The trial transcripts and related materials in the case of Miss Woods and Miss Pirie vs. Dame Helen Cumming Gordon consist of over one thousand pages. Several of the speeches of the judges and lawyers are over one hundred pages apiece. Because so much of the material is repetitious and written in archaic language and legalese, I have edited it considerably, but always with a concern for the accuracy of the ideas expressed in the original documents.
I have made several changes as well in the form of the materials that I discovered in the trial transcripts. In order to preserve some of the information from the judges’ speeches without reproducing those speeches at great length, I have created out of portions of them judges’ “notes” on the testimony, and I have placed those notes at the intervals in which, I conjecture, they must have been written as the judges listened to the witnesses. I have also used the “notes” of Lord Robertson to speculate on the physical appearances and personalities of the witnesses. In order to spare the reader the tedium of the lengthy third-person depositions taken of the witnesses, I have created courtroom dialogues out of those depositions, in which the voices of the witnesses, the attorneys, and the judges are all heard.
I have also made several other modifications of the transcripts. For the sake of easier reading, I have omitted or modernized many archaic and/or confusing expressions, and I have substituted terms with which American readers will be more familiar; e.g., the British terms pursuer and defender have been changed to plaintiff and defendant. Because repetitious or inconsequential testimony has been omitted, for the sake of dramatic continuity I have altered the dates of some of the witnesses’ appearances (usually by less than a week or two). For simplicity’s sake I have omitted the roles of the agents, clerks, and other minor figures in this courtroom drama. In addition, I have embellished some of the biographical data, always with reference to the information that was available to me. In making these changes my primary concern has been to create out of unreadable documents a readable book, while preserving the intent of my subjects’ statements and their attitudes.
Finally, I have tried to present a modern perspective on this early nineteenth-century material through my first-person narrative.