Unmarried, pregnant and Victorian

For most unmarried Victorian women an unexpected pregnancy meant poverty and hardship

Emma Darby, was in an impossible situation: she was unmarried and pregnant in 1880. Somehow she managed to conceal her pregnancy while working as a servant for James Tyler, a smith and bell-hanger from Middlesex. But early in February, she felt the first twinges of labour.

Even the usually unobservant Tyler noticed that she was unwell: “calling her to mind the shop, I noticed her looking peculiarly wild and strange.” Later he noticed that his toilet was not flushing properly. Peering down into the bowl, Tyler noticed “something like skin” wedged down the pipe. He tried to move the obstacle, nudging it with a broom handle, but it was stuck fast. Finally he reached in and pulled out the sodden corpse of a new born baby boy, “quite dead,” with his umbilical cord still attached.

The  baby’s skull was “broken in, causing a hole large enough to admit a small orange,” which suggested that a “blunt iron or wooden instrument” must have been used to shove him down the toilet headfirst. His umbilical cord was still attached. 

Tyler called the police, who arrested Emma and charged her with “feloniously, wilfully and of malice aforethought" murdering  her new born baby son. The coroner, Dr Alfred Kay judged that the baby's injuries could not have been caused by someone pushing the child down the toilet.

Emma told the police "all she knew of it was she went to the WC to make water and fainted away." She refused to answer the charge. I haven't found any record of Emma's sentence, but other women, like Amy Gregory of Richmond in 1894, who were tried for similar crimes were sentenced to death or life in prison.

Victorian unmarried mothers, especially working class ones faced an impossible dilemma during the nineteenth century. Most employers would turn them out as soon as their condition became obvious and then it was the workhouse or often unsympathetic relatives. After they gave birth few would employ a mother and child and lodging your child with a nurse cost money.

The saddest aspect of Emma's desperate act was that it wasn't unusual – that same year Ann Noakes of Reigate was charged with murdering her baby son. In 1894 Minnie Wells was tried for killing her twin daughters.

You can read the depositions for Emma's case at The National Archives in CRIM 1/7/6.

Quilts 1700-2010 exhibition at the V&A

The Rajah Quilt was made by female convicts on
board the HMS Rajah in 1841

You might think that quilting was just a dull way for Victorian women to pass the time, but as the V&A Quilts exhibition shows, needlework is full of hidden history...

The Rajah quilt was made in 1841 by female convicts on board the HMS Rajah en-route to Australia, where they would serve their sentences most of them for life or at least several years. But for some reason the prisoners decided to use the long weeks of their voyage to create a quilt for the women in the benevolent society, who had supplied them with sewing materials in prison. The beautiful results, with ornate appliqued birds and flowers probably never reached the society, as it is kept in the National Gallery of Australia, but the idea of twenty, perhaps thirty women all hunched over the quilt making something so ornate when they had lost everything, really struck me.

Tracy Emin's bed, one of the more modern pieces 

Another touching story lay behind an incomplete coverlet from 1943. Twenty girl guides aged eight to 16, who were incarcerated in Changi Prison, Singapore created the cover for their leader’s birthday, using scraps of their dresses until a prison guard put a stop to them congregating in the yard.

My favourite quilt was by self-styled prophet, Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) who made her quilt as a protest when refused entry to George III’s court. Joanna, who once claimed to be pregnant with Moses, carefully snipped George’s insignia off commemorative fabrics for his Coronation and sewed an inscription out of strands of her own hair. Legend has it that she cursed the King with every stitch.

The exhibition has definitely inspired me to make a start on the quilt I keep putting off, although I won’t be following the Victorian Temperance movement's advice and swapping a tipple for a  needle and thread...

Detail from a quilt by Ann West, 1820. 

Victorian female convicts - fashion-fiends?

Florence Maybrick was famously convicted for poisoning her husband in 1889. Six years later, she had become one of England's most glamorous gaol-birds...

A stereotypical female convict at Millbank prison, by Herbert Watkins (1862).

On 9th September 1895 the New York Times published an article entitled:

'Vanity of Female Convicts

The Ruling Passion Strong in a Condition Worse than Death'

The writer called British female convicts 'the vainest of the vain daughters of Eve,' but claimed that the vainest of them all was American-born Florence Maybrick. Trend-setting poisoner Maybrick had apparently sent all the female felons in Woking jail mad for long-skirted dresses with trains. The fashion-crazed ladies spent hours 'touching up' their prison garb, its plainness 'a constant source of annoyance'.

The journalist went on to mention the prisoners' fad for using the oil from door hinges in their coiffures and stealing candles to made pommade in Millbank prison. In Woking prison one convict was caught chewing her red apron to redden her lips, while another fainted away after she put on rudimentary stays constructed from wood and wire. 

The glamorous Florence Maybrick was imprisoned
for poisoning her husband with arsenic

Rather than use stray pieces of wire to pick locks, others fashioned hair pins from bits of wire. Pages from the Bible were 'torn out to make old fashioned 'cracker' curls,' which 'if found out, involves a very severe punishment.' But the fashionista felons apparently wouldn't stop trying to look good. Even lifers wanted to check out their wrinkles, he says. They would 'scheme and plot for months together in order to become possessed of a piece of broken window glass' at 'the risk of solitary confinement on a bread and water diet.'

The journalist somehow seems to have trans-Atlantic access to the prisoners' mail. When they write to women friends, he claims, they will ask 'to be informed about the latest fashions' and even request that their friends visit them dressed a la mode. 

But female felons weren't just inspired by the outside world, the prison had its own trend-setters. When one convict started a fashion, 'if it meets with approval [it] will be immediately copied by all the other convicts.' Warders even used fashion to subdue rowdy inmates: 'many a violent, half-witted woman has been rendered tractable by permitting her to copy some little innovation then making itself fashionable within the prison walls.'

Punch and the Woman Question

Delving into old copies of Punch recently I came across a few cartoons that were so reactionary and anti-feminist they were funny. In this one from 1895, 'Jack' is reduced to the servants' hall for feminine company, because the women in his household have turned into 'New Women' - tie-wearing, fag-puffing intellectuals...

And then, there's the unmarried female writer - what else but a mustachioed lesbian seductress....

 

...the female commuter, getting in the way of all those poor gentlemen trying to read their newspapers...