Courtroom Ghosts

Harriet Richardson, later Harriet Staunton Harriet Richardson likely had learning difficulties. She had inherited £5000 from a great-aunt, equivalent to around £500,000 in today's money, and lived a comfortable lifestyle with her mother. In 1873, things became rather complicated. Harriet had a cousin named Thomas who had married a widow and gained two step-daughters. The elder step-daughter, Elizabeth, had married a man named Patrick Staunton and Patrick Staunton had a brother, Louis. Elizabeth's younger sister was fifteen-year-old Alice Rhodes and twenty-three year old Louis was in love with her. Thus there were in effect two couples/ pairs of siblings - Patrick and Elizabeth Staunton, and their respective brother and sister, Louis Staunton and Alice Rhodes. But when Louis Staunton met Harriet Richardson through Harriet cousin, Alice Rhodes' step-father, he began to form a plan. Harriet's mother, who had remarried after the death of her husband and now went by the name...

Amelia Dyer was tried before Justice Henry Hawkins at the Old Bailey in 1896, just two years before the judge retired. His judicial career spanned more than twenty years and he himself is an interesting topic to explore, not least because he gained a reputation as a ‘hanging judge’ - in other words, disinclined to recommend mercy in capital cases. When Hawkins died in 1907, the  Times ran an extensive obituary, which informed the reader that 'it cannot be said that Hawkins was a great judge [...] and he was sometimes charged with undue severity in criminal cases'. The obituary continued in somewhat more generous terms by describing Hawkins as 'acute and penetrating', before remarking that the memoirs Hawkins had had published in 1904 were 'two bulky volumes' which could not be said to 'constitute a valuable contribution to legal literature'. It continues that, 'the book, in fact, hardly deserves to be called amusing, for many of the stories, told at...

Amelia Dyer A note at the beginning to say that most of the illustrations I have included in this post come from the  The Illustrated Police News , a tabloid which ran from the 1860s through to the 1930s and is a goldmine of weird and wonderful cases, complete with equally bizarre illustrations. The British Library have some examples  here  and you can find even more on Google Images.  While women who killed their own new-born  infants increasingly generated sympathy among the public and within the judicial system, there was one class of baby-killers who most certainly did not. As I mentioned last week, the introduction of the 1834 Poor Law left women who were pregnant outside of marriage in an even more dire situation than had been the case previously. If a woman wanted to continue working and stay out of the workhouse, she would need to make alternative arrangements for the care of her child. And this is where the baby farmers come in. On 16 th  May 1...

Last week I talked briefly about the ways in which attitudes towards the crimes and execution of women changed over time. The crime of infanticide, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as the crime of a mother killing her child when it is less than one year old, is a useful lens for looking at those changes. This post is based in part on my MA dissertation, which looked at the options available to unmarried mothers in the 17th and 18th centuries.  In 1624, Parliament passed a piece of legislation called the 'Act to prevent the Destrouing and Murthering of Bastards'. The full text reads Whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoid their Shame, and to escape Punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the Death of their Children, and after, if the Child be found dead, the said Women do alledge, that the said Child was born dead; whereas it falleth out sometimes (although hardly it is to be proved) that the said Child or Children were murthered by the sai...