Bibliography and Sources

As with all historical enquiry, writers generally find themselves indebted to those who have gone before in the mainstream paths of intellectual and social history. In this respect, credit goes to Joan Jacobs Brumberg, whose work on anorexia through history opened up potential lines of thought to all future historians on the subject. In contrast, with a close focus on the Welsh context only, there is John Cule’s book, a source for other writers who tackled the subject before I began the project. Mr Cule was able to apply his medical as well as his historical knowledge – something called for ever since Fowler’s early work, listed below.

Yet the story of Sarah Jacob is not simply a medical enquiry: it has a complex legal entanglement, and help with that has come notably from Richard Ireland, of the Welsh Legal History Society.

Many of the following sources are obscure indeed, and such is the nature of this remarkable case that it has entailed some persistent searching in several areas of secondary importance, but which have opened up some enlightenment in some of the darker rooms of that great mansion that is Welsh social history.

One of the most helpful and informative sources was not verbal at all: the photos of John Thomas, from the archive at the National Library of Wales (and published by Y Lolfa) bring the material world of rural Wales in the mid-Victorian period very much to life.

There is a vast and still growing library of scholarship on Sarah’s story too: academics from areas such as gender studies, women’s history, the social history of medicine and legal history have all shown an interest, and more reflection and analysis continues to arrive in print. I have consulted much of this, even to the borderline yet related subjects of hunger artists and ‘performance studies’ in general. As with all intellectual history, some is focused clearly on a line of thought with close relevance to the topic in hand, and some is essentially linked to other disciplines.

Naturally, there are sources in Welsh, also, primarily from the periodical press of the time, and I have consulted and used these only to a limited extent; the most directly influential ones are, naturally, the narrative, edifying texts for children on religious themes, and the newspaper reports for Welsh readers.

The most significant of the related legal issues is arguably the notion of manslaughter and its problematic in Victorian legal discourse and debate. It became prominent in official reports and enquiries, so these feature prominently here and I have tried to make these appear below with some sort of accessible rationale.

It still fills me with wonder, when I reflect on how a regional tale like this grew and grew, like Topsy, and in consequence, the bibliography of research on this also grows apace, so my selection is far from exhaustive, but will prove more than helpful for anyone who wishes to add more to the work already done. I hope that some readers will want to explore areas I have merely touched on, and perhaps continue the enquiries into the truth of the case.

Primary Sources

Books Cited and Consulted

Anon. The Medical Annual 1923 (John Wright and Sons)

Anon. The Welsh Fasting Girl: a complete history of the remarkable case of Sarah Jacob (D. Jones, 1904)

Anon. The Youth’s Instructor and Guardian (J. Mason, 1834)

Britten, Emma Hardinge, Ghost Land, or Researches into the Mysteries of Occultism (Progressive Thinker Publishing House, 1897)

Bruce, H. A., Letters of the Rt Hon. Henry Austin Bruce, Lord Aberdare (Oxford: for private circulation, 1902)

Burdett’s Official Nursing Directory (The Scientific Press, 1898)

Fowler, Robert, A Complete History of the Welsh Fasting Girl (Henry Redshaw, 1871)

Gay, Peter, (Ed.) The Freud Reader (Vintage Books, 1989)

Golby, J.M., (Ed.) Culture and Society in Britain 1850-1890 A sourcebook of contemporary writings(Oxford University Press, 1982)

Jones, Iwan Meical, (Ed) Hen Ffordd Gymreig o Fyw/ A Welsh Way of Life: The photographs of John Thomas (Y Lolfa, 2008) These are from the John Thomas collection at Llyfergell Genedlaethol Cymru, Aberystwyth.

Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis and other stories (Penguin, 2007)

Kilvert, Francis, Diary 1870-1879 (Penguin, 1977)

Mayhew, Henry, and Binny, John, The Criminal Prisons of London (Griffin Bohn, 1862)

Morike, Eduard, ‘Verborgenheit’ in Forster, Leonard (Ed.) The Penguin Book of German Verse (Penguin, 1957) p. 348

Nicholson, Emilius, Nicholson’s Cambrian Travellers’ Guide of the Principality of Wales (Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1840)

Nield, Basil, Farewell to the Assizes (Garnstone Press, 1972)

Saint Therese of Lisieux L’Histoire D’Une Ame (Office Central de Lisieux, 1898)

Shea, Victor and Whitla, William (Editors) Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and its Reading (University of Virginia Press, 2000)

Strahan, J.A., The Bench and Bar of England (William Blackwood, 1919)

Tuke, Samuel, Description of the Retreat (1813) Reproduced by the Process Press, 1964.

Wilson, Violet M., Diary entries for 1896 in Creaton, Heather (see below)

Periodicals and Official Publications

British Medical Journal Lewis, Thomas, ‘A Continuance of the Case of the Welsh Fasting Girl with an account of the post-mortem appearances’ Jan. 8 1870 pp.27-29

Griffith, John (‘Gohebydd’) ‘Fel Bytheid’ Llythyr y Gohebydd in Baner ac Amserau Cymru Oct.20, 1869 issue 660

‘The End of Succi’s Fast’ in The Daily Graphic April 28, 1890

Sunday at Home: ‘Hospital for Sick Children’ p.471 (The Religious Tract Society, 1864)

The British Almanac 1870 (Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1870)

The Times Digital Archive:

‘The Cattle Plague’ 2 March, 1866, p.10

‘Alleged Death from Starvation’ Letters, 2 Feb, 1869

‘Deaths from Starvation’ Lankester enquiry report: 6 March, 1868 p.10

Central Criminal Court, Feb. 26, 1861, The Times, p.11

‘Distress in Poplar’ Letters to the Times, 12 Jan, 1867

‘Suicide and Murder by Starvation’ 11 Dec, 1867, p.6

House of Commons report, 21 Feb, 1867, p.8

‘The Clerkenwell Explosion’ 15 April, 1868 p.11

‘A Fasting Girl’ 22 Oct, 1874, p.10

‘Shaftesbury Theatre’ 22 May, 1890, p.6

Tracts for the Times Vol. II 1834-35 by members of the University of Oxford. (J H Parker, Oxford)

‘The Fasting Girl of Wales’ letter from Dr Fowler 7 Sept, 1869, p.8

Western Mail: Dec 25 1869 ‘Sarah Jacob, The Welsh Fasting Girl’ article 252 online

‘The Welsh Fasting Girl and her Imitator’ Western Mail Nov 20, 1869

‘The Fasting Man’ Illustrated London News April 26, 1890

Law Reports:

R.v Blow, Alfred and Blow, Sarah March 22, 1867 Midland Circuit assizes The Queen v Sarah Shepherd (Manslaughter) Court for Crown Cases Reserved Jan 25, 1862, The Times p.9

Other Sources

Hansard Commons Debates: 1 July, 1870 ‘Fasting Girl’

Ibid. ‘Judicial Sentences: Question pp.1430-1431

Report from the Select Committee on the Homicide Amendment Bill 1861 (Irish University Press, 1989)

Royal Commission on Agriculture 1882 ‘Report by Mr Doyle on Welsh Labourers’ in Parliamentary Papers: Agriculture, 1878-1882, p.56

‘Abbot Street Sunday School’ Wrexham and Denbighshire Advertiser 11 February, 1860 issue 266

‘Our Library Table’ North Wales Chronicle 25 February, 1860 issue 1717

Secondary Sources

Books Abse, Dannie, Goodbye, Twentieth Century (Parthian, 2011)

Altick, Richard, Victorian People and Ideas (Dent, 1974)

Altick, Richard, The English Common Reader: a social history of the mass reading public 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957)

Appignanesi, Lisa, Mad, Bad and Sad: a history of women and the mind doctors from 1800 to the present ( Virago, 2008)

Ayton, Dr Agnes, Anorexia Nervosa: Hope for Recovery (Hammersmith Press, 2011)

Baker, J.H., An Introduction to English Legal History (Butterworths, 2002)

Barnard, Sylvia.M., Viewing the Breathless Corpse (Words@ Woodmere, 2002)

Bondeson, Jan, Freaks (Tempus, 2006)

Bostridge, Mark, Florence Nightingale (Penguin, 2009)

Brown, Nicola, and Burdett, Carolyn, The Victorian Supernatural (CUP, 2011)

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Vintage Books, 2000)

Busby, Sian, A Wonderful Little Girl: the true story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl (Short Books, 2003)

Bynum, W.F., Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University press, 1994)

Cartwright, Jane, (Ed.) Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Chapman, Pauline, Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors (Grafton, 1985)

Cook, Chris (Ed.) Britain in the Nineteenth Century 1815-1914 (Routledge, 2005)

Creaton, Heather, Victorian Diaries: the daily lives of Victorian men and women (Mitchell Beazley, 2001)

Cule, John, Wreath on the Crown (Gomerian Press, 1967)

Daly, Nicholas, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (CUP, 2009)

Daunton, Martin.J., The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (OUP, 2011)

Davenport-Hines, Richard, The Pursuit of Oblivion: a social history of drugs (Orion, 2004)

Davies, John, A History of Wales (Penguin, 1993)

Davies, Martin, Save the Last of the Magic: traditional qualities of the West Wales Cottage (the author, 1991)

Davies, Owen, Murder, Magic and Madness (Pearson Longman, 2005)

Denning, Lord, Landmarks in the Law (Butterworths, 1984)

Diamond, Michael, Victorian Sensation (Anthem Press, 2003)

Ferris, Paul, Dylan Thomas (The Dial Press, 1977)

Field, Linda, Nutrition and Hydration (Pearson, 2010)

Flanders, Judith, Consuming Passions; leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain (Harper, 2007)

Fraser. Maxwell, Introducing West Wales (Methuen, 1956)

Glazebrook, P.R., Blackstone’s Statutes on Criminal Law (OUP, 2010)

Goldman, Paul, Victorian Illustrated Books 1850-1870 (Trustees of the British Museum, 1994)

Goodall, Peter.J., For Whom the Bell Tolls (Gomer, 2001)

Goodall, Peter.J., The Black Flag over Carmarthen (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, 2005)

Graham, Evelyn, Fifty Years of Famous Judges (John Long, 1936)

Gray, Adrian, Crime and Criminals of Victorian England (History Press, 2011)

Hall, John, The Trial of Adelaide Bartlett (William Hodge, 1927)

Hammond, William A, Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement (G P Putnam’s, 1876)

Hastings, Selina, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (John Murray, 2009)

Hastrup, Kirsten, A Passage to Anthropology: between experience and theory (Routledge, 1995)

Hibbert, Christopher, George III: A Personal History (Penguin, 1999)

Horn, Pamela, The Victorian Country Child (Roundwood Tree Press, 1974)

Hutchinson, Matt et alia, A Brief Atlas of the Human Body (Pearson, 2007)

Jagger, Peter.J., (Ed.) Gladstone (Hambledon, 1998)

James, Louis, Print and the People 1819-1851 (Penguin Books, 1978)

Johnston, Dafydd, Pocket Guide to the Literature of Wales (University of Wales press, 1994)

Jones, David J.V., Crime in Nineteenth Century Wales (University of Wales Press, 1992)

Laing, R.D., Self and Others (Tavistock Publications, 1961)

Laing, R.D., The Politics of the Family and other essays (Tavistock Publications, 1971)

Jupp, Peter C. and Gittings, Clare, Death in England: An Illustrated History (Manchester University Press, 1999)

Kingston, Charles, Famous Judges and Famous Trials (Stanley Paul and Co., 1910)

Leighton, Angela and Reynolds, Margaret, Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1995)

Licence, Tom, Hermits and Recluses in English Society (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Losowsky, Monty (Ed.) Getting Better: stories from the history of medicine (Medical Museum Publishing, 2007)

McMahon, Darrin, The Pursuit of Happiness (Penguin, 2006)

Martin, Elizabeth.A. (Ed.) The Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary (OUP, Eight edition, 2010)

Mitton, Lavinia, The Victorian Hospital (Shire, 2008)

Monaghan, John and Just, Peter, Social and Cultural Anthropology (OUP, 2000)

Musson, Anthony and Stebbings, Chantal, Making Legal History (CUP, 2011)

Palmer, Roy, A Touch on the Times: songs of social change 1770-1914 ( Penguin, 1978)

Peate, Iorwerth C., The Welsh House

Porter, Roy, Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine (Penguin, 2003)

Porter, Roy, Madness: A Short History (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Roberts, H., Y Ferch ryfeddol, neu, Hanes Sarah Jacob, Lllethr-neuadd (c 1869) in Y Casghwr 51 (1993)

Russell, Sharman Apt, Hunger: An Unnatural History (Basic Books, 2005)

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, Death without Weeping (University of California Press, 1993)

Selvini, Maria, Self-Starvation (Chaucer Publishing, 1963)

Smith, F.B., The People’s Health 1830-1910 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990)

Snaith, Philip, Clinical Neuroses (Oxford University Press, 1981)

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen, Historical Encyclopaedia of Nursing (ABC-Clio, 1999)

Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, A History of the Criminal Law of England (Macmillan, 1883)

Trilling, Lionel and Bloom, Harold, Victorian Prose and Poetry (Oxford University press, 1973)

Turner, E.S., Call the Doctor: a social history of medical men (Michael Joseph, 1958)

Vidler, Alec R., The Church in an Age of Revolution (Penguin, 1961)

Williams, E.N., A Documentary History of England Vol. 2 (Penguin, 1965)

Wilson, William, Criminal Law (Pearson, 2011)

Wolmar, Christian, Fire and Steam: how the railways transformed Britain (Atlantic Books, 2007)

Worsley, Lucy, If Walls Could Talk (Faber and Faber, 2011)

Articles in Books, Web Sites and Periodicals

Anon. ‘How to Develop Patient Trust in Anorexia Treatment’ Nursing Times Vol. 107 no. 3 2011, pp.24-5

Bourne, Fiona, ‘Are You Related to a Nurse’ Local History News number 103 Summer, 2012

Gooldin, Sigal, ‘Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists: Spectacles of Body and Miracles at the Turn of the Century’ Body and Society 2003 Vol. 9 no. 7, pp.27-53

Hamilton, Bernard, ‘The Solitary Virtue’ Times Literary Supplement May 4, 2012, p. 29

Hardy, Anne, ‘Pioneers in the Victorian Provinces: Veterinarians, Public Health and the Urban Animal Economy’

Ireland, Richard, ‘Putting Oneself on Whose Country? Carmarthenshire Juries in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ Legal Wales: Its Past, its Future: essays dedicated to Dafydd Jenkins on his Ninetieth Birthday (Welsh Legal History Society, 2001), pp. 63-87

Ireland, Richard W., ‘ Sanctity, Superstition and the Death of Sarah Jacob’ in Musson, A. and Stebbings, C., (Eds.) Making Legal History (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.284-302

James, Heather, ‘Cholera and the Public Health Movement in Carmarthen 1848-1856’

The Carmarthenshire Antiquary, Volume XXIV 1988, pp. 83-106

Johnson R.W.M., ‘Public Policy in Food and Agriculture: Veterinary Public Health, An Historical perspective’ Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems www.eolss.net

Kunkel, Lucinda, ‘From Piety to Malady: The Spiritual Birth of Anorexia’ Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Canadian Conference on Spirituality and Social Work, King’s College, University of Western Ontario, 2005 at www.stu.ca-~spirituality/Kunkelnotes05.pdf

Morgan, Gethin, ‘Fasting Girls and our Attitudes to them’ British Medical Journal, 1977, Vol.2, pp.1652-1655

Morgan, Kenneth.O., ‘Gladstone, Wales and the New Radicalism’ in Jagger (see above), pp.123-136

Quinault, Roland, ‘Victorian Juries’ History Today May, 2009, pp. 47-53

Risse, Guenter B., ‘Hysteria at the Edinburgh Infirmary: The Construction and Treatment of a Disease 1770-1800, Medical History Vol. 32 1988 pp.1-32

Scull, Andrew, ‘Nosologies’ Times Literary Supplement, May 18 2012 pp.14-15

Springhall, John, ‘The Penny Dreadful’: publishing business in the City of London from 1860’ The Historian Autumn, 2009 pp. 14-17

Tallis, Lisa, ‘The “Dr Faustus” of Cwrt-y-Cadno: A New perspective on John Harries and Popular Medicine in Wales’ The Welsh History Review/Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru, Vol. 24 Number 3 June, 2009 pp.1-28 ‘The Pioneers of Therapeutic Fasting in America’ www.scientificfasting.com

Williams, Mari A., ‘Sarah Jacob’ Oxford Dictionary of national Biography (OUP 2004-11) online: www.oxforddnd.com/view/printable/89662 Wohl, Anthony S., ‘Victorian Racism’ The Victorian Web (see below)

Art Sources Referred to in the text

From Trial and Innocence Edited and written by Helena Moore (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, 1984): Alfred Provis, ‘Interior, Girl Reading’

Print: Fading Away by Henry Peach Robinson. For a further discussion of this, see Death in England (see above) pp.234-5

Internet Articles

Nicholas, Jane, ‘Hunger Politics: Towards Seeing Voluntary Self-Starvation as an Act of Resistance’ Thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture.

www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/nicholas/215 ‘Treasury prosecutions’ http:/hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1906/nov/15/treasury-prosecutions

Web Sites

www.oxforddnb.com ‘Harding Stanley Giffard, first Earl of Halsbury’ www.tsol.gov.uk/about_us/our_history.htm

The Victorian Web – www.victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html ‘A History of Hunger’

The Welsh Legal History Society – www.welshlegalhistorysociety.org/research-jacob-trial-report.php

This has a full account of the Carmarthenshire assizes, with transcripts from the small print of the contemporary local newspaper reports.