Abstract
Few autobiographies of working-class women were published in the early and mid-Victorian period, and these were generally accounts of severe mistreatment which had attracted the compassion and assistance of middle-class patrons. In this chapter I consider two such early memoirs of abused women who, along with their sponsors, strove to present their lives as representative of a larger cause. Each woman had endured violence of the most visceral sort—Elizabeth Storie’s “doctor” almost poisoned her to death, and Mary Prince’s slaveholding “employers” beat, insulted, humiliated, and sexually assaulted her—and each suffered lifelong consequences from the abuse she described. Both Storie and Prince made direct polemical appeals to their intended audiences, and each needed personal assistance and financial subvention to further her cause.
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Notes
- 1.
Records of Girlhood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-century Women’s Childhoods, ed. Valerie Sanders. London: Ashgate, 2000, 9.
- 2.
Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, 203.
- 3.
Pascal: “Autobiography is not just reconstruction of the past, but interpretation” (Pascal, 19).
- 4.
Richard Stobbs, South Portland Street. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition.
- 5.
Possibly “nettle rash,” or hives, an itchy skin rash.
- 6.
As she explains this particular wind of Scottish law, “The general reader may not know that the Act of Sederunt affords a parishioner aid in a just cause. The minister and elders of a parish are herein empowered to enforce a case on the Green Table for litigation” (76).
- 7.
George Stephenson (1781–1848), English mechanical engineer and inventor born in humble circumstances, drafted plans for the first railroad utilizing steam engines, completed in 1825. He was often cited as a model of self-education and perseverance.
- 8.
The twenty-six pages of documents relating to this trial alone (30–56) include, in addition to the statements of six medical witnesses who testified to her affliction and its probable cause, the reports of twelve family friends described as Mary Duncan, relict of Robert Duncan, Weaver; Catherine Wylie, wife of Robert Macarthur, Weaver; Robert M’Arthur, Weaver; Catherine Turner, wife of Murdoch Morrison; John M’Micken Pagan; Mrs. Ann Clelland or Angus, widow of Alexander Angus; John Campbell, Weaver; James Milligan; James Headifin; John Johnstone; Mrs. Jane Barron or Gillan; and Janet Ballantyne or Allan, spouse of Richard Allan. Several of the testimonies merely attest to what the speakers had heard from Storie’s parents at the time; their inclusion seems to embody a view that their truth has been verified by insertion in a legal record.
- 9.
Another name on the list is that of Alexander Watson , the minister who had earlier suspended her, and against whose actions she had petitioned the Synod; either this is another Alexander Watson, or he seems to have felt impelled to seem sympathetic to his former parishioner.
- 10.
Lawyers employed in the matter seem to have included John Kerr (whom she found dishonest and against whom she later brought a suit), David Campbell, Mr. Macqueen, S. S. C., Edinburgh, Richard Arthur, S. S. C., and Charles Scott, an Edinburgh advocate (62, 113), in addition to an official “agent for the poor” (135).
- 11.
That removal from the church community would affect her livelihood seems implied in her statement in the petition to be reinstated as a communicant that she is “a poor female supporting herself by needlework to the best of her ability, with nothing to sustain her exertions but her moral integrity” (93). Perhaps she depended on fellow churchgoers for patronage.
- 12.
As noted in Chap. 1, Regenia Gagnier has argued that autobiographers can only sustain a sense of self to the extent that they share a kindred language and values with their intended audience (Subjectivities, 167).
- 13.
Another instance occurs in the letter from an elder of St. Matthew’s Church, with two supporting signatures, confirming that “Elizabeth Storie has been a member of St. Matthew’s Church for some years. She has, during all that time, been in very poor health. She supported herself by dressmaking, and was very industrious; and I believe, always well-behaved” (84).
- 14.
According to the 1841 census, Elizabeth Story was living with her mother Barbara Storey and younger brother Robert Storey (spellings are inconsistent), a shop apprentice, at Macalpine St. No. 55, St. George parish, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, parish No. 644/1; in 1851 she was living with Robert, now a pattern designer, at 15 Bothwell Street, Barony Parish, Lanarkshire Parish No. 622. In 1861 she was living at 100 Burnside Street, Govan, in St. George parish, Glasgow; in 1871, as mentioned, she was in Edinburgh, at 4 Montgomery Street, Greenside, in St. Andrew Civil Parish, Reg. No. 685; in 1881 she was in the same parish and at the same address, but with Jane A. Penny also residing there; and in 1891 she was in the same parish, St. Andrew, St. Cuthberts, Edinburgh, at No. 6 SS James Street, north side. It is possible that Jane A. Penny was a visitor, guest, or landlady; in any case, her father Dr. Frederick Penny had held a chair of medicine in Glasgow and had given forensic evidence at the 1857 trial of Madeline Smith, accused of arsenic poisoning. Perhaps he had been consulted by the Stories as a specialist in the effects of arsenic. I am indebted to Sharon Knapp of Burnaby, British Columbia for locating information on the Storie and Penny families.
- 15.
Glasgow Herald, 22 March 1898. I am grateful to Steve van Dulken of the British Library for providing this information. This is likely she, as none of the other twenty-four Scottish Elizabeth Stories whose deaths were recorded after 1859 matched her likely location and/or age of birth.
- 16.
Now Turks Island, part of the British overseas territory of Turks and Caicos Islands.
- 17.
Ferguson has identified Mr. I. as a Captain Ingham, 36.
- 18.
Ferguson, 20.
- 19.
Compare Henry Louis Gates’s comments on the perceived need for attestation by twelve prominent colonial figures that Phillis Wheatley was indeed the author of her 1773 volume of verse (Poems on Various Subjects, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Oxford University Press, 1988, vii–x).
- 20.
Pringle (1789–1834) was a Scottish writer, poet, and abolitionist. He emigrated to South Africa in 1820, teaching in a school and running two newspapers. When his criticisms of the South African government prompted the closure of both newspapers and the school, he returned to London and served as secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society from 1827 to 1834. He lived to see the passage of the 1833 law prohibiting slavery in British colonies, but not the law’s implementation in 1838. His Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, 2 vols., appeared in 1834 and The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle in 1838.
- 21.
In her Letters of a Lifetime, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, Strickland describes her transcription of Prince’s story as “from her own dictation and for her benefit adhering to her own simple story and language without deviating to the paths of flourish or romance” (cited in History, 26).
- 22.
Susanna Strickland Moodie (1803–85), abolitionist, poet, and memoirist, later moved to Canada and authored Roughing It in the Bush, or, Life in Canada (1852).
- 23.
The court transcript identified Susan Brown as “a sister-in-law of Mary Prince” (History, 148), an error for the sister-in-law of Thomas Pringle.
- 24.
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, Pluto Press, 1984, 130–32.
- 25.
The case of Grace Jones , a former slave who had been forcibly returned to the Caribbean, was tried by Judge Stowell in 1827 (Fryer, 130–31).
- 26.
“The Colonial Empire of Great Britain,” Blackwood’s, vol. 30, November 1831, 744–64; the quotation is on page 752, cited in Sara Salih, ed., History, xxix.
- 27.
The suit was against Thomas Cadell , the publisher of Blackwood’s. Pringle’s friend Leigh Ritchie reported a letter from him dated January 12, 1832, in which he states: “The prosecution of Blackwood is not an affair of mine. I wished to have replied in print, and I will still do so in a fourth edition of the tract” (The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle. With a Sketch of His Life by Leigh Ritchie, London: Edward Moxon, 1838, 105, quoted in Ferguson, 49). Pringle fell ill and died shortly afterward, and this fourth edition never appeared.
- 28.
The nominal grounds for defeat was that Pringle was unable to produce witnesses from the West Indies to prove his allegations (perhaps he had not been given advance notice that these would be required).
- 29.
Royal Gazette (Kingston, Jamaica), L/2, 5–12 January 1828, Postscript, p. [17], quoted in Fryer, 131. The Antigua Free Press (no pun intended) pronounced that “Reason and equity have triumphed over cant and hypocrisy” (IV/174, 14 December 1827, [2], in Fryer, 131).
- 30.
Ferguson reprints the transcript of “Wood v. Pringle,” 140–49 and Salih an extract, 100–103.
- 31.
History, Appendix 6, “Court Case Involving Mary Prince,” Wood v. Pringle, 1 March 1833, 140–49.
- 32.
Her questioners seem to have demanded details which they found amusing but may have hurt the Society’s case: “One night she found another woman in bed with the Captain [who had] pretended to be a friend of [the] witness. (Laughter) Witness licked her, and she was obliged to get out of bed. (A laugh). The captain laughed, and the woman said she done it to plague witness. Witness took her next day to the Moravian black leader, when she denied it, and witness then licked her again. (A laugh). The woman then complained before a magistrate, Mr. Justice Dyett; [but] when the story was told, they all laughed, and the woman was informed that she must never come there again with such tales, or she would be put into the stocks” (Ferguson, 147).
- 33.
From Prince’s testimony: “Witness was also before the justice about beating a female slave, respecting a pig. Witness did not beat the woman, but she was punished as though she did by the desire of Mr. and Mrs. Wood. She used to make a little money by selling small articles—such as coffee, yams, pigs, and c.; and she used to take in washing” (147).
- 34.
London: Published by F. Westley and A. H. Davis, Stationers' Hall Court; and by Waugh & Innes, Edinburgh: And supplied at trade price to Anti-Slavery Associations by Joseph Phillips, 18, Aldermanbury. 1831. As mentioned, 23 of the book’s 41 pages consisted of Prince’s narrative, to which Pringle’s “Supplement” was appended.
- 35.
Anti-Slavery Monthly Reporter, vols. 1–5, London: London Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 1825–36. The Reporter was founded and edited by Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838) and, after a hiatus from 1837 to 1839, continued as the Anti-Slavery Reporter from 1840 to 1994.
- 36.
February 15, 1831, 133.
- 37.
Despite its documentary cast, the Anti-Slavery Reporter contains much cogent and shrewd polemical writing. Writers for the Anti-Slavery Reporter were not content to report a general litany of pain, but honed in with incisive sarcasm on those responsible. Of the trial of a Mr. Walley, for example, the commentator remarks, “His Lordship professed to feel deep horror of the inhuman and abominable conduct of his manager, Mr. Walley. He has not, however, explained to Lord Goderich, how he came to place, in that man’s hands, the uncontrolled power over his slaves with which he appears to have been invested. … Nay, we find that so long ago as the 1st of May, 1827, this very Mr. Walley … was actually indicted for the murder of a slave …; and that the indictment was then, as now, thrown out by the grand jury. Now it does seem strange that Lord Combermere should have been unapprised of this transaction; or being apprised of it, that he should have suffered Mr. Walley to remain in charge of his slaves for about three years longer, until he had killed off nearly a fourth of them” (323). Modern readers will recognize “plausible deniability.”
- 38.
February 15, 1831, 139.
- 39.
Ibid., 133.
- 40.
“The plaintiff’s letter to the Secretary of the Governor of Antigua … stated that Mary Prince’s moral character was very bad, as the police records would show, and charged her with an act of gross indecency as a proof of her immoral conduct” (History, 148).
- 41.
The Moravians, noted for their missionary efforts, were a German Pietist movement founded by the Bohemian reformer John Huss (Jan Hus, c. 1369–1415).
- 42.
Ferguson glosses this eloquent passage as follows: “Here in a sense is the resolution of her inevitable conflict in trying to say all the right things, of abiding by the prescriptions about how a ‘female’ should act, about determining what an ex-slave should say, yet remaining true to herself” (27).
- 43.
It is possible that Prince was able to return to Antigua after emancipation, though blindness would have rendered this more difficult. Although several Mary Princes appear in the London census for 1838 and years following, without knowing her address one cannot know if the former slave was among them.
- 44.
Hackett, 10; Gagnier, 148, 169–170.
- 45.
In Ferguson’s words, “Obliged to confine herself within the parameters of acceptable debate, Mary Prince undoubtedly encodes her discourse, using all the conventions at her disposal, to plead her unique self” (26).
- 46.
Peterson, 22; Liz Stanley, The Autobiographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, 14.
- 47.
“Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie,” trans. James Olney, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, 45.
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Boos, F.S. (2017). Under Physical Siege: The Early Victorian Autobiographies of Elizabeth Storie and Mary Prince. In: Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64215-4_3
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