11

The Problems Being an 1860s Girl Can Bring…

Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I have repeatedly drawn into my story the decade in which little Sarah Jacob lived. The bare story in the Carmarthen long house has been crowded in my telling of the fast with references to publications, shows, religious tracts, diseases, professional men and their lives, animal ailments, political viewpoints, and most of all, with knowledge. The way in which Victorians understood their knowledge of the world and of God wraps around Sarah like a very uncomfortable, stifling garment.

Al these things have been considered because of the particular importance of the 1860s for children and working families. It was a time when the revolution in print and popular entertainment gave hints at what sort of cultural enrichment was on the horizon, notably with the 1870 Education Act. In 1867 the electorate was extended to include more working men, but trade unions still had a long struggle to endure for legality.

The females of the species were still downtrodden, but there were signs of change. The year 1858 saw a debate on women’s situation regarding work and legal entity, in such places as The Englishwoman’s Journal. Then in 1865 the first stirrings of a women’s suffrage movement were heard in the petitions created by the Ladies of Langham Place. This was reinforced by the publication of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women in 1869.

But what about being a young girl at that time? My account of deprivation and starvation of children, linked to the workhouse and the poor law, has shown the precarious nature of life for young adults. Child prostitution was a problem in the cities; cruelty to children was a huge problem, and not until 1884 was there any kind of society to protect children. The establishment of the NSPCC came in 1895.

Children like Sarah, in the rural areas and in the towns, worked very long hours. The inspection which gathered evidence on this in 1866 reported this statement by a boy in Suffolk: ‘At bird-keeping I had to stay from 6 till 6, except at barley, and then from 5 a.m. till 8 p.m. Sunday was the same as other days.’ There was a general need for child labour on the land in the country areas, and school log-books always list of large numbers of children away from class to work in the fields.

Sarah was more fortunate, in that she had brothers and older sisters, so she and the youngest girl would have worked more indoors. There is no doubt that she was given time with her books, and her destiny would have been to marry and be a good wife – that is, have all the domestic skills of cleaning and cooking, as well as knowing about child-rearing. Sarah was well-read and had a creative side. The 1860s girl in the middle class was closer to Sarah’s lifestyle and acquisitions than was the typical working class labouring girl.

Images of girls like Sarah in art, such as ‘The Farmer’s Daughter’ by William Lee Hankey, painted in 1899, show such girls working in the fields and lanes; here an aproned girl carries a stick and looks after a dozen geese. It would be understandable for some to respond simply that Sarah welcomed the attention generated by her illness, and was on some kind of ego-trip. That image would never match with her being genuinely ill and, regardless of what the illness was, we have to look for an understanding that goes way beyond that kind of link to an outlook that provokes yet more questions.

Looking at Sarah’s story from the standpoint of the 1860s, one aspect stands out; it relates to the idea that the advent of starvation casts a dark shadow of criticism and blame over the society in which it exists. For Victorian Britain starvation was a stigma, a source of shame and embarrassment. The Pax Britannica might have stretched across all the distant places on the globe that were painted pink, but back home, in Wales, that fabled backwardness identified by the Llyfrau Gleision had become even more shameful than the poverty in the London streets. Sarah was a young girl in a place which had become a thorn in the flesh of the great Empire on which the sun never sets, comparable to Ireland, as discussed, in the racial perspectives of the time.

The Jacob trial at assizes was deliberately made an operation of media spin. If we consider eating n the context of how knowledge was understood and applied in the society then, we find that Sarah represents the nature of girlhood, in terms which modern thought cannot comprehend. She did not starve in order to be accepted by the culture she was in; but there is a factor of the time that applies: as some commentators have pointed out, the fasting girls came along at a time of a shift to modernity, that ‘it was no longer enough just to survive’ as Lucinda Kunkel puts it. Anorexia, whatever the cause, when it was taken up by Dr Gull, related to aspects of modernity, of the changing perceptions of the self in a paternalistic culture.

Clues as to the larger picture abound in the two letters by the local professional men. Knowledge generally was being relocated and redefined across the land, backed by such thought as was embodied in Essays and Reviews, and yet ‘H.H. Davies, surgeon, Llandysul’ could write to Seren Cymru of Sarah:

About sixteen months ago, she expressed a wish to have the Sacraments Administered to her by the clergyman of the parish, and since then all the inmates, who are considered respectable and truth-telling people, protest that she has not taken anything into her mouth in the form of nourishment or otherwise… I do not comprehend the motive… The readers may wish to know my unflinching opinion. I really and truly am perplexed, well knowing that nothing is impossible in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of all mankind.

Sarah, he states, asked for the sacrament; this must refer to extreme unction, suggesting that the girl thought she was in her last hours and had not long left to live. She asked for it – not the parents. That was well before any notoriety, so it surely confirms that there was a serious illness in her, far more than Davies seems to have understood, and he wrote that, when called out at around that time, he ‘expressed an opinion accordingly, that dissolution was not near at hand’.

Davies’ knowledge came from long years of work in therapy, and from acquired medical information through reading. He labelled the illness ‘catalepsy’ when he wrote to the paper. He knew that the illness was ‘extraordinary’ and that was yet another generic term for what was not understood. One definition expresses it like this: ‘The subjects of catalepsy are in most instances females of highly nervous or hysterical temperament. The exciting cause of an attack is usually mental emotion operating either suddenly… or more gradually in the way of prolonged depression.’ That is, his stock vocabulary and second-hand knowledge had let him down, and there were obvious limits to his experience in ‘hands-on’ doctoring. There was space in his intellect for the thought that ‘nothing is impossible in the sight of the Creator’.

When we turn to the Rev. Evan Jones, we need to be reminded of what he said in his letter to The Welshman: ‘Medical men persist in saying that the thing is quite impossible, but all the nearest neigh-bours… entertain no doubt whatever on the subject and I am myself of the same opinion…’. He clearly places ‘medical men’ in a lesser category of knowledge organisation than the Creator.

Both Davies and Jones are voicing their need to have a place in the intellectual and spiritual scheme of knowledge for the numinous, the unseen, the workings of a divine power. It is useful to recall here that in this period, the ‘cunning folk’ who practised cures and astrology were still referred to as ‘wizards’, and phrenologists liked to study their skulls. One analysis of a ‘wizard type’ was this: ‘I have been both astonished and affronted by their effrontery, as they revealed the tricks they adopted to work on the feelings of the credulous and superstitious.’

The Welsh Fasting Girl lived at a time when the axis of accepted knowledge and the way it was organised was being reconfigured. Her condition was close to anorexia mirabilis, and what was ‘admired’ in 1869 shifted from the realm of the miraculous to the bizarre, the ‘beyond nature’ phenomenon. Those who had put boundaries on their knowledge saw a sham; the ones who still saw the Creator, a being capable of anything, remained impervious to change, and in the 1860s, for all kinds of reasons, the challenge was out in the open.

In that context, a court of law usually brings out the very centre of such oppositions, showing the fault lines in all mind-sets; but at Carmarthen assizes in 1870, the law machine had been well-oiled to attain its target – to gun down the forces at work in a place where, it was becoming more and more apparent, the miraculous might eclipse the new enlightenment.