This article reconstructs the evasive tales of two lower-class rural English mothers, Ellen Harper and Selina Wadge, who killed their offspring in the 1870s. Investigating depositions, other legal documents prepared for their trials, and reports of inquests and trial proceedings (when existent) in local and national newspapers, it interprets incoherent remnants of their life stories and through them the attitude of the English legal system toward mothers who killed their offspring in the late nineteenth century. Selina's and Ellen's personal experiences are related in concrete detail and read in the light of contemporary policies, laws, rules, and norms concerning, for example, motherhood, poverty, reproduction, sexuality, and demography. Reconstructing the concealed stories of two marginalized poor mothers, this article reilluminates the way in which England's middle-class mind-set, implicit policies, norms, and regulations influenced the legal system's decision making and dominated the degenerating, poverty-stricken life of oppressed lower-class mothers.
The assize judges were commissioned to hold king's court all over England. They rode, in pairs, the six assize circuits (each circuit covering a group of counties) three times a year from the middle of the nineteenth century, dealing with the most serious indictable offenses. See David Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1998), 51-54.
2.
National Archives (hereafter, NA), Public Record Office (hereafter, PRO), ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper.
3.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, June 1878, Selina Wadge.
4.
The term infanticide has increasingly signified the killing of infants and older children alike. See Mark Jackson, “The Trial of Harriet Vooght: Continuity and Change in the History of Infanticide” in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000, ed. Mark Jackson ( Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 10-11. This meaning allows me to compare Ellen Harper's and Selina Wadge's acts of homicide despite the disparity of their life stories.
5.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution ( London: Virago, 1986), 13, 14.
6.
Giovanni Levi, “ On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing , ed. Peter Bruke ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press , 1992), 95.
7.
Levi, “On Microhistory ” 106.
8.
Matti Peltonen , “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History and Theory40 (October 2001): 359.
9.
Margaret Arnot, “ The Murder of Thomas Sandles: Meanings of a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Infanticide ,” in Jackson, Infanticide , 149, 167. Arnot's chapter is an interesting example of crime microhistory.
10.
Ruth Behar, “ Introduction: Out of Exile,” in Women Writing Culture , ed. Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995), 15.
11.
Maria Mies, “ Women's Research or Feminist Research: The Debate Surrounding Feminist Science and Methodology,” in Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship and Lived Research, ed. Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 66.
12.
Quoted in Behar, “Introduction,” 13.
13.
Ruth Linden, Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust ( Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 4.
14.
Linden, Making Stories, Making Selves, 10.
15.
Ancestry.com, “England and Wales, Civil Registration Index: 1837-1983,” http://www.ancestry.com (accessed January 2, 2008).
16.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper.
17.
At the end of the nineteenth century, delivery of a child by a doctor was considered a safer yet more expensive option and was thus inaccessible for rural lower-class people such as the Quicks. See Yvonne Knibiehler, “ Bodies and Hearts,” in A History of Women in the West: Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, ed. Genevieve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press , 1995).
18.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper.
19.
Ibid.
20.
Ibid.
21.
Sauer, quoted in Warren C. Robinson, “Population Policy in Early Victorian England” European Journal of Population18, no. 2 ( 2002): 166. See also the report of the coroner of Nottingham, in Erna Olafson Hellerstein , Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen , Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France and the United States (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981), 204-5.
22.
Robinson, “ Population Policy in Early Victorian England” 166. In the 1860s and early 1870s, there was a journalistic, medical, and official panic. For example, see Margaret Arnot, “Understanding Women Committing Newborn Child Murder in Victorian England,” in Everyday Violence in Britain 1850-1950, ed. Shani D'Cruze (London: Longman , 2000); Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain 1800-1939 (London: Routledge, 1986); Ann R. Higginbotham, “`Sin of the Age': Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London,” Victorian Studies (Spring 1989): 319-37; Carol Smart, “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex: The Regulation of Reproduction and Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century” in Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality, ed. Carol Smart (London: Routledge , 1992), 16; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870-1918 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Joan Perkin, Victorian Women (New York: New York University Press, 1993).
23.
See Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents; and Smart, “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex,” 16.
24.
Quoted in Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents, 36.
25.
Robinson, “ Population Policy in Early Victorian England” 166; and Smart , “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex” 16-17.
26.
Smart, “ Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex,” 17; Ross, Love and Toil, 188-89; and Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and theEnglish Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 159-80.
27.
Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, 18.
28.
Ross, Love and Toil, 187; and Higginbotham , “`Sin of the Age,'” 319.
29.
Public debate on cases of serial infanticide by baby farmers (paid nurses) led to the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, which required nurses to register with local authorities. For an insightful analysis of this development, see Margaret Arnot, “ Infant Death, Child Care and the State: The Baby Farming Scandal and the First Infant Life Protection Legislation of 1872” Continuity and Change9, no. 2 (1994): 217-311. In 1897, the 1872 Infant Life Protection Act was modified. The new act empowered local authorities to actively seek out baby farms and remove abused children to a place of safety. See Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 157; Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (London : Longman, 1996); Smart, “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex ”; and Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents.
30.
Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 156; Roger Chadwick.Bureaucratic Mercy: The Home Office and the Treatment of Capital Cases in Victorian Britain (New York: Garland , 1992), 291; and Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 123.
31.
Arnot, “Understanding Women Committing Newborn Child Murder,” 57; Jackson, “The Trial of Harriet Vooght,” 9; Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2005 ); and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Penguin, 1985).
32.
Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 123-24; and Smart , “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex,” 17.
33.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper.
34.
Anna Clark, “ Humanity or Injustice? Wife-Beating and the Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Smart, Regulating Womanhood; and Anna Clark, “Domesticity and the Problem of Wife-Beating in Nineteenth Century Britain: Working Class Culture, Law and Politics,” in D'Cruze , Everyday Violence in Britain.
35.
Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 133.
36.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper. Dr. Pratt's warning may sound like the standard caution given by police constables in making an arrest: “whatever you say will be taken down in writing, and may be given in evidence against you upon your trial” (quoted in NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper). Yet there is an overt difference. Policemen were obligated to state this warning, whereas Dr. Pratt was under no such obligation but nevertheless chose to articulate it three times, thus exposing his wish to silence Ellen.
37.
Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents, 61-62.
38.
See Ross, Love and Toil, 187; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy; Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents; Smith , Trial by Medicine, 146-47; and Jackson, “The Trial of Harriet Vooght.” Until 1803, the crime of infanticide was tried under an act of 1624 that defined the offense as one committed specifically by an unmarried woman. It put on the accused the onus of proving, with at least one witness, that a dead infant had been born dead. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the act was increasingly perceived as cruel, and trials of infanticide were turned by juries into murder trials. The Act of 1803 formalized this state of affairs.
39.
Jackson, “ The Trial of Harriet Vooght”; Emsley, Crime and Society in England; Ross, Love and Toil; and Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents.
40.
Martin Wiener , Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
41.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper.
42.
Olwen Hufton , 1500-1800, vol. 1 of The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 273. See also Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents, 161; and Perkin , Victorian Women, 181.
43.
I discovered Sarah's age in the Registers of Burial 1875-1920 in the Somerset Archive and Public Record Office. Sarah died on December 12, 1902, aged eighty-four, whereas her husband, James, was seventy-seven years old when he died on March 29, 1890. At the time of the murder, when the average life expectancy was between forty and forty-eight, Sarah (then fifty-nine) and James (then sixty-five) were old. See Robert Fogel William, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The UK Censuses of 1871 and 1881 reveal that James worked as a general laborer; see UK Census, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008). For the poverty of unskilled laborers, see Barry Reay, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 ); and John Burnett, Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Routledge, 1994).
44.
Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). See also Showalter, The Female Malady; and Smith , Trial by Medicine.
45.
Showalter, The Female Malady , 58-59.
46.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper (the emphasis is mine).
47.
In the UK Census of 1871, I discovered that living in the Quick household was the niece of James, by the name of Ellen, who was eleven years old; see UK Census, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008). Taking into account the clearly evident inaccuracies in the census information concerning personal status and age, I imagine that this is the same Ellen of the indictment, who was seventeen when giving birth to and killing her baby.
48.
Hilary Marland , “Getting Away with Murder? Puerperal Insanity, Infanticide and the Defence Plea,” in Jackson, Infanticide; and Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 151.
49.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper.
50.
Marland, Dangerous Motherhood; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy; Showalter , The Female Malady; and Smith, Trial by Medicine.
51.
Marland, Dangerous Motherhood; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy; Knelman , Twisting in the Wind; Showalter, The Female Malady; and Smith, Trial by Medicine .
52.
Aminata Forma , Mother of All Myths: How Society Moulds and Constrains Mothers (London: HarperCollins , 1999); John R. A. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Silva Bortolaia, “The Transformation of Mothering ,” in Elizabeth Silva Bortolaia, Good Enough Mothering? Feminist Perspectives on Lone Motherhood (London : Routledge , 1996), 10-36; and Sally Shuttleworth, “ Demonic Mothers: Ideologies of Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian Era ,” in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory History and the Politics of Gender , ed. Linda M. Shire ( New York: Routledge, 1992), 31-51.
53.
Marland, Dangerous Motherhood; Smart, “ Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex”; Showalter, The Female Malady; and Smith, Trial by Medicine .
54.
Showalter, The Female Malady, 58. For a detailed history of puerperal mania, see Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, mainly 9-64.
55.
Alfred Swaine Taylor, The Principles and Practices of Medical Jurisprudence, 2 vols. (London , 1865), 1098.
56.
Jonathan Andrews , “The Boundaries of Her Majesty's Pleasure: Discharging Child-Murderers from Broadmoor and Perth Criminal Lunatic Department, c.1860-1920,” in Jackson, Infanticide, 216-48; Showalter, The Female Malady, 59; Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 141, 153; and Ross , Love and Toil, 278.
57.
Andrews, “ The Boundaries of Her Majesty's Pleasure”; and Knelman, Twisting in the Wind, 153.
58.
Showalter, The Female Malady, 85; and Ross, Love and Toil, 187.
59.
Ross, Love and Toil, 187.
60.
Knelman, Twisting in the Wind; Perkin, Victorian Women; and Rose , The Massacre of the Innocents.
61.
NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, October 1877, Ellen Harper.
62.
Knibiehler, “ Bodies and Hearts,” 334.
63.
Elizabeth Treble was fifty-eight years old. The Trebles were poor. James, the head of the family, had been an unskilled laborer; see UK Census, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008). Susan Maria Farrington, Sancti Stones: Parish Memorials of Wiveliscombe Somerset (Wiveliscombe, UK: Colden, 2001), revealed, however, that unlike the Quicks, the Trebles had a tombstone erected by their children.
64.
See Perkin, Victorian Women, 181; and Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents.
65.
See “The Charge of Murder,” ( Taunton, UK) Somerset County Gazette: Bristol Express and Devonshire News, Saturday, November 3, 1877.
66.
In the 1881 Census, I found a woman by the name of Ellen Harper who was born at Wiveliscombe; see UK Census, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008). She worked as a servant in the house of the Young family in Burnham near Westonsuper-Mare. In the space headed “A Position as to Marriage,” someone had punctiliously erased the information. If this was the “said” Ellen, I could imagine it might have been hard for her to decide concerning her personal status.
67.
Patrick Wilson, Murderess: A Study of the Women Executed in Britain since 1843 ( London: Michael Joseph, 1971). See also Capital Punishment UK, http://www.richard.clark32.bitnternet.co.uk (accessed January 2, 2008).
68.
Arnot, “The Murder of Thomas Sandles,” 170.
69.
Western Circuit, Bodmin July 27, (London) Times, July 29, 1878, 4:3; and NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, June 1878, Selina Wadge.
70.
The depositions mentioned only Selina's mother, Mary. Yet the Censuses of 1871 and 1881 reveal that she also had a father, Thomas, who lived in the same household. NA, PRO, ASSI 26/14, June 1878, Selina Wadge.
71.
Ibid.
72.
Ibid.
73.
Ibid.
74.
Ibid.
75.
Ibid.
76.
Western Circuit, Bodmin July 27, (London ) Times, July 29, 1878, 4:3.
77.
See Robert Lee , Unquiet Country: Voices of the Rural Poor, 1820-1880 (Cheshire, UK: Windgather Press , 2005); and Arnot , “Understanding Women Committing Newborn Child Murder.”
78.
On the horrifying conditions in workhouses, see Lee , Unquiet Country; Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); A.N. Wilson, The Victorians (New York: Norton , 2003); Leonore Davidoff, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830-1960 (London: Longman , 1999); and Reay , Rural Englands.
79.
Arnot, “ Understanding Women Committing Newborn Child Murder”; Knelman, Twisting in the Wind; Ross, Love and Toil; and Forma , Mother of All Myths.
80.
Arnot, “ The Murder of Thomas Sandles”; Andrews, “The Boundaries of Her Majesty's Pleasure”; Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy; and Smith, Trial by Medicine.
81.
Ross, Love and Toil, 186.
82.
Arnot, “ Understanding Women Committing Newborn Child Murder,” 61-63.
83.
Ross, Love and Toil; and Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy.
84.
Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy.
85.
Wilson, Murderess.
86.
Western Circuit, Bodmin July 27, (London ) Times, July 29, 1878, 4:3.
87.
Ibid.
88.
Ibid.
89.
Wilson, Murderess; and Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy.
90.
Western Circuit, Bodmin July 27, (London ) Times, July 29, 1878, 4:3.
91.
“Execution: Selina Wadge, a Single Woman” (London) Times, August 16, 1878, 5.
92.
Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy.
93.
Arnot “ The Murder of Thomas Sandles”; and Davidoff, The Family Story.
94.
Françoise Barret-Ducrocq , Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality and Desire among Working-Class Men and Women in Nineteenth Century ( London: Penguin, 1989); and Smart, “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex”
95.
Lee, Unquiet Country .
96.
See Jackson, “ The Trial of Harriet Vooght” Two historians who commented on Selina's case reflected the same attitude. Roger Chadwick (in Bureaucratic Mercy, 295) viewed Selina's sexual conduct as confirmation of her willfulness. Patrick Wilson (in Murderess) viciously accused Selina of abusing Westwood and her son Johnny.
97.
Lee, Unquiet Country ; Jackson, “ The Trial of Harriet Vooght”; Smart, “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex ”; and Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria.
98.
Lee, Unquiet Country ; Jackson, “ The Trial of Harriet Vooght”; Knelman, Twisting in the Wind; and Emsley, Crime and Society in England.
99.
Smart, “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex.”
100.
McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture.
101.
Wilson, The Victorians ; and Robinson, “ Population Policy in Early Victorian England.”
102.
McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 88.
103.
Robinson, “Population Policy in Early Victorian England,” 167.
104.
See Smart, “ Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex.”
105.
Ancestry.com. N.d. England and Wales, Civil Registration Index: 1837-1983. http://www.ancestry.com (accessed November 20, 2005).
106.
The charge of murder. 1877. (Taunton, UK) Somerset County Gazette: Bristol Express and Devonshire News, Saturday, November 3.
107.
Hellerstein, Erna Olafson, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen .1981. Victorian women: A documentary account of women's lives in nineteenth-century England, France and the United States, 204-5. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press .
108.
National Archives, Public Record Office.1877 . ASSI 26/14, October 1877, EllenHarper . London: National Archives .
109.
———. 1878. ASSI 26/14, June 1878, Selina Wadge. London: National Archives.
110.
———. 1879. HO 140/44 Calendar of Prisoners 1877, 1878, 1879. London: National Archives.
111.
Somerset Archive. 1893. The Somerset County Record Office Registers of Burials, 1875-1893.
112.
———. 1920. The Somerset County Record Office Registers of Burials, 1893-1920.
113.
UK Census.1861. 1861 England Census. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008).
114.
———. 1871. 1871 England Census. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008).
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———. 1881. 1881 England Census. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008).
116.
———. 1891. 1891 England Census. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008).
117.
———. 1901. 1901 England Census. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census (accessed January 2, 2008).
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Western Circuit. 1878. Bodmin July 27, (London) Times, July 29, 4:3.
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Arnot, Margaret.1994. Infant death, child care and the state: The baby farming scandal and the first infant life protection legislation of 1872. Continuity and Change9 (2): 217-311.
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