, and Miss Goldworthy, 2 footmen behind.259

Elizabeth Needham’s father would have been the Coachman, a high status position in the serving class. One of the footman may well have been Mr. Gore’s friend, Mr. Howman, later to become page to the Prince of Wales. It is not surprising that when Elizabeth was arrested she expected the mention of her father’s status in Lady Finch’s household, with its connections to the Royal circle, to carry the protective magic of an ancient amulet, for the head coachman held a position of authority, controlling a staff of underlings ranging from under coachman to stable boy, each with clearly defined duties and distinctive clothing.

Even families without claim to a coat-of-arms would provide livery for their coachmen and

naturalist witnessed a spider attack a finch in the Amazon basin but notes it was considered unusual by the locals. See, Davis (2001), pp.183, 197-198. 258 For an introduction to Mrs Delany’s botanical art see Professor Lisa L. Moore, ‘Mrs. Delany, Chapter 7, ‘Flower Collage: A New Art’ in The Sister Arts: British Gardening, Painting and Poetry, 1700- 1832, http://www.en.utexas.edu/Classes/Moore/sources/02.htm. 259 See Lisa L. Moore, ‘Mrs. Delany, http://www.en.utexas.edu/Classes/Moore/sources/02.htm. — 86 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______grooms. The coachmen’s garb included a greatcoat with one or more shoulder capes to lead rain off the shoulders.260

*

Possibly Elizabeth-Gore Needham did see Mrs. Delany’s paper cuts, or paper mosaics, which are of astonishing intricacy and accuracy, especially given that Mrs. Delany was seventy-two when she began her art and her sight was already deteriorating. Against black paper the white tendrils of her Sea Daffodil (Hexandria Monogynia) on display uncoiled like tapering ribbons from six pointed stars, in a fragile ballet of waving filaments and anthers. Collectors, including Sir Joseph Banks, sent Mrs Delany specimens which she studied with careful dissections. I had not expected to see this work which was produced either in Mrs Delany’s cottage in St James’ Park, a short walk from what was then

Buckingham House, or in Queen Charlotte’s grace and favour cottage in Windsor Park.

*

From Kingsway I turned left into Sardinia Street,261 a short street at the south-western end of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There I was jolted back to the Gordon Riots, for there the rabble with their cockades and banners once surged towards the home of the Sardinian

Ambassador attacking the building and destroying the chapel, a mass house, with its organ, priceless books and vestments. [T]he maddest people that the maddest times were ever plagued with, Ignatius Sancho, a once-child slave, wrote to a friend after witnessing similar destruction from his Charles Street grocery shop in the vicinity of Parliament — a shop

260 Georgian Index: Carriages and Their Parts, http://www.georgianindex.net/horse_and_carriage/carriages.html. 261 These streets were re-configured at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. — 87 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______bought with a bequest from the Duchess of Montagu who with her husband had been the original owners of Montagu House. 262

Within the month of the Gordon Riots most of the trials were over, sentences were passed, and carts went battering over cobbles towards portable gallows erected at the site of the crimes, one of which was the house of the Lord Chief Justice, William, Earl of Mansfield, in Bloomsbury Square. In Bow Street, a short walk away from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, through Kemble Street towards Covent Garden, two lads, hardly seventeen years, were hanged, convicted of destroying the house of Sir John Fielding,263 the novelist’s brother and fellow magistrate, commonly known as the Blind Beak.

Most surprising of all the capital sentences was that of Edward Dennis, the Jack Ketch264 of that time. This was the same man who had the previous year hanged the young mother,

Mary Jones, moments after she had suckled her baby. It was the same man who would light the shavings under the faggots around Phoebe Harris. His name must have caused Anna

Mullens to tremble during the months she was imprisoned with her three year old daughter.

If the shame and horrific suffering of a hanging death really functioned as a deterrent to crime, then we might imagine that Edward Dennis would be the most unlikely offender in the kingdom; and yet he was arrested, or taken, as was the common term, for tearing down a house in New Turnstile. However, so that he might execute his brother rioters, he was pardoned. Within days he had hitched the halter, the kiss, the cheat, around his

262 Now King Charles Street.. 263 ‘An Account of the Riots in London in 1780: Lord George Gordon’ from the Complete Newgate Calendar, Volume 4, http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/newgate4/gordonlg.htm, (Last Updated: November 2003); also see Ackroyd, p.492. 264 Slang term for hangman which derived from the name of an infamous seventeenth century executioner. — 88 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______companions’ throats, set the white hoods over their heads and clipped the rumps of the tumbrel horses. A miscreant the author of the Newgate Calendar called him.265

Of this time one observer recollected a cart load of young women in summer dresses, lashed together, faces bewildered.266 His compassion is in contrast to the response of the

Newgate Calendar author who, rather than seeing human faces, dismissed them as refuse.

He wrote, Among those tried and convicted, were several women and boys; but not one individual of the smallest respectability or good fame; negroes, Jews, gypsies, and vagabonds of every description; the very refuse of society.267

Thirty-seven people were sentenced to death in the Old Bailey Sessions which began 28

June 1780, and within three weeks twenty-five were executed, two of whom were not rioters.268 Yet, twenty-five was a small number of executions considering the extent of the destruction and the thousands participating in the riots which had begun with a three abreast column four miles long.269

Four of the twenty-five hanged were Africans, ex-slaves, one of whom was a woman, a much greater percentage than the ratio in the population. An examination of the Session papers, the sentences and the respites do suggest inconsistencies in the judgments which were further complicated by the fact of a fifty pound reward offered to those bringing

265 ‘Lord George Gordon’ The Newgate Calendar 1780, http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/newgate4/gordonlg.htm. 266 ‘Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers’, 2nd Edn, 1856, cited by Gatrell (1994), pp.11-12. 267 Lord George Gordon, The Newgate Calendar 1780 Online, p. 147. 268 The trials for the Session and the summary of sentences and details of executions are available at OBPOnline, 28 June 1780, Ref: f17800628-1. 269 Ackroyd, p. 484. — 89 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______successful prosecutions. The question of when, or if, the prosecutor had learned of the reward was usually asked in these trials. However, the question appeared to be merely a matter of form, as did the prosecutor’s claim of ignorance, at the most admitting knowledge of the reward after bringing the prosecution. There are so many conflicted meanings in those ‘facts’: multiplicities of motivations and ways a ‘fact’, an object, an action, a person, a race, were interpreted, existing as they did, and we do, in a complex historical space.

Thus, for some it was a crime to be poor: the poor were valueless, refuse, gallows fodder, whose deaths would be a convenient warning to others. In his examination of riots over the century Robert Shoemaker suggested the small number actually executed, or imprisoned, together with those charged with a minor offence, instead of the capital offence of riot, indicated a toleration of riots.270 However, it seems more likely to have been a matter of what Foucault identified as the dynamics of social power which shape the different ways that people may live, and die, in an historical space.

*

Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade, There the pale artist plies his sickly trade; Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. ‘The Deserted Village’ Oliver Goldsmith (1770)

*

Confused by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reconfigurations of the streets between the British Museum and Lincoln’s Inn Fields I paused for orientation in the shady

270 Robert Shoemaker (2004), p. 137. — 90 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______depth of Sardinia Street, the sign pregnant with intimations of the Gordon Riots. It was not until later when I tried to match a current London map with a digitalized version of John

Rocque’s 1746 Map of London, Westminster and Southwark271 that I realized Sardinia

Street was once Duke Street, the actual site of the Sardinian Ambassador’s residence and chapel.

In Duke Street a crowd with their cockades and banners, differing in mood from that which would later attack the house of Lord Mansfield, for it was directly anti-Catholic, surged through the heavy archway to Lincoln’s Inn Fields with bludgeons rattling and dogs running with the excitement. The target was the home of the Sardinian Ambassador, site of a Catholic chapel, a mass house. It was there, trailing the crowd, that Anna Mullens, the young woman from Dublin, who in a few years would be capitally convicted and confined in Newgate with her three year old daughter, might have been seen. Drawn by the shouting and clanging as it moved towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields she had hurried anxiously with several other Catholics from ‘Little Ireland’ in St Giles. The Ambassador’s chapel was, after all, their home church. That this would have been so was borne out, albeit indirectly, by Dorothy George, a foremost historian of eighteenth century London. George wrote that

St Giles was a centre for beggars and thieves and the headquarters of street sellers and costermongers [fruit and vegetable sellers] and it had a reputation in Ireland for being generous in matters of poor relief.272 This poor relief must have come largely from the

271 John Rocque’s Survey of London, Westminster and Southwark, 1746, with commentary by Ralph Hyde, CD, 2nd Edn (Motco Enterprises 2003). 272 M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, (1925/2000), p. 121. George’s work on eighteenth century London is essential reading for anyone interested in the period. She represents the Irish immigrants’ living conditions as nightmarishly degraded. We should, however, allow for the possible exaggerations and prejudices of the early nineteenth century sources upon which she draws for she completes her descriptions explaining that the Irish labourer had greater physical strength than Londoners and allows — 91 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Catholic parish funds as the immigrants would not have qualified for English ‘poor relief’: under the Poor Laws they would not have been recognized as having a parish settlement.

Even immigrants from counties in England would not have qualified for relief. Dorothy

George wrote that when they [English from the counties] first came to London, poor and friendless, they had no possible claim to parish help. To apply for it would result in their being sent back to their own parishes.273

That religions must take care of their own was also indicated by the role of the Jewish

Synagogue in parish relief, especially for the Ashkenazi,274 the people of central Europe who spoke Yiddish, the dialect which had evolved from Germanic and Hebrew languages.

As ‘Abrahams’ was an Ashkenazi name this is the group to which Esther Abrahams would have belonged. In addition Esther must have had some connections, probably through her marriage, with the wealthier Sephardic community because in New South Wales both she and her daughter, Rosanna, came to use the Sephardic name of Julian. That Esther was married so young is probable, because early marriages were common in Jewish communities where the youthful couple was protected by the Jewish custom of kest, or boarding, provided by the marriage contract.275 It is also likely that as a young wife Esther would have maintained her father’s name because that was a Jewish tradition.

that they (the St Giles residents excepted) were perhaps thriftier than the English of a corresponding class. If their living conditions were so appalling it seems unlikely they would have any strength at all. See George, pp. 120-131. 273 Ibid., p. 119. 274 Ibid., pp. 131-132. 275 For an explanation of the traditions related to naming and marriage see Natalie Zemon Davis (2001), pp. 9- 11. — 92 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Again, while in some ways a hindrance for researchers, the instability of proper names, of

“signatures”, can be seen as a special archive.

*

A Catholic chapel had been on the site at Duke Street since the mid-seventeenth century, tolerated within a developing tradition across Europe as part of the extra-territoriality of embassies and their right to freedom of worship.276 Access to the chapels was not meant to be open to London Catholics and those parishioners who attended were subject to intermittent arrests, or anti-Catholic attitudes, until what has been called the fiction of privacy and invisibility of the chapels became more accepted.277 In 1720 the Embassy in

Duke Street passed from Portugal to Sardinia, with a local ministry focused around St Giles and its large community of Irish immigrants.278

*

Anna Mullens feared for what the march would mean for her chapel — and it was her chapel. She had heard of it soon after her arrival from Dublin, when she and her sailor,

Peter Roach, who full of promises had brought her to London, had stepped in for a porter at The Cock in High Street. She was not quite sixteen years old, and she could recall her trepidation when first she crossed the threshold of the Ambassador’s grand house, for there

276 A brief introduction to embassy chapels and attacks upon them during the Gordon riots see John Richardson, The Annals of London (2001), pp. 162, 221. 277 For a discussion of the fine distinctions drawn between the concept of extra-territoriality and private and public spheres in the role of the embassy chapels see Benjamin J. Kaplan, ‘Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of: Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe’, The American Historical Review Vol. 107, No. 4 (October 2002), pp. 1031-1064. 278 For a sound account of the historical roles of embassy chapels in Europe with special attention to the Sardinian Chapel in London see Benjamin J. Kaplan, ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Devotion: Embassy Chapels and the Toleration of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Early Modern History, Vol. 6, No. 4 (September 2002), pp. 341-361. — 93 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______was no other access to the chapel. Being conscious of her shabby petticoat and the roughness of her kersey jacket she had wished for invisibility, and quickly moved into the shadows at the western end of the nave, beneath the organ with the angels and a regal coat of arms, a white shield embossed with a red cross and flourishes of scrolled leaves.279

Of course she was not the only poor Irish immigrant present and the glory of the chapel quickly distracted her self-consciousness. It was like a cathedral with a nave, tiered wooden galleries and light flooding from the cupola into the apse.280 The chapel was where the choir and the golden angels on the high organ sang so sweetly that her back prickled, and she was transported in a small ecstasy to the edge of what she imagined paradise to be.

There was nothing akin to it in her Dublin. She could endure hunger and loneliness if there was the music: the chants and the soaring sounds of the Kyrie Eleison, Gloria and

Sanctus.281

*

What a religion is this! How finely does it harmonize with the weakness of our nature; how seducingly it speaks to the senses; how forcibly it works on the passions; how strongly it seizes on the imagination; how interesting its forms; how graceful it ceremonies; how awful its rites. — What a captivating, what a picturesque faith! Who would not become its proselyte, were it not for the stern opposition of reason — the cold suggestion of philosophy! 282

*

279 See Charles Oman, ‘The Plate of the Chapel of the Sardinian Embassy’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 763 (October 1966), pp. 500-503. 280 Benjamin Kaplan writes that, the chapel served as veritable cathedral of English Catholicism. See (September 2002), p. 359. 281 For further information about the music of the chapel, including the roles of Thomas Arne and Charles Wesley see Julian Herbage, ‘Arne: His Character and Environment’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 87th Session (1960-1961), pp. 15-29. See, too, Philip Olleson, ‘Spirit Voices’, Musical Times, Vol. 138, No. 1855 (September 1997), pp.4-10. 282 Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, edited with an introduction by Kathryn Kirkpatrick, 1st publ., 1806 (Oxford University Press 1999), p. 50. — 94 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

So wrote the Anglo-Irish narrator of Sydney Owenson’s novel The Wild Irish Girl: A

National Tale (1806), in the early stages of his sojourn at his family seat in Connaught, to which he had been banished by his father for youthful misdemeanours. The foundation of the novel, about historical Anglo-Irish relationships and prejudices, was the author’s knowledge of her Irish culture, which she carefully footnoted, thus giving an historical validity and political intent to what was, in other ways, a traditional gothic romance. It was yet another surprising archive, a serendipitous gift, from which the phantom of Anna

Mullens might be assembled and the life of the vanished woman partially understood.283

*

The Italianate Sardinian chapel would have been very different from Anna’s childhood memories of little stone churches with the rush lights, the sparse yellow flicker of candles and a cross roughly hewn above the door. However, this would not have meant Anna ceased to cherish the little church which she would never visit again, except in memory and dreams, for the beguilement of the Sardinian chapel belonged to the same devotional order, its music blending with memories of the old hymns and ballads. When Anna remembered how the music of the fiddle and pipes set her reeling at dances and fairs, her throat pained with sadness and she longed to sail home to dance and hear again the harp tunes, the planxty, and to hear the songs of the woman called Clarseach na Vallagh, the Village

Harp.284 Then she would be consoled by the music of the London chapel; by the rituals, the language, the music, and the glowing candelabra suspended from the cupola, and the face

283 For a careful appraisal of the novel within its historical, political and generic contexts, including its contrast with the work of Owenson’s contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, see Thomas Tracy, ‘The Mild Irish Girl: Domesticating the National Tale’, Éire-Ireland: An International Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 39, Issues 1 and 2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 91-109. 284 Sydney Owenson revealed that her own grandmother (County Mayo) was called Clarseach na Vallagh for the beauty of her voice. See Owenson (1806/1999), Footnote 1, p. 75. — 95 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______of the Saviour in its haze of gold in the painting above the altar. All of those things protected her from despair when her purse was light,285 and cold and hungry she felt abandoned in a strange city. Years later, when she would wake in a Newgate cell to the midnight death chant of the bell-man, she would hold her child close and pray for survival, sustained by her memory of the chapel and its songs of paradise.

In the chapel it mattered nought that she was poor: were not the very hairs of her head numbered? Often after mass she returned to St Giles humming an old song with the meld of mourning and romancing she had learnt at wakes; or perhaps even before that it was inscribed in her DNA, in the pulse of her mother’s womb. As the Gaelic princess, explained to the English narrator in Sydney Owenson’s novel, an Irish air with the most animated of measures, like all Irish melodies, breathes the very soul of melancholy.286

Anna realized Edward was nudging her, frowning, offering her a stick, urging her to carry it. She had been so far away, dreaming, even within the jostling crowd, chanting, No

Popery … No Popery. Holy Mother, protect the chapel. For it to be destroyed would be a kind of death. She realized it was dangerous to be present without participating, though it horrified her to carry something even resembling a weapon. What would the Ambassador think? What would the Bishop Challoner think?287 And the dear friars288 who had at times

285 A ‘saying’ which recurs in The Wild Irish Girl and might thus be taken as common usage of the period. See Owenson, p. 41. 286 Ibid., p. 73. 287 Apostolic Vicar of the London district (1758-1781), see ‘London Catholics after the Reformation’, New Advent: Catholic Encyclopaedia http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09341a.htm. Bishop Challoner was the son of a Nonconformist. He converted to Catholicism when he was thirteen years old. See also Tony Handland, ‘From Reformation to Emancipation: Twixt Fifteen and Forty-Five (1715-1745)’, Thames Valley Papists, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09341a.htm. — 96 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______given her bread when they saw her so pale and wan, and they had given her small employment dusting the altar, or polishing pewter and the wainscoting in a rich woman’s house? Edward pressed her again. There were other women, some with children, who were empty handed. Shaking her head at Edward, Anna exchanged glances with a woman who walked resting her hand lightly on the shoulder of a lad of nine or ten. Anna could see they were mother and son.

In Newgate Anna would meet the woman again and wonder why she looked familiar, for it was Mary Harrison, the silk-winder, with her son, Joseph, who would be fifteen-years-old when he accompanied his mother on the voyage to Botany Bay.289 The silk weavers had come out for they had long resented the Roman Catholics, the Irish in particular, because they were cheap labour.290 Although the weavers’ attacks upon the Irish had been well before Anna’s time in London, they were legendary and she knew that resentments did not vanish when weapons and flames were gone: they might easily flare again. The woman looked away, restraining her son who was pushing forward.

Newcomers arrived every moment, some carrying cudgels, even swords, and there were a few men on horseback with their rallying cries of No Popery. Many of the walkers were mere lads, apprentices, roughly dressed, but shod. And there were women like herself from the chapel congregation: there because they could not stay away.

288 Benjamin Kaplan claimed there were some thirty chaplains assisting the ministry of Apostolic Vicar Richard Challoner, see Kaplan (September 2002), p. 359. 289 Regulations about children accompanying their mothers were not established until the 1790s; it seemed to be quite erratic and was probably dependent on the decision of the mother; unless the woman was required to spend time on the Dunkirk hulk, prior to embarkation. See Robert Holden (1999), pp. 4-5. 290 In his seminal work in which he identified the participants and motivations George Rudé analysed three major eighteenth century riots in London, including that against the Irish in 1736. See George Rudé, ‘The London “Mob” in the Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1959), pp. 1-9. — 97 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The heat of the June day intensified, the frisson rippling from the chanting and the banging of iron bars and hammers as the crowd, ‘the mob’, passed beneath a heavy arch, crumbling and festooned with ivy. Even the sparrows were silent in the dense green leaves of summer elms. The trees held the heat like ovens as Anna and her friends entered Duke Street and heard the sound of splintering of glass, counter-pointed by the noise of beams and crowbars barged against the Sardinian embassy’s heavy doors. Legs and boots waved through the lower windows. It was impossible to know what was happening inside. Then the

Ambassador, Monsieur Cordon and his wife were almost bundled through the front door, the man trying to support the terrified and weeping woman. A gentleman pushed through the press and clamour and, avoiding the wild weapons, took Madame Cordon’s arm to lead her to safety. The man was a cousin of Horace Walpole (1717-1797). In a letter to a friend,

Walpole, the son of an English Prime Minister, Member of Parliament, writer and printer, wrote that his cousin, Thomas Walpole, who lives in Lincoln's Inn Fields, went to her [the

Ambassador’s wife] rescue, and dragged her, for she could scarce stand with terror and weakness, to his own house.291

Anna was anxiously watching the Ambassador’s wife pause when a man shouted, Roman

Catholic dogs, may their bowels drop out.292 The woman staggered, and then supported by her rescuer she was allowed to pass with barely a glance from the rioters, so intent were they on burning the Ambassador’s doors and cheering the flames fed by holy books and

291 See Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, to Sir Horace Mann, 5 June, 1780, Letters of Horace Walpole by Horace Walpole, Part 4, http://www.fullbooks.com/Letters-of-Horace-Walpolex14524.html.See, too, Catholic Ancestor Journal, Vol. 3, No. 6 (November, 1993), p. 225, http://www.catholic- history.org.uk/cfhs/ancestor.htm. 292 This ‘wish’ was addressed to James Crossley, a Catholic clock-maker in Moorfield, see OBPOnline, 28 June 1780, trial of Jonathan Stacey, riot: breaking the peace, Ref: t17800628-116. — 98 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______silk vestments. Red, green, rose, white and purple, seamed and braided with gold, the silks flared, bright fragments floating over the fields. Cinders fell on shoulders and hats.

An engine had arrived and rioters pressed about, preventing the officers’ attempts to extinguish the blazes.293 Then, O Jesus Mary and Joseph and St Brigid, the large painting of the Saviour which hung above the altar was being carried towards the bonfire. Mr. Cordon gesticulated, pleaded, offered five hundred guineas that the painting might be spared. 294

The man was almost weeping and repeated several times that the painting was a

Renaissance masterpiece. 295

Nearby a man was collecting for the poor mob; surely five hundred guineas was a fortune that would satisfy one and all. Oh, St Brigid and all the Holy Saints, the Saviour’s shining face was cast upon the flames which licked through the centre and consumed the gold frame so that it crumpled into ash as though eaten by the Devil. Anna almost made the Sign of the Cross, but recalled herself. And then, parts of the organ were carried from the chapel.

It could not be: the golden angels with the trumpets had been torn from their pinnacle on the top gallery.

The Ambassador was gesticulating wildly, begging, crying out that he would give one thousand guineas that the organ might be spared. Did they not know this organ was made

293 Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, to Sir Horace Mann, 5 June, 1780, See Footnote 291 above, p. 98. 294 See Brycchan Carey, Ignatius Sancho: African Man of Letters online, http://www.brycchancarey.com/sancho/letter2.htm , (Updated 24 November 2005. 295 Thought to be the work of the Italian artist, Andrea Casali, according to R. C. Fuller, Warwick Street Church (1956), p. 13, cited by British History Online, 'Golden Square Area: Warwick Street', Survey of London, Vols 31 and 32; and St James Westminster, Part 2 (1963), pp. 167-73. http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=41468. — 99 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______by Father Smith, the same Father Smith, friend of Christopher Wren, whose organ graced

St Paul’s Cathedral … Durham Cathedral … and … The man lost his voice, fell to his knees in the position of prayer. Apparently without fear, he made the Sign of the Cross, his face imploring. A man shouted in the Ambassador’s face, his voice hoarse with hours of angry chanting, What price absolutions today, eh?296 There was ugly laughter and the man, holding the angels above the Ambassador’s head, cried out that they would burn him with his precious idols, given the chance.297 And pieces of the organ were heaped into the flames. O, Mother of the Orphans, Breast of the Infants, Pray for us.298 Anna turned and hurried away, she could not watch the angels disappear. She did not hear Edward call to her, did not see him again that day.

*

In the Sardinian chapel in 1793 Fanny Burney would make her marriage vows to Monsieur

Alexander D'Arblay,299 the French émigré, member of the Constituent Assembly and

Adjutant-General to Marquis de Lafayette. As I passed from Sardinia Street into Lincoln’s

Inn Fields I wondered if what was once the Ambassador’s house still faced Lincoln’s Inn

Fields with the chapel invisible at the back. The chapel was still functioning when in 1894

Constance Hill went searching for the site of Fanny Burney’s Catholic marriage. After the

296 This was another taunt directed at James Crossley by Jonathan Stacey, again see OBPOnline, Ref: t17800628-116 (Footnote 292, p. 100, above). 297 The information about the ambassador offering the money for the painting and organ was reported in a postscript in a letter from Ignatius Sancho, a grocer in Westminster and ex-child slave, to his friend John Spink, 6 June 1780. As he wrote the letter Sancho was observing about a thousand mad men, armed with clubs, bludgeons, and crows, just now set off for Newgate. See Brycchan Carey online (2005). 298 From an ancient Irish Litany of Mary, see New Advent: Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary’, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15459a.htm. 299 Constance Hill Juniper Hall: A Rendevous of Certain Illustrious Personages during the French Revolution Including Alexandre D'Arblay and Fanny Burney, from John Mark Ockerbloom (ed.) The Celebration of Women Writers (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1894), p. 165-171. The website was developed in collaboration with the On-Line Books Page, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/hill/burney/junip17.html#p165. — 100 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Gordon Riots the chapel had been extended and Constance Hill had entered through a

Norman doorway leading from the garden. She admired the tiered galleries and the restored organ. I understood her delight and sense of accomplishment, when she wrote that [by] the kindness of this priest an old record volume was searched for and put into our hands, and there among the marriage entries for 1793 appeared the following:

DIE 30 JULII, 1793. ‘Nullo impedimento detecto in matrimonium [Page 168] conjuncti fuere Alexander Gabriel Pieuchard D'Arblay et Francisca Burney. Testibus Jacobo Burney et Louisa Maria Jacques et Felice Ferdinand. P. CAR: JULIAENS’ 300

Constance Hill later wrote that the chapel was, full of interesting historical associations. It seemed an understatement for the flesh and blood past indicated by the sign, Sardinia

Street.

*

By 1793, when Fanny Burney married, Anna Mullens was settled at Port Jackson with her daughter Mary, who was born in St Giles, and the three children of her marriage to the sailor Charles Peat, the polite highwayman. Peat, who had been pardoned within a year and became one of the principals of the night watch,301 would be a loyal husband and step- father. Mollie Gillen thought that Mary vanished from the records after she and her mother

300 Constance Hill, Ibid., p. 167-168, On-Line Books Page, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/hill/burney/junip17.html#p165. 301 Gillen (1989), p. 280. — 101 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______arrived in Australia; however, the record of Mary’s marriage to Lawrence Brady shows she used her step-father’s name.302

*

By 1793 Elizabeth Needham had also settled into Port Jackson life and was married to a fellow convict, William Snailham, whose mother was a servant to Lady Byron in Somerset

Street, London.303 The couple’s daughter, Ann, was two years old.304 Their fellow convict,

Esther Abrahams-Julian, was particularly well established in the colony with First

Lieutenant George Johnston together with her daughter, Rosanna, and three additional children. The case of Esther Abrahams was, as I have indicated, one which had originally motivated my antipathy to the Recorder of London, James Adair, and led me towards

Lincoln’s Inn Fields. That Esther established a comfortable life in the colony was no defence for James Adair’s failure to attend to her petitions for more than a year.

*

Despite Adair’s hard legal judgments and decisions and despite his support for the Catholic

Relief Act (1778) his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was not attacked in the 1780 riots. It was no doubt fortunate for him that the attack on the chapel occurred early in the riots, directly following the march to Parliament and Lord Gordon’s anti-Catholic petition, because then the focus was the symbols of Popery. Further, Adair may not have been

302 Marriage of Mary Peat and Lawrence Brady, NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, No. V1803245 147A/1803, http://www.nsw.gov.au. Note: This Mary Peat could not have been the child of Anna and Charles Peat because that child was baptized in 1792. As it is unlikely the family would have two girls called ‘Mary’, it is more likely that Mary Mullens was baptized into the Church of England in 1792. 303 Indicted as Snaleham, but in the colony he signed his name as William Snalham, OBPOnline, 24 April 1784 trial of William Snaleham, theft: burglary, Ref: t17840421-8; Gillen (1989), p.554 and 559; see also Gillen, p. 338. 304 See Gillen (1989), p. 262. — 102 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______especially well known for he had been in his powerful legal position as Recorder of London for little more than a year. In addition, watchmen did not bring their arrests to his home for authorization of imprisonments, as was the case for Justices Hyde, Fielding and Mansfield.

His legal role was also protected by anonymity so in the published Proceedings he appeared as Mr Recorder whereas other judges were named. Perhaps that anonymity is one of the reasons Adair has not been given full attention in early Australian history.

*

Lincoln’s Inn Fields was quiet and peaceful when I arrived there on that August afternoon.

Even the traffic hum of Kingsway had faded, replaced by the casual sound of tennis balls bouncing on racquets. An elegant young woman, tall, well dressed, crossed the road, walking with a loose limbed grace, her smartly cut coat flowing with the rhythm of her long stride. Still thinking of the attack on the Sardinian chapel, I wandered around the square where, in 1728, John Gay’s musical The Beggars Opera: A Newgate Pastoral, satirizing the corrupt relationship between thief-takers and the administration of criminal justice, was first performed.

The late light shed a faint gold haze, glazing the past. It was perfect for photographing

Lincoln’s Inn and the Royal College of Surgeons, where Robert Adair, once held the position of Royal Surgeon. The relationship of the Surgeon to James Adair remains a mystery to me; as does that of another Robert Adair who claimed a place in American colonial history. Both the lawyer and the American adventurer were born in Ireland.

— 103 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The young woman re-crossed the road. We had almost passed when she suddenly said, ‘Oh lady, please help me.’ Her accent was European. Once I looked directly, I saw she was distressed, her hands spread nervously and then clenched against her breasts. ‘Please could you give me money for a meal? I came here to work. I’ve been to the police, they sent me to Social Benefits, but they say I need a number … They cannot help me.’

She looked around desperately and then directly at me. There were eleven pounds in my wallet. ‘My money is almost gone. My room is so expensive. I can’t even wash my hair… or phone my father,’ she said. Her hair was pulled tightly back, exposing her high cheek bones. She would have been, perhaps, thirty years old and appeared about to collapse when, after a quick calculation, I offered her the eleven pounds. There were a further twenty tucked in an inside pocket with my cards. ‘Oh, lady, thank you, I’ve asked so many … you are the only one who has helped me.’ She was from Portugal. ‘Why did you come to

London?’ I asked, but I knew the answer, it was the old dream of employment, if not of fortune; at home there were so few opportunities, wages were low. We walked together towards Kingsway, trailed by the ghosts of those who have dreamed of London as a bountiful city. ‘London is a hard city. Too hard,’ she said, close to tears. ‘Go home,’ I said.

‘If you ring your father will he send money for your fare?’ She nodded. ‘Have you enough money now, to ring your father?’ Again she nodded, ‘Yes.’ We stood a moment before parting. ‘Have you been to your Church for help? I’m sure they would,’ I said. ‘Just to

Mass, not for help, oh but I will, oh thank you, lady, I will, you have helped me, London is so hard, stay with God, lady, oh stay with God, lady, thank you.’ ‘Good-bye,’ I said. I might have been literal and said, ‘God be with you.’ She turned by the Fields, now reduced to the size of a large London square, where the tennis game had finished, and I continued — 104 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______down Sardinia Street retracing my steps to the underground at Holborn. Perhaps I should have given her more; I should have at least suggested she went to her Embassy. Later my archivist friend said I could have sent her to St Martin’s-in-the Fields — where the fields have also long vanished.

There will be some who might judge me a gullible fool. I do not care. If she were an actress then I have paid more for less convincing performances. If she were sincere, as I believe, then it was too little. For the few Dick Whittingtons who arrived in that town, with or without a cat, there were multitudes who starved, died in prison, were compelled to prostitution, or were pressed into the military. For them I should have been more generous.

A friend said that it was sentimental to draw a parallel between a young woman travelling to seek employment in the European Union of the twenty-first century and young women seeking employment in eighteenth century London. Nevertheless the event carried something of the multiplicity of the eternal return: iterations on patterns, ever different, but within boundaries, fractals, not circles.

*

‘Young men and women in the country fix their eye on London,’ rued the agrarian writer Arthur Young in 1771 … ‘they enter into service in the country for little else but to raise money enough to go to London … quit[ting] their clean healthy fields for a region of dirt, stink and noise.’ Roy Porter305

305 Roy Porter, London: A Social History, 1st publ. 1994 (Penguin 2000), p. 159. — 105 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

César de Saussure [1705-1783] writing around the same time as Fielding, concluded that most of London’s street walkers were from the country, come to London to seek their fortunes. Such women were, wrote William Hutton, ‘a sacrifice to the metropolis, offered by the thirty-nine counties’ … Of those prostitutes arrested in Southwark between 1814 and 1829, seventy- eight percent had their place of birth recorded…immigrant prostitutes made up over sixty per cent of the entire group. Tony Henderson306

*

306 Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830 (Pearson Education 1999), p. 19. Henderson’s citations are from: César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II (translated and edited by Mme. Van Muyden 1902), p. 203, and W. Hutton, A Journey to London: Comprising a Description of the most Interesting Objects of Curiosity to a Visitor of the Metropolis, 2nd Edn (1818), p. 47. — 106 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 6

31 December 1786 The Law in the Age of Reason

*

In England the punishment of crimes is tempered with mildness and humanity. The most atrocious villain when he has been tried and found guilty by an equitable judge and an impartial jury is put to death with all the leniency that can possibly attend capital punishment. Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1792.

The public execution is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted ... Its aim is…to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dyssymetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all- powerful sovereign who displays his strength … The punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle, not of measure, but of imbalance and excess … By breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince — or at least those to whom he has delegated his force — who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken … The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. Michel Foucault307

*

In his room above Lincoln’s Inn Fields James Adair lifted a bundle of documents from his desk and slid one beneath the other, reading swiftly. Many of the London women in this story did not know James Adair Esquire, or Mr. Justice Recorder, for so he was addressed, although some had stood before him at their trials in the Old Bailey where from his vantage on the Bench he scrutinized their faces, exposed under the wash of mirrored window light.

Adair shared the belief of his time that character was revealed in the face. On that winter

307 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. by A. Sheridan, 1st publ., 1977 (Penguin, 1979), p. 9. See also pp. 23, 34, 48-49. — 107 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______afternoon, 31 December 1786, engrossed at his desk, his greying crimped curls disciplined with a grosgrain ribbon and wearing his tambour waistcoat over cream worsted breeches he was a kindly looking man with large dark eyes. With his plump face tense, his full sensuous lips slightly pursed and heavy brows drawn into a concerned frown, he was very different from the Justice in the heavy sable wig of the Courtroom. There his aquiline nose dominated his expression.308 He sighed and began shuffling the Session parchments over and under each other like cards, the names falling … Elizabeth Needham … Hannah

Mullens … Esther Abrahams, the Jewish girl …there was not one of her petitioners known to him, not one gentleman or respectable tradesman.309

The sudden arrangements for the re-introduction of transportation, as necessary as it was to clear the gaols, had made two heavy Sessions upon which he must Report to His Majesty.

His task was made more difficult for he had been summoned to his sweet daughter’s bedside in Southampton, which meant he had been absent for the duration of both

Sessions.310 Although Mary Ann was apparently now beyond danger, she had been rendered frail and his urgent desire was to return to Southampton to comfort the dear young woman and her devoted mother. When she was stronger he would have the pleasure of informing her that a man of great dignity, and mathematical and legal intelligence, a fellow

308 There are several portraits of James Adair in the National Portrait Gallery, London. My digitalized print is of the portrait by Charles Howard Hodges (1764-1837), in the style of George Romney, NPG No. D1256. George Romney (1734-1802) has been judged as a portrait painter had the dispassionate eye of the camera in expert hands, who know that the instrument cannot lie but are not concerned to tell the truth. That is, he did not penetrate the character of his sitter. See Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain 1530 to 1790, 4th Edn, 1st publ. 1953 (Penguin Books 1978), p.306. 309 Such a statement was made about James Bloodworth’s petitioners by another magistrate, Thomas France, Recorder General Quarter Sessions, 24 November 1786, HO47/298. 310 Universal Register, London (Thursday Nov 2, 1786), p. 2, in The Times Digital Archive, 1785-1995, UNSW Library. The Universal Register was first published in 1785 by the proprietor-editor, John Walter. It was renamed The Times in 1788. See David Fisher, Chronomedia: Eighteenth Century, http://www.terramedia.co.uk/Chronomedia/years/18century.htm ). — 108 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______of the Royal Society, had requested permission to call upon her with a view to matrimony.

He thought she was probably aware of Sir John Wilson’s intentions for when he had told her of the Judge’s recent Knighthood she had smiled tenderly. And there was the additional good fortune that Sir John was a family friend whom he had known since his own days at

Peterhouse, Cambridge, where the young Wilson then taught Mathematics, his name prominent on the Honour Board.311

Setting aside these satisfying thoughts he began to read the petitions from felons in the cells of Newgate. He paused, stared at the coals glowing on the hearth. Then as invisible, as powerful, as the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who presided in the ethereal air of Mount Olympus and apportioned the lives of mortals, spinning, deciding on the twists of luck (to which all mortals were granted the right) and weaving destinies to which all mortals must answer, Mr Justice Recorder lifted his quill and began the work of shaping the women’s lives of this story.

He had previously written that his report for the October session would be completed by the

3rd of January and that he was prepared to report the last session by the following

Wednesday the 10th. He continued writing, claiming he had a report now in hand in answer to a number of references on petitions lying before me …and another on the Capital

Respites included in the list already sent to Lord Sydney both of which I hope to be able to furnish and transmit to the office in the course of the present week. He made a further

311 Mary Ann Adair married Sir John Wilson, 7 April, 1788. See J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, ‘John Wilson, 1741-1793’ in ‘The MacTutor History of Mathematics’, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Scotland, http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Wilson_John.html. — 109 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______comment which took account of the imminent Botany Bay embarkations before signing and dating the letter, as he signed all letters:

Your obliged and obedient,

Humble Servant

Lincoln’s Inn Fields J Adair 312

26 December 1786

It remained for him to complete his Report.

He almost knew the petitions, their accompanying depositions and court transcripts by rote.

He certainly knew all the names and by some strange gift, or punishment, or as a twenty- first century neuroscientist might suggest, a disturbance in the temporal lobe, against reason and will, he could visualize those wretches who had stood before him, miserable and lying: that was most certainly his burden, his punishment. His head ached. He was not a bad man; he was not a cruel man; he had stood for Liberty. Had he not given his services free to John

Wilkes (1725-1797)?313 Liberty and John Wilkes was a cry that reverberated around

London and Middlesex almost twenty years past, when he was a young man beginning his career and stout against encroachments of the Crown upon civil liberties.

Of course he had always held reservations about Wilkes’ predilection for insult and invective published weekly in the North Briton. Still he admired the boldness of its

312 James Adair, Letter to the Home Office, 26 December 1786, National Archives, Kew, HO47/5/62/175. 313 James Adair, Letter to John Wilkes, 1768, British Library, Manuscript Room, Catalogue 30,870, f. 95. — 110 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______reference to the Prime Minister, the Earl of Bute, and his dangerous role in the

Government’s encroachment of civil rights. He had believed not so much in John Wilkes, the man, but in the constitutional principles which the man’s situation had represented.

Wilkes lacked moderation, and that was a serious shortcoming. He could not understand any man writing the distressingly shocking piece, An Essay on Woman. And only a foul mouthed rake such as Lord Sandwich314 would have felt free to read such words in the

House of Lords. Adair balked at the memory; and then, in spite of himself, the image of that penis against a ten inch scale and the scandalous words jiggled in his head … leave all meaner things/This morn shall prove what raptures swiving315 brings/Let us (since life can little more supply/Than just a few good fucks and then we die)/ Expatiate free o'er that lov'd scene of Man.316 Naturally many were outraged both at the words and at the inappropriate laughter of others. Tales of the furore multiplied in the coffee houses where the offensive pages had been surreptitiously circulated. It was even rumoured that some Lords had fainted in Parliament. Adair was often mystified by Londoners’ penchant for gossip and scandal.

How could Wilkes not have thought of his gracious and loyal daughter? Where was the man’s shame? Of course, the man had written, or been involved in writing, the rubbish when he was young, and he had not intended that it should become public knowledge, had

314 Sir Francis Dashwood and the fourth Earl of Sandwich were members of the Hell-Fire Club, to which Wilkes also belonged. The group became the Monks of Medmenham and met in an old Abbey apparently to engage in sacrilegious and bacchanalian activities. 315 To swive: to copulate, see Francis Grose, The Vulgar Tongue: Buckish Slang and Pickpocket Eloquence, edited by Alistair Williams, 1st publ. 1785 (Summerdale 2004), p. 279. The lexicographer’s son, of the same name, was appointed Lieutenant Governor of the NSW colony for two years (1792-1794). See Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition, ‘Grose, Francis (1758? —1814)’, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010444b.htm. 316 Tom Hodgkinson, (Review) ‘Instead of Trials Lets Have Duels’: John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty by Arthur H. Cash’, The Independent, ‘Books’, Sunday 12 March 2006. — 111 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______but printed several copies for some of his lewd friends who judged such parody as wit. The reading of the piece in House of Lords had shaken Adair’s resistance to the rumour that

Wilkes was, or had been, a participant in orgies with the Hell Fire Club, or the Monks of

Medmenham, or whatever they called themselves. And Lord Sandwich with them, all dressed as friars with prostitutes in the garb of nuns. It was beyond belief. He paused, recalling a story he heard of some satanic ritual where the company would blaspheme, calling on the devil to show himself, and Wilkes, given to japes and mockery, had hidden a monkey clad in a black robe in a box. At the appropriate moment he had released the animal and wild with fear it had leapt upon Sandwich’s shoulder, sending him about the room screaming for Satan to forgive him. For a moment Adair was caught between amusement and disgust.

Well, so be it, he could not allow his natural rejection of impropriety to interfere with his defence of the principle of liberty and free speech. That the principle was under threat had been well demonstrated in Court responses to Wilkes’ trenchant criticisms of the

Government for its concessions to France in the Treaty of Paris317 which ended the Seven

Years War (1756-1763). Of course Wilkes went too far, to impugn the King as the mere mouthpiece of his Prime Minister and then to suggest His Majesty’s behaviour was prostitution. It was, indeed, too much. Nevertheless he, James Adair Esquire, newly called to the Bar, had responded to the accompanying calls for parliamentary reforms, including the right to report Parliamentary debates. He had joined his colleagues at meetings of the

317 Of course I cannot digress to the complications of the wars in Europe which extended into colonial conflicts involving interests in Canada, America, India and the West Indies, the text of the treaty which caused Wilkes’ condemnation is available online. See ‘Treaty of Paris 1763’ Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/paris763.htm, (Last modified 16 November 2006). — 112 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights at the London Tavern and subscribed to the cause. And he had done so in spite of despising the riots, nay, fearing the mobs, which had supported Wilkes and his challenges. The times had been too dangerous not to take a stand.

The principle of Habeas Corpus itself had been under threat.

The foundations of civil liberty were undermined when officers of the Crown, or Ministry, might enter a home and arrest a person on mere suspicion of an offence. Such processes were not to be accepted, he would fight such a prerogative with his last pound. The Bill of

Rights (1689)318 was inalienable from its signing when William and Mary of Orange had been set upon the throne. He smiled at the memory of the legal challenges in which he had supported Wilkes, and he remained proud that their brief used in the Court of Common

Pleas had been taken up by the American colonists. He, as others of the time, had taken inspiration from the forty-fifth verse of Psalm 119: I will walk in Liberty, for I keep thy precepts.

And so he had continued to do, even yet. Within his legal provenance had he not recommended liberty to those poor wretches whom he might? Had he not recommended several women to the King’s mercy for free pardons, and that several capital felons be transported beyond the seas?319 And had he not recommended that those young men, with some prospects and character, be given into the care of father or friends; or that they be allowed to transport themselves beyond the Kingdom for the term of seven years, or for

318 See ‘The English Bill of Rights’, The Avalon Project Online, Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/england.htm. 319 A common sentence delivered in the period after the end of transportation to America. — 113 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______life?320 It was important to take account of a felon’s reputable family background,321 and whether or not the accused was a common thief.322 Further, he always gave due consideration to clemency when a felon’s health became dangerously compromised. 323

Yes, he had ever been governed by reason and sought to deliver compassion; to uphold the principles of liberty, recognizing, of course, there was no liberty beyond the law. Thus it was proper that Wilkes did answer to the law and later he vindicated the loyalty of his supporters as a highly principled reformist Member of Parliament, Sheriff and then Lord

Mayor of London, followed by the position of Chief Chamberlain.324 It was in his position as Chief Chamberlain that Wilkes had summoned armed officers when the Bank of

England and the Exchange had been under threat during the Gordon Riots, for which Adair was grateful, as were all law-abiding citizens. Later Adair had heard the good Dr Johnson remark with his usual irony that Wilkes’ was always zealous for order and decency.325

Well, doubtless, Wilkes was a man of contradictions. Yet there was much to admire. The freedom of the press to report Parliamentary debates and decisions was a precious victory and, in addition, a more equitable parliamentary representation had prevailed. Adair, with

320 For example, James Adair, Sessions Report, 31 December 1786, recommended Thomas Harknett , G. Warwick and William Smith be pardoned on condition [they] leave the kingdom for seven years. See HO47/5/62, National Archives, Kew. 321 See James Adair’s Report, 4 January, 1785, in which he noted Luke Rogers’ reputable family and recommended clemency on the grounds his friends and relatives were willing to send him abroad, HO47/3/24; see similar recommendation for Daniel Gunter, Report, 2 September, 1786, HO47/5/46, and Adair’s recommendation that Peter Orwall be allowed to transport himself because of previous good character [and because he] came from a reputable family that had fallen on hard times, Report, 30 October 1786, HO47/5/61. 322 For example, see James Adair, Report 14 September 1784 in which the ground for extending clemency to Thomas Bradley was that he was not a common thief, HO47/3/14. 323 For example, on this consideration Adair recommended free pardons to James Ellis, Report 29 December, 1785, HO47/2/83, Samuel Phillips, Report, 25 August, 1784, HO47/3/13 and William Stone, Report, 4 October, 1784, HO47/3/15. 324 For a short biography of John Wilkes see Peter D. G. Thomas, ‘Wilkes, John (1725-1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29410. 325 Thornbury and Walford, ‘Newgate’, British History Online. — 114 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______his quill resting, recalled how lucidly the man had spoken in support of a Dissenters’ Relief

Bill in 1779, declaring his wish to see cathedrals, mosques, pagodas, synagogues rising in one neighbourhood, and with his usual exaggeration added, a temple of the Sun. It was, he said, the sole business of the magistrates to take care that they did not persecute each other.326 Amen to that.

So Adair was proud that he lived by the principles of Liberty and the Law. It would be, he reasoned, an apposite epitaph.

That he had spent a lifetime fulfilling his duties was no empty boast; although at times, usually in the small hours of the morning when he heard the watch crying, It is the third, or first or second, hour on a clear and frosty morning and all’s well, he admitted an increasing sense of horror, of despair, at what the law had required of him. He could not think of the case of Phoebe Harris without shuddering. Yet he could not have recommended

Phoebe Harris to mercy: coining was High Treason. Civil order was maintained by such example. And, in truth, the King held no mercy for coiners. Her death followed His

Majesty’s will and to have recommended otherwise would have damaged his own standing with the King; and made it more difficult to win other acts of mercy, such as pardon for the men imprisoned on the hulks who had been recommended, by the good man, Duncan

Campbell (1726-1803), master of the hulks. His compliance with reasonable requests for mercy balanced those other rigorous, necessary, judgments.

326 Peter D. G. Thomas, ODNB Online (2004). — 115 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

He looked fondly at a framed tapestry text upon his desk. The words were those of the

Ancient Greek sage, Bias of Priene. It had been embroidered by his wife’s hand. He took up the frame.

Nature exacts my Tenderness, but the Law my rigour. Bias of Priene327

The text was framed in a laurel wreath and above it his wife had set the face of Justice, her eyes swathed. Beloved Elizabeth, she was so desirous that he be honoured with a portrait, her pride in his work sustained him … she so well understood his struggles. He would indulge her; allow her to arrange for the portrait sittings, with a plain portraitist, of course, neither someone as fanciful as Mr Gainsborough, nor as expensive as Mr Reynolds. His wife would choose wisely; he could rely upon her. He remembered the day he came upon her reading at the window seat, her face serious, intent, as she studied Mr Henry Fielding’s pamphlet, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. That was long ago.

He adhered to Fielding’s arguments for they were the precepts of civil order. Still smiling faintly, he took his well-thumbed copy of the pamphlet from a desk drawer. It fell open at what were its indubitable arguments … To consider a human Being in the Dread of a sudden and violent Death; to consider that his Life or Death depend on your Will; to reject the Arguments which a good Mind will officiously advance to itself; that violent

Temptations, Necessity, Youth, Inadvertency have hurried him to the Commission of a

Crime which hath been attended with no Inhumanity; to resist the Importunities, Cries, and

327 Henry Fielding, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, edited by Malvin E. Zirker, 1st publ., 1751-1753 (Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 165. — 116 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Tears of a tender Wife, and affectionate children who, though innocent, are to be reduced to misery and Ruin by the strict adherence to Justice.

He closed his eyes, the words still visible before him … These altogether form an Object which whoever can look upon without Emotion, must have a very bad Mind; and whoever by the Force of Reason can conquer that Emotion must have a very strong one.328

Carefully he returned the pamphlet to the drawer. Well, in spite of the lapse of half a year he could smell Phoebe Harris’s dreadful burning, and not just in his dreams. The smell ambushed him; even sometimes as the steaming roast was carried to the table he was halted, carving knife to his right hand. It was only by an effort of will he maintained his dignity before the family. He sensed his wife’s anxious gaze. His wife had no inclination to witness executions and they had agreed their children should not be permitted to do so.

Well, they were like their dear mother and as children had not expressed interest or inclination. Of course, for their son, James, it was important that as he matured he bore witness to the place of execution in public administration.

He was glad at least that strangling prior to burning was no longer a rare compassionate gesture of the executioner, and he was pleased that a more humane method of strangling had been devised. He knew there had been earlier times when shavings flamed the faggots with such awful suddenness that the executioner was forced to withdraw the last act of kindness, occasionally suffering grievous burnings to his own hands. Still Mr Justice

Recorder prayed that Phoebe Harris was dead, or at least insensible, before the faggots

328 Henry Fielding, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751-1753), p. 164. — 117 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______flamed. Of course he knew that wretches did not always die within a half an hour and that even when they had swung from the Long Drop the suffering could be interminable, often enduring until friends or loved ones dragged at the legs to bring release. Phoebe Harris had stepped from a stool a mere twelve inches from the earth. He comforted himself that her body swayed heavily when the executioner chained her against the stake. Indeed, she was already swaying as Edward Dennis helped her to the stool. And it would have been at least thirty minutes before the two cartloads of faggots had hidden her entirely from view. That was another new devising of which he approved; although it was possible to see her body drop behind the flames when the rope about her neck burnt through. After that he did not linger on the platform, taking his leave from Mr Akerman, the Keeper of Newgate, immediately after the bodies of the six men hanged prior to the burning were prepared for the anatomizers.

But for all the improvements he wished he might never again be required to advise such a death. He had heard the comment that burning at the stake was a dreadful end for putting a slick of silver on a few copper coins. That he acknowledged; but then, coining was far more than the monetary value of the forgery. Critics of the capital code should not let sensibility cloud their reason. But he did pray there would come a time when such executions were no longer necessary.

He thanked God that it had been some years since executions with disembowelling had been … he almost thought, ‘staged’, but pushed away the thought. The sense of calculation in the word was too shocking. Nevertheless he could not hold away the thought. He would have been two years old when the last disembowelling occurred. The boys of Eton were

— 118 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______still speaking of it so graphically when he was enrolled, that it was as though those dreadful punishments were his own memory. He had been shocked at their tales, but then, and now, even infants, while still enjoying the protection of their mothers’ arms, witnessed executions of one, two, three, or occasionally twenty-four malefactors at a time. Surely, that the last disembowelling was now some forty years past bespoke progress, and vindicated the Law. In his position he must witness executions, and he accepted the jerking legs, the bulging eyes, the urinating and defecating. He accepted the necessity of that end. But that the men had been cut down as they gurgled and danced on the air, had their entrails violently spilled and held in front of their faces, on the end of a sword, dripping and steaming ... even now he shuddered, remembering the older school boys’ accounts. The skulls with empty eye-sockets still stood upon the pikes in Temple Bar when, as a child of ten, he first arrived in London. The Eton lads said one head, with the bared teeth and wild hair had long gone, tilted askew, fallen and rolled into a ditch, street urchins kicking it as if it were a ball, the stray dogs which roamed like mobs in the streets later gnawing hungrily.

But since that fateful day there had been no such instances of high treason. That indicated those sentences were necessary, that they were effective deterrents.

He was also haunted by the strange silence of the mob when the young woman with babe at her breast was executed, five or six years past. It seemed but yesterday he had taken his position upon the cast iron balcony of the Sheriff’s house to witness the execution of the young woman and the other capital offenders. It was as if a pall had been cast across the multitudes teeming around the scaffold; and then there arose a sound best described as mournful howling. It was of such a pitch it set a shiver across his shoulders, as though he had touched the conductor on Mr. Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with a Leyden Jar and — 119 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______had released the jolt of its stored electricity.329 He did not understand such science, his world was the Law, yet there seemed an odd connection between whatever was released from that jar and what happened between people in some circumstances; it was as if they were electrically charged by each other. He had heard a discussion that perhaps the soul was electricity located in the brain.330 Mr Priestley apparently believed that. Adair shook his head for it was beyond fathoming and verged towards blasphemy.

Afterwards he had supported a motion in Parliament that sentences be more proportionate to the crime, for he held the principle of balance in the administration of justice. Balance was essential to the maintenance of order.

James Adair closed his eyes. His mind was rambling. If he were not so tired he would have completed his Reports. Perhaps he should have followed his relative, Robert, into the profession of Surgeon.331 Although, then he would have been, no doubt, anatomizing the bodies of the hanged. It had to be admitted, he did not have the heart for that profession. He knew there were cases, yet to be prosecuted, of those who had plundered church yards to procure bodies for anatomizing. There were dark deeds happening in the name of Science.

He had read that a pregnant dog cut open for study was more concerned with licking her

329 For the history of the development of the Leyden Jar see Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810, 1st publ. 2002 (Faber and Faber 2003), pp. 12-14; Eugenii Katz, ‘Pieter (Petrus) van Musschenbroek’ [inventor of the ‘Leyden Jar], http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/musschenbroek.htm, (updated May 2004); for elementary explanations of the basics of this experiment and some simple science-at- home experiments, see ‘The Leyden Jar’, The Bakken Library and Museum, http://www.thebakken.org/electricity/Leyden-jar.html. 330 Joseph Priestley disputed the separation of body and spirit, holding that mental powers were part of the organic structure of the brain itself. See Jenny Uglow (2003), p. 74. 331 As indicated in the previous chapter I have not found evidence of a family relationship between James Adair and Robert Adair (Surgeon General). However, the families had an Irish connection, so such a relationship would be possible. See Robert Adair’s obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 60, Part 1 (16 March 1790), p. 282. — 120 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______pups than with her own gaping wounds, such was the natural strength of an animal’s maternal bonding. He was sickened by the experiment and agreed with the naturalist John

Ray that famous Philosophers [who] suppose Brute Animals to be only certain Machines … seem not to satisfie a Mind desirous of Truth.332 He was unsettled by the animal’s expression of — he hesitated — moral good.333 Afterwards he could not but think of the unfortunate animal without visualizing the women who had come before him, indicted with casting their infants into privies, the innocent creatures discovered when the contents of the night carts were shovelled onto the waste ground beyond the walls. James Adair tightened his grasp on his papers, stared at his court wig on its stand in the corner. He had to control his mind’s rovings.

He reached for a clean sheet of parchment but hesitated, his quill poised above the well, he set it down again, pressed his temples.

He must be gone from London by Friday.

He must deliver his Reports.

It was his enduring lot: Newgate overcrowded, unreasonable demands upon him. Indeed, he had been asked to report two Court Sessions together, when to report one Session in a sitting would be unreasonable. There were above one hundred cases to report and the King

332 John Ray, ‘De Animalibus in Genere’, in Synopsis Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentine Generis, (London, 1693), p. 9, cited by Anita Guerrini, ‘The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 50, No. 3 (July-September 1989), p. 399. 333 For philosophical debates about the ethics of animal experimentation see Anita Guerrini (1989), pp. 391- 407. The question of an animal’s capacity to behave with ‘moral good’ is based on Guerrini’s reference to Thomas Aquinas, p. 399. — 121 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______insisted upon standing for the duration.334 Adair wondered at the King’s constitution. He knew his own propensity to the dizziness wrought from fatigue, and had made a reasoned case against that request. He arose and walked to the window.

Outside acres of trees were frozen in a blue white light. Even the ghosts of those executed in the Field below would be stilled a while in the frosted air. This had been a hard, hard, winter. In summer he sometimes sensed spectral presences in the susurrations of the leaves before recalling himself: he was not a superstitious man, such thoughts were mere fancies.

What was he about, entertaining such thoughts? He was a Man of the Law, the Recorder of

London, designated as one Beloved by His Lord, the King, George the third, on every Court document establishing the Justices of the Bench prior to the Sessions.

His most pressing responsibility was the immediate reduction of numbers at Newgate. Each summer he endured the threat of the black fever taking the lives of judges and jurors, as well as the lives of the prosecutors, wretches and whores before the Bench. It had happened in the past. Each new generation of the Bench inherited the memory of that pestilence, gaol fever. The dangers had been greatly increased by overcrowding since transportation to

America had ceased.

There was now a great urgency for Orders in Council to legalize transportation of those prisoners previously sentenced to Africa, or capitally convicted and later respited, for at the moment their transportation to Botany Bay was unconstitutional. The executive processes

334 See James Adair, Letter, 26 December, 1786, HO47/5/62. (This is the National Archives Catalogue online reference, however, in my notes I have recorded, HO47/5/175.) — 122 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______were grindingly slow. It seemed at times that the Privy Council, and indeed even His

Majesty, were incognizant of the pressures with which he constantly contended. He would not believe in the eventuality of the Botany Bay enterprise until the fleet was well beyond the English Channel, bearing away the detritus of the city, including those convicts who mutinied on the Swift and the Mercury and then sailed back to Torbay. A dangerous lot they were. If they had but turned their skills and courage to productive work they might have happily prospered. Instead they had chosen paths which endangered the social fabric.

In the distance London’s horizon was blurred in the winter light, Westminster Hall and St

Peter’s Abbey bulked towards the south-west against a faintly luminous sky, promising snow that night. He knew that closer to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was the steeple of St Clement

Danes, and in the distance to the south east was the steeple of St Sepulchre’s. He was occasionally awakened when the muffled knelling of St Sepulchre’s bells sounded in his dreams. Afterwards he would lie under the canopy of his bed, under the crewel bedspread, embroidered in glossy silken thread, and shiver until the death dreams faded. In the

December light Christopher Wren’s grand cupola of St Paul’s and the steeple of St Bride’s were smudges on the horizon. St Bride’s steeple had been lowered after a lightning strike.

That was before Mr Franklin’s protective lightning rods had been introduced.335 There was such a debate between Franklin and the King. Would England use Franklin’s sharp points or select blunt points? It remained a fine steeple though it had lost some ten feet in the

335 For an overview of the development of lightning rods see, Phillip E. Krider, ‘Benjamin Franklin and Lightning Rods’, Physics Today Online, January 2006, p. 42, http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss- 1/p42.html, [Accessed 20 October 2006]; for religious beliefs and attitudes to bringing electricity from the clouds see Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 Volumes, 1st publ., 1896 (Kessinger Rare Reprints), Chapter 11, Sec. 4, pp. 282-289; for the significance of lightning at St Bride’s see Jan Collie, ‘St Bride’s: The Printers’ Church, Fleet Street, EC4, Hidden London, http://www.hiddenlondon.com/stbrides.htm. — 123 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______rebuilding. Indeed, he lived in an extraordinary age with such a burgeoning of knowledge.

Again he did not understand the science, although he heard many of the debates at ‘the

Club of Honest Whigs’ at St Paul’s Coffee-House.336 For him, a man of the Law, to have the mysteries of the heavens so disciplined was little short of miraculous.

When the steeple of St Bride’s was shattered James Adair had been a young man, idealistic, hopeful, before the years of dealing with criminals hardened his resolve to maintain order, and tarnished his faith in the goodness of humanity. James Adair shivered as he stared over the fading skyline. It was the women who bothered him most. They, after all, should be examples of modesty, decorum, and maternal care; they should naturally contribute to order. He had read Rousseau’s Emile, followed the arguments about a woman’s position in

Nature, outside of, but supporting a man’s participation in culture. Rousseau’s argument followed the logic of his own observations. But day after day, he dealt with the debasement of women; he dealt with the recidivism of their whoring and thievery, and with their stories and their lies.

He could forgive a man, moved by poverty and led astray by bad company; it was much more difficult to forgive women when they behaved unnaturally, when they would throw even a stillborn child into a privy; or when they wore men’s clothes; or committed acts of violence or behaved lewdly. He stared into the gloom coloured by the ugly deeds he daily confronted; deeds which flourished in alleyways, dens and twisted houses and which for him contaminated even the elegance of the city’s churches, theatres and leafy parks, the grandeur of Grosvenor and Hanover Squares and the Royal Exchange. He stared across the

336 Jenny Uglow notes the existence of this Coffee House and the interests of its clientele, Uglow (2003), p.76. — 124 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______darkened London where fires and the new lighting flickered erratically. In the darkness without-the-walls there was Saffron Hill, carrying the dream of clouds of pink and yellow crocus, but despoiled by the Bear Pit and Cock Lane. The Bear Pit set him thinking of the area around St Bartholomew’s and the madness of summer fairs. Fairs were the paradise of criminals, with their crowds, laughing, dancing, ogling, and drinking; with their insanity of rope walkers, the displays of the bizarre and the deformed, the liquor, the fire-eaters, the chattering of monkeys, and their boxing and betting.

Of course there was also Vauxhall Gardens, yet even there criminals often walked; and without close observation of their faces they were indistinguishable from the elegant honest men and women. So, too, they could be indistinguishable in the theatres. There were some who gave approval for such mingling of stations; in the last week he had read an editorial suggesting, the manners of the lower order of the people have … been humanized by often mixing with their betters, and that national spirit of independence which is the admiration

… of Europe … takes birth from the equality it occasions.337

At least a few minutes walk away from Lincoln’s Inn Fields the British Museum was a small haven from such mingling, for appointments were required. He frequented the exhibits in Montagu House and was especially interested in the specimens from Captain

James Cook’s Pacific explorations.338 It was at the Museum he had been introduced to Sir

337 “Vauxhall,” source of clipping unidentified, Museum of London (Wroth Collection), Vauxhall Scrapbook, 3:38, cited by Jonathan Cronin, ‘Vauxhall Revisited: The Afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden, 1770-1859’, Journal of British Studies (October 2006), p.718. 338 As Captain Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of New South Wales, wrote two years later of an anecdote he includes in his records about Captain James Cook’s relationship with the Otaheitan chief, O’too: nothing can be devoid of interest which relates to a man so justly admired as Captain Cook, the reader will probably be pleased to find here,[reference to Captain’s Cook’s voyages] though out of its proper place. See, ‘Anecdote — 125 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Joseph Banks who had wished that he might accompany him fishing. He had declined for spending his few leisure hours thigh deep in water was unappealing. Besides, he feared he might find himself in the society of the fourth Earl of Sandwich who was known to be Sir

Joseph’s fishing companion.339 Admiral or not, he could not abide the man; he shuddered when he thought of that unfortunate monkey.

Adair took up his quill, thinking of women with their dark intentions, speaking in their strange argot: the language of the London criminals, the language of vulgar ballads and broadsheets. It was a corruption of the purity of the English language. How sorely offended Adair had been when he overheard Edmund Burke sneer that Mr Justice

Recorder’s voice was better suited to a rookery.340 And Edmund Burke was an Irishman, too. Well, be that as it may, his legal advice was much in demand. There were few with a more complete knowledge of the Law. Surely he deserved the position of Chancellor of

Ireland.341 It would be a respite from London, scarred as it was with murders, infanticides, prostitution, riots and mob violence.

The Old Bailey Session transcripts and felons’ petitions before him turned Adair’s thoughts to William Hogarth’s engravings, nightmarishly crowded, dominated by stages of cruelty, idleness, prostitution and the scaffold. If he might, he would have expunged Hogarth’s

of Captain Cook and O’Too’, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, compiled from Authentic Papers which have been obtained form several Departments, etc. (John Stockdale Piccadilly, 1st publ. in facsimile reprint 1968, (Hutchinson of Australia 1982), pp. 292-294. 339 L. A. Gilbert, ‘Banks, Sir Joseph (1743-1820)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, (ADB Online) (Melbourne University Press 1966), pp. 52-55), Online Edition, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010051b.htm. 340 A common name used for the Irish alleys of St Giles. 341 Michael T. Davis, ‘James Adair (1743?–1798)’, ODNB Online (2004). — 126 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______image of boys ramming a broomstick into the anus of a dog struggling on its forepaws: the first stage of cruelty. Sometimes it stood before his eyes so vividly he felt he might reach out and touch it.

Again he pressed his temples, thinking of summer storms, both natural and human. In the summer of 1780 he had seen the streets of London ablaze with gin and people falling dead from flames and fumes. The first week of June, 1780, had been one of the hottest in memory. The unnatural heat boded ill for the city as Lord Gordon began his march to

Parliament with his band of Protestant followers. Memories of the destruction during that week would not be erased.342 Given his own record for supporting religious tolerance he had been fortunate; as were the prisoners in Newgate. It was a miracle they were not incinerated. Two days later he had stood with Mr. Akerman assessing the damage. The debris of the prison was still smouldering and Mr Akerman’s house was a mere shell of bricks. Strangely, many of the released prisoners had also returned to the ruins; there they had wandered bewildered, like lost shades unable to cross the river Styx to Elysium.

The cells of Newgate simply had to be cleared. God speed the Botany Bay enterprise. The women danced like phantoms against his eyelids, not now confused, or lost, as some of the wretches appeared in court or on the scaffold, rather they were beckoning, teasing.

In St Margaret’s church yard, within an alley of crypts and the silhouettes of angel statuary, under the shadows of Church and Abbey, was Susannah Trippet, brazenly soliciting a

342 ‘Lord George Gordon: An Account of the Riots in London in 1780’, The Newgate Calendar 1780 Online, http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng358.htm . — 127 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______gentleman hurrying home at two in the morning, then stealing his watch. He imagined her stepping onto a pathway with her bodice slipped from her shoulders, her flesh suddenly slicked silver in the moonlight. She had a craft; she might earn her living honestly. He imagined her simpering and coaxing, lifting her skirts above her thighs, above the muff of pubic hair. He pressed his fingers against his eyes. Enough, he was a man of reason. But the image projected behind his lids, then faded to be replaced by that of Catherine Wheel

Alley, strangely empty, silent. The Alley belonged to the rents about Petticoat Lane — a dark and claustrophobic place, the alleys so narrow and the shadowy half-timbered dwellings and public houses — gin shops — teetering so dangerously inwards that even a coffin must be tilted for egress, the weight of the body tumbled awkwardly. Through the gloom he could see two women walking abreast. The women were Mary Harrison and

Charlotte Springmore.343 They entered Catherine Wheel Alley. In that alley spinners huddled over wheels in tiny rooms and garrets casting the cobweb matter of thousands of cocoons onto shining spools. As his projection materialized Adair heard the faint rhythmic tapping of wooden treadles turning wheels, a sound from his childhood. Towards the women another woman was walking; she walked swiftly, anxiously glancing about. She attempted to step around the two women who barred her way at which she tried to side-step and then screamed, holding her hands away from her garments. Her gown was dissolving into holes. You ruin it for honest whores, one of the assailants called as the victim ran back into the darkness. He could see the two women sitting in a tavern drinking gin, as was reported by the prosecutor and her witnesses.

343OBPOnline, 19 October, 1785, trial of Charlotte Springmore, Mary Harrison, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17851019-57. — 128 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Adair shook his head for although his images were graphic the evidence was neither coherent nor consistent. There was something amiss, the accusations had shifted and were revised several times. In court he had noted the narratives were visibly mended.344 In addition the prosecutor was of a highly dubious character, as were her witnesses. The owner of the damaged gown had no shame at admitting that she lived in the gin shop at the sign of the Black Swan. It was impossible to know the truth of the actual deeds. Mr

Recorder wanted justice; he believed in justice. Yet he also believed in the common weal.

No-one could really know the facts of this case. If there was one thing he was certain of it was that Mary Harrison and Charlotte Springmore were abandoned women, whatever the prosecution’s case. In addition, throwing acid upon someone’s apparel as they walked abroad was an appalling crime and it should be deterred. The jury was right to find the women guilty as charged, and he stood by his decision to enforce this law in its severity for that was the way to do justice to the public. At the time he had intended the judgment merely as a caution and would have later recommended mercy. And then he did not, deciding to make an example of the women for the benefit of those who otherwise might be tempted from the path of decency. His sentence had proved timely for he had recently been advised that the King and Privy Council desired some better balance between male and female numbers in those destined for Botany Bay, and Mary Harrison and Charlotte

Springmore were strong, healthy women. Besides, the silk workers had been an enduring problem with a long history of riot. Transportation would give the women an opportunity to make a new start. One of them, Mary Harrison, had also requested permission for her

344Ibid. — 129 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______fifteen year old son to accompany her.345 As an able bodied male, the lad would make a contribution to establishing the settlement at Botany Bay.

*

He re-read the Gaol Delivery lists from Newgate, running his fingers down the pages, noting the names of women he had come to know well. Their lives, their presentations in court, trembled under his moving fingers. Their justifications and lies were shocking. He paused at the name of Elizabeth Needham. Elizabeth Needham had the impertinence to associate herself with His Majesty’s very Court. The woman told some rambling story about her connection with Lady Charlotte Finch and, even more extraordinarily, with His

Majesty’s page. She would offend again for she had already been sent to the House of

Correction for twelve months, and little good it had done her. To rid the Kingdom of such detritus was necessary; and she well might be improved in such a place as Botany Bay. She would be more likely to live decently where the temptations afforded by luxuries were unavailable, a place where Nature prevailed and where she would be forced to labour for her own survival.

Elizabeth Needham’s recidivism stirred the phantom of Ann Smith. He realized that some reformers would consider it harsh that she had been sentenced to seven years transportation for stealing a pewter mug valued at six pence. Indeed, in some instances he would also have felt that the sentence was not fully commensurate with the crime, except that she was an old offender. It seemed a mere few months since, out of compassion, he recommended her to

345 Unfortunately, I have not found a record of this request. Although it should have existed there obviously were irregularities at the time of embarkation. — 130 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

His Majesty’s mercy if she could prove that her health was endangered by her imprisonment.346 He was indeed surprised to find her standing before him again; standing before the Bench with neither shame, nor modesty, but anger and resentment. She deserved her sentence; besides she should be useful in the new colony for after all she was a nurse; or claimed to be.347

Again he walked to the window and stared into the darkness. The crowded, curling streets of London faded, and he imagined the shores of Botany Bay. He was still following the accounts of Cook’s current South Pacific voyage in each monthly edition of The

Gentleman’s Magazine. If those women had any chance of leading lives of some use, it would be in close proximity to Nature, in the pristine land recommended by Sir Joseph

Banks. It was not that they were likely to be easily morally transformed; but perhaps when the opportunities for their criminal and immoral proclivities were removed they would learn to labour honestly. He smiled for in spite of his years dealing with criminals, he remained, after all, an idealist, still hopeful. There was comfort in John Locke’s thoughts on Human

Understanding. The humanity, the largeness of spirit, of that essay expressed the principles by which he had always sought to live; above all the philosopher suggested the possibility of rehabilitation, if the situations were conducive. It was what informed his decision to support Mr Duncan Campbell’s application for the pardons for selected men on the hulks.348 He much admired the humanity of that man.

346 See James Adair, Report of Old Bailey Sessions, January 1785 and 2 February 1785, HO47/3/104. 347 When the muster lists were compiled on board the Lady Penrhyn Ann Smith gave her occupation as ‘Nurse’. See Smyth (1979), p. 7. 348 See Alan Frost, Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginnings (Melbourne University Press 1994). Frost questions many of the interpretations of the conditions of the hulk system given by historians such as Manning Clark, Geoffrey Blainey and Mollie Gillen, arguing that Duncan Campbell — 131 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

James Adair turned as his Clerk knocked and entered bearing a tray. He indicated that the young man should move the tray by the fire. He would refresh himself in the warmth. The servant pumped the bellows and the red-bright lower coals gleamed through those tumbled from the scuttle. For a few moments cutting the toast and sipping the wine he was comforted, and then the women’s images again rose before him.

Without-the-Wall he could see Mary Pile at a tavern; she was dressed in breeches and jacket, her feet set firmly apart. How a woman could behave so unnaturally was beyond his comprehension. It was an offence in itself, and she had been forbidden to wear men’s clothes again. For a young woman to behave as a man, to seek accommodation in a man’s bed, was simply against nature and was obviously borne of criminal predilections.

Still pondering on the woman’s depravity he returned to his desk and took up his quill. For a few moments he held it poised above the page and then dipped it in the ink and listed the twenty-nine capital respites in the cells, including women who would be embarked on the

Lady Penrhyn. Of two women, Mary Johnson and Sarah Partridge he wrote:

From the conduct and expression of these women, I have no doubt they were going about different shops, for the purpose of stealing whatever they could and therefore the prisoner does not appear to me to be deserving of any recommendation to his Majesty’s mercy.

frequently made such recommendations; Adair did respond positively to Duncan Campbell’s petitions for hulk prisoners. — 132 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Thus Mary Johnson and Sarah Partridge were destined for Botany Bay. He hesitated at the name of Ann Moore, Sarah Partridge’s accomplice. He had little choice really: both Mr. Akerman and the Sheriffs had written commending Ann Moore for her constant exemplary behaviour. So he reported those recommendations emphasizing the woman had behaved remarkably well throughout the whole of her very long confinement now full 3 years continuing, I therefore think it right therefore to humbly recommend to his Majesty for a free pardon.349

At last he wrote his report on Elizabeth Needham. In that instance he did not hesitate, she made such a fuss. He wrote quickly:

Elizabeth Needham was indicted for stealing 2 pairs of silk stockings value 30s privately in the shop of John Archer. She came to Mr. Archer’s shop, under pretence of buying a pair of black worsted stockings, which she said were set down to a Mr. Howman, who was page to the Prince of Wales, she told a long, idle story about a ring given to Howman by her father, who she said was coachman to Lady Charlotte Finch, on account of which Howman was to give her stockings and a pair of buckles. Mr. Archer sent his shopman with her but missing the stockings he sent after her, and had her brought back, and she was seen to drop the 2 pair of silken stockings in the shop. She behaved ill, and made a disturbance in Mr. Archer’s house. The jury acquitted her of the Capital charge, but found her guilty of stealing the stockings, and I cannot see the smallest ground for recommending her to any remission of the sentence of transportation for seven years.350

349 James Adair, Old Bailey Sessions Report, Ann Moore and Sarah Partridge, 31 December 1786, HO 47/5/181. 350 James Adair, Old Bailey Session Reports, National Archives, HO 47/5/181. — 133 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

His report was completed. He would consider the petitions of the Jewish girl, Esther

Abrahams, another day. As I mentioned before, Adair did not respond to Esther Abrahams’ petition for a year. Perhaps it slipped behind his desk.

*

James Adair was not appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland, as he had desired: he did not go home. He resigned from his position as Mr. Justice Recorder in July, 1789. The

Gentleman's Magazine suggested that Adair's resignation was because he was snobbish and considered common council business ‘a drudgery … [that was] beneath him’.351 He died returning from a shooting exercise with the volunteer light horse. His house, No 46

Portuguese Row, is listed as one of London’s heritage homes.

He will now almost disappear from the story yet he exercised power in the administration of British criminal justice and so made critical decisions about many of the convicts selected for the first transportations to New South Wales. Nowhere are the systemic contradictions of criminal justice administration, and its imbrication with class and place in eighteenth century England, more apparent than in Adair’s 1784 recommendation of Robert

Abel, another ‘first fleet’ convict, to George III’s mercy. He had then written, When he

[William Rellions] was being executed — or before he rec’d the sacrament — he admitted

Robert Abel was not responsible for footpad attack and robbery. The prosecutor was a common labourer living in Gravel Lane, the known haunt of the lowest and worst of people, swearing under temptation of sharing a reward of £40 for each prisoner, whom he should be able to convict. I therefore recommend him [Robert Abel] to his Majesty’s royal Wisdom

351The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1st Series, 68 (1798), 720–21, cited by Michael T. Davis, ODNB Online. — 134 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______and goodness … 352 At this time a hard-working labourer was fortunate to earn twenty pounds per annum.

James Adair’s little noted decisions and actions, founded as they were on class prejudices, venality and a central concern with protection of property, might be seen as serving a butterfly effect in the development of the British colony on the far side of the globe.

*

The punishment of death is pernicious to society, from the example of barbarity it affords. If the passions, or the necessity of war, have taught men to shed the blood of their fellow creatures, the laws, which are intended to moderate the ferocity of mankind, should not increase it by examples of barbarity, the more horrible as this punishment is usually attended with formal pageantry. Is it not absurd, that the laws, which detest and punish homicide, should, in order to prevent murder, publicly commit murder themselves?

Cesare Bonesana, Marchese Beccaria, 1738-1794353

We must be careful, however not to judge men of the past by the standards of our own times. There were of course sadistic judges and sadistic prison governors, but most of the men who ordered the severe punishments we shall have to describe were acting in the ways rational normal men of their time and place thought it reasonable to behave. J. J. Tobias354

There is something so inhuman in burning a woman, for what only subjects a man to hanging, that human nature shudders at the idea. Must not mankind laugh at our long speeches against African slavery – and our fine sentiments on Indian cruelties, when just in the very eye of the Sovereign we roast a woman fellow creature alive, for putting a pennyworth of quicksilver on a halfpenny worth of brass. The savage barbarity of the punishment — and the smallness of the offence in the eye of God are contrasts that should meet the consideration of Government. The Times, 24 June, 1788355

*

352 James Adair to King George III, National Archives, Kew, HO47/3/73. Adair actually seemed to confuse William Rellions with William Collop whose trial followed that of Rellion and who was executed at the same time. 353 Cesare Bonesana, Marchese Beccaria, (1764/1778/1814), http://www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun.htm. 354J. J. Tobias, Crime and Police in England: 1700-1900 (Gill and Macmillan 1979), pp. 139-140. 355 The Times, Tuesday, 24 June 1788, Issue 1106, pg. 2, Col B, The Times Digital Library, 1785-1985. — 135 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 7

London July 2004 — Seeking Elizabeth Needham 356

*

There is no doubt that Elizabeth Needham was an enterprising and competent business woman, her success not far short of what the better known Mary Reibey (Royal Admiral 1792) had achieved in the colony. Mollie Gillen357

It [the phantom] represents neither an action nor a passion, but a result of action and passion, that is, a pure event. The question of whether particular events are real or imaginary is poorly posed. The distinction is not between the imaginary and the real but between the event as such and the corporeal state of affairs which incites it about or in which it is actualized. Events are effects … … … Freud was then right to maintain the rights of reality in the production of phantasms, even when he recognized them as transcending reality. Gilles Deleuze358

*

It is ‘understandable’, under the eighteenth century criminal code, that Elizabeth Needham would be transported for stealing two pairs of silk stockings as the goods were valued at thirty two shillings, which far exceeded many other thefts receiving transportation sentences. Her sentence was ‘reasonable’. (Although why silk stocking should be so expensive is difficult to understand, given the enduring poverty of silk workers.)

356 Elizabeth, born Elizabeth Gore, parents John and Elizabeth, christened 1 December 1761, at St James, Westminster, London, , see http://www.familysearch.org, and OBPOnline,19 Jul 1786, trial of Elizabeth wife of Henry Needham, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17860719-15. 357 Gillen (1989), p. 263. 358 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Thirtieth Series of the Phantasm’ (1990/ 2004), p. 241. Deleuze’s reference to Sigmund Freud is from The Wolf Man, Section 5. — 136 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

What was noteworthy in James Adair’s rationale for rejecting Elizabeth’s petition for mercy was his declaration that [s]he behaved ill, and made a disturbance in Mr. Archer’s house. Such a rationale points to the silence around a work which Pierre Macherey called, the area of incompleteness from which we can observe [a text’s] birth and its production

…the pseudo-judgment … which remains imperceptibly beyond language.359 It was a manifestation of an attitude, an unspoken prejudice, towards women who did not behave meekly and decorously. It was an attitude which he obviously expected the Home

Secretary, Lord Sydney and George III to share. Making a fuss had included several cries of Murder from Elizabeth. Her cries, which were not specified by Adair, raise questions about how she was treated once she had obeyed the prosecutor’s command to go to his parlour. It was apparent that however she was bullied she was meant to remain quiet and polite.

The unspoken margins of Adair’s report support the contention presented by Paul Carter that convicts, and surely convict women in particular, were denied a voice. The attitudes also echo the grim metal of the scold’s bonnet. Could anyone really call that torture contraption a bonnet: that clamp of metal bands with the optional spiked tongue piece?

Male discourses on scolding – nagging – women have a long history. In ‘touring’ the boundaries of London, Daniel Defoe mentioned in the flow of his perimeter sites, the

Ducking Pond,360 which was used, also optionally, in conjunction with the scold’s bonnet.

359 Macherey (1966/1991), pp. 215-222. 360 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Vol. 2, Introduction by G.D. H. Cole and D. C. Browning, 1st publ., 1723 (Dutton and Dent 1962), p.317. — 137 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

For Defoe the significance of the name was obviously so naturalized its purpose passed without comment.

*

On a morning in July 2004, my mood shaped by such thoughts, I set out for St George’s

Church, Hanover Square,361 where in early 1782 Elizabeth Gore had married Henry

Needham. St George’s, one of the grand eighteenth century churches, was built for the wealthy parishioners, dukes, generals, earls, who settled in the area in the second and third decades of the century. Elizabeth’s association with St George’s indicates she had some status.

*

Heidegger wrote that [r]emains, monuments, and records that are still present-at-hand, are possible [and he emphasised ‘possible’] ‘material’ for the concrete disclosure of the Dasein which has-been-there.362 Pondering this thought as I crossed the threshold and entered the deep interior of the church was, perhaps, akin to a prayer, an expression of faith in the possibility that something of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s eternalized fragment would have been left in the room: that there would be traces of Elizabeth Needham’s story rendered invisible by court records.

361 Historical details of this Church are based on the booklet by Reverend William Maynard Atkins, The Parish of Saint George, Hanover Square (Dix Charlmont Press 1976). The Church was built in the years 1721-1725. 362 Martin Heidegger, B and T (1977), p. 446; S and Z (1967), p. 394. — 138 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Within the nave there was that immediate quietness of religious spaces in which city sounds fade and then vanish. At that vanishing point Elizabeth Needham’s phantom stood before the chiaroscuro painting of the Last Supper above the altar by William Kent (1684-

1748).363 The light floated about the Christ’s head and shed across the shoulders and flowing tunics of reclining apostles; it was brightest beneath the uplifted chalice. A shadowy Judas was vanishing from the scene. Elizabeth Gore turned to smile at Henry

Needham, handsome in his cream fustian wedding suit with silver braid and long waistcoat.

In eighteen months time Elizabeth, holding a baby, would receive a six months sentence to the House of Correction for stealing twenty-seven yards of muslin. The judge would note the absence of her husband and remark that in the prison she would receive care for herself and her baby. She had replied tangentially that her husband was a journeyman butcher in

Oxford Market, earning six shillings a week.364 It was a small claim to status, in the face of her ignominy. Elizabeth could not have imagined such a turn as she stood before the altar smiling at Henry Needham. In his wedding clothes her husband was as fine as any gentleman.

As I breathed the church’s quiet air the later changes to the church, the membrane of the present dissolved. The pews were still boxed, the pulpit with its curving wrought iron stair still canopied and solid on its curved plinth. As the curate joined the couple’s hands, the

363 Artist, coach-painter, carpenter, furniture designer, Master Mason, interior designer, architect and garden designer: Horace Walpole said of Kent: he leaped the fence and saw all nature was a garden. See, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, online http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/heritage/timeline/1700to1772_caroline.html. For his garden design see Pam Mills, ‘Rousham and Kent’, online, Manor House Gallery, Oxfordshire, http://www.manorhousegallery.co.uk/Rousham2.htm (nd) [Accessed 13 November 2006]. For the breadth of Kent’s achievements see John Summerson, Georgian London, edited by Howard Colvin, 1st publ., 1945 (Yale University Press 2003), pp. 56, 91, 104, 110-112, 132. 364OBPOnline, 23 Jul 1783, trial of Elizabeth Needham, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17830723-96. Note: A journeyman had completed an apprenticeship but still worked for a Master. — 139 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______glow of seven lamps, which are the seven spirits of God (Rev., 5), illuminated the young woman’s powdered hair and pretty face, limning the lace ruffles on her sleeves and bodice.

The phantoms of Elizabeth and Henry followed the curate to the vestry and the Venetian window of stained glass above the altar vanished leaving the simple diamonded lead-light which was there on the day of Elizabeth’s marriage. So, too, still standing beneath the altar was the first baptismal font, at which Henry Needham was baptized in 1757:365 a marble basin on a carved oak base, which rolled on casters, a practical, if odd, design.366 But the heavily carved altar rails brushed by Elizabeth’s petticoat as she passed remained solid to my touch, glowing with almost three centuries of polish.

In that church, designed by an architect once apprenticed to Christopher Wren, the echoing of that Amen has floated in the high spaces of the chancel from its consecration day, 23

March 1725, through all the vagaries of London’s history with its wars and riots. Through all the vagaries of parishioners’ dedication to renovation and improvements, that church preserved eighteenth century history.

It was the record of the church’s layered history which made possible the splitting of time and the release of phantoms. Details of the original lead-light window above the altar and its nineteenth century replacement with an early sixteenth century Venetian window from a convent in Antwerp, which was removed to the crypt during the London Blitz, have been

365Henry Needham, birth, circa 1757, ‘of St George Hanover Square, see London Family Search, International Genealogical Index v.5.0, Film No. 447817, Ref: No. 2705, online, http://www.familysearch.org . 366 Reverend William Maynard Atkins (1976), (unpaginated). — 140 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______faithfully recorded. So, too, other changes, including the redesign of pews and pulpit, now set on six columns (also described as an odd design), have been documented.

In the silence of a mid-week summer morning the preserved past connected to my store of auditory memories, making it possible to hear as keenly as with the sensual ear phrases from Handel’s celebratory music, with its choruses of Alleluias and commands to Rejoice

Greatly. Handel was one of the first parishioners and lived but a short walk away in Brook

Street until his death in 1759, a death possibly caused from the lead contaminations of wine. That was two years before Elizabeth Gore-Needham was born. The organ in the west gallery was splendid with one thousand five hundred and fourteen golden pipes serried across the gallery like dancers on points and decorated with swathes of lace work so fine it might have been woven with gold thread pulled from hundreds of spangled bobbins on a giant pillow of butcher blue. St George’s was like one of those places in quests where the peasant girl might linger too long or drink from a binding cup and circle under the spell of ghosts forever. Trapped, the peasant girl, or the researcher, might suddenly realize that like

Childe Rowland she had approached that welcoming door widdershins. But the spell was broken by a church guardian offering a gift, a map to the archives. He shook my hand, wished me well and said that the opening times were listed.

Elizabeth and Henry walked from the vestry to the opening chords of a grand recessional hymn. Elizabeth smiled at her parents and they stepped behind her. She blushed seeing

George Finch, Ninth Earl of Winchilsea, Lord of the Bedchamber, standing in his family pew. In her chest of wedding linen she had packed Finch family gifts, a book of poetry by the great aunt, Ann Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, a night cap and a pair of silver scissors, — 141 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______silk stockings from Harriet, and from dear Lady Charlotte, the fine lace ruffles and a copy of Miss Burney’s novel, Evelina. Elizabeth knew George Finch would always save and protect her if she were ever in need, and if it were possible. She sighed lightly, half-smiling, for she was, in spite of her father’s status in Lady Finch’s house, one of the servant classes.

She tried to think of George as her brother, her foster brother, valued the time when they were children and beyond the laws of class. Her husband Henry followed her gaze and frowned, before leading her slowly down the aisle. For a moment the wedding couple was silhouetted at the door; then, with her hand tucked over the arm of her husband, Elizabeth stepped forward, onto the road to Botany Bay.

By the time I had followed the couple onto the columned portico jutting into the street they had evaporated into the sunlight. If Frances Burney had been present at the brief ceremony she may well have repeated a sentiment she recorded after witnessing a wedding at King’s

Lynn in 1768: how short a time does it take to put an eternal end to a Woman’s liberty!367

At the door of the church I almost patted the life-sized cast iron statues of the pointer dogs, the patient dogs, given into church care by a local tailor when his shop was bombed during the Blitz. The figures were appealing, sitting above their hunting harness and a snipe, but I was accustomed to angels. And although behind me there was the faint smell of a wine libation, and the sounds of a mallet tamping down the purple-stained foundation stone and of a man’s voice praying, The Lord God of Heaven preserve the Church of St George, there was not even the lingering ghost of one of those long ago Carmelite nuns from Antwerp

367 Frances Burney, Early Journals and Letters, Vol. 1, edited by L. E. Troide (Toronto, 1989), p. 17, cited by Margaret Anne Doody, Introduction, Frances Burney, Evelina, Or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, 3rd Edn, 1779, 1st publ., 1778 (Penguin Classics, 1994), p. xxxii. — 142 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______who prayed under the stained glass image of a blue cloaked Virgin Mary. Then ghosts are probably like hobgoblins and do not cross water.

So the Church of St George was a slightly uncomfortable place for a papist spirit brought up on scraps from the Italian Renaissance and songs and stories of the Emerald Isle. I was relieved to be in the everyday sunshine and hurried past the roadwork on Brook Street searching for Handel’s House, lingering momentarily at Number 25 before deciding it was certain to be one of those enchanted places from which it would be difficult to escape. My destination was Westminster which lay beyond a brief passage through the Underground.

*

On the last turn of the stairway leading to St James’ Park and the sunlight, I was halted by a giant poster of a painting by William Hodges: a panorama painted during his voyage with

James Cook to the South Seas. The first impression was of a wide expanse of the palest smooth silver sea shimmering with dawn light. Misty islands were threaded around the horizon under a translucent pink sky where high cumulus were delicately limned with gold; a small sailed boat hove towards a narrow beach, ruffling the mirrored surface with its shivering image; scattered palm trees fringed the narrow beach and the hazed shape of near hills curved away from the viewer, melting into the islands on the horizon behind the boat.

The poster was an advertisement for an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum celebrating William Hodges’ achievements as Captain Cook’s South Sea artist. Again I hesitated, and then reluctantly turned away from the enticement and continued towards the sunlight and the parish registers at Westminster Archives. The little boat, like the lowing

— 143 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______heifer on John Keats’ Grecian Urn, sailed on towards a narrow reef, the rocky tips occasionally gleaming above the surface of the water.

Place is imagined … the future is invented368, Paul Carter wrote, and … cartographies are to do with exploration, rather than discovery. He compared the differences between the way Sir Joseph Banks named the plants gathered on the voyage and the way Captain James

Cook named places, For Banks, names enjoyed a simple, Linnean relationship with the object they denoted. They gave the illusion of knowing under the guise of naming. Cook’s names obey a different, more oblique logic, the logic of metaphor. His names do not intend to preserve the delusion of objectivity, for his standpoint is neither neutral nor static.

Instead they draw geographical objects into the space of the passage.369 Cook, Carter noted, said that he made no very great Discoveries yet [he] ha[d] explor'd more of the

Great South Sea than all that ha[d] gone before [him].370 The statement, that cartographies are to do with exploration, rather than discovery, was a comfort as I traced the directions to the Westminster Archives on my pocket map. After all, what was available for discovery on this expedition, not just to Westminster Archives but to England, might prove disappointingly meagre.

It was Carter’s premise, place is imagined, which shone like Newton’s prism refracting light as I stood on Broadway in Westminster City with the small origami map opened in my hand like a stiff water lily. In those moments, the different maps of London I was accumulating floated free of their neat Euclidean grids.

368 Carter, (1988), p. 294. 369 Ibid., p. 25. 370 Ibid., p. 26. — 144 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

James Adair’s map was marked with the activities of the Bow Street Runners, London’s thief takers. They were the early police established by the magistrates, Sir Henry Fielding and his half-brother, Sir John Fielding, the Blind Beak. The Runners had eventually transmogrified into the Metropolitan Police. On that day in July, outside their headquarters,

New Scotland Yard on Broadway, opposite the Underground station of St James’ Park, guards cradled sub-machine guns as blithe walkers passed in the streets. Above their heads an electronic billboard scrolled the information that London was now a safer city, followed by the percentage reduction of various crimes. So hurrying locals swung handbags, brief- cases, computer bags, back-packs, loosely clasped and it seemed only a nervous middle- aged Australian had secreted her travel documents and second ATM card beneath a long jacket, too heavy for a hot summer day.

Perhaps I had been contaminated by the ghost of James Adair breathing in his files and letters. In the concentrated silences of the Manuscript Room at the British Library and the locked silences of a strong-room in the National Archives, to and from which a researcher is escorted, I had also found desperation in his handwriting which scrawled —as mine does

— when he was tired and strained, recalling again Javier Marías’s description of handwriting as the voice that speaks.371 In the erratic handwriting, which was controlled when he addressed Lord Sydney or the King,372 I had read of his desire to be gone from

London, observed his struggles to be principled, compassionate, and reasonable. There were times when Adair recommended mercy to men if they had been hard-working and of

371 Javier Marías, p. 126. 372 See James Adair, Letter to Lord Sydney informing His Lordship he is prepared to report to the King the cases of Capital convicts of last April Session …, 26 May 1786, HO 47/5/109. — 145 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______previous good character; or if a father, or someone of importance, would vouch for the man’s future behaviour; or if a responsible man would ensure that the felon went abroad.373

Not once did Adair make such a recommendation on a woman’s behalf; although after transportation to America had ceased and Newgate had become dangerously over-crowded,

Adair did recommend immediate pardons for several women prisoners on the conditions set opposite to their names. These conditions ranged from six to twelve months of hard labour in the House of Correction.374 A compassionate response was most likely if Adair deemed the petitioner, or petitioners, to be of some significant status. This can be seen in his recommending an unconditional pardon for Ann Moore. With Sarah Partridge she had been sentenced to death for stealing a bolt of material valued at nine pounds.375 Thirteen months later that death sentence was commuted to transportation to Africa for seven years.376 Although the women had apparently acted in concert, and both were judged by an assistant to be very genteel ladies, Sarah Partridge (also known as Roberts) was eventually embarked on the Lady Penrhyn for Botany Bay, while Ann Moore received an unconditional pardon because she had been recommended to him by Mr. Akerman and the

Sheriffs. It is impossible not to wonder how the woman came to the attention of the

Sheriffs; and how her behaviour could have been so much better than that of many of the other women.

Accompanied as I was by Adair’s ghost, I hurried past New Scotland Yard searching for St

Anne’s Street and the Westminster Archives. When I hesitated on a corner, the origami

373 As an example see James Adair, Report on Last January Session, 2 February, 1785, HO47/3/96. 374 James Adair, Report on Capital Respites in Newgate, 3 May 1785, National Archives, Kew, HO47/3/149. 375 OBPOnline, 14 January 1784 trial of Ann Moore, Sarah Partridge, otherwise Roberts, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17840114-44. 376 OBPOnline, 23 February 1785, Ref: f17850223-1. — 146 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______map blossomed in my hand, a man stopped and asked if he might help. ‘You’ve come too far,’ he said, ‘I’m going that way I’ll show you the turn.’ So with the stranger I continued my quest, sharing a proffered bag of cherries. This gift, within the economy of kind exchange, dispelled the ghost of the Recorder of London. London was sunny and friendly.

*

On the microfiche record of their marriage Henry Needham’s signature was surprisingly elegant, but that of Elizabeth Needham was awkward, cramped. In the green light of technology their voices still spoke. It was understandable how the young woman, proud of her connections to the family of Lady Charlotte Finch, proud of her accommodation and her proximity to Royalty, might be flattered and seduced by a young man’s seeming elegance.

There were no baptismal or death records of the child Elizabeth held in her arms on the occasion of her first offence in 1783. The family must have moved from the parish of St

George. As I tried to tug the past into the present, to read the gaps, the silences, I kept wondering what dreadful matters befell the young woman. How was Elizabeth Gore-

Needham’s map of London written after she married in the Church of St George, and so lost the security of the coachman’s quarters in Lady Finch’s apartments at Kew and St

James’ Palace? Somewhere the future which she would have imagined as she stood at the altar had passed into what must have been a nightmare.

And what might the slipperiness of the facts of Elizabeth’s trial obscure? Within one social code, unspoken as it was, a woman making a fuss (in a gentleman’s house) rendered a — 147 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______woman’s punishment of seven years transportation just and reasonable. In the same way that despatching the social refuse on the gallows was also reasonable, serving as a symbolic warning to others inclined to crime. In another social code, theft of silk stockings and an emotional reaction to being interrogated might signify the desperation of poverty caused by an unfortunate marriage.

Finding a way into the lives of the convict women was not so much a matter of weaving a line between the facts, as Hilary Mantel said she aimed to do in her carefully researched historical writings,377 rather with the omni-pointed compass of a spatial history, it was a matter of seeing facts as the archived interpretation of those in power and turning those interpretations upside down and sideways, seeking the shifting meanings carried in the silences, the harmonies and dissonances of multiple voices.

I had entered the shadows, the unknowns, collecting the elements and sources from which my verbal holograms have been assembled. From the components of those assemblages other narratives and speculations might be told. It is thus an acknowledgement that all historical representations are open to a ‘future’ (l’avenir), to what is to come (a venire); a position held by Jacques Derrida and John Caputo.378

The acknowledgement of non-closure is perhaps related to Natalie Zemon Davis’s experience when, as a script-writer and historical advisor, she watched Gérard Depardieu

377 Hilary Mantel was speaking about the writing of historical novels and about writing her memoir, ‘Giving up the Ghost’, Sydney Writers’ Festival, 22 May, 2004. 378 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 117-118, cited by Mark Mason, ‘Exploring 'the Impossible': Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and the Philosophy of History’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice (2006), p. 503. — 148 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______feel his way into the role of the false Martin Guerre. She wrote that working on the film was a historian’s adventure with a different way of telling about the past and that watching

Depardieu made her think about the accomplishment of the real impostor, Arnaud du Tilh

… and that she felt she had her own historical laboratory, generating not proofs, but historical possibilities.379

*

For every historical representation is an attempt to some extent or other, on the part of the historian to strain towards plenitude whilst simultaneously recognizing that this can never be achieved and that, if it ever was, history would be over. Mark Mason380

*

379 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. vii-viii. 380 Mason, ‘Exploring ‘the Impossible’’ (December 2006), pp. 506–507. — 149 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 8

Elizabeth Needham

*

Under her [Queen Charlotte’s] care and that of the Royal Governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, the royal children were raised in an educationally progressive environment, according to a program that incorporated fashions as diverse as creative play and elegant conversation, and based on the premise that the method of education should reflect an awareness of the individual child’s abilities and enjoyment. Evidence for this focus, which made use of some of the most creative concepts and techniques of the time, can be found in the Queen’s library; in recorded examples of the application of play to teaching; and in the impact on other children in the royal ambit. Jill Shefrin381

… Treat nobody with contempt … Queen Charlotte382

*

The bitterness in Elizabeth’s mouth was as astringent as wormwood. She tried to swallow as she stood awaiting sentence in the prisoners’ dock at the Old Bailey on a hot day at the end of July, 1783. Her baby was making strange little mewling sounds, sucking at its knuckles. She did not know what she would say, prayed the baby would not begin wailing.

Then perhaps if that happened someone would take pity on her. Her husband surely would not, for neither pity nor love could she expect there. She patted the baby, rocking almost imperceptibly to and fro. The room was malodorous; she could scarcely breathe the vile air.

Above her on the Bench the judges, in their red gowns with gold braids and tightly curled full wigs, shuffled papers and muttered together, occasionally dabbing their brows with

381 Shefrin, p. 4. 382 Queen Charlotte to George, Prince of Wales, 12 August 1770, cited by Shefrin, p. 59. — 150 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______handkerchiefs or lifting one of the wilted nosegays scattered along the Bench against prisoners’ contagions — a practice recalled today with the strewing of rose petals at the first summer session of London’s Central Criminal Court. At one end, with head bowed, sat the chaplain in his black robes and white wig, at the ready to stand and intone, Amen, should the Judge speak the dreaded words, Guilty: to hang by the neck until she is dead.383

Outside, above the portico, the figure of the Recording Angel supported by her companions

Truth and Fortitude waited, quill poised.384

*

‘It is not a wise choice. She’ll rue the day,’ her mother had said. Elizabeth was in the motion of tapping on her parents’ half-opened door and paused mid-gesture.385 She had not meant to listen, had simply been frozen by the seriousness she heard in her mother’s words, or perhaps it was anxiety more than seriousness. ‘My dear wife, my dear Elizabeth,’ her father said, ‘Our daughter will be well settled, Henry Needham is a fine young man, elegant in his ways, with a good trade.’ She should have withdrawn of course. It was hearing her name mentioned with that of Henry Needham which had forestalled her retreat. Enamoured as she was with everything about him, Elizabeth remained fixed to the floor. ‘Needham,

’tis a bad name; Mother Needham was a shameful lot, she and her sister Isabella Eaton, or whatever names they went by.’

383 Theresa Murphy, The Old Bailey: Eight Centuries of Crime, Cruelty and Corruption (Mainstream Publishing 1999), p. 12. 384 Theresa Murphy (1999), p. 11. 385 It is likely (I cannot be sure) that Elizabeth’s parents were George Gore and Elizabeth. They were married 19 February 1737 at Westminster, London; see Family Search, International Genealogical Index v.5.0, Batch No., 1031178, http://www.familysearch.org. If this is the case then it is also likely that Elizabeth’s mother was the daughter of a Jewish couple who had converted to Christianity, frequently a point of distress for the Jewish community of London. An Elizabeth Cowen was born to Jacob and Elizabeth and christened 21 September 1720, St Dunstan, Stepney, London, see Family Search … v.5.0, Batch No. C055773 (1715-1724), Source Call No. 0595419, http://www.familysearch.org. The Finch family papers might hold some answers. — 151 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

She had not known her parents to have differences, not ever. And for her mother to be contradicting her father was unthinkable. ‘My dear, that was long ago and a young man cannot be held responsible for whatever sins and crimes his forebears committed.’

Elizabeth heard the floor creak a little. Her father had obviously moved closer to her mother; or perhaps her mother was about to leave the room. Elizabeth began to move softly backwards while yet straining to hear. She paused. ‘There is shame attached to that name,’ her mother said. ‘People still talk of the trial of Mother Needham and that lascivious Lord

Charteris for the ruination of the unfortunate servant girl.386 I’ve forgotten her name, but I have not forgotten the name of Needham. Your mother told me the woman had the audacity to keep one of her disorderly houses, a tavern so called, right here in St James.’ ‘My dear, that was thirty years before Henry Needham was born.’ Elizabeth heard an unfamiliar exasperation in her father’s voice. Also unfamiliar was her mother’s resistance. ‘Thirty years or not, people will remember because of Mr. Hogarth and his wretched prints of those two and that poor girl’s ruin.’387

There was a little silence and Elizabeth edged back towards the door. Henry Needham was so charming. Who would connect him to anything that was low or criminal? Was he not a friend of George Finch? She recalled the morning Henry had encountered her as she strolled in Lady Charlotte’s garden, carrying a basket of freshly gathered tansy, mint and

386 OBPOnline, 28 February 1730, trial of Francis Charteris, sexual offences: rape (Guilty: death), Ref: t17300228-69. 387 William Hogarth (1697-1764), artist and satirist. The Harlot’s Progress, five etchings and engravings, 1732, depicting the narrative of the rape and ruination of an innocent country girl by an infamous procuress, recognizable as Mother Needham and the licentious Scots Colonel, Francis Charteris. — 152 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______balm, for polishing her bedroom floor.388 Surprised at the sudden appearance of a young gentleman she scarcely knew upon the turn of the path, Elizabeth had caught her breath. He had bowed and greeted her elegantly. Surely it could not be improper to pause a while in polite conversation? So she had lingered, smiling and blushing in a haze of aromatic perfumes.

Henry Needham had spoken of the latest theatrical entertainments, asked if she had seen the fantoccini at the theatrette in Ranelagh Pleasure Grounds – Italian marionettes, he hastily added, perceiving her confusion. Or perhaps causing her blush had been his intention. In the next breath he had promised to escort her there and to Vauxhall Gardens, properly chaperoned, of course. His aunt and cousins would attend the outing.

And then he was gone and light-headed Elizabeth had drifted to her attic room in the Coach

House. It could not have been an improper encounter, could it? And yet, she did not mention the meeting, waiting for him to make a formal call. She still nurtured a dream that one day she would find placement as a personal maid in a fine household; perhaps even in a

Royal Household. After some weeks, when she had almost despaired, Henry Needham called, explaining that his absence from London had occasioned his neglect.

388 A method recommended by Hannah Glasse in The Servants’ Directory (1760) cited by Martin E. Weaver, Review article: ‘The National Trust Manual of Housekeeping (1985), by Hermione Sandwith and Sheila Staiton,’ APT Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 4 (1986), p. 79.

— 153 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Elizabeth’s father had closed the subject with her mother, ‘We are no longer young, my dear. I have given Henry Needham permission to court our daughter. It will be a good match.’

*

One of the judges cleared his throat. The baby had fallen asleep. Elizabeth saw the tracery of blue veins on the fine skin of the little one’s forehead. Elizabeth tried to swallow; at any moment she would faint. Twenty-seven yards of muslin … if she had known of the suckling babe who was torn from Mary Jones moments before she was hanged for the theft of eight yards of muslin she would have despaired. The judge cleared his throat again and someone on the jury took snuff. Elizabeth glanced towards the Bench surprised at the kindness of the man’s face. Elizabeth could not know she was about to be addressed by the

Deputy Recorder, Thomas Harrison, Esq.389 She had not said much in her own defence, simply that she was not wearing a cloak as the witness claimed and that when the assistant said you have a bit of lawn she said have I, and I gave it him directly, adding that her husband was a journeyman butcher in Oxford Market earning six shillings a week. That was sufficient for a couple with a child to live decently, if Henry were not so given to taverns and … she tried not to think of his other habits.

She was not wearing a cloak for the day was hot and she had been wearing a light capuchin.390 She could not say that for it would have made her appear like a poor spoon-

389 OBPOnline, 23 July 1783, trial of Elizabeth Needham, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17830723 . 390 Capuchin: a short cape, often worn by the poor. Paul Sandby’s series of engravings, The Cries of London, includes an image of a spoon seller wearing a capuchin. In another trial recorded in the OBPOnline a judge did ask a witness whether a defendant’s cloak was a capuchin or not. See OBPOnline, 20 October 1784, trial — 154 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______seller or old clothes woman reduced to crying her wares. She had listened to the witness telling how she had sat down and moved the baby about, wrapping her cloak and apron over as though she had more than a baby in the bundle.

For goodness sake, she was trying to give the child her breast. The impertinent, rude, man might have looked the other way. The little thing was never satisfied and had been whimpering with the heat and thirst. She had such a poor flow. When she had been in the

Lying-In Hospital391 all had been promising: for three weeks she had been given gruel, fruit and vegetables with servings of caudle, gruel mixed with warm wine, and sometimes egg.

Once she returned to their small rooms close to Oxford Market she was frequently famished and driven to searching for dropped or discarded produce in Covent Garden after the stalls were closed. One day she was sustained by a cup of milk given to her by the Welsh dairy maid392 who plied her area and had found Elizabeth leaning against a wall and clutching her baby. When Elizabeth wept at the unexpected kindness of a stranger, the girl had smiled and winked: a little added water, a little chalk, no-one would notice.

of Elizabeth Burley, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17841020-85. The engraving and that question gave me a way of finding a truthful element in Elizabeth’s denial of her prosecutor’s recollection. The references offered a method of reading something in the margins of her trial. 391 For an introduction to the quality and choices of hospital or domiciliary mid-wifery services available in Georgian London see Bronwyn Croxson, ‘The Foundation and Evolution of the Middlesex Hospital’s Lying- In Service, 1745-86’, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2001), pp. 27-57; Bronwyn Croxson, ‘The Public and Private Faces of Eighteenth-century London Dispensary Charity’, Medical History, Vol. 41, No. 2, (April 1997), pp.127–149; Lisa Forman Cody, ‘Living and Dying in Georgian London's Lying-In Hospitals’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 309-348. 392 From the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century young Welsh women dominated the street milk trade in London. See Emrys Jones, ‘The Age of Societies’, Ch. 3, in The Welsh in London: 1500-2000, edited by Emrys Jones (University of Wales Press 2001), pp. 103-104. — 155 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The morning she entered the drapery shop in Maiden Lane by Covent Garden Elizabeth had made a desperate decision.393 Her needlework was superior; from the time she was a small child Lady Charlotte had praised her skill. With her connections to Lady Charlotte and her daughters she could earn her living sewing baby linen, if she could procure materials for but one baby wardrobe from bonnet to robe. She had already purchased remnants from the stalls in Smithfield Markets and made a series of small caps and jackets and sold them for a meagre profit to women she met on the street. It was not satisfactory and she felt like a street beggar. Besides, she was assaulted by the smell of those markets where the stalls were so close to the herds of animals, to their cries and the smell of blood, and dogs barking, and cats prowling, all shadowed by waiting ravens.

She needed something more. Profit from one finely made wardrobe was all she would need to purchase a supply of fabrics, ribbons and tapes to establish a future for herself and her baby, for she and the baby would otherwise surely die as beggars. And she could not beg.

Her thought of the lottery was quickly dispelled by memory of her father waving his hand at a multitude of stars and telling her mother there was a one in thirty-five thousand chance of winning the lottery.394

Let us say, Henry was a gambler, with his interests more dangerous than the lottery. Yes, he had his occasional successes when they lived a high life and then came the losses. How they had not been imprisoned for debt she did not know. She would choose the shop

393 There are three Maiden Lanes in Georgian London. Elizabeth Needham’s transcript does not identify which Maiden Lane, however several other shop-lifting prosecutions were brought by Thomas and George Jeremy, linen-drapers of Maiden Lane. In one of those prosecutions, the shop location was given as the corner of Maiden-lane and Southampton-street, near Covent Garden. See OBPOnline, trial 20th October, 1784, Elizabeth Burley, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17841020-85. 394 The Gentleman’s Magazine, November, 1751, cited Picard, p. 44. — 156 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______carefully: it would not be well-lit, and it would be where she was unknown for then she was least likely to be remembered. She tapped her pursed lips a little: she would purchase a small remnant of muslin as a way of opening a conversation with a shop assistant. If she were later accosted she would behave as if she had gathered up the fabric inadvertently.

This, as the trial transcript shows, she had done.

Justice Harrison was speaking, The offence of which you have been found guilty, is, by the mercy of the Jury, reduced to what is called single felony, that is, it does not effect [sic] your life … She would not be hanged, Elizabeth’s knees quivered. The judge went on, gently impressing upon her that it might have been otherwise … but if they had gone to the extent that the evidences have proved, and that the law have impowered them to go, they might have affected your life …395

Elizabeth stopped breathing. What then was her sentence to be?

The Judge continued, your prosecutor likewise has intimated a wish, that you should not undergo the extent of the law to its severity, and it is not desired that you should be transported for seven years … she had not considered transportation … In hopes therefore, that the mercy of the Court and Jury will not be thrown away on you … whatever the sentence she would be grateful; although, dear Lord, let it not be whipping and more especially, let it not be branding for then her shame, burnt on her thumb, would be on display forever … the Court think it proper, that you should be sent to the house of correction for six months, and then discharged. She breathed a sigh of relief, although her

395 OBPOnline, 23 July 1783, trial of Elizabeth Needham, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17830723. — 157 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______weeks in Newgate had been hard, and she and the baby had received little nourishment, at least there was to be no humiliation of the undress required of a whipping, and no permanent brand. The judge continued speaking, his voice so kind he sounded like a father speaking to a daughter, As your husband does not appear, and you have a child in your arms, the Court do this out of humanity; as you and your child will there be taken care of.

For a moment Elizabeth looked directly at the judge and then bowed her head. My child is almost starved already,396 she said, her voice wan. Although she knew politeness required her thanks she could not say the words for she felt too weak and sad. Her parents were gone, her connections with Lady Charlotte destroyed and her poor little baby was frail to the point of death. She allowed herself to be led away.

*

The next time Elizabeth stood before the Bench at the Old Bailey accused of stealing the two pairs of silk stockings, for which she was sentenced to Botany Bay, was almost three years to the day after her sentence to the House of Correction, Clerkenwell. It was another hot day in mid-July, 1786.

When she was arrested on that second occasion Elizabeth made a point of saying several times that she was the wife of Henry Needham. Let her husband share her shame. She stood rigidly as her trial was announced, Elizabeth, wife of Henry Needham. Something in her had hardened and she lived with a carelessness that at times startled her. It was as if her capacity for attachment was gone. Losing her baby had caused a dislocation of her

396 Ibid. — 158 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______sensibilities. She had returned to Henry but related to him, as she did to everyone, as though she were an Italian puppet in a theatrical show, as if some outside force controlled her actions and as if she were a mouth piece of other people’s words. And should those beside her have vanished she would have cared as little as the puppet returned to the quiet of its box. She had frozen long before the morning when winter came through the iron bars of the prison frosting the walls and Esther Whitehead, a young woman convicted with her,397 had taken her hand and led her to the fireplace in the day-room of the Women’s

Court.398 Elizabeth sat obediently, as rigid as stone on the stool which Esther placed for her.

Esther had rubbed Elizabeth’s purpled fingers, encouraging her to hold them towards the warmth. When she thanked her companion, Elizabeth’s voice was distant, spoken from behind the daze of bereavement.

*

Waiting again in Dead Man’s Walk brought Elizabeth a tumult of memories and her composure was almost undone by them. If she could hold her baby just once more, feel the tiny hands flexing on her breast or curling about her finger, the tiny feet kicking with pleasure, hear the snuffling sounds of the sleeping child against her cheek, and see the smiles. Even in the last days the baby had kicked a little and smiled a half- smile, emitting fragile pleased sounds as the mother, settling the thin buttocks over the fraying diapers had gently re-tied the tapes hoping the matron’s salve might soothe the tender skin, red and weeping. That the baby’s linen, so finely stitched and embroidered, had become shabby

397OBPOnline, 23 July 1783, trial of Esther Whitehead, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17830723-63. 398 Details of the New Prison, Clerkenwell (the ‘House of Correction to which Elizabeth was sentenced) are derived from John Howard, The State of Prisons in England and Wales: With Preliminary Observations and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, Bicentennial ed., comprising a facsimile reprint of the 1st edition, 1777, with preface by Martin Wright (Professional Books 1977), pp. 181-184. — 159 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______was no longer of concern. The matron’s decoction of willow bark had been ineffective … nothing was of use. Bending over the barrack bed she would tug the robe into place and holding the tiny fists sang plaintive songs. She became fixed on the words of ‘The

Nightingale’ which her mother had sung to coax away her childhood fears, My sweetheart, come along … Don't you hear the fond song … Of the sweet nightingale … So be not afraid

… be not afraid.399

*

Standing again in that awful passage between Newgate and the Old Bailey exposed to the elements, for its roof was an iron grid, she knew she had also been singing for herself, singing against her own fears, against her despair. She had failed her sweet brave little soul: she had not provided. If she had been more adept when she tried to steal the muslin they might have made a new life, she and the baby. Perhaps she should have taken her baby to the Foundling Hospital. She had almost determined to do so but was so wrenched by the thought that she determined to find a way to support them. And apart from the pain of such parting she had heard tragic stories of babies so abandoned. Then, at her first trial, on that day in July so long ago, her hope had stirred because of the sympathy in the Judge’s voice when he remarked that since her husband was not with her he would send her to gaol where she would receive care for herself and her baby. Even a judge, high above her, could see that they were abandoned, must have recognized she was not of the ordinary criminal class, the kind of felon she had encountered in Newgate as she awaited her trial.

399Robert Bell, ‘The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England’ (1996/2002), http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/oleng10.txt. — 160 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The Judge had understood their circumstances were not all her fault, as Henry had made her believe. She was the wronged wife. Henry had accused her of being extravagant, shouting that she was not a good wife and she was not a good mother. The accusation that she was not a good mother was too close to her own judgment. The truth was there were many times when she resented the baby. She had wept as she grew large and cumbersome for that was when Henry lost interest in her. She would lie uncomfortably in bed, listening for the watch calling the hours. Sometimes on those nights she would arise from the bed and sit by the window waiting for Henry’s return as the watch passed with his stave and lanthorn crying

… two in the morning and all is well … all is well … all is well … She wanted to cry out that all was not well. When she saw Henry entering their street she would return to bed and feign sleep. His arrival and disrobing were a predictable ritual. He made no attempt to walk quietly on the stairs. Once inside she heard the rustle of his jacket as he tossed it upon a chair, then he lit the candle and sat on the edge of the bed, dropping his shoes. He rarely bothered with the nightshirts she had carefully stitched for him, preferring to roll between the sheets in his evening shirt, smelling of liquor and other women, the candle still flaring in spite of the pence required to replace it. It was a cheap candle with the unpleasant smell of hot tallow unlike the beeswax candles of her childhood. She would lie stiffly, her hands clenched and the baby stretching and exercising, pushing at the wall of her flesh. Soon

Henry would snore loudly his arm flung out, sometimes across her face. And then she eased herself from the bed to snuff the precious candle.

*

— 161 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

In spite of the summer heat of Dead Man’s Walk she shivered: someone was walking over her grave. She had heard some women say that in the Walk ghosts of the hanged fingered the necks of the living. She shivered again.

*

Once she had been such a happy careless woman, in the days when Henry was taking her to the theatre, or to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, as he had promised on that long ago day, when he had waylaid her in Lady Charlotte’s Coach House garden at St James’ Palace.

Sometimes the couple accompanied Henry’s friends in a chaise and although it was not as fine as Lady Charlotte’s coaches, it was sufficiently elegant for her delight. When they attended the Pleasure Gardens there was the additional excitement of the horses prancing onto the Horse Ferry and the shimmer of London floating on the Thames. She would always count the thirteen arches of Westminster Bridge, [e]ach pier ended in a charming little hooded alcove, like a night porter’s chair.400 It was said the arches of the bridge had a splendid echo and in summer musicians gathered to play French horns, although she had not heard them.

From her childhood Elizabeth had heard about the rehearsal of Mr. Handel’s Water Music in 1749 at Vauxhall. Twelve thousand people had attended. There was to be a grand display of fireworks which went badly awry. The pavilion on which they were to be displayed caught fire and a young lady was almost burnt alive when one of the rockets darted straight forward [and] set fire to [her] clothes. She was saved by several men who tore off her flaming gown and petticoat so that she stood in her stays and shift. Elizabeth had listened,

400 These historical details of Westminster Bridge are given by Picard (2000), p. 21. — 162 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______her face a study in shock: that unfortunate young woman, how humiliating for her. In addition, a man drowned in a pond, and a painter who fell from a stand, and a boy who fell from a tree, died from their injuries.401 At a time when bread cost a penny per loaf the night’s debacle cost fourteen thousand five hundred pounds.402

*

When she and Henry alighted from the coach Elizabeth, secure in the knowledge she made a pretty figure, would pass the enclosures where servants in livery must wait. It was possible that her father would be there. Then she would almost dance along the gravel paths to the strains of the joyful music floating through the illuminated arbours and gardens, the grottoes, across the lawns and into the temples or the Umbrella Room, filled with music and songs. She understood why Matthew Brambly — or was it Bramble? —the character in

Humphrey Clinker, had told of being dazzled and confounded with the variety of beauties that rushed all at once upon my eye, and why he extolled the wonders of the temples, the cascades and the infinite number of lamps, disposed in different figures of suns, stars, and constellations.403 There were, too, the mysterious unlit alleys in one of which was a hermit who would tell one’s fortune. The alleys were also places of lurking dangers for there sauntered unattached young men, such as encountered by Miss Burney’s eponymous heroine, Evelina, who was fortunate not to have been ravished by a young Lord.404 Such dark possibilities simply added to the lustre of Vauxhall nights as Elizabeth, feeling like a protected princess, floated over the gravel paths in her favourite tapestry shoes. During the

401 Picard, pp. 39-40. 402 Roy Porter (1994/2000), p. 211. 403 Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771), cited by Michael Carter, ‘Vauxhall Gardens Revisit'd’, Weekly Eastern Kentucky University (WEKU), http://www.weku.fm/carter_page_02.htm. 404 Frances Burney, Evelina, 3rd Edn, 1779, 1st publ., 1778 (Penguin Classics 1994), pp. 218-222. — 163 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______entertainments there would be a fine supper of cold collations with ham sliced …as thin as muslin,405 so thin you could read through it,406 melting on her tongue.

*

Elizabeth had been vain and foolish. In any case her joy in such entertainments was brief for soon she was big with child and she ‘rued the day’ of her marriage, just as her mother had foretold. Sometimes she would find a Vauxhall musical program folded in Henry’s jacket and would study it through a film of tears, imagining the night’s entertainment with the elegant orchestra and singers in grand Umbrella Room and the woman, or women, with whom Henry had danced and dined, seemingly handsome and charming. Maybe he was one of those men lurking in the shadowed alleys. No, she did not really believe that: Henry would not need to seek misfortunate women in the shadows.

Once, after reading one of Henry’s programs, she had opened her closet and taken out her evening shoes of twilight blue tapestry. Although the elegantly curved heels were slightly damaged by the gravel paths and there was a trace of a stubborn watermark on the fabric, they remained quite lovely for they were of good quality materials and workmanship.

Above the heel, where the shoe tucked snugly below her ankle, was a pattern of dark blue lace which flowed along the sides into a burst of feathery leaves and flowers of the softest rose which matched the six-petalled daisy adorning the fashionably pointed toe and the large button holding the broad strap which fitted comfortably across her foot. The first night she wore the shoes at Vauxhall, George Finch had bowed and led her to the dance

405 Michael Carter, ‘Vauxhall Gardens Revisit'd’, Weekly Eastern Kentucky University (WEKU), http://www.weku.fm/carter_page_02.htm. 406 Picard, p. 247. — 164 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______floor. Vauxhall was known for the extraordinary mingling of classes which occurred there.

Provided a person was dressed decently, not wearing a uniform and could afford the entrance fee, they were welcome.

Of course before approaching Elizabeth, George Finch, the Earl, would have first sought permission from her chaperone and Henry. Elizabeth felt overcome as George Finch bowed, because although he was her childhood protector and teacher, and often times a brotherly tease, he was an Earl, the Ninth Earl of Winchilsea. It sounded so grand, so elegant and he was so graceful, a nobleman of the old school, and a high-bred gentleman in his manners to all.407 Immediately he had put her at her ease and she laughed, twirling and spinning, as he reminded her of her babyhood ways. She was a little out of breath as he escorted her back towards Henry and they had paused for ices. It was then he recalled the day when she was about four — he was thirteen and home from his studies at Eton — when

Elizabeth had met Farmer George in the fields at Kew inspecting the sheep,408 and he had waved and said, ‘Out walking, little girl, what? Fine morning, what? Could you help me count the sheep, little girl, what?’409 And the farmer laughed heartily, as eighteenth century novelists would have described his Majesty’s ebullience. As she grew older Elizabeth became accustomed to seeing George III strolling about his farm, moving the sheep and

407 Gerald M. D. Howat, ‘White Conduit Cricket Club (act. c.1785-1788)’, ODNB (Oxford University Press 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/64818. 408 George III was known as ‘Farmer George’ because of his farming at the Royal Garden of Kew where he established crops of barley, oats, buck wheat and turnips and kept sheep. See ‘'Farmer' George and his 'ferme ornée'’, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Kew History and Heritage, http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/heritage/timeline/1773to1820_farmer.html. 409 In spite of his formality of the Courts, royal and judicial, George III was known for his homeliness and openness to people and for his habits of walking around parks and gardens without guards and for the habitual use of, what? Fanny Burney reports this speech peculiarity of the King in a letter to her sister, Susan, see Diaries and Letters of Madame D’Arblay edited by her niece, Charlotte Barrett, (Macmillan 1904-1905), pp. 319-320, Hester Davenport, cited by Shefrin, p. 36. — 165 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______admiring the fields of oat and barley; or strolling with friends in St James’ Park, nodding and greeting passers-by, for there were no prohibiting fences about the palaces and parks, merely a turnstile to prevent the disruption of coaches. Anyone might stroll, or gather mushrooms, in the Royal Gardens.

That night at Vauxhall in the company of George Finch, Elizabeth had suddenly thought of the King’s elephant. She had not thought about it for a long time. She had told her dancing partner that her earliest memory was of her father taking her to see the elephant in the

Royal stables410 and allowing her to feed it hay. It had coiled its trunk around the offering and tucked it into its mouth. Her father had told her there were not many little girls in

England who had fed an elephant and stroked its trunk, unless she were a princess or Lady

Charlotte’s grandchild. Afterwards Elizabeth would plead to go into the Park when the elephant was exercised. She did not tell the Earl how she would hold her nose at the silage wreak of its giant pats which she could smell long before the creature was in sight. The Earl told her of a joke about the time when the English had defeated the French in Canada after the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and many French settlers sought British citizenship. It seemed that one day when an elephant was being exercised in St James’ Park a man had inquired where it was going, and his companion, a merry wag, replied, to the parliament house to get itself naturalised.411 She was laughing animatedly as they rejoined Henry and she thanked the Earl with a graceful sink.412 Watching George Finch walk away Elizabeth thought of all the other things she might have said, she wanted to converse about the cricket

410 See Picard, p. 38. 411 P. J. Grosely, A Tour of London, transl. by Thomas Nugent, (London, 1772), cited by Picard, p. 38. Picard notes that M. Grosely was in London in 1765, Note 9, Chapter 5, p. 306. Elizabeth Gore was then four years old. 412 Sink: curtsey. See Picard, p. 264. — 166 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______games he played with his sisters and the little princesses. At the time he was teaching the princesses the skills of the game she had reached the age of knowing it was not her place to play with Royalty and she had watched from behind a tree. He had discovered her there and brought her into the game and with the other children she had pelted the ball and run with her petticoats rising almost to her knees. In Vauxhall that night she had stood smiling at the memory, at dear George’s kindnesses to her. Afterwards Henry had spoken crossly, tarnishing her evening. It was all so long ago.

In Dead Man’s Walk, also called the birdcage because of the peculiarity of the barred roof,413 Elizabeth closed her eyes and visualized her father bowing to Lady Charlotte. Her father, in his braided livery and white-powdered wig with its tightly rolled side buckles and small queue tied with a black ribbon, would hold his tricorn across this breast as his right foot in the black leather shoe with the silver buckles settled with its pair. In her memory the figures were frozen like subjects in a portrait against the coach with its emblematic winged horse on the Coat of Arms and the four real horses, black and slim-legged.

Removal of image required under copyright agreement.

3. The Finch Coat of Arms414

413 Murphy (1999), p. 15. 414 The Finch Family,http://clutch.open.ac.uk/schools/twomileash99/LordsFinch.html, [Accessed 2 January 2007].

— 167 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

When the baby was born — oh how she regretted her lack of natural feelings — she had resented her broken sleep and the way the baby clamped hard upon her breast, drawing blood. She wanted to thrust the baby away from her as the pains pulled upwards in her stomach. Sometimes when the baby would not cease from crying and Henry shouted at her, banging the door as he departed, whence she knew not, she would close the door on the baby and retreat to the shared kitchen below. There she would cook the few limp vegetables she had found scattered in Covent Garden markets with the scraps of tough meat or offal which Henry brought home. She returned to the room when she could trust herself to be gentle with the baby, doing what was needful for the infant’s cleanliness and comfort.

Gradually the responses Elizabeth identified as natural developed and maternal attachment twined in her stomach, visceral. It was, by then, too late. The child was not thriving.

Elizabeth’s hopes were momentarily kindled by the kind words of the judge and she was grateful that he understood her plight.

Though it might seem to a modern reader that the judge was mistaken in his beliefs about the care available for mother and child in the gaol, Tim Hitchcock wrote that even to be arrested and sent to a House of Correction for vagrancy was in fact a boon.415 Mollie

Gillen’s family history which includes the first fleet convict, Mary Parker, supported this contention for when Mary Parker was serving a sentence in the House of Correction she worked as a nurse, caring for elderly inmates. Three times she was called by a coronial

415 Hitchcock, p. 179. Extensive details of the medical care offered in houses of correction are given, pp. 173- 179. — 168 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______judge to give evidence about the quality of the care prisoners had received prior to their deaths.416

For Elizabeth’s baby the help was obviously too late, or the care the judge had promised was too little and too irregular. The diet allowance at the House of Correction, Clerkenwell was a penny loaf a day. A butcher in Smithfield regularly supplemented that allowance with donations of both beef and bread.417 There were also other occasional donations; we might imagine them to be of basic vegetables, such as potatoes, carrots and leeks. Because she was a nursing mother the matron would probably have given Elizabeth a beef broth several times a week and every second day a little caudle such as served by mid-wives.

Perhaps, too, given the customs of the times, the baby would have been offered gruel mixed a little beer and butter. It is easy to imagine the baby making mouths and refusing to swallow ‘the nourishment’.

*

Then one morning Elizabeth awakened, alarmed by an awful stillness. The precious life was gone and her baby was white and cold. When Elizabeth began to sob, rocking the baby, willing a return of breath, of smiles, Esther Whitehead sprang from the other bed. ‘Oh, my dear God,’ she said banging upon the door to alert the Keeper. The night cell was always dismal for apart from an iron grate over the door through which a faint light seeped it was entirely closed. In his ‘Report on Prisons’ John Howard had called these sleeping cells with

416 Mollie Gillen, The Search for John Small: First Fleeter (Library of Australian History 1985), p. 80. 417 John Howard 1777/ 1977), p. 182. Details of the ‘House of Correction’: New Prison, Clerkenwell are derived from Howard’s ‘Report’, p. 183. — 169 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______their two barrack beds either cabins, closets or cupboards, noting that they would be very unwholesome; having no air but from grates over the doors into the gallery.418

Elizabeth did not know where her baby was laid to rest, a small pauper in an unmarked grave in the nearby Burying Ground which served both Clerkenwell and Bridewell prisons.

Perhaps the Irish woman, Anna Mullens, would have told Elizabeth about the holiness of wells, would have told her that St Bridget, St Bride, would be watching over her baby’s soul. Such words would have been no comfort to Elizabeth for she did not hold those old superstitions.

*

On a cold day in January 1784 with fine snow falling Elizabeth Needham and Esther

Whitehead walked with a Keeper through the women’s court, up seven steps, past the tap- room wicket through which liquor was served. At the outer gate they joined the six men with whom they had been brought by waggon from Newgate. That day had been sweltering and all but Elizabeth and an old man, Henry Ash,419 had been whipped. Henry and his wife

Sarah were a kind enough couple, although not really to Elizabeth’s taste. Elizabeth had exchanged a few words with the woman in Newgate when she offered to help with the baby. They had been called to the court just before Elizabeth. The woman was found Not

Guilty and while the old man had rejoiced for his wife, he was bewildered by the judgment against him. After all they were accused of the same crime and the witnesses had described

418 John Howard (1777/1977), p. 182. 419 OBPOnline, 23 July 1783, trial of Henry Ash, Sarah Ash, theft with violence: robbery, Ref: t17830723-94. — 170 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______them as acting together. They were lying, of course. It was impossible to understand. ‘The little girl lied,’ the man had said. ‘She must have been paid, or threatened.’

*

The judgments against the couple are difficult for a modern reader to understand, even once allowances are made for the flaws of the court transcription processes. The case is yet another example of the vagaries of England’s eighteenth century justice system. It was as though the judges were hedging their decision. They could be certain fifty percent of that judgment was ‘deserved’. As I puzzled yet again over the ‘Proceedings’ I had to remind myself that the penal code was not about punishment: its function was that of deterrent.

Displays of what would happen to transgressors were what mattered.

*

Could her release from Clerkenwell be but six months gone? Elizabeth remembered looking at her prison companions as they passed through the Clerkenwell Prison gate and stood uncertainly in New Prison Walk, the fine snow powdering their hats and shoulders.

They were each a little thinner, a little more dishevelled. She half turned to look over her shoulder. On the gateway was a board painted with a list of fees, for gaols were commercial enterprises. The sign was cracked and faded and would remain in place until prison staff were salaried and fees abolished. This reform was recommended by John Howard in 1777 when he also recommended that acquitted and discharged prisoners should be freed in open court and not further confined until discharge fees were paid as was the practice. Alexander

— 171 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Popham introduced Howard’s recommendations as a Bill to Parliament in 1777, and it was successfully passed.420

*

Elizabeth had half-expected that Henry would meet her, for she had written and told him of the baby’s death and he had visited several times. His behaviour towards her was effusively solicitous. In spite of herself she was drawn back to him. Surely he had changed. She was his wife and after her suffering, she was certain he would take care of her. Besides he had not actually been cruel to her, not like the Honourable William Finch had been to Lady

Charlotte, and to Miss Harriet and Miss Sophia.421 Apparently the poor man had grown senile, for he was old enough to have been Lady Charlotte’s father, and became stark staring mad and tried to kill Lady Charlotte and their daughters.422 He had to be pensioned from his place as Vice-Chamberlain in the King’s Household (1742-1765) and Lady

Charlotte had to separate by articles.423 Elizabeth knew she would have been little more than an infant then for she could not remember The Honourable William Finch at all.

*

A court officer interrupted her memories, indicating that she should proceed to the

Courtroom. Henry had actually bought a copy of the proceedings of her first trial. How

420 A Statute in 1728 required that a schedule of fees be posted. In fact, until John Howard and several other reformers began investigating the administration of prisons acquitted prisoners remained in goal until their discharge fees were paid. The first gaol to abolish fees was Horsham in Sussex in 1775. See Randall McGowan, ‘The Well Ordered Prison: England 1780-1825, Chapter 3 in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (eds) The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford University Press 1998), pp.75, 78. See also R.S.E. Hinde, The British Penal System: 1773-1950, (Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 1951), pp. 30-32 and Notes 21 and 27, p. 239. 421 Elizabeth Montagu to her husband, 19 February 1765, cited by Shefrin, p. 38. 422 Lady Sarah Bunbury to Lady Susan O’Brien, 9 January 1766, cited by Shefrin, p.38 423 Elizabeth Montagu to her husband, 1764, cited by Shefrin, p. 38. — 172 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______could he have done that? And kept it? He must have known she would come upon it and be reminded of her pain. Well, she supposed it really was of little account for her life was in such ruins.

*

It would be easy to judge Elizabeth as unwise for returning to Henry who, as the Justice at her first trial noted, had not offered her support even then. However, Elizabeth probably would have had no other option, apart from prostitution. There were many women who found themselves forced to make that choice, at least temporarily as both Bridget Hill

(1994)424 and Tony Henderson (1999)425 argue, basing their claims on comprehensive overviews of eighteenth century social commentaries. Although those commentaries were exclusively male they were not necessarily unsympathetic. Further, from a late twentieth century perspective both historians noted the relationship between the seasonal nature of some work and the vulnerability of those employed as domestic servants, dressmakers, milliners, tailors, seamstresses, lace and straw workers.426 These occupations were common to women convicts transported to New South Wales.

Henderson also notes the diminishing opportunities available to women because these traditional occupations became increasingly … dominated by men.427 Bridget Hill argued that [m]any single women, particularly those with children to support, resorted to prostitution in the evenings to supplement their inadequate wages. For many women it was

424 Bridget Hill (1989/1994), pp. 8, 173. 425 Henderson, (1999), pp. 13-16; 47-49. 426 Hill, (1989/1994), p. 173. 427 Henderson, p. 14-15. — 173 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

‘a rational choice’, given the nature of the alternatives. Earnings were almost certainly higher than for most other female occupations. Hill cites the belief of William Acton

(1813-1875), a gynaecologist and member of the Royal College of Surgeons, that prostitution was ‘a transitory state, through which an untold number’ passed and that

[m]any he believed, returned ‘sooner or later to a more regular course of life.’ 428 The emergence of men-midwives itself was a part of the diminution of traditional female occupations.

*

The other ‘rational’ choice for the impoverished, underemployed woman was crime, its hazards mitigated by inconsistencies in the administration of the criminal code. Of course, the choices of prostitution and crime were not mutually exclusive.

*

So the events, which are abstractions, concepts, not states of affairs,429 of Elizabeth

Needham’s back story, shift, disappear, reappear, change shape as they transform and unfold between the attractors of criminal court, prisons and royal court, between multiplicities of social and cultural codes and between other stories, intentions and desires.

428 William Acton, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects (1857), pp. 73, 64; cited by Bridget Hill (1994), p. 173. 429 Deleuze and Guattari made complex distinctions between events, concepts and states of affairs. Events are singularities of a new infinite order. These singularities happen in an instant, their zones indiscernible, undecidable. Events thus belong with the incorporeal order of concepts, not with states of affairs, which are to do with functions, a time and variables, with the biological. Events are the basis of the philosophers’ concept of becoming, for events are to do with the meanwhiles between the instants of the infinite components of what happened. The meanwhiles cannot be totalized because of the inseparable variation of the components. A virtuality is also incorporeal, referring to chaos, but extracting consistency. These summations have been largely drawn from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, 1st publ, 1991 (Columbia University Press 1994), pp. 20-21 and 154- 160. — 174 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Inevitably, the unknowns, the shadows, remain, and so that a phantom, a virtuality, might

be assembled, the unknowns and shadows have been coloured with a thick description of the world in which Elizabeth lived as a child and a young woman.

And so my Elizabeth Needham phantom joins the other figures of these tales to move in the manner of the popular fantoccini in their theatrette in Ranelagh Pleasure Grounds. They are, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might have said, assemblages, surfaces without centres, provisional, available to series of transformations. They have, as Elizabeth Grosz argued of all systems, openness to the undoings the future proposes.430

*

430 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, ‘Architecture from the Outside’, Chapter 8, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies, (Allen and Unwin, 1995), p. 136. In this chapter Grosz seeks to understand Deleuze’s philosophical relationships to Derrida, Foucault and Heidegger, and his contributions (with Guattari) to questions of ‘thinking’, ‘the unthought’, ‘the expelled’ and ‘the outside’ in the broadest sense of buildings, texts, etc. In terms of spatiality, she argues, Deleuze stressed the dynamics of ‘forces’, not ‘forms’; and that ‘thinking’ arises from ‘the provocation of an encounter’, which engenders transformation. That is, texts are always ‘unfinished’: they are ‘encounters’ in processes of ‘becoming’. This understanding of texts is in contrast to the adversarial features of many academic exchanges. — 175 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 9

Of Jolly Damsels: Seeking Susannah Trippet

*

Who are those fair creatures, neither chaperons nor chaperoned: those “somebodies whom nobody knows,” who elbow our wives and daughters in the parks and promenades and rendez-vous of fashion? Who are those painted, dressy women flaunting along the streets and boldly accosting passersby? Who [are] those miserable creatures, ill-fed, ill-clothed, uncared for, from whose misery the eye recoil, cowering under dark arches and among bye-lanes. William Acton431

Westminster Bridge was opened on 18th November, 1750. The Gentleman's Magazine described it as “a very great ornament to our metropolis, and will be looked on with pleasure or envy by all foreigners. The surprising echo in the arches, brings much company with French horns to entertain themselves under it in summer; and with the upper part, for an agreeable airing, none of the publick walks or gardens can stand in competition.” Other writers took a less cheerful view, suggesting that the recesses in the form of alcoves over each pier, designed for shelter in bad weather, might be used by robbers and cut-throats who, if it were not for the special guard of 12 watchmen and the high balustrades, might set on unwary travellers and push their bodies into the river.432

*

Unlike the London maps of Mr. Justice Recorder’s printed with gloom and anxious responsibility, James Boswell’s map of London was marked by delight and pleasure, by curiosity and happy congresses. Boswell (1740-1795) loved women, was obsessed by them; or perhaps it would be more precise to say he was obsessed by his many and various sexual encounters. A twenty-first century reader might be tempted to declare him a sex addict,

431 William Acton, Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities: With Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of its Attendant Evils, 1st publ., 1857, revised 1870, p. 24, cited by Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘Review: Notes on the History of Victorian Prostitution’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1972), pp. 106-107. 432 Howard Roberts and Walter H. Godfrey (editors) 'Westminster Bridge', Chapter 17, Survey of London: Vol. 23, (1951), pp. 66-68. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47046. — 176 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______although his predilections did not exclude him from polite and educated society. He was not seen as a fallen man and he might boast of his behaviours with social impunity.

In his journal Boswell recorded an evening when he had strolled along the Haymarket.433

His afternoon had begun in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket after which he had dined well and past the twelfth hour434 turned towards his lodgings in Downing Street, a short walk from Westminster Bridge, St Margaret’s Church, and Westminster Abbey, more commonly known then as St Peter’s Abbey. The crowds were diminished except for folk like Boswell returning from the theatre or taverns or from waiting upon friends.

Imagine the young Scotsman, ever the London flâneur, delighted to be in the grand city with the freedoms availed by a small allowance from his father, who yet retained expectations of his son entering the Law. Although thoughts of his father’s expectations sometimes ambushed him, that night they were far from the young man’s mind as he listened to the rhythmic tapping of his shoes on the cobbles and the passing sounds of coaches and carts and observed the lights flickering into shadows beyond the reach of moonlight. After dour Edinburgh and the stern gaze of his father Boswell lived in London as though he had entered the freedoms of a carnival. So wearing his genteel violet coloured frock-suit;435 or perhaps it was the one of a pink colour with a gold button,436 both purchased upon his arrival in London, he walked down the Haymarket, pleased with the

433 The Haymarket with its theatrettes, cafes, supper-rooms and ‘friendly bonnet shops’ continued to be frequented by prostitutes into the mid-nineteenth century, see Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: The Classical Study of Poverty and the Criminal Classes in the 19th-centruy, Vol. IV, introduction by John D. Rosenberg, 1st publ., 1861, reprinted and unabridged (Dover Books 1968), p. 217. 434 James Boswell, London Journal, 1762-1763, edited with Introduction by Frederick A. Pottle (Heinemann 1950), p. 255. 435 James Boswell (1950), p. 53. 436 Ibid., p. 65. — 177 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______day and open to whatever the night might offer. Although it was October it was a mild, bright night. The family people, the flash people, those of the London poor who had evolved an argot to conceal their relationships and intentions to breach laws, would probably have said Oliver was out, denoting that it was a night for robberies, for going together with such intent.

Boswell’s thick dark hair was probably lightly dressed with pomade and powder and hidden beneath a soft black hat. He had not yet taken up wearing a wig. In spite of his youth he was already a little plump around the middle. I imagine Boswell buying a pastry from a lad who had a few remaining pieces on the large tray he carried on his head. With

London’s pleasures awaiting him Boswell strolled on.

Then he saw her: a woman walking towards him; watching him, smiling. As they drew close she winked, swayed her hips and swished her flounced petticoat above her slender ankle. She wore a small bunch of papier-mâché roses where her shawl fell across her breast. Boswell’s description of the jolliness of the young woman who solicited him in the

Haymarket that night, 9 May 1763, reminded me of Susannah Trippet’s jaunty air when, years later, 29 August 1786, Susannah solicited the ‘gentleman’ in St Margaret’s

Churchyard. The woman Boswell met would have been of an age with Susannah Trippet’s mother.

As he bowed, the man observed that the young woman was quite lovely, dimpling and natural; and even in the moonlight he could see she had not yet had recourse to rouge.

— 178 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Perhaps there was a hint of alkanet437 deepening the glow of her lips. He was pleased that these days he was always prepared: he well understood matters venereal. It was a very short time past that he had to retire from the world for more than a month to undergo the discomforts and hazards of mercurial treatment. He did not wish to endure again the excess of black salivation, the stinking breath, the aching gums, the loose teeth 438… and the treatment cost five guineas439 … it was enough to make a man commit to the life of a monk. He thanked God that would not be necessary. Instinctively he patted his jacket where he had safely tucked the prophylactic package bought from Mrs Phillips, the proprietor of the Green Canister, in Half-Moon Street440 — the sheath was commonly known as Mrs

Phillips’ purse. Boswell had soaked the membrane in a jar of water, ensuring the red silk ribbons trailed free; and that the tell-tale jar was hidden from his maid’s curious eyes.441

‘Would the fine gentleman like a sweetheart?’ The womanly voice was sweet, and her eyes were mischievous. Boswell liked that edge in her demeanour, found it enticing. He took her arm. When he returned to his rooms he wrote in his journal, At the bottom of Haymarket I picked up a strong jolly damsel, and taking her under the arm I conducted her to

437 A herb (alkanna tintoria) with a large tap root which from Greek and Roman times ground and mixed with an oil or balm (such as bees-wax) and used as lip colour. It was probably stored in a small stoppered jar and applied with a brush. See F. T. Walton,‘My Lady's Toilet’, Greece and Rome, Vol. 15, No. 44 (May 1946), pp. 68-73. It was used for an amazing number of ills from leprosy to gravel in the kidneys. See Culpeper’s Colour Herbal, edited by David Potterton, illustrated by Michael Stringer, (W. Foulsham 1983), p. 14. 438 For the effects of mercury treatments see Henderson (1999), pp. 39, 41. Henderson uses a double citation to the work of a eighteenth century Dutch Hermann Boerhaave (1668-1738) physician and chemist and then refers to Henry Fielding’s observation that some of the women who had been arrested from a bawdy house had already been salivated. 439 Boswell, p. 155. 440 See Frederick Pottle, James Boswell: The Early Years: 1740-1769 (McGraw Hill 1966), p. 119; Henderson, p. 41. Half-Moon Street intersected with Maiden Lane, near Covent Garden. 441 Natasha McEnroe, ‘Protection from the Tyranny of Treatment’, History Today, Vol. 53, Issue 10 (October 2003), p5. — 179 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage up in this noble edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much.442

He was still smiling as he took his brandy. Of course, he should not have been so pleased that he cast his armour upon the water. That was wasteful. The thought quite chastened him, brought him a moment of shame for having enjoyed such a poor creature, as he called her; but the shame passed quickly enough. After all Boswell was a young man who delighted in romping with several prostitutes together, especially if they were very pretty little girls.443 It was fortunate that he had laid in a supply of the articles.444

By the time he was recording his view of the encounter, his discarded condom had swirled down into the eddying silt with the debris of the Thames, with the dead dogs, the animal entrails from Smithfield markets, the broken implements, furniture, vegetable refuse, the raw sewage and the stillborn babies. Perhaps the babies were not stillborn; perhaps some had taken their first breaths before expiring with or without their mothers’ desperate hands.

If so, and the body was discovered, the lungs would float when the coroner tested them in water, and the mother would be in danger of hanging. If not she would be imprisoned for months and all would be lost, her position and her livelihood. Whichever decision she made

[p]regnancy was grounds for immediate dismissal.445 This common fate of women made concealment of pregnancy and birth imperative. If the desperate woman had strength she

442 Boswell, p. 255; also cited by Roy Porter, London: A Social History, 1st publ. by Hamish Hamilton, 1994 (Penguin Books 2000), p. 209. Porter noted that ‘fully armoured’ meant wearing a condom. 443 Boswell, pp. 263-264. 444 Frederick Pottle, James Boswell: The Early Years (1966), p.119. 445 Hill (1994), p. 136. This work is a scholarly study of the kinds of difficult experiences the eighteenth century women convicts would have encountered as they sought to support themselves and their families. Reading Hill’s text in conjunction with Tony Henderson’s text gives an overview of the often harsh milieu of working class women. — 180 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______might have tied the body in an old cloth with a few stones, carried the bundle hidden beneath her apron and surreptitiously thrown it to the keeping of the secretive, charter’d

Thames with its nibbling fish and crustaceans. After that she would weep in the darkness and try not to double over with the contractions of her uterus as she lifted a heavy cauldron or carried a coal scuttle from the yard. Her breasts would be hard and painful and no doubt abscessed.

*

The image of the young woman described by James Boswell as a strong jolly damsel mirrors the traces of Susannah Trippet’s life like an incomplete transparency. And while

Susannah’s sashaying along the path through St Margaret’s churchyard suggested she, too, might have been described as a jolly damsel, unlike Boswell, her prosecutor called her a hussy and a whore — or a W, as he said, rather coyly, in court. Susannah’s phantom, so different from that of Elizabeth Needham, is the most elusive of all. The life she led has to be assembled from the streets she walked, and the glimpses of the lives of other prostitutes and poor women.

It was not surprising that the young woman Boswell met in the Haymarket was cheerful because it was probably not often a handsome gentleman took her arm as though she were a lady. She had observed that he was not from London, although she could not quite identify from whence. She was not to know that the young Scotsman had taken elocution lessons from an actor, to mellow or erase his Edinburgh accent.446 Well, from whence he came was really of no matter. She slipped the shining coin into her pocket. He had been surprisingly

446 See Frederick A. Pottle, ‘Introduction’, Boswell (1950), p. 9. — 181 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______generous, that high spirited young man. In truth, Boswell would most likely have been frugal, offering a glass of wine and a shilling447 or, more likely, just a glass of wine,448 except that he was especially pleased at his performance on Westminster Bridge. He was, at times, surprised at his own generosity. The young woman thought it strange how quickly she had come to know which of the fine gentlemen would be generous and which would not. Nor was he, she would wager, the kind of man who would require her to beat him.

Lord, she could tell stories. Of course, such men usually paid well. A woman might expect at least ten shillings for her bother. She had heard tell of a woman who was required to use brooms, or, as absurd as it sounded, had been obliged to borrow a kitchen whisk from a neighbour to give some grovelling man his satisfaction.449 She was not at all inclined to slip away this young man’s watch, for she was sure that he would pay the coin he had promised.

In any case he was so very good humoured and so very cheerful she was uplifted by the encounter and that was indeed rare. He was so very pleased that even her failure to suppress a gurgling laugh when she was fumbling with what he called the armour — a bag fashioned from a sheep’s bladder and fixed with difficult ribbons — did not diminish his swelling member. She was quite astonished for she knew the withering effects of female laughter. He laughed with her as she tried to pull the awkward thing snugly into place before he deftly tied it and promptly set to with a vigorous rutting. As he rutted she could not tell if he were laughing or grunting and groaning, but the strangeness of the sound made her laugh so vigorously that she would have expelled him, but he gave a final hard plunge and fell to panting wetly against her neck, his hair tickling her ear, his hat awry. She

447 Boswell, p. 84. 448 Ibid., p. 264. 449 A few years previously both of these incidents were given in evidence in Old Bailey trials, see Henderson, (1999), p. 37. — 182 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______lowered her heels, her legs a-shiver, and leaned against the wall of their little hooded alcove at the top of a pier. It took the man but a few moments to remove his armour and cast the membrane bag with its small weight arcing into the glinting water. Its ribbons trailed like the tails of a kite. He re-tied the lap of his breeches and resettled his hat.

Before them were the bare masts of ships, the shadows of small boats — wherries and lighters — and, more distantly, domes and spires, gabled roofs and chimney pots, silhouetted on the silver blue sky. The young woman drew a deep, slow breath, experiencing something of what Wordsworth would later call a calm so deep; but not for a moment would she have imagined all that mighty heart ... lying still. She knew that

London’s heart was always seething; even in the dark purlieus of Westminster where she lodged. High above the Thames with a sharp evening wind lifting her hair, she momentarily leaned her head on his shoulder, as though he were a real lover. For that brief hour she was as joyful as Boswell. She breathed in the moonlit scene, watching the black waters rippling with liquid silver as they eddied around the piers and stairs, before rushing and curling onwards towards the sea. How astonished the couple would have been if their encounter had occurred a few months later — in September — when an elephant, a present to the king, would have loomed above them with two Bengali grooms and a sailor swaying on his back.450

*

Assembling the jolly damsel from various historical sources, I follow for her phantom returning to a small room in Thieving Lane. She would pass a tavern, where a link-boy,

450 See Picard, p. 32. — 183 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______hoping for a late night reveller, leaned against the wall, holding his smoking torch. She would then have passed a watch-house, where food and drink were available for a small price; but she would not pause for the watch-house would have saddened her. It was where the lost vagrant, the impoverished family beyond their parish boundaries, the petty criminal and the unfortunate or misfortunate — women, the group in which the young woman, herself, would be counted — first faced questioning.

*

Instead she bought a bowl of saloop from a stall in a yard before Thieving Lane and sipped the sweet aromatic decoction of sassafras wood, sugar and milk,451 no doubt heavily adulterated with chalk. It was three pence well spent because the drink was always most comforting. She would stand a while warming her hands over the coals where the old woman simmered the pot; the early hours of the morning were always chill. She knew the woman well; as long as the young woman could remember the saloop-seller was a ballad singer, chap-seller and char woman, knocking door to door, offering small services in return for pennies or broken food. Now she had her stall. On hanging days she would wheel it on a rough hewn cart to Tyburn where her voice would join with the other cries of

London.

*

The moon had gone, Oliver was sleeping, and here there was little lighting. Nor was it a street where a link-boy would await with his torch to guide a better-off traveller towards a well-lit street, because this dark labyrinth wound in upon itself: there was no thoroughfare

451 Ackroyd, pp. 353-354. — 184 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______to other parts and even the watchman was unlikely to penetrate its depths. Those vagabonds who found it slept undisturbed. She could see a little huddle of sweeps under a coarse blanket against a near wall. There was not even a shop bulk for protection in her area, which had dissected and multiplied inwards after the Great Fire, when boundaries were tightly drawn and the city rebuilt. A homeless child of about four years, a girl, was pressed close to the stall seeking warmth. She sucked her thumb, watching the young woman with the steaming cup. The prostitute, for she has no proper name, bent down and gave her the last of the drink. She watched the child’s gulping, and then gave her a penny. The child almost snatched the coin, shrinking back into the shadows of the stall. In daylight her skin would be bluish, her eyes rimmed with pink. The young woman smiled into the shadow where the child was hiding. For a moment she was tempted to take the child home. Then what would she do for the next child, and the next child, and the next child? Her cheeks tightened with rising tears. She leaned down and gave the child another penny. Unlike

James Boswell who had given a child sixpence a few months previously, this young woman could not have walked away supposing anyone would call such a gift a little incident that might be laughed at as trifling. Nor is it likely she could have imagined that anyone would walk away, as Boswell did, thinking it amusing, and valuing it as a specimen of my own tenderness of disposition and willingness to relieve my fellow-creatures.452 Although James

Boswell might walk in the same streets as the young prostitute, and as Susannah Trippet would walk twenty years or so later, they lived in very different historical spaces. Susannah

Trippet’s experiential world, her historical space, twenty years later, was closer to that of the jolly damsel, than Boswell’s was to that of the woman he had led onto Westminster

Bridge that night in 1763.

452 Boswell, 21 December 1762, p. 100. — 185 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Because her streets were unpaved and the central kennels thick with muddy sludge, the young woman stepped delicately as she made her way the short distance to her tiny attic room. The red heels of her shoes were always carrying debris.

Some of the Black Guard boys would scavenge through the kennels for old iron or coins, anything which might have the slightest value. She knew of one lad who bought a kite from such spoils. She would watch him as he ran by the Thames, the other boys following like a flock of geese after a goose girl. It was a joy to watch the huge wild thing with the bright eyes and tassels – she was sure it was taller than any of the lads — as it soared over the water. 453 Watching in delight she understood why the boy would choose to spend his money so. Sometimes, standing above the Thames she also saw the boys swimming, as naked and supple as fish.

Of course Alexander Pope would definitely have said, bad neighbourhood I ween and noted the cack.454 Yet all manner of kind and inventive people lived there. As she walked the young woman determined to watch for the fine gentleman. She had not gleaned where he lived, although she had learned that he was fond of fairs, the theatre and Pleasure Gardens.

She resolved to seek him in such places. As she drifted into sleep she heard the nightsoil men emptying the privy in the alley. She was fortunate because in some of the alleys they rarely came – as she was fortunate to have her small room. Once she had shared rooms and

453 The account of the scavenging and the description of the kite is taken from the autobiography by Francis Place (1771-1854) as summarized by Picard, p. 179. This is not referenced, the author merely mentions in her Preface that the autobiography is available in the British Library, see Picard, p. xvii. Place’s accounts are obviously a very significant historical source of the period; his autobiography is frequently cited by historians. 454 See Alexander Pope’s parody of Edmund Spenser’s epic verse The Faerie Queen ‘In Imitation of Spencer: The Alley’. — 186 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______beds with half a dozen people. A half bed could cost two pennies, tuppence. Before she slept the young woman thought again of the man’s sweet, smooth face.

Later she stirred, dreaming of a time before London, before she had come to the city to make her living selling flowers so perfect that customers would bend to their perfume. In her waking hours she sealed the past in forgetfulness. It was only in dreams that phantoms from a small village outside London curled like smoke around her room. She counted herself fortunate for she was yet pretty, and with her flower-making she could afford a tiny room and fetching raiment; at least they were fetching in the night when their small tatters and stains were concealed. In the morning she would take a basket of silk flowers and stroll along the Embankment towards the Strand and Drury Lane, smiling and nodding. She would take flowers to the Theatre Royal. In the afternoon she would sleep and stroll again, looking for gentlemen in the late evening. She refused to join one of the disorderly houses or stews,455 as those brothels set in bath-houses were called. She would prefer to rely on her own judgments and would pass by as decorously as any lady until she had made her selection. She might marry any time she wished, and perhaps would do so in time to come.

It would be some years hence because she was not yet destitute of good looks and she could earn her freedoms.

*

Such was the historical space which Susannah Trippet would inherit. The transcriptions of

Henry Mayhew’s (1812-1887) extraordinary interviews with prostitutes in the mid-

455 Most of the stews were situated in Southwark. Surprisingly the Southwark stews were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester and functioned on strict guidelines. See Henderson (1999), pp. 79-81. There were debates about the establishment of other legalized brothels; see Henderson, p. 100. — 187 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______nineteenth century indicate that these were not uncommon traits in women working and supplementing their small incomes in this way.456 Unfortunately, as I have suggested, there are very few traces of the historical Susannah Trippet’s London life. The foremost are to be found in the transcript of her trial in the Old Bailey Proceedings where her qualities and life appear in high relief against her prosecutor’s deposition. We see, too, that she was probably aware of the dangers of the night and that she had three male protectors within calling distance. Her name is registered in Gaol Deliveries and Surgeon Arthur Bowes

Smyth noted that she was an artificial flower maker. We know, too, that she was arrested in high summer, a few days after St Bartholomew’s Fair, which was held in the last week of

August. Many of the attractions of the fair may well not yet have dispersed.

This material, small as it may seem, is important in the assemblage of my phantom. As with traces of the other women’s lives in these tales, the shadows and margins of Susannah

Trippet’s history have been necessarily coloured with a mosaic of anecdotes collected by historians of the London poor. And as the assemblage that is her phantom enters these tales from a position in St Margaret’s churchyard close by Westminster Bridge, where the flesh and blood woman once stood in the company of three young men, her figure wears a mask partially assembled from the glimpses of the young woman with Boswell on Westminster

Bridge, partially from traces of Susannah Trippet’s life and partially from traces of the historical space in which she lived. As with all the figures in this tale, the figure indexed to the proper name is more than a stereotype, although that charge might be laid, it is rather linkages of surfaces, unstable, without centre, produced by a resemblance between

456 A young prostitute interviewed by Henry Mayhew had said, What do I think will become of me? What an absurd question. I could marry tomorrow if I liked. See Henry Mayhew (Dover Books 1968), p. 217. — 188 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______resonating series.457 As with proper names, in general, it is an index of a multiplicity of a life;458 it is a virtuality.459

The incompleteness of records, their silences and partialities, together with the metaphorical levels of all writing are explicitly acknowledged in the artifice of dramatizations: in a show with figures assembled from historical traces of individual lives and their eighteenth century contexts.

*

Prostitute interviewee:

Birth is the result of accident. It is the merest chance in the world whether you’re born a countess or a washerwoman. I’m neither one nor t’other. I’m only a not who does a little typographing by way of variety. Those who have had good nursing, and all that, and the advantages of a sound education, who have a position to lose, prospects to blight, and relations to dishonour, may be blamed for going on the loose, but I’ll be hanged if I think that priest or moralist is to come down on me with the sledge-hammer of denunciation. You look surprised at my talking so well. I know I talk well, but you must remember what a lot has passed through my hands for the last seven years, and what a lot of copy I’ve set up. There is very little I don’t know, I can tell you. It’s what old Robert Owen would call the spread of education.

… … …. …

Bracebridge Hemyngs (Interviewer):

And her arguments although based upon fallacy, were exceptionally well put. So much for the spread of education amongst the masses. Who knows to what it will lead. Henry Mayhew460

457 Deleuze (1990/2004), p. 299. 458 See Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (2001/2005), p. 30. 459 Ibid., p. 31. 460 From Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. IV, 1st publ., 1861, p. 256, cited by Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘Review: Notes on the History of Victorian Prostitution’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1972), p. 108. — 189 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 10

H)Ánna(h) Mullens, An Irish Cailín — Encounters in Newgate, 1786

*

There is little doubt that the women who were transported from Ireland were, in the estimation of the British and the colonial officials, the most depraved, dangerous and rebellious of all the women and girls transported to the English penal colony of Botany Bay. This opinion was not based on the collective or individual criminal records of these women, for very little was known of the specific crimes of the transported Irish. It was an opinion which rested primarily on the undisputed fact of their Irish nationality. That these women were both Irish and criminal was sufficient ‘proof’ that they were, and would continue to be, treacherous, untrustworthy, troublesome and disobedient. Portia Robinson461

St Giles-in-the-Fields had over two thousand poor Irish inhabitants, comprising 17 per cent of the poor Irish population of London. Many commentators believed that these districts were peopled largely by thieves and prostitutes, but most of them were simply poor, and many were simply beggars, or at the least practitioners of the begging professions. Tim Hitchcock462

*

Anna Mullens was brought before the Court towards the close of April.463 It was the month that Sylvanus Urban, Gent, the fictitious name used by succeeding editors of The

Gentleman’s Magazine, delighted his readers with observations that dragonflies had emerged from their aurelia state, that pastures were golden with dandelions, and that

461 Portia Robinson, The Women of Botany Bay: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Women in the Origins of Australian [White] Society, 1st publ., 1988 (Penguin 1993), p. 128. 462 Hitchcock, p. 11. 463 Both Ann and Hannah are the English translations of the Irish name, Ánna. As indicated in Chapter 3, once Hannah Mullens had learned to sign her name she used Anna, hence my reason for choosing Anna instead of Hannah. See ‘Irish Translations of English Names’, http://www.namenerds.com/irish/trans.html. — 190 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______blooms of horse-chestnuts, quinces, cherries, and early apples were scenting the air.464 As

Sylvanus Urban noted the meadows growing soft with fox-tail grasses and the return of swifts and martens, before lamenting a white frost [that] killed kidney beans in exposed places, Anna, behind the high blind walls of Newgate, waited with her baby daughter, Little

Mary — Mary Óg, in Irish.465 Watching her daughter skip with her friend Mary Fowles in the small rectangle of sunlight almost fifty feet long466 and perhaps a little over three strides wide, which was the Women’s Court, Anna recalled tingling at the coldness of the heavy edifice when she had occasionally walked by. The prison was like a stone cliff rising into the sky, strangely unrelieved by the draped female figures, distant and perfect, set in their shallow niches.

Anna was arrested at the end of February 1786, when she submitted a document to a probate clerk, swearing it was the last will and testament of Peter Roach [and] that she was

464 Seasonal features, including the information about the weather, have been derived from the editor’s regular columns ‘Observations’ and ‘Meteorological Table’ in the April publication of The Gentleman’s Magazine. See Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 4, Part I (April 1786), p. 274. The editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine at that time was David Henry (1709-92) who succeeded the founding editor, Edward Cave (1691- 1754) in 1754. The magazine is a rich resource of cultural history. Paul Ranger reviewed a work by Emily de Montzulin in which she had highlighted what might be gleaned about Georgian England from the magazine. Ranger claimed Montzulin concentrated on the macabre and bizarre and suggested the magazine is a richer more varied resource. See Paul Ranger, (Review) Emily de Montluzin (ed.,) Daily Life in Georgian England as Reported in the Gentleman's Magazine, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002, Notes and Queries, Vol. 50, No. 3 (September 2003), pp.364-365. See also Emily Lorraine de Montluzin’s online article, ‘Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868: An Electronic Union List’, http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/gm2/GMintro.html, (last updated 13 March 2003), [Accessed 20 July 2007]. This article indicates Montluzin has a more detailed and varied knowledge of writings in the Gentleman’s Magazine than Ranger represented in his review of her book. 465 The early Australian historian, Portia Robinson, noted that Irish convicts often caused resentment because they spoke together in their own tongue. See Portia Robinson, The Women of Botany Bay: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Women in the Origins of Australian [White] Society, 1st publ., 1988 (Penguin 1993), p. 130. Óg: literally ‘young’. See South Amargh Irish Lessons, Lesson 2, http://www.burnsmoley.com/pages/language/lesson2.php. 466 Rudolph Ackermann noted that the men's court is forty-nine feet six inches by thirty-one feet six inches; the women's is about the same length, but not more than half the width. See Rudolph Ackermann, from Microcosm of London (1809), ‘Item of the Day’, Eighteenth Century Reading Room (Monday 24 October 2005), http://18thcenturyreadingroom.blogspot.com/2005/10/item-of-day-microcosm-of-london-1809.html. — 191 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the executrix therein named.467 Upon reading the document, the clerk had frowned, and without a word turned away, leaving Anna waiting anxiously at the counter beside John

Abel, her lover’s friend from Worcestershire. Abel was a man Anna had always mistrusted for like some birds he possessed the gift of mimicry and often used the name, Daniel

Patterson, claiming to be Irish. When her lover, Edward Edwin, had introduced his friend,

Anna presumed he was from Ireland. Edward had laughed, thumping the man’s shoulder and calling for another jug. Alone with Abel in the probate office Anna shifted from foot to foot, praying to the Holy Mother and St Brigid.468 She should not have agreed to the deception. What if she were arrested? What would happen to Mary Óg? A thousand blessings light on the child’s sweet head.469 The clerk had returned, and looking at her suspiciously, asked who had brought the document to her. She nodded at John Abel and said, This man, his name is John Abel.470 Edward had warned her not to indicate his friend had an Irish connection. John Abel did not say anything — a point he would repeat to the magistrate — perhaps at Bow Street — and repeat again in Court, which was the way he avoided being party to the charge. Having indicated they should wait, the clerk returned some time later in the company of two constables of the watch. The constables tied loose rope restraints about the protesting John Abel and the stricken Anna and led them to a magistrate.

467 See OBPOnline, trial of (H)Anna(h), otherwise (H)Anna(h) Mullens, Ref: t17860426-10). As in previous chapters italicized passages are direct quotations from trial transcripts, unless otherwise indicated. 468 St Brigid (Brighid 451-523): Leinster saint and founder of a famous convent in Kildare. Her spiritual qualities, and name, are conflated with that of the Celtic fire goddess, protector of the hearth. Both figures are celebrated with a fire festival on 1 February. There is a brief note about the conflation of the goddess and the Christian saint in Owenson (1806/1999), Note 99, p. 260. 469 For eighteenth century Irish vocabulary and idiom, including cultural habits such as blessings and beliefs I have relied heavily upon Owenson’s novel. 470 See the evidence of the Court’s witness identified as Slade, OBPOnline, trial of (H)Anna(h), otherwise (H)Anna(h) Mullens. See Footnote 467, above. — 192 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

After the depositions were taken one of the constables removed the restraint from John

Abel’s waist. More anxious at the separation from her daughter than for her own hazard,

Anna wept, begging John Abel to give his word that he would see Mary was fetched and

Anna’s belongings, too. So, stepping in a daze around jostling beggars and strollers, men and women carrying boxes and baskets on their heads, defecating dogs, dogs dragging entrails, hurrying chair-men bearing elegant passengers in tapestried sedans, mounds of human detritus and the bon-fires of vagabonds and beggars, Anna was led like a cow through the noise of London: through the clattering of hooves, the grinding of iron wheels on cobbles, the rattle of barrows and carts, street fiddlers and pipers begging on corners, and the resonant voices of balladeers and street sellers crying their wares. Then they crossed Drury Lane, into the narrow ways of Coal Yard where Nell Gwynn, actress and mistress of Charles II, was born, and where there was once a vineyard. In Anna’s time there were squat almshouses, recently moved from High Holborn, and a watch-house pressed in a shadowy corner. They emerged onto the broad road between Newgate and Tyburn and turned in a contrary direction to the execution processions. Their way was past grand houses, tenements and St Andrew’s church, following the rise and fall of Holborn Hill, the

‘heavy hill’ as it was known before executions were moved to the long drop outside the

Debtors’ Door at Newgate.

From ‘heavy hill’ the road curved south to Snow Hill, and ahead Anna saw the square bell tower of St Sepulchre’s with its four small spires, rising above the five-storied buildings with their windowed garrets. At the turn of the road, they passed the Saracen’s Head Inn,

— 193 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______resting place of travellers, fast coaches, carriers and wainmen,471 its door guarded by the busts of two Saracens, the severe planes of the carved faces framed by the wooden drapery of yashmags.472 From mid-century the Saracen’s Head Inn also served as a post office.473

Anna barely glanced into the yard, where several stage coaches and waggons had recently halted, because she was looking towards St Sepulchre’s bell tower. It was so close above the Inn’s gable roof that the four wind-vanes atop the spires were clearly visible. As they drew close to St Sepulchre’s the corner of Newgate was visible, and directly above it was the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, which seemed to shift about the skyline baffling the walker. Years afterwards Anna would recall the dome and a small spark of gold beneath the clouds, and then she would wonder if each vane on St Sepulchre’s really pointed to different parts of the heavens, for that image would randomly surface in her memory,474 as memories do.

Removal of image required under copyright agreement.

4. Door of Newgate475

471 Waggon drivers; haywain: hay waggon. 472 Yashmag: the traditional Arabic headdress; also called shemag and keffiyeh. 473 See J. Holden MacMichael, ‘The Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill, Notes and Queries, 10s XII (14 August 1909), pp.131-132. 474 Thornbury and Walford cite the comment, Unreasonable people … are as hard to reconcile as the vanes of St. Sepulchre's tower, which never look all four upon one point of the heavens, in 'St Sepulchre's and its Neighbourhood', British History Online. 475 Thornbury and Walford, 'Newgate’, British History Online. — 194 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

By the time they reached the Debtor’s Door on the left of the Keeper’s House at Newgate

Anna had regained some outward composure. A soiled bell-rope was almost hidden in the shadow of the forbidding portico draped with fetters. The clang of the invisible bell summoned a turnkey who took them into a court and indicated a door on the right which opened into a dark passage, and thence into a small wainscotted office with two windows and several stools and desks. It was very different from the Prerogative Will-Office where she had first presented the document which Edward, her lover, claimed would not be challenged. In Newgate a clerk on a high stool wrote her name and charge into large book.

She watched as the man’s handwriting scrolled down the page. Finishing his handiwork with a small flourish the man carefully blotted his words. Afterwards a Turnkey was summoned, and again Anna waited. When he arrived Anna thought that except for his belt hung about with large keys, which could be heard chinking before he stepped into the room, the Turnkey might have been a priest, or a clergyman, dressed as he was in a broad brimmed black hat and a heavy coat.476 Anna followed the man deep into the prison and as each lock was turned and the door clanked shut behind them, her sense of peril grew: in spite of what Edward said, she might be hanged.

She was vaguely aware that they had passed a corridor leading to a taproom from which voices and snatches of songs, laced with laughter, drifted. They were the sounds of a

476 This description of the Turnkey and entrance to the Newgate is based on an essay by Charles Dickens written seventy years later. By then there had been some changes to the Courts with additions of walls and gates, but the prison was substantially as it was when the rebuilding was completed after the 1780 Gordon Riots. See Charles Dickens, ‘A Visit to Newgate: Sketches by Boz, 1836’, in Charles Dickens: A December Vision, His Social Journalism, edited by Neil Philip and Victor Neuburg (Collins 1986), p. 57. — 195 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______tavern; comfortingly familiar, they eased Anna’s breathing as she walked up a wide stone staircase and was left to stand in the Women’s Ward.

Fifty or so women were in the Ward, some playing cards, others talking in groups, a couple were sewing and knitting. There was occasionally a good natured cursing from the card players. Light curls of blue air spiralled from those women smoking pipes. By a central fireplace, where a shovel of coal glowed, a small girl was playing with a big-bellied tabby cat. The child was almost naked, her ragged calico shift adrift on her shoulders, her feet bare, her hair unkempt. Her name was also Mary — Mary Fowles — she was three years old, a year older than Anna’s daughter. The children would be companions on the Lady

Penrhyn, bound for Botany Bay.

Six or so women observing Anna’s arrival left their activities and came towards her, their hands outstretched for the ritual newcomer payment. ‘Garnish! Garnish!’ they chanted circling about her, lifting her apron, fumbling with the fringe of her shawl, examining the weight of filling in the quilting of her petticoat, nodding approvingly at each other.

Although the women’s faces were good humoured, Anna looked at them in alarm. How much was expected?

‘Shoo! Away with you! Cease your teasing!’ An old woman came towards them flicking her hands up as though she were scattering fowls. ‘Now let me see, what pretty have we here? No less than a walking image of little Peg Woffington in her hat;477 before your time,

477 Peg Woffington (1718c-1760) was an Irish actress and for several years David Garrick’s lover. She played at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, at Drury Lane and at Covent Garden; she was famous for her breeches — 196 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Mrs. Woffington was, no matter,’ she said. ‘Now, be gone with you! Be gone!’ she said, coming between two women and bumping them with her hips, well-padded with horse hair stuffed bum-rolls. One woman bumped her back, ‘Ooh, Mother Handland, just a little balsam478 for a drop from the taproom — to celebrate the judy’s invitation to Mr.

Akerman’s Hotel.’479 The young woman held her hands high, rubbing her fingers together.

The old woman laughed, ‘You’re a flash one, Mary Moulton480 … let it be later … later

….’

The women drew back deferentially, still observing the newcomer. ‘Don’t mind them; they do my bidding; a woman of great spirit, I am; gone eighty years old. Surprised, eh? Old clothes seller, ’tis me — or, ’twas, ’til that rascal boy and his fine counsel,481 got me here.

Perjury! Perjury, indeed; and they was paid by the judge for it. Bah … Prisoner’s Counsel!

You should have heard him, that prince prig:482 This is a poor man, I take it up out of

roles; and perhaps for the fashion of her flattish, low-crowned hat. See Martin Wallace, 100 Irish Lives (Rowman and Littlefield 1983), pp. 42-44. 478 Balsam: money, See Grose (1785/1994), p. 22. 479 A slang term for Newgate which was based on the Akerman family’s long association with the prison and its administration. The elder Richard Akerman became a turnkey at Newgate in 1724, and then Head Turnkey (August 1736) before serving as Keeper (February 1744—March 1754). The younger Richard Akerman then served as Keeper of Newgate (October 1754 – November 1792). Horace Bleakley, ‘Eighteenth Century Newgate: Governors or Keepers’, Notes and Queries, (3 September 1927), pp. 167-168. The term is recorded by Francis Grose, p. 14. (The author’s son, also named Francis, was appointed Lieutenant Governor of the NSW colony for two years: 1792-1794). 480 Indicted as Mary Morton. See OBPOnline, 23 February 1785, trial of Mary Morton, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17850223-62; but she also used Mary Moulton in colonial records. One possible interpretation of the name slippage in the convict records kept by Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth (Lady Penrhyn) is that she gave her name three times, either as a jest at the first ship’s muster, or to procure more rations, which would have been insufficient because the mothers had to share rations with their children. See Smyth (1979), pp. 5-6, Nos 41, (Mary Moulton) and 42 and 63 as Ann Morton. There was also an Ann Martin: No. 48 in Smyth’s muster list. 481 Written as Council in the court transcript. See OBPOnline, trial of William Till, theft: specified place, 14th December, 1785, Ref: t17851214-47. Note: Dorothy Handland was recorded in the transcript as Henly, when she brought the prosecution against William Till, for which she was later prosecuted for perjury. William Till had employed a counsel, Mr Silvester. As the truth of many witnesses and prosecutions seemed to be dubious, this perjury charge was unusual. There were sixty-two deception: perjury charges from January 1780- December 1790, compared to four thousand five hundred and forty-eight charges for theft: grand larceny. Calculated at ‘Statistics’, OBP Online, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/forms/formStats.jsp. 482 Prince prig: King of gypsies; also the head thief or receiver general. See Grose, p. 224. — 197 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______charity; I will be at the expense of the prosecution … so he said, with hand out like a beggar for the blood money … The Court will relieve you, Mr. Silvester, by ordering a prosecution … And that Prisoner’s Counsel, bends him low as a dandy-prat483 ... well, no matter … I shall see the world … at the King’s expense … to be transported, no less … a regular Hannah Snell upon the high seas … saw her many times … before your birth … over thirty years gone … sang two catches at New Wells Theatre in Goodman’s Fields … pleasing she was, in her Marine Habit … wounded too, in India484 … who’d have thought it, such pretty quiet manners as that woman had?

Mrs. Handland, who wore a mob-cap with the lappets pinned under her chin, was a sturdy woman with a round face contoured in wrinkles, a finely curved nose and a pointed, slightly prominent, chin — or so Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth recorded, the following year, with a profile caricature of the woman, captioned Mother Handland. The Surgeon’s sketch is reminiscent of a Judy in the ubiquitous puppet theatre.485

The woman’s vigour was surprising. She had taken Anna’s hand in a firm grip and, while talking, walked Anna to the washroom which was set at the corner of the Ward. The room had open drains, a pump, tubs and several small washing boards. There was a flash of a rat’s tail disappearing down the steps to the privies, a line of holes carved in a wooden

483 Dandy prat: an insignificant or trifling fellow. See Grose, p 96. 484 See Matthew Stephens (1997), pp. 25-33, 39-40. 485 See Arthur Bowes Smyth, Original Daily Journal Kept on the Transport “Penrhyn”, Containing one of the most Detailed Accounts of the First Hundred Days of the Settlement of Australia in 1788. [A brochure with extracts from the text and with facsimiles] (Francis Edward 1964). — 198 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______bench over a cesspit, sometimes called the vault. The women kept an ash-bucket to limit the odour.486

As they were returning to the women waiting before the hearth, Mrs. Handland dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, nodding in the direction of a woman who had not been present when Anna had arrived. ‘Now, my dear, you be minding that Bet Leonell487 woman; a sneaking, wheedling judy, would get you into the privy and bloody your nose for tuppence. No, don’t take fright, just beware. Now give these good-hearted prittle- prattlers488 a few pence … best be a shilling … if you have it … keeps them happy … and mind Hell-Fire-Moll,489 you would not be choosing to meet that one in a dark alley.’ The old woman shook her finger towards Anna, bobbing her head. ‘Now, come to this old woman, if needs be.’ Anna was fumbling in her pocket for a few pence and a sixpence, without revealing she also had the two shillings which John Abel had slipped into her hand.

‘From Edward,’ he said; and, startled, she had looked at the man. Had Edward expected she might be arrested? She prayed Edward or John would speedily send her child and a few precious belongings. Mary Óg would be fretting. In a wordless prayer Anna momentarily pressed the rosary tucked in her stays where it had left an imprint of a crucifix in the soft flesh of her breast.

486 This description is based on very vague details in John Howard’s reports and my assumptions drawn from models of privies in other sources, including an ash privy at York Castle Museum. 487 Elizabeth Leonard (indicted as Leonell and called Bet by a woman she attacked in the vault at New Prison). See OBPOnline, 17 October 1784, trial of Elizabeth Leonell, theft with violence: highway robbery (Death), Ref: t17841020-68. Note: the trial is another instance of the loose classification of types of crime in this period. 488Prittle-prattle: Insignificant, harmless talk. See Grose, p. 224. 489 OBPOnline, 10 December 1783, trial of Mary Humphreys (indicted as Humfreys), theft with violence: highway robbery, (Guilty: Death), Ref: t17831210-9. — 199 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

At the end of the first week of April, Anna would have been woken at midnight to the knelling of the bells of St Sepulchre’s and the whispers that the black dog was walking. In the streets outside the bellman strode, exhorting those who must die to prepare themselves.

Automatically Anna nestled Mary more tightly and slipping her rosary beads from their hiding place counter-pointed her fears with repetitions of the prayer, an tÁivé Máiria,490 fervently repeating pray for us now and at the hour of our death, Amen.

Some said the black dog walked in the new prison because the old capital cells had been retained in George Dance’s rebuilding. In 1784, the prison reformer, John Howard, described the capital cells as horror inducing, darksome, solitary, abodes. He reported that on each of the three floors of Newgate there were five of these retained cells, each approximately six feet by nine with a vaulted ceiling, near 9 feet high to the crown … In the upper part of each cell [was] a window, double-grated, near 3 feet by 1½. The doors

[were] 4 inches thick. The strong wall [was] lined all round each cell with planks, studded with broad-headed nails. In each cell [was] a barrack bed.491 The phantom of a black dog as a centuries-old herald of death would have been a likely emanation from those cells.

Others shook their heads and said it was an apparition arisen from the wickedness of gaolers and from the cruelties of prisoners to new inmates, stretching back to the miseries of the twelfth century and beyond.492 Whatever the phantom’s origin, it was a hardened

490 an tÁivé Máiria : Hail Mary. 491 John Howard, (1777/1977), p. 152. These cells were retained when the prison was rebuilt on George Dance’s design. 492 For the story of the ‘black dog’ and its links to the history of Newgate prison, see Ackroyd, pp. 247-249. — 200 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______felon who did not feel a tingle at the base of the neck when St Sepulchre’s knelling aroused whispers that the black dog was walking. Peter Ackroyd wrote that there are some who say the phantom still haunts an ivy covered corner of Amen Court which is at the end of Pater

Noster Row,493 named for the monks who once walked its length reciting the Pater Noster.

The prayer concluded with Amen at the Court, which is near the site of the old Sessions

House.

*

On 25 April 1786, the eve of her trial, Anna was awakened before midnight by the slow spread of dampness. Mary Óg’s hand was clutched into her mother’s hair. Anna had been dreaming of sharing a family meal of boiled potatoes. She could see familiar hands dipping the potatoes into a bowl of hot water in which slices of an onion floated. Scadán caoch,494 blind herrings, her father had said, munching and smiling, as he was wont to do. Although she could neither see the details of the room, nor a face other than her father’s, the dream was suffused with warmth. How she wished she had not sailed away, sinful and blithe. But then there would have been no Mary Óg. Oh, Mother of the Golden Light, Honour of the

Sky, and St Brigid, bright and glowing, protect her.495

The dampness of the bedding and petticoats soon chilled. Diaper clout496 was almost useless once a child was Mary’s age. Anna’s own bladder ached but she did not want to

493 Ibid., p. 248. 494 See Owenson, p 28, including Note 2. 495 A loose compilation from the Litany of Virgins, from Fr. Maelruain Dowling’s Celtic Breviary, Part III, ‘Prayers, Paschaltide, Rogations, Hymns, Litanies’, (1997), http://celticchristianity.org/library/brev3.html; and an eleventh century Irish Marian litany, http://www.catholictradition.org/Mary/knock.htm#Hail, [Accessed 3 May 2007]. 496 Diaper clout: Diaper cloth. — 201 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______disentangle her child for she would surely wake and scream, disturbing the snoring and mutterings of the other women. Inevitably that would set a few of the tetchiest, or most desperate, cursing. The Ward was in near darkness and any warmth in the coal ash of the central fireplace would have faded. It was warmth made possible by charitable donations for there were few comforts in the Common Side of Akerman’s Hotel. Not that Mr.

Akerman was an unkind or greedy man; he spoke respectfully to the prisoners and generously contributed towards their relief.497 It was rather that, although the Keeper’s position was by then salaried, the profits and fees of Newgate were part of a lucrative livelihood. Historians of Newgate have noted that Richard Akerman left an estate of twenty thousand pounds.498 He administered the three divisions of the prison: the Master’s Side, where wealthier prisoners paid for their accommodation and comforts; The Debtors Prison; and the Common Side, where all of the first fleet convicts from London and Middlesex were incarcerated. His income included Common Side fees, which were mandatorily displayed, and additional profits for supplying some comforts, such as allowing the removal of fetters from men and for the renting of private spaces, including leasing the taproom,499 together with other goods and services which could only be considered necessities. Taprooms were traditionally a significant source of income for a Keeper, and maintained in spite of reformers’ objections.

At least by Anna’s time City funds were also allocated to supply meagre food for those on the Common Side. The poorest prisoners were thus not so cruelly deprived as in the past

497 John Howard (1779 Edn), cited by Thornbury and Walford, ‘Newgate’, British History Online. 498 See, Will of Richard Akerman, Gentleman of Old Bailey, City of London PROB 11/1224/298-301, National Archives, Kew, Documents Online, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. 499 See Randall McGowan’s essay, ‘The Well-Ordered Prison: England, 1780-1865’, in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison, pp. 74-75. The essay is an excellent overview of changes in the prisons of England during that period. — 202 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______when prisoners had died from starvation, if they could not buy subsistence rations, and had neither family nor friend to supply their needs. By Anna’s time, as a result of the persistence of reformers, such as John Howard and the eccentric Jonas Hanway with his sword and umbrella, there was a daily ration of bread, a penny allowance for a little butter and cheese and, perhaps twice per week, a little cabbage and boiled meat from the eight stone of beef donated by the Sheriffs.500 In addition, visitors had almost unrestricted admission,501 men and women were free to socialize during the day, and also at night, for love or prostitution — if they paid a fee. There was gossip, the smoking of tobacco, the taking of snuff, drunkenness, gambling and lewd, wild behaviour; the taproom often resounded with the laughter and singing, which Anna had heard on her admission, along with the tears, oaths and occasional fighting. As Randall McGowan wrote, tolerated the admission of friends and the curious, who mingled with the prisoners … The prison wall scarcely separated the community created among the prisoners from the wider world.502

People were as they always were, in prison or beyond it: some were to be liked and some, as Mrs. Handland had warned, were to be avoided. Mary Óg and her friend Mary Fowles played and ran, as children would in any street or garden. They were watched over by good women and were entertained by cats with their kittens and by visiting dogs — they were especially fond of a pair of King Charles spaniels, who sought them out. The girls knelt

500See excerpt from Rudolph Ackermann, (1809), Eighteenth Century Reading Room, (Monday 24 October 2005), http://18thcenturyreadingroom.blogspot.com/2005/10/item-of-day-microcosm-of-london-1809.html. 501 Randall McGowan (1998), p. 75. One of the author’s major points is that, paradoxically, the genuine care and humanity of reformers, such as John Howard and Jonas Hanway, resulted in changes which would, unfortunately, separate prisoners from their communities. However, in 1786-1787 those changes had not yet been implemented, so the prisoners could still maintain familial and social relationships. 502 McGowan (1998), p. 75. — 203 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______down, their arms wide, as the dogs raced towards them. Then there was a resident pig,503 which grunted and snuffled around their toes, so that the little girls danced and went spinning like wild fairies. For a brief time fears of hanging and burning, vanished as the children pirouetted and squealed mimicking the pig. Little bright souls, the Holy Mother and St Brigid, bless them.

At times other children visited relatives. Frances Lewis, a woman accused of murdering her sister-in-law,504 had three children, and when they appeared with their father they would come tip-toeing shyly and fling themselves upon their mother. Later the woman would sit quietly holding her husband’s hand and the children’s boisterousness was released as they played tag, ring-a-ring-a-rosy and leap frog through the afternoon. At first Mary Mullens and Mary Fowles were hesitant, and then they too joined the games.

Anna looked at Frances Lewis and her family; it was impossible to imagine the gentle woman would kill a beetle. And it had been a dreadful accident: so many times Frances

Lewis spoke of how her sister-in-law had been beating her; and that when she had grabbed her arms and shaken her to make her stop, the woman had fallen on a box. Would the

Judges and Jury believe her? Would she hang and leave her children motherless?

*

503 Animals were allowed in Newgate until 1793. The presence of a pig and visiting King Charles spaniels has been recorded — although not necessarily in 1786. 504 OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of Frances Lewis, killing: murder, killing: manslaughter, Ref: t17860426- 84. — 204 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

As she lay awake on the eve of her trial Anna heard several women moving in the direction of the privies and the wash room. A sconce burnt at its entrance, its light small against the ward’s darkness. At least there had been a water pump fitted when Newgate was re- designed. Nevertheless, Anna missed St Giles, which would surprise those many who saw it as the most squalid, disease ridden part of the city, inhabited by thieves, beggars and prostitutes; a place where babies and children were hired out to beggars for the persuasive force of their pathos.505 Then St Giles was where Anna’s baby had become as agile as a monkey climbing the trap-ladder from cellar to street, where she heard her own language and where women sat on stools in doorways on summer evenings, sewing and knitting, while the men were cobbling shoes, rubbing leather, painting a toy or a bird cage or making cabbage nets. Few observers saw any of that, although Walter Thornbury and Edward

Walford noted, They have the appearance of being on the whole a contented race.506

In spite of her nostalgia for what was lost, Anna admitted to herself that Newgate was more comfortable than some of the basements where she had slept crowded against others, with a pump and an overflowing privy a distance away in an alley. And while rats and mice inhabited Newgate, as they did St Giles, and the women slept against each other on the platform built around three walls, there was also grandeur in the high-rafted ceiling and large windows facing the quadrangle. Sometimes she watched the sky at sunset as shades of

505 A Trip From St James’s to the Royal–Exchange: With Remarks Serious and Diverting on the Manners, Customs and Amusements of the Inhabitants of London and Westminster (1744), pp. 25-26, cited by Hitchcock, pp.117-119. 506 Thornbury and Walford, 'St Giles-in-the-Fields', Old and New London, Vol. 3 (1878), pp. 197-218, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45147. The description of the street scene is based on their observations.

— 205 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______gold and pink soaked across the windows and she was certain that the angels and the Holy

Mother had not deserted her.

If there had not been window bars she might have imagined Newgate was what living in a castle would be like, for there were sweeping arches and wide staircases to forbidden places behind locked doors, and on nights when the moon shone, the ugly bars cast narrow scarves of light, like beaten silver, across the floor. Anna would look at the bright patterning and hear her grandmother’s admonishment, ‘Never sleep with moonlight on your face, Cailín;

’twill pull your mouth crooked, or send you mad.’ If Anna could have but known that she would see her daughter grow into womanhood, then Newgate would not have been such a place of dread.

*

Anna lay staring at the windows; rain was beginning to beat on the deep stone sills. What would happen on the morrow? How had she come to such jeopardy? At times she was angry with Edward and then she would acknowledge that her purse was light and she had been tempted by thoughts of the room she might rent, of the clothes and food she would have for herself and her child; besides Edward had been good to her and it would be some repayment for him. And it was her foolish talking which had set Edward on his wild scheme; a scheme concocted from the shreds of her life when she was little more than a child and had come so recklessly from Ireland with a sailor whose face she could no longer remember. Then, as Edward grew increasingly excited with his plan to discover the man’s fate and whether or not he was gone to his Maker with or without a will, she realized that she had carried a forgotten grief and that speaking of it had refreshed the pain. It was as — 206 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______though her sailor’s presence had returned as an obscure, tantalizing, memory of a laugh, or a tender expression, or the cadence of his voice in a song or shanty. The phantom was as elusive as a dream which will not be recalled. Anna concentrated her will — or, as she would have said, her prayers — upon finding news of the man. She began seeing his figure before her in a crowd, or turning into the shadows of an alley and she would follow, into taverns and shops and around corners. Then before her eyes the shape of the figure would change, or vanish. At a time when she could trace the first tumbling of the baby in her womb Anna would lie awake with tears seeping from the corners of her eyes. It was, she would think later, a strange time of yearning, of mourning for all things lost: for her

Ireland, for her family, for the once glorious Sardinian chapel, for her grandparents’ cabin, for the sweetness of the planxty507and for the gathering of women and girls scutching and spinning flax and the wheels following the rhythms of an improvised song.508 Her child would never know them; they were all gone, their absence opening like an abyss from which vanished voices and places called.

She was not surprised when Edward could find no news of the man; he was no doubt lost somewhere in distant seas. He was dead and that was that. She had frowned when Edward told of his plan to discover another sailor gone to his Maker some years past, without anyone making a claim on his effects and dues; and, Edward said, it would be necessary that ‘witnesses’ also be gone to their Maker, for else they might deny the document. As

Anna began to shake her head in alarm, Edward had held her face between his hands and calling her his sweet Cailín,’ said that many sailors were lost in the King’s cause and their

507 Planxty: animated Irish harp melody. See Owenson, p. 73. 508 The female traditions of scutching and spinning flax, including the accompaniment of singing are described by Owenson, Notes 1, pp. 20-23. — 207 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______dues left languishing in the English coffers while women and infants starved — and was there not to be a little one? He placed his hand upon the small bulge of her belly. What harm could be done? Surely he loved her and would rather die himself nor509 injure a hair on sweet her head. And the angels knew he spoke the truth. Once a sailor had been identified there was little more to do, he said. An inquiry at the right office was all that was required to discover if there were unpaid dues; all sailors knew that.510 After some months

Edward had discovered three departed sailors from the same ship and one of them, Peter

Roach, had unclaimed dues and effects.

Anna was overcome with fear and began to protest and shake her head when Edward showed her a document he had written with John Abel in a booth at The Cock; she was sure no good could come of it. Edward stroked her cheek, asking again why the English King should keep it all; and then, smiling fondly at her, he lay on the bed and sang The Cualin.511

His voice tender, plangent, made her at once melancholy and uplifted as the song lamented the cruelty of the English king, Henry VIII, who prohibited poor Irish men and women from wearing their glibbs, or long tresses, and drove them beyond the pale to face starvation. There was a little silence after the last note faded and then Edward swung his sturdy porter’s legs over the bed and stood up.

509 The syntactical feature … rather … nor … is used throughout The Wild Irish Girl as idiomatic of poor Irish speakers. For an example of this usage see Owenson, p. 38. 510 This is virtually what Henry Williams, one of the Navy’s witnesses, said at the trial. 511 Owenson mentioned in a Footnote that The Cualin is one of the most popular and beautiful Irish airs extant, pp. 28-29. The melody is still sung today but the lyrics summarized by Owenson seem to have changed and the original political themes have been replaced by the romance of women’s ‘fair tresses’. Perhaps this is because of some historical conflation of the words, cualin and cailín (colleen). — 208 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

And, may the good Lord forgive her and the Blessed Virgin and the Cross of St Brigid protect them, she had smiled uncertainly and went with the papers to the Doctor’s

Commons, the civil and ecclesiastical court in Great Knightrider Street, a street south of St

Paul’s through which Knights once rode to and from the Royal Tower.512 Before entering the small court leading to the building she had walked the length of the street several times, staring up at the columns of the Cathedral from which the ribbed dome blossomed against low bulking clouds fading from almost black to a luminous grey. Looking back at the golden cross of the dome was her last hesitation before entering the court and climbing the few steps. Inside was a large room crowded with clerks, busily fetching and returning bulky volumes and little boxes from the shelves. At a cluster of desks in the centre of the room, clerks were skimming their hands down pages and turning leaves at a dizzying rate, long practice having taught them to discover at a glance the object of their search.513

Unable to read or write Anna momentarily forgot her nervousness as she watched the readers and the numerous copyists who were transcribing or making extracts from wills stored in the little boxes,514 their quills gliding across the creamy new pages. The clerk had been helpful and had taken her into the hushed interior of the building where the only

512 The interior details of ‘Doctors’ Commons’, a significant site of Anna Mullens’s crime, including direct quotations, were derived from Charles Knight (ed.), ‘Doctor’s Commons: Prerogative Will-Office’, London, Vol. 5, (Charles Knight and Co., Ludgate Street 1843) in Edwin, C Bolles,. [1836-1920], The Bolles Collection is available at the site The History of London Online, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Bolles.html. Also see, ‘Prerogative Court’: The Prerogative court: so denominated from the prerogative of the archbishop of Canterbury, who can there try all disputes that arise concerning the last wills of persons within his province, who have left goods to the value of £ 10 within the diocese of London, or to the amount of £5 in any other diocese. In this court is a judge, stiled Judex curiæ prerogativæ Cantuariensis; and a register, in whose office are deposited all original wills; which are here proved, and administration taken: under him are a deputy and several clerks. From: John Noorthouck, Ch. 14, 'Book 2, Castle Baynard Ward', A New History of London: Including Westminster and Southwark (1773), pp. 579-87, http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=46757&strquery=Great%20Knight%20Rider%20Street. 513 Ibid. 514 Ibid. — 209 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______disturbance of the air was the swishing of white fur and scarlet gowns as serious-faced men disappeared down corridors. Her guide had knocked softly upon a heavy oak door and they were invited into the office of one of the Doctors, gowned in white fur and a round black velvet cap,515 who signed her paper, barely glancing up from a large desk, almost covered with neat piles of papers. It remained to take the papers to the probate office.

She was so reluctant to go on the second errand that Edward asked John Abel to accompany her.

*

By the time that Mary Óg stirred on the morning of the trial, rain fell in curtains down the windows516 and women were rolling away their bedding and talking. It was usually a quiet time of the day, before tempers festered and laughter became raucous. Anna had slept between her friends, Mary Parker and Mary Harrison, the silk-winder; they, too, would eventually be transported to Botany Bay on the Lady Penrhyn, but at this time the future was hidden. Mary Harrison had been sentenced to transportation the previous October, her destination unstated. She did not seem to be the kind of violent woman who would throw acid on another woman’s gown. Anna noticed Mary kept a distance from Charlotte

Springmore, the woman with whom she was accused and sentenced. In her first days in

Newgate Anna had looked at Mary Harrison and Mary Parker; there was something

515 Anna Mullens’ fraudulent will was signed by a Doctor Harris. The minerver (white fur) and black velvet cap was the apparel of Cambridge graduates, the red silk gown lined with taffeta that of Oxford graduates. See ‘Doctors’ Commons’, Samuel Leigh, New Picture of London (W. Clowes 1819), Genealogy and Family History, http://www.londonancestor.com/leighs/crt-docoms.htm. I do not know which apparel Doctor Harris wore. 516The rain was remarkably heavy that day, 26 April 1786. See Meteorological Table, The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 4, Part I (April 1786), p. 274.

— 210 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______strangely familiar about both. Had she met them before? Not until Mary Harrison’s tall son,

Joseph, visited did Anna recall the day long ago when she had followed the crowd to the

Sardinian Chapel and exchanged glances with a woman walking beside a little lad.

Although Anna was careful to hide her religion from Mary Harrison, she liked the woman well enough, saw that she was a fond mother. Mary Harrison would be accompanied by her son on the Lady Penrhyn’s voyage to New South Wales; by then Joseph was fifteen years old.

*

Several times after their first meeting Anna and Mary Parker would laugh as they each caught the other studying her face: surely they had met? Neither woman was surprised to discover they had walked the same streets, lived close by each other, frequented the

Bloomsbury Market and both sometimes drank porter at The Cock in High Street, St Giles.

Anna learned that Mary Parker had also known loneliness in London; perhaps greater loneliness than she had herself for the Irish of St Giles were open-hearted to their folk, whatever the English might say about their rookeries.517 Something in Mary’s remarks gave the impression that she was not a Londoner, suggesting rather that she had come from the north to be a companion servant to a widowed aunt, who later died. As Anna gathered glimpses of Mary Parker’s story, she warmed to the woman whose good qualities must have also been observed by the Matron at the House of Correction in Clerkenwell, from which she was recently released, for the Matron had given Mary nursing duties in the infirmary for prisoners.

517 To rook: to cheat; Grose suggests the word might also derive from the thieving disposition of rooks, p. 239. — 211 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Anna had looked at her friend in astonishment. How was it possible that this well-mannered woman had committed another crime — and so soon?518 Listening with the tips of her fingers across her lips and with constant glances towards the children on the floor throwing scraps of crumpled paper for the entertainment of several tabby kittens, Anna learned that

Mary committed the original theft because her landlady had not paid her for washing she had done. As foolish as it was, when she was released from Clerkenwell, she had returned to the house in Duke Street to request a character from another lodger, a woman who knew why she had committed the theft for which she had been so recently imprisoned. Mary was desperate: who would employ a servant — or a char for that matter — without a character?

Her intention had been to slip in and out of the one stair up without being noticed. If only the woman had been at home Mary would not have succumbed to the desire for a small revenge. So many times she had laundered for that Mary Hickman and received not a penny for her cold and bleeding hands and aching arms, while the woman collected payment for the laundry service. Mary had strewn the sheets and linen across the garret floor imagining the woman’s fury at the re-washing. Re-telling the scene Mary Parker’s eyes glimmered again. Foolish woman, she had thought no one would ever know: she moved so quietly, slipping off her shoes and tip-toeing up the stairs. Well, her deed was not burglary, although that was her charge; she had not broken into the building and she had not intended to take anything. Perhaps she would just be branded on the thumb. Mary concluded her tale with a deep sigh.

518 Mary Parker’s motivations are inferred from her trials, See OBPOnline, 14 Sep 1785, trial of Mary Parker, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850914-138, and OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of Mary Parker, theft: burglary, Ref: t17860426-4, and from Gillen, In Search of John Small, (1985), pp. 76-79. Mary Parker was Mollie Gillen’s ancestor and Gillen infers from the trial and her own research that she might have been from Birmingham.

— 212 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

On the morning of the trial Mary and Anna exchanged nervous glances as they folded and packed. There were forty-one women set to appear at those April Sessions, accused of crimes ranging from petty theft and highway robbery, to murder and finally to coining,519 which was high treason.

Mary Parker, Anna Mullens and two women, sisters-in-laws, who faced being burnt at the stake for coining, would be called on that first Wednesday morning. Phoebe Harris, one of the women on the high treason charge, had spent most of her time at Newgate in the infirmary adjacent to the Ward; the other, Elizabeth Yelland, either attended to her sister’s needs or sat quietly in the Day Room with her husband, the women’s co-accused.

Occasionally they were visited by an attorney.

That morning voices dropped to a whisper as, leaning on her sister’s arm, Phoebe Harris had passed through the Ward. In other circumstances the women might have been admired, or envied, for they were both pretty520 and very decently attired, their gowns of dark blue and pale grey worsted, exceedingly well cut. It was said in the corners of Newgate that Mrs

Harris and her family had been betrayed by a Francis Hardy, the very man who, declaring his love for her, had persuaded Mrs Harris to take a room for the purpose of coining. After all, no-one would suspect a woman who was poorly, and who was the mother of a young daughter, of such a crime. It was also said that he, a married man, had courted the pretty

519 Coining: Counterfeiting. 520 A contemporary account of Phoebe Harris’s execution includes the comment that she was of pale complexion, and rather handsome features. See ‘Domestic Occurrences’, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 6, Part I (Wednesday, June 1786), p. 524. — 213 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______woman because her brother-in-law, Joseph Yelland, who had come upon hard times and could find no work, was a whitesmith. Understanding the properties of metals, and skilled in polishing light metals, Joseph Yelland possessed the knowledge for making moulds and using the crucible, aquafortis and pickle to give the slick of silver to a copper coin.521

*

Anna helped her daughter to the privy and wash tub. The child caught her breath and flinched away and then laughed, as she always did when her face was splashed with cold water. After Anna had combed her own hair and pinned it firmly with her old wooden bodkin and dressed Mary Óg, she collected her bread roll from the officer and received a small one from the charity basket for Mary. The Ward was gloomy and dark with the rain and heavy clouds; and since Phoebe Harris and Elizabeth Yelland crossed the Ward the quietness had grown eerie.

Unaffected by the mood of the day Anna’s daughter ran to Mary Fowles whose mother,

Ann Fowles,522 was still sleeping. Mary Óg was warmly clad in red woollen stockings and a worsted coat which had been given to Anna by a friar from the Chapel. Despite Anna’s handiwork in remaking the garment, it was still too large and fell almost to the bottom of the child’s blue petticoat; but it was warm, unlike the ragged calico shift hanging askew from Mary Fowles’ shoulders. Recently her mother had almost shaved Mary’s head and rubbed it with fat to subdue lice, so that the child smelled like a tallow-chandler’s shop. In

February 1789 Mary Fowles would be separated from her mother and given into the care of

521 The processes of counterfeiting are well described in a number of transcripts of Old Bailey trials, including that of Phoebe Harris and her relatives. 522 See OBPOnline, 6 Apr 1785, trial of Ann Fowles theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850406-7. — 214 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the public at Norfolk Island, because Ann Fowles was deemed a woman of abandoned character.523 A few days before her child was taken from her Ann was flogged with twenty-five lashes for abusing a sentinel and in June of that year she would be publicly flogged with fifty lashes each Thursday for three weeks, as well as having her head shaved and being required to wear a canvas cap printed with the word THIEF.524

It was not that the mother had no love for the child. In May 1787 Surgeon Arthur Bowes recorded Mary’s age as four years, which meant she was two when she was brought to

Newgate. Childhood mortality rates were high; someone had nourished and cared for the child before and after Newgate. Further, Ann Fowles would follow her daughter to Norfolk

Island where she was again sentenced to twenty-five lashes for allowing hogs into a garden.

Later she was lashed seventy-five times for stealing and killing a hen. It is impossible to know what provoked some of her wild and rebellious behaviour: carelessness, drunkenness, hardship, resentment at injustices? In any case, it continued for several years. Ann Fowles was one of London’s poor — some would say common — women; hers was not an historical space where women learned that silence and polite manners were virtues; she lived in Gravel Lane, stigmatized by James Adair as the known haunt of the lowest and worst of people.525

Ann Fowles had offered to watch over Mary Óg for the day; and there she was, fast asleep, snoring still. ‘Hicksius doxius,’526 Mary Moulton said, laughing, when she saw Anna pause

523 See Gillen (1989), p. 133. 524 Ibid., p. 133. 525 James Adair, Sessions Report (22 November 1784), HO47/3/73. 526 Hicksius doxius: drunk. See Grose, p. 153. — 215 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______by the sleeping woman. ‘It’s a shame,’ Elizabeth Colley said, joining them; a child’s garments were draped over her arm. ‘Come, my sweetheart,’ she said, taking the hand of the almost naked child with the stubbled hair. ‘I have a surprise for you, little pretty.’

Both Elizabeth Colley and Mary Moulton, who would also be transported on the Lady

Penrhyn, were willing to care for Mary Óg. Anna had declined the offers, as she had declined Ann Fowles; she would take her daughter and their belongings for perhaps she would be blessed and found not guilty; and there was still sufficient to pay the discharge fee in the small purse Edward had sent her. It was not that Anna did not trust both women, for as wild as Mary Moulton could be, singing lewd ballads for a glass of wine, she walked in good will and good humour; some would have called her a fine wench.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Colley was subdued and industrious. Perhaps that had always been her way; or perhaps it was because she grieved for John Kelsey, her partner who had been hanged for the robbery for which they had been charged. Elizabeth Colley would be one of the six Lady Penrhyn convicts whom the critical Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth judged as well behaved on the voyage to Botany Bay. In the early months of the Norfolk

Island colony Elizabeth Colley would begin living with Assistant Surgeon Thomas

Jamison; and by mid-June 1794 Mary Fowles, the child Elizabeth met in Newgate, would be recorded as at service with Mr. Jamaison.527

*

527 Gillen (1989), p. 133. — 216 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The prisoners gathered uneasily before the Turnkey in the Day Room, waiting to be led into the passage to the Sessions House. The April Sessions would last ten days, during which time there would be one hundred and forty-three trials, one hundred and ninety-three defendants, and one hundred and nineteen convictions. It would follow the typical pattern of the Old Bailey Sessions, with some trials lasting several hours and others apparently minutes. In addition to four women, Anna Mullens, Mary Parker, Elizabeth Yelland and

Phoebe Harris, nine men were in the first group to appear at these Sessions.

Apart from the coining charge against Joseph Yelland, who stood with the women, his arm about his wife’s shoulders, the men’s charges were all to do with robbery, from theft with violence on the King’s highway, to grand larceny, burglary and animal theft. One of those charged with highway robbery was a young man with a strange and angry story; the whispered words unnatural crime, mollie and back-gammon player hovered around his name in Newgate gossip. After all, he made no secret of having met his prosecutor, a wealthy wine merchant and banker, in the shrubbery of Green Park where men were sometimes detected wearing women’s cloaths.528 He was, he claimed, treated shabbily by the man and in spite of his entreaties for fair recompense he had been charged with blackmail under the guise of highway robbery. Anna wondered at how he could talk so.

Then who was she to judge? Had priests not read the words judge not from the altar? Still, sodomy … was it not a grievous sin?

528 OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of Jonathan Harwood, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17860426-11. — 217 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

It was said in Newgate that the man accused of horse theft, George Woodward, was an attorney of a respectable family, his father a man of fortune.529 Who could be telling how he came to be in such a place, where none but the most unfortunate would be expected? Anna would have described him with the word uasal, which meant more than gentleman in

English.530 She supposed there was some foul play, a wicked thief-taker at work, for even an ignorant Irish woman knew of the shady dealings of horse fairs where the liberty of the smartest of men might be at risk.

Removal of image required under copyright agreement. 5. Dead Man’s Walk531

Heavy rain poured through the iron bars of Dead Man’s Walk as the prisoners were hurried through by their Turnkey and Court officers towards the bail dock, an enclosed circular space which extended from the main courthouse to prevent prisoners communicating with friends and relatives in the street.532 Anna had set her daughter down, squeezed the red fringe of her shawl and waited. It was a cold day, yet more comfortable in both the bail dock and the courtroom than earlier in the century when, as a protection from the contagious miasma of gaol fever,533 the western side of the courtroom was open with judges, jurors and prisoners, in the dock and waiting, exposed to the elements. Some of the

529 OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of George Woodward, theft: animal theft, Ref: t17860426-6. 530 Owenson (1806/1999), p. 28, Note 1. The semantics included nobility and worthiness. See Irish Dictionary Online, http://www.englishirishdictionary.com/dictionary. 531 Richard Clark, ‘Newgate’, http://www.richard.clark32.btintnernet.co.uk/newgate.html, [Accessed 26 June 2006]. 532 Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, Tales from the Hanging Court (Hodder Arnold, 2006), p. xix. The authors describe the bail dock as a wall, whereas an earlier text suggests that the bail dock, like the stairs to the courtroom, was inclosed. See Thornbury and Walford, ‘Newgate’ British History Online. 533 Gaol fever: typhus. — 218 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______older women transported to Botany Bay, such as Dorothy Handland, carried memories of the Old Bailey trials taking place like tragic dramas on a stage.

Mary Parker was the fourth called before the Bench. She was found guilty of a lesser offence [than burglary], which was a crime associated with night-time theft, or intended theft, which could carry a capital sentence.534 The four men who were tried after Mary

Parker were convicted of capital crimes. They were game men and assumed easiness as they spoke of their convictions with each other. Anna looked at them with a deepening sense of foreboding. Outside the clouds shifted in dark billows and behind the wall London waggons and coaches rattled over the cobbles of Newgate Street, the sounds of their wheels rain-muffled. Through that long cold day Anna waited; several times she and her friend were escorted to the necessary at the end of a dark corridor at the side of the building; and several times Anna sat upon her bag and drawing the child close began to suckle her. Her breasts were so shrunken away it was a miracle that her milk still flowed. Daily she thanked the Blessed Mother for it was difficult enough to manage a little broth and cabbage for the child. Mary Parker stood beside the mother and child; it was also a blessing that such a woman was with there to watch over Mary Óg when Anna was summoned to her trial. She could not have asked help from Phoebe Harris and her sister-in-law, so stricken were those women with their own fears. It would have been impossible to draw either woman back to the ordinary task of watching over a child, helping her to squat and lift her skirts as necessary. Besides, there was no way of knowing the order of trials.

534 The crime of burglary is defined in notes on types of crime in the OBPOnline as: breaking into a dwelling house at night with intent to commit a felony (normally theft), or actually doing so. This was considered a serious offence, because there were likely to be sleeping inhabitants in a house, and those convicted of this offence were often sentenced to death, See Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, ‘Crime, Justice and Punishment: theft: burglary’ in ‘Historical Background to the Proceedings of the Old Bailey’, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/history/crime/crimes.html#burglary. — 219 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Anna was finally called to the court for malefactors at the time when women in the audience at Drury Lane Theatre would have been dabbing handkerchiefs at tears of laughter, as they followed the antics of a foolish father, a manipulative young daughter and her oafish suitors, in Henry Fielding’s farce, The Virgin Unmasked, second on the program that evening.535 Anna’s trial was the tenth trial of the Sessions, and followed that of Phoebe

Harris and her brother and sister-in-law.536 The transcript of the Harris-Yelland trial indicates it was lengthy and then at its conclusion the Jury retired for some time. This was unusual because, although the verdicts would not be delivered until the end of the Session, they were often reached after the jury were involved in a brief muttered consultation.

Phoebe Harris returned, sobbing, distraught. It was the first time Anna had seen the woman without a member of her family: the woman’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law had been discharged.

*

The old constitution of this court for malefactors [the Old Bailey] is given by "R. B.," in Strype (v. 384). "It," he says, "is called the King's Commission on the Peace of Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol Delivery of Newgate, for the City of London and County of Middlesex, which court is held at Justice Hall, in the Old Bailey, commonly called the Sessions House, and generally eight times, or oftener, every year. The judges are the Lord Mayor, the Recorder, and others of his Majesty's Justices of the Peace of the City of London, the two Sheriffs of London being always present; and oftentimes the judges (being always in these commissions) come, and sit to give their assistance. The jurors, for all matters committed in London, are citizens of London … and the jurors for crimes and misdemeanours committed in Middlesex are freeholders of the said county." Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford 537

535 ‘Theatrical Register’, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 4, Part I (April 1786), p. 355. 536 OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of Joseph Yelland , otherwise Holman, Ph[o]ebe Harris, Elizabeth Yelland, offences against the king : coining, Ref: t17860426-9. 537 Thornbury and Walford, ‘The Old Bailey', Old and New London, Vol. 2 (1878), pp. 461-477, British History Online. — 220 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

So with Phoebe Harris’s keening, and her child’s wailing, vibrating in her ears Anna had mounted the stone steps with rails and banisters leading towards the courtroom. She climbed upwards, her palms and the tips of her fingers pressed together … Ó Mother of

Orphans, let them be seeing she was a good woman. She had been warned of how prisoners before the Court were closely watched for evidence of their morality and guilt, for in the eighteenth century court there was the belief that innocence and moral worth would reveal itself in the demeanour of defendants, victims and witnesses.538 Anna had blessed the rain and dark clouds of the morning as she hurried against the rain in Dead Man’s Walk, for the large glass mirror … positioned to reflect daylight on to the face of the accused539 and so reveal innocence or guilt, would be safely dull. It was surely a heavenly sign and she whispered a small prayer of thanksgiving.

There were, of course, natural anxieties which any but the boldest of prisoners might experience; anxieties which could be read as guilt. There was foremost the nervous discomfort of being observed by galleries of spectators while standing before the Judge and

Jurors whose questions and decisions could not be predicted. For the defendant in the dock there were those other irrepressible emotions such as anxiety for a baby left in the room below with another prisoner. That anxiety, expressed in the biting of a lip, the twist of a shawl or a nervous sideways glance, might be all the evidence required for a capital

538 Hitchcock and Shoemaker (2006), p. 108. 539 Ibid., p. xix. — 221 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______conviction. Even the silent whisperings of a prayer might be interpreted as a rehearsal of a defendant’s speech, and be taken as ‘evidence’ of her guilt.540

When in those late evening hours Anna Mullens, breathing rapidly, had taken her last steps into the defendant’s stand in the Courtroom she was dazzled by gas lights, suspended from four brass chandeliers. Before the scene settled into human shapes she saw above her what seemed to be a line of full wigs, tightly curled, suspended over featureless faces and bright red gowns, rising from the dark glow of polished wood. As her breathing steadied she became aware of a white entablature behind the central figure — it was Justice Baron Eyre, although Anna would not be told that. There were two large windows with festooned pelmets on either side of the entablature. She saw also two wide colonnaded galleries crowded with the heads of spectators at each end of the room and was conscious of clerks and transcribers busy at their desks with their quills and papers, shuffling and sorting, on the floor below her. Beside them was an empty chair at a semi-circular table of glossy mahogany, in readiness for those defendants with a lawyer and recently vacated by the

Counsel engaged by Joseph Yelland, Phoebe Harris’s brother-in-law. For a moment Anna was transfixed by two irons attached to a bench upon which lay three branding irons and her breath quickened as she glanced under her lashes at a raised stall a little to her right where the Jurors, variously bewigged and in sober coats, listened as her charge was read. At

540 Hitchcock and Shoemaker argue that these grounds for judgments, invisible in extant court transcripts, offer some explanation of the apparently erratic and hasty nature of many eighteenth century criminal verdicts. See Hitchcock and Shoemaker (2006), p. 110. — 222 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the conclusion of the reading some members of the Jury leaned together whispering, their eyes fixed upon Anna’s downcast face.541

*

I have set Anna’s trial as the penultimate of the day. Although she may have waited all day and been first called on the second day, long Court days were not unknown. In a letter to his brother, Baron Hotham, one of the judges before whom a number of Botany Bay convicts appeared, recounted an occasion on the Northern Circuit when he had begun hearing two Boundary Causes at eight o’clock on the Monday morning and without stirring from the Bench, finished my summing up (which lasted two hours and three quarters) exactly at ½ past 4 on Tuesday morning … was at court again at 8 … and finished it a little after eleven at night.542

*

541 The description of the Old Bailey is derived from paintings and from Hitchcock and Shoemaker, ‘History of the Old Bailey’, OBPOnline, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/history/the-old-bailey. 542 Baron Hotham’s Letter to his brother, Chislehurst, 11 September 1778, in (The) Hothams: Being the Chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton from their hitherto unpublished family papers, Vol. 2, edited by Anna Maria D. W Stirling (Herbert Jenkins, 1918), p. 336. — 223 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 11

543 Uaigneas — Towards the Scaffold and Stake

*

(H)ANNA(H) otherwise (H)ANNA(H) MULLENS, was indicted, for that she, well knowing that one Peter Roach had served our Lord the King, as a seaman, on board the Burford, and that certain wages and pay were due to him for such service, on the 11th of November last, she did appear in her proper person before the Worshipful George Harris, and did produce and exhibit a certain paper, partly printed, and partly written, with a certain mark thereunto set, which purported to be the last will and testament of the said Peter Roach, and did then and there unlawfully, wilfully, and knowingly, take a false oath that that paper did contain the last will and testament of him the said Peter Roach; and that she was the executrix therein named, with intent to obtain probate, in order to receive the wages and pay so due to him the said Peter Roach, for and on account of his said service, against the statute. A second count, for that she, supposing certain wages and pay was due, &c. ………………………………………………………………….. (The Will read, witnessed by Philip Riley and John Penny.) …………………………………………………………………………….. THOMAS PLUCK sworn. I was a foremast-man on board the Magnanime. Did you know Philip Riley of the Burford? — Yes. Have you seen him write often? — Yes. Look at this? — That was never his hand writing in the world; I knew him extremely well, he wrote a very heavy and a very ordinary hand, indeed; he was very little used in writing. ……………………………………………………………………. GUILTY [26 April 1786]: Death [6 May 1786]. Tried by the London Jury before Mr. Baron EYRE. She was humbly recommended to mercy by the Jury, because they supposed she had been drawn in.544

*

543 Uaigneas: more than sorrow; pronounced ‘oowigness’. I am indebted to an Irish friend, Paula Clifford for the Irish phrases and their meaning. Uaigneas is a sorrow like the most searing bleak wind; it was defined as the soul-chilling deathly aloneness of the grave, by Hugh O’Connor, ‘Swim-Two-Birds: Irish and Celtic Names Explained,’ http://swimtwobirds.org/webdoc46.htm. 544OBP Online 26 Apr 1786, trial of (H)Anna(h), otherwise (H)Anna(h) Mullens: deception fraud, Ref: t17860426-10. — 224 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

It was late evening when Anna Mullens, her child protected beneath her shawl and with her small bundle of clothing bumping against her hip, was led with her companions back from the bail dock towards the brief passage to Newgate. Guilty … it was the worst of days …

Guilty. Through teeth clenched against shivering Anna began whispering Ó liomsa dob uaigneas … ‘Oh the sorrow is upon me’ …Ó liomsa dob uaigneas : A sorrow like the most searing grey wind of winter, freezing her blood, freezing her breath. She had committed this crime for her child’s security; thought the Holy Mother would understand that she did not do it for herself, well, not entirely for herself, for both of them and for Edward. No matter … no matter why she did it … uaigneas was upon her.

Ó dear Holy Mother, Mother of Orphans, how could she, a simple Irish cailín,545 be about knowing what might be read from the scrawl of pen marks upon a page? How could she be about knowing that those marks were as distinctive as the nose on a man’s face? She reminded herself that she would not have desired that Edward stand condemned beside her; but how could he betray her so? Without a blush, he had said to the Judge, She has had two or three husbands while I knew her — and him the father of Mary Óg; and she a woman who trusted him with her life. His words were like a fist struck in her stomach; bitter sickness had jolted into her mouth. Then the shame of it when the Judge smiled a little and said, You are not one of them, are you? And, as though they were freaks in a sideshow at St

Bartholomew’s Fair, the spectators in their finery peering down from the gallery had sniggered. A little smile hovered about the Judge’s lips as he banged the gavel. Foolish, foolish, ignorant Irish woman, she had believed Edward when he said she would be safe because she could not cipher and if she followed their plan which showed she had taken the

545 cailín: ‘girl’. See Footnote 511, p. 208, above. — 225 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______document in all innocence. She would be safe if she were vague about how she came by the papers … if she could not remember … if she had the child … Ó …she had left the child with Mary Parker … but … several times she had mentioned the little one. Had she not carefully explained she could not present the document sooner because [she] was big with child, and [she] did not like to go till [she] was well. She had kept her eyes downcast and held her hands together to still their trembling. But what help was all of that? Men writing who could not write; or who wrote pretty middling; or who had a very heavy and a very ordinary hand, indeed [and] was very little used in writing … [t]hat was never his hand writing in the world; or, who were dead before they signed the paper … Ó … how she had jumped with shock when the naval clerk said that upon looking who were witnesses to the will, I found that one of the witnesses was dead two years before the will was made. She recalled the day she had gone to the probate office with John Abel and that very clerk had disappeared for some time before returning and asking her who had given her the will. So they had always known that the ‘will’ was false? What then behoved how the sailors wrote; or if they could write; or why she had kept the document for eleven months; or where she lived; or how she lived; or what any father’s name was; or what name she went by; or how old she was? Ó … the Judge had confused her, snaring her into lies; pointless lies. Why did she say she had been in England for ten years? Ten, or six, what did it matter?

When a Juryman said they believed she had been drawn in, Anna had a moment of hope; then the Judge began talking about other wills she ha[d] been concerned in; and if so, you

[the Jury] would wish to withdraw your recommendation. Her mind went blank and she did not hear the Judge’s concluding words, if she is really an innocent person, we will listen to it; I shall desire my Lord Mayor, who has had this affair before him to make enquiry into it. — 226 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

She was doomed. Holy Mary and dear Saint Brigid knew she was innocent of those further charges. Who could have made such accusations against her?

Ó, it was true she had been drawn in; but then, in truth, she was glad enough to be drawn in for there were the child’s needs and Anna would not beg and could not char with a child toddling and running beneath her feet; nor would she give her into another’s care. That was her foolishness, her mother’s love had misled her and brought Mary Óg to the worst of perils. She might have given her baby to the care of the friars at the Chapel to find a nurse; or left her on the doorstep of the Foundling Hospital. Afterwards she might have claimed her again. No, she could not have abandoned her baby … May the Blessed Mother and St

Brigid protect them.

*

Anna felt a gentle pressure in the small of her back. It was Mary Parker, urging her to towards the passage. Even before she had stepped into the Walk, Anna heard Phoebe Harris beginning to moan again. The moan grew into an unearthly sound, like the cries of a Bean

Si,546 rising and ululating on the rain drifting in occasional gusts through the barred roof.

The voice alarmed Mary Óg and the child began trembling and burrowing her cheek against

Anna’s shoulder. The mother wrapped her shawl more tightly and pressed her hand close against the child’s ear. Sputtering torch light intensified the gloom setting the floor with a slippery shine, accentuating the sinister edges of recently uplifted flagstones. A dozen or so enlarged shadows of convicted felons and guards quivered around the walls. The usual

546 Banshee: Celtic fairy woman, harbinger of death; similar to the Highland Bean-nighe, or ‘washer-woman’ seen by streams washing the linen of those about to die. See Katherine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and other Supernatural Creatures (Penguin 1977), pp. 19-20. — 227 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______scatterings of fine dark earth mixed with a powdery residue of lime bearing the imprint of the prisoners’ passing feet had been dissolved or washed against the walls. Would her bones soon be dissolving in that lime, buried under the flags with those others hanged before — and with — her? Would her last night on earth be marked by midnight bells and the silent padding of the black dog? Would she be sent to eternity without the benefit of a priest of her faith to absolve her sins and bless her soul with the last rites? Ó the Lord forgive her. When she was a child Anna had so often heard the old Irish prayer for a quick death and an easy one. Now her death was likely to be a hard one, neither quick nor easy, dependent on bystanders swinging on her legs to still her suffering. She was in mortal danger; locked in nightmare thoughts of becoming one of the poor hanged souls who had walked over their own graves, to be further punished by the footsteps of others eternally passing above them. Or else, in the words of the old ballad sung night after night in the tap room, she might be taken to the Anatomist and her bones left to grin in a glass case.547 Of course better that, than to be burnt alive.

.

Anna looked towards Phoebe Harris, heart-sore and keening in the Walk ahead of her. The woman could barely stand; George Woodward and the young soldier — both also found guilty of capital offences — kept her upright. What must Phoebe have felt when her brother-in-law and sister-in-law walked free and she stood convicted of high treason? What must she have felt, reading the rush of relief on their faces before it was partially masked in horror at Phoebe’s fate and flickers of guilt for the joy of their escape? Were her daughter and mother watching from the gallery? What suffering it would be to know a beloved was likely to be burned alive. Perhaps if the daughter had remained with her mother she would

547 You’ll be scragged, ottomised, and grin in a glass case. See Grose, p.208. — 228 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______never have been charged because, before betraying them, their wretched Judas had persuaded the girl to quit her mother’s house to become a servant in his. Perhaps he thought

Phoebe could not be found guilty; perhaps she had rejected him.

*

Rocking Mary gently, Anna moved to stand beside Phoebe Harris, whose keening had become a low moaning. Anna tried to form words of comfort; but before such suffering, words failed. She thought in any case the poor soul would not have heard her, for her face was blank with shock. It had to be a sin against the Lord to burn a woman. And so it was to hang the mother of a young child. Ó what madness would have made a law that set women burning for coining while men were hanged for the same crime?548 Why was the crime so much more heinous if a woman committed it? If Anna knew anything it was that the woman would not have committed the crime alone. This was, indeed, a view sometimes taken by the Court.

Rain-bedraggled, Anna rocked Mary gently from side to side, seeing her own horror reflected in glances she exchanged with Mary Parker and the men supporting Phoebe

Harris. The several guards who had stood along the walls had moved to encircle them, their torches held aloft, smoking and sizzling. Anna stared unblinking at their shadows gathering across the wooden door in huddled confusion. Like the projections of a nightmare, the dark figures were studded onto the wood by rows of broad-headed nails. Anna’s legs went weak; she wanted to rest. At least Mary had relaxed in sleep. The little heart had lost its trembling and was beating steadily against her own.

548 The last execution of a man at the stake was in 1612. — 229 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

When Anna thought she could stand no longer, a turnkey, dressed in the usual heavy black coat and deep crowned hat with a broad brim, came to unlock the door, his keys chinking, rain dripping from his hat, his shoulders gleaming with wetness. As the condemned passed before him he looked at each with something akin to pity.

*

For the ten days between Anna’s trial and the delivery of sentences the movement of time became unbalanced with hours almost halting and then flashing by at such speed that Anna was beset by nausea. On the second day of the Sessions a new prisoner, Ann Davis,549 was brought to Newgate. She would become the first woman hanged at Port Jackson. On the second morning of her imprisonment she awakened in the Women’s Ward, farted loudly and sat up. Her old leather stays, with laces broken and missing, were worn to a greasy sheen. ‘Piss and fart, sound at heart,’ she said, wrapping a once blue shawl about her shoulders and laughing as Anna Mullens glanced at her. Anna shrugged and continued running a fine-tooth comb through her daughter’s hair. It was, after all, impossible to hide bodily functions. Ann Davis was to appear later in the April Sessions. ‘What do you say, eh, little flash wench?’ she said, reaching over and giving the child’s cheek a light niggling pinch; Mary Óg leaned back against her mother and, dropping her head slightly, scrutinized the newcomer through her lashes. The woman’s breast almost slipped from her stays as she leaned to finger a fold of Mary Óg’s blue linsey-woolsey petticoat which had once been an

Irish mantle. ‘A pretty colour,’ the woman said, at last coaxing a fleeting smile from the

549 OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of Ann the wife of William Davis, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860426-119. — 230 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______child. In records Ann Davis would be represented even more negatively than Ann Fowles; however, while she may not have been genteel and did not have a well-developed moral sense — apparently before confessing the theft for which she was hanged she had first accused another convict of the crime — she would die with remarkable dignity and stoicism on that scaffold at Port Jackson.

*

As the Sessions progressed some prisoners were found not guilty and disappeared; others returned apprehensive, or resentful and angry. What chance of justice was there when prosecutors and witnesses were paid?550 Very few were as brave as Phoebe Harris’s brother-in-law who in Court had pointed angrily at their prosecutor, crying out, [T]his witness wants to swear my life away, for the sake of the blood money; and although the whole of that tale would never be known a man in a blindfold could see the case had the stink of a privy. Their prosecutor was impecunious, had failed in his green grocer’s business in Drury Lane and had met the parish constables for the first time when they delivered a warrant upon him. The blood money would serve him well. The prisoners’

Counsel had made it clear that their prosecutor was a liar, had lied to the landlord at the time Mrs. Harris took the room. [Y]ou was the person thought the fittest with that demure face to tell a lie, was what the prisoners’ Counsel said. While Mrs. Harris lay weeping or silent in the infirmary where she was nursed with tenderness by the matron and those prisoners given infirmary duties, prisoners repeated and speculated on the course of that

550 For an indication of the eighteenth century development of monetary compensations, first for successful prosecutions and, following an Act of 1778, the offering of substantial rewards, especially for varieties of theft, whatever the outcome, see J. M. Beattie, ‘The Pattern of Crime in England 1660-1800’, Past and Present, No. 62 (February 1974), pp. 56-57. Hitchcock and Shoemaker also give an introduction to the history of rewards in England’s criminal justice practices (2006), pp. 2, 11.

— 231 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______trial, shaking their heads and cross-hatching it with their own and other accounts of the impossibility of receiving justice. Daily, the prison Ordinary, the Reverend Mr. John

Villette, visited Phoebe Harris exhorting repentance and offering consoling scriptures.

That Phoebe Harris would have received kindness is suggested from the observations of

Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This man, later credited with influencing the mode of colonization used in South Australia, spent three years in Newgate for abducting an heiress and marrying her at Gretna Green. The humanity of Wakefield’s witness, his passionate and informed criticisms of the capital code and his descriptions of the administrations of that code, are a valuable trace of the physical structure of the prison and its social traditions.

Although Wakefield was imprisoned late in the eighteen-twenties, by which time women were no longer burnt at the stake — the last such execution was in 1789 — and reformers had made Newgate, in many ways, both more repressive and less sociable than in the seventeen-eighties, there is no reason to conclude the officers would have behaved very differently. While Wakefield wrote of the incredible scenes of horror in Newgate he also emphasised the peculiar tenderness accorded to all of those under sentence of death adding that prisoners convicted of forgery excite an extraordinary degree of interest in all who approach them.551 Strictly speaking, Mrs Harris would not have been under the sentence of death until the sentences were ‘handed down’; however, the possibility of such an horrific execution would have most likely brought special consideration prior to her actual sentencing. The fact that she was in ill health, a matter mentioned in her trial and in one of

James Adair’s letters, would have contributed to her becoming an object of pity, a common

551 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis, 2nd Edn (Effingham Wilson 1832), p. 94. — 232 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______phrase used in letters and reports about those suffering ill-health in the aftermath of imprisonment.

*

Some weeks from sentencing and facing a more common fate, Anna would not yet have been an object of special tenderness. Seeking her own comfort through worship she had begun to attend chapel services in the first days of her imprisonment. The stark architecture of the Younger George Dance’s chapel with the tiered oak pews was, after all, the Lord’s house, in spite of its lack of religious adornments and the barred windows in place of the richness of stained glass. Seeing her own distress displayed in the fear and misery on the faces of the condemned, Anna bowed her head understanding their united suffering as both penance for sins and as sharing in the Lord’s own torment. However, there was little in the service to transform her deepening sorrow into a consoling joy. The few uplifting moments were confined to the introductory hymns glorifying and praising God which were led by the rich voice of the prison Ordinary and accompanied by the irregular voices of prisoners.

Often the motley choir was embellished with voices of the curious who had paid to view the condemned seated around an oversized black coffin in their ‘dock’, a large rectangular pew, enclosed to a little more than waist height. The tiered structure of the pews set the coffin as centre-piece, which was described by John Summerson as designedly grim, in his notes accompanying a small selection of illustrations which were the collaborative work of

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), who could draw life, and Augustus Charles Pugin

(1768-1832), who could draw architecture.552

552 John Summerson, The Microcosm of London by T. Rowlandson and A. C. Pugin (King Penguin 1943). The descriptions of the chapel are based on Summerson’s book and on the words of John Howard, together — 233 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Anna, with Mary Óg, sat in the highest gallery which was accessed through a narrow, winding staircase from the women’s ward. The opposite gallery was reserved for the visitors. At the Sunday service before execution day the sheriffs, in their apparel of red robes and gold chains, joined the visitors. Below the women’s pew, the men sat above the floor-level condemned ‘dock’ with its macabre centerpiece. To the left of the men, there was a small pew for the Keeper and his wife. From her vantage Anna could see the top of

Mrs. Akerman’s head as she leaned piously over her prayer book, as if she did not wish to look into the faces of felons. Her husband, on the other hand, watched the overflow of men prisoners file in to stand directly facing the pulpit in the aisle between the altar and the condemned pew. Behind the standing men, above the altar, was a board displaying the Ten

Commandments, to which Mr. Villette, in a surplice and bobbed wig, powdered white, occasionally referred when he addressed the congregation from the pulpit. To Anna’s left was another small corner pew reserved for two turnkeys with staves. The sight of the two armed men seated where angels might have been expected had been like an assault; even the Lord’s house, where peace should reign, had been sullied with the threat of violence.

Despite the great differences between the attack on the chapel in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields and the presence of the officers, their incongruity gave Anna a brief tremor of fear and anxiety which was allayed when she observed a stave tilt against the wall and realized the officer had fallen asleep during Mr. Villette’s intoning.

* with other observations by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Summerson’s small book was derived from Rudolph Ackermann’s serialized work, The Microcosm of London (1808).

— 234 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

I attended there several times, and Mr. Villette read the prayers distinctly, and with propriety. The prisoners who were present seemed attentive; but we were disturbed by the noise in the court. Surely they who will not go to chapel, who are by far the greater number, should be locked up in their rooms during the time of divine service, and not suffered to hinder the edification of such as are better disposed. John Howard553

*

When Anna had first attended the services in mid-March there were twenty-two men and two women in the pews, each condemned at the February Sessions. It was dreadful to see the deterioration of the prisoners sitting before that coffin, some holding their hymn books high, their faces imploring, for they were awaiting the decisions of the King in Council upon their sentences. Sweet Margaret Dawson554 — bless the child, she was barely fifteen, frightened and pining for her mother far away in Ormskirk555 — had faded to little more than a skeleton. Why, Anna had heard in the tap-room that a prosecutor’s witness at

Margaret’s trial had said he should not [have known] her again, she [was] so much altered since [her arrest], which was mid-February, a mere ten days previous to the trial. If Anna had heard Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s words echoing backwards through time, she would have assented to his comments for she, too, saw brown hair turned gray, and gray white, by a month of suspense such as most London capital convicts undergo … The smooth face of a man of twenty-five becomes often marked with decided wrinkles on the forehead and about the eyes and mouth; and, in certainly three cases out of four, one month of the cells of Newgate causes a great diminution of flesh over the whole body. ‘How thin he grows!’ is

553John Howard (1779 Edn), cited by Thornbury and Walford, 'Newgate’, British History Online. 554 OBPOnline, 22 February 1786, trial of Margaret Dawson, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860222-54. 555 Lancashire: This biographical detail was recorded in Surgeon William Balmain’s will (13 November 1803); Margaret Dawson was to have two natural or reputed but dearly beloved children with the man who became principal surgeon in the colony. She was ensient at the time the will was made and gave birth to a daughter three days after Balmain’s death. Balmain is buried at St Andrew’s, Holborn. See Gillen (1989), pp. 21-22. — 235 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the common remark of the prisoners, when speaking of one who has passed a month in the condemned pew.556

Anna did not know the February group of condemned men for unlike capitally sentenced women, who remained in the wards,557 when men were capitally sentenced they were taken immediately to the condemned cells with the small double-barred windows. In 1784 John

Howard recalled that he was told by those who attended them that criminals who had affected an air of boldness during their trial, and appeared quite unconcerned at the pronouncing of sentence upon them, were struck with horror, and shed tears, when brought to these darksome, solitary abodes.558 In the account of his imprisonment Wakefield reported that condemned men were confined in those cells from dusk to daylight during winter, and from dusk till eight o’clock next day in summer. In winter, and in the neighbourhood of St Paul’s, dusk begins at three o’clock in the afternoon, and daylight at nine in the morning, leaving convicts under sentence of death six hours of the twenty-four for washing, eating, exercise, intercourse with their friends, the chapel service, which they attend everyday; and lastly, exertions to propitiate the King in Council, on whose opinion of their cases depends the question of life or death.559

*

Nothing could have prepared Anna for the night when Mr. Villette delivered the Recorder’s

Report to Margaret Dawson and Sarah Parry. News that the King was in Council rippled

556 Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1832), pp. 150-151. 557 However, if women were convicted of murder, they, too, were taken to the condemned cells. 558 Thornbury and Walford, ‘Newgate ', British History Online. 559 Wakefield, pp. 86-87. — 236 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______through the Wards and Yards bringing a pre-storm tension; it seemed at any moment the air would snap with lightning. As one, like heliotropes drawn to the sun, the women in their frilled mob-caps turned towards the Ordinary when at last he entered the Ward, his plump face, as usual, benign and unreadable. He had beckoned Margaret Dawson and Sarah Parry to speak away from their friends. Anna watched as the two women clutched each other, the girl weeping on Sarah Parry’s shoulder. It was plain from the sounds of gasping wonderment in Margaret’s cries and the expression of Sarah’s face, from which all anxiety was erased, that they had been respited.560 Then Mr. Villette gestured the women should kneel and spreading his hands towards the other women, invited them to join prayers. The two women looked up at their friends, their faces luminous with tears. Elizabeth Colley was the first to reach the kneeling women and taking Margaret’s hand kissed her forehead. Most of the women kneeled as Mr. Villette bowed his head and led the prayer:

We humbly acknowledge before thee, O most Merciful Father, that all the punishments Which are threatened in thy law, might justly have Fallen upon us, by reason of our manifold Transgressions and hardness of heart. Yet seeing it Hath pleased thee of thy tender mercy, upon our Weak and unworthy humiliation, to assuage the Contagious sickness wherewith we lately have been Sore afflicted, and to restore the voice of joy and Health into our dwellings; we offer unto thy Divine Majesty the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, Lauding and magnifying thy preservation and 561 Providence over us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

560 To be respited meant the capital sentence remained under consideration. The future was by no means certain, but there was usually a lesser sentence. Sarah Parry and Margaret Dawson (together with (H)anna(h) Mullens) would be pardoned 10 January 1787, on the condition of transportation to the Eastern coast of New South Wales, or some one or other of the islands adjacent. See OBPOnline, 10 January 1787, Supplementary Material, Refs: 017870110-1 and 017870110-2. 561 From ‘Prayers and Thanksgivings for Several Occasions’, The Book of Common Prayer: 1662 (John Baskerville 1762), http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1662/pray&thanks.pdf. I have regularized spelling and the use of the letter ‘s’. — 237 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The women’s response scarcely repressed their relief, and they had burst into wild dancing and singing almost before the Ordinary passed from the Ward to attend those men waiting in the condemned cells. Forming a circle the women sang and danced to old ballads. And then Mary Moulton and Mary Pile moved to the centre of the ring posing and prancing.

Mary Pile paraded as a hapless man as Mary Moulton slid her skirt along her thigh and they sang, One night as I came from the play/ I met a fair maid by the way/ She had rosy cheeks and a dimpled chin/ and a hole to put poor robin in …, Oh behold my rolling eye, she did say/ Oh behold my rolling eye, she did say/ Besides my milk white thigh/ And there’s something else that’s nigh, bowl away, bowl away/ and there’s something else that’s nigh, bowl away. Mary slid her skirt upwards until there was the wink of hair and the other women stamped, lifting the gleeful little girls high as they sang the rollicking choruses:

……… And her cuckoo’s nest he spied … As her legs she opened wide …

What the devil’s in the man …? It will neither sit nor stand … Tho’ I rolled it in my hand, bowl away …

When the breath of their hysteria had deflated, anxieties returned as women wondered about the fates of the men in the condemned cells. Elizabeth Colley began to weep. It was plain that she was thinking of that dreadful night, a little more than a year before, when she learned that all hope was lost and her lover, John Kelsey, had hours to live. She would forever be thankful to the turnkey who allowed her a last farewell. As she wept the two children knelt before her, each laying her face upon the distressed woman’s knees, and

Elizabeth Bramham and Margaret Dawson, who years later would be remembered with

— 238 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______warmest gratitude in Surgeon William Balmain’s will for her tenderness towards [him] while in ill health,562 rushed to her side.

*

On that evening, probably Saturday, 8 April 1786, in addition to Margaret Dawson and

Sarah Parry, who were both eventually pardoned on condition of transportation, to the

Eastern coast of New South Wales, or some one or other of the islands adjacent,563 twelve men were respited and ten heard they were to be executed. The executions were to take place the following Wednesday, 12 April 1786, for once the King’s judgment was made execution followed swiftly.

Observing these rituals over a period of three years profoundly affected Edward Gibbon

Wakefield, the occasions arousing in him that sort of anger, which is commonly produced by watching gross injustice. He wrote that [o]ne sees twenty-five fellow creatures, who yesterday were all under sentence of death — twenty of them are saved and five are utterly condemned. Are the five the most guilty? By no means.564 On such evenings, with family and friends waiting in Newgate Street to hear the fate of loved ones, Wakefield observed scenes of passion, joy, wild despair, jealousy, envy, hatred, malice and brutal rage, which follow this proceeding of the [O]rdinary should be witnessed in order to be thoroughly conceived. But, he continued, there would be no advantage in describing them correctly were that possible. I therefore pass by them …565

562 Gillen (1989), pp. 21-22. 563 See OBPOnline, 10 January 1787, Supplementary Material, Refs: 017870110-1 and 017870110-2. 564 Wakefield, p. 152. 565 Wakefield, 143-144. — 239 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

It was no doubt wise of Wakefield to resist description of such distress, for the prospect of death defies words. Words of comfort, pain or love, lodge in the throat like stones, resistant to swallowing and impossible to release for fear they will sound hollow, trite. How can

Death’s dominance in Newgate possibly be imagined? Such an act belongs with Derrida’s philosophical position on the Gift, Hospitality, Mourning and Forgiveness: it is beset by impossibility.566 Yet, this is the task of historians who always stand before death, the candles which are their words telling of shadows, phantoms, nailed over absences: virtualities bearing the secrets of what cannot be recovered or said. This, of course, is to return, again, to Derrida’s secret, to Nietzsche’s maybe: to the possible which haunts the impossible, which is to do with both mourning and hospitality.567 It is certainly not about relativity and ‘anything goes’; it is about the supplement, that which exceeds words, what cannot be said, that which is always deferred.

*

The mid-point of Anna’s waiting was May Day, a cross-quarter day,568 half-way between

March equinox and June solstice. It was the day when across the kingdom young people went a-Maying, gathering flowers and fruit, garlanding cows, dancing about may-poles bedecked with floweres and multicoloured ribbon, before the lighting of May-Eve (Beltane or Beltaine) bon-fires: all remnants of pre-Christian fertility rituals.569 In London, May Day

566 For a reiteration of Derrida’s philosophical discussions of ‘impossible possibilities’ see Derrida (2003/2007), pp. 441-461. 567 Ibid., pp. 457-458. 568 Quarter days are conflations of pagan and Christian festivals. They are: Candlemas, a Fire/Purification Festival conflated with St Brigid’s day and the Epiphany, or purification of Mary in the Temple (2 February); Queen of May, Queen of Heaven, Beltane, a Fire/Fertility Festival, (1 May); Lammas (or Loaf Mass), a Harvest Festival (1 August); and All Hallows, or All Saints Day (1 November). 569 Beltaine is the Irish word for ‘May’. A brief mention of the Beltane rituals is given by E. O. James, ‘The Influence of Folklore on the History of Religion’, Numen: International Philosophical Journal Review, Vol. 9, Fasc. 1 (January 1962), p. 13. — 240 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______was a festival for milk-maids and chimney sweeps. Groups of milk-maids, many of them

Welsh, adorned their hair with flowers and ornaments. Accompanied by musicians and two men carrying a huge pyramid structure decorated with silver pots, plates, pans and flowers, the young women danced and sang through the streets inviting donations from customers.

May Day was also the festival when chimney sweeps scrubbed their faces and, if their masters were just, received fresh linen and a new suit of clothes. Boys as young as four, not much older than Mary Fowles, were sent climbing into the narrow twists and crevices of chimneys until their bones were bent or broken and they developed cancer of the scrotum; but on that day they chose a ‘King’ and ‘Queen’, chalked their clean faces white and with gold and silver paper in their hair went dancing, shaking tambourines and banging tins against their shovels and crutches. With hats held out they danced after a Jack-in-the-green, one of the sweeps inside a pyramid of leaves over a wooden frame. 570

It was impossible for Anna not to remember the joyful transformation of London on Mary

Óg’s first May Day. Anna had tied her child upon her back and followed the festival, the baby laughing and clapping her hands. Afterwards Anna had gathered into her apron red rose petals and the waxy white flowers of Portugal laurel with their nose-tickling frill of anthers.

Anna’s grandmother would have said, ‘Arrah now, do not be lookin’ behind thee, cailín;

’twill be to a pillar of salt thou’lt be turnin’.’ Regrets, she bore so many of them; she could

570 John Thomas Smith, A Book for a Rainy Day: Recollections of the Events of the Years: 1766-1833, introduction by Wilfred Whitten (ed.), 1st publ., 1845 (Methuen 1905), pp.19-20. — 241 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______not but look back. It was, in any case, a way of not looking forward. Anna clamped her teeth over her bottom lip and stared through the window bars; behind a bulk of dark cloud was a patch of very pale hard blue, like fine glass: there was snow in the sky.

*

Sylvanus Urban recorded that May Day, 1786, came with a [v]ery smart fall of snow for near 20 minutes, which was succeeded by an intense frost, which proved fatal to the blossoms where it was felt.571 The snow eddied into the Ward exciting the children, who ran through the flurries, holding their hands out to catch the flakes and then circling back to the women to display their prizes, the delicate stars netting Mary Óg’s hair and settling into a pale halo over Mary Fowles’ spikes. Mary Óg held her arms out for her mother to see the flakes, fragile and perfect, on her sleeves.

Hearing a clatter of shoes and laughter, Anna turned as Mary Moulton and Mary Pile rushed by, leading Catherine Hart,572 Margaret Dawson and fourteen-year-old Mary

Bramham.573 Catherine Hart and Mary Bramham who, according to character witnesses, was a dutiful child, would both be transported to Botany Bay.

‘Come little ones,’ Mary Moulton called, pausing to swing Mary Fowles into her arms, while Mary Bramham, who was employed as a baby-sitter at the time of her arrest, lifted

Mary Óg. ‘Little Polly,’ Mary Moulton said, nuzzling the three-year-old’s cheek and the

571 Sylvanus Urban, Gent., Editor, The Gentleman’s Historical Magazine and Chronicle, Vol. 56, No. 5, Part I (Monday 1 May 1786), p. 437. 572 OBPOnline, 8 December 1784, trial of Catherine Hart, theft: specified place, Ref: t17841208-116. 573 OBPOnline, 8 December 1784, trial of Mary Bramham, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17841208-149. Bramham is sometimes Branham and Brenham. — 242 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______child clasped her arms around the woman’s neck. Then to the yapping of a small white dog, with tail curved in a half circle over its back, the women ran down the winding staircases to the iron-gate into the Chapel Yard. A turnkey allowed them access and watched the women and children laughing and jumping in the mat of snow, scooping the stuff in their hands and tossing it high. Anna followed slowly, frowning, her hands in a characteristic pose, tips together as though prayer had become inscribed in her bones.

In moments the young women were lobbing rough balls at each other, their cries attracting men and women from the nearby tap-room and they too joined the wild merriment pelting each other and ducking to avoid the slushy attacks. For ten brief minutes the courts resounded like a May Day carnival, until the snow was muddied and dispersed and the wet- footed merry-makers drew breath, their faces still shaped with laughter, the adults’ chests heaving, and the little girls’ cheeks glowing magenta, the colour of sword lilies which were, that week, unfurling in London’s parks. 574

Anna walked towards her daughter who had squatted, steam rising from her puddle, and saw that poor mad John Simpson575 had belatedly come into the Yard. Anna hurried, for although the man was all kindness he had fatally stabbed his wife, falsely believing her to be a gypsy lover in bed with his wife. In his pitiable madness the man did not know that he had committed such a shocking deed. Several times Anna had seen him speaking to a hat

574 Sword lilies: gladiolus communis. Sylvanus Urban observed the flowers were blooming, although he called them corn flags. 575 The details of John Simpson’s crime and behaviour are construed from the transcript of his trial. He had murdered his wife thinking she was a gypsy in bed with her. At his trial, the forty-fourth of the Session, he was found not guilty although the Judge said, I will order he shall not be discharged at present, but that he shall be examined before the Lord Mayor; and his friends will, I hope, appear, and settle some method to take care of him. See OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of John Simpson, killing: murder, Ref: t17860426-42. — 243 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______which was on a hook in the taproom. He had smiled, nodding lovingly, and Anna realized he thought he was addressing the living presence of his unfortunate wife.

The previous day, for his trial would almost certainly have been the last day of April, he had been found Not Guilty and yet remained confined. As Anna went to pass through to the staircase, he put his hand on her arm and asked her if she could hear the gypsies singing; it was his habitual question. Exchanging an anxious glance with the turnkey she shook her head, ‘They live below a trapdoor in my room,’ he said. Then looking vaguely at Anna, his gentle expression blending sadness and puzzlement, he said, ‘Protect the little sweetheart.’

To be sure it was a tragic thing to behold, a man so taken leave of his senses that he heard voices about him and could not tell what was solid from the air itself.

*

The next day dawned fair, or so Sylvanus Urban recorded, noting also the damage to trees caused by caterpillars; the flight of swifts after moths; that vegetables were refreshed from the rain; that there was much haymaking, and that the blooms of Portugal laurel perfumed the air a considerable distance.576 In the last four days of the Session, from 3-6 May, heavy rain returned, intensifying the gloom within the prison. Women huddled around the hearth in the Women’s Ward, anxious and frowning as the end of the Sessions drew closer. All were affected by the likely fate of Phoebe Harris who lay limply in the infirmary staring at the ceiling, or kneeling on the hard stones by her bed.

*

576 Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 5, Part I (May 1786), p. 357. — 244 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Those capitally convicted were always the first group to return to the courtroom for the passing of sentences. Somehow Anna was in the leading position when they had filed into the dock and she had been almost insentient by the time she had moved to her position.

Immediately, her body memory beseeching Divine intervention, she kneeled and bowing her head pressed her palms together, holding the tips of her fingers hard against her lips.

And then — nothing like it had ever happened before — each prisoner in turn also kneeled with bowed head. There was a slight shuffling as George Woodward, the highwayman of good fortune and Jonathan Harwood, the young mollie soldier, steadied Phoebe Harris, who was trembling violently as she eased onto her knees. Then for moments no-one moved, no- one spoke, for those watching were compelled to stillness by the passing spell of surprise.

The Judges on the Bench were momentarily frozen above the array of spring nosegays spread before them; one had been in the act of lifting his flowers to hold the perfumes against the smell and contagion of the prisoners arriving before him, his arm fixed in action; the Recorder’s mouth, shaped to call for the reading of (H)anna(h) Mullens’s indictment, fell slack; however, Mr. Villette, in his black cloak, exhaled the words ‘Glory be to the Lord,’ and turned his eyes towards the ceiling medallions in thanksgiving.

Moments later Anna’s indictment resounded in her ears: Guilty, Death: to be hanged by the neck until she is dead. And the figure of death standing at the end of the Bench, clad in his black cloak and hood had bowed his head and said, Amen. She startled at the sound of a cry of pain and then realized it was her own voice; Ó Mother Mary, how that holy word, had struck her with horror. Anna kneeled in a daze through the Judge’s litany of seven sentences and the chaplain’s responses: Death, Guilty: to be hanged by the neck until he is dead: Amen; Death, Guilty, to be … Amen. And then Anna heard Phoebe Harris’s spine- — 245 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______shivering cry, like that of a terrified, cornered animal. Through the sounds she heard the instruction, ‘All rise’ and stood automatically. Suspended, somewhere between courtroom and memory was the echo of the Judge’s most dreaded words: This last prisoner to be burnt.

*

Saturday May 6th

The sessions at the Old Bailey which began on Wednesday April 26, ended, when the Recorder proceeded to pass sentence on the nine capital convicts, viz. Hannah, alias Hanna Mullins, for taking a false oath, with intent to obtain probate of a seaman’s will; William Smith, alias Storer, for coining halfpence (this being Smith’s second conviction, he is ousted of his clergy; Edward Griffiths and Daniel Keith, for highway robbery; Jonathan Harwood, a soldier, for extorting money from a gentleman, under threats of false accusation; William Watts and James May, for burglaries; George Woodward (the son of a gentleman of fortune), for horse-stealing; and Phoebe Harris, for high treason in coining silver. The prisoners appeared more affected than usual on receiving sentence, and each kneeled down when first brought to the bar; but the agitation and cries of the two women were too shocking for description, particularly of her who is to be burnt. Sylvanus Urban, Gent.577

*

It would be six weeks before the hoped for, and dreaded, delivery of the Recorder’s Report from the King in Council. At night Anna would take her rosary from her stays, the duration of her mediations on the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Family’s life measured on the slide of beads through her fingers as she completed silent prayers.

During the day she could barely allow Mary Óg from her arms until the child became fractious, kicking her legs and pinching her mother’s hands.

577 Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 5, Part I (6 May 1786), p. 437. — 246 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The women comforted Anna; Margaret Dawson and Mary Bramham brought a pack of cards attempting to distract her and when she could not concentrate, the young women turned to making a house of cards with the children. For a while the little ones concentrated on the structure, their faces intent as Mary Bramham set the pinnacle card. Afterwards the two little girls brought the cards close to Anna and spread them around on the sleeping bench. The cards were decorated with the sketches of the Cries of London, the words printed in elongated balloons. The little girls began to build their own card castle. Absently

Anna gathered a few cards, slowly shuffling them; the figures were recognizable, the lobster seller, the shrimp girl, the old man with the bag of broken glass, the costermonger with the berries and fruit; she could not read the words but the cries were as familiar as her own voice. Her eyes were glassy with tears when Anna looked up, half-smiling at Elizabeth

Colley, who had said she was certain Anna would be spared because of the child. Anna ceased shuffling cards, her thumb across the King of Hearts, partially obscuring the balloon of words: The Cat does on the Cock with Fury Fly/And many reasons urged that he must die/The Cock denied the fact; in Vain thou plead’st/Replyed the cat, for right or wrong, thou bleedest.578

Anna shook her head, remarking on the account she had heard of the young mother suckling her child in the cart under the gallows; it had happened around the time of her arrival in London. And hadn’t Mother Handland told the story of the ballad singer, Mary-

Cut-and-Come-Again who, desperate to feed her children, had snipped pockets from the foolish well-to-do? Did that mother not go into living memory because she had taken out her breasts and squirted milk in the eyes of her takers, crying, Damn your eyes, do you want

578 Linebaugh (2006), p. 144. The ‘Cries of London’ cards were published c.1754. — 247 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______to take my life away?579 It was a heart-paining tale and Mother Handland had known someone who went to the trial — and her own mother had gone with the procession to

Tyburn. Anna would not be soothed when Mother Handland said all that was many years gone, wasn’t she herself a mere slip of a girl back then? Times had changed. There followed a little uncomfortable silence. ‘That is as maybe,’ someone said. Besides when

Mother Handland told the story some weeks before most of the women present had taken pleasure in the woman’s mad defiance, in her gameness, for she licked [her prosecutor] before the justice and said she longed for it; and said she would spit upon the justice’s seat, and she did so. 580

After Mrs Handland had told of poor Mary-Cut-And-Come, Mary Pile had pulled her stool from the circle and draping a piece of old sheeting over her head cried, ‘Bring that prisoner before me!’ She had pointed at Mary Moulton, who was dragged across protesting, ‘Damn your eyes, my Lord. I’ll spit upon your arse!’ At which ‘the judge’ sprang up, turned and bending low pulled her skirt high over her bare buttocks; and to shouts of laughter, the

‘prisoner’ spat. ‘Missed! Away with her to the chapel’s darkest dungeon! Fetter her!’ But the judge herself was ‘seized’ and forced to kneel and push her head between the legs of the stool.581 When she was in the ‘stocks’ with hands tied together around the legs, the women

579 An account of the life and arrest of Mary-Cut and-Come-Again, See Hitchcock and Shoemaker (2006), pp 33-35; see also OBP Online, 24 April 1745, trial of Mary Cut and Come-again [as indicted], theft with violence: highway robbery Ref: t17450424-31. 580 The Ordinary of Newgate, His Account … 7th of June 1745 (1745), pp. 8, 10; cited by Hitchcock and Shoemaker (2006), p. 35. 581 Such mockery would follow the carnivalesque of fairs such as St Bartholomew’s in late August. Gatrell warns that ‘the word is an elastic one and it will snap if stretched too far’ and that interpreting carnivalesque features of gallows ritual as the exercise of control by the crowd and the condemned, is to mistake the function of grotesque subversion, which he argues often emulated the behaviour of those in power. He cites an instance of a mock trial in Newgate in which a wrongdoer was punished in the ‘stocks’, having been tried by a ‘judge’ wearing a knotted towel for a wig. However, I would argue that the point of the mockery is not emulation; rather it is a revelation of the grotesque nature of the criminal code of the time. The mockers thus — 248 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______threw a few rolled rags at her and the little girls joined in, jumping up and down and clapping. Then Mary Pile was untied and Mary Moulton retrieved the sheeting. ‘I s’ll have need of rags, come tomorrow.’ Anna had sat beside Mary Parker watching the charade, followed by the women gathering the makings of their menses bandages.582 In twelve months time Surgeon John White would be requesting a quantity of old sheets in the

Botany Bay supplies: so many women, so much blood. The shifts and petticoats of the women were inevitably stained; it was impossible to wash heavily quilted petticoats, and there was very little wood ash in the goal for making lye, although some of the women used urine in washing shifts and bandages.

Anna wiped her eyes on the corner of her shawl. At the time of the mock-trial she recalled

Mother Handland saying that at Tyburn Mary-Cut-And-Come-Again, who eventually identified herself as Mary White, had asked spectators to pray for her and said she bore no body any spite.583 Mother Handland’s mother had heard the words with her own ears.

Would she, Anna, die game? Then, as frequently happened during those weeks, Anna’s thoughts turned to her fellow-condemned: Mrs. Harris, George Woodward and the other men in the cells. At least, Frances Lewis, the woman charged with murdering her sister-in- law had been found guilty of manslaughter, not murder. Her sentence had been branding on the thumb with the letter ‘M’. Three men had been sentenced to Africa, an effective death sentence which was therefore controversial; while Mary Parker and seven other women find a means of subversively criticizing what they cannot ‘control’ or change. See Gatrell, Chapter 3, ‘Carnival or Consent?’ pp. 90-105. 582For a description of this ‘bandage’ and a contemporary analysis of women’s reproductive biology and advice on general aspects of midwifery and baby care, see Alexander Hamilton [1739-1802], Outlines of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (C. Elliot, Edinburgh; and G. Robinson, London 1784). 583 From The Ordinary of Newgate (1745), pp. 8, 10, cited by Hitchcock and Shoemaker (2006), p. 35. — 249 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______were sentenced for seven years to that vague destination parts beyond the seas. Eight months later, these women from the April Sessions, Mary Parker, Mary Dykes, Elizabeth

Cole, Mary Johnson, Elizabeth Lee, Ann Dutton, Margaret Bunn and Ann Davis584 would be discharged from Newgate for embarkation on the Lady Penrhyn. One of them, Elizabeth

Lee,585 by a sleight of shadows in the winter dark morning would vanish, and in her place a woman called, at that time, Martha Eaton would appear.

*

In the weeks that followed sentencing, Anna sat in the condemned pew with Mary Óg. On the first morning the child had tried to climb onto the coffin and Anna, whispering a sharp reprimand, pulled on her skirt. It was a moment of lightness, of brief smiles, around the dreaded table. Strangely, Anna had found an unexpected, almost silent, companionship with her fellow condemned; well, they were kind men, God-fearing and civil, whatever they were supposed to have done. Occasionally Phoebe Harris attended chapel, but she was very weak and the steep stairs were mostly beyond her strength. Like Phoebe Harris,

William Smith, who sat opposite Anna, was also to be executed for coining; unlike the woman he was to be hanged. It was a discrepancy in the law, beyond comprehension. And the case of James May was also impossible to follow. He had been one of three who robbed a warehouse at Narrow-Street, Limehurst, on the Thames. Although he had remained in the

584 As with other people of the ‘First Fleet’ biographies of these women are available in Gillen (1989); their trials are available on the website, OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, Ref: f17860426-1. 585 Note: two women called Elizabeth Lee were imprisoned in Newgate and discharged for embarkation to the Lady Penrhyn; it is this Elizabeth Lee (with three associates), tried before the Middlesex jury, who escapes. See OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of John Spencer, Thomas Pearce, Elizabeth Lee and Ann Dutton, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860426-102. The other Elizabeth Lee, the one who arrived at Botany Bay, was tried before the London jury the year before. See OBPOnline, 23 February 1785, trial of Elizabeth Lee, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850223-68. She had stolen money, jewellery, clothing, candles and a large quantity of wines and spirits. — 250 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______boat while the others entered the warehouse by prising a plank from the necessary built over the water, it would be May who was charged. No doubt the others received blood money for ‘confessing’, and for naming him.

Over the six weeks Mr. Villette’s sermons followed common the themes of crimes, punishments, repentance. Anna ceased to listen; instead she addressed prayers to the

Blessed Virgin, St Brigid and the souls of departed relatives. Sometimes her thoughts roamed to the way moss fell in curtains from the trunks of trees growing in damp Irish glades; or she would rehearse stories of fairies and selkies she must tell her daughter, for she might have but days to live.

Staring through the window bars Anna remembered her childhood delight gathering rushes from a lake to celebrate St Brigid’s Day. She supposed the one she had placed above the lintel of their cellar in St Giles was still in place. Perhaps Edward or John Abel would take

Mary back to Ireland. Of course, she did not know who would be alive there, surely there would be someone. Or they could take her to the friars; or to the chapel in Moorfield.

Perhaps the friars would know of a secret convent where the nuns would care for her. If

Anna were back in Ireland, that was what she would do: she would send her daughter to a convent where she would be kept safe from harm and sin. Anna’s father had always wanted a daughter in the convent.

George Woodward touched her sleeve lightly; the service was over and Mary Óg was asleep.

— 251 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

The Recorder’s Report was delivered the evening of Friday 16 June. There were tears and some kissing of cheeks after the Ordinary made his visit to Anna, but the universal apprehension for Phoebe Harris’s fate subdued any outburst of relief. Moments after the

Ordinary had departed to the infirmary the waiting women heard one anguished scream; and then an unnatural silence settled through the gaol. The loudest of women spoke in whispers; it was as though everyone, gaolers and prisoners alike, was afraid to disturb the air which was, that month, marked by high temperatures, showers and thunder. The children and the animals lay listlessly on the sleeping platform, the cats stretched out, panting in the oppressive atmosphere. Sylvanus Urban reported that on one day the temperature was 80o at 8 a.m. and that it had increased to 83 o by 2 p. m.586 The stones of the prison trapped the heat.

*

On the Sunday after the Recorder’s Report was delivered, Mr. Villette preached the condemned sermon in the presence of the Mayor, the sheriffs and spectators. Restored to the women’s high pew, Anna babbled prayers for Mrs. Harris, for the men who had become her companions and for whom she had developed affection, and in thanksgiving for having been respited. The young boatman, James May, like Anna, had been respited and was standing in the aisle, holding the back of the condemned pew. In 1790 he would be transported for Life on the Surprise.587 Men already transferred to the hulks, or tried a year of so previously, would be transported first. Anna, wrapping her arms around her daughter,

586 Sylvanus Urban, ‘Observations’, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 6, Part I (June 1786), p. 446. 587 See Lesley Uebel, Claim a Convict, http://users.bigpond.net.au/convicts/page54.html. — 252 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______paused in her prayers. The visitors’ gallery opposite was crowded with men in fashionable coats and women in glossy silks and heavily embroidered stomachers, their hair high and powdered, crested by feathered and flowered hats; all hoping for a glimpse of she who was to be burnt. Audible nudging and sighing followed Phoebe Harris’s trembling steps towards the coffin.

Mr. Villette’s sermon maintained the usual themes of crimes, [with special mention of the iniquitous nature of coining as high treason] … shame, ignominy, sorrow … wretchedness … childless parents, widows and helpless orphans, broken and contrite hearts, and death … [the most extreme of deaths], for the benefit of society.588

*

Tuesday evening was the time of the black dog and the bellman who, at midnight, tramped the streets about Newgate ringing his bell and chanting. Along Newgate Street, the bellman went, past St Sepulchre’s, up Snow Hill, turning into Cock Lane prior to St Andrew’s churchyard, circling back to complete his ritual in the arcades of Newgate, crying: You prisoners that are within/Who, for wickedness and sin/after many mercies shown you/ are now appointed to die/ … to-morrow morning/ the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre's shall toll for you … I beseech you, for Jesus Christ's sake,/ to keep this night in watching and prayer/ to the salvation of your own souls while there is yet time and place for mercy … .589

588 Although these themes were extracted from those noted over forty years later by Wakefield they are in keeping with those beliefs and values to be found in eighteenth century records. See Wakefield, p. 256. 589 To the right of St Sepulchres’ altar was a board listing charitable donations, which included the donation from a Mr. Robert Dowe in 1605, for ringing the greatest bell in this church on the day the condemned prisoners are executed, and for other services, for ever, concerning such condemned prisoners, for which services the sexton is paid £16s. 8d.—£50. See Footnote 143, p. 42, above.

— 253 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

The night before the executions Anna had not expected to sleep; she lay for several hours.

The little girls were asleep beside her, their arms flung wide and their shifts hitched high on their thin legs. Unable to sleep women moved about the ward, whispering. Eventually Anna drifted to sleep and dreamed that she was binding the rushes of a St Bridget’s Cross when it burst into flames, towering above her, toppling, flames leaking outwards as though a seam had burst in the walls of hell, she could hear screaming, and someone sobbing. And a dog, a black dog, was licking her hot forehead. She reached out to touch the creature and it sat back gazing at her with dark, melancholy eyes. ‘Uaigneas,’ she whispered, ‘Uaigneas.’ At that instant Anna awakened. She lay for a moment before rising; the children were snuffling softly in deep sleep. Anna closed her eyes again, remembering the mournful face of the black dog; the phantom was not a figure of evil, it was a figure of sorrow.

Slowly Anna sat up and eased herself from the platform. It was Margaret Dawson’s cry which had entered Anna’s dream. Several women were trying to soothe her. Anna slid her shawl over the girls and tip-toed to the friends gathered about Margaret Dawson; Mary

Parker whispered that Mrs. Harris was sleeping, that Mr. Villette had given her the sacrament and afterwards matron had persuaded her to take a draft of purl, a mix of beer, gin and wormwood. Matron would give her something else in the morning, something very strong. The Ordinary had quickly gone to minister to the men in the cells. It would be likely that he held a short service in one of the two communal rooms with the large arching windows reserved for the day use of the condemned.

— 254 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Anna and her companions would remember the smell of roasting flesh, burning hair and fiery pitch. The smell and smoke were suspended over the Yards, seeped through the bars into the wards, lingered in the combing of the stones and permeated their dreams. With the other women Anna had been listening for any clank of doors that morning. The ominous sound came about 6. 30. a.m. Shortly before 7.30.a.m, there was a cry from the crowd, distant, muffled through the walls. From the turnkeys’ gossip, she heard later that their male companions had devoutly prayed on the scaffold, and immediately before the trapdoor was released, led by the Ordinary, they had sung the psalm they called the Sinner’s

Lamentation, and that some members of the crowd had joined their voices.590

*

This morning the malefactors already mentioned were all executed according to their sentence. About a quarter of an hour after the platform had dropped, Phoebe Harris, the female convict, was led by two officers to the stake, about eleven feet high, fixed in the ground, near the top of which was an inverted curve made of iron, to which one end of the halter was tied. The prisoner stood on a low stool, which, after the Ordinary had prayed with her a short time, was taken away, and she hung suspended by the neck, her feet being scarcely more than twelve inches from the pavement. Soon after signs of life had ceased, two cartloads of fagots were placed around her and set on fire; the flames soon burning the halter. She then sunk a few inches, but was supported by and iron chain passed over her chest and affixed to the stake. It was more than three hours before the fire was extinguished, and then some scattered remains were observable among the ashes. She was a well made little woman, of pale complexion, and rather handsome features. When brought to the stake, she trembled much and appeared to be struck with horror at the punishment she was to undergo. She never spoke, but [was] found absorbed in agony of mind. Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman’s Magazine591

590 These details are given in a news item in The Times, Issue 468, Col., D, (22 June 1786), p. 3. The most likely Lamentation would be Psalm 51; that was the Psalm chosen for the Rev. William Dodd (1729-1777), first Grand Chaplain of England (1775), hanged for forgery 27 June 1777. See Assoc. Records, OBPOnline, Ref: t17770219-1. 591 Sylvanus Urban, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 6, Part I (June 1786), p. 524. — 255 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Soon after the unhappy men were dead, twelve persons came upon the scaffold, and had the hands of the deceased repeatedly stroked by the executioner upon their faces and necks, as a supposed cure for the protuberances called wens. … A great concourse of people attended on the above melancholy event. The Times592

* Within a few days a Middlesex Sheriff’s clerk would calculate an account for the Sheriff’s attendance at the burning, the cost of faggots, brushwood, shavings, post, chain and tackle and for burying the bones. In elegant script, the style at which Anna Mullens always looked with wonder and which Mollie Gillen would call a clerkly hand,593 he would transcribe his calculations to the ledger marked Sheriff’s Cravings 1784-1787, and then submit the itemized account for twelve pounds, eight shillings and six pence, to the Treasury

Chambers, Whitehall. There was no sign of a tremble in the flow of ink, now faded to a shade of pale henna:

From: The Sheriff’s Cravings 1774-1787

£ s. d. Attending the Execution of Phebe Harrif for coining 6. 5. 6 Faggotf, Brufhwood & Shavingf 1.15. 6 Poft, Chain & Tackle for burning the body 2. 2. 6 Burying the bonesf 2.4. 6 594

*

On a bitter December afternoon seventeen years later, Margaret Dawson, the girl who had once sat before the coffin in Newgate’s condemned pew, would stand in St Andrew’s churchyard, but a few steps from Cock Lane where St Sepulchre’s bellman and his phantom dog always turned on execution eve. Margaret Dawson would be grieving at the

592 The Times, Issue 423, Col. D (22 June 1786), p. 3. 593 Gillen (1985), p. 4. 594 Sheriff’s Cravings: From the Treasury Chambers, Whitehall 1784-1787, Expenses arising from Middlesex April Sessions, Lent 1786, T90/165, National Archives, Kew, U.K. — 256 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______grave of her beloved, Surgeon William Balmain, her baby warmly swaddled in her arms, and her five year old daughter holding her mother’s black cape with one hand and her three year old brother’s hand with the other. White faced, Margaret Dawson had paused at the lych-gate and look towards Newgate, recalling her fear of the black dog, the dreadful day

Phoebe Harris was burned; and then she would wonder at the happiness, the family comforts, she had known over the previous twelve years. She, too, might have hanged and instead her foolish flight homewards on the Chester coach, carrying stolen property wrapped in a bundle, had led to a remarkable love and bonny children. She remembered her loneliness, her longing for her mother and the meanness of her mistress who had so much; she had so many rings and silver coins, so many hats and petticoats that Margaret had almost believed the things would not be missed. First she had taken the hooped gold ring, the mourning ring with the dark red stone; she had kept it hidden for days before snatching the garments and coins and running to the coach at the Golden Cross, Charing

Cross. It was impossible to understand the way that blessings and punishments were dispersed, why she had lived and others had died. Her William might easily have died in his obstinate duel with Surgeon White; or been hanged for murder. That two surgeons, so wise and reasonable, could have committed such an act had astounded her; she had been a child when she had committed her crime. Her skin prickled as she glanced towards Newgate; it was distressingly close. She had wanted to return to England, to bring her children home and to seek treatment for William, but the proximity of the prison had caused a return of old nightmares.

Her daughter tugged on her cape and Margaret Dawson turned towards the lych-gate, trailed by a new sorrow and the memory of that day so long ago; it was a memory which — 257 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______would always be waiting to waylay her; as it would waylay her forty Newgate companions, who disembarked with her at Port Jackson in February 1788, each woman indelibly marked by Phoebe Harris’s death.

*

Botany Bay women convicts in Newgate, 21 June 1786.

10 December 1783 MARY HUMFREYS, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17831210-9 (Death) 14 January 1784 SARAH PARTRIDGE, otherwise ROBERTS, theft: shoplifting, , Ref: t17840114-44 26 May 1784 MARY, wife of JOHN LAWRENCE, theft: specified place, Ref: t17840526-75 SARAH SLATER, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17840526-5 (Death: respited 3 March 1785) 7 July 1784 MARY MARSHALL, theft with violence: robbery, Ref: t17840707-41 17 October 1784 ELIZABETH LEONELL, also LEONARD, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17841020-68 8 December 1784 MARY BRAMHAM, theft: simple grand larceny, ELIZABETH COLLEY, theft: burglary, theft: receiving stolen goods CATHERINE HART, theft: specified place 12 Jan 1785 MARY DAVIS, offences against the king: ANN READ, theft with violence: highway robbery 23 February 1785 MARY MORTON, theft: shoplifting (Mary Moulton) ELIZABETH HIPPESLEY, theft: specified place, Ref: t17850223-61 (Saffron Hill) ELIZABETH LEE, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850223-68 6 April 1785 ANN FOWLES, theft: simple grand larceny MARY PILE, theft: burglary 11 May 1785 ELEANOR M'CABE, ANN GEORGE, theft with violence: robbery, Ref: t17850511-32 MARY GREENWOOD, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17850511-3 (Death) 29 June 1785 JANE JACKSON, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850629-95 14 September 1785 ELIZABETH DALTON, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17850914-24 JANE CREEKE, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850914-48

— 258 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

JANE LANGLEY, MARY FINN, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850914-96 MARY JACKSON, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17850914-87 19 Oct 1785 CHARLOTTE SPRINGMORE, MARY HARRISON, theft with violence: highway robbery, Ref: t17851019-57 MARIA HAMILTON, theft: specified place, Ref: t17851019-4 22 Feb 1786 DOROTHY HANDLAND, deception: perjury, Ref: t17860222-131 MARGARET DAWSON, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860222-54 (Death) MARY WILLIAMS, theft: specified place, Ref: t17860222-14 SARAH PARRY, theft with violence: robbery Ref: t17860222-23 (Death) 26 April 1786 ANN the wife of WILLIAM DAVIS, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860426-119 ELIZABETH LEE (disappears 6 January 1787), ANN DUTTON, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860426-102 ELIZABETH COLE, MARY JOHNSON, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860426-27 HANNAH otherwise HANNAH MULLENS, deception: fraud, Ref: t17860426-10 MARY DYKES, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17860426-40 MARY PARKER, theft: burglary, Ref: t17860426-4 31 May 1786 MARY SMITH, theft: shoplifting, Ref: t17860531-3 (Death) MARY DIXON, theft: specified place, Ref: t17860531-37 (Death) 19 July 1786 LUCY BRAND, otherwise WOOD, theft : simple grand larceny ( taken 7 June), Ref: t17860719-42. 595

*

595 References are to OBPOnline.

— 259 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 12

From the Norfolk Broads

*

Norwich Castle: The part which is called the Upper Gaol has ten rooms for Master’s Side Debtors; and leads for them to walk on. — The Low Gaol has several rooms for Debtors and Felons etc — a small area in the middle of the Gaol, in which are lately made some improvements; such as a pump, a convenient bath, and some rooms over it. There is a dungeon down a ladder of eight steps, for Men-felons; in which is often an inch or two of water: and a small room for women-felons; which keeps them always separate from the men, except when delicacy would most require it. John Howard596

Heavens! what a wonder! exclaims Johnny Bull: the Turnkey of county gaol in possession of the ordinary feelings of humanity!!! But … [t]his Mister Simpson (so he is called) would never have hitched into public notice, but that his good friend the Doctor (who is a man of experiences) either to feel the pulse of public credulity, by the exercise of his pen on the sympathetic and sentimental journey to Plymouth … The fact is, Simpson (who, by the bye, is as vulgar and hardened a fellow as any Turnkey in the kingdom) … A Gentleman in Norwich, 16 December 1786597

Thurlton lies close to the Suffolk border, set in a gentle valley bounded by marshland to the north and a tributary to the River Yare known as the beck to the west.598

*

Until she was nineteen years old Susannah Holmes lived safely in the village of Thurlton where, in the churchyard of All Saints, tree roots had disjointed the bones of her ancestors.

Every Sunday and Feast Day she had passed from the church of knapped flint where she

596 Howard (1777/1977), p. 255. 597 ‘Extract of a letter from a Gentleman in Norwich to his friend in London, Dec. 15’, 1786’, The Times, 21 December 1786, Issue 577, Col. A, p. 3. 598 Thurlton Village, South Norfolk Council, http://www.enterprise-link.co.uk/thurlton/home.asp. — 260 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______had been baptized and through the south door overlooked by two Renaissance angels swinging censers. Across those years it seemed to Susannah she stepped into the green light of the churchyard marked by a protective blessing. Her life changed at about twelve in the

Night, 13 November 1783.

November was always a cold month on the Broads, that area of eleventh century peat quarries in south eastern Norfolk which was transformed into a maze of waterways, fens, swamps, pine carrs599 and dykes as tidal channels, designed for ferrying the peat, spread from the River Yare, seeping into the quarries and through the absorbent earth. During the day the land was friendly, abundant with fish, eels, birdlife and insect species. At night the marshes were hazardous when the play of moonlight dissolved the borders of solid paths and phosphorous lights deceived unwary travellers. Tales of the ‘lantern men’ were the stuff of Susannah’s nightmares.

In winter, winds whipped from the frozen north, and under temperamental skies, mists and fogs rose from the marshes and roiled from the sea, settling and muffling sounds. On that life-changing November evening, the moon, five nights past full, was crossed by restless clouds casting deep shadows. Not that Susannah needed light; she knew the village so well she might have walked on the darkest of nights, guided by the bulk of shapes, the brush of bare branches, the lift of a path and passing smells. She could always recognize the smell of hanging game at Jabez Taylor’s butcher’s shop, for the scent clung in the air even when the shop was locked fast.

599 Carr: Unlike ordinary woodland, a swamp carr consists of a layer of mud and peat which covers an often deep section of thick, muddy water. Definition from Surlingham Broad, Norfolk, UK, BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A14609135. This site offers a description of the Norfolk Broads. — 261 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Like a photograph resolving in developing solution a phantom image of the shop emerged from books and websites as one of those thatched, wattle and daub, half-timbered dwellings with the frontage partially devoted to the shop window. In fine weather the window would be swung upwards like an awning with pheasants, mallards, widgeons, geese and hares suspended from the window lintel on one side, and sausages and black puddings dangling from the other. Joints, cuts, bones of beef, lamb and dressed game were displayed on the bulk. Immediately noticeable was the small game because of its distinctive smell, glossy plumage, or fur, riffling in the wind. In such a shop the awnings were dropped over the bulk at night and locked.

*

Perhaps Susannah would not have lingered before the fastened window if she had left the

White Horse Inn at an earlier hour. The White Horse situated at the meet of Low Road and a winding path across the marsh which led to Thurlton Staithe, a loading wharf half-way between Norwich and Yarmouth, was a convenient resting for wherrymen, masters of the shallow-hauled, single-sailed vessels which plied the Broads. A couple of wherrymen had winked at her making it known that should she have sundry good quality merchandise they would buy it for the Norwich Markets. She looked at the dark silent house. She could be quiet and swift. What harm to take from the well-to-do? The harvest was over and winter was a hard time of the year. In the shadows between the dwelling and an evergreen hedge she would be invisible.

— 262 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Unfortunately, prior to 1789, depositions and recognizances for the Norfolk Assize Circuit have not survived. These might have given some insight into Susannah’s circumstances and her relationship to Jabez Taylor, together with details of her discovery, collection of evidence and the roles of the witnesses. There are, however, some press reports and

Delivery of the Gaol of our Lord the King of the County of Norfolk holden at Thetford, which includes the Delivery for Lent 1784.600 That Delivery contains verdicts, details of the crime and margin notes specifying distribution of rewards to the prosecutors and witnesses.

Susannah stole linen, clothing and cutlery valued at two pounds, three shillings and sixpence. Privately stealing from a dwelling house goods valued at five shillings was a capital offence.

Jabez Taylor received twenty pounds for prosecuting her, and his witnesses, Thomas

Watson and James Wiffin, received ten pounds each. The rewards seem disproportionate to the offence and certainly beyond costs of prosecution. Again the records are an indication of the venal nature of England’s eighteenth century Court based on private prosecutions.

Occasionally the details of a crime with descriptions of the perpetrator, or perpetrators, and the associated reward for successful prosecution were advertised in newspapers. Two years before Sarah’s crime, the Norfolk Chronicle carried such an advertisement describing a footpad robbery, noting [t]he reward for apprehending a highwayman, and prosecuting him to conviction, is 40 pounds.601 It was in a newspaper I learned that Jabez Taylor was a

600 Norfolk Circuit Gaol Delivery, ASSI 33/6, National Archives, Kew, UK. 601 Norfolk Chronicle, News Item, 6 January 1781, Col. 4, p.2, transcribed by Janelle Penny, The Foxearth and District History Society (2006), http://www.foxearth.org.uk/1781NorfolkChronicle.html. — 263 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______butcher,602 and that watermen had a reputation for illegal trading. Noting the scale of the crimes recorded in the Norfolk Circuit Gaol Book I had already thought there might be something ‘organized’ about many of the thefts.

*

Whereas many Frauds and Robberies have at divers Times been practised by Watermen and others employed upon, and living adjacent to different Parts of this Navigation. The Proprietors for the better discovering and preventing the like in future, do hereby offer and promise to pay a Reward of Ten Pounds to any Person who will give Information of any Watermen or other Persons, who have, or may hereafter steal, sell, conceal, or embezzle, in any Manner whatsoever, Corn, Flour, Coals, Liquor, or Merchandize, from onboard their Keels, or Wherries, or any Craft in their Employ on this Navigation or off their Staithes, or out of their Warehouses near the river at Bungay or Yarmouth. Norfolk Chronicle 603

*

From these scant archives my assemblage of Susannah Holmes’s historical space had steadied and as her phantom slipped from the midnight shadows there was the flash of her hand stealthily lifting the latch of the kitchen door and I saw the possibility that Susannah knew that house, had perhaps been a servant there.

*

With her eyes well accustomed to the darkness Susannah stepped directly into the kitchen

and glanced around. For a moment she stood before the hearth absorbing the night warmth;

and then, quickly crossing the room she gently opened the door and stepped up into another

room with heavy beams. Silently she opened the curtains, slid the cushions from the

602 Norwich Mercury, Assize News, 23 March 1784, Microfilm, Norwich Historical Library. 603 Norfolk Chronicle, News Item, ‘Bungay Navigation,’ 19 May 1781, Col. 4, p.3, transcribed by Janelle Penny, The Foxearth and District History Society (2006), http://www.foxearth.org.uk/1781NorfolkChronicle.html.

— 264 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______window seat and lifted the hinged lid upon a stock of neatly arranged linen and two dark silk cloaks. Working quickly Susannah gathered the garments and linen into her bag. Then as she tiptoed through the kitchen she saw two silver teaspoons (value: two shillings) and two silver tablespoons (value: twelve shillings) on the dresser and slipped them between the fabrics in her overfilled bag. Perhaps a mistake for their disappearance would be quickly noticed.

*

By the following day, Friday 14 November, Susannah was committed to the Castle by

Robert Harvey, Esq.604 In some way, Susannah was almost immediately linked to the theft.

Given that two men were each paid ten pounds as witnesses, it can be surmised that she was seen entering or leaving the dwelling, traced by footprints or observed with the incriminating goods, possibly as she sold them. The speed of Susannah’s transfer to the gaol suggests she was transported to Norwich by wherry because the waterways were more convenient than roads and lanes meandering through the marshes in November.

*

Until the 19th century it was quicker and easier to travel by water to Amsterdam from Norwich than it was to go to London overland, which could take three days on terrible roads.605

604 Norfolk Chronicle, 18 November 1783, Norwich Historical Library, cited in Production Notes for Peter Bellamy’s opera, The Transports, based on the history of Susannah Holmes and Henry Cabell (also Kable), http://www.thetransports.com/norfolk-chronicle.php. In calculating the dates and corresponding day of the week from the highly contextualized comments in newspapers, such as on Friday last I have drawn on Common Year starting on … or … Leap Year starting on …Calendars which are available on the internet. It is necessary to have already identified the starting day from general readings of journals and newspapers. 605‘Hidden Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire: The Bridges of Norwich’, Eastern Daily Press 24 Online, 30 September 2006, http://new.edp24.co.uk/content. — 265 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Susannah was weeping as Mr. Harvey led her down the long staithe across the mudflats and shallow water to the wherry. Afterwards she would remember the sound of metal on the wooden decking and realize that the incriminating prints made by her pattens the night before had been soundless. After the robbery, Susannah had lain awake for some time, trembling at her daring. Perhaps she had been asleep for an hour or so when there was a great banging on the door.

Huddling under her quilt Susannah felt a draught of cold air and heard several male voices followed by her mother crying out that it was impossible, it could not be. Then there was the tramping towards her room. Her father flung open the door and she jumped to her feet, still wearing her petticoat. Her muddy shoes and pattens606 were beside the bed. The constable, Mr. Harvey, followed by Mr Taylor and two other men pressed into the room, their elbows jostling in the confined space. Susannah pulled a shawl about her shoulders.

She was pale, her eyes wide with alarm and guilt. Mr. Harvey’s first action was to seize the pattens and inspect the metal band which lifted the wearer’s shoes above the mud.

Handmade, as the metal rings were, their shapes bore distinctive irregularities. With triumph the man displayed the metal to his companions. They both nodded and looked at

Susannah. She bit her lip at their accusations and the demand that she produce the stolen goods. What pained her most was the distraught look on her father’s face and her mother’s continuing cry that it was impossible: her daughter was a good girl, a hard-working girl.

606 Pattens: Leather-strapped wooden overshoes with a circular metal attachment on the sole to lift shoes above the mud. — 266 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Mr. Harvey opened the bag. The Norfolk Chronicle would report that Susannah had confessed.607 Caught as she was, confession was a mere formality.

*

There was an icy wind hurling around the mast and slashing at the boomless sail rigged from mast to the aft end of the cabin. Susannah paused near the tiller. In that brief moment the security of the wherry and the nautical twilight of the Broads brought Susannah some calm. Unsafe in an open sea the broad-beamed wherry had a pointed stern and bow designed for manoeuvring the pressures of mud shoals and wind. While hugging the banks of narrow channels the vessel could sail almost windward at speed without tacking. In spite of the cold there was nowhere more beautiful than the first moments of sunrise on the

Broad. That Friday morning the concave sky, luminous silver and striated with pink clouds, was hinged to its reflection at the golden line of the horizon. Silhouettes of reeds and a few hardy ducks inscribed the near edges of the watery shell. Susannah closed her eyes, imprinting the scene: she might never see the Broads again. In the next months her father would be harvesting and ricking the reeds for thatching; she herself had gone poling marsh hay in spring.608 She was a child of this watery world which trapped the sky and shaped dreams. In All Saints, her parish church, there was a faded fresco of St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, bearing the Christ Child across a river with fish and crabs swirling about his feet; and the cerulean blue of its angel window was like a canticle to the summer

607 Norfolk Chronicle, [Tuesday] 18 November 1783, cited in production notes for Peter Bellamy’s opera, The Transports. 608 See late nineteenth century photographs of these activities see the photographs of P. H. Emerson (1856- 1936), included in the website of Jon Stringer, The Meandering River Yare, http://people.netcom.co.uk/j.stringe/meanderi.htm. Reeds are harvested between December and March after frosts have removed the leaves. — 267 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______sky.609 She might never again kneel in the church where her parents had brought her to the baptismal font. She thought of the font with its carved roses and a pedestal from which the fore-quarters of rippling maned lions on their haunches, half-emerged from the stone, had once stared into her child-face, steadfast and respectful.610 Her poor parents, she had left her mother weeping and her father bewildered in the kitchen which she had always loved.

The enormity of what she had done staunched any further tears and she silently followed

Mr. Harvey’s instructions to make herself comfortable in the cabin. Before she had gone below Susannah looked back across the staithe to the Low Road path. How could she have been so wicked?

There was only a small cabin space as the hold was packed with bags, boxes and bales; there would have been about thirty tons of goods. In deep winter, ice was harvested to be stored in ice-houses, and it, too, was ferried in these vessels; so, too, was the French stone for Norwich’s great cathedral. Susannah curled on one of the bunks, pulled a blanket close and lay listening to the sounds of the water. Somewhere a lapwing cried its mournful peewit; it was a cry she always associated with the winter marshes, and was the last sound she heard before falling into an exhausted sleep, rocked by the soft undulations of the tidal river. She was asleep before they passed another dominant image of her childhood: the

609 Descriptions of the church are based on photographs and commentary by Simon Knott, ‘All Saints, Thurlton’ (2005), http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/thurlton/thurlton.htm. 610 In heraldic terms the lions were demi-affronté, ‘A to Z Guide to Heraldic Terms’, Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, http://www.burkes-peerage.net/articles/heraldry_a.aspx. The lion affronté represented respect for each other. See Thomas Robson (ed.), The British Herald, Or Cabinet of Armorial Bearings of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland: From the Earliest to the Present Tim …, Vol. 3 (Temple and Marwood 1830), p. 20.

— 268 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______comforting bulk of the village corn mill, the Great Goliath, with its tower of tarred red brick above the beck.611

Susannah awoke with the slight change in current movement at the confluence of the Yare and the Wensum. The latter river flowed in north-arcing loop around Norwich joining the

Yare a little to the south east of the city. When Susannah climbed from the cabin the captain, his hands in his pockets, was leaning against the tiller talking comfortably with

Susannah’s guard. They greeted her kindly, even sympathetically. In spite of her crime

Susannah had an engaging manner, an unselfconscious sweetness which encouraged kindness in others. She smiled gently and then looked towards the black flint walls of the city which lay before them with its eleven gates and regular towers. Behind the wall and towers, the spires of the cathedral and churches could be seen. From the wherryman’s conversations at the White Horse Inn Susannah had sometimes dreamed of her first visit to the city. She would have attended the Theatre Royal and from the markets bought leather leggings for her father and, perhaps, a singing canary, for Norwich was famous for its canaries. Then she had imagined seeking madder for her mother in the famous maddermarket where the spreading plants with the narrow bright scarlet roots were grown and processed into powder.

*

611 Jonathan Neville, ‘Thurlton Towermill’ (2005), http://www.norfolkmills.co.uk/Windmills/thurlton- towermill.html; Mark Berry, ‘Great Goliath’ Towermill, Thurlton (2007), http://www.windmillworld.com/millid/2550.htm.

— 269 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

There is something special about a city which welcomed Strangers. Because of their weaving techniques Dutch and Walloon612 weavers had been invited to Norwich in the mid- sixteenth century to revive a failing woollen industry. Escaping the pressures of the

Catholic rule of Spain the Strangers had found a haven, bringing with them sophisticated weaving techniques, a printing press and canaries which were sold in the market and became popular in the city. There was a time when these Strangers who stayed, dwelling in what was, in this case, a comfortable space of distance and proximity, formed more than a third of the population.613 The city has preserved the memory of the Strangers’ contributions by naming a grand medieval hall, rebuilt and extended over the centuries,

Strangers’ Hall. Appropriately the Hall, which has now been a museum for more than a century, was owned by one of the merchants who encouraged the migration and offered accommodation to the Strangers614. On a less grand note the Strangers’ fondness for canaries is today secreted in the badge of the Norwich City Football Association team;

another remnant from the past: a fact barren without its context.

*

Here [Norwich], apparently, the Strangers had succeeded in creating a status for their members, which made them the equal to native Englishmen — and women — in the city’s law courts — a privilege that was rare among minorities in early modern towns in England and elsewhere in England. Raingard Esser615

612 Wallonia is the French speaking part of Belgium, which had long connections to the woollen industry of Norwich. See Diana Divo, ‘Wallonia and How its Weaving Families Came to Emigrate to England’ (2007), http://www.cryerfamilyhistory.btinternet.co.uk/location-wallonia.htm. There were several small areas of German speakers in the east. As Protestants they suffered under the Catholic rule of Phillip II of Spain. 613 For an illuminating philosophical meditation on the ambiguous and potentially alien space of ‘the Stranger’ see Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, Chapter 10, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Donald N. Levine (University of Chicago Press 1971), pp. 143-149. 614 See ‘A Brief History of Strangers’ Hall’, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/default.asp?Document=200.23.001.01. 615 Raingard Esser, ‘They Obey All Magistrates and All Good Lawes … and We Thinke our Cittie Happie to Enjoye Them, Urban History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2007), p. 70. — 270 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

The city’s civility to others apparently stretched to the Castle Gaol for in his 1779 Report

John Howard noted that [t]he Gaoler is humane, and respected by his Prisoners. These

Felons as well as Debtors, sell at the grates of their separate day-rooms, laces, purses, nets etc, of their own making.616 It was a very different prison from Newgate. This did not mean that the ‘bloody code’ was not enforced. Earlier in the century heads were displayed on the wall, as they were at the Tower of London and at Temple Bar; and corpses of the executed were still sometimes hanged in chains from gibbets in public places, expensive as such additional displays of power were. In his Cravings for the year ending 1786, Sheriff of

Norwich, Francis Longe, Esq., claimed twenty pounds ten shillings and sixpence for

[e]xpenses attending the execution of the above John Shilling he being hung in chains at

Burnham Thorpe thirty miles from Norwich.617 John Shilling was a companion of Susannah and the friends she would make in the Castle.

*

Norwich Castle, built in the latter half of the eleventh century, is of grey stone, ornately decorated with rows of blind arcades, and stands square, about sixty feet above the city on a motte, a steep-sided artificial hill. By the time of Susannah’s arrest the ditch which protected the castle had been flattened and part of the area had become the cattle market.

There the Galloways with their dark hides belted with a wide band of white were dominant.

616 Howard (1777/1977), p. 255. 617 Francis Longe, Esq. (Sheriff of Norfolk), Sheriff’s Cravings, from the Treasury Chambers, Whitehall 84, 85, 86, 87, T90/165, National Archives, Kew, UK. — 271 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

They were brought on droves from the Highlands of Scotland.618 On the eastern side was

Castle Meadow and below the castle, on the western side, was the city market which was also established in the eleventh century. Perhaps because of the city’s trade and its water conduit to Europe it was, unusually, a permanent market and remains so to this day; and then, as now, all manner of things were sold there: fresh produce, leatherwork, pottery, linen, textiles, clothing, shoes, even coffee. However, Fothergil’s Chymical Nervous

Drops, available when Susannah entered the city have vanished. Variously sized and priced from 10 shillings and 6 pence, to 3 shillings and 6 pence the Bottle, they cured everything:

Nervous Disorders, Lowness and Depression of Spirits from Ebriosity, or otherwise,

Palpitations of the Heart, Giddiness in the Head, horrid Thoughts, Startings in the Sleep,

Dimness of Sight, Pains in the Back and Head, trembling of the Hands, Decay of Nature,

Barrenness, and debilitated Cases. We might yet find versions of the Venetian Bloom

Water which, being processed from fragrant Flowers and the purest Dew collected in the

Month of May, removed all things disagreeable from the skin; and there might also be a version of Hooper’s Female Pills, Price 1 shilling the Box which were Peculiarly adapted to the Female Sex and about which it was unnecessary to say more.619

*

Conisford Gate was the city’s southern entrance and some fifty metres above the protection of the Boom Towers with their two great chains of good Spanish iron across the river with the machines wound by a windlass in the tower on the west so that no ship nor barge nor

618For an introduction to the movement of livestock droves in the British Isles see Shirley Toulson, The Drovers, 2nd Edn (A Shire Book 2005). 619 These items and other available in Norwich Market were advertised in the Norfolk Chronicle, 28 April 1781, p.4, column 3, British Library Newspaper Library, transcribed by Janelle Penny, The Foxearth and District History Society (2006), http://www.foxearth.org.uk/1781NorfolkChronicle.html. — 272 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______boat might come in or depart without leave, nor against the will of those who have to govern the city.620 Most probably Susannah and Mr. Harvey would have disembarked below Conisford Gate and entered the city by foot, whereas the wherry would have continued to the unloading wharves in the centre of the city. The Gate led to King Street, one of the most important streets in Norwich and, as the name indicated, a direct route to the Castle. From the Gate, the bank fell steeply to the water and a black tower loomed behind it for this was the defence juncture of river and wall. A suitable place to step ashore was a little down river where, the name Conisford suggests, there was once a ford.

Removal of image Removal of image required under required under copyright agreement. copyright agreement.

6. The exterior of Conisford Gate (1793)621 7.The interior of Conisford Gate (1793)622

As she walked Susannah absorbed the details of the scene. Just outside the city, above trees to the west, she could see the roof and tower of an abbey. She almost hesitated for something had summoned a vague memory, a sermon, perhaps. Why would she think of it?

It made no sense; she had never been to Norwich. And then she recalled the curate on the

620 William Hudson and John Tingey, The Records of the City of Norwich, Vol. 2 (Jarrold 1910), p.218 cited by Stephen Alsford, ‘Norwich — River Wensum’, Medieval English Towns: Urban History (1999), http://www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/ssp02.html, [Accessed 10 October 2007]. 621 Sketch by John Ninham (1793) in ‘Conisford Gate’, Norwich City Walls Survey 1999-2002, Norwich City Council, http://www.norwich.gov.uk/webapps/citywall/35/report.asp, [Accessed 10 October 2007]. 622 Ibid. — 273 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______pulpit. She struggled with that lost moment and heard priest’s voice intoning, All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.623 It was spring, May: she remembered the lilies and white daisies in the churchyard. Mr. Harvey was urging her to walk a little faster.

She smiled at him vaguely, puzzled by the random memory. All manner of things shall be well: the words were comforting. The words held the comfort of a blessing, for whatever reasons they had returned.

The Gate, which was demolished a few years later, was narrow with four battlements and dormer-windowed houses abutted against it on either side. Inside the entrance Susannah looked in wonder at the grandeur of the dwellings along the well-paved street, and for moments almost forgot her circumstances as she gazed at the tall buildings with mullioned windows. To Susannah’s left a road wound away which led both to Ice House Lane and the church of St Julian of Norwich, after whom a famous anchoress, a medieval mystic, apparently took her name. From her cell behind the altar of St Julian’s the holy woman disseminated her visions of her deity’s forgiveness and compassion borne in the prophetic text, All shall be well. English Christian churches celebrate the woman’s life on 13 May.

Given her fame, it would be likely that local parishes then, as now, acknowledged that celebration in a sermon.

*

623 The text is associated with the ‘showings’, or ‘revelations’, of a medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416), an anchoress, who lived in a cell above the Wensum near the Conisford Gate. In the Anglican Church calendar the life of the anchoress is celebrated on 13 May, the day the mystic made a recovery from a grave illness. — 274 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Susannah and her guard passed a double-arched medieval doorway set in closely studded walls with brick in-fill. ‘Dragon’s hall,’ Mr. Harvey said, charmed by the glow of wonder on the young prisoner’s face. These days some would say Susannah Holmes had charisma; within two years her fate would have caught the imagination and emotion of a clergyman, a sheriff, an M.P., the Duchess of Norfolk, a turnkey, the Home Office Secretary, Lord

Sydney, who personally offered to pay the fee for her marriage,624 and ordinary people who donated £20 — about twice the annual salary of a labourer — for Susannah, her baby and the child’s father.625 Two centuries later, in the tradition of The Beggars’ Opera (sometimes referred to as A Newgate Pastoral) a ballad opera would be written about her life, tribulations and triumphs.626 While Elizabeth Needham was born on the fringe of the Royal

Household and enjoyed a lifelong loving relationship with an earl, it was Susannah Holmes who was, in many ways, the princess of felons.

In the meantime, a castle, an Assize court and a death sentence loomed. Susannah climbed the steps on the outer wall of the Norman palace as directed by her guard.

*

Beginning with her arrest there were several occasions which Susannah, my flickering phantom, would consider the worst in her life, each replacing the other. However, entering

Norwich Castle and walls was not one of them. Tingling with trepidation about the

624 See, ‘Narrative Relating to a Convict Ordered to be Transported to Botany Bay’, from Scot’s Magazine, Vol. 48, November 1786, cited by Holden (1999), pp. 91-96 and Gillen, pp. 62, 158. 625 The story of the donation appeared in the London Chronicle, 2-5 December 1786, p. 539; Norfolk Chronicle over four issues: 11 November, 9 November, 23 December 1786 and 6 January 1787; the Gentleman’s Magazine (London) supplement for the year 1786, pp. 1138-40. See Holden (1999), Note 7, p. 190. 626 Peter Bellamy, The Transports, composed 1977 (Silver Edition, FRDCD 2122, Free Reed Records, UK, 2004). — 275 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______unknown, guilt at loved ones grieving, and a spontaneous elation at the unexpected memory with its prophetic message, Susannah was in a state similar to that which occurs at the beginning of an adventure: that liminal moment when the continuity of the everyday has been disrupted and the prospects are both dangerous and compelling.627 Indelible in

Susannah’s later memory of stepping across the Castle threshold into the roofless keep, and confronting the prison’s rambling wooden building of several floors, were her meetings with other prisoners, the first of whom was Elizabeth Pulley.

*

Elizabeth Pulley628 was a capital respite and very different in nature from Susannah. While in jail, she was regarded by [t]wo other prisoners as the only inmate clean and intelligent enough to deliver their baby. A guard thought she would be good looking if she had the chance to live decently.629 Her wild good spirits and lack of dismay at her fate sustained

Susannah’s courage and resilience as she faced all that lay ahead.

Elizabeth had three previous arrests, resulting in one acquittal (July 1779); one three week imprisonment in Wymondham Bridewell followed by public whipping (July 1780); and twelve months hard labour in the House of Correction at Aylsham (August 1781). Perhaps

Elizabeth’s recidivism was shaped by the optimism of the anchoress’s text; or, as is more

627 My understanding of how some of the convicts experienced their transportation sentences has been influenced by Georg Simmel’s metaphysical meditations on ‘The Adventurer’. His work has influenced how I have understood Susannah Holmes’s circumstances at the time of her incarceration, which seems to be in contrast to the experiences of the women in London and in Worcester. See Georg Simmel ‘The Adventurer’, Chapter 13, On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), pp. 187-198. 628 Also see Powley and Pooley, variations originating in Ralph Clark’s Journal; Clark’s spelling was generally wayward. 629I am grateful to the family history web-site of Anthony Rope (1763-1843) and Elizabeth Pulley (1763?- 1837) for transcriptions from the Norfolk Chronicle and for the photographs of the couple’s gravestones. See http://members.optusnet.com.au/glennbro1/rope/rope.htm, (Last updated 2 February 2008). — 276 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______likely, she accepted the necessity of the gamble. With such a pattern it would not be a stretch to assume Elizabeth had committed additional undetected thefts as discoveries and prosecutions were imperfect. Elizabeth’s fourth arrest, which resulted in a capital sentence, was occasioned by a crime committed at midnight; as Susannah’s had been. However, this might well have been a stock description of night time robberies, because the hour and season of burglaries were on a scale of legal consequences.630 It was the first time Elizabeth had been arrested in her own village, Hethersett, on the outskirts of Norwich. The victim was a widow, a status which had obvious vulnerability. Not surprisingly Elizabeth was called an old offender in the Norfolk Chronicle when she was apprehended for this crime: theft of food-stuffs on Christmas Eve. It was a more ambitious burglary than those of her previous arrests. The timing suggests that Elizabeth knew she might quickly dispose of the goods.

*

24 Decr last, at Hethersett abt 12 in the Night Burg. D.N. of Elizabeth Nimms widw Steals 10 lbs wt of Cheese v. 3s. 3lbs wt of Bacon v. 18d. 24os. Wt of Butter v. 12d. 3lbs wt Raisins v. 12d. 7lbs wt of Flour v. 12d. 2 rolls of Worsted v. 12d. Goods of sd Elizabeth Nimms.631

*

Elizabeth, responding to Susannah’s innocence, would become her guide, her counsellor, her mid-wife, and most of all her friend. There would be a time on the high seas when

Susannah would be shocked by Elizabeth and the friends she had met on the Dunkirk hulk; would be shocked by the language and drunkenness of those women. At the same time she

630‘To break a pane of glass at 5 p.m. on a winter’s evening with intent to steal was a capital offence; to housebreak at 4 a.m. in summer when it was light was only a misdemeanour’. See Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England (Routledge 1989), p. xiii. 631 Norfolk Circuit Gaol Book, Lent 1783, p. 207, ASSI 33/ 6, National Archives, Kew, UK. — 277 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______was horrified at the past brutalities of the Marines which she understood had engendered their angry behaviour. And then, Susannah would despair for Elizabeth’s health, weeping

and begging her not to provoke the officers with her defiance and scorn. Her pleadings would be to no avail, and Surgeon Thomas Arndell was compelled to intervene to protect

Elizabeth and her rebellious friends from the sadistic punishments of Lieutenant Ralph

Clark and Captain James Meredith.632 Susannah, forced to witness Captain Meredith lashing a gagged and bound woman, had closed her eyes, battling jolts of nausea at the sound of the nine-tailed whip slicing air and ending in a dull thud on soft flesh. Not wishing to gaze on the woman’s suffering and humiliation Susannah had reluctantly opened her eyes at the cease of the rhythm. Ever after her memory was printed with the image of the pleasure on the Lieutenant’s face, observing that he desired the punishment to continue.633

Of course, those events were two and a half years in the future and beyond the scope of this narrative, introduced because they reveal something of Elizabeth Pulley’s nature; and because they also reveal something of the different regimes and attitudes the women encountered.

*

632 See Ralph Clark, ‘Thursday 26 July’, 1787, The Journal and Letters of Lieutenant Ralph Clark, 1787- 1792, edited by Paul G. Fidlon and R.J. Ryan (Australian Documents Library in assoc. with the Library of Australian History 1981), p. 30. Gillen notes the Surgeon ordered Elizabeth’s release from irons because she was ill and blistered. Gillen (1989), p. 266. Pulley is associated with Elizabeth Dudgeon, Elizabeth Barber and Elizabeth Thackeray on the Friendship. Ralph Clark would support their treatment but as Gillen points out both Dudgeon and Barber had been so brutalized (raped) by the Marines on the Dunkirk, that the overseer at that time, William Cowdry, had written a shocked protest to the authorities 24 August 1784. the result of Cowdry’s protest was that a Code of orders drawn up to restrain the guards; see Gillen (1989) p. 110. Ralph Clark’s righteous attitude and cruel behaviour towards the women is put in perspective by Gillen. Gillen wrote of Elizabeth Barber, there is do doubt she was a very spirited girl refusing to accept humiliation meekly, at considerable cost; see Gillen (1989), p. 23. Her comments about Elizabeth Barber might also be applied to Pulley, Dudgeon and Thackeray and several others. 633 Ralph Clark freely admits his pleasure at the flogging of Elizabeth Dudgeon. See Ralph Clark, 5 July 1787, p. 24. — 278 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

On the day when Susannah crossed the castle threshold and made her first acquaintance with Elizabeth of the wide smile, Susannah also met Henry Cabell, the man who would become her beloved. He was then barely seventeen years old with red gold curls tied back with a black ribbon, thoughtful eyes and a determined mouth which belied his youth.634 It was not surprising that there was an edge of toughness, of ruthlessness, in the lad’s face. At the same Assize court, Lent 1783, at which Elizabeth Pulley had been condemned, Henry, his father and their friend, Abraham Carman, had also heard the sentence, To be hanged by the neck until he be dead. And then, because of his youth, Henry had been reprieved. In the prison Henry had been his father’s constant companion until his last morning, Saturday 5

April 1783. On the eve of the men’s execution the lad had prayed with them as the chaplain, Reverend Mr. Willins, ministered blessings and the sacrament. The next morning he had stood rigid with anguish as accompanied by Mr. Willins the men passed through the

Castle gate to a scaffold erected on Castle Hill. His control was almost undone when

Elizabeth Pulley touched his arm in sympathy. Later he opened his clenched fists and saw his nails had left crescent wounds on his palm. In his right hand lay his father’s half guinea, which had also left a faint circular print. He could hear his father’s voice, mingling with the voices of his fellow-condemned, returning thanks to the grand jury for half-a-guinea, which they received by their governor [Mr. Gynne].635

Theirs had been a bold night robbery in the Suffolk village of Alburgh, near Harleston,636 some miles to the north of Henry’s home at Mendham. The burglary was well-planned;

634 There are very few descriptions of these first NSW convicts. Don Chapman mentions the colour of Henry Cabell’s hair. See Chapman (1986), p. 56. 635 The Norfolk Chronicle, 18 March 1783, cited in production notes for Peter Bellamy’s opera, The Transports. Mr. Gynne’s unusual gesture is perhaps another indication of the generosity of the city. 636 Detail from The Norfolk Chronicle, 8 February 1783 cited in Production Notes, Peter Bellamy, The Transports, http://www.thetransports.com/norfolk-chronicle.php. — 279 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Mollie Gillen suggested the culprits belonged to a gang which was breaking into barns and stealing livestock as well as goods. ‘The gang’ knew the widow Abigail Hambling, at least by repute: knew that her house was well stocked with marketable goods: meat, drink, sugars, quality linens, furnishings, kitchen utensils as well as fine clothing. And they knew that in the first week of February 1783 the family was absent. Villains, the editor of the

Norfolk Chronicle called the robbers, reporting that they had stripped the house of everything moveable, including bed-steads, and even the meat out of the pickle cases. The greatest offence seemed to be that not only had they regaled themselves with wine, they left several empty bottles behind them.637

*

Years ago, drawn by the story of Susannah and Henry, I had visited Norwich Castle thinking about the logistics of their meeting and how their relationship might have had the privacy and space to develop. The wooden structure which John Howard mentioned, with its rooms and leads, had long gone; as had the bath and the pump. The tour did, however, include ‘the dungeon’, which was presented as ‘The Gaol’. That visit was a little more than two centuries after the Botany Bay convicts were inhabitants there and, unlike its state at the time of Howard’s inspection, the dungeon was quite dry; but the absolute blackness when the lights were extinguished would have been identical. On the tour there was a five year old girl. I had waited in the queue beside her father who also had a baby in a stroller.

He said his daughter was determined to visit the castle but he would wait at the entrance

637 Ibid. The press also reports an eighteen day lapse before the arrest of the older men, followed by Henry’s arrest two days later at Yoxford. The list of stolen goods is more extensive in the press than that of the Gaol Delivery Book. It is most likely the press quoted from the trial evidence. Incriminating horse prints noticed by a neighbour were also mentioned in the press. — 280 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______with the baby. The little girl’s independence was impressive; nevertheless her father was relieved when I said I would watch over her. As we were standing in the blackness of the dungeon a small hand crept into mine. I could see how personal connections could be made in such a place; but it was unlikely a baby would have survived in those circumstances.

Afterwards, the child and I walked hand-in-hand along the battlements and into the Great

Hall where, suspended from the rafters, there was a ceremonial Snapdragon which, as I remember it, was about twenty feet long, with grinning mouth, big ears, short wings and green and red scales. On St George’s Day, 25 April, the prisoners watching from the grates would have seen the Mayor’s gala procession as it left the castle accompanied by coaches, musicians and the Snapdragon.638 Would the six month old baby Harry have been as entranced by the dream creature as my little companion?

*

Some time after reading John Howard’s ‘Report’ on Norwich Castle Gaol. I returned to his ambiguous words women were always separate from the men, except when delicacy would most require it.639 ‘Do you think Howard meant the bathhouse and the privy?’ I asked my husband. Together we could not think of any other meaning for the euphemism. It was almost laughable; I had thought the story of Susannah Holmes and Henry Cabell was a

Romance and now my lovers were going to meet in a stinking privy with a row of holes in a wooden bench (known as garderobes). My imagination gulped, resisted. Besides, even though an article in the press written by a friend of Mr. Simpson the Castle’s turnkey,

638 ‘Snap, the Norwich Snapdragon’, Norwich Museum Services, http://www.dragonglow.co.uk/snap.htm. 639 See Footnote 596, p. 260, above. — 281 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______implied that men and women were kept separate — the author had written that Henry

Cabell was seldom permitted to see the child [yet] he discovered a remarkable fondness for it,640 I did not entirely believe that first clause. There was, by 1786, an established discourse about the importance of separating men, women and children in gaols, so a turnkey might not want to publicly announce his gaol had failed to implement new standards. In addition,

Norwich Castle was one of the few gaols where prisoners were encouraged to be industrious and given leave to sell their goods; further, it had a very humane turnkey, a community which took an interest in prisoner welfare, and John Howard had reported that the Gaoler, Mr. George Gynne, was humane, and respected by his Prisoners.641 Howard also remarked on the remarkably good quality of the prisoner’s bread, and their bedding straw paid for by the County. A measure of Mr. Gynne’s humanity was the gift of half-a- guinea, ten shillings and sixpence, which he gave those capitally convicted. As the weekly allowance for dietting prisoners in county gaols was two shillings and four pence, per week,642 and stealing five shillings from a dwelling house was a capital offence, that amount was considerable; and while it was hardly compensation it might have been used for last comforts; or be given to struggling relatives or friends. Although in London Mr.

Akerman would attend to prisoners’ necessities from his own account it would be most unlikely that he would have been so generous to those facing execution; and if he had if he had given such a gift there would be some mention of it.

640 ‘Narrative Relating to a Convict Ordered to be Transported to Botany Bay’, from Scot’s Magazine, Vol. 48 (November 1786), cited by Holden (1999), pp. 91. 641 John Howard (1777/1977), p. 255. 642 Thomas Bund, Esq., Sheriff of Worcestershire, Cravings for the year ending Michaelmas 1786, T90/165, Treasury Chambers, Whitehall. — 282 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Thus I circled over the possibilities of how Susannah and Henry met, how they managed their intimacies and how the baby was accommodated. It seemed most likely that Susannah and the baby would have spent at least some time in one of the airy rooms in the infirmary.

And, given that John Howard noted the humanity of the Keeper, and the prisoners’ respect for him, it would seem unlikely that he would lock men in a dungeon carrying inches of water; or, more importantly, prevent the ordinary social relationships of men and women.

With the humanity of the prison administration in mind, parallels began to settle between the general prosperity of the city which welcomed Strangers and the way in which the industriousness of the city was reproduced within the Gaol through the freedom prisoners were given to sell their creative handiwork. There seemed to be something of a mise en abyme relationship between city and Castle: the mirror, or the dream, reproducing its image.

*

So whichever way I turned my kaleidoscope of archival scraps they shifted into images of a healthy social space sustained by a secure and comfortable city. Towards the end of the eighteenth century Norwich seemed to have no fears, no sense of being threatened — again, it was so different from London. I was not surprised that within a few years of Susannah’s arrest, the city had dismantled its gates and flint walls and allowed people to use the materials for other buildings. Neither was I surprised that even though there were many good and nurturing mothers in the first convicts selected for NSW, it was from Norwich that we have the one representation of the felon tenderly suckling her child, protecting her milk and absorbed by the baby’s smiles. In contemporary representations of Susannah there

— 283 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______is almost a sanctification of the maternal body. Susannah Holmes was not just the princess of felons, she became the Madonna of felons.

*

Elizabeth Pulley led Susannah on a tour of the Gaol, showing her the bath, the privies, the dungeons, the day rooms. Women looked up from their needlework and lace-making as she entered. Afterwards they walked within the keep; and that was where Susannah met Henry

Cabell. He had been selling leather pouches at the grate and stood a while taking orders.

Afterwards she would think about the young man’s fine fingers, his serious eyes. He acknowledged Elizabeth, who had tried to comfort him when his father and his Uncle

Abraham were hanged. Elizabeth told Susannah how stiffly he had stood with his hands clenched; he had been barely breathing and was as white as chalk. Afterwards Henry’s mother, Dinah, had been brought into the gaol and for a few minutes they had clung together. Even then Henry did not weep and neither did his mother.

At first, because of the bond between them, the direct way they looked at each other,

Susannah thought that Elizabeth and Henry were more than friends. Elizabeth shook her head. He was just a lad, she said, a boy; a sharp and loyal boy. And they had been locked together for days in the dungeon in the Bridewell at Thetford, crowded in there with about fifteen others, including a young woman accused of murdering her baby. Elizabeth shook her head; she knew the story, the piece of valueless linen, no baby linen prepared. Lucy

Tann had been acquitted, thank God, but she and others had suffered from nightmares.

Facing death sentences, locked together like that, with a small grated window at surface level and another into a blind passage, you became closer than family; or sickened and — 284 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______filled with dislike for each other. There was no water; they were fortunate for Mr. Gynne sent a small cask of water with his prisoners.643 There was no privy, just several, chamber pots, not sufficiently large. Susannah would need to prepare herself, not be so modest.

Elizabeth laughed; she could expect to have a hard bloated stomach after several days; there was, however, a privy at the court house. She laughed again at the relief on Susannah’s face. It was little wonder the judges held nosegays of herbs and set baskets of spiced petals along their bench.

Susannah should also be prepared for her menses; distress did strange things to women’s cycles. Susannah tried to mask her shock; she would never mention such matters, although her winter shift and petticoat was permanently marked with faded stains. Susannah smiled dubiously; well, at least she knew what to expect. Elizabeth assured her friend that she would be all right; after all, she looked like an angel and it was her first arrest. At the most she would be whipped and perhaps sent to the House of Correction. Elizabeth pointed out that she had not been capitally sentenced until her fourth arrest, adding that she had been acquitted the first time.

When Susannah recalled that Henry was sentenced to death on his first arrest, her friend countered that it had been a very large theft; and a sheep and sheep skin had been found at their house. Better to steal a goat than a sheep; stealing a goat was not a capital offence.644

And, of course, he and Elizabeth had been reprieved at the end of the Sessions. Unlike

643John Howard gives these details of the Thetford dungeon, its size, lack of water and the fact that sixteen to twenty prisoners were held in it for four or five days. See Howard (1777/1977), p. 261. 644 For an indication of the anomalies of the eighteenth century British criminal code see Frank J. McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England (Routledge 1989), pp. xi-xvii. McLynn notes that it was a capital offence to steal a sheep from 1741, but not a cow or a goat as Sir William Meredith pointed out in his critique of the criminal code presented in Parliament in 1778. — 285 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

London prisoners who were capitally sentenced, the county prisoners did not have six weeks of anxiety waiting for the Recorder’s report; Assize judges would re-assess capital sentences at the end of the Sessions. Susannah was affected by Elizabeth’s optimism.

Elizabeth did expect to be transported somewhere and she said it could not be too soon.

Who knew what marvels lay ahead? She would make her way in a new world, follow the way of great sea-captains, like … Elizabeth paused and then laughed: she could not name one. It was of no matter, for once you have been sentenced to death, and reprieved, each sunrise carried promise. Again Elizabeth laughed: beyond the seas resonated with possibilities.

*

Sheriff’s Cravings (Norfolk)

For removing 29 Felons from Norwich to Thetford to take part in their Tryals at the Lent Assizes:

£. s. d. 15 9 6645

*

It was not until after her sentencing and reprieve at the Thetford Lent Assizes that Susannah and Henry began to spend time together. He had quietly stood beside her when she was weeping for the two men also capitally sentenced at the Lent Assizes and who, at that moment, had been taken through the Castle gate, hands bound and the nooses already about their necks. After that the young man had sought Susannah’s company. Perhaps she was charmed by his tales fashioned around his heroic father who died game after a daring

645 Francis Longe Esq. (Sheriff of Norfolk), Sheriff’s Cravings, From the Treasury Chambers, Whitehall ([17]84, 85, 86, 87), T90/165.

— 286 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______robbery. Susannah’s eyes widened when he told of his anxious vigil as look-out. The handsome lad paused in the narrative, deciding not to include the row of empty bottles they had left after drinking joyful toasts in the overstocked cellar, telling instead of the ominous cry of a barn owl as they drove the waggon from the orchard. Yet it was not until eighteen days later that his father and friend were taken; followed by his own desperate escape to

Yoxford. His mother had come running towards him in a neighbour’s field saying he must be instantly gone; and she stood waving and weeping as he galloped from Mendham. Henry had changed horses at the Carman’s house in Laxfield before galloping eastward to

Yoxford.

*

The young man reached for Susannah’s hand, leaned a little closer, gratified at the catch of her breath as he heightened the pace of his tale, reaching for its crescendo when, two days later, with pursuing horsemen in view, his own fine mount had stumbled as they bounded over a hedge. Afterwards Susannah thought how she and Henry had been blessed in spite of their misdeeds; surely their meeting was fated.

When their son was born, Susannah had carried him proudly from the infirmary after her lying-in. She held Harry high in the crook of her arm and spared quick glances from the child, needing to see his effect on her companions’ faces. The new mother almost expected others to share the physical surge of love, the protective fierceness, which had clamped in her stomach when her son’s first hard tugs on her nipple set her womb aching and contracting. She had smiled a vague exhausted smile at Elizabeth as her friend fussed, wiping her forehead, collecting the bloodied linen; and when Henry tip-toed in, his face — 287 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______expectant, Susannah looked up from the nuzzling head, her eyes dazed. At the conclusion of her lying-in Susannah was meant to return to the women’s small dungeon at night but the Surgeon, Mr. Edmund Rigby,646 suggested she move to one of the small rooms above the bath-house which would be healthier for the baby.

*

[Henry Cabell’s] attachment to her [Susannah Holmes] is so strong that rather than be separated from her and his child he is desirous of being transported to the same place. James Preston (J.P., Chairman of the Quarter Sessions to Lord Suffield).647

*

On the last day of October 1786, when Harry was about six months old, Mr. Gynne, the

Keeper, received a letter, signifying His Majesty's pleasure that Susannah Holmes,

Elizabeth Pulley and Ann Turner, another woman from Norwich Castle Gaol, be conveyed to Plymouth in the course of the first week of November and there be put on board H.M.

'Dunkirk' bound for the new settlement of Botany Bay. They were accordingly last Monday taken from the said gaol and seemed not in the least dismayed at the length of their voyage or of their future fate.648 They had set out the following day. I should say that for me Ann

Turner has remained a shadow in the corner of the story. Somewhere she vanished from the records. There would surely be some later record of her on the hulk at Plymouth but she is not in any biographical dictionary nor, as far as I have found, in ship records or muster lists.

*

646 The Surgeon’s identity is mentioned in the Norfolk Circuit Gaol Book, ASSI 33 6. 647 Gillen (1989), p. 178. 648 Norfolk Chronicle, 1 November 1786, cited on the Rope-Pulley Family Website, http://members.optusnet.com.au/glennbro1/rope/rope.htm, [Accessed 3 February 2008]. — 288 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

All Saints Day, Susannah would think as she awoke that morning. Her parents would attend a special service in her little flint church with the square tower and the lop-sided tombstones. Imagining them praying for her, forgiving her, Susannah wept as she sat up to suckle Harry.

*

The suddenness of the parting was hard. Henry and Susannah had both wept while consoling each other with prayers that their latest petition would be answered.649 Then clasping hands they had vowed that whatever transpired their parting would not be forever.

If Henry were not to be transported she would return in seven years: all would be well. On the journey, apart from occasional tears and fragile smiles, Susannah was engrossed in the baby’s care; she could endure all losses because of her baby and she would protect him with her last breath: Should twenty thousand dragons rise/I’d fight them all before your eyes.650 Gazing at the silken face she smiled at her own fancifulness. Henry would surely join them on their departure. Had Mr. Gynne not reassured them that Lord Suffield was a powerful man in Parliament and would persist in their cause? In the meantime their staunch

Mr. Simpson would protect them.

*

It is difficult to decide which means of transport would have been chosen; people generally travelled by hired coach, Royal Mail service and stage coach. The Royal Mail was in its

649 The last petition from the James Preston, the Justice of the Peace and Chairman of the Quarter Sessions to Lord Suffield, M. P. for Yarmouth, cited by Gillen had been dispatched upon the receipt of Susannah’s removal orders, 31 October 1786. 650 Verse included on a dragon plaque found in Norwich Castle Yard. See ‘Snap the Norwich Snapdragon’, Norwich Museum Services, http://www.dragonglow.co.uk/snap.htm. — 289 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______infancy but it was available between Norwich and London and London and Plymouth, which were turnpike roads. By 1786 there was a network of turnpikes inter-connecting major cities to London, but there was no direct turnpike connection between Norwich and

Plymouth. The most direct route from Norwich would have been Cambridge, Thetford,

Oxford, Frome, Taunton, Exeter, Plymouth, although this route probably meant hiring a coach and travelling on parish roads between Cambridge, Oxford and Frome. Beyond

Frome there was a turnpike road to Plymouth by 1770.651 At that time of the year whatever mode and route were chosen a journey of over two hundred miles with a six-month-old baby in a horse drawn vehicle would have been arduous. It would have required frequent stops to change or rest the horses at coaching inns. Noisy places, according to Robert

Southey (1773-1843), with doors opening and shutting, bells ringing, voices calling to the waiter from every quarter, while he cries ‘coming,’ to one room, and hurries away to another652 — and at least one baby crying. Susannah would change the baby’s diaper re- wrapping him in triangle of fulled wool653 on these welcome interludes when frozen feet and hands were thawed at fires and petticoats steamed and dried as they took a frugal meal before resting. The first stop was Thetford. Stepping into the market place renewed

Susannah’s memories of standing before the Judge in a malodorous state hearing the heaviest of words. Elizabeth was right, after being spared each day was a blessing; especially now she had the baby.

651 Dan Bogart, ‘Neighbors, Networks, and the Development of Transport Systems: Explaining the Diffusion of Turnpike Trusts in Eighteenth-century England,’ Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 61, No. 2 (March 2007), p. 251. It is possible the network had been considerably extended by the end of 1786. 652 Robert Southey Letter 1, Letters from England, 1st publ., as Letters from England: by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. Translated from the Spanish by Robert Southey (Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme 1808), p. 6, http://ia310911.us.archive.org/0/items/lettersfromengla01soutuoft/lettersfromengla01soutuoft.pdf , [Accessed 10 January 2008]. 653 Fulled wool has been milled in water to make the weave dense. — 290 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Because of the weather the women travelled with the leather curtains closed and missed many scenes through which they passed. Elizabeth did lift the curtain a little and would express excitement at a spire or a neat village. Mr. Simpson, wearing his great coat and tricorn hat often rode above with the coachman and guard, a blunderbuss within reach; although in such weather highwaymen were unlikely. At other times he came into the coach benignly watching as Susannah entertained the baby, singing lullabies or clapping his hands to the Snapdragon rhyme. Under Mr. Simpson’s supervision Susannah was once allowed into the Great Hall to show Harry the Snapdragon. The baby had looked up uncertainly to the object of his mother’s pointing and then from his mother to the man and back towards the rafters. Mr. Simpson had lifted his pike and pushing the Snapdragon sent it drifting. The baby watched, his mouth slightly open, eyes round, puzzled at what he was supposed to notice. Then the man smiled, clapping his hands to the chant he had learned as a boy,

‘Snap, Snap, steal a boy's cap/ give him a penny and he'll give it back’654 and Harry was teased into a laugh.

Their journey wound through cities, villages, fields, across streams, and through winter woods. At times they traversed slopes so slippery the passengers must alight and walk behind, and even push to aid the labouring horses when the wheels began to spin. Above them the ragged nests of rooks patched silver-grey skies. Susannah had been persuaded to tuck the baby into a basket and wedge it firmly between the seats and unwillingly she had agreed: the baby was safer there than in her own arms as she stumbled in the mud. She thanked God that the child was so contented and placid. The women’s capes and petticoats

654Traditional rhyme associated with Norwich’s ‘Snapdragon’. See, ‘Snap the Norwich Snapdragon’, Norwich Museum Services Online. — 291 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______grew heavy with water and mud and the rumble-tumble655 strapped at the back of the coach became increasingly bespattered.

*

The Dunkirk prison ship was moored in that loop of the Hamoaze known as Millbrook

Lake, near enough to the Cornwall border to be described as being "in the River Tamer in our county of Cornwall".656 With Elizabeth and Ann, Susannah and her baby had waited for three hours in a small boat in the Hamoaze,657 the estuary river which flows into Plymouth

Sound on the western side of the city. They were waiting while Mr. Simpson argued with

Henry Bradley, the overseer of the prison hulk.658 There was some problem with their papers and his contracts. Although the old ship, mastless, its weathered hull barnacle encrusted, gave some shelter against the worst of the weather, the women were wet and stiff with the cold. Numb to her own discomforts, Susannah had concentrated on protecting her baby from bursts of stinging sleet. Witnessing the women’s distress, a sailor had unrolled spare canvas and fashioned a shelter. Then all seemed well; the overseer had been persuaded to accept the women, perhaps surrendering to the Turnkey’s persistence and recognition that conveying the women to the Dunkirk was done at His Majesty’s pleasure.

Elizabeth had helped Susannah tie Harry safely inside her shawl. Elizabeth and Ann were first to climb the rope ladder swinging flush against the hull. From the boat the swaying

655 The wicker basket used for luggage — and sometimes passengers. 656 Gillen (1985), p. 65. 657 Narrative Relating to a Convict Ordered to be Transported to Botany Bay’, from Scot’s Magazine, Vol. 48, November 1786, cited by Holden (1999), p. 92. 658 Henry Bradley assumed the overseer role of the Dunkirk from 10 March 1786, replacing the very humane William Cowdry. There was apparently nepotism in the appointment for the brother was chief clerk of the India Board and a friend of Evan Nepean (1753-1822), Permanent Under-Secretary in the Home Office. See Gillen (1985), p. 65. — 292 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______ladder looked precarious. Elizabeth had climbed with her usual gameness; then she was not carrying a precious baby. Susannah closed her eyes; there was nothing else for it, and silently shaping her charmed words, ‘All will be well,’ Susannah began to climb, glad that

Mr. Simpson was below to steady her progress.

Followed by Mr. Simpson, Susannah climbed over the gunwale and released her pent up breath, cradling the weight of her baby in her shawl. She smiled at the sweet face just visible in her wraps; he had not even whimpered. Then she heard the beginnings of a tirade in a grating male voice and looking up, her face still tender from gazing at the perfect baby, took a step backwards and stiffened against the gunwale. Susannah’s arms locked tight around her child: inexplicably she was the focus of the anger.

The overseer, Henry Bradley, was red-faced, shouting and gesticulating towards Susannah.

Had he not, out of his generosity, a mere week previously accepted an infant because the mother, consumptive, struggling for breath, spitting blood, declared she would destroy herself if she were separated from the child.659 He still awaited a reply from the Home

Office and was in a mind to send that child back to its parish in Lancaster. And here, before him, was another bastard child. Was he now expected to transform a prison hulk into a nursery without recompense? How many more would there be? Why the hulk was not ever meant to take women, let alone their squalling progeny.

659 The woman was Jane Parkinson delivered with nine month old Edward. The woman died from consumption on the voyage. See Gillen (1985), pp. 73, 88-89. — 293 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Like an angry eagle he stabbed at Mr. Simpson’s document with his finger. Was there mention of a child? No, there was not. Return it to its parish. Let the mother destroy herself, if she must. Peremptorily he ordered two soldier guards to remove the baby from the mother. For a moment the soldiers stood still, as though they might resist the order; and then they swooped on the screaming woman and the then screaming child. Two others thundered towards her; the woman lashed and kicked, tried to bite the hands pawing at her shawl, tugging at the child, terrifying him. As he was wrenched from the fabric Susannah pulled free, flinging herself on her knees, weeping, begging, crawling trying to grab the legs of the soldier who had snatched Harry. She was dragged to her feet, arms pinioned behind her as the soldier thrust the frantic child at the turnkey. Susannah ground her teeth, groaned; would throw herself in the icy river, would drown herself, poison herself. She was panting, sobbing, pleading with Mr. Bradley.

That was the worst day of Susannah’s life. What brought the sharpest of pain was the image of Harry’s foot twisting, pulled from his stocking, as the clumsy men tried to disentangle him from her shawl. On the first evening of separation she had pressed the small item against her swollen breasts and wailed. Was there ever such cruelty?

Susannah would always remember Mr. Simpson’s horrified face as he witnessed that cruelty and called that he would care for the babe and obtain permission that she might take her child. The wind carried away her cries and his promises as she was dragged down the hatchway and pushed stumbling into the women’s cell. Disoriented, dizzy from hyperventilating, she was immediately surrounded by kind faces and from somewhere a woman cursing their gaoler. Elizabeth Pulley helped Susannah to a stool at a long table, — 294 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______hushing her, reassuring her; and another woman, a woman with a slight limp, a pock- marked face, brown hair and steady grey eyes660 helped her sip wine to calm her agitation.

The woman was, Susannah would learn, Mary Braund, a fisherman’s daughter from Fowey,

Cornwall. Voices and faces fragmented around her. She heard a baby crying. It was then that Susannah fainted. When she regained consciousness she was lying on a berth, with

Elizabeth Pulley stroking tendrils of hair from her forehead and Mary Braund encouraging her to sip brandy.

*

Some weeks later, Susannah awoke, panting, from a nightmare of lantern men calling, promising to lead her to baby Harry.661 In the dream she had plunged deep into a swamp where water, thick with mud and weeds, sucked at her feet, dragged at her petticoat. All the while she could hear her baby crying. Released from the dream, she exhaled slowly. Dear, kind Mr. Simpson, true to his word, had re-united her with her loved ones, arriving the day before with both Henry and their baby. The child was sleeping in the crook of her arm, safe and peaceful. In the darkness of the women’s deck she cupped her hand around the silky

660 The description is from Don Chapman, (1986), p. 48. He does not give a specific reference but as he mentions it in the context of Newgate Gaol where Mary Braund was imprisoned after her astonishing escape from Sydney Cove, it is probably in the Newgate Gaol Delivery book. See too, Warwick Hirst, Great Convict Escapes in Colonial Australia (Kangaroo Press, 2003) and Carolly Erickson, The Girl from Botany Bay: The True Story of the Convict Mary Broad and Her Extraordinary Escape (Pan Macmillan 2004). Erickson’s book is slip-shod, and although she quotes from Journals such as those of Surgeon White she obviously has read extracts, rather than the text. Thus she has Mary Braund/Bryant with ankle sores from fetters, when White, and Tench, state clearly that women were not fettered. They were put in irons on the voyage for ‘punishment’, as can be seen in Ralph Clark’s journal. Further, Erickson’s description of the first night the women were disembarked at Sydney Cove, exaggerated even upon the accounts of Surgeon Smyth. Most likely it was drawn from the hysterical account of a night of unmitigated horror, by Joan Druett (2001), p. 135. 661 The baby was baptized Henry, his father’s name, but in a public letter to his mother Henry Kable (indicted as Cabell) called the child, Harry. ‘Extract from a Letter from Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, county of Cumberland, New South Wales, to Mrs. Dinah Cable at Laxfield, near Fressingfield, Suffolk, England, dated November 17, 1788’, The London Chronicle, Vol.66, No.5117 (Thursday, 23 July 1789), p. 77. See full text of letter, p. 293. — 295 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______head which was red-gold in the sunlight. Harry would soon awaken and she would suckle him. Her breasts were tight with milk.

*

Saving her milk, as reported 16 November 1786 in the Scots Magazine662 was not so difficult once the young woman from Cornwall reminded Susannah that she must be calm; otherwise she would lose her milk. Mary Braund suggested that until she was reunited with her baby she should nurse little Edward Parkinson, the other baby who had caused Henry

Bradley’s rage. Like baby Harry, Edward was also conceived and born in gaol. He was nine months old, but not as well-grown as six-month-old Harry, for his mother was unwell and her milk had failed. Jane Parkinson, suffering from consumption, died on the voyage to

Botany Bay and her son, Edward, would be sent to Norfolk Island with Mary Fowles, to be given to the public, with the produce of five acres of ground to provide for support and education.663

*

Mollie Gillen was mistaken in her account of the eventual arrival of Henry and Harry at the

Dunkirk. Because father and son arrived together she supposed that Harry had remained in the Castle when Susannah departed.664 However, the baby did travel with the mother and true to his promise Mr. Simpson set off in the first coach to London, carrying the child all the way on his knee, and feeding it at the different inns he arrived at as well as he could.665

662 Cited by Holden (1999), p. 96. 663 Gillen (1989), p. 133. 664 Ibid., p.178. 665 Scots Magazine item (16 November 1786), mentioned by Holden (1999), p. 96. Full text below, p. 297. — 296 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

In London he left the baby with a careful woman and, against the protests of Lord Sydney’s staff, waylaid the Home Secretary and, having overcome Lord Sydney’s initial annoyance, obtained permission for the baby to be restored to the mother and for Henry to be transported with them. In addition, Lord Sydney offered to pay the fee for their immediate marriage and ordered that a letter be dispatched to Susannah to relieve her distress.

*

9th November, 1786: Wednesday [7 November] the keeper of the Castle received a letter from Lord Sydney, signifying his majesty’s pleasure that Henry Cabell the younger, a convict who received sentence of death at Thetford assizes in 1783, and afterwards reprieved, should be immediately removed to Plymouth and put on board the Dunkirk bound for Botany Bay; he was sent off accordingly. Norfolk Chronicle, November 1783666

Dear Sir, It is with the utmost pleasure that I inform you of my safe arrival with my little charge at Plymouth: but it would take an abler pen than mine to describe the joy that the mother received her infant and her intended husband with. Suffice it to say, that their transports, that the tears that flowed from their eyes, with the innocent smiles of the babe, on the sight of the mother, who had saved her milk for it, drew tears likewise from my eyes: and it was with the utmost regret that I parted with the child, after having travelled with it on my lap for upwards of 700 miles backwards and forwards. But the blessings I received at the different inns on the road have amply repaid me. I am, with great respect, your humble servant.

John Simpson Plymouth 16 Nov. [1786]667

*

666 Norfolk Chronicle, November 1783, Norwich Historical Library, cited in Production Notes for Peter Bellamy’s opera, The Transports. 667 Mr. Simpson’s letter was appended to the ‘Narrative Relating to a Convict Ordered to be Transported to Botany Bay’, from Scot’s Magazine, Vol. 48, November 1786, cited by Holden (1999), p. 96. — 297 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

______

I cannot say much about this country as yet, I mean what it will produce, there being only a few gardens in any prosperous conditions; corn and other seed seem to afford little prospect of this place being fertile, or in any degree able to support the few inhabitants on it; this country is the most barren that ever I hear of, producing nothing but a leaf called sweet tea, a sort of cabbage which grows on trees, and a sweet red berry; as for any other sort of fruit, it is as scarce as on the barren mountains of Wales. There is an animal called a cancuro, likewise an opossum and a flying squirrel, which together with a species of rats called cancuro rats, because of their likeness to that animal, are all this country is stocked with; paroquets are very plenty; some few pigeons, and a few parrots; plenty of different sorts of finch. Our Governor has draughted a great many of our people, and made two other settlements, one called New Norfolk, the other Orange Bay; the former is in a fine flourishing condition, about seven days sail hence, the latter but just inhabited, about twelve or fourteen miles. We have an extreme good and healthy climate, very heavy rains and prodigious heavy claps of thunder; here the sun goes to the left from the eastward; and our summer is very hot; our winter, which commences at May, is not altogether very cold, but very sharp. We have a little garden, which supplies us with cabbage and turnips in plenty; likewise I have gathered a small crop of peas. I am, thank God, very easily situated, never worked one day since I have been here; some officers have been so pleased with my conduct that they continue me in the office of an overseer over the women, there being several overseers over the men. Our little boy Harry is promising little fellow, and goes to school. The girl that was with us, Elizabeth Pulley, is married, and has a fine little boy. It is day here when it is night with you.

______

Henry Kable to his mother, Dinah Kable, 23 July 1789668

668 Henry Kable, ‘Extract from a Letter from Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, County of Cumberland, New South Wales, to Mrs. Dinah Cable at Laxfield, near Fressingfield, Suffolk, England, dated November 17, 1788’, The London Chronicle, Vol.66, No.5117 (Thursday, 23 July 1789), p. 77. Note: the change in the family name from Cabell to Kable. Kable has remained in usage. — 298 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 13

A Stourbridge Apprentice — Sarah Davis from Old Swinford

*

Dying and being born belong to our public person. Our coming and our going are public acts … There are laws to be obeyed … How many pieces of paper are there in one death, one birth? And how many systems of our social and cultural living are mirrored in these pieces of paper? And what are the different ways in which the papers are archived in some way? The texted past even in its simplest form is so filled with symbolling that its reading is endless. Greg Dening669

8. Church of St Mary, the Virgin, Old Swinford, Stourbridge To the church the living call, and to the grave do summon all. (Tenor Bell Inscription 1740)670

*

In 1782 viewed from a north-western vantage the village of Stourbridge lay in a shallow green vale. If one stood before the shade of the sycamore avenue leading to Wollaston Hall,

669 Dening (1993), p. 99. 670 Image from: J. W. Willis-Bund (ed.), 'Parishes: Old Swinford', A History of the County of Worcester, Vol. 3 (1913), pp. 213-223, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=43112. Inscription cited by Nigel Perry, A History of Stourbridge (Phillimore 2005), p. 142. — 299 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______an early seventeenth century five-gabled, ornately half-timbered mansion, the village was a distant stretch of houses glimpsed between the trees edging the River Stour. Towards the north-east stood the red brick tower of the grammar school, in perpendicular style with oggee windows, and somewhere carved on an oak panel the initials S.J., the vandalism of

Samuel Johnson during a brief enrolment — or so it was believed. On a line to the south- west was a windmill and after that the tower of St Thomas’s church. Hidden from view, in that south east sector, was the strange Mud City on Lye Waste. For centuries it was peopled by vagabonds and gypsies who seemed to live by nail-making beyond parish interference, although the nakedness of their children was remarked upon. Whatever the details of the actual social scene the landscape viewed from the sycamores of Wollaston Hall, with the foreground a series of terraced gardens falling away to the Stour was, as the nineteenth century historian William Scott remarked, a pleasing prospect.671 His opinion was confirmed by the watercolour, probably the work of one of Fanny Burney’s cousins, included in the History of Worcestershire (1782) by Dr Treadway Russell Nash (1725-

1811).672

Invisible in Scott’s pleasing prospect was the smoke that rose from scythe and nail-makers’ forges (many of them in Lye Waste), and from the kilns of glassmakers from Bohemia, via

France, and later from Mantua, for the earth was rich with iron, coal, marl and clay; and the green vale and the hills chimed with the striking of iron on anvils. The glassmakers began

671 William Scott, Stourbridge and its Vicinity, 1832, p. 88, cited by Nigel Perry (2005), p.43. 672 A copy of the watercolour, or sketch, is included by Perry (2005), p.70. Perry identifies Nash’s history but not the artist. For the suggestion that one of Fanny Burney’s cousins may have been the artist see ‘The Worcestershire Drawings of E[dward] F. & T[homas] F. Burney’, Record Office, Worcestershire County Council Online, http://worcestershire.whub.org.uk/home/wcc-records-burney-watercolours.html [Accessed 20 November 2007].

— 300 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______settling in the village during the sixteenth century: secretive immigrant glassmakers, Nigel

Perry called them, noting the new names beginning to scatter across parish registers. They had been tempted to England, he said, to practice their secret skills of glassmaking.673

Stourbridge glassware is still famous. I have stood before a kiln on the High Street to

Wollaston watching glass, malleable from the coals, spinning on a metal tube to the rhythms of the maker’s hands, blossoming and shining, as fine and iridescent as a soap bubble. Also imprinted in my memory of that day were a translucent emerald frog with minute suckered pads and sleek haunches, and a crystalline vase with intertwining swirls of sapphire and scarlet. These industries, iron and glassmaking, began as the village’s prosperity from the woollen industry was fading. A small protection for that industry was the mandatory use of a woollen shroud for everyone, excepting paupers and those who died from the plague.674 So at the heart of the village, in the chests and presses of each house, could be found one, or several, neatly folded woollen shrouds, tucked with lavender, rosemary and fever-few against the moths.

*

It was into this village that Sarah Davis was born in the last week of December 1754. Her parents, Betty Badger of Belbroughton and Thomas Davis had been married a fortnight or so previously at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, in Old Swinford parish.675 The parish name archived the existence of a swine ford across the River Stour in use from Saxon times; it was mentioned in the Domesday Book as Suineford.

673 Perry (2005), p. 42. 674 Ibid., p. 121. 675 Although Gillen (1989) wrote that ‘Sarah Davis ‘may have been the daughter of Enoch Davies and Prudence Rowlinson of Halesowen, all the records of the time give her name as Davis, not Davies. — 301 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

It takes little to imagine the familial and parish tensions and pressures prior to the Badger-

Davis marriage. The fact that it was by license instead of by banns, and that it was at the very last moment of Betty Badger’s pregnancy, suggests those pressures had not been easily resolved. Under Lord Hardwicke’s 1753 Marriage Act, marriages were no longer merely a matter of the couple’s private vows, which had caused complicated breach of promise cases, ruined heiresses, and family inheritances passed away. Under the Act marriage was mandatorily performed by a clergyman after either a three week publication of banns in the parishes of both parties, or the purchase of a license. The license had no waiting period but required parental consent for those younger than twenty-one years.676

So that cold day in December when Betty had whispered, ‘I do’ with head bowed before an unfamiliar, grim faced Thomas, the curate and two wardens in the church of St Mary the

Virgin, would not have been a happy one. The bride clenched her jaw against shivering as she made her mark against the name Betty Badger.677

Mr. Wylde had pressed Betty Badger to do her duty: she would name the father and if he could not be persuaded to marriage, then she must bring a bastardy suit against him at the

676 For a detailed exploration of the parliamentary arguments accompanying the uneasy passage of ‘Hardwicke’s Act’ and whether the motivations of the Act were about enshrining patriarchal control (most likely) or to give place to young women’s feelings see David Lemmings, ‘Marriage and the Law in the Eighteenth Century: Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (June 1996), pp. 339-360. Marriage by license did not require the three week publication of the proposed marriage in the parishes of both parties; however, it still required the consent of a parent (and here the rights of the father had dominance) if the parties were not over twenty-one years. 677 Old Swinford Parish Registers: Baptisms and Burials 1752-1768; with Marriages 1753-1754, Vol. 5, (Microfiche), Worcestershire Library and History Centre, Trinity Street, Worcester, WR1 2PW. — 302 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______next Quarter Sessions.678 It was not right that she should expect the parish to be responsible for the expense of a bastard. Thomas had succumbed to Betty’s stammering presentation of these parish conditions; he would be shamed by a bastardy suit. Longing for the return of the handsome young man laughing in their tunnel of green with sprays of pink in Dark

Lane, Betty Davis had looked up from making the mark and realized with a shock that hers was probably a knob-stick wedding: a wedding in which the parish had offered a cash incentive to the reluctant groom.679

*

St Mary’s Parish Church Old Swinford Thomas Davis m Betty Badger 10 Dec 1754 (by licence) Curate: Witnesses: S. Male Richard Willcox and Matthias Crowther

Sarah Susannah Thomas Charles Edward bap. 11 Jan bap. 17 July bap. 9 June bap. 20 October bap. 8 Feb 1767 1755 1757 1760 1765 bur. 3 Dec 1768

9. Badger-Davis marriage and children’s baptisms 680

The baby, Sarah, was baptized in the same fourteenth century church, with the Anglo-

Saxon foundations, the embattled tower and fine stone spire with small trefoil-headed

678 The Bastardy Act (1733) ordered that a father be imprisoned until he would indemnify the parish for the care of his illegitimate child. For its administration and accompanying documentation see Anne Cole, An Introduction to Poor Law Documents before 1834, 2nd Edn (Federation of Family History Societies 2000), pp. 24-26. 679 Perry, p. 58. 680 Old Swinford Parish Registers: Baptisms and Burials 1752-1768; with Marriages 1753-1754, Vol. 5 Microfiche No. 40. — 303 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______lights, on 11 January 1755.681 By the time she was seven, perhaps before, Sarah’s family was receiving parish welfare.

10. Illustrated capital: Honi soit qui mal y pense: Shame upon him who thinks evil of it682

*

In the mid-afternoon of the twenty-fourth day of July in the Second Year of the Reign of our sovereign Lord, George the third by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France683 and

Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, and so forth; and in the Year of our Lord One

681 The church was later renovated and extended and the spire removed. 682 The illuminated capital beginning Sarah Davis’s indenture contract: This the indenture … from Quarter Session Books and Order Books (1757-1772), Vol. 4, 1762, Sessions holden on Tuesday, next after the Feast of St Thomas, the Martyr [7 July], p. 338a, Worcestershire Record Office, County Hall, Spetchley Rd, Worcester, WR5 2NP. 683 This anachronistic claim to sovereignty over France in royal styles and titles was the remnant of past battles, victories and marital alliances with regions in France (Normandy, Anjou, Acquitania). Reference to sovereignty over France was first used by Edward III (1337). This is mentioned by E. Cobham Brewer, in The Readers’ Handbook: A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1896) There is a poorly scanned Ecopy at http://www.archive.org/stream/readershandbook00brew/readershandbook00brew_djvu.txt, (University of California, San Diego).The style was used until 1801 when the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland was proclaimed by George III, who from thence was styled GEORGE the THIRD, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith; see The Times, January 3, 1801, Column D, p. 4. See Royal Arms, Styles, and Titles of Great Britain: Documents, http://www.heraldica.org/topics/britain/britstyles.htm. The website draws upon various sources, including Paul H. Hughes and James L. Larkin: Tudor Royal Proclamations, Vols 1 and 2 (Yale University Press 1964- 69). — 304 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______thousand seven hundred and sixty-two,684 seven-year-old Sarah Davis clung to her mother’s hand as her Uncle William Davis ushered them into his sewing room in his house in

Stourbridge. His one requirement had been that the child would enter her apprenticeship with basic skills in the art. He had studied Sarah’s collected samplers, before nodding curtly and agreeing that he would become her Master. In truth he would have had little choice. A family of three children was a drain on parish funds, and family members of means had obligations. If Sarah’s apprenticeship indenture had been a private family matter, an act of kindness from one brother to another, the certificate would not have been included in the

Old Swinford parish records.685 Finding that document from 1762, with the faded signatures and the wax seal as darkly crimson as a gout of recently dried blood, was one of the highlights of my archival searches.

*

As she stepped into the room the new apprentice’s eyes widened with wonder at the display of magical fabrics and the mantuas. Mantys, her Uncle William called the elaborate gowns with the heavily boned bodices shaped to be worn with pointed, embroidered stomachers and voluminous skirts opened to display contrasting petticoats. Some were almost complete, others in strange pieces spread on one of the two long tables. A woman was bent over a rose tabby silk, while another stitched loops of ribbon along the opening of a skirt fashioned from heavily embroidered deep blue wool.

684 Indenture Certificate of Sarah Davis. See Footnote 682, p. 304, above. 685 For a simple, but careful, overview of the administration of parish apprenticeships indentures, including the last observation, see Anne Cole, An Introduction to Poor Law Documents (2000), pp.20-23; for an academic overview see Hill, ‘Female Apprenticeship’, Chapter 6 (1994), pp. 85-102. For a succinct economic and political history of the Poor Laws see Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782, 1st publ., 1990, (Cambridge University Press 1995). — 305 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

So this was where she was to work; she looked up at her mother her lips parted at the wonder of it. A young woman was stitching dark blue silk buttons bound with a fine silver ribbon. Her work was lit by a lace-maker’s lamp on the sill, the glow of a candle refracted and magnified by water in the glass bowl. Where the sunlight streamed beside the lamp a black and white cat was sleeping, curled into a tight ball with a white paw tucked around its eyes. The woman looked up from her stitching and smiled at the child’s interest in the button foundations which were like tiny wooden squashes. The cat had unwrapped slightly to watch the conversation with half-opened amber eyes. The new apprentice looked at the animal and then at her mother. Was she allowed to touch it? She understood the faint shake of her mother’s head and disappointed looked wistfully at the cat. The mother knew her daughter was thinking of the fortunes of Sir Richard Whittington and his rat-catching, sea- faring cat. The story of a poor apprentice who became thrice Lord Mayor of London where the streets were paved with gold was a favourite local legend; as it was in London where people would not buy a print of their Lord Mayor until the traditional skull on which the figure’s hand rested was redrawn as a cat.686 When Newgate had been rebuilt with a bequest from Whittington his effigy with a cat curled at his feet was set on the façade. For centuries afterwards the prison was known as the Whit.

686 T. H., The History of Sir Richard Whittington, edited, with introduction by Henry B. Wheatley, (The Villon Society 1885), Gutenberg Project EBook #17652, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17652/17652-8.txt. This is an account of the folk tales, ballads, plays, essays, chap books and prints which accrued around the life of Sir Richard Whittington, evaluating them against the life of historical figure. The legends of the poor boy and his cat seem to have begun in the early seventeenth century and the people of London were apparently very attached to it and would not buy a print of the Lord Mayor without the inclusion of a cat. It seems likely that, on his way from Gloucester to London, Richard Whittington (1353-1423) sojourned at Kinver, a village near Stourbridge, where his grandfather was a Knight at Arms. Local people still believe so, indicating the Whittington Inn as evidence. Older inhabitants identify a small manor house in a nearby lane as the actual residence of the Master of the Mercer’s Company and three times Lord Mayor of London during his visit to Kinver. ‘T. H.’ includes a note from Pepys’ Diary about the delight of a Whittington puppet show. — 306 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Betty Davis was relieved that her daughter would not stand with the family to receive parish relief at the church door on Sundays and would not bear the stigma of wearing a brass badge stamped with OP — Old Swinford Pauper.687 The Justice of the Peace had clearly read that Brother William and Sister Phoebe688 would supply, Meat, Drink and

Apparel, Lodging, Washing, and all other things necessary, including a good new suit for the Holy Days, and another for the Working-Days until Sarah was a grown woman. 689

Betty Davis reached down and took Sarah’s hands, bidding her be an obedient child. She gazed a moment at her first-born’s upturned face, her unarticulated wishes for the qualities of her daughter’s character encompassing the symbolic meanings, unreadable to her, in the apprenticeship certificate’s illuminated capital: strength, fortitude, peace, harmony, well- tempered judgment — and purity.690

*

So began Sarah Davis’s apprenticeship. She would have spent her childhood with her left index finger roughened from needles and an ache between her shoulders as she sat for long hours with her back curved over fabrics, sewing seams with simple running stitches, whipping lace, accomplishing herringbone and back-stitch and learning to bone a bodice, all in the company of skilled women and under her uncle’s critical gaze. Then there were

687 Perry, p. 63. 688 There was a baptism of William, son of William and Phebe Davis in the Old Swinford Register of Baptisms and I have drawn the conclusion that would be Sarah’s cousin. 689 For a careful elaboration of the inclusive concept of ‘family’ in the eighteenth century see Naomi Tadmor, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, No. 151 (May 1996), pp. 111-140. 690 Heraldic emblems of the illuminated capital of the apprenticeship certificate are lions rampant and statant, harp, buck and fleur-de-lis. — 307 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the household chores, minor at first, perhaps emptying the night’s chamber pots for the laundry, filling the coal scuttle, sweeping. When she was a little older there would have been the requirement of errands in busy High Street where she might stare with wonder at the grandeur of the Grammar School, observe the changing of timber framed facades for brick, the demolition of the Market Hall and the advent of the ‘flying coaches’ leaving The

Talbot. As long as she could remember her Uncle William had attended parish and lodge meetings at that famous inn, where men also gathered for cock-fighting and to hear readings from newspapers. Sarah’s destination would frequently have been Samuel

Mogridge’s mercer’s shop from which, in 1783, she would steal four silk handkerchiefs valued at sixteen shillings and for which she would first be sentenced to death and thence to transportation.691

There was something about Mr. Samuel Mogridge which incited dislike, resentment. In the small hours of the morning, 13 August 1782, the year before Sarah would commit her crime, a chimney sweeper, a woman and a boy climbed over Samuel Mogridge’s garden wall and wrenching open a casement at the back of the dwelling entered it, not for the purposes of burglary, but to burn it down. From the neighbouring carpenter’s yard they brought a basket of chips and a dark Lanthorn, with a lighted candle in it. They put the said chips against a door in the said house [in Stourbridge] and maliciously and voluntarily set fire to the said chips; and then all three ran away.692 The name of the lad was never discovered; however, the fire was successfully extinguished and the couple

691‘Sarah Davis’, ‘Judgments, Recognizances and Depositions’, Summer Assizes, (Worcestershire 23 July 1783), ASSI 5/103/23, National Archives, Kew. 692 Deposition of Robert Bullas, glassmaker, Stourbridge, against Joseph Hirst, alias Purdon and Hannah Pardon (12 September 1782), ASSI 5 /103/ 21. — 308 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______arrested. Why would a chimney sweeper, whose occupation was to save houses from fire, deliberately attempt to burn a house? Could it have been that he felt he had not been paid fairly for his work? The Assize documents I chanced upon as I searched for Sarah’s file did set a vantage from which I would view her crime.

*

The highlight of the parish year was always Rogation Sunday, the fifth Sunday after Easter.

Rogation Sunday meant the annual beating of the bounds, a spring day when a procession of church officials and parishioners recalled and memorized the parish boundaries.693 The parish supplied festive food and drink, probably perry, the drink brewed from a bitter pear still popular in Worcestershire. Wearing coronets and necklaces of daisy chains for good luck, small children and girls would have followed the procession around fields, down lanes and through copses, where wild apples and pears bloomed. The occasion was different for the lads, for they were whipped, or swung by the hands and feet and bumped on the earth at significant markers — an oak tree, a pond, a boulder. At invisible boundaries in streams they were tossed into the water, frightening the fish and fracturing the sunlight patterns above glossy pebbles with their splashing and gasping. So the parish boundaries were inscribed, archived, with red welts on their skin, bruises on their buttocks, the splutterings of their lungs and the muffled soughing of their water-logged ears. Even as old men, snaggle-toothed and crippled with labour, they would remember those days: they would know parish boundaries even as they knew the liver marks on their own hands. And the cycle would begin again. Their sisters and female cousins followed carrying special fare

— ginger breads, lardy cakes, ham sandwiches — laughing and singing around the

693 See Bill Gwilliam, Old Worcester: People and Places (Halfshire Books 1993), p. 93. — 309 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______boundaries. For females these archives were lightly inscribed in memories of laughter and groves swept with bluebells and the yellow flowers of cowslups694 gathered in their aprons for making wine. But woe betide those foolhardy enough to cross that lane, cross that stream or travel beyond that tree without a pass, because they would forgo parish care and services and become vulnerable to imprisonment as vagabonds.

*

Sarah Hanley, then heavily pregnant, was being conveyed by pass as a vagrant from St Martin’s when she was delivered of a bastard child at St John’s in Bedwardine which child is now chargeable to that parish, which is unreasonable — she is committed to the House of Correction. Worcestershire Quarter Sessions Papers (1750-1799), 695

*

Years before her twenty-first birthday Sarah had realized manty making was not as romantic as she had fancied. She would be glad to escape stitching perfectly, almost invisibly, against the weight of those gowns, and then the facing criticism of rich ladies — followed by her uncle’s — for some perceived imperfection which had more to do with their own shapes than with her skill. Besides, she would never earn more than a pittance from her uncle, or someone like him. No, she would join the glove-making industry, which had been flourishing in Worcestershire for several centuries.696 Partly a cottage industry it was ideal for a young woman desiring to work independently. She knew many glove- makers very satisfied with their earnings. The leather preparations, the tanning, slitting,

694 Plantlife: ‘Cowslip (Primula veris), Worcestershire’, http://www.plantlife.org.uk/uk/plantlife-discovering- plants-county-flowers-england-worcestershire.htm. Cow-slips grow in cow-pats, which were known in Worcestershire as slups. 695 Worcestershire Quarter Sessions Papers (1750-1799), Packet 443, Document 35. 696 D. C. Lyes, The Leather Glove Industry of Worcester in the Nineteenth Century, 1st publ., 1973 (Worcester Museum and Art Gallery 1976). Although this small publication focuses on the nineteenth century, Lyes also gives a brief historical background to the industry. — 310 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______stretching, paring697 and staining of the leather, together with the cutting of the tranks — the outline of the hand and the fingers, and the fourchettes, or side fittings to the fingers — were completed by men; then the slit tranks were delivered to women outworkers. Sarah’s mantua-making experience meant she could seam, welt, point and embroider on any material, from muslin to leather. She was a fine seamstress. In addition there were other women in town with whom she could cooperate. It was common for women outworkers to specialize in specific sewing tasks. Mr. Mogridge had agreed to be a delivery and collection point; unlike some glove-makers Sarah would not be trapped in cycles of walking.698 As a personal arrangement she would also fill a monthly order for the mercer. Sarah’s spine began to unbend at the thought of the lightness of a leather glove in her hand. Further, as good fortune would have it, Sarah had met a man; his name was Ashley. Sadly, her parents and her aunt and uncle were unlikely to have approved for there was no record of an Ashley family in the Church of England registers, which indicates he might have been a Dissenter.

*

In Sarah’s childhood dissenting houses and schools699 were tolerated, although those choosing to worship in their churches or meeting houses were often ostracized from their families and friends. Nevertheless, dissenting churches were established. When Sarah was

697The terms are taken from ‘Glossary’, Appendix 1 in D. C. Lyes (1976), p. 60. Slitting seemed to apply both to the slitting of a piece of heavy leather (so there was a piece of double-sided suede and a piece with the grain), and to the cutting of the fingers and fourchettes (forks). Paring was a polishing of the skin to reduce it to an even thickness and texture. 698 The historical spread of glove-making to villages in outer parishes; the specialization of the female- makers; and the organization of deliveries and collections are given by Lyes (1976), pp. 15-18. Lyes also notes that “shopkeepers”, sometimes called “bagwomen” acted as collection points and that some imposed their own conditions, which could prove unsatisfactory for the workers. Further, there was the development of payment by tokens to overcome the manufacturers’ problems of payment distributions. Lyes does concentrate on the nineteenth century but these practices and problems would have had beginnings in the later eighteenth century. 699 The existence of this school is mentioned at the website, Park Lane Unitarian Chapel, Cradley, http://www.cradleylinks.com/park_lane_history.html. — 311 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______fifteen she would have learned that a famous preacher was to address those interested in finding freedom and salvation through faith. The preacher was John Wesley (1703-1791); he had first visited Stourbridge in 1743, although it was not until 1790 that Methodist worship was established there.700

In parts of the town there was a rustle of gossip and excitement, a whispering and humming of verses from new hymns, Remove this hardness from my heart/This unbelief remove: To me the rest of faith impart/ The sabbath of thy love.701 The old black and white cat was asleep at her feet as Sarah paused from her stitching to consider whether she might slip away in the evening. It would be a short walk to Amblecote. Could she?

Later Sarah would have heard that so many had crowded into the house that a hole was cut in the ceiling of the kitchen and the Reverend Wesley had stood on a stool so that those in the bedroom above might also hear his words.702 Then there was singing. Next time, one way or another, she would attend. Sarah faltered again when she heard that very week a mob had threatened violence against the preacher in nearby Cradley. 703

*

Apart from these shadowy traces of her village history, Sarah Davis passed almost invisibly through her adult years prior to the summer’s day, 1 July 1783, when she walked into

Samuel Mogridge’s shop and slipped four silk handkerchiefs beneath her apron. In scrolled

700 Perry, p. 154. 701 ‘A Plain Account of Christian Perfection,’ The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 11, edited by Thomas Jackson (1872), pp. 366-446, online, Section 14, http://gbgm-umc.org/UMhistory/Wesley/perfect2.html. 702 Bill Gwilliam (1991), pp. 162-163. 703 Ibid., p. 163. — 312 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______parchments at the National Archives there were a few more traces from which a Sarah

Davis simulacrum might be fashioned, that copy of a copy without the original.

*

The Assize Court records of Sarah Davis from Old Swinford parish in the County of

Worcester,704 in which Sarah was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead, had surely been untouched since the summer in 1783 when they were scribed. The edges of the scrolled parchments were shrivelled together, almost fused; unsealing them was like opening a chrysalis. Even before I read the words, Sarah Davis, otherwise Ashley, phantoms began shedding with the black dust scattering across the desk and rising into the white glow of fluorescent light. There were phantoms of a stolen blue waistcoat; a milking cow with a remarkable stroke of white upon her under jaw and a small star on her forehead; a Marine deserted from the Portsmouth Division; and a dressmaker, Mary Evans, who signed with her mark the recognizance in which her parish overseer had contracted to bond fifty pounds to bring a prosecution against Richard Wilkes, a nail-maker, who had beaten, starved and tortured his small child, knocking him about the head and shoving sticks up his nose until his life was despaired of. The suffering of the child and the woman’s courage might have been written yesterday, so palpable was the distress in the words of her deposition. Sarah’s theft of four silk handkerchiefs valued at sixteen shillings was insignificant by comparison.

Hannah Nash, a singlewoman presented another compelling case. She was accused of having brought forth a male child, by the Providence of God …which said male child so

704Judgments, Recognizance and Depositions, Summer Assizes, (Worcestershire 1783), ASSI/103/23. — 313 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______being born alive by the Laws of the Realm was a bastard … and seduced by the instigation of the Devil afterwards … feloniously willfully of her malice aforethought did make an assault and … with both her hands about the neck of the said child … did choak and strangle … the said child … did kill and murder against the peace of our said Lord the

King his crown and dignity.705

It was a common indictment and pulled by her anguish I lingered over Hannah Nash’s documents. She appeared in court at the same Session as Sarah Davis, so they were imprisoned together: she was part of Sarah’s story. So, too, was the obscenely cruel father against whom the dressmaker, Mary Evans, was a prosecuting witness.

*

Early in the search I found Samuel Mogridge’s recognizance by which he contracted to personally appear at the next Gaol delivery to be holden at Worcester … and then and there prefer a bill of indictment against Sarah Davis otherwise Ashley late of the township of Stourbridge … for the felonious and privately taking and carrying away from out of the shop of said Samuel Mogridge situated in the Stourbridge … four silk handkerchiefs of the value of sixteen shillings — the property of the said Samuel Mogridge. If he made default upon these conditions, signed on the second day of July in the twenty third year, of Great

Britain, France and Ireland, King, defender of the faith … Samuel Mogridge of Stourbridge in the said County acknowledged himself to owe to our Lord, the king, his heirs and successors, the sum of twenty good pounds of lawful money of Great Britain, to be made

705 ASSI/103/23. — 314 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______and levied of his goods and chattels, lands and tenements, to the use of our said Lord his heirs and successors.706 It was the standard document.

*

There was little more about Sarah in Mogridge’s deposition, apart from the note that she had committed the theft on the first day of July; so her arrest had followed swiftly.

*

For those who might listen, ghostly footsteps still echo, and hints of breathing stir the cool air of a narrow lime-washed passage and the shadowy twist of a disused staircase, which once led from the holding cells under Worcester’s Guildhall to the courtroom of the

Worcestershire Assize Circuit.

On my visit to the women’s cell under Worcester’s Guildhall, a manikin representing another Worcestershire convict, Ann Inett, was set in a corner beside a small street-level grate. My guide seemed surprised that I knew that Ann Inett was a lover of Lieutenant

Phillip Gidley King, (later Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales) and mother of his sons, Norfolk and Sydney. The dummy had ragged dun-coloured hair and was posed leaning a little forward, arms thrust awkwardly onto the knees, the head turned away from the peering tourist towards the pale light from the grating. Greg Dening’s warnings about re-enactments hovered in the cell: They [make] the past look quaint … They remove the

706 Ibid. — 315 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______responsibility of remedying the present by distracted, unreflective search for details of a past whose remedying will make no difference.707

I reminded myself that Dening also said, Every cultural act stands … always manifold. And further, ethnography is a cultural act. It is a description of somebody and a statement to somebody. It can never lose its relativity to the person making it and to the persons to whom it is made. He explained that ethnography is not a replay of events but a creative reconstruction … [it is] the interplay of observer and observed … [it is] the unfolding of many and larger significances. 708 The turn of the plastic head towards the light, the slightness of the model and the shallow curved shoulders, suggested hopelessness. Wraiths of despair hovered in the tiny cool space.

Ann Inett was prosecuted at the Lent Assize Sessions, March 1787. The traces of her life suggest she was a kind and practical woman. Much later I learned that when Ann Inett was in that cell she had two small children, Thomas (b. 1778) and Constance (b. 1781). I would also learn that she had later contact with her daughter, for in 1820, at St John’s Church,

Worcester, Constance Guy (née Inett) named her baby Mary Ann Robinson Guy. In 1792

Ann Inett had married Richard Robinson in Sydney.709

Almost three years prior to Ann Inett’s arrest Sarah Davis otherwise Ashley, was locked in that cell where the awkward dummy was displayed. With her was Hannah Nash, the young

707 Greg Dening, The Bounty: An Ethnographic History, (Monograph) (University of Melbourne 1989), p. ix. 708 Ibid., p. 106. 709 Michael Grundy ‘One Final Mystery in Gallows-to-Glory Tale’, News Quest Media Midlands (8 Nov. 2003), http://archive.thisisworcestershire.co.uk/2003/11/8/153558.html. [Accessed 2 February 2008]. — 316 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______woman accused of choaking and strangling her male bastard child. Two years later (March

1785) Mary Abell and Olive Gascoigne,710 were also brought to the cell. Olive Gascoigne, a servant in Worcester, had stolen from the son of her employer thirteen pieces of gold coins and a silver dollar, the total value of which was thirteen pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence. Olive’s defence was that she stole the money to save her Aunt Riddy from

Debtors’ Prison.711 With Mary and Olive was Mary Lewis, a young woman who, like

Hannah Nash, was accused of murdering her child against the peace of our said Lord the

King his crown and dignity. In July 1785 Sarah Bellamy also passed through that cell door; and at the Lent Assize Court of 1786 Mary Turner, otherwise Wilkes, accused of theft, would also wait there to be summoned to the court above. Apart from Hannah Nash and

Mary Lewis these Worcestershire women would be transferred to the New Gaol

Southwark; three departed, 25 November 1785 and Mary Turner and Ann Inett followed ten days later. The women were embarked on the Lady Penrhyn at Gravesend, 31 January

1787 and according to Surgeon Bowes Smyth, generally harshly critical of the women convicts, Ann Inett and Olivia Gascoin (the Surgeon’s spelling) uniformly behaved well during the whole of the Voyage.712

*

Sarah Davis lay on the barrack bed in the Bridewell, a cell under the Town Hall in High

Street, Stourbridge. She had watched its construction some five years before. How could

710 Gillen points out that her name would cause trouble for colonial scribes. Spelling variations were Oloff, Olave, Olivia and Gaskins, Gascoyne, Gascoin, Gasking, see Gillen (1989), p. 141. 711 Worcestershire Lent Assizes, 1785, trial of Olive Gascoigne, spinster, crime committed 10 August 1784, at Severn Stoke, against Edward Griffith, son of Olive’s employer, George Griffith, ASSI 5 105/32. 712 Smyth (1979), p. 65. — 317 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______she have joined those who smiled as they called the wretched cell the cage?713 She had sinned, trespassed, shamed her parents, her family, and she fumbled for justification:

Samuel Mogridge was a hard man, an unfair man, and she had felt the sting of his meanness. She had been outraged at his treatment of the chimney sweeper, Joseph Hirst, alias Purdo and his wife Hannah, the year before, which had resulted in their imprisonment.714 Of course, she knew that her anger and judgments were sinful. Oh, she could see her trespasses were grown up to heaven. The words of the hymn consoled her for they prompted the following verse: But far above the skies, In Christ abundantly forgiven, I see thy mercies rise.715 She might be punished, hanged even, in an earthly court; she would bow to that, knowing she would receive a greater forgiveness. It was a comfort to think that the wise Reverend Wesley taught that there is not a man on earth who liveth and sinneth, not.716 No, that was not all, she knew the hymn demanded she weep, believe and sin no more.717 She stared through the barred door, she would again struggle with anger, but for the moment her resentments had dissolved. She was resigned to whatever lay ahead.

*

It was not so far from Stourbridge to Worcester in summer, even using lanes rather than turnpikes and jogging in an unsprung cart. From 1781 the wealthy might take ‘the

713 Nigel Perry claimed that the Bridewell was affectionately called ‘the cage’. Perry, p. 72. He was citing William Scott, Stourbridge and its Vicinity (1832), p.61. 714 Deposition against Joseph Hirst and Hannah Pardon, Worcestershire, September 1782, ASSI 5 103/21. 715 From John Wesley, Sermon 59, from The Works of John Wesley, edited by Thomas Jackson (1872), Online, Global Ministries: The United Methodist Church, http://new.gbgm- umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/59. 716 From John Wesley, Sermon 15, edited by Thomas Jackson (1872), http://new.gbgm- umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/15. 717 Charles Wesley, ‘Depth of Mercy’, Hymns (1740), http://gbgm- umc.org/umhistory/wesley/hymns/umh355.stm. — 318 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Diligence’ from The Talbot to the Crown Inn in Worcester and return that day.718 In the cart with her was a parish constable who treated her coldly. What more could she expect? She had committed a serious offence. Sarah, watching the passing landscape, the canopied lanes and the placidly grazing sheep and cattle, accepted that she would be punished; that was as it should be. Then her interest was caught by the cave houses at Clent; once hermit retreats, the dwellings had been inhabited by the poor of the district for some thirty years. Washing fluttered on bushes by the doorways, some of which were almost concealed with overhanging shrubs and flowers. The driver turned into Belbroughton Road, making a brief stop at the Holly Bush coaching inn at that village. So she was at last in her mother’s village; Sarah alighted. After Stourbridge it seemed a wild place. In the nail-makers’ wagons, horses bothered by summer gnats, moved uneasily at the hitching-rail; and from the blacksmith’s shop, within the inn yard, the rhythmic sounds of the anvil echoed. Nearby there was a gypsy waggon.719 Dark children played about the wheels, while several women were spinning fleece with distaffs, another worked at a small vertical loom, several were smoking and an old woman was peeling potatoes.

Late in the afternoon, on the outskirts of Worcester, Sarah’s cart crossed Drovers’ Way where a late herd of some two hundred Welsh blacks was passing from North Wales to the

Smithfield market in London. Short legged black and white dogs, solid as barrels, guided the beasts. Sarah waved to the drovers in their long smocks, leather leggings and broad black hats. Suddenly Sarah was tired; she had almost reached her destination. The city of

Worcester lay in the valley before her, dominated by the square tower of what was

718 Perry, p. 66. 719 Ibid., p. 84. — 319 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______obviously the Cathedral. There were several other spires, one extraordinarily tall and slender. She had never seen a spire like it. She glanced at the constable, but finding his face still cold, she did not speak. Behind the city was a ring of hills, over which the late afternoon light cast a blue haze.

As they passed down the High Street, Sarah’s attention was taken by a large building decorated with Royal statues and a central fan-shaped entablature of gold at the roof-line. It was grander than any building in Stourbridge. The last stage of the journey was through

Edgar Tower, a heavy castellated gate abutted by a shop-front with mullioned windows.

Two women with parasols emerged from the shop and joined a child entertaining himself with a hoop.720 Not for the first time that day Sarah pondered the separateness of lives brushing past each other, unknowing, uncaring. She recalled the dizziness she had experienced as a child when she first became aware of her own separateness. The image she carried was of her hand polishing her aunt’s mirror when she was compelled by her reflection. She had held the edge of the table staring at herself as others saw her, would always see her, from the outside. She was overwhelmed at the days stretching into the future when she would always be who she was and no-one else. It was as though a strange lock had fastened around her. That odd sense had returned as the cart crossed the shadow of the Cathedral and halted at a small medieval castle built above the River Severn, which years later would be demolished and replaced by a boys’ school and playground. But the afternoon of Sarah’s arrival the castle setting was idyllic. A number of small square-sailed

720 Based on engraving by William Williams (c.1727-1791), ‘Edgar Tower’, Worcester City Museums, Resources, Old Pictures and Photographs Online (2001), http://www.worcestercitymuseums.org.uk/content/oldpics/cathx.htm. — 320 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______boats were reflected in the river, and a curl of smoke drifted from a nearby porcelain kiln.

‘Not a sparrow falls,’ she thought, as a guard opened the bailey gate.

Within the Castle Yard solid stone buildings confronted Sarah and above them, on the motte, was a narrow keep. Once her name was entered in the records the constable departed and Sarah was taken by a turnkey to the Day Room, a small area under an arch. There were some fifteen felons, men and women, seemingly at leisure, some lounged against a wall, while others played cards or dice. Many smoked pipes. She was aware that her entry had excited some attention. For a moment Sarah stood awkwardly with her small bundle dangling from her hand. The space was perhaps twelve feet by seven, to the side was a large pump with a barrel and dipper; in the middle was a square grating and beside it a hand-turned ventilator. Morning and evening men would use it to refresh their dungeon below. The dungeon, Sarah would learn, was a circular room, deep underground, with barrack beds.721 Once she had taken in her surroundings, Sarah walked towards a young woman also standing alone. Hannah Nash glanced at the older woman. She had been in gaol since May.

*

In the cell under the Guildhall, Sarah reached for Hannah Nash’s hand; it was dry and cold.

‘A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit,’ Sarah whispered. ‘Remember that, always.’ On the first night of her imprisonment Sarah had lain on her straw mattress and heard Hannah

Nash weeping. After a few nights she had gone to kneel at Hannah’s side. Over the

721 The description of the Castle Gaol is based on John Howard’s report; see John Howard, ‘Worcestershire: Oxford Circuit, Worcester’ (1777/1977), p. 322. — 321 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______following days she had pieced together the young woman’s jumbled outpourings about running into the orchard that early morning … the pains … not knowing … wanting to hide in the hovel above the pig-pen … falling into the grass … the baby’s whimpering … wrapping her apron over him … the shock of the slithering after-birth … falling asleep, or fainting from the shock … the baby cold and stiff across her breasts … going to the barn for a spade … the cow lowing … her duties … milking the animal … stoking the kitchen fire … preparing the mid-day meal … tossing the afterbirth into the ditch … digging black earth … sluicing herself at the well … returning with her pail to the cow … her forehead against its warm flank … her hands moving … the soft weight of the udder … thumbs opening and closing …up and down … milk foaming white in the pail … crying … walking to her mother in the village … weightless … telling of the miscarriage … she could not return … she must … her mother accompanying her … suspicions … accusations … the midwife squeezing milk from her nipple … showing where the baby was buried … running away.722

*

Sarah had soothed the young woman with words she had gleaned from Reverend Wesley and his followers. Then, on what was called Assize Sunday, the fragile strength which the young woman had gathered dissolved. The prisoners had woken that morning to the sounds of bells, trumpets and drums. Moving towards the Cathedral was a grand procession led by Sheriff’s Men in livery and carrying javelins, followed by coaches bearing wealthy guests in finery and two judges wearing the resplendent regalia and full wigs of their office.

722 These details are given in Hannah Nash’s depositions, which are exhaustive. — 322 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

In the Cathedral loft school choristers, wearing red cassocks and white cottas, sang jubilant hymns. The pageantry would have befitted a minor coronation.723

After the Cathedral service the prisoners accused of capital crimes, including Sarah and

Hannah, were lined up to await the townsfolk who had paid sixpence to inspect them.

Hannah stood shaking with her eyes closed and tears sliding from under her lashes. At the last moment, as most spectators were withdrawing, Hannah’s mother came through the gate; her daughter fell upon her shoulder, sobbing. Mrs. Nash reassured her she would be waiting in the Courtroom on Tuesday. Monday was always set aside for Court preparations including the empanelling of juries.

With little thought for the distress of the prisoners, Judges sometimes brought family with them to enjoy the entertainment. Baron Beaumont Hotham took his fourteen-year-old son with him on the Norfolk Circuit in 1783, which had fallen in the school holidays. The

Judge wrote good humouredly to his brother he had done it, thinking that he [the son] was safer and better employed with me, than at home teazing his mother to let him do every thing that he pleased, which he is just of an age to do, and probably to succeed in. He was much amused, by Riding about the country during the mornings, and going into Court with me in the afternoon, unless a Ball happened to interfere. 724

723 Descriptions of Assize Sunday rituals are a blend of those given by Gillen (1985), p. 60, and Ellen Wood (1814-1887), a writer who lived part of her early life near Worcester Cathedral; see Michael Flowers, ‘Ellen Wood’s Worcestershire Childhood’ (2006), http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk/childhood.html and Ellen Wood, ‘The Judiciary Service in Worcester Cathedral at the beginning of the High Court Judge's Sittings in the Shire Hall’ Worcester, England’, King’s School website, http://www.ksw.org.uk/community/JudgesDay/index.html. 724 Baron Hotham [Beaumont Hotham, 2nd Baron Hotham of South Dalton] (1737-1814), Letter, Norfolk Circuit 1783, Hotham Papers, Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, cited by Gillen (1985), p. 60. In — 323 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

When she returned to await her verdict Hannah was inconsolable: the coroner had dismembered her poor baby. The girl was sobbing as a guard led Sarah up the twisting stairs to stand before the judge taken to face her prosecutor, Samuel Mogridge. Emerging from the stairs Sarah was momentarily disoriented by the homely sound of an anvil and a strong smell of coffee,725 before she took her place in the extravagant courtroom with its array of lawyers and clerks and the judges in their long wigs and gold-braided red gowns.

They were surrounded by women wearing the best silks, the finest wools, embroidered heavily and ruffled with lace. Holding nosegays, the women smiled and nodded towards the

Bench. Sarah felt filthy, in spite of her sprigged dimity gown with flounced sleeves.

Outside she could hear the voices of students from the Cathedral School celebrating the traditional Judge’s Half, the half holiday the Senior King’s Scholar still requests, in Latin, of the Circuit Judge on the first morning of the Court. Above Sarah, the jury waited in their high gallery; she could almost feel their cold breath pass across her neck.

Before she looked at the floor to await what would be, Sarah, glanced at the window and was astonished by the image of the slender spire which had caught her interest as she jolted towards the city. Through the imperfections of the old glass it quivered like a reflection suspended, shimmering, on water. And it was so close she might almost have touched it.

Distracted, Sarah startled when the judge called her name for the reading of the indictment.

describing the celebrations of the Assize Circuits, Gillen also draws upon the work of Élie Halévy, England in 1815, Vol. 3, p. 152. 725 Worcester Guildhall rooms were leased as a coffee house and an ironmonger’s business at this time. — 324 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The other Worcestershire women who were transported to Botany Bay would also stare, fascinated, at the narrowness of the shining spire hewn from grey stone. Each woman,

Mary Abell (alias Tilley), Olive Gascoigne, Sarah Bellamy, Mary Turner and Ann Inett, would take her turn to stand before the judge, watched by the jury, ignored by the well- dressed women, who were whispering about the Assize Ball or, perhaps, greeting a judge’s teenage son. Under the image of the spire rippling in the glass, against the sounds of the anvil and children playing and, with the exception of Mary Turner (otherwise Wilkes), each woman would hear the dreaded words, Guilty: to be hanged by the neck until she is dead.

But for Sarah Davis, otherwise Ashley, the spire sang of her life, told of her sorrow and shame for it was the Glovers’ Needle, famed across the shire and beyond.

*

Hannah Nash and Mary Lewis, also accused of killing and murdering her Bastard male child, were found Not Guilty. Richard Wilkes, the cruel father was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment.

*

I made three trips from London to Worcester on the early train and stood several times in the old courtroom of the Guildhall, staring up towards the jury gallery as Sarah Davis,

Sarah Bellamy and the other women did so long ago. The gallery now sealed with plaster is an awkward oval structure under the ceiling where jurymen, their faces attentive, or critical, or just bored, once sat easing their buttocks on the hard chairs, before the Assize Ball celebrations. On each occasion I was drawn to the impressionistic quality of the spire — 325 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______created by the effects of imperfect glass. The helpful librarians in the History Centre were vague about when the church of St Andrew’s, from which the spire once rose, was demolished. But the spire, emblematic of Worcester’s glove makers, was preserved, leaving a trace of Sarah Davis’s story printed on the sky.

— 326 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______. 338a. . 338a. p

y], 7 Jul [ r y theMart , (1757-1772), Books 4, Vol. 1762, Order and Books Session Quarter next after the Feast of St Thomas the next after y, on on Tuesda holden 11. Sarah Davis, Indenture Certificate, Certificate, Indenture Davis, Sarah 11. Sessions

— 327 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 14

Sarah Bellamy of Belbroughton — A Poor Prisoner Speaks With Her Own Breath

*

Extracts from Belbroughton Vestry Minutes

5 February 1769 £. 2. 15. 0 to John Perrot 2 years rent of Richard Bellamy’s house and 20/- for the rent of widow Bellamy’s house. 10/- of which Mr. Collins already received of Timothy Bellamy her son.

10 June 1769 John Humphries to relieve Richard Bellamy and family with linnen and necessaries during their illness of the small pox.

5 July 1772 Thos. Bough to relieve Richard Bellamy’s wife with necessities so that she may go clean into the infirmary.

2 May 1773 … also that Richard Bellamy be relieved discretionally. Belbroughton Vestry Minutes726

*

Between 1774 and 1776, Richard Bellamy appears to have received regular payments from the parish, which is unusual unless the recipient was chronically sick, old or handicapped. Then … the payments were stopped, and the references are to casual relief. Some years later regular payments resumed. Madge Gibson727

726 Belbroughton Vestry Minutes (1769-1776), County Record Office, Worcester, cited by Madge Gibson, Belbroughton to Botany Bay (Belbroughton Historical Society 1987), p. 4. 727 Madge Gibson (1987), p. 4. In addition to the Vestry Minutes, Madge Gibson has drawn upon the Overseer’s Book, 1798-1802 (Belbroughton Historical Society). — 328 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Holy Trinity Parish Church Belbroughton Richard Bellamy m Elizabeth Staunton 16th November 1755 (by banns) Curate: Witnesses: John Wylde William Taylor and John Perkes

Thomas Mary Elizabeth John Margaret Sarah Phebe Richard 1 August 16 April 10 May 29 April 20 May 3 February 24 February 21 July 1756 1759 1761 1766 1767 1769/1770 1775 1776 New Style

12. Staunton-Bellamy Marriage and Children’s Baptisms. 728

In January 1770, some six months after a great sea captain had witnessed the planet Venus transiting like a round black seed across the fiery surface of the sun and was sailing in quest of the Great Unknown Southern Continent, Terra Australis Incognita, an infant girl was born at Belbroughton, a few miles from Old Swinford. The Enlightenment quest for knowledge and James Cook’s Endeavour commissions were an iteration point in the geometry of this infant’s unimaginable future in a distant land.

The infant was Sarah Bellamy, sixth child of Richard and Elizabeth Bellamy (née

Staunton). Given the family’s contraction of smallpox in the first months of the pregnancy it was a marvel, a miracle, that the baby had not miscarried; unless of course the mother had once been infected with cowpox; or the infection was chicken-pox and not small-pox. 729

The latter is the most likely because there were no family mortalities from the infection.730

728 Belbroughton Parish Register (Microfilm 20/1), Worcester Library and History Centre, Trinity Street, Worcester. 729 ‘Smallpox: Historical Significance’, WHO, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/smallpox/en. Given the lethal nature of smallpox I have assumed that Elizabeth Bellamy would have immunity. 730 Willibrord Rutten, ‘Smallpox, Subfecundity, and Sterility: A Case Study from a Nineteenth-Century Dutch Municipality’, The Social History of Medicine, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1993), p. 85. — 329 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

In any case this baby brought to the baptismal font at Holy Trinity on the first Sunday of

February 1770 — the same font at which Sarah Davis’s mother was baptized — might, with hindsight, be seen to have been born under some fortunate alignment of planets; or, more realistically, the child simply possessed a winning sweetness which would protect her when, as an uneducated village girl of fifteen, she committed a foolhardy act and was thus cast into the tangles of an erratic criminal code, a maelstrom released by a colonial rebellion and Britain’s expansion interests.

Not least of Sarah’s blessings was Belbroughton’s parish administration. Overseers had given the family rooms in a brick house with a porch where roses and clematis climbed in spring, and a large back garden for flowers and vegetables. In addition the family that baptismal morning was comfortable in the good linen which had been a gift from Mr.

Humphries when the family was ill seven months before.

13. Baptismal font, Belbroughton. Font at which Sarah Bellamy and Sarah Davis’s mother, Betty Badger, were baptized. Photographer: Mary Jordan, 1 June 2006. (Image reproduced with permission)

— 330 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

With Elizabeth soothing the baby and Richard shepherding John and Margaret, the family walked from the hilltop churchyard where druids might once have danced, and turned down the gentle slope towards the houses 4 and 8 Queens Hill. These red brick dwellings were let to the overseers of the poor of Belbroughton and occupied by paupers of the said parish and which gardens adjoin on the North and East to the close of land herein before mentioned and the said tenements front to the said road leading through the village of

Belbroughton towards the mill …731

14. Nos. 4 and 8 Queens Hill, Belbroughton, where Sarah Bellamy lived until she was nine. Photographer: Mary Jordan, 1 June 2006. (Image reproduced with permission)

The curate who baptized Sarah was the same Reverend Mr. Wylde who had been Betty

Badger’s curate before her marriage to Thomas Davis; and the same curate who would later identify Sarah Bellamy’s nephew as John Bellamy (baptized 27 May 1781), a Bastard son of Mary Bellamy which she fathered upon John Jandy.732 In the greenish glow of the microfiche in Worcester Historical Library I followed a phantom of the Reverend as he entered Holy Trinity’s vestry and opened the Baptismal Register. Elizabeth and Richard

731 Excerpt from parish document, 1783, loaned to Belbroughton History Society by Mr. W. A. Allen and cited by Madge Gibson (1987), p. 2. 732 ‘Christenings 1781’, Belbroughton Parish Registers (Microfiche), Worcestershire Library and History Centre, Trinity Street, Worcester, WR1 2PW. Note: The initial letter of the father’s family name was unclear. — 331 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Bellamy had been one of his first marriages under banns as required by Lord Hardwicke’s

Marriage Act 1753;733 they were a virtuous couple, worthy of respect. Unlike some they had faced the misfortune of Richard’s ill health with prayer and fortitude, grateful for parish welfare. Of course, to give to the poor was a spiritual duty. Mr. Wylde, Gentleman, paused, and then reached for a quill; it was timely that he again preached from Matthew 25. He would begin with the verses 44-46: Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.734 The curate, beginning to write, resolved to bequest a sum of money to the parish poor; surely to do otherwise would put his very salvation in jeopardy. Besides, it was proper that he set an example. And so he would late write: I also give and bequeath to my son John Wylde and to my good friend

William Clarke of Belbroughton aforesaid Gentleman the sum of twenty pounds upon trust to distribute and divide the value unto amongst such poor persons of the parish of Bell

Broughton as they the said ministers in their discretion shall think proper. 735

On the last page of the Baptismal Register allocated for 1769 Mr. Wylde, absorbed in planning his will and a forthcoming sermon, recorded Sarah Bellamy’s baptism, 3

February. The ink had not dried before he realized his mistake: on a recent and rare visit, his Rector, dutifully inspecting the Church Registers, had remarked that since 1752 records

733 Picard, p. 188. 734 Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version (Oxford University Press, Amen Corner), p. 838. 735 Last Will and Testament of the Reverend John Wylde, 23 January 1784: Probate granted 22 May 1788, No. 11/1166, National Archives, Kew, Documents online, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. — 332 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______should have followed the Gregorian calendar.736 There was nothing for it but to complete the date of Sarah’s baptism with the year 1770 followed by the letters, n. s.: New Style.737

The curate stared at the notation wondering, not for the first time, how the first day of

January, the Seventh day of Christmas, had ever come to mark the beginning of the year.

He had long resisted such a change because it confounded spiritual sense: Lady Day, 25

March, marking as it did the Anniversary of the Archangel’s descent and the Annunciation of the Holy Child’s advent, was the year’s true beginning. Lady Day heralded the coming of the Messiah. Even the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, would have been more fitting.

Thus Sarah Bellamy’s name was registered in Holy Trinity’s vestry archives; her parents’ poverty making her a poor child of the parish. Although there does not seem to be evidence that poor parishioners of Belbroughton were required to wear a pauper’s badge on an outer garment, the constancy of the word poor in the Bellamy family’s daily lives had to be a circumscribing force in the child’s nurturing space. Poor was an epithet both protective and disabling: in return for shelter it taught obedience, compliance; the child would have quickly learned her social status and what her family must and must not do.

While Sarah was learning the weight of the word poor she would not have blamed anyone for their status; that was the family’s lot, what the Lord had given. She saw that in spite of his weakened constitution her father, when he was able, worked in Mr. Wylde’s garden, in

736The calendar changes are noted by Picard, p. 182; see corresponding Note 31, p. 334. For an extended article on the anger and confusion caused by the change to the Gregorian Calendar see, Robert Poole, ‘"Give Us Our Eleven Days!" Calendar Reform in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, No. 149 (November 1995), pp. 95-139. 737 Belbroughton Parish Register, Baptisms, 1739-1800, Vol. 3, Worcester History Centre, Microfilm Ref: X988.52. — 333 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______local fields, and in forges of the ironmongers and scythe-makers where he pumped the bellows and shovelled charcoal, proud to work in the village’s ancient industry.738

In the months when Richard Bellamy was well enough, he would carry his father’s old scythe to the fields and after the mowing would carefully select hollow wheat stalks with firm ears from the last swathe that his children might weave corn dollies to honour the gift of fertile earth. The children would cast the dollies into a field on Plough Monday, the

Monday following Twelfth Night, after which farm work was resumed, for the cycles of planting and harvesting were still governed by equinox, solstice, moon and sun: the pagan and the Christian melded in commonsense knowledge of the seasons.739

15. Stooking the Sheaves. Photographer: Gillian Nott.740 (Image reproduced with permission)

‘Remember, seven corn ears for the ‘seven years of plenty,’741 the father would say, nodding, admiring his sixth child’s nimble fingers as she wove the stalks into one figure or

738 This industry was carried on at Belbroughton at least as early as 1564, when 'John Smythe, sythesmythe,’ was the defendant in a suit; see Quarter Sessions Records, cited by J. W. Willis-Bund (ed.), 'Parishes: Belbroughton', A History of the County of Worcester, Vol. 3 (1913), pp. 11-19, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=43080. 739 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough; A New Abridgement, edited with Introduction and Notes by Robert Fraser, 1st publ., 1890 (Oxford University Press 1998), pp. 553-554. 740 See Gillian Nott (ed.), ‘Frequently Asked Questions — Straw’, A Granary Article, Guild of Straw Craftsmen (18 August 2005), http://www.strawcraftsmen.co.uk/faq_straw.html. 741 M. Lambeth, Discovering Corn Dollies, 1st publ., 1974 (Shire Publications 1994), p. 42. — 334 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______another and turned to helping the younger children to neaten their skrobble.742 John was little interested. Sarah was particularly fond of making a female figure and a crown. Once,

Sarah’s father had given Sarah a Staffordshire Knot. As the child turned it over he told her that it was originally made in memory of three vagabonds who, as they stood before the gallows, were told by the sheriff that the one who could devise a knot to hang them all at once would go free. Sarah had looked at him with such alarm that he told her it was just a foolish tale and that truly the knot was the heraldic emblem of the Earls of Stafford.

16. Staffordshire Knot. Dolly and photograph by Gillian Nott. 743 (Image reproduced with permission)

For the remainder of the day Sarah had looked at him with the expression of an offended cat ready to flee; her father resolved to be more careful with his stories. In the evening he distracted her with an old seed rhyme: One for Rook, and one for Crow/ One to rot and one to grow,744 and when they sat at the table he made her laugh by looking at her sideways and saying, ‘Ar bet yow cud ate a scabby ’oss.’ At other times as they sat down he would say,

742 Skrobble: tangle. Ian Beach, The Ancient Manor of Sedgley: "Ow we spake", online (2007), http://www.sedgleymanor.com/dictionaries/dialect.html. 743 Gillian Nott, The Granary, The Guild of Straw Craftsmen, http://www.strawcraftsmen.co.uk/index.html. Gillian Nott generously sent me this image. 744 Gillian Nott, ‘FAQ: Straw’ Online. — 335 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

‘Get sum bostin’ fittle down your larup.’745 Those were the happy times; times the father was well enough to work.

*

First John and then Margaret, according to their age and strength, joined their father tying the sheaves and stooking them until their arms glowed as brown as beech nuts. By the time that Sarah was sufficiently strong for such work, babby Phebe and the father’s namesake,

Richard, were toddling, and Margaret and Sarah alternated work in the field and helping their mother because she was so often mithered.746At other times the mother would look at the older children with exasperation, telling them to stop mithering her with their blaberen an’ blaberen, and to take the little ones for a walk so she might rest. ‘Day turn yow back on the babbies,’747 their mother inevitably insisted as the children escaped; ‘An’ day goo by

The Holly.’ The girls would hurry away to ramble in Dark Lane or Gorse Green Lane and across the expansive pastures of the Commons,748 taking turns to carry the younger babby.

Sometimes they went as far as Badger Copse to study the setts with old straw and leaves of past beddings about the entrances. In midsummer they nipped a few foxglove blossoms to wear on their fingers, waggling them at each other and the babbies in fairy exchanges, for the thulian pink of the blossoms faded to cream where the petals folded back like the frilled brim of a bonnet. Afterwards, with gooseberries — goose-gobs — in their aprons they

745 Jon Wood, ‘[Black Country] Dialect Stands the Test of Time’, article, The Stourbridge Chronicle (Thursday 14 July 2005), p. 16. Bostin’ fittle’: satisfying food (as in ‘bursting vittles’). Larup is obviously metaphorical because larupin means to ‘beat’ or ‘thrash’; see, Ian Beach,"Ow we spake", online (2007). 746 Mithered: harassed, confused by pestering. Thought to be from the Anglo-Saxon word, meðe, weary, tired. See E. Mein, Notes and Queries, Vol. s.9-VI, No. 157 (16 December 1900), p. 510. It is a word my mother used; it is still current with older people in the Black Country. 747 Day: don’t. 748 Until the Enclosure Act of 1799 there were five hundred acres of unhedged Commons at Belbroughton. See J. W. Willis-Bund (ed.), 'Parishes: Belbroughton', British History Online. — 336 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______meandered homewards, often diverting past The Holly, so they might see the gypsy caravans.

*

Black Country speech … contains inflexions no longer used in everyday English. I bin, thee bist, we bist, yo bin, they bin are declensions of the verb to be. Will becomes woon or woot and a is often sounded as o. … Black Country humour is also characteristic … J. H. Ingram749

*

Thus until she was nine and Margaret was twelve Sarah Bellamy’s childhood was ordinary enough, even idyllic. Elbows on the table, chins propped on their hands the sisters gleaned kitchen wisdoms as they watched their mother turning the intestines of a pig into tasty chitterlings, or making faggots by seasoning offal and breadcrumbs and baking them in kell. 750 At other times she set aside the sweet breasts of rooks, and soaked remaining portions for a day and a night to remove the bitterness. Years later, nostalgia for her mother’s boney pie with its filling of tender meat, turnips and potatoes flavoured with herbs would trail through Sarah’s dreams, like bedstraw clinging to her skirts when she was a child wandering the commons. 751 It was a dish impossible to reproduce.

*

As in all of England’s parishes Belbroughton held regular services and parish feasts and festivals, including the beating of the bounds, on Rogation Sunday. Lulled by Mr. Wylde’s

749J. H. Ingram, North Midland Country, 1st publ., 1947 (Batsford 1948), p. 29. Ingram also notes the characteristic features of Black Country humour. 750 Pat Purcell, Bostin’ Fittle, 1st publ., 1978 (Black Country Society 1998), p. 4. Kell is stomach lining. 751 Bedstraw (gallium aparine): also called goose-grass, cleavers and catchweed. — 337 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______long prayers and sermons in his elevated pulpit, Sarah studied the shapes and patterns of the church which were visible above the high-backed pews. Close under the roof of the South

Aisle was a faded image of a slender woman. Graceful in a flowing garment with a small train and a dark apron, the figure stood beneath an arch supported by columns, around which the tendril of a vine was coiling.752

The child squinted; the image pulled her like an almost vanished memory, or an escaping dream. What most compelled Sarah was the reverent attention the figure was paying to an open book which she held in her hand. Sarah imagined herself wearing such a garment and standing in a grand garden-hall, her gaze intent upon a book. She wanted to read; children should learn to read. Sometimes at night before she fell asleep, the figure floated against her closed eyelids. She could not explain the arrival of the image; it was like the face of her tabby cat and other images of birds, dragonflies, flowers and kitchen utensils which came and went unbidden before she fell asleep. It was as though she could look into a small cave opening from her eyelids. Sarah held her breath and stared into the cave willing the reading figure not to disappear.753

Many years later at Petersham Hill in New South Wales, when Sarah had become a property owner and a widow with three living children — she had borne eight — she rented her kitchen and an adjoining room to a Jeremiah Cavanaugh in return for his teaching her

752 The fresco does exist in the south aisle. See Madge Jones (previously Gibson), Rectors and Restorations: Belbroughton Church in the Nineteenth Century (Belbroughton History Society 2006), p.2. 753 The phenomena have been termed hypnagogic images by the neuroscientist Robert Stickgold. His experiments suggest the experience is to do with the laying down of memories in the neo-cortex. For a report of a relevant study see, Robert Stickgold, April Malia, Denise Maguire, David Roddenberry, Margaret O'Connor, ‘Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics’, Science, New Series, Vol. 290, No. 5490 (13 October 2000), pp. 350-353. — 338 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______children, George (1796), Ann (1798) and Elizabeth (1802), to read.754 Perhaps she was inspired by the faded fresco in her childhood church. The father of Sarah’s children’s was

James Bloodworth (sometimes Bloodsworth) (1759-1804),755 a convict who was largely responsible for the design and the erection of Australia's first buildings.756 Bloodworth was emancipated in 1790, and in September 1791 he was appointed Master Bricklayer. During

1789 he had built Sarah a brick cottage with a window and hearth. The Governor offered

Bloodworth a return passage to England, but the emancipist declined; I like to think that was because of Sarah. When he died in 1804 James Bloodworth was given a public funeral.

The Sydney Loyal Association escorted the cortège with muffled drums, and the body was laid in the town cemetery with military honours.757 The couple would have met when Sarah was transferred from Worcester Castle Gaol to Southwark, although it seems they did not develop a relationship until they were living in the colony.

*

In 1779, as poor children of the parish, Sarah and her sister, Margaret, were indentured.

Sarah became an apprentice in housewifery to James Spurrier of Bell Inn where she would develop skills in general domestic duties, including cottage industries and farm chores: in the eighteenth century the gendered division of labour was not as marked as it would later become.758 Sarah must have shown a special aptitude for textiles because by the time she

754 Gillen (1989), p. 32. 755 Gillen records that James Bloodworth was born at Kingston-on-Thames and was imprisoned at Southwark and transported for an untraced crime, Gillen (1989), p. 39. 756 Morton Herman, ‘Bloodsworth, James ([c1759]-1804)’, ADB Online, Vol. 1 (Melbourne University Press 1966), p. 122, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010112b.htm. 757 Morton Herman, ADB Online (1966), p. 122. 758 Bridget Hill examines the complex roles of women in the domestic, industrial and agricultural economy of eighteenth century England. See especially, ‘Women’s Work in the Family Economy’, Chapter 3 (1989/1994), pp. 24-46. As mentioned in the previous footnotes, Hill’s chapter on female apprenticeship is — 339 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______was fifteen she was working for Benjamin Hadon, a weaver in Dudley. Most parish apprenticeships extended until the age of twenty-one, although there might be other terms.

The vestry documents in which Sarah Bellamy’s indenture was filed were too fragile for me to view, so it is impossible to know the exact terms of her contract.

*

Keith Snell has drawn attention to the loose way in which terms like ‘housewifery’ were used, commenting how terminological indiscrimination in indentures was common between ‘servant’, ‘servant in husbandry’, ‘house servant’, ‘house servant in husbandry and ‘housewifery’. … We should not assume that ‘housewifery’ in the eighteenth century meant the equivalent of housework today. Bridget Hill759

It [housewifery] represented a quite deliberate choice by parish authorities as the most likely training to fit children to become financially independent. Bridget Hill760

*

Belbroughton historian, Madge Gibson, in her publication, From Belbroughton to Botany

Bay (1987), had identified the location of Sarah’s apprenticeship as the Malt House, at the village of Fairfield. However, during a 2006 visit to England my husband met Madge

Gibson (now Jones) and she had by then discovered that Spurrier’s Malt House was at Bell

End, and was known as Bell Inn. Serendipitously, Bell Inn still exists, and was popular with some Australian and Stourbridge friends. The fusion of Sarah’s Bell Inn apprenticeship

also valuable in understanding the nature of experiences such as those of Sarah Davis and Sarah Bellamy. See Chapter 6, pp. 85-102. 759 Keith Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge 1985), p. 283, note 30, cited by Hill (1989/1994), p. 48. 760 Hill (1989/1994), p. 100. — 340 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______with close friendships generated a small magnetic charge: I would return to England seeking a child phantom.

*

One of our Stourbridge friends, a Welsh fairy woman, a small sibyl, whose name means

‘Gift’, had already taken a special place as my guide to the histories of the Black Country.

On my first visit to Belbroughton, she had stood on a medieval bridge in Dark Lane wearing a foxglove blossom, digitalis purpurea, on her right index finger. The sibyl’s fine hands were bent, painful with arthritis, worn from years of needlework, marking assignments, writing lessons, transforming houses, baking and writing in the old calligraphies. With her flowered finger she beckoned her daughter and me from our car.

Her daughter, Mary, cut the engine, laughing as she silenced the anxious voice of the computer still insisting on the next left turn: the deep gloom of canopied leaves in Dark

Lane was far beyond the range of satellite navigation. In the green shadows the older woman’s hair was like a puff of light, a nimbus. As we approached she pointed to an oak tree on the right where the rill tumbled foaming over a small weir polished by the falling water. She told us that it would have been a very small sapling when Sarah was a child.

‘But that one,’ she said, indicating with her left hand the tree above the other side of the bridge, ‘that one, would have been quite a large tree even then. It is probably four or five hundred years old.’ On that side the water flowed into a black pond, glossy as onyx. We leaned over the coping stone. ‘The hedgerows and fields would have been much the same,’ she said. We wandered a little way identifying plants which grew beyond the canopy where the sunlight fell across the hedgerow and fields. Willow herb (epilobium angustifium) with — 341 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______its long stalks of pink flowers grew freely and bedstraw, or goose-grass, tangled with the white trumpets of bindweed over brambles, briars and gooseberries. We were looking for teasels (dipsacus fullonum), the giant thistles once used for napping woollen cloth, and sometimes mistakenly thought to have been used for carding the staples, perhaps because the Latin word for thistle is carduus.761

We found a safe turning at Giles’ Farm — the lane was meant for carts — and returned to the village of Belbroughton, passing Field House Farm again, without navigational directions from a satellite. At the parish church of Belbroughton, Holy Trinity, we wandered about the old graves, disappointed that most were unreadable. At the lych-gate fallen beech nuts opened like small four-pointed stars with a velvet sheen. The nuts were dehydrated, fibrous in the mouth, inedible; Sarah would have gathered them when they were fresh and sweet. During the afternoon we had begun speaking of Sarah: as though she were a living person, a friend, who was just absent for the moment: an absent presence, a trace haunting our language, stretching between past and future, an effect of desire, of obsession.762

At tea my guide, she is Dodo to the family, gave me a booklet about Thomas Gainsborough

(1727-1788),763 saying that he was of the period and his landscapes and scenes of wooded lanes and farm work would have been similar to those of the Stourbridge-Belbroughton district. ‘And this cart would have been identical to the one Sarah begged to be whipped

761 An experienced spinner and archivist wrote that the misconception is usually fostered by those who have never tried it; see June R. Lewis, From Fleece to Fabric: A Practical Guide to Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving (Robert Hale 1983), p. 45. 762 This is my very understanding of Derrida’s use of différance and archive fever. 763 Mary Woodall, Thomas Gainsborough, Blandford Art Series (Blandford Press 1970). — 342 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______behind on market day,’764 Dodo said. She then turned to A Peasant Girl Gathering Sticks

(1782),765 remarking that it was painted when Sarah Bellamy was twelve years old, and that the girl would be about nine, the age Sarah was indentured.

‘Rather better fed,’ her son-in-law, Pete, an artist, remarked.

While the wistfulness, the sadness, in the turned face was in keeping with a child separated from her family and working long hours as an apprentice on a farm, Pete’s quick comment had identified a dissonance in the portrait which was more than a matter of diet: the bodice’s torn neckline exposing plump luminous shoulders, the figure’s expression, her isolation before a broken tree, beneath a melancholy drift of bruised clouds, suggested the vulnerability, the sexual vulnerability, of a poor girl child. It was markedly different from the artist’s painting of his two little daughters,766 depicted holding hands as they hurried along a verdant garden path in their pale glossy gowns and slippers. The ‘Peasant Girl’ belongs to the genre of fancy pictures, marked by elements of imagination, invention or storytelling.767 The portrait was an educated male’s figment of poor female children like

Sarah Bellamy, Mary Mullens and Mary Fowles; as this ‘unthinkable history’ is the figment, the dream, of an educated woman over two centuries later. As in many ways are all historiographies, figments: copies of copies without the original, the accumulated traces

764 Gillen (1989), p. 31. Unfortunately, Gillen does not cite the source of this information. The Jury verdict merely notes that Sarah Bellamy ‘prayed’ (ASSI 5/ 105/36). Madge Gibson cites the source as PRO [ASSI] 5/105/ (Pt 3), Gibson (1987), p. 7 and Note 5, p. 26. 765 Woodall, p. 60. 766 Woodall, The Painter’s Daughters Catching a Butterfly: late Ipswich work, oil on canvas, 44 ¾ in. x 41¼ (National Gallery, London). 767 The term was first used in 1727 and applied to Gainsborough’s paintings of imagined peasant and beggar children; see ‘Glossary’, Tate Gallery Online, http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=101. — 343 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______of absences. Unfettered by a fear of the absent subject Gainsborough used dolls as models for his portraiture figures, a method discernible in the slackness of the figures’ spines, the dangle of their limbs.

We cleared the table leaving the mementos of Belbroughton: a saucer with the opened beech-nuts and a small spray of foxglove. Wise herbalist women in Sarah’s time knew that the plant cured dropsy caused by failing hearts, a condition suffered by Elizabeth Beckford, a seventy year old woman who would eventually be Sarah’s mess companion on the Lady

Penrhyn. Mrs Beckford died on the voyage.768 When Sarah Bellamy was a child, William

Withering (1744-1799), one of the Lunar Men, who lived a few miles north in Birmingham, learnt of the plant’s curative properties from such a wise woman, Mrs. Hutton from

Shropshire.769 Not surprisingly, Withering’s name is always recorded as the discoverer of digitalis and that of the woman is virtually forgotten. However, instead of accepting the accumulated female wisdom, Withering was driven by the eighteenth century obsession with empiricism and so lost a few patients as he experimented with the herbalist’s treatments. In Jenny Uglow’s telling words, [Withering’s] subjects — as disposable as

[Joseph] Priestley’s mice — were the poor of Birmingham.770

*

768 Robert Hughes missed the fact of Elizabeth Beckford’s death in his essential and comprehensive work, The Fatal Shore; see Hughes (1987), p. 72. It is a logical supposition that the organization of convict mess groups on the Lady Penrhyn followed the order of names in Smyth’s muster list (1979), pp. 4-7. 769 Cheryl Hogue (ed.), ‘Digoxin: Typical Cardiac Drug’, Chemical and Engineering News, Vol. 83, No. 23 (20 June 2005), http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8325/8325digoxin.html. 770 Uglow (2003), p. 276. Joseph Priestley (1743-1804) was one of the ‘Lunar Men’ of Birmingham, to which Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus (1731-1802), belonged. — 344 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The next time I visited Stourbridge it was again full summer and oaks and elms shaded our walk down the gravel path to the Bell Inn, which dates from 1577, and is one of the many inns in which King Charles is incorrectly said to have rested in his flight from

Worcester,771 when that city had succumbed to Cromwell’s forces. The slate tiles of the old part of the building dip in gentle undulations as though the rafters have sighed. On our left was the barn, and suspended from a curved iron bar in the raked roof, which linked the barn to the inn’s more recent wing, was the eponymous bell, once used to call labourers to and from the fields in the seasonal and diurnal patterns of a farm year. The original kitchen area was easily identifiable because of the aged rafters, the hearth surrounded by a simple but finely adzed mantelpiece, and the flagstones, hollowed at the threshold and glowing like forest earth polished with honey. Above the mantelpiece was a detailed eighteenth century engraving of the room as it would have been when Sarah first stood on those hollowed stones, which were already two hundred years old. The image with the spinning wheel, baskets, hanging herbs and hams overlaid the present room like a transparency; and once again it seemed I was standing where time had left an eternalized fragment in the room.

Reluctantly I turned away, knowing that behind me there was the phantom movement of a nine year girl standing by a hearth-fire easing blue fleece through the finger-tips of her right hand to the lift and drop of her left wrist, in the rhythmic twisting of her spindle. A slow flush of delight suffused her face as after so many failures the fleece was suddenly spooling into unbroken thread.

771 See J. W. Willis-Bund, ‘Parishes: Belbroughton’, pp. 11-19, British History Online.

— 345 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

17. The Bell of Bell Inn. Photographer: Mary Jordan 2006. (Image reproduced with permission)

Beyond the walkway, where the bell now hangs, we turned into the garden above the brick barn which is patterned with open crosses, perhaps for the access of pigeons or for ventilation during the roasting of barley and hops; after all, when Sarah Bellamy was an apprentice, ordinary barns were often adapted for the processing of grain. During Sarah’s apprenticeship, there would have been a strong smell of malting barley and fermentation mingled with the more unpleasant odour of a fermentation vat containing woad (isatis tinctoria) and aged urine: [a]ll fermentation vats have a smell, the urine vats generally being the worst.772 The processing of woad leaves releases the compound indoxyl, a derivative of another compound called indole, a precursor of indigo, and which passed through digestion systems causes the odour of faeces.773 There were no smells of a working farmyard during my visit. In their stead was a well-groomed lawn and delicate scarlet flutes of mobretia sprays (iradeae crocosmia) scribbled through lush borders of lavender, white daisies, and the small pale blue blossoms of plumbago (plumbago

772 J. N. Liles, ‘Fermentation Vats’, excerpt from The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing: Traditional Recipes for Modern Use (University of Tennessee Press 1990), http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u3tc/u3materials/natDye.html, [Accessed 7 May 2007]. This short extract was an informative supplement to Rita Buchanan’s guidelines in her well-illustrated texts, A Weaver's Garden: Growing Plants for Natural Dyes and Fibers, 1st publ., 1987, (Dover Publications 1999), and A Dyer's Garden: From Plant to Pot Growing Dyes for Natural Fibers (Interweave Press 1995). 773An explanation of the chemistry of indigo (and woad) is given by Rita Buchanan (1999), pp. 102 ff. — 346 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______auriculata). Then, as I followed the flight of a furry bumble-bee, the size of a baby’s hand, it hovered at the end of the path, directly above another small sign of the past resisting erasure: a tiny, fragile, teasel once cultivated in the garden for napping fabric.

On 7 February 1779, a few days past her ninth birthday, Sarah crossed the threshold of Malt

House Farm with a sickening tightness in her stomach and the memory of her mother’s anxious voice instructing her to make sure she learned to milk cows for it would protect her from the small pox.

Mrs. Spurrier welcomed Sarah and led her into the kitchen, where warmth from the hearth was suffused with the homely smell of simmering beef in a pot suspended over the coals by a chimney crane. For a moment the child was distracted; there were so many things to see; she was aware of small paned windows overlooking distant woods, nearby fields ploughed for sowing and winter meadows where black-faced sheep grazed on strewn fodder. The warm room was long and narrow. The child’s lips were slightly parted in wonder as she looked up to see bunches of herbs, smoked hams, shining pitchers and willow baskets, hanging from the beams. Standing within the warmth of the hearth was a spinning wheel set beside a bow-backed chair and a basket filled with astonishing blue fleeces, from the palest shade of starling eggs, through the colour of periwinkle flowers (vinca major) to the darkest, richest blue, like the blue of stained glass in Holy Trinity.774 Sarah took a step towards the basket.

774 The description is based on the black and white engraving which still hangs above the mantelpiece. — 347 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

For a child taken from her family to a farm, February 1779 was a gentle month. Balmy days followed the ice of January, which had been stored in the icehouse,775 cherry plums already bloomed and the meadows were greening. Mrs. Spurrier repeated many times that a person would think ’twas April, what with the flowers so advanced776 and the rooks patching their nests, a sign that sowing might begin.

Curled on her lonely cot Sarah counted the days until Sunday when she would see her family at Holy Trinity. For a few minutes she would be surrounded by them, her baby sister pulling at her petticoat. She had so much to say, so much to tell about the colours of the blue wool which tainted her fingers with its smell, the spinning wheel and the loom, the mill, the sheep and the hens, and the white cat in the barn which had kittens; and, perhaps most magical of all, the little door behind the kitchen garden which opened into a buried room where ice was stored from one winter to the next.

18. A Worcestershire Icehouse, Avoncroft, Museum of Buildings, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.777

775 An introduction to the architecture of icehouses and harvesting of ice is given by Tim Buxbaum, Icehouses, 1st publ., 1992 (Shire Publications 2002). It is likely Bell Inn had an ice-house. 776 For a very useful work giving phenological and agricultural details for the period 1758-1795 see The Diary of Janet Burnet 1758-1795, edited by Mowbray Pearson (Canongate Press 1994). Burnet lived in Aberdeenshire and, although that is some distance, I have taken her descriptions and records as an indicator of the Midlands situation. 777 See Tim Buxbaum (2002), p. 31. The capacity of this ice-house chamber was twenty-five tons. It is likely that a well-to-do Malt House Farm would have an icehouse and that it would be similar. (Permission to reproduce the image has been granted by the curator of Avondale Museum). — 348 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Yet, in spite of her night-time rehearsals, when Sarah was briefly surrounded by her family in the churchyard she could say nothing, or almost nothing. She returned to Bell Inn, the voiceless stories in her mouth causing waves of misery she must control until that evening when she was alone in her nook against a chimney wall. She would awaken on Monday morning, subdued, her eye-lids swollen, as she helped soak linen in the tub of water and urine, three buckets of water to one bucket of urine, before she dusted the furniture, swept the floors and polished the pewter.

*

To Get Spots of Ink out of Linne [linen] Cloth Before that you suffer it to be washed, lay it all night in urine, the next day run all the spots in the urine as if you were washing in water; then lay it in more urine another night and then rub it again, and so do till you find they be quite out. Hannah Woolley, The Compleat Servant-Maid778

*

The March of 1779 was also remarkably warm and by the middle of the month there were bostin’ days, like summer almost. Sarah helped to plant woad for late summer harvesting.

In June the plants grown in November would be harvested, and Sarah would at last learn the secrets of blue hidden in the woad plants’ lush green leaves, which looked rather like spinach. The days were so warm the cattle were left in the meadow at night, the orchard trees were in full blossom, and when Mrs Spurrier saw the strawberries in flower she told

Sarah it would soon be time to collect urine for the fermentation vat set behind the barn,

778 Hannah Woolley, The Compleat Servant-Maid or, The Young Maidens Tutor: Directing them …, 4th Edn, 1st publ., 1677 (Tho. Passinger, at the Three Bibles on London-Bridge 1685), see, ‘Lye and Chamber Lye’, Old and Interesting, http://www.oldandinteresting.com/washing-with-lye.aspx, [Accessed 5 May 2007]. — 349 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______where it would age in the sun. Sarah, head down, went inside and arranged the sad irons,779 on the hearth, quietly humming the joyful tune Summer is icumen in/ Loud sing cuckoo/ as she spread an old blanket on the table for ironing. Forgetting for a short time the clench of loneliness, she stifled a laugh at the words, Bullock starteth, buck farteth/ Merry sing cuckoo.

In the first week of December 1781, the close of the second year of Sarah’s apprenticeship, there was snow followed by rain and wind. Sarah had grown familiar with the ways of the household and garden, and knew the farm in all its seasons. She had seen the gardeners collecting ice from the mill stream and learned the secret of releasing the blue dye from young woad plants. She had helped soak the torn leaves in water, poured the fluid with the bronze surface from the blue sediment, and learned that once the sediment had been transformed into dried powder the colour would disappear when it was added to vat of fermented (aged) urine. Sarah’s mouth had opened in surprise as the deep colour gradually returned, transferred to the fleece, as over one or two days it was soaked in the vat and intermittently lifted into the air.

Everything about processing wool fascinated Sarah: the way the flock must be run through the mill stream before shearing, sorting the shorn fleece according to staples, lowering it into the stream in a basket for further gentle washing. Sarah had also helped beat the woven

779 Sad: a Black Country colloquialism for heavy. See Dave Mellor, ‘Colloquial Slang from the Black Country …’ Black Country Vocabulary, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Dave_Mellor/slang.htm. This is another example of the remnants of Old English features of Black Country Dialect for in Old English the word for solid was sæd. — 350 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______material in the stream after rubbing it with fuller’s earth, a white clay, for the last scouring and to tighten the weave. Afterwards the fabric was stretched on tenterhooks to dry.

On 9 December, the Sabbath, a day of rest, and the day she should have seen her family at

Holy Trinity, Sarah awakened from one of her recurring dreams of walking between yellow clouds of woad blossoms carrying a washed fleece with its fresh animal smell of greasy wool and summer pastures. She was aware that someone was following her, a woman, who remained out of sight; at times it seemed to be ‘the lady’, at other times she sensed it was her mother or Mrs. Spurrier. As Sarah was about to slide the wetted out fleece into the fermentation vat she was awakened by shouting coming across the field from the mill stream.

Her first thought was to run into the garden; however Mrs. Spurrier, more than usually severe, ordered her to stay inside and attend to breakfast. Automatically the girl stirred the porridge and, although she did not dare to disobey, several times she straightened to peer through the window’s melting frost flowers. Mrs. Spurrier’s maid was also in the kitchen and like Sarah, anxious. They dared not gossip because Mrs. Spurrier, stern-faced, was coming and going. Several carts rattled by above the barn before Mr. Spurrier announced that the gardener had discovered the body of a child floating face down in the stream. Sarah heard Mrs. Spurrier’s maid’s intake of breath; all Sarah could do was stare: a drowning, in the stream where they washed the fleeces and fulled the cloth; where she had laughed as she pounded the fabric with her paddle.

— 351 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The death, Sarah would soon learn, was not the worst of it: Mary Higgs, poor child of the parish of Bromsgrove, had been drowned by Catherine Higgs, her mother. Her own mother

… ‘poor child, poor child, poor child’ … the words knelled about the farm. How could a mother? How was it possible? Sarah wanted to fling her arms around her own mother and cling, weeping. Afterwards, accompanying Mrs. Spurrier’s maid, Sarah did creep down to the stream and stand on the muddied bank staring at the trailing tendrils of bare weeping willows eddying on the water, imagining the little girl’s rippling hair, white face and staring eyes almost visible, like a reflection trembling on the pewter surface of the stream.

Inevitably Sarah listened at the edges of the ensuing gossiping, or camplin’ in Black

Country speech. The whispers that the mother was mad, that she was always cruel, that the child was an imbecile, that she was disobedient, that she drove her mother insane, that she was ‘poor, poor, poor’, turned in Sarah’s nightmares. Her dreams crowded with images of water and the figure of Mary Higgs partly submerged, hands waving, grasping at slippery branches. Sarah did not want to go to the stream again, or carry grain to the mill.

*

During the 18th Century there was a mill near the Inn, and in 1781, Mary Higgs, a poor child of the parish of Bromsgrove was drowned in the stream at the Bell Inn by her mother Catherine who was executed at Worcester in 1782. Copied from an inscription displayed at Bell Inn (2007)

Catherine Higgs guilty of the murder of her daughter, Mary, by throwing her in a pond, in the parish of Belbroughton on 9th December 1781, so that she drowned therein. Thursday, 14 March 1782, Berrow’s Worcester Journal780

780 I am grateful to Richard Clark for sending me this item, which was given to him by the researcher, David Mossop. Catherine Higgs was the one woman hanged at Worcester in 1782; see Richard Clark, ‘Female — 352 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Sarah was almost fifteen, and had become what her father called picturesome, when Mrs.

Spurrier surprised her with praise and the announcement that the parish was arranging a place for her at Dudley with a Mr. and Mrs. Hadon, who were seeking a skilful weaver.781

Sarah glowed in spite of her apprehension about living with strangers. Bell Inn had been her home for years; she was part of the household, part of the family. It was as though she had always known Mrs Spurrier and the Inn, had been born smelling malted hops and barley, processing wool, collecting the pennies from labourers when they bought their pails of wobble782 from the barn door where the white cat lived.

Sarah farewelled her parents with more tears; she would be in a different parish, attending a different church. When, how, would she return to Belbroughton? In any case, it seemed she had no choice; and while her parents shook their heads at the way her speech had become so genteel, she knew they were proud of her success.

What would Dudley be like? Although Sarah had heard of the town, it was merely a few miles distant across the Staffordshire border; she had not travelled so far. It might have been another country.

Executions 1735-1799’, Capital Punishment in the 18th & 19th Centuries, http://uk.geocities.com/[email protected]/fem1735.html. 781 Sarah’s occupation was recorded as ‘Weaver’ in Surgeon Bowes’ muster list. She was most likely an apprentice weaver, a natural progression from her housewifery apprenticeship which would have introduced her to the cottage woollen industry. 782 Wobble: third grade beer available from small brewers in the Black Country; see Bill Gwilliam (1991), p. 137. — 353 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Dudley — parl[iamentary] and mun[icpial] bor[ough] and par[ish], in a detached section of E. Worcestershire, on Dudley Canal, 8 miles NW. of Birmingham and 122 miles NW. of London — parl[iamentary] bor[ough] (extending into Staffordshire) … Market-day, Saturday. Dudley is situated in the centre of the "Black Country ". 783

*

Sarah gazed at the castle ruins on the hill above Dudley, allured by the round hill with the crenellated keep, the jagged walls with mysterious entrances under floating white clouds.

Later she sat on her bed, astonished that the room she would share with another weaver had a window, a small table with a mirror on a stand, and a press for their clothes. Who could have expected such good fortune? Sarah swept her hand across the embroidered quilt, not noticing that it was shabby, fraying. In the kitchen, darker than that of Bell Inn, Sarah saw the Staffordshire Knot tied to the curtain as a good omen.

Mr. Hadon, intent on improving his business, had bought a fourth loom which Sarah would use; it was about the size of Mrs. Spurrier’s four-poster bed. There was a comforting clack of treadles, as the weavers in their white caps, barely glancing at Sarah, raised and lowered heddles in the rhythmic passing of the shuttles carrying weft threads. The closest weaver was producing a yellow tabby, the self-stripe soft and lustrous; it was probably dyed with weld (reseda luteola); or perhaps lady’s bedstraw (galium verum).784 While Sarah was elated at the thought of mastering the new loom, she would miss the dyeing and spinning.

783 John Bartholomew, Gazetteer of the British Isles (1837), cited online, A Vision of Britain through Time, 1801-1974, http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=201, (University of Portsmouth, (n.d.), www.gbhgis.org). The focus of this site is specific areas, administrative units, not merely the ‘places’ of tourist interest. 784 There is a note about these dyes in Owenson (1806/1999), p. 94. — 354 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

What Sarah could not know was that Mr. Hadon was in financial difficulties. Within months Mr. Hadon had determined she must go. According to Madge Gibson (Jones),

Benjamin Hadon was charged with bankruptcy at the 1785 Worcestershire Summer

Assizes, the same sessions at which Sarah was indicted.785

*

For all her weaving skills Sarah had earned a pittance from those who lived well; and after her service she was to be dismissed. How could they? She had given up her place with Mr.

Spurrier. She might have stayed with his family until she was twenty-one, or married. She thought of the orchard in blossom, the pink of cherry plums and white of pears. And now where was she? Where could she turn? Like her parents she would be a poor woman of the parish. And how could she return to Belbroughton when her settlement had become Dudley parish? It was so sudden. She would apply for a pass to visit her parents. On Sunday 29

May 1785, there was a bitter wind and storm clouds over the castle. That was the day Sarah committed grand larceny: theft of a small fortune, including golden guineas and promissory notes (which she could not have read), to the value of thirty one pounds, ten shillings and eight pence, from the employers with whom she roomed.

*

785 Although Madge Gibson mentions that Hadon was charged with bankruptcy at the Assize Session at which Sarah was tried, his charge would have been heard before a Bankruptcy Commission, not in the Assize court. It was not until 1831 that jurisdiction was given to a chief judge in bankruptcy, who was assisted by three judges and six commissioners. See W. J. Jones, ‘The Foundations of English Bankruptcy: Statues and Commissions in the Early Modern Period’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 69, No. 3 (1979), p. 50. W. J. Jones gives a detailed history of bankruptcy statutes. Madge Jones also mistook the procedural requirement that prosecutors sign a recognizance, for pressure having been brought to bear on Hadon and his wife to prosecute Sarah. Interestingly, she did observe that promissory notes, which Sarah stole, were not mentioned in the bankruptcy charge, although Sarah’s theft of money was included. — 355 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

If Sarah had faced an Old Bailey court she would surely have hanged; and perhaps she was fortunate to have been tried by Baron Beaumont Hotham (1737-1814), the judge who two years previously had taken his fourteen-year-old son on the Norfolk Circuit to prevent him from teasing his mother786 and who, although frequently unsure of the law, was distinguished [in criminal cases] for his humanity, and for his impressive and pathetic addresses to the prisoners787 — and sometimes to prosecutors. In the case of Catherine

Hart, another convict transported with Sarah on the Lady Penrhyn, Baron Hotham asked the prosecutor the value of these things, pointing out that if they are above forty shillings value, it will be a capital offence. Although the itemized clothing had been valued at fifty-seven shillings in the indictment the prosecutor replied, My Lord, I value them at thirty shillings, in order to save her life, because the wretch's life is no value to me. Catherine’s verdict could then be Part Guilty: theft under 40s. Hotham then sentenced her to transportation for seven years.788

Besides being tried before a man who would, if possible, spare a felon’s life Sarah was also fortunate to be tried in a county city where, from my reading, the judge had more power to be merciful: Circuit Court judges, unlike London judges, could apparently make decisions about the exercise of mercy before they departed, thus bypassing the role of the Recorder,

James Adair and his usually uncompromising judgments. It was not as though Sarah and

Benjamin Hadon reduced their prosecution, thus allowing an uncontroversial reduction of

786 Gillen (1985), p. 60. 787 The Judge, who was baron of the Court of Exchequer, became the 12th baronet and second Baron Hotham when his brother died in May 1813. The ‘Common Friend’, an ambiguous description used by legal colleagues, died ten months later. See Edward Foss (1787-1870), Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England from the Conquest to the Present Time: 1066-1870 (Lawbook Exchange Ltd 1999), p. 355-356. 788 OBPOnline, 8 December 1784, trial of Catherine Hart, theft: specified place, Ref: t17841208-116. — 356 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______the charge, as Catherine Hart’s prosecutor had done. Sarah Bellamy was found guilty of stealing more than fifteen times the capital offence and sentenced to hang by the neck until she is dead. However, before the Judge departed from Worcester Sarah Bellamy was pardoned on condition of transportation.

*

Sarah would sail from England still marked by the epithet, poor. She was twenty and living in her brick cottage built by James Bloodworth in Sydney Cove before an assault led her to challenge the power of that word. At the conclusion of the attack she would bow her head and knowing that she had done no wrong, say that as she was but a poor prisoner, therefore she must go wherever [a gentleman] bade her. That ‘gentleman’ was a Captain James

Meredith who, in a drunken state, standing on the shoulders of a navy master had tried to climb through her window under which she was sleeping. How do you reason with drunken men? Sarah would try, arguing, begging, reminding Meredith that he had a good woman at home and what would he think if someone disturbed her sleep so? At that he heaved across the window sill and pulled her hair shouting, I will have my Revenge on you, I would no more mind killing you than I would Flying in the Air. And as much as he might — a drunken man balancing on another drunken man’s shoulders, his stomach pinched by a wooden sill, his arm flailing — he beat Sarah about the head and face. His shouting attracted the night watch and it was Meredith who ordered Sarah to the guard house. After that Sarah said she, Resolved in her own breath … not to put up with such unmerited treatment from Captain Meredith or anyone else.789 These were Sarah’s words to Judge

Advocate Collins: she had at last stepped from the control of that ambiguous word, poor.

789 Gillen (1989), p. 32. — 357 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

The jurors for Our Lord the King upon their Oath present that Sarah Bellamy late of the parish of Dudley in the county of Worcester Spinster … against the peace of the King and the Crown … with force and arms in the dwelling house of Benjamin Hadon … feloniously did steal take and carry away one linen purse of the value of two pence fifteen pieces of Gold coin of the proper coin of this realm called Guineas of the value of fifteen pounds and fifteen shillings one piece of gold in the proper coin of this realm called half a Guinea of the value of ten shillings and sixpence of the Goods and Chattels and Monies of the said Benjamin Hadon and Promissory Note commonly called a Bank Note signed under the hand of William Jackson for the governor and company of the Bank of England No. 6010 bearing date the eleventh day of April one thousand seven hundred and eighty five of the value of ten pounds One other Promissory Note signed under the hand of Thomas Hill Junior for Hill Watson and company bearing date the second day of May one thousand seven hundred and eighty five whereby the said Thomas Hill did for the said Hill Watson and company promise to pay the bearer Five Guineas on demand at the Sir James Esdale, Esdale Hammet and Esdale Bank, London value received of the value of five pounds. The said Notes and each of them at the Time of committing the felony aforesaid being the property of the said Benjamin Hadon respectively payable and secured by the said promissory notes. 790

*

790 Indictment of Sarah Bellamy, Worcestershire Summer Assizes, 1785, ASSI 105/36. — 358 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 15

Martha Eaton and Newgate Mysteries

* Martha Eaton’s trial has not been traced, but she was recorded as a receiver (“buying stolen goods”) by Bowes and sentenced to transportation for seven years, an unusually light sentence for receivers, who were generally sentenced to transportation for fourteen years. But she does not appear in either the Newgate Calendar or the Prison commission records other than when she was released by proclamation after “no prosecution” in September 1784. … … … Martha Eaton does not appear in the Orders in Council [essential Orders to legalize the change from prior transportation destinations – beyond the seas, Africa, or even America – to Botany Bay] but she was on the Lady Penrhyn transport by 13 May 1787 when Major Ross took the muster. … … … On 23 March 1788 she married Edward Jones at Sydney Cove, signing the register as Martha Beddingfield (no record of her has been found under that name either) … It was reported that she and her husband were “the first couple married [in Sydney] under a marquee”. … … … Elizabeth Lee: On 13 March 1787 Major Ross recorded the London girl (Elizabeth Lee or Lees) on board the vessel: so did the contractor William Richards Jr. on 31 March, but he also listed the Middlesex girl [Elizabeth Lee] among “convicts intended for the Lady Penrhyn for whom Bonds and Contracts have been signed but who were not on board” … The Middlesex Elizabeth does not reappear in Newgate records. What happened to her is a mystery. Mollie Gillen791

*

The traces of Martha Eaton’s mystery passage to the Lady Penrhyn are as elusive as the occasional glints of passing light on a spider’s web in a night garden, compelling and dramatic. Martha Eaton, or Martha Beddingfield, as she called herself when she arrived at

Sydney Cove, must have had much in common with the spirit of the adventurous, inventive, determined female figures of Shakespeare’s comedies. When I think of the great daring which led her to join a sea voyage disguised as a convict, and the qualities she must

791 From biographical entry for Martha Eaton/Beddingfield, Gillen (1989), p. 115; and from biographical entry for the Middlesex Elizabeth Lee/s, Gillen, (1989), p. 216. — 359 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______have possessed to inspire the levels of loyalty and complicity from other women necessary for her to have travelled with them, I think of Viola or Rosalind.

But why did Martha Eaton claim to be a convict? Was it simply for the adventure? Or was she a Hannah Snell figure following a lover across oceans? And who was Edward Jones, the man she married at Sydney Cove? Could they have known each other in England? Met in Newgate, perhaps?

*

In the top gallery of one of the vanished manifestations of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the phantom of a young woman leaned forward, absorbed in the exchanges between the disguised Viola and Duke Orsino. The Duke was a fool, thinking that no woman’s sides can bide the beating of so strong a passion/ As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart/ So big, to hold so much …. 792 Martha’s theatre ticket, which probably costing one shilling, was a grand extravagance, worth every scraped penny.793 She rejoiced to have just once been in the audience rather than loitering in the off-stage scenery after she had finished her regular employment in the boxes and galleries sweeping, collecting rubbish, and the occasional coin dropped from careless purses.

*

792 Duke Orsino to Viola disguised as Cesario, William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act II, Sc. iv. 793 The Account Books for Covent Garden and the Treasurer's Books at Drury Lane (1749-50) indicate the top gallery seats were one shilling. The Account Books for that period were cited by Edward D. Sullivan and Kevin B. Pry, ‘Eighteenth Century London Theater and the Capture Theory of Regulation’, Journal of Cultural Economics, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Dec. 1991), p. 45. I did imagine that there would be an increase in ticket price by 1786, but the existence and policies of theatres were controlled by the Lord Chamberlain. When John Palmer opened the Royalty Theatre, Wellclose Square, in June 1787 and set the minimum ticket price at two shillings, he was forced to open a gallery with one shilling tickets. — 360 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Martha Eaton stood at her garret window staring into the darkening street leading towards

Newgate. The usually restful jostling of pigeons settling on the sill heightened her impatience to be gone. Behind her a candle flame cast the shadow of a small bulging sack like a dark watermark on the wall. Martha smiled recalling again Mrs Jordan’s Theatre

Royal performance in Twelfth Night last October. The performance had almost glowed, unfolding like a prophetic dream from the bible revealing truths about love through wild stories of the sea, the survival of a ship wreck, a nobleman’s foolishness and a disguised identity. Even the silly sub-plot of Malvolio in his yellow stockings and crossed garters, which she had found distracting, was like an odd turn in a dream with some obscure connection.

How well Mrs Jordan, confident in breeches, had countered the duke’s claim about a man’s love exceeding a woman’s.794 Not even Mrs Siddons could have delivered those lines more tellingly. For more than two years past Martha, herself, had pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy … like Patience on a monument and that evening the music of the actress’s voice shaping Viola’s words about women being true of heart was like a lightning flash on a mirror showing Martha her own face and she understood she could, she would, find a way to sail the seas to be with her beloved Edward. They would have a new beginning, a life together in a new land, beyond the seas. Was that not the meaning of

Twelfth Night, the old fire extinguished at the end of the winter solstice bringing the new season, the new birth? Martha rubbed her hands, the weather had been exceptionally cold; water in the ewer had frozen several nights in the past weeks. Oh, it would be passing

794 Review: ‘Theatre Royal, Drury Lane: Twelfth Night with the Romp’, The Times, Issue 563 (Monday, 23 October 1786), p. 2, Col. D. this is a brief review in which special mention is made of Mrs Jordan’s delivery of those lines. — 361 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______strange, if it so happened that Twelfth Night were the departure date; it was after all, just a few days hence; she would take it as another sign.

Passing strange? Why did those words come into her head? It was sure to be Shakespeare again; her memory was full of such fragments, the result of seemingly attentive sweeping, while her ears were tuned to the words, repeated again and again in rehearsal. Heaven had made her such a man,795 the dramatic speech nudged into her memory, and the nape of her neck tingled: heaven had sent her such a man. Then she frowned; the speech was from

Othello; she hoped she was not to be caught in a tragedy. It was the joy of comedies which uplifted dreams. She could not bear to see another tragedy; she had wept openly at the sorrow of Desdemona, so tenderly presented by Mrs Siddons.796

Of course at that time Martha, herself, had been in the depths of despair because Edward

Jones was on the Ceres and it seemed they would be separated forever. Martha shook her head; all of that had now changed for she had set a different course. Edward did not think she could join him in Botany Bay, but she would. In the confusion which must happen when the convicts were discharged from Newgate and were climbing into waggons to travel to the Thames, she was to change places with the woman Elizabeth Lee. Elizabeth

Lee was of the same height and colouring as Martha, and ready to risk added punishments should she be observed and re-captured. Visiting a sick friend Elizabeth Lee had been in the

795 William Shakespeare, Othello (Act 1 Sc 3, 160-163). 796 Sarah Siddons played Desdemona at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Saturday 17 September 1785, Advertising: The Times, (Tuesday, 20 September 1785), Issue 230, Col. A, p. 1. — 362 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______wrong place at the wrong time;797 as many prisoners had been. She looked upon Martha as though she were a rescuing angel. Elizabeth would play her part, and win help from her friends. Martha bought two dark cloaks from Rosemary Lane, one of which she gave to

Elizabeth.

The crier called the eleventh hour, on a cold and frosty evening. Martha had to put away thoughts of poetry, be practical and prepared.

*

So it was that Martha at last snuffed the candle and lay on her bed carefully reviewing the plan to join her Newgate friends when they were being moved to the transport ships. She knew the plan would work with the help of loyal friends. She could rely on some distraction from the audacious women, Mary Moulton and Mary Pile, the female highwayman, as the young woman wearing breeches was called in court. Mary Pile and

Martha had been friends since, well, since January 1783 and their chance meeting at the

Porter’s Lodge in Newgate, when Martha, glancing at the figure she thought was a handsome young man, saw he had some need. Martha had been visiting Newgate to assist

Mary Shepherd rehearse the story she was to tell the judge in what was a foolhardy scheme they, well Martha mostly, had devised as a way of making a little money from a false prosecution; no-one was meant to be found guilty. It had been such a complicated plot, almost as complicated as one of Shakespeare’s comedies.

797 OBPOnline, 26 April 1786, trial of John Spencer, Thomas Pearce, Elizabeth Lee, Ann Dutton, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref. t17860426-102. This case was tried before the Middlesex jury. This is not the Elizabeth Lee tried before the London jury, OBPOnline 23 February 1785 trial of Elizabeth Lee, theft: simple grand larceny (guilty: transportation for seven years), Ref: t17850223-68.

— 363 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Martha’s mother had been angry when Martha wanted to go to London. ‘Wilful! Wilful!

Wilful! Wilful hussy!’ she had cried, stamping her foot. ‘You will shame us all in wicked

London!’ Martha had protested that she would become a servant; there would be many decent women in London needing servants. Soon afterwards Martha had run away from her remote Suffolk village with its flint church in a bosky glade (as the church historian, Simon

Knott described the setting).798 To mark her escape from a family life bound by the tramped path between her parents’ villages of Cratfield and Linstead Magna, Martha abandoned the name of Bed(d)ingfield, taking up the disguise of Eaton, a more common name in London.

*

In 1989, Mollie Gillen noted that no record had been found for the mysterious Martha

Eaton under the name of Martha Beddingfield, the name she used when she married; however, having used Beddingfield in something as special as her marriage service it seems unlikely that Martha would have chosen the name at random or just made it up. Surely there was some emotional motivation for the choice, such as its being either her birth name, or a close family name. The current inclusions of the International Genealogical Index for the period suggest that Martha Eaton was a common name across Ireland and England, whereas Bed(d)ingfield was a specifically Suffolk name and that the name Martha

Bed(d)ingfield, was rare. At least one Suffolk family history, which includes a Martha

Bedingfield at Cratfield, Suffolk, indicates that Martha Bedingfield was a family name.799

798 Simon Knott, ‘St Mary, Cratfield’, Suffolk Churches, http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/cratfield/htm. 799 Marie Foster, My Suffolk Family, http://www.mysuffolkfamily.com/f48.htm. — 364 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The Cratfield baby would have been about twenty-nine or thirty in March 1787 at the time when ‘Martha Eaton’ gave her age as twenty-five at a Lady Penrhyn muster. My own family history attests such a discrepancy is not beyond possibility, especially if the woman’s appearance belied her age and she was in a relationship with a man some years younger. Edward Jones was said to be twenty-one when he was transferred to the Ceres in

April 1785, and although this seems very young to have been married with three children, as one prosecuting witness claimed, the man probably was younger than Martha.

So, not entirely wilfully, I have leaned towards identifying the Martha Beddingfield married at Sydney Cove as the Martha Bedingfield born to Robert and Martha Bedingfield

(née Philpot) and baptized 23 October 1757 at Cratfield, Suffolk.

*

Martha’s mother had been right, London was not an adventure: London was hard, earning a shilling for running errands, taking risks, committing small thefts, scavenging in the market place. Martha had been desperate at times, foolish, too; and as her mother said, wilful. But she had never been reduced to prostitution and she had not begged. And for some reason she had been given good fortune, and hope, in spite of her dubious actions. Nothing short of good fortune had led her to the Drury Lane theatre where the regular employment of cleaning had given her sufficient income to rent her own room. It was strange how her mistakes and misdoings seemed to have led to the moment of meeting Edward Jones. And now she was waiting to dare all and join the dangers of sea voyage to which he was sentenced.

— 365 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

The false prosecution which introduced Martha to Newgate and the Old Bailey began as a little joke during the laundering and mending of yet another bundle of dresses Mary

Crocket had brought to her acquaintance, Jane Spiller, Martha’s landlady. The women had laughed, adding possibilities to possibilities, and the joke had turned into a believable plot with four characters. It could have been staged; well, Martha could have staged it; she did stage it — in Court. The women had looked at each other and laughed, looked at each other again and said in one voice, ‘Why not?’ Mary Crocket who owned the dresses would make the prosecution; Martha Eaton’s role was to be that of a witness unwittingly caught up in a theft and Jane Spiller’s role would be based on her laundry and mending work. When examined Martha would say she had been asked to take the dresses to several pawn shops and to pawn them in Jane Spiller’s name. It was a kind of receiver’s role; and so at the Lady

Penrhyn muster there was some truth in Martha’s claim that she was sentenced to seven years transportation for receiving.

What was initially missing from the women’s prosecution scheme was someone to play the role of the prosecuted. Martha thought of Mary Shepherd, perhaps a distant relative — there were Shepherds and Eatons in the West Country; and another Botany Bay convict,

Mary Shepherd/ Haydon from Plymouth also used the name Eaton when she was arrested with Mary Braund and a Catherine Pryor in Exeter, in March 1786.800 The London Mary

Shepherd sold fruit and water-cresses in Oxford Road,801 possibly of the scavenged and wilted kind. Mary Shepherd was to ‘steal’ wet dresses from Mary Crocket’s line and carry

800 Gillen (1989), p. 327. 801 OBPOnline, 26 February 1783, trial of Mary Shepherd, theft: simple grand larceny (Not Guilty), Ref: t17830226-62. — 366 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______them to Jane Spiller in her apron, asking Jane to mend and launder them and then send her woman (Martha) to pawn them.

No-one could believe Mary Shepherd owned so many dresses, she would be acquitted and the four women would share the spoils of prosecution and witness ‘payments’, or

‘rewards’. These payments were listed as ‘rewards’ in Susannah Holmes’s Norfolk records.

It is important to note that to encourage citizens to take the trouble to make prosecutions after 1778 it became possible for a prosecutor to be reimbursed for an unsuccessful prosecution.802 As Hitchcock and Shoemaker noted, at times prosecutions were a result of the entrepreneurial activities of informers and ‘thief takers’ motivated by the prospect of financial reward.803 They do not mention the possibility that the prosecuted might also share in the ‘rewards’; however, the case of Mary Shepherd and the theft of Mary Crocket’s dresses indicates as much.

Martha had been right: the Jury, realizing that the prosecution case was suspicious, had asked Jane Spiller, how [she] could think, that this beggar could have so many things. Jane had answered vaguely that she used to go out with things. Mary Shepherd had already told the court that the prosecutor thought within [her] own breast Sarah Spiller and the other young body [Martha] were guiltier than Mary (although the ‘prosecutor’, Mary Crocket,

802 David Friedman, ‘Making Sense of English Law Enforcement: The Private Prosecution of Crime’, from author’s version of paper delivered at University of Chicago Roundtable, (1995), http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html. While Friedman’s identification of legal procedures is informative, his argument that the system ‘made sense’ was critiqued at the Symposium by George Fisher; see http://law-roundtable.uchicago.edu/s03.html. 803 Hitchcock and Shoemaker (2006), p. xviii. — 367 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______had claimed that she never saw the prisoner before). In any case, Mary Shepherd was acquitted.

Martha had been amused when a court clerk had sworn her in as Mary Heaton: names were slippery; a woman could hide in the shadows they cast; as she planned to hide in real shadows and change places with Elizabeth Lee when the convicts were discharged from

Newgate. At any moment Martha expected to receive the message to be at the Debtor’s

Door as the transport waggons were arriving. She must sleep, stop thinking; everything was planned. What if she were so deeply asleep she did not hear the knock? No, this was fate, destiny, all of those chance meetings and events and then the revelatory performance of

Twelfth Night when she had understood that she could follow Edward beyond the seas.

*

As it must have been destiny that day, it was 19 July 1784, when spiteful busybody neighbours had falsely accused Martha of stealing 10 yards of new Irish Cloth from the Pig in Armour. She had been so furious when those women said that Martha Eaton was well known in the neighbourhood to be of Evil Fame;804 and yet, in another inexplicable turn of the wheel, their spite had brought her a great love because she was in Newgate when

Edward Jones had been arrested. Of course she had also been furious when that man who had known Edward for a long time said that his character was [v]ery indifferent indeed, he keeps bad company, and is turned out one of your fighting Gentlemen.805 Did the wretch

804 Two women had laid these charges against Martha Eaton, 19 July 1784; see Gillen (1989), p. 115. 805 OBPOnline, 15 September 1784, trial of Edward Jones, John Dennis otherwise Hammond, theft: simple grand larceny, theft: receiving stolen goods, (both Guilty), Ref: t17840915-70.

— 368 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______not have sympathy for Edward, who was so worn out trying to provide for his wife and three little children? Wasn’t it understandable that Edward sometimes drank? Again she was angry at the injustice, and yet it had brought them to each other. Sweet Edward, how he had wept, his poor face suffering and haggard, because imprisoned and sentenced to transportation he would never be able to help his babies. His wife would not even visit him.

How could she be of such a cruel heart? He did not deserve the punishment. Martha had lain with Edward in a small cell in Newgate, weeping as he told of his childhood memories, of the smell of warm bread in an uncle’s bakery and the soft sweetness and crispness of the kissing crust his aunt saved for him, his childhood so different from his own poor mites.

Martha, with a cheek against the young man’s bare chest, his heart tapping against the bones of her face, thought of gentle hands separating two loaves of bread and was almost overwhelmed by a rush of her childhood memories. She was about to tell him of the wild man with his club and shield facing a dragon above the entrance of St Mary Church when a turnkey banged on the door. Their half an hour of privacy was over.

*

Martha had expected to be tried at the same September Session along with Edward Jones and Mary Shepherd, who had this time put her life in danger by stealing a box containing five half-guineas. Fortunately Mary had thrown the money down and the box was worth a mere penny. Mary and Martha hoped that would save her life; optimistically, Martha advised Mary to say she was in Oxford Street selling apples. Edward was afraid that he, together with his friend who was charged with receiving, would be hanged; or sent to

Africa. Martha herself was likely to be transported.

— 369 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Martha could name the moment she decided that to be transported with Edward would not be a punishment. It was early in September and Martha, standing in the Press Yard where

Edward and companions were playing skittles, looked up at the chapel windows, swallows skimming across the prison roof and realized that she would glad if they shared transportation.

And then, apparently, the busybody women did not prosecute Martha, either they did not sign the recognizance, or the magistrate decided there was no evidence. As a result Martha

Eaton was discharged from Newgate by proclamation.806 She would, however, have been in the public gallery at the Old Bailey, anxiously watching the proceedings. Mary Shepherd said she was selling hundreds of apples in Oxford Street. Martha blinked: hundreds of apples? Why, hundreds? Martha was relieved when the foolish girl was fined a shilling and sent to the Bridewell for twelve months. Edward Jones was sentenced to seven years transportation.

*

Edward Jones remained in Newgate until 5 April 1785 when he was transferred to the

Ceres hulk. Martha Eaton nominated April 1785 as the date of her non-existent trial when she was required to give her personal details at the first muster on the Lady Penrhyn. It would be too much of a coincidence for that to have been a chance date. Given the openness of Newgate we might assume that Martha visited Edward Jones in the months between her discharge in September 1784 and his transfer to the Ceres April 1785. Given,

806 The discharge was registered in The Newgate Calendar: Newgate’s List of Felons 1784-1785: The Names of Prisoners on the Common Side, National Archives, Kew, PCOM2/171, p. 214. Presumably the original charge would be archived at the London Metropolitan Archives. — 370 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______too, the commitment and loyalty which would have been necessary for her to secretly join the women between Newgate and Woolwich; it is likely that Martha continued her visits to

Newgate, maintaining friendships and performing favours and services.

As with the nomination of the April 1785 date and Martha’s use of the name Beddingfield at her marriage, it is surely not chance that the names of five of the women who were brought to Newgate during the months between Edward Jones’s September 1784 trail and

April 1785 were clustered with Martha Eaton’s name on the Lady Penrhyn muster list, a list which was most likely the basis of the women’s friendships and mess groups. The five women and their Old Bailey trial dates were:

Elizabeth Colley, 8 December 1784 (Elizabeth’s partner John Kelsey was hanged and Martha would have been in Newgate at the time); Elizabeth Lee, 23 February 1785 (the ‘London’ Elizabeth Lee, not the ‘Middlesex’ Elizabeth Lee who ‘disappeared’ between Newgate and Woolwich); Mary Branham, of Brenham, 8 December 1784 (the Covent Garden babysitter); Elizabeth Hippesley, 22 February 1785; Ann Read, 12 January 1785.

Also tried 23 February 1785, and whose name/s appears in the next muster sequence, was Mary Morton/Moulton. Mary Pile was sentenced to transportation at the April 1785 Sessions, the time Martha nominated as her trial date. Mary Pile was arrested on 22 January 1785 and so would have met Martha Eaton during those months; and perhaps before she was transferred from Newgate to the Bridewell in 1783.

The good behaviour of Colley, Lee and Hippseley on the voyage was recorded by Surgeon Bowes. The other women also behaved well and industriously in the colony. It seems Ann Read may have tried to commit suicide on the voyage for she took a draught of solution of Mercur: Sublimat corrosive. Bowes Smyth recorded the incident as accidental.807

*

807 Smyth (1979), p. 20. — 371 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

So the traces of the mysterious Martha Eaton-Beddingfield’s life flicker like faint trails of light. She was undoubtedly romantic, daring and clever, inspiring loyalty and respect. The couple, Martha and Edward Jones, had three children, Sarah (1794-1795), John (1796) and

Edward (1799). In the colony Edward Jones worked primarily as a baker and in 1800 signed a petition protesting the high cost of living.808 After a lingering consumption Martha died in Sydney, 3 September 1817.809

*

… always esteemed as an honest and industrious woman …. Tribute: Hobart Town Gazette, September 1817810

*

808 Gillen (1989), p. 198. 809 Ibid., p. 115. 810 Tribute to Martha Eaton/Beddingfield/Jones in the Sydney Gazette, Gillen (1989), p. 115.

— 372 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Chapter 16

The Twelfth Day of Christmas, 1787 —

A Farewell Masque

*

Viola: Conceal me what I am, and be my aid For such disguise as haply shall become The form of my intent. … What else may hap, to time I will commit, Only shape thou thy silence to my wit. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, Act I, sc. ii, 53-55; 60-61.

The anguish of those convict mothers separated from their children is not found in the officers' journals and lavishly illustrated accounts of the First Fleet. Even the most passionate First Fleet diary, that of Lieutenant Ralph Clark, who continually laments his separation from his wife and young son, reveals little empathy with the fate of convicts' families. It is as if Clark and other officers believed finer feelings and deep emotions were solely the prerogative of the ruling class. By uncovering the determination of some convict mothers to take their children on the First Fleet we apprehend an emotional dimension that is absent from the accounts that survive. Robert Holden.811

*

On Saturday, 6 January 1787, the Feast of the Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, fifty-six women were to be discharged from Newgate and taken on waggons to Woolwich where the Lady Penrhyn was anchored behind a misty veil. It was necessary that they depart in the darkness for the passing of such a number of criminals was certain to alarm

residents and merchants. And so the solidity of a stone prison was to be replaced by the

811 Holden, p. 5. — 373 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______queasy instability of a sailing ship on a tidal river. And thence, on 13 May 1787, Rogation

Sunday, they would beat the bounds of far seas. As usual, sermons that day would be construed around the text, Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, ye shall receive, that your joy may be full (John 16:24).

*

Long before the hour when Christian priests would be donning white and gold vestments to celebrate spiritual beginnings, women were waking in the gloom of Newgate. They looked at each other, ribcages stiff, suspended between anxiety and relief. And in the shadowy hustle, the tramp of guards with their smoking torches, the occasional curse at the loss of some item and the sudden cry of a child, sounds were muffled, as though they were dampened by the press of the future. The farewells taking place were generally made with a resignation which neither allayed grief nor anxiety.

For these women there would be no epiphany services to mark their new beginning: their passing from the past to the future would be marked by each woman’s walking under the lintel of Debtor’s door into the sounds of chilled horses shifting in their waggons; the prison threshold a sign of that passing hiatus we call the present.

*

Nor would there be an epiphany service for Martha Eaton who would be waiting on the cobbles when the women passed through the Debtor’s Door. Martha took the date as auspicious; all would go well. Having scarcely closed her eyes the night through, she

— 374 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______dressed quickly and swung her dark blue cloak around her shoulders, stroking its deep folds: her masquerade disguise.

*

In the Royal Chapel the very religious Queen Charlotte would attend epiphany services; and on Twelfth Night, as the convict women were adjusting to their tiered berths and the unfamiliar sounds of restless wood, she would dine from Josiah Wedgwood’s cream-ware service with the green flowers and the remarkable gilt edge of gold leaf ground in honey.812

When the Queen awakened that morning her wardrobe would be, as usual, presented in her dressing room by Fanny Burney who since Monday 17 July 1786, a month after the burning of Phoebe Harris, had been Keeper of the Robes. It was six long months since

Fanny Burney had lost her liberty. The novelist, wheezing, dreaded another day of standing prisoner for hours behind the Queen, afraid of coughing, obliged to walk backwards down steps, fearful of tripping on her hem. To think so recently she had ever parodied such protocols.813 At Matins in the Royal Chapel she would pray for the resolve to raise the matter of her resignation with her father. He was proud of her role at Court and had continued to hold hopes of his own preferment as a musician and composer because of it; but a dream of escape was borne in Miss Burney’s every shallow breath. Was it eight years since she had danced in free delight around a mulberry tree because Dr. Samuel Johnson was reading her anonymously published first novel, Evelina?814 When would she again know such freedom?

812 Uglow (2003), pp. 87-88. 813 Fanny Burney to Esther Burney, 17 December 1785, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, edited by Charlotte Barrett, Vol. II, pp.352-353, cited by Hester Davenport (2003), p. 30. 814 Ibid., p. 2. — 375 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The writer’s discontent would have astounded the women in Newgate. Not that Burney lacked courage: in September 1811 she would endure a mastectomy without anaesthetic; and sharing the convict women’s maternal loyalties would later escape from post-

Revolutionary France to save her sixteen-year-old son from conscription in Napoleon’s army.815

*

In Newgate, those awaiting trial observed the heightening agitations of companions who were departing. Of that number were Isabella Rosson, the laundress who would become the colony’s first teacher;816 Elizabeth Hayward, apprentice clog-maker, the youngest female to be transported; and shabby old Mrs. Beckford with doughy legs. Like Fanny Burney, Mrs.

Beckford wheezed too, but loudly, with every laboured step; and when she heaved herself over on the sleeping platform. Within a short time she would be removed to the Lady

Penrhyn, her legs weeping, and thence to her sea burial, with the usual form, cobbled in the remnants of a sail while she was still warm. [T]he burial service was read by Mr. Ball, 3rd

Mate.817

*

815 Ibid., p. 196. Fanny Burney’s operation was conducted by Napoleon’s surgeon. 816 See Gillen (1989), p. 315. Rosson’s teaching work was in company with her husband, fellow convict, William Richardson. See Gillen, p. 315. Their teaching was supported by the colony’s chaplain; see Neil Keith Macintosh, Richard Johnson, Chaplain to the Colony of New South Wales: His Life and Times 1755- 1827 (Library of Australian History 1978); however, it is Richardson’s role which is referred to in Rev. Johnson’s letters. 817 Smyth, 11 July 1787 (1979), p. 25. — 376 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Isabella Rosson had slept fitfully, disturbed by dreams, and by the restlessness of the other women, also unable to sleep.818 Would she be transported, too? Sent away from everything that she had ever known? She struggled against nausea; if she went to the privy she would disturb little Elizabeth Hayward who was snuggled against her for warmth. Lizzie had been arrested the week before Christmas, and was adjusting to prison life when Isabella was arrested a few days later. The three women, Isabella Rosson, Elizabeth Hayward and Mrs.

Beckford, would appear at the Sessions to begin in four days.

Isabella could hear Elizabeth Evans, the Welsh woman, attending to her daughter. And nearby she could hear the conspiratorial whispers of the women contriving to hide

Elizabeth Lee’s exchange with Martha Eaton. That was surely a foolhardy scheme. What would lie in store for them? What lay in store for her? Once Isabella Rosson had such plans; and she had given good service to Mr. Kydd and his wife at Gray’s Inn. Her mouth tasted of bile. Have mercy upon me, Oh God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. She would despair but for her faith in God’s mercy, for there was none in this world, not from the man who had seduced her, the man she had loved. And just look at the poor mite beside her.

Recalling, yet again, that moment when she had fallen on her knees, Isabella stared towards the beamed ceiling. She had immediately surrendered the pawn shop tickets to her mistress.

818 OBPOnline, 10 January 1787, trial of Isabella Rosson, theft: simple grand larceny, Ref: t17670110-72. The italicized exchanges between the prisoner and her prosecutors below are based on Isabella’s trial proceedings. — 377 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

She had intended to return the property; she was in a state of confusion, distress. How had she come to such humiliation? She had never wanted her master’s attentions; hadn’t she resisted many times? But he was always there, would watch as she went to the cellar; would send her to the cellar. There was no escape. Besides, he was so elegant, a

Gentleman, with Chambers at Gray’s Inn. He had been so kind; had praised her for her grace, said she deserved more; held her hands, kissed her palms.

‘Sweet fingers’, he murmured. She had tried to pull her hands free, humiliated at their roughness, their redness. He loved her; would protect her; she was elegant, modest, and clever. He would withdraw; she should not be alarmed; he had locked the cellar door. And gently he pressed her down onto Mr. Green’s trunk, which she had packed with the freshly laundered summer linen and bed curtains. That first time he did withdraw, but sometimes, after that, he did not. ‘Sweetheart, how can I escape when you cling so?’ His voice lilted against her ear. In autumn she stood beneath the golden light of the Lombardy poplar, flaring like a bright candle under the dark clouds, surprised at the stillness come upon her.

Through the weeks she continued to carry buckets to and fro, rubbed the heavy linens, rinsing and ringing their watered weight, moving serenely, her face as soft as if she were sleeping.

Then her tranquility shattered: she realized she was with child. She knew she must make some provision; even while she still held a faint hope that he would take her to some haven: perhaps a tiny cottage in the country where their child, their children, would be healthy and free. But what if he did not? She was paid so little; barely sufficient to keep body and soul together; and now there would be a baby requiring care. She had need of books, she would — 378 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______prepare herself for teaching; she might pass herself as a widow; take a position in a lady’s parlour school.

In September she pawned his muslin waistcoat. She had access to his clothes; after all, she was his laundress. She hid the money in her attic bedroom. He had by then been frequently absent in the country; barely noticed her. When he returned she would tell him about the baby. If he took care of her, or promised to take care of her, she would have redeemed his garment and no-one need have known. But when he returned he avoided her; it was not that he was rude; it was as though she were invisible. So she took the bed curtains from Mr.

Green’s trunk. With the two shillings for the waistcoat and the six shillings for the bed curtains she had accumulated eight shillings. Shortly afterwards she carried a set of Mr.

Kydd’s bed curtains to the pawn shop. She should still have been safe; they were summer curtains; she had also packed these away herself. But, for some reason Mrs. Kydd decided to write an inventory of the household linen. Isabella was discovered. She wept; asked forgiveness; confessed to also pawning Mr. Green’s curtains. Mrs. Kydd sent for a constable and would await her husband’s return from the country before taking further action. Surely, surely, he would have mercy on her.

Mr. Kydd returned at six in the evening. Isabella’s employers stood before the hearth, the constable observing. Isabella had looked from Mrs. Kydd to Mr. Kydd. She saw a flicker of softening in his eyes and had fallen on her knees, whispered, Forgive me; I am in distress.

What is your distress, Bella?

— 379 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

She could hardly believe he was asking such a question before his wife; but his voice was gentle, kind; she heard the trace of his old tenderness; his eyes would be soft, coaxing, waiting.

‘I am pregnant … Sir; please have mercy …’ Her head was bowed; her voice just above a whisper. There was silence, a cold silence. She glanced up. The man and woman were both gazing at her, their faces set in disapproval.

Her mistress’s words were scored on her heart: You deserve no mercy from me. And indeed she did not, and was suffering for it. Well, the least she could do was rise and help the women with their children, because almost everyone seemed to be awake.

In four days time, Stewart Kydd, who had chamber in Gray’s Inn, would recount the exchange, mentioning how he had some intention to forgive her, because she pleaded distress; I enquired into the distress, and the enquiry did not turn out in her favour.

The Justice would ask, Was there any promise made to her of favour?

Startled, Isabella would glance at the Judge: he knew, understood.819

Mr Kydd would reply, Not the least that I know of, by me or any person to my knowledge.

819 While we cannot know the paternity of Isabella Rosson’s expected child, female servants were vulnerable to the attentions of the heads of households, their sons and male servants. See Hill (1994), pp. 137-138, 146; Hill explains the dire consequences of pregnancy for female servants and touches on the bad treatment young women often received from wives because of sexual suspicions. … women were all too accessible to sexual advances. Hill, p. 138. — 380 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The prisoner would bow her head and say with dignity, I leave myself to the mercy of the Court.

*

There were also women in the cell who were awaiting the unpredictable answers to petitions, most notably Elizabeth Needham and Esther Abrahams. At the time of that momentous departure morning, Esther was seven months pregnant and distressed that she had received no answers, in spite of the petitions submitted in her favour. Surely the silence was because she was Jewish.

As the phantom shape of Esther Abraham’s life flickered from the margins of documents, it was difficult not to attribute the silence which followed her petitions to prejudice. After all, her family had procured Mr. William Garrow as defence Counsel, the most famous barrister in London. William Garrow was a major, perhaps the major, figure in the introduction of defence counsel to the courtroom. He was famed for his demolition of false witness, reducing hostile witnesses to incoherence.820 He contested the judgments of the

Bench and made consistently eloquent attacks on a prosecution system based on blood money.821 Judges were reduced to saying, We must go by the rules of law and evidence, as

Justice Rose said at the end of the trial of Jonas Abrahams, who was also defended by

820 John Hostettler, Fighting for Justice: The History and Origins of Adversary (Waterside Press 2006), p. 59. See especially Chapter 5 -7, which deal with Garrow’s legal development and his dynamic, even fiery, role at the Old Bailey. See, too, John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford University Press 2005). Langbein is critical of the adversarial courtroom, stressing that wealth becomes a factor, and that does not favour the accused. It is important to note that Garrow also acted as prosecution counsel; oddly, it seems that a prosecution counsel could also be hired by the defendant, as a way of procuring counsel’s address to the jury because until the Counsel Act (1836) there was a prohibition on defence counsels addressing the jury. See Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, ‘Trial Procedures: How Trials Were Conducted at the Old Bailey, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Trial-procedures.jsp. 821 For some of Garrow’s attacks on the place of ‘blood money’, see Hostettler (2006), pp. 86, 88. ‘Blood money’ was a dominant metaphor in Garrow’s passionate speeches in the courtroom. — 381 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

William Garrow.822 The British model of courtroom justice, which we have inherited, thus owes much to the man who appeared as defence Counsel for Esther Abrahams. He also appeared for Elizabeth Lee, the London Elizabeth Lee who arrived at Sydney Cove, not the

Middlesex Elizabeth Lee, who was, at the time Esther was reviewing the happenings of her last six months, donning her masquerade disguise: a dark blue cloak over breeches and jacket belonging to Mary Pile’s brother. The London Elizabeth Lee was charged with stealing wine and candles valued at thirty-eight pounds and eighteen shillings, a value almost twenty times above a capital sentence, only a little less than a labourer might expect to earn in two years. Elizabeth Lee’s case had always puzzled me, especially since

Elizabeth was supposed to have confessed. I had not realized the reputation of her defence counsel, William Garrow, who had asked the closing question about Elizabeth Lee’s confession: Was this examination taken in writing?823 The capital charge against Elizabeth

Lee collapsed, and she was sentenced to seven years transportation.

*

Esther lay on the platform thinking of William Garrow’s reputation at the Synagogues. Had he not secured two Not Guilty verdicts for Jonas Abrahams?824 What was odd in her case was that Mr. Garrow had shown that the prosecution’s charge against her had no foundation. He had stressed that the lace she was charged with stealing was of the common housekeeper kind, and therefore virtually impossible to identify. He also stressed that the

822 Jonas Abrahams was brought to trial in February 1784 and January 1785, OBP Online trial Refs: t17840225-23 and t17850112-9. For the developing attention to ‘laws of evidence’ see John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (2005), p. 244. 823 See OBPOnline, 23 February 1785, Ref: t17850223-68. 824 Jonas Abrahams was a dealer in scrap metal: an occupation popular with the poor, especially Jewish poor, and was generally regarded with suspicion. Abrahams was a common Ashkenazi name, and while we cannot know if he were related to Esther, the Not Guilty verdict Garrow procured for Abrahams and others would have been common knowledge within the Ashkenazi community. — 382 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______lace was a remnant, which no-one had seen her take, and that she had not been searched.

And then, when Mr. Garrow pressed the shop assistant, the woman refused to take an oath.825 Esther was not consoled when her Counsel pointed out that the charge was for a theft valued at fifty shillings for which she might have received a capital sentence. She had frowned. How could she have been convicted without definite evidence against her? There was a card of lace on the floor and someone had heard her drop it? Even Mr. Akerman, recognizing the injustice, had petitioned on her behalf. She sighed; surely it was Mr.

Akerman’s petition which secured had Ann Moore’s release. Yet for her, Esther Abrahams, there was nothing.

The girl, for she was a girl, not yet sixteen, spread her hands on her stomach, a protective shield over the baby who was then waking and stretching. Her baby was due at the time of

Esther’s Feast, following the days of fasting during the Festival of Purim. If she had a boy

Esther thought she would call him Mordecai, for justice; although, when she thought of the baby in her arms it was always a girl. Perhaps that meant she should call a daughter, Esther.

Should she do so, it would be not for herself, but that the child might inherit the courage and wisdom, which was necessary for those who belonged to Queen Esther’s history. From her earliest days she remembered her mother reading from the Book of Esther. Although,

Esther Abrahams was not as obedient to male demands and advice as her namesake; perhaps she had also inherited the independence of the cast-off and cast-out Queen Vashti for whom she had a great sympathy. Nevertheless, the story of Esther was archived in her genealogy; it was manifested in the lift of her eyebrow, the turn of her wrist, her posture,

825 OBPOnline, 30 August 1786, trial of Esther Abrahams, theft: shoplifting, Ref. t17860830-4.

— 383 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______her gliding walk. Esther Abrahams’ beauty and courage would not be blessed by a gold sceptre, but the young mother’s large grey eyes with their melancholy expression, her clusters of black ringlets and wide sensuous mouth, baby Rosanna in her arms, would halt a young Lieutenant from Dumfries as he paced the deck of the Prince of Wales in his scarlet jacket, his musket upright at his shoulder. Poor man, to think he had been charged with the duty of keeping the men separate from the women. He arranged for Esther Abrahams to be transferred to the Lady Penrhyn, to ensure she would be within the care of Surgeon Smyth.

*

It is likely that Esther’s marriage had been arranged for some years; and if, as suggested by her use of the name Julian, he was a Sephardic man, it would have been a ‘good’ marriage.826 No doubt her imprisonment had brought shame upon both families, although they had learned to expect such injustices. With the passing of time, the Sydney suburb of

Annandale would be named after Esther’s house which, in turn, was named for her

Lieutenant George Johnston’s birthplace in Scotland. Two centuries later, Esther would be recognized as the great-great-great-grandmother of Rear Admiral Sir David James Martin,

Governor of New South Wales (1989-1990), a man remembered for his contributions to young people in crisis.827

None of that excuses James Adair’s neglect of her petition; and he did have reminders. If her file had fallen behind his desk, surely the reminders would have alerted him.

826 For an indication of the relative wealth and poverty of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Londoners see, Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England 1714-1830, 1st publ., 1999 (Ann Arbor Paperbacks 2002), p. 32. 827 See Register of War Memorials in NSW, http://www.warmemorialsnsw.asn.au/traditions/martin.cfm, and John S. Levi and G. F. J. Bergman, 1st publ., 1974, New Edn (Melbourne University Press 2002), p. 35. — 384 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

One of the most recently convicted women, Elizabeth Evans,828 tied the ribbons of her daughter’s warm cape and smiled at her child, Jenny Jones. Elizabeth had cherished so many dreams for her little girl, had hoped she would attend the Welsh School, which had been relocated from Clerkenwell to Gray’s Inn when Elizabeth, herself, was a child.829

Now, where would they be on St. David’s Day when the children marched with leek cockades in their caps, and sermons were delivered in the Antient British language?830

Evans and Jones: they are the most common names in Wales, although that did not prevent me from pursuing the Welsh phantoms through books and cyber space into Newgate’s darkness, brittle with cold, that January morning. At least both names were Welsh and it would seem that Elizabeth Evans was using the Welsh patrilineal tradition. That gave my emerging phantom a definite form: the history of the Welsh in London. The form became fixed through searching Rocque’s Survey of London for some clue to identify the King

Street where Elizabeth Evans had stolen a packet of tea. The map expanded on the screen: there was a King Street in the purlieus around the southern end of Smithfield Markets in the vicinity of Cow and Duck Lanes and, importantly, Hosier Street, signifying the Welsh sale of knitted stockings: in earlier times, stalls would have been established there, gradually transforming into shops. The area was dominated by Welsh activities.

828 OBPOnline, Ref: t17861213-131. 829 For the history of the Welsh schools in London, supported entirely by Welsh charity, see Emrys Jones (2001), pp. 63-66. The school admitted a few girls in 1768. The Clerkenwell school building still stands, transformed into the Karl Marx Museum. 830 See Emrys Jones (2001), p. 62.

— 385 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

Elizabeth’s mother had knitted Jenny’s travelling cape in heavy grey wool, and embroidered a border of rowan berries, which the Welsh drovers always wore to ensure a fair journey and good trading;831 not that she expected to be trading, but above all the rowan protected from accidents and supernatural ill-will; her mother kept to the old ways and beliefs. Each spring and autumn Welsh drovers, wearing long farmers’ smocks, thick woollen stockings, leggings, broad-brimmed dark hats and sprigs of rowan, arrived at

Smithfield with their small black cattle and feisty corgis. For Elizabeth Evans and her daughter Jenny Jones, a connection with Wales was more than a nostalgic memory. The

Welsh had been moving between their distant farms and London for centuries832 and although some had settled, especially the wealthier, many followed the peripatetic trading.

Welsh historians record that, thousands of Welsh cattle and sheep were driven eastwards in two great annual tides, spring and autumn, and they emphasize that these were tides — not in principle migrations.833

Except on the Sabbath the drovers, accompanied by women, the itinerant weeders, or merched y gerddi in Welsh, some with their children, walked a steady two miles an hour, twelve hours a day.834 Perhaps Elizabeth and Jenny walked that way; or Elizabeth and her

831 Shirley Toulson, The Drovers, (2005), p.14. This is a small, invaluable synthesis of drove literature. It includes the drovers from Scotland together with those of Wales and is given immediacy because Toulson has walked some of the roads. It is thoughtfully illustrated. 832 Droving had been taking place since at least the fourteenth century: there is an extant writ from 1384 mentioning, Johannes Kereslegh Drovere et Civis London. See Caroline Skeel, ‘The Cattle Trade between Wales and England from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Series, Vol. 9 (1926), p. 149. 833 R. T. Jenkins and Helen Ramage, A History of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and the Gwyneddigion and Cymreigyddion Societies: 1751-1951 (The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion 1951), p. 7. 834 For the history of the ‘weeders’, see Emrys Jones (2001), pp. 2, 58-61, 93, 99, 103, 200. — 386 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______mother. If so, they walked beside the sturdy Welsh blacks, singing ballads and Isaac Watts’ hymns translated into Welsh, frequently interspersed with the drovers’ resonant cries,

Heiptrw Ho,835 to warn local farmers that they should move their herds. As they travelled the drovers and their companions knitted thick grey woollen stockings for market stalls in

London,836 and slept as they might under hedges or at Drovers’ Inns. Their journeys were down precipitous mountain ridge-ways, sometimes they forded rivers, or were ferried on flat-bottomed boats. Those from Anglesey drove hundreds of cattle across the Menai Strait, the animals like strange black flotillas with horned figureheads, struggled in the tidal current, urged on by the banging of water and shouting, the stragglers pressed by boatmen, who sometimes cast a rope around their horns and towed them to the Caernarvonshire shore.837 After two or three weeks, the droves would arrive at rich pastures, such as those of the Vale of Aylesbury838 with its belly-high fodder. There the cattle quickly fattened before being moved to markets around London, or to the central market at Smithfield. The weeders, sleeping in barns, selling milk about the streets, and baskets of their carefully tended sweet smelling strawberries, would earn about three shillings per week. Some women stayed, but many returned to Wales, carrying what seemed to be riches. Some of the wealthier drovers journeyed home in coaches, leaving their dogs to make their own way, a message about their necks requesting inn keepers to feed them and itemize the account for the following drove.

835 See Gareth Hicks, ‘Cattle Drovers’, http://home.clara.net/tirbach/HelpPagepearls5.html. Gareth Hicks offers several useful sites identifying resources. 836 Shirley Toulson (1980/2005), pp. 16-17. 837 Most histories of the droves mention this crossing and usually refer to the description given by Arthur Aiken in his Journal of a Tour through North Wales (1797). Gareth Hicks quotes the passage, see his compilation, ‘The Drovers: Who They Were and How They Went: An Epic of the English Countryside’, http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/DroversEnglish.html, (Nov. 2004). 838 Toulson, p. 16. — 387 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The young woman standing before her eight-year-old daughter carried such memories, together with the memory of a paper bag rustling with three pounds of tea, still warm from its drying.839 That day Elizabeth had walked with a friend across the Markets, past Pye corner, to a little tea shop in King Street, behind St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The woman was desperate: she had realized she was pregnant. An ounce of tea gave an infusion of two quarts, which meant a pound of tea made about one hundred and ninety-six cups.840 She might use a little brazier and sell it for a few pence per cup; or package it in ¼ ounce bags.

The hope which had lifted with her calculations erased any fear, or guilt, as she slipped the packet into her pocket.

* The women waited for the Turnkey to order their departure. Susannah Trippet stood a moment between Mary Moulton and Mary Pile, her arms about them. No-one responded with huzzas or calls of kissing girls.841 Whispered words were of hope, comfort, consolation; and the possibility of a last minute pardons for Elizabeth Needham and Esther

Abrahams. Mary Fowles and Mary Óg, excited by the unusual disturbance, chased each other around the women before rushing to Jenny and flinging their arms about her. The little girls would be departing in three days.

839 OBP Online, Ref: t17861213-131. Picard wrote that a pound of tea was worth between seven shillings and sixpence and sixteen shillings per pound, depending on the quality, see Picard, p. 296. The best article I could find on the fashion of tea drinking and the vagaries of its prices (related to fluctuations in import taxes and the effects of smuggling) in eighteenth century England was, W.A. Cole, ‘Trends in Eighteenth Century Smuggling’, The Economic History Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1958), 395–410. Prices fell at various times, significantly for Elizabeth Evans, in 1784, when tea drinking had become popular even with the poor. Citing a House of Commons Journal, Vol. XXV, pp.103-5, Cole wrote that the cheapest black tea in London was five shillings per pound; smuggled tea was probably a shilling cheaper. 840 See W. A. Cole (1958), p. 403.This information is based on the evidence of a branch manageress of a well known tea-shop recorded in the House of Commons Journal, Vol. XXV (see preceding footnote). 841 Kissing Girls was a Spitalfields ballad, parodying lesbians. See Rictor Norton, Early Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Reports: A Sourcebook, "Two Kissing Girls of Spitalfields" (23 April 2002), http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/grub/lowlife9.htm. — 388 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

*

The Turnkeys urged the women through the Debtors’ Door. In the dark hours before dawn the prisoners gathered under the phantom of the scaffold, from which some had been reprieved, and where others had witnessed the dear and the unknown climbing the steps.

‘Poor Phoebe Harris,’ was the thought which curled upwards on the women’s frosty breath, their foggy exhalations rising towards the prison façade. When a grey light dawned, hours hence, there would be a tracery of ice like frosted tears on the red bricks, where once there had been the figure of Dick Whittington’s cat.

The hush remained as the women milled, waiting for orders. Families and friends had also gathered, bearing last minute gifts, taking beloved hands, weeping, promising. The guards were tolerant of the intrusions. Martha Eaton was in the crowd. The waiting horses were docile, stamping gently, their shoes ringing a little on the hard granite stones, like small echoes of St Sepulchre’s muffled knelling. The women shivered, stamped their feet, blew warm breath into their cupped hands. Captain Arthur Phillip would be shocked, angry, when he inspected them in four months time, demanding that they be supplied with warm clothing: The situation in which the magistrates sent the women on board the Lady

Penrhyn, stamps them with infamy — almost naked, & so very filthy, that nothing but cloathing them could have prevented them from perishing, he railed to the Home Office.842

*

842 Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1, Pt II, pp. 58-59. — 389 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The men’s waggons were moving away, rumbling, clattering. In the poor areas of the city the homeless huddled in doorways and crannies, coldly sleeping, many shoeless, clad in rags, almost naked; if you can believe the judgments of those snuggled in wool and fur.

Some of the hapless were, no doubt, stiff with rigor mortis. Some more fortunate, such as the wild Black Guard Boys, were warm in the ashes of the Glass Houses behind the

Minories, that grandest of shopping arcades. Milk maids were stirring, their cows, waiting in the stalls at the back of their shops, would soon gaze drowsily at the first customers; and shepherds and drovers bestirred their flocks and herds to move them along the broad thoroughfares towards slaughter at the Smithfield. The fishmongers were ready to lay their catch in Billingsgate. In those liminal hours between night and day, relieved, or fearful, the women in the first waggons had also begun their journey towards Woolwich and the voyage to Botany Bay: the dream of freedom, or the nightmare.

But there was some disturbance in the second last group, the women pressed and moved beside their waggon; two women were fighting over a shawl. Dragging it from each other’s shoulders they barged and shoved, stumbling into those standing close by, to be pushed in return, so that the brawling rippled outwards. Elizabeth Evans moved to the edge of the group, pressing her daughter’s face against her bodice. The little girl twisted free to observe the struggling women, her mother’s friends, so recently holding hands when they were saying farewells in the Hall. Jenny witnessed the taller woman, she knew her to be Mary

Pile, wrenching Mary Moulton’s hair as she shouted, ‘Hook-nosed whore,’ and forced her friend’s head down, shaking it, the shawl apparently forgotten on the cobbles.843 Then they began circling each other, hands clenched, positioned, like boxers. Feint to the right; feint

843 Robert Shoemaker devotes Chapter 3 in The London Mob (2004), to ‘Public Insults’, pp. 51-78. — 390 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______to the left; a swift uppercut glances from the chin…dance two back… dance two forward…circle…

Someone called, ‘A fight! A fight!’ Others began chanting, ‘A ring! A ring!’ Elizabeth thought the women might be models for fighting figures she had seen on a card advertising

Figg’s Boxing Competitions.844 Then the guards rushed in, yelling, ‘Damned whores.’ They pushed the women apart with staves, ordered those fighting to desist. Although they pressed the ends of their staves to the fighters’ breast-bones, it was a mere gesture. No guard wished to hinder the passing of those women to the sea.

As quickly as the fracas had begun, the women became quiet, sober, each straightening her jacket, settling her cap, taking up her bundles and clambering into the waggon. Mary Pile retrieved the shawl, returned it to Mary Moulton. The fair haired lad, Joseph Harrison, helped his mother step up into the vehicle. The women greeted Martha, wrapped in her warm cloak, with some wonderment. It was difficult to comprehend her joining them; willingly, changing places with another. Such love was rare. There were suppressed smiles, squeezing of hands. The shadow of Elizabeth Lee, wearing breeches, her cloak quickly removed, had vanished into the darkness.

Martha Eaton/Beddingfield closed her eyes and allowed a new song to unwind in her head.

As she tapped the rhythm with her fingers, warm under her blue cloak, its images passed

844 James Figg was allegedly the first boxing ‘champion’ of England and established an academy for training in ‘the noble science of defence’ in 1719. A Swiss visitor, Cesar de Saussure (1705-1783), reported witnessing a female boxing match in 1728. Boxing had become the most fashionable combative competition by 1788. See Shoemaker (2004), pp. 201-211. — 391 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______like a long unfurling tapestry. She thought one day she would embroider a cushion with a partridge in a pear tree. Or perhaps she would make a whole quilt: Drummers drumming,

Pipers piping, Lords A-leaping, Ladies dancing, Maids A-milking, Swans A-swimming,

Geese A-laying, Gold rings, Calling birds, French hens, Turtle doves, circling and spinning from her snipping and stitching. She would use fabrics collected from this voyage beyond the seas. The partridge in the pear tree would be the centre-piece. With the cold burning inside her nostrils, an image of a round green tree bearing a golden pear and a silky grey partridge was printed on her eyelids.845

The old woman, Mrs. Handland, smiled to herself: the voyage was an unexpected adventure, a blessing, promising new beginnings. She looked at Martha Eaton: she understood her mettle, the pretty young woman with the dreaming smile. They were both women of great spirit.

They were all women of great spirit.

*

So for now, the masquerade closes. The phantoms, released from the archives, from house arrest, as Derrida said, are opened to the future, to disseminate, to multiply, to transform, and to be transformed.

845 From what I can glean, the Christmas song, ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ was introduced into England in a magazine called Mirth without Mischief in the early 1780s. Most sources cite Leigh Grant, Twelve Days of Christmas: A Celebration and History (Harry N. Abrams 1995). The best site about the song was that of Anderson, Douglas, D., ‘Twelve Days of Christmas: Notes on the Festival and Carol’, Hymns and Carols of Christmas, http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/Notes_On_Carols/twelve_days_of_christmas.htm. Anderson, drawing upon Leigh Grant’s work, gave something of the possible European origins of the song. — 392 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Bibliography

Archival Sources

Assize Records:

 Norfolk Circuit Gaol Book, Lent 1783, ASSI 33/ 6, National Archives, Kew, UK.

 Worcestershire Winter Assizes 1782, ASSI 5 /103/ 21, National Archives, Kew.

 Worcester Summer Assizes 1783, Judgments, Recognizance and Deposition for Sarah Davis ASSI 5/103/23 National Archives, Kew.

 Worcestershire Lent Assizes, 1785, ASSI 5 105/32, National Archives, Kew.

 Worcestershire Summer Assizes 1785, ASSI 5/105/36, National Archives, Kew.

Belbroughton Parish Register, Marriages 1754-1812; Banns 1754-1823, Vol. 4, 1 August, 1756, Worcester Library and History Centre. Trinity Street, Worcester WR1 2PW. Microfilm Ref., X988.52.

Belbroughton Parish Register, Baptisms, 1739-1800, Vol. 3, Worcester Library and History Centre. Trinity Street, Worcester WR1 2PW, Microfilm Ref. X988.52.

National Archives, Kew, Documents Online, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages, http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au.

Old Bailey Proceedings Online (OBPOnline) (1674-1864), www.oldbaileyonline.org.

Copies of Despatches to Governor Phillip, 1790-1794, Colonial Office, Great Britain and Ireland, (Official Letterbook), Microfilm, CO/331, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Colonial Office, Great Britain and Ireland, CO 201/2, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Judge’s Letters and Reports, 1784-1787, Home Office, HO47, National Archives, Kew, UK.

Last Will and Testament of the Reverend John Wylde, 23 January 1784. Probate granted 22 May 1788, No. 11/1166, National Archives, Kew, Documents Online, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

— 393 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Last Will and Testament of Richard Akerman, Gentleman of Old Bailey, City of London, PROB 11/1224/298-301,National Archives, Kew, Documents Online, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Name Index to Apprentices, compiled by W. English, Worcester Library and History Centre, Trinity Street, Worcester, WR1 2PW.

Newgate Calendar: Newgate’s List of Felons 1784-1785: The Names of Prisoners on the Common Side, PCOM 2/171, National Archives, Kew.

Naval Office: Treasury Board Archives, microfilm, PRO 3555, PRO T1 718-733, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Old Swinford Parish Register, Marriages with Banns 1754-1762, Vol 6, No 40, 10 December, 1754, Worcester Library and History Centre, Trinity Street, Worcester ,WR1 2PW.

Old Swinford Parish Register, Baptisms 1752-1786, Vol. 5, 11 January 1755, Worcester Library and History Centre, Trinity Street, Worcester WR1 2PW.

Rocque, John, 1746 Map of London, Westminster and Southwark: Find your Way around Mid-Georgian London, (CD, 2nd Edn), commentary by Ralph Hyde (formerly Keeper of Prints and Maps at London Guildhall Library (Motco Enterprises 2003).

Sheriff’s Cravings: From the Treasury Chambers, Whitehall 1784-1787, T90/165, National Archives, Kew.

Worcestershire Quarter Session Books and Order Books, Vol. 4, (1757-1772), 1762, Worcester Record Office, County Hall, Spetchley Road, WR5 2NP.

Worcestershire Quarter Sessions, Vol. 5 (1773-1790), Worcester Record Office, County Hall, Spetchley Road, WR5 2NP.

Published Primary Sources, 1689-1872 (Including modern editions and digitalized forms)

Ackermann, Rudolph, Microcosm of London (1809), ‘Item of the Day’, Eighteenth Century Reading Room (Monday 24 October 2005), http://18thcenturyreadingroom.blogspot.com/2005/10/item-of-day-microcosm-of-london- 1809.html.

Bartholomew, John, Gazetteer of the British Isles (1837), cited online, A Vision of Britain through Time, 1801-1974,

— 394 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=201 (University of Portsmouth n.d.), www.gbhgis.org.

Beames, Thomas, The Rookeries of London (Thomas Bosworth 1852).

Bell, Robert, ‘The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England’ (1996/2002), http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/oleng10.txt.

Bonesana, Cesare (Marchese Beccaria), ‘Of the Punishment of Death’, from Of Crime and Punishment, 1st publ., in Italian 1764, (R. Bell, next door to St. Paul's Church, in Third- Street 1778), transl. from the French by Edward D. Ingraham. 2nd American Edn, (Philip H. Nicklin: A. Walker, printer 1819), online (Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics), http://www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun.htm.

Boswell, James, The Essential Boswell: Selections from the Writings: Selections from the Writings of James Boswell [1762-1795], edited by Peter Martin (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2003).

Boswell, James, Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763, edited, with introduction by Frederick A. Pottle (Heinemann 1951).

Bolles, Edwin, C. [1836-1920], The Bolles Collection on the History of London Online, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Bolles.html.

Bradley, William, A Voyage to New South Wales, 1786-1792 (Public Library of New South Wales in assoc. with Ure Smith 1969).

British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk.

Burnet, Janet, More Frost and Snow: The Diary of Janet Burnet 1758-1795, edited by Mobray Pearson (Canongate Academic in assoc. with Ethnological Research Centre and National Museums of Scotland 1994).

Cadogan, William: (A Physician), ‘An Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children, from their Birth to Three Years of Age: In a Letter to one of the Governors of the Foundling Hospital, 3rd Edn, published by Order of the General Committee for Transacting the Affairs of said Hospital (J. Roberts in Warwick Lane 1749) [Price 6 d.], http://www.neonatology.org/classics/cadogan.html.

Clark, Ralph, The Journal and Letters of Lt Ralph Clark, 1787-1792, edited by Paul G. Fidlon and R. J. Ryan (Australian Documents Library in assoc. with Library of Australia, 1981).

Collins, David, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, With Remarks on the Disposition Customs, Manners, etc, of the Native Inhabitants of the Country, Vol. 1, 1st publ., 1798, edited by Brian H. Fletcher (A. H. Reed and A. W. Reed in assoc. with the Royal Australian Historical Society 1975). — 395 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Defoe, Daniel A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Vols 1 and 2, Introductions by G. D. H. Cole and D. C. Browning, 1st publ., 1724-6 (Dent 1962).

Dillon, Peter, Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage to the South Seas Performed by Order of the Government of British India to Ascertain the Actual Fate of La Pérouse’s Expedition…Vols. 1 and 2 (St Paul’s Churchyard 1829).

Dixon, Hepworth, John Howard, and the Prisonworld of Europe: From Original and Authentic Documents, Introductory Essay by Richard, W. Dickinson (Frederick Chandler, 1852/ Digital Reprint: University of Michigan Library).

Easty, John, (Marine Private), Memorandum of the Transactions of a Voyage from England to Botany Bay, 1787-1793: A First Fleet Journal (Trustees of The Public Library of New South Wales in association with Angus and Robertson, 1965).

English Bill of Rights (1689), Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/paris763.htm.

Farr, E. and E. H. Nolan, ‘The History of England: From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria’, The Project Gutenberg EBook of The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol. III, 1st publ., 1860 (EBook #19218, prod., by David Widger, 8 September 2006), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19218/19218.txt.

Fielding, Henry, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, edited by Malvin E. Zirker, 1st publ., 1751-1753 (Clarendon Press 1988).

Foss, Edward (1787-1870), Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England from the Conquest to the Present Time: 1066-1870 (Lawbook Exchange Ltd 1999).

Fowell, Newton, The Sirius Letters: The Complete Letters of Newton Fowell, Midshipman and Lieutenant aboard the Sirius Flagship of the First Fleet on its Voyage to New South Wales, edited with commentary by Nance Irvine (Fairfax Library 1988).

Gentleman's Magazine, (1785-1788), British Library Rare Books, London, UK.

Grose, Francis, The Vulgar Tongue: Buckish Slang and Pickpocket Eloquence, edited by Alistair Williams, 1st publ. 1785 (Summersdale 2004).

Hamilton, Alexander, A Treatise of midwifery, comprehending the management of female complaints, and the treatment of children in early infancy. To which are added prescriptions for women and children, and directions for preparing a variety of food and drinks, adapted to the circumstances of lying-in-women. Divested of technical terms and abstruse theories (J. Murray, J. Dickson, W. Creech, and C. Elliot 1781).

Hanway, Jonas, Letters on the Importance of the Rising Generation of the Laboring Part of Our Fellow-Subjects; Being an Account of the Miserable State of the Infant Parish Poor; ... — 396 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Vol. II (London, 1767).

———— A Sentimental History of Chimney Sweepers, in London & Westminster. Shewing the Necessity of Putting Them Under Regulations, to Prevent the Grossest Inhumanity to the Climbing Boys. With a Letter to a London Clergyman on Sunday Schools. Calculated for the Preservation of the Children of the Poor … (London1785), Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO.

Historical Records of New South Wales 1788-1796, Vol. 1 (The Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament 1914).

(The) Hothams: being the Chronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and South Dalton from their hitherto unpublished family papers, edited by Anna Maria D. W. Stirling, Vols 1 and 2 (Herbert Jenkins 1918).

Howard, John, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales: with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals. 3rd Edn (Printed by William Eyres; and sold by T. Cadell, J. Johnson, and C. Dilly, London 1784).

———— The State of Prisons in England and Wales: With Preliminary Observations and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, Bicentennial ed., comprising a facsimile reprint of the 1st Edn, 1777, with preface by Martin Wright (Professional Books 1977).

Hunter, Captain John, Commander HMS Sirius, with further accounts by Governor Arthur Phillip, Lieutenant P.G. King, and Lieutenant H.L Ball, An Historical Journal, 1787-1792, edited by John Bach, 1st publ., 1793 (Angus and Robertson in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society 1968).

King, Philip Gidley, The Journal of Philip Gidley King: Lieutenant, R.N. 1787-1790, edited by Paul G. Fidlon and R.J. Ryan (Australian Documents Library 1980).

Knight, Charles (ed.), ‘Doctor’s Commons: Prerogative Will-Office’, London, Vol. 5, (Charles Knight and Co., Ludgate Street 1843) in Edwin, C. Bolles, [1836-1920], The Bolles Collection, The History of London Online, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Bolles.html.

Lee, Sophia, The Recess: Or a Tale of Other Times, edited by April Alliston, 1st publ., 1785 (University Press of Kentucky 2000).

Leigh, Samuel, ‘Doctor’s Commons’, Leigh's New Picture of London (W. Clowes 1819), http://www.londonancestor.com/leighs/crt-docoms.htm.

———— ‘Gray’s Inn’, Leigh's New Picture of London (W. Clowes 1819), http://www.londonancestor.com/leighs/crt-grays.htm.

— 397 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

‘Lord George Gordon: An Account of the Riots in London in 1780’, The Newgate Calendar 1780 Online, http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng358.htm.

Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor: The Classical Study of Poverty and the Criminal Classes in the 19th Century, Vol. IV, Introduction by John D. Rosenberg, 1st publ., 1861, reprinted and unabridged (Dover Books 1968).

Nagle, Jacob, The Nagle Journal, A Diary of the Life of Jacob Nagle, Sailor, from the Year 1775 to 1841, edited by John C. Dann (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988).

Nicol, John, Life and Adventures, 1776-1801, edited by Tim Flannery (Text Publishing 1997).

Noah, William, Voyage to Sydney in the Ship Hillsborough 1798-1799 and A Description of the Colony (Library of Australian History 1978).

Norfolk Chronicle, Microfilm, Norwich Historical Library, Norwich, UK.

Norfolk Chronicle, transcribed by Janelle Penny, The Foxearth and District History Society (2006), http://www.foxearth.org.uk/newspapers.html.

Norwich Mercury, Microfilm, Norwich Historical Library, Norwich, UK.

Owenson, Sydney, (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, edited with an introduction by Kathryn Kirkpatrick, 1st publ., 1806 (Oxford University Press 1999).

Noorthouck, John, Ch. 14, Book 2, ‘Castle Baynard Ward', A New History of London: Including Westminster and Southwark (T. Baldwin 1773), pp. 579-87, http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=46757&strquery=Great%20Knight%20Rider%20Street.

Phillip, Arthur, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay; with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson & Norfolk Island; Compiled from Authentic Papers, ... To which are added, The Journals of Lieuts. Shortland, Watts, Bradley & Capt.Marshall etc, (John Stockdale 1789), Facsimile Edn, 1st publ., 1968 (Libraries Board of South Australia 1982).

Priestley, J. B., ‘Hamoaze River or Estuary’, Historical Account of the Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railways, of Great Britain, 1st publ., April 1831. Available online as Priestley's Navigable Rivers and Canals, courtesy of James Shead (2007), http://www.jim-shead.com/waterways/sdoc.php?wpage=PNRC0341#PNRC327.

Robson, Thomas (ed.), The British Herald, Or Cabinet of Armorial Bearings of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland: From the Earliest to the Present Time with a Complete Glossary of Heraldic Terms, to which is attached a History of Heraldry, Vol. 3 (Temple and Marwood 1830).

— 398 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Smith, John Thomas, A Book for a Rainy Day: Or Recollections of the Events of the Years, 1766-1833, edited and introduction by Wilfred Whitten, 1st publ., 1845-1861 (Methuen 1905), (Kessinger Publisher Legacy Reprints 2007).

Smyth, Arthur Bowes, The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn 1787- 1789, edited by Paul Fidlon and R. J. Ryan (Australian Documents Library1979).

———— Original Daily Journal Kept on the Transport “Penrhyn”, Containing one of the most detailed accounts of the first hundred days of the Settlement of Australia in 1788, [A brochure with extracts from the text and with facsimiles] (Francis Edward, 1964).

Tench, Watkin (Captain of the Marines), Sydney's First Four Years, being a reprint of A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and a Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, with introduction and annotations by L.E Fitzhardinge (Angus and Robertson 1979).

The London Chronicle, British Library Rare Books, London, UK.

The Newgate Calendar, Vol. 4, http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/newgate4.

The Times, Digital Archive, UNSW Library, http://info.library.unsw.edu.au.

Treaty of Paris (1763), Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/paris763.htm.

Vaux, James Hardy, The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux: Including His Vocabulary of the Flash language, edited with an introduction and notes by Noel McLachlan, 1st publ., 1819 (Heinemann 1964).

Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis, 2nd Edn (Effingham Wilson 1832).

Walpole, Horace, The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, Including Numerous Letters Now First Published, From The Original Manuscripts, Vol. 4, 1770-1797 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard), 1842, (Project Gutenberg, EBook of Letters of Horace Walpole, Vol. 4), http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/lthw410.txt.

Wesley, Charles, ‘Depth of Mercy’, Hymns (1740), http://gbgm- umc.org/umhistory/wesley/hymns/umh355.stm.

Wesley, John, (The Works), Vol. 11, edited by Thomas Jackson (1872), Section 14, http://gbgm-umc.org/UMhistory/Wesley/perfect2.html.

———— Sermon 59, from The Works of John Wesley, edited by Thomas Jackson (1872), Global Ministries: The United Methodist Church, http://new.gbgm- umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/59.

— 399 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

White, John Esq., (Surgeon-General to the First Fleet and the Settlement at Port Jackson), Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, introduction by Rex Rienits, edited by Alec H. Chisholm, 1st publ., 1790 (Angus and Robinson 1962).

Secondary Sources, 1872 to present

Abbas, Ackbar, ‘On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images’, New German Critique, No. 48 (Autumn 1989), pp. 43-62.

Acciaioli, Gregory L., ‘Knowing What You’re Doing: A Review of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice’, Canberra Anthropology, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1981), pp. 23-51.

Ackroyd, Peter, London: the Biography, 1st publ., 2000 (Vintage 2001).

Allen, Graham, ‘Aporia’, The Literary Encyclopedia (20 July 2005), The Literary Dictionary Company (15 January 2008), http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1578.

Alsford, Stephen, ‘Norwich: River Wensum’, Medieval English Towns: Urban History (1999), http://www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/ssp02.html.

Anderson, Douglas, D., ‘Twelve Days of Christmas: Notes on the Festival and Carol’, Hymns and Carols of Christmas, http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/Notes_On_Carols/twelve _days_of_christmas.htm.

Atkins, William Maynard, The Parish of Saint George, Hanover Square (Dix Charlmont Press 1976).

Atkinson, Alan, The Commonwealth of Speech: An Argument about Australia’s Past, Present and Future (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2002).

‘A to Z Guide to Heraldic Terms’, Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, http://www.burkes- peerage.net/articles/heraldry_a.aspx.

Attridge, Derek, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge University Press1988).

Attridge, Derek, ‘Following Derrida’ in Khoraographics for Jacques Derrida, edited by Dragan Kujundzic, Tympanum 4 – Special Issue (15 July 2000), http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/khora.html.

Atwood, Margaret, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge University Press 2002).

— 400 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs.

Babbington, Anthony, The English Bastille: A History of Newgate Gaol and Prison Conditions in Britain 1188-1902 (Macdonald 1971).

Bakhtin, M.M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 1st publ., 1975 (University of Texas Press 1981).

Barnes, Julian, Flaubert's Parrot (Picador 1984).

Barthes, Roland, ‘Historical Discourse’, reprinted from Social Science Information (International Social Science Council) Vol. VI, No. 4 (August 1967), translated by Peter Wexler, in Introduction to Structuralism, edited by Michael Lane (Basic Books 1970).

Bartlett, Alison, ‘Dear Regina: Formative Conversations About Feminist Writing’, FemTAP: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Practice (Summer 2006), http://www.femtap.com/id14.html.

Bartlett, Alison (ed.), Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women Writers (Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1998).

Batchelor, Jennie, ‘‘Industry in Distress’: Reconfiguring Femininity and Labor in the Magdalen House’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 1-20.

Barquet, Nicolau and Pere Domingo, ‘Smallpox: The Triumph over the Most Terrible of the Ministers of Death’, History of Medicine: Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 127 Issue 8, Part 1 (15 October 1997), pp. 635-642.

Bateson, Charles, The Convict Ships, 1787-1868, 1st publ., 1959 (Library of Australian History 1983).

Beach, Ian, ‘The Ancient Manor of Sedgley: "Ow we spake"’ (2007), http://www.sedgleymanor.com/dictionaries/dialect.html.

Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England: 1660-1800 (Princeton University Press 1986).

———— ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer 1975), pp. 80-116.

———— ‘The Pattern of Crime in England 1660-1800’, Past and Present, Vol. 62 (Feb., 1974), pp. 47-95.

— 401 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Bender, John B. ‘Making the World Safe for Narratology: A Reply to Dorrit Cohn’, New Literary History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter 1995), pp. 29-33.

———— Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of the Mind in Eighteenth-century England (University of Chicago Press 1987).

Benjamin, Walter, On the Concept of History, Theses I-IX, translated by Dennis Redmond, 2005, first written 1940, Walter Benjamin Archive, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.

———— The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, transl. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, developed, 1927-1940, this edition 1st publ., 1999 (The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press 2002).

Benkovitz, Miriam ‘Dr. Burney's Memoirs’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 39 (August 1959) pp. 257-268.

Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida: Derridabase and Circumfessions, transl. by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago University Press 1993).

Bentley, Michael (ed.), Historiography (Routledge 1997).

Berry, Mark , ‘Great Goliath’ Towermill, Thurlton (2007), http://www.windmillworld.com/millid/2550.htm.

Black, Jeremy and Roy Porter, (eds), A Dictionary of Eighteenth Century History, 1st publ., 1994 (Penguin Books 1996).

Bleakley, Horace, ‘Eighteenth Century Newgate: Governors or Keepers’, Notes and Queries (3 September 1927), pp. 167-168.

Bogart, Dan, ‘Neighbors, Networks, and the Development of Transport Systems: Explaining the Diffusion of Turnpike Trusts in Eighteenth-century England,’ Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 61, No. 2 (March 2007), pp. 238-262.

Boulton, Jeremy, ‘ “It is Extreme Necessity That Makes Me Do This”: Some “Survival Strategies” of Pauper Households in London’s West End during the Early Eighteenth Century’, in Household Strategies for Survival, 1600-2000: Fission, Faction and Cooperation, edited by Laurence Fontaine and Jürgen Schlumbohm. International Review of History, Supplement (Press Syndicate, University of Cambridge 2001).

Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘The Political Field, the Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field’, excerpt from a lecture delivered in Lyons, France (14 November 1995), translated by Richard Nice, Chapter 2 in Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, edited by Rodney Benson, Erik Neveu (Polity Press 2005), pp. 29-47.

———— The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford University Press 1991). — 402 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

———— The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Polity Press with Basil Blackwell 1990).

Bowett, Adam, ‘The English “Horsebone” Chair, 1685-1710, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 141 (May 1999), pp. 263-270.

Bradfield, Nancy, Costume in Detail: 1730-1930, New Ed., 1st publ., 1968 (Eric Dobbey Publishing 2005).

Bradley, Simon and Nikolaus Pevsner, London: The City of Churches (Penguin Books 1998).

Bray, Abigail and Claire Colebrook, ‘The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the ‘Politics of (Dis)Embodiment’, Signs, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn 1998), pp. 35-67.

‘(A) Brief History of Strangers’ Hall’, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/default.asp?Document=200.23.001.01.

Briggs, Katherine, A Dictionary of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and other Supernatural Creatures (Penguin, 1977).

Buchanan, Rita, A Weaver's Garden: Growing Plants for Natural Dyes and Fibers, 1st publ., 1987 (Dover Publications 1999).

———— A Dyer's Garden: From Plant to Pot Growing Dyes for Natural Fibers (Interweave Press 1995).

Bullock, Ann-May, Lace and Lacemaking (B. T. Batsford 1981).

Burke, Peter, 'Oblique Approaches to the History of Popular Culture', in Approaches to Popular Culture, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby (Bowling Green University Popular Press 1976).

Burney, Frances, Evelina, Or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, 3rd Edn, 1779, 1st publ., 1778 (Penguin Classics 1994).

Burton, Elizabeth, The Pageant of Georgian England (Charles Scribner’s Sons 1967).

Buxbaum, Tim, Icehouses, 1st publ., 1992 (Shire Publications 2002).

Byatt, A. S., On Histories and Stories, 1st publ., 2000 (Vintage 2001).

Byatt, A. S., and Ignes Sodre, Imagining Characters, edited by Rebecca Swift (Vintage 1995).

— 403 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Callinocos, Alex, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Polity Press 1995).

Carey, Brycchan, Ignatius Sancho: African Man of Letters online, http://www.brycchancarey.com/sancho/letter2.htm.

Carr, E.H., What is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961, 2nd Edn, edited by R. W. Davies (Macmillan 1986).

Carter, Michael, ‘Vauxhall Gardens Revisit'd’, Weekly Eastern Kentucky University (WEKU), http://www.weku.fm/carter_page_02.htm.

Carter, Paul, ‘Culture of Coincidence: Notes on a Performance Piece Called Mirror States', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Vol. 3 No 1 (1990), http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/3.1/Carter.html.

———— The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (Faber and Faber 1988).

Cash, Arthur H., John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (Yale University Press 2006).

Cash, Derek, Introduction and Ch. 1, Access to Museum Culture: the British Museum from 1753 to 1836, http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/researchpublications/electronicPDF/133/Ch1.pdf (The British Museum 2004).

———— ‘The Trustees and Officers of the British Museum: Their Attitudes and Practices During the Eighteenth Century’, Ch. III, Access to Museum Culture: the British Museum from 1753 to 1836, http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/researchpublications/electronicPDF/133/133.html (The British Museum 2004).

Chapman, Don, 1788: The People of the First Fleet, 1st publ., 1981 (Doubleday 1986).

Clark, Richard, ‘Newgate’, (nd) http://www.richard.clark32.btintnernet.co.uk/newgate.html.

Clark, Richard, ‘Being Hanged at Tyburn’, (nd) http://uk.geocities.com/[email protected]/hangedt.html.

Cleland, J. B., ‘The Old Woman of Botany Bay’, Journal of Royal Australian History Society, Vol. 43, Part 3, No. 47 (1957), pp. 137-139.

Clendinnen, Inga ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’ Quarterly Essay, No. 23 (2006).

— 404 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Cobley, John, The Crimes of the First Fleet, 1st publ., 1970 (Angus and Robertson 1982).

Cody, Lisa Forman, ‘Living and Dying in Georgian London's Lying-In Hospitals’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 309-348.

Cohen, Margaret, ‘Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria’, New German Critique, No. 48 (Autumn 1989), pp. 87-107.

Cole, Anne, Poor Law Documents Before 1834, 2nd Edn, (Federation of Family History Societies 2000).

Cole, W.A., ‘Trends in Eighteenth Century Smuggling’, The Economic History Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1958), 395–410.

Collie, Jan, ‘St Bride’s: The Printers’ Church, Fleet Street, EC4, Hidden London, http://www.hiddenlondon.com/stbrides.htm.

Collier, Ann, The Art of Lacemaking, 1st publ., 1986 (David and Charles, 2000).

Collins, Rebecca, ‘Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography: Myth as Mystification in Historical Discourse’, Rethinking History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (November 2003), pp. 341–365.

Conlin, Jonathan, ‘Vauxhall Revisited: The Afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden, 1770– 1859’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45 (October 2006), 718–743.

Combe, Kirk, ‘Shadwell as Lord of Misrule: Dryden, Varronian Satire, and Carnival’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 24, No.3 (2000), pp. 1-18.

Crowley, John E., ‘The Sensibility of Comfort’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No.3 (1999).

Cousins, Mark ‘The Practice of Historical Investigation’, in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (Cambridge University Press 1988).

Cradley: Park Lane Unitarian Chapel, http://www.cradleylinks.com/park_lane_history.html.

Crawford, Catherine, ‘Nihell, Elizabeth (b. 1723)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37812.

Crawford, R. M., Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, Making History (McPhee Gribble in Assoc. with Penguin1985).

Cross, Arthur Lyon, Review: ‘London in the Eighteenth Century by Walter Besant’, — 405 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

The American Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (October 1903), pp. 154-158.

Croxson, Bronwyn, ‘The Foundation and Evolution of the Middlesex Hospital’s Lying-In Service, 1745-86’, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2001), pp. 27-57.

———— ‘The Public and Private Faces of Eighteenth-Century London Dispensary Charity’, Medical History, Vol. 41, No. 2 (April 1997), pp.127–149.

Cruickshank, Dan and Peter Wyld, London: The Art of Georgian Building (The Architectural Press 1982).

Curthoys, Anne and John Docker, Is History Fiction? (UNSW Press 2006).

———— ‘Is History Fiction?’ The UTS Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1996), pp. 12-37.

Damousi, Joy, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge University Press 1997.

Davenport, Hester, Faithful Handmaid: Fanny Burney at the Court of King George III (Sutton 2000).

Davis, Michael T., ‘James Adair (1743?–1798)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article.

Davis, Natalie Zemon, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, 1st publ., 1995 (Harvard University Press 2001).

———— The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press 1983).

———— Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford University Press 1987).

Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. by Anne Boyman and Introduction by John Rajchman, this Edn 1st publ., 2001 (Zone Books 2005).

————The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, 1st publ., 1990 (Continuum 2004).

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and Foreword by Brian Massumi, 1st publ., 1988 (Continuum 2004).

———— What is Philosophy? translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, 1st publ., 1991 (Columbia University Press 1994).

Dening, Greg, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge University Press 1993).

— 406 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

———— The Bounty: An Ethnographic History (Monograph) (University of Melbourne 1989).

Derrida, Jacques, ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, transl. by Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry, 1st. publ. in French, 2003, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pp. 441- 461.

———— Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, transl. by Eric Prenowitz, originally published as Mal d'Archive: Une impression Freudienne (Editions Galilee, 1995); this translation 1st publ., in Diacritics (Summer 1995) (University of Chicago Press 1996).

———— On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, transl. by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford University Press 1995).

———— Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf and Introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (Routledge 1994).

———— Positions, transl. and annotated by Alan Bass, 1st publ., 1972 (University of Chicago Press 1981).

Devereaux, Simon, ‘The City and the Sessions Paper: "Public Justice" in London, 1770- 1800’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (October 1996), pp. 466-503.

Ditchfield, P. H., The Charm of the English Village (Senate/Studio Editions 1994).

Divo, Diana, ‘Wallonia and How its Weaving Families Came to Emigrate to England’ (2007), http://www.cryerfamilyhistory.btinternet.co.uk/location-wallonia.htm.

Donnelly, Paul, ‘‘A Bracelet of Bright Hair’: Memory Tokens of Love’, in Convict Love Tokens edited by Michelle Field and Timothy Millett (Wakefield Press 1998).

Dray, William, ‘Philosophy and Historiography’, in Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley (Routledge 1997).

Dreyfus, Hubert L., ‘Wild on Heidegger: Comments’, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 60, No. 22, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, Sixtieth Annual Meeting (24 October 1963), pp. 677-680.

Druett Joan, She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea (Simon and Schuster 2000).

Dutoit, Thomas, ‘Translating the Name’ in Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford University Press 1995).

Durrant, Samuel, ‘Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee’s Inconsolable Works of Mourning’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Autumn 1999), pp. 430-463. — 407 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Duyker, Edward, ‘A Stout Pair of Boots, Reflections of an Historian in the Field’, Theo Barker (1919-2003) Memorial Lecture (Charles Sturt University 12 August 2004).

Earnshaw, Pat, Bobbin and Needle Laces: Identification and Care (Pitman Press 1983).

Elden, Stuart, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of Spatial History (Continuum 2001).

Ely, James W. Jr., ‘The Eighteenth-Century Poor Laws in the West Riding of Yorkshire’, The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (January 1986), pp. 1-24.

Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, ‘Trial Procedures: How Trials Were Conducted at the Old Bailey’, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Trial-procedures.jsp.

Endelman, Todd, E., The Jews of Georgian England 1714-1830, 1st publ., 1999 (Ann Arbor Paperbacks 2002).

———— ‘In Defense of Jewish Social History’, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2001), pp. 52-67.

Erickson, Carolly, The Girl From Botany Bay: The True Story of the Convict Mary Broad and Her Extraordinary Escape (Pan Macmillan 2004).

Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds, ‘Ethics and Method’, History and Theory, Theme Issue, Vol. 43, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 61-83.

———— ‘The Crisis of Realism in Postmodern Time’ in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Science, Literature and Culture, edited by George Levine (The University of Wisconsin Press 1993).

Esser, Raingard, ‘They Obey All Magistrates and All Good Lawes … and We Thinke our Cittie Happie to Enjoye Them, Urban History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2007).

Falconer, Delia, ‘Historical Novels’, Eureka Street, March, Vol 13, No 2 (March 2003), pp.31-34.

Family Search, International Genealogical Index, http://www.familysearch.org.

‘'Farmer' George and his 'ferme ornée'’, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Kew History and Heritage, http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/heritage/timeline/1773to1820_farmer.html.

Fensham, Rachel, ‘Beyond Corporeal Feminism: Thinking Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century’, Women: a Cultural Review, Vol.16, N. 3 (Winter 2005), pp. 284-304.

Festa, Lynn, ‘Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring 2005), pp. 47-90. — 408 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Fisher, David, Chronomedia: London Timeline Eighteenth Century, http://www.terramedia.co.uk.

Fisher, Judith W., ‘Creating Another Identity: Aging Actresses in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Aging and Identity, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1999), pp. 57-77.

Flowers, Michael, ‘Ellen Wood’s Worcestershire Childhood’ (2006), http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk/childhood.html.

Fontaine, Laurence and Jürgen Schlumbohm (eds), Household Strategies for Survival, 1600-2000: Fission, Faction and Cooperation, (International Review of History, Supplement 8) (Press Syndicate, University of Cambridge 2001).

Forster Robert, ‘Achievements of the Annales School’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 38, No. 1 (March 1978), pp. 58-76.

Foster, Marie, My Suffolk Family, http://www.mysuffolkfamily.com/f48.htm.

Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited with an Introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. from the French by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 1st publ., 1977 (Cornell Paperbacks 1980).

———— The Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse of Language, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon Books 1972).

Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement, edited with Introduction and Notes by Robert Fraser, 1st publ., 1890 (Oxford University Press 1998).

Free, Anthony, ‘The Anthropology of Pierre Bourdieu: A Reconsideration’, Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 16, No. 4, 395-416 (1996).

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. by A.A. Brill, 1st publ., 1900 (Gramercy Books 1996).

Friedman, David, ‘Making Sense of English Law Enforcement: The Private Prosecution of Crime’, from author’s version of paper delivered at University of Chicago Roundtable, (1995), http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/England_18thc./England_18thc.html.

Frost, Alan, Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginnings (Melbourne University Press 1994).

Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (University of Chicago Press 2000).

— 409 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Gascoigne, John (nd) ‘Exploration, Enlightenment and Enterprise: The Motives for Pacific Exploration in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, http://web.mala.bc.ca/black/amrc/Document%20Vault/Papers/gascoign.htm.

Gascoigne, Margaret, Discovering English Customs and Traditions, 3rd Edn, 1st publ., 1969 (Shire publications 1998).

Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford University Press 1994).

Gebauer, Gunter and Jennifer Marston William, ‘Habitus, Intentionality, and Social Rules: A Controversy between Searle and Bourdieu’, SubStance, Vol. 29, No. 3, Issue 93: Special Issue: Pierre Bourdieu (2000), pp. 68-83.

Geertz, Clifford, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, Ch. 1, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1st publ., 1973 (Hutchinson 1975).

———— ‘The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Levi-Strauss’, Ch. 13, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Hutchinson, 1975).

George, M. Dorothy, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 1st publ., 1925 (Academy Chicago Publishers 2000).

Gertzina, Gretchen Holbrook, ‘Ignatius Sancho: A Renaissance Black Man in Eighteenth- Century England’, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 12 (Autumn 1998), pp. 106-107.

Ghosh, Amitav, The Glass Palace (Harper Collins 2001).

Ghosh, Ranjan, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the 'Doing' of History: A Dialogue Between F. R. Ankersmit and Ranjan Ghosh’, Rethinking History, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June 2007), pages 225 – 249.

Gibbs, Anna, ‘Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences’, TEXT, Vol.9, No.1 (2005), online journal, http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/april05/gibbs.htm.

Gibson, Madge, Belbroughton to Botany Bay (Belbroughton Historical Society 1987).

Gilbert, L. A., 'Banks, Sir Joseph (1743 - 1820)', Australian Dictionary of Biography Online (ADB Online), Vol. 1 (Melbourne University Press 1966), pp 52-55, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010051b.htm.

Gilboy, Elizabeth W., ‘The Cost of Living and Real Wages in Eighteenth Century England, The Review of Economic Statistics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (August 1936), pp. 134-143.

Gillen, Mollie, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (Library of Australian History 1989). — 410 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

———— In Search of John Small: First Fleeter (Library of Australian History 1985).

———— ‘The Botany Bay Decision, 1786: Convicts, Not Empire’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 385 (October1982), pp. 740-766.

Goodman, Jordan, ‘History and Anthropology’, in Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley (Routledge 1997).

Gray, A. J., ‘Ann Smith of the Lady Penrhyn’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal, Vol 43, Part 5 (1957), pp. 252-259.

Grenville, Kate, The Secret River (Text Publishing 2005).

Gribben, John, Deep simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life, 1st publ., 2004 (Penguin Books 2005).

Griffith, W. P., ‘The Tudor Prelude’, Ch. 1, The Welsh in London: 1500-2000 (University of Wales Press 2001).

Grundy, Joan E., History’s Midwives: Including a C17th and C18th Yorkshire Midwives Nominations Index (The Federation of Family History Societies 2003).

Grundy, Michael ‘One Final Mystery in Gallows-to-Glory Tale’, News Quest Media Midlands (8 Nov. 2003), http://archive.thisisworcestershire.co.uk/2003/11/8/153558.html.

Guerrini, Anita, ‘The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 50, No. 3 (July-September 1989), pp. 391-407.

Gwilliam, Bill, Old Worcester: People and Places (Halfshire Books 1993).

———— Worcestershire’s Hidden Past (Halfshire Books 1991).

Harlow, Barbara, (Review) ‘Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth Century England by John Bender’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter 1990), pp. 209-211.

Hart, Avril and Susan North, Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries, 1st publ., 1998 (‘V and A’ Publications 2006).

Hart, Sally, ‘On Jacques Derrida: The Politics of Mourning’, Rethinking History, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June, 2007), pp. 169-185.

Hay, Douglas, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, 1st publ., 1975 (Peregrine/Penguin Books 1977).

— 411 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Heidegger, Martin, Towards the Definition of Philosophy (1918 Lecture Series), translated by Ted Sadler (Continuum Impacts 2008).

———— ‘Nietzsche’s Interpretation of History’, in Nietzsche: Nihilism Vol. 4, edited by David Farrell Krell, 1st publ., 1940 (HarperSanFrancisco: Division of HarperCollins 1991).

———— Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, transl. by John van Buren (Indiana University Press 1999).

———— Being and Time, (B and T), translated by Edward Robinson and John Macquarrie (Oxford University Press 1977): Sein and Zeit, (S and Z), 11th Edn (Max Niemeyer 1967).

———— Towards the Definition of Philosophy (1918 Lecture Series), translated by Ted Sadler (Continuum Impacts 2008).

Heinzel, Herman, Richard Fitter and John Parslow, The Birds of Britain and Europe: With North African and the Middle East, 1st publ., 1972 (Collins 1977).

Henderson, Tony, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830 (Pearson Education 1999).

Herman, Morton, 'Bloodsworth, James ([c1759]-1804)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 1, Online Edn (Melbourne University Press 1966), p. 122, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010112b.htm.

Hibbert, Christopher, King Mob: The London Riots of 1780, 1st publ., 1958 (Dorset Press 1989).

‘Hidden Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire: The Bridges of Norwich’, Eastern Daily Press 24 (30 September 2006), http://new.edp24.co.uk/content.

Hill, Bridget, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press 1996).

———— Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth Century England, 1st publ., 1989 (McGill-Queen’s University Press 1994).

Hinde, R. S. E., The British Penal System: 1773-1950 (Gerald Duckworth 1951).

Hirst, Paul Q., Marxism and Historical Writing (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1985).

Hirst, Warwick, Great Convict Escapes in Colonial Australia (Kangaroo Press 2003).

History Writing Festival, NSW Writers Centre, Rozelle (18 September 2004).

Hitchcock, Timothy, Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London (Hambledon and London 2004). — 412 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Hitchcock, Tim and Robert Shoemaker, Tales from the Hanging Court (Hodder Arnold 2006).

Hobson, Marian, ‘History Traces’, in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (Cambridge University Press 1988).

Hodgkinson, Tom, ‘Instead of Trials Lets Have Duels’: John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty by Arthur H Cash’, The Independent (12 March 2003), http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article350878.ece.

Hogue, Cheryl (ed.), ‘Digoxin: Typical Cardiac Drug’, Chemical and Engineering News, Vol. 83, No. 23 (20 June 2005), http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8325/8325digoxin.html.

Holden, Robert, Orphans of the First Fleet (Text Publishing 1999).

Holmes, Richard, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, 1st publ., 1985 (Flamingo 1995).

Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (Routledge 1990).

Hostettler, John, Fighting for Justice: The History and Origins of Adversary Trial (Waterside Press 2006).

Houston, James D., ‘Where does History Live?’ Rethinking History, Vol. 11, No. 2 (March 2007), pp. 51 – 60.

Howard, Patricia, ‘Did Burney Blunder?’ The Musical Times, Vol. 139, No. 1864 (Autumn 1998), pp. 29-32.

Howat, Gerald, M. D., ‘White Conduit Cricket Club (act. c.1785-1788)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (ODNB Online) (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/64818.

Hughes, Kathleen, Review: Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis by Carl Selmer, The English Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 302 (January 1962), pp. 133-134.

Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (Collins Harvill 1987).

Ibbett, John, ‘Our Obligation to the Past’, Rethinking History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 51 – 67.

— 413 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Iggers, Georg G., ‘Historiography between Scholarship and Poetry: Reflections on Hayden White's Approach to Historiography’, Rethinking History, Vol. 4, No. 3 (December 2000), pp. 373 – 390.

Ingram, J. H., North Midland Country, 1st publ., 1947 (Batsford 1948).

Innes, Joanne, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells: 1555-1800’ in Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective, edited by Francis Snyder and Douglas Hay (Tavistock Publications 1987).

Irish Dictionary Online, http://www.englishirishdictionary.com/dictionary.

James, E. O., ‘The Influence of Folklore on the History of Religion’, Nume: International Philosophical Journal Review, Vol. 9, Fasc.1 (January 1962), pp. 1-16.

Jardine, Lisa, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, 1st publ., 1999 (Abacus 2000).

Jenkins, Richard, Pierre Bourdieu, Rev. Edn (Routledge 2002).

Jerrard, Rob, History of the Central Criminal Court up to 1973 (Police Main Page: Central Criminal Court, London 1973), http://www.rjerrard.co.uk/law/city/ccc2.htm.

Jenkins, Keith, ‘The End of the Affair: On the Irretrievable Breakdown of History and Ethics, Rethinking History, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June 2007), pp. 275 – 285.

———— On “What is History?”: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White, 1st publ,1995 (Routledge 1996).

Jenkins, R. T. and Helen M. Ramage, A History of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, and of the Gwyneddigion and Cymreigyddion Societies: 1751-1951 (The Honourable society of Cymmrodorion 1951).

Jones, Emrys (ed.), The Welsh in London: 1500-2000 (University of Wales Press 2001).

Jones, Madge (previously Gibson), Rectors and Restorations: Belbroughton Church in the Nineteenth Century (Belbroughton History Society 2006).

Jones, W. J., ‘The Foundations of English Bankruptcy: Statues and Commissions in the Early Modern Period’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 69, No. 3 (1979), pp. 1-63.

Kalman, Harold D., ‘Newgate Prison’, Architectural History, Vol. 12 (1969), pp. 50-61, 108-112.

— 414 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Kaplan, Benjamin J., ‘Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe’, The American Historical Review Vol. 107, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 1031-1064.

———— ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Devotion: Embassy Chapels and the Toleration of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Early Modern History, Vol. 6, No. 4 (September 2002), pp. 341-361.

Eugenii Katz, ‘Pieter (Petrus) van Musschenbroek’ [inventor of the ‘Leyden Jar], http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/musschenbroek.htm.

Kelly, Jason, M., ‘Riots, Revelries, and Rumor: Libertinism and Masculine Association in Enlightenment London’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45 (October 2006), pp. 759-795.

Kemp, Peter (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, 1st publ., 1976 (Oxford University Press 1979).

Kerr, Heather and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (University of Western Australia Press 1998).

Kington, J.A., ‘Daily Weather Mapping from 1781: A Detailed Synoptic Examination of Weather and Climate During the Decade Leading up to the French Revolution’, Climatic Change No.3 (1980), pp.7-36.

———— ‘Four Successive Cold Marches’, Climate Monitor, No. 9 (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. 1980), pp.34-42.

———— ‘July 1783: The Warmest Month in the Central England Temperature Series’, Climate Monitor, No. 9 (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. 1980), pp.69-73.

Kington, J.A. and B.D. Kington, ‘The Three Coldest Autumns: 1676, 1740 and 1786’, Climatic Change No.3 (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K. 1980), pp.119-125.

———— ‘The Spring of 1782’, Climate Monitor, No. 8 (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K 1979), pp. 65-75.

———— ‘The Cold November of 1782’, Climate Monitor, No. 8 (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K 1979), pp.110-114.

Knott, Simon, Suffolk Churches, http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk.

Kraatz, Anne, Lace: History and Fashion (Thames and Hudson1989).

Krider, Phillip E., ‘Benjamin Franklin and Lightning Rods’, Physics Today Online (January 2006), http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-1/p42.html.

— 415 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, transl. by A. Sheridan, 1st publ., 1973 (Penguin 1987).

Lahire, Bernard, ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics, Vol. 31 (2003), pp. 329-355.

Lake, Marilyn, ‘History and Politics’ in The Historian’s Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, edited by Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne University Press 2004).

Lambeth, M., Discovering Corn Dollies, 1st publ., 1974 (Shire Publications 1994).

Langbein, John H., The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford University Press 2005).

Leigh, Samuel, New Picture of London (W. Clowes 1819), Genealogy and Family History, http://www.londonancestor.com/leighs/crt-docoms.htm.

Lemire, Beverly, ‘Second-hand Beaux and ‘Red-Armed Belles’: Conflict and the Creation of Fashions in England, c. 1660-1800’, Continuity and Change, Vol. 15, No. 3 (December 2000), pp. 391-417.

Lemke, Jay L., ‘Practice, Politique, Postmodernism: A Review of Bourdieu, Pierre and Lois J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (University of Chicago Press 1992)’, Postmodern Culture, Vol. 4, No. 1 (September 1993).

Lemmings, David, ‘Marriage and the Law in the Eighteenth Century: Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (June 1996), pp. 339-360.

Levi, John S. and G. F. J. Bergman, Australian Genesis: Jewish Convicts and Settlers, 1788-1860, 1st publ., 1974, New Edn (Melbourne University Press 2002).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind, transl. by John and Doreen Weightman, 1st publ., 1966 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1974).

———— Structural Anthropology, Vol.1 trans. by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf; Vol. 2, trans. by Monique Layton (Allen Lane 1973).

Lewis, June R., From Fleece to Fabric: A Practical Guide to Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving (Robert Hale 1983).

Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics, http://www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun.htm.

Libin, Laurence, Nineteenth-Century Album of English Organ Cases, Metropolitan Museum Journal, Vol. 24 (1989), pp. 275-284.

— 416 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Liles, J. N., ‘Fermentation Vats’, excerpt from The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing: Traditional Recipes for Modern Use (University of Tennessee Press 1990), http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u3tc/u3materials/natDye.html.

Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1st publ., 2003 (Verso, 2006).

———— (Review) 'To the teeth and forehead of our faults': V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford University Press 1994), Issue 68 (Autumn 1995), International Socialism Journal, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj68/linebaugh.htm .

Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Introduction by Fredric Jameson, 1st publ., 1962 (University of Nebraska Press 1983).

Lyes, D. C. The Leather Glove Industry of Worcester in the Nineteenth Century (Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery 1973).

Lyons, Martyn and Monica Azzolini, ‘Natalie Zemon Davis: An e-mail Interview with Martyn Lyons and Monica Azzolini’, History Australia, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2005), pp. 91.1- 91.10.

Macherey, Pierre, ‘The Text Says What It Does Not Say’, translated by G. Wall, 1st publ. 1966, reprinted in Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents edited by Dennis Walder (Oxford University Press with the Open University 1991).

Macintosh, Neil Keith, Richard Johnson, Chaplain to the Colony of New South Wales: His Life and Times 1755-1827 (Library of Australian History, 1978).

MacMichael, J. Holden, ‘The Saracen’s Head’, Notes and Queries, 10s. XII (14 August 1909), pp131-132.

McCalman, Iain, ‘Flirting with Fiction’, in the Historian’s Conscience, edited by Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne University Press 2004).

———— The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (HarperCollins, Random House 2003).

———— ‘Newgate in Revolution: Radical Enthusiasm and Romantic Counterculture, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 22, No. 1 (February 1998), pp. 95-110.

———— ‘Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France,’ The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (July 1996), pp. 343-367.

McEnroe, Natasha, ‘Protection from the Tyranny of Treatment’, History Today, Vol. 53, No. 10 (October 2003).

— 417 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

McGowan, Randall, ‘The Well-Ordered Prison: England, 1780-1865’, in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison: the Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford University Press 1998), pp. 71-99.

McLure, Ruth K., Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press 1981).

McLynn, Frank, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England (Routledge 1989).

Marías, Javier, Dark Back of Time, translated by Esther Allen (Chatto and Windus and Vintage 2004).

Márquez, Gabriel Garcia, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Harper and Row 1970).

Mason, Mark, ‘Exploring 'the Impossible': Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and the Philosophy of History’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Vol. 10, No. 4 (December 2006), pp. 501–522.

May, Allyson N., (H-Albion Review): John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford University Press 2003), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=257131081146921.

Mellor, Dave, ‘Colloquial Slang from the Black Country …’ Black Country Vocabulary, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Dave_Mellor/slang.htm.

Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick (Collector’s Library 2004).

Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Derrida Enisled’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33 (Winter 2007), pp. 248-276.

Montague, Ronald, Dress and Insignia of the British Army in Australia and New Zealand: 1770-1870 (Library of Australian History 1981).

(de) Montluzin, Emily Lorraine, ‘Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1868: An Electronic Union List’, http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/gm2/GMintro.html.

Moore, Lisa L., ‘Mrs. Delany — Flower Collage: a New Art’, Ch. 7, The Sister Arts: British Gardening, Poetry and Painting, 1700-1832. http://www.en.utexas.edu/Classes/Moore/sources/02.htm.

Moore, Lucy, The Thieves’ Opera: The Mesmerizing Story of Two Notorious Criminals in Eighteenth Century London (Harcourt Brace and Company 1997).

Morris, Norval and David J. Rothman, (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison: the Practice of Punishment in Western Society, (Oxford University Press 1998).

— 418 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Morton, Edward Payson, ‘The Spenserian Stanza in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Philology, Vol. 10, No. 3 (January 1913), pp. 365-391.

Moseley, Brian, ‘Bridges’, (The Encyclopaedia of Plymouth History 2005), http://www.plymouthdata.info/Bridges.htm.

Motion, Andrew, Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confession of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright — Regency Author, Painter, Swindler and Probable Murderer — woven from historical fragments (Alfred A. Knopf 2000).

Muir, Percy, English Children’s Books: 1600-1900, 1st publ., 1954 (B. T. Batsford 1985).

Munz, Peter, ‘The Historical Narrative’, in Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley (Routledge 1997).

Murphy, Theresa, The Old Bailey: Eight Centuries of Crime, Cruelty and Corruption (Mainstream Publishing 1999).

Neal, David, The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in New South Wales, 1st publ., 1991 (Cambridge University Press 2002).

Neville, Jonathan, ‘Thurlton Towermill’ (2005), http://www.norfolkmills.co.uk/Windmills/thurlton-towermill.html.

New Advent: Catholic Encyclopaedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09341a.htm.

Nicholson, B. E., S. Ary, and M. Gregory, The Oxford Book of Wild Flowers (Oxford University Press 1977).

Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, Untimely Meditations, 1st publ., 1874, this Edn 1st publ., 1997, edited by Daniel Breazale and transl. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press 2004).

Nokes, David, Jane Austen (Fourth Estate 1997).

Norris, Christopher, The Truth About Postmodernism (Blackwell 1993).

Norton, Rictor, "Two Kissing Girls of Spitalfields", Early Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Reports: A Sourcebook (23 April 2002), http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/grub/lowlife9.htm.

Norwich City Walls Survey: 1999-2002 (Norwich City Council), http://www.norwich.gov.uk/webapps/citywall.

Nott, Gillian, ‘Frequently Asked Questions — Straw’, A Granary Article, Guild of Straw Craftsmen (18 August 2005), http://www.strawcraftsmen.co.uk/faq_straw.html.

— 419 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Novak, Alfred, ‘Boerhaave: Three Chairs to Oblivion’, BioScience, Vol. 21, No. 10 (15 May 1971), pp. 479-482.

Ockerbloom, John Mark (ed.), The Celebration of Women Writers, (developed in collaboration with the On-Line Books Page), http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/hill/burney/junip17.html#p165.

O'Connell, Sheila, with Roy Porter, Celina Fox and Ralph Hyde, London 1753 (The British Museum 2003).

O’Connor, Hugh, ‘Swim-Two-Birds: Irish and Celtic Names Explained,’ http://swimtwobirds.org/webdoc46.htm.

Ogborn, Miles, “This is London! How D’ Ye Like It?” Journal of Urban History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (January 2001), pp. 206-216.

Old and Interesting, http://www.oldandinteresting.com/washing-with-lye.aspx.

Olleson, Philip, The Musical Times, Vol. 138, No. 1855 (September 1997), pp. 4-10.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) (Oxford University Press 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.

Oxley, Deborah, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge University Press1996).

Pennell, Sara, 'Pots and Pans History': The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England’, Journal of Design History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1998), pp. 201-216.

Perry, Nigel, A History of Stourbridge (Phillimore 2005).

‘Peter Bellamy’s Opera, The Transports, based on the history of Susannah Holmes and Henry Cabell’, http://www.thetransports.com/norfolk-chronicle.php.

Pezze, Barbara Dalle, ‘Heidegger and Gelassenheit’, Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10 (2006), pp. 94-122, http://www.mic.ul.ie/stephen/vol10/Heidegger.pdf.

Phillip, Neil and Victor Neuburg, Charles Dickens: A December Vision, His Social Journalism (Collins 1986).

Phillips, George L., Notes and Queries, Vol. 194, No. 23 (November 1949), pp. 491-493.

Picard, Liza, Dr. Johnson’s London: Coffee Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education (St Martin’s Press 2000).

— 420 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Pickford, Stephanie (ed.), Behind the Scenes: The Hidden Life of Georgian Theatre 1737- 1784 (Dr Johnson’s House Trust 2007).

Pierce, Patricia, Old London Bridge: The Story of the Longest Inhabited Bridge in the World, 1st publ., 2001 (Review 2002).

Poole, Robert, ‘“Give Us Our Eleven Days!": Calendar Reform in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, No. 149 (November 1995), pp. 95-139.

Porter, Roy, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 1st publ., 2003 (Penguin Books 2004).

———— Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine 1st publ., 2002 (Penguin 2003).

———— London: A Social History, 1st publ., 1994 (Penguin 2000).

Pottle, Frederick, James Boswell: The Early Years: 1740-1769 (McGraw Hill 1966).

Prendergast, Kate, ‘Pursuing the Ingenious: An Interview with Lisa Jardine’, Science and Spirit, (2000), http://www.science-spirit.org/article_detail.php?article_id=203.

Pugh, Gillian, London’s Forgotten Children: Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital (The History Press 2007).

Purcell, Pat, Bostin’ Fittle, 1st publ., 1978 (Black Country Society 1998).

Ranger, Paul, (Review) Emily de Montluzin (ed.) Daily Life in Georgian England as Reported in the Gentleman's Magazine (The Edwin Mellen Press 2002), Notes and Queries, Vol. 50, No. 3 (September 2003), pp.364-365.

Rawlings, Philip, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (Routledge 1992).

Roberts, (Sir) Howard and Walter H. Godfrey (eds) 'Westminster Bridge', Chapter 17, Survey of London: Vol. 23, (1951), pp. 66-68. http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47046.

Rees, Siân, The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary Story of the Lady Julian and its Cargo of Female Convicts Bound for Botany Bay (Hodder 2001).

Ribeiro, Aileen, Dress in Eighteenth Century Europe (Yale University Press 2002).

Richardson, John, The Annals of London: A Year-by-Year Record of a Thousand Years of History, 1st publ., 2000 (Cassell Paperbacks 2001).

Robilant, Andrea, A Venetian Affair: A True Story of Impossible Love in the Eighteenth Century (Fourth Estate 2003).

— 421 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Robinson, Portia, The Women of Botany Bay: A Reinterpretation of the Role of Women in the Origins of Australian Society, 1st publ., 1988 (Penguin 1993).

Rosenstone, Robert A., ‘Confessions of a Postmodern (?) Historian, Rethinking History, 2004, Vol. 8, Issue 1 (March 2004), pp. 149-166.

Roth, Cecil, ‘History of the Great Synagogue: London’, The Susser Archive, Jewish Community and Records (2002-2006) http://www.jewishgen.org/jcr- uk/Susser/roth/index.htm.

Roth, Michael S., The Ironist's Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History (Columbia University Press 1995).

Royal Arms, Styles, and Titles of Great Britain: Documents, http://www.heraldica.org/topics/britain/britstyles.htm.

Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/heritage/timeline/1700to1772_caroline.html.

Rudé, George, ‘The London “Mob” in the Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1959), pp.1-18.

Rushdie, Salman, Fury (Jonathan Cape 2001).

Rutland, Suzanne D., The Jews in Australia (Cambridge University Press 2005).

Rutten, Willibrord, ‘Smallpox, Subfecundity, and Sterility: A Case Study from a Nineteenth-Century Dutch Municipality’, The Social History of Medicine, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1993), pp. 85-99.

Sassoon, Joanna, ‘Remembering and Forgetting’, Public History Review, Vol. 10 (2003), pp. 40-60.

Saggini, Francesca, ‘Memories Beyond the Pale: The Eighteenth-century Actress Between Stage and Closet’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, Vol. 19, No.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 43-63.

Schama, Simon, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (Granta Books in assoc., with Penguin Books 1991).

Scrooge, Clifford M., ‘Martin Heidegger's Revolutionary Attempt to Integrate Thinking's Openness to Future, Past, and Present … Thinking’s Legacy and the Evolution of Experience (1998), http://differnet.com/experience/sec7.htm.

Sharpe, James, ‘Popular Culture in the Early Modern West’, in Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley (1997 Routledge).

— 422 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Shefrin, Jill, Such Constant Affectionate Care: Lady Charlotte Finch: Royal Governess and the Children of George III (The Cotsen Occasional Press 2003).

Shesgreen, Sean, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Criers of London (Rutgers University Press 2002).

Simmel, Georg, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Donald N. Levine (University of Chicago Press 1971).

Shoemaker, Robert, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (Hambledon and London 2004).

———— ‘The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July 1997), pp. 273-304.

Shore, Heather, ‘Cross Coves, Buzzers and General Sorts of Prigs: Juvenile Crime and the Criminal ‘Underworld’ in the Early Nineteenth Century’, The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1999), pp.10-24.

Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, (Expanded Edn) 1st publ., 1977 (Princeton University Press 1999).

Skeel, Caroline, ‘The Cattle Trade between Wales and England from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Ser., Vol. 9 (1926), pp. 135-158.

Slack, Paul, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782, 1st publ., 1990 (Cambridge University Press 1995).

Sloan, Kim (ed.), with Andrew Burnett, Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (British Museum Press 2003).

Smith, Bonnie, (Review) ‘Ewa Domanska (1998), Encounters: Philosophy of History After Postmodernism’, Rethinking History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (July 2000), pp. 215-217.

Smith, Chloe Wigston, ‘‘Callico Madams’: Servants, Consumption, and the Calico Crisis’, Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring 2007), pp. 29-55.

‘Snap the Norwich Snapdragon’, Norwich Museum Services, http://www.dragonglow.co.uk/snap.htm

Stafford-Clark, Max, Letters to George: The Account of a Rehearsal (Nick Hearn Books 1989).

Starsmore, Ian, English Fairs (Thames and Hudson 1975).

— 423 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Steedman, Carolyn, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, 1st publ., 2001 (Rutgers University Press 2002).

Stephens, Matthew, Hannah Snell: The Secret Life of a Female Marine 1723-1792 (Ship Street Press 1997).

Stickgold, Robert, et al., ‘Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics’, Science, New Series, Vol. 290, No. 5490 (13 October 2000), pp. 350-353.

Stringer, Jon, The Meandering River Yare, with photographs by P. H. Emerson (1856- 1936), http://people.netcom.co.uk/j.stringe/meanderi.htm.

Sullivan, Edward D. and Kevin B. Pry, ‘Eighteenth Century London Theater and the Capture Theory of Regulation’, Journal of Cultural Economics, Vol. 15, No. 2 (December 1991), pp. 41-52.

Summerson, John, Georgian London, ed. by Howard Colvin, 1st publ. 1945 (Yale University Press 2003).

———— The Microcosm of London: By T. Rowlandson and A. C. Pugin (King Penguin Books 1943).

Surlingham Broad, Norfolk, UK, BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A14609135.

Sutton, Ann, Peter Collingwood and Geraldine St Aubyn Hubbard, A Practical Guide to Spinning, Dying and Weaving (BBC 1982).

Swann, June, ‘Shoes Concealed in Buildings’, Costume, No. 30 (1996), p.56-69, reprinted online, http://www.apotropaios.co.uk/june_swann_concealed_shoes.htm.

Szekely, Michael, ‘Rethinking Benjamin: The Function of the Utopian Ideal’, Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice (2006), http://www.clogic.eserver.org/2006/szekely.html.

Tadmor, Naomi, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, No. 151 (May 1996), pp. 111-140.

Tague, Ingrid H. ‘Love, Honor, and Obedience: Fashionable Women and the Discourse of Marriage in the Early Eighteenth Century’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (January 2001), pp. 76-106.

Tales from the Old Bailey: Writing a New History From Below, Conference, University of Hertfordshire (July 5-6 2004).

Tate Gallery Online, http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=101.

— 424 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

“T. H.”, The History of Sir Richard Whittington, edited, with introduction by Henry B. Wheatley (The Villon Society 1885), Gutenberg Project EBook #17652, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17652/17652-8.txt.

The Rose Family of the Bellona: Australian Free Settlement Begins16 January 1793 (Thomas and Jane Rose Family Society 1990).

The Stourbridge Chronicle, (2004-2006).

‘The Worcestershire Drawings of E. F. & T. F. Burney’, Record Office, Worcestershire County Council Online, http://worcestershire.whub.org.uk/home/wcc-records-burney- watercolours.html.

Thomas, Peter D. G., ‘Wilkes, John (1725-1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (Oxford University Press 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29410.

Thompson, Edward Palmer, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, Past and Present, No. 50 (February 1971), pp. 76-136.

———— The Making of the English Working Class, 1st publ. 1963 (Penguin 1968).

Thornbury, Walter and Edward Walford, 'St Giles-in-the-Fields', Old and New London, Vol. 3 (1878), pp. 197-218, British History Online, http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45147.

—— ‘Newgate’ in Old and New London, Vol. 2 (1878), pp. 441-461, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=45114 .

—— 'The Old Bailey', Old and New London, Vol. 2 (1878), pp. 461-477, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45115.

—— ‘St. Sepulchre’s and its Neighbourhood: Condemned Prayer,’ Old and New London, Vol. 2, (1878), pp. 477-491, British History Online, http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45116.

Threadgold, Terry, Feminist Poetics: Poiesis, Performance, Histories (Routledge 1997).

———— Semiotics Ideology Language, Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, No. 3 (The Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture 1986).

Threadgold, Terry and Anne Cranny-Francis (eds), Feminine- Masculine Representation (Allen and Unwin 1990).

Tobias J. J., Crime and Police in England: 1700-1900 (Gill and Macmillan 1979).

Toulson, Shirley, The Drovers, 2nd Edn (A Shire Book 2005) — 425 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Tracy, Thomas, ‘The Mild Irish Girl: Domesticating the National Tale’, Éire-Ireland: An International Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 39, Issues 1 and 2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 91-109.

Tulip, Robert, ‘The Place of Ethics in Heidegger’s Ontology’, unpublished MA Thesis (Macquarie University 1991).

Uebel, Lesley, Claim a Convict, http://users.bigpond.net.au/convicts/index.html.

Uglow, Jennifer S., The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810 (Faber and Faber 2003).

———— Hogarth: A Life and a World (Faber and Faber 1997).

Valiant, Sharon, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: Recovering an Eighteenth-Century Legend’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring 1993), pp. 467-479.

Wacquant, Loïc, ‘Pierre Bourdieu’, in Key Sociological Thinkers, edited by Rob Stones (Macmillan 1998), pp. 215-229.

Waldby, Catherine, ‘Feminism and Method’, in Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, edited by Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (Allen & Unwin 1995).

Walkowitz, Judith R., (Reviews) ‘Notes on the History of Victorian Prostitution’: Prostitution by William Acton and Peter Fryer; The Anti-Society: An Account of the Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney; London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 4 by Henry Mayhew; The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality by Ronald Pearsall, Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1972), pp. 105-114.

Wallace, Martin, 100 Irish Lives (Rowman and Littlefield 1983).

Walsh, Claire, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1995), pp 157-176.

Walton, F. T., ‘My Lady's Toilet’, Greece and Rome, Vol. 15, No. 44 (May 1946), pp. 68- 73.

Waterhouse, Ellis, Painting in Britain 1530 to 1790, 1st publ., 1953 (Penguin1978).

Weaver, Martin E., (Review) ‘The National Trust Manual of Housekeeping (1985), by Hermione Sandwith and Sheila Staiton,’ APT Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 4 (1986), pp. 78-79.

Weitzman, Arthur J., ‘Eighteenth-Century London: Urban Paradise or Fallen City?’ Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 36, No. 1 (July-September 1975), pp. 469-480.

— 426 — The Dream — Or, An Unthinkable History ______

Welsh, Alexander, (Review) ‘Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England’, by John Bender, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring 1988), pp. 373-378.

West, Shearer, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (Pinter Publishers 1991).

White, Andrew Dickson, Chapter 11, ‘From the ‘Prince of the Power of Air’ to Meteorology’, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 Volumes, 1st publ., 1896 (Kessinger Publishing Rare Reprints).

White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, 1st publ., 1973 (The John Hopkins University Press 1975).

Whittick, Christopher, ‘Review: The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, by Peter Linebaugh’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 410-413.

Willis-Bund, J. W. (ed.), 'Parishes: Belbroughton' from A History of the County of Worcester, Vol. 3 (1913), pp. 11-19, British History Online, http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=43080.

—— 'Parishes: Old Swinford', A History of the County of Worcester, Vol. 3 (1913), pp. 213-223, British History Online, http://www.british- history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=43112.

Wilson, Eric, ‘Plagues, Fairs, and Street Cries: Sounding out Society and Space in Early Modern London,’ Modern Language Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 1995), pp. 1-42.

Wilson, Pip, Wilson's Almanac on the Month of May, http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/may.html.

Wolloch, Nathaniel, ‘Christiaan Huygens's Attitude Towards Animals’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 61, No. 3 (2000) 415-432.

Wood, Ellen, ‘The Judiciary Service in Worcester Cathedral at the beginning of the High Court Judge's sittings in the Shire Hall’ Worcester, England’, King’s School website, http://www.ksw.org.uk/community/JudgesDay/index.html.

Woodall, Mary, Thomas Gainsborough (Blandford Press 1970).

Worcester City Museums, Resources, Old Pictures and Photographs Online (2001), http://www.worcestercitymuseums.org.uk/content/oldpics/cathx.htm.

Wyschogrod, Edith, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (The University of Chicago Press 1998).

— 427 —