← Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
The Fake Princess Who Fooled Georgian England
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- [00:00]
Kate Lister
Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history, like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods, or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:38]
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Dr. Maddie Pelling
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Kate Lister
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Kate Lister
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- [02:40]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
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- [02:43]
Kate Lister
Hello, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. You are back once again listening to Betwixt the Sheets. Hello. Thanks for dropping by. It's so lovely, lovely to see you. But before we can go any further together, I have to give you the fair dues warning. Okay, what's a fair dues warning? Well, that's the warning we have to give you at the top of the show, just in case you wandered in here accidentally and don't know what the show is about. So here it is. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adultery way of covering age of subjects. And you should be an adult too. And we do that because I. I don't know why we do it. Why would you be here if you didn't want to listen to upsetting and smutty things? All right, fine, fine, we'll keep doing it. That was my producer telling me off. Right, fine. Okay. Proceed at your own peril. Today's story takes place at a small village between Bristol and Bath at the start of the 19th century. While Britain is expanding its empire overseas, you could be forgiven for not thinking that a world even exists outside of this tiny little village. But all of that is about to change when a strange looking woman, claiming to be Princess Caribou no less, staggers into a cobbler's cottage and collapses. And what happens next causes a sensation. Who was she? Where did she come from? Where the hell is Caribou? And what fantastical story does she tell? I'm ready to find out if you are. Hello, and welcome back to the Twix Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. The line between what is true and what is a great big stonking fib has always been a little bit murky. And long before we had fake news, the Georgians managed to come up with some pretty outrageous stories of their own. Today's episode focuses on one such story and it takes some incredible twists and turns. But where it ends up is probably the most extraordinary part of it. I won't say anything more than that because joining me today is the Fantastic, the wonderful Dr. Maddie Pelling, Co host of our sister podcast After Dark, whose new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, delves into some of these amazing stories. Right, without further ado, everyone, let's just crack. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Maddy Pellen. How the hell are you doing, gorgeous?
- [05:23]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Okay, I was just saying to you off mic, I am now so pregnant. By the time people hear this, I'll be holding a baby at home. I'll be crying. They'll be like, whoever. And most of it will not be mine. Like I am.
- [05:34]
Kate Lister
You are not sailing through this glowing, are you? You're not enjoying this at all.
- [05:38]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
I'm sweating, Kate. It's sweat, not glow. Like, yeah, it's not good. But you've been having a very glamorous time. I've been enjoying you on Lucy Worsley BBC flagship three part series. It's a bit amazing.
- [05:51]
Kate Lister
That was a bit of a behind the scenes fat for that one. I had the worst flu of my whole life when I was filming that. It really is a sort of a lemzip blur. I was watching it back going, oh, I don't sound too bad. Actually, that's pretty good.
- [06:03]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
I mean, I will say you looked great on the drugs, so, you know, good for you. You looked fantastic. Thank you.
- [06:09]
Kate Lister
But we are here not to talk about pregnancy and flu. We're here to talk about a rather extraordinary hoax. I love a good con story, like, you know, like true crime is that. I think that's one of my favorite genres of true crime. And you've always sat there going, why would you believe that?
- [06:26]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, it's people's credulity that you just can't get over how gullible people can be. And I think it fits so nicely within the true crime genre as well, because it's one of those things where when people do a hoax, they do a scam, they do some kind of fraud. It's people who are able to somehow manipulate the rules of society and for a second get away with it. And I think that's why we're so obsessed with it, because we can see how things have slightly clicked out of place, but nobody's noticed until it's too late. And there's something so satisfying and so fascinating about that. And yeah, today this story is just. It's a wild ride. I'm going to take you on it. It is truly weird. It's a weird story.
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Kate Lister
All right, well, let's set the scene. Where are we and what time are we in?
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Dr. Maddie Pelling
Okay, so we are in the 1810s. So we're kind of 1816 into 1817.
- [07:14]
Kate Lister
So this is Jane Austen period peak. Austin.
- [07:17]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Austin. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting. When I started writing. So this is one of three stories in my new book, Hoax. And when I started writing that, I was like, okay, I'm going to have to situate people in this, this kind of Austen esque world that people are familiar with, you know, you've got your Mr. Darcy's, you've got your Pemberley, you've got your polite little balls. Everyone's kind of bowing and scraping to each other, some polite dancing, maybe some love letters, that's it. But this is also, you know, this is a time when the world is feeling incredibly dark. Napoleon's just been defeated, Waterloo has just happened in 1815. There's been enormous bloodshed. People in Britain are seeing veterans come back from the continent with missing limbs. They're not getting work. The industrial north is increasingly unstable and unsatisfied. There's food shortages, there's work shortages, you know, it's all of that. And on top of all of this, in 1816, there is the year that's known as the Year Without Summer, which listeners might know because of a little tale about Lord Byron in Switzerland, which, you know, ever heard of him? You know, where he invites Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and the guy who wrote the vampire novel that everyone forgets the name of, Polidori. There we go. Thank you very much.
- [08:24]
Kate Lister
It's my one little weird fact that I've got in there because I know Byron called him Polly Dolly and it's stuck in there ever since.
- [08:30]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Well, Byron was like so vile to that guy. But that's a whole other. That's a whole other podcast. Yeah, there should be a podcast that's just moaning about Lord Byron.
- [08:38]
Kate Lister
Like I would listen to that, actually.
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Dr. Maddie Pelling
Continue.
- [08:41]
Kate Lister
Yeah, the Summer Without a Summer.
- [08:43]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
That's a good tangent. Yes, the Year Without a Summer. And this is Mary Shelley and all of that gang meet in this really dark summer and she writes what becomes the beginning of Frankenstein, which is kind of linked a little bit to this story and the context that we're going to talk about today. So this kind of unseasonal darkness is really the backdrop for this story taking place. And there's a feeling of unease. Nobody at the time could really know why the summer hadn't occurred. And I mean, it was really serious. You know, there was snow falling in July across the northern hemisphere, which didn't help the food shortages and, you know, the lack of crops growing and all of that. And if you look at the work of like, Turner, for example, the whole palette that he's working with that year becomes much darker. It's a really grim time.
- [09:23]
Kate Lister
And it was a volcano going off in Iceland, wasn't it, that did it?
- [09:26]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Well, it was in the East Indies, Kate, which is going to Be a sort of far off setting for the story as well. So we have all these elements kind of coming in in terms of context. We've got the dark summer. We've got. Yeah, it's Mount Tambora, which is one of the East Ind Indian island volcanoes, and it produces something like 10 times as much dust into the atmosphere as Vesuvius did in AD 79.
- [09:47]
Kate Lister
It's a lot of dust.
- [09:47]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It's wild, it's a lot of dust. And that basically causes the world to go dark for the entire year. So there's a lot of. Yeah, a lot of darkness. Both sort of spiritual and literal and environmental. And it's not the sort of polite, pastel y coloured Austen world. Do we know?
- [10:02]
Kate Lister
No. It's a bit stabby, It's a bit dark, it's a bit.
- [10:05]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It's a bit stabby, it's a bit
- [10:06]
Kate Lister
anxious, it's a bit hungry. So.
- [10:09]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yep.
- [10:10]
Kate Lister
And of course, we're at the precipice of the Industrial Revolution. Like, there's big cultural. And then, of course, there's been the French Revolution. I mean, that would frighten the shit out of you. Like, we look back at that now as historians, you know, with a kind of. I'm not gonna say admiration, because they were cutting people's heads off, but, like, imagine like that just happened. People started cutting the heads off kings and queens. Scary. That's a scary time to be in.
- [10:29]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
You know, the. The world order has been upended, the rules have been rewritten and there's a real fear in Britain throughout the 1790s and going into this, the Regency period, that there are foreign spies everywhere that, you know, the French are infiltrating with their politics and their revolutionary ideas. There's real panic that Britain is going to have its own revolution and chop the head off George III or indeed the Prince Regent. You know, there's a real sense that authority and hierarchy is breaking down. And of course, into this mix, you then get a hoax that does all of this and really humiliates the people in charge. It embarrasses them and it exposes people's ignorance. Because the other thing, I suppose, in this moment is that Britain is on a global st. We fought Napoleon. We. Like I was there, I wouldn't have been fighting Napoleon. I'd be like, you have great style, my friend. I'm on your side. Like, it's fine. Never mind the dictatorship. Like, loved the art. You know, he was being fought in this kind of global arena across the British and French empires and what this story that we're going to talk about in a minute does is expose how ignorant people are about that empire. The people who are living at home, who've never boarded a ship, never gone anywhere, they benefit from the economics of the empire, from the goods that have been brought in, all of that and the sort of aesthetics that are born from especially the exploration and colonization of the East. And people have this fantastical idea of what the world is like out there and what they're entitled to of it and how they exoticise it and in some cases, sexualize it, actually. And that is going to be at the core of this story. And it. Yeah, it exposes people's stupidity, essentially.
- [12:05]
Kate Lister
God love him. All right, so that is the time period. Where are we in the Great British Isles?
- [12:12]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Okay, so we are in a little tiny village outside of Bristol, which today is, like, butted right up against a motorway interchange, but it still exists as a tiny village called Almondsbury. And it has a really great pub which was there in the 18th century and is part of this story. I recommend it. There's a good, good chip butty and a pint, and essentially it's a sleepy backwater. Nothing ever happens here. And one day in 1817, in the spring, this young woman walks up the dusty high street and she stumbles into the house of a cobbler whose door is open because that's cobbling his business. He's cobbling, he's cobbling. He's trying to get people in off the road whose shoes are broken. She stubbles in and kind of collapses dramatically in the doorway. And she isn't speaking English, but nor is she speaking any language that the cobbler recognises. And you might think, yes, well, a rural cobbler in Bristol is not necessarily going to have an encyclopedic knowledge of global languages. But of course, Bristol at the time is one of the biggest port cities. It's the most busy. There are people of all nationalities.
- [13:13]
Kate Lister
You might have heard a smattering basis. Even if you can't speak it, you might have been able to say, well, that's definitely French and that's.
- [13:18]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's. Yeah, there's Spanish, there's Portuguese, you know, there's. There's all these different languages taking place. So he's like, okay, I don't. She's not French, she's not Spanish, she's not Portuguese, she's nothing.
- [13:27]
Kate Lister
I'm out of all options.
- [13:28]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Those are the only options. And they're all European. Beyond that, no idea. And she's also dressed quite unusually, and this really piques the attention of everyone in the village. She has this dirty old dress on and she's carrying a bundle of rags. She has in her pocket a bar of soap on a little string and a forged coin, which suggests she's maybe a vagrant, that she's living, you know, sort of on the street or in fields or whatever, but around her head she has this black shawl that she's tied as a turban. She has quite dark skin and very dark hair and eyebrows and these really big, beautiful eyes. And she's so attractive to the people of this village and so mysterious that they call the overseer of the poor, who was the person who would usually be responsible for moving vagrants on, essentially in different locations. And he's like, well, she could be a beggar, but also she could be something else. And I'm not really sure, and I don't want to get rid of her in case she's something else. And I don't want to be in trouble for this. So he marches up to the hill, up the hill to the big house called Knoll House, which is a kind of really ancient seat that's being rented out at the time by the magistrate, a local magistrate of Bristol. And he's kind of. If anyone ever watched Poldark, he's kind of like George War Legon, the antagonist of Poldark. He owns a small local bank. He's the magistrate. He's just like your classic baddie.
- [14:52]
Kate Lister
So we don't like him.
- [14:55]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Boo and hiss to him. He's. He is known locally as Samuel Devil Worrell.
- [15:00]
Kate Lister
All right. Okay. That bad, then, right?
- [15:01]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, that bad. And there's a. There's an amazing anecdote about him when he has been, like, out drinking in Bristol at some fancy event, and he gets out of his carriage and he slips on the step of the carriage and falls on the pavement. And he's so kind of pissed off that people have seen him, that he accuses a random shopkeeper who's watching of having pushed him over and is like, I will take you to court, sir. Like, he's just.
- [15:20]
Kate Lister
Oh, dear.
- [15:21]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
He's just a dick.
- [15:22]
Kate Lister
Okay?
- [15:22]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
He's not great, right? This poor woman who's collapsed is taken up to the magistrate's house and she's let into the parlor, and they're like, who are you? And she just carries on speaking this language they don't understand. And she's, you know, quite animated. She's trying to explain to Them what's going on at one point. And again, I just love the sort of, oh, you're a foreigner, you'll know. One of the people in the household is like, we have a Greek servant, bring him in, see if he can understand what she's saying. And this poor Greek servant gets dragged in and you know, they're like, what's she saying, mate? And he's like, well, she's not Greek, so I don't know. Why are you asking me? Just because I'm foreign. It becomes this sort of farce immediately anyway, they can't get a sense of who she is, but nor can they just abandon her because she's very.
- [16:02]
Kate Lister
Well, they're involved now, aren't they?
- [16:04]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
They're involved. And also there's something about her. She moves in this very elegant way. They describe her as being very sort of cultivated and elegant. She's not someone of the lower ranks. They claim that's how they see her, that she must be. She's more delicate than that, she's more refined than that in their eyes. And they, they see a little bit of a opportunity here because she's something of an exotic mystery. And so they're like, she could bolster our standing in this community.
- [16:28]
Kate Lister
What kind of fucked up madness is that? That would be one of your first thoughts when you found some random woman, poor woman, with a ragtag round her head, talking gibberish. She's like, how can I make money from this opportunity?
- [16:40]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yes. How can I improve my own situation? And so they take her in, not out of the charity of, you know, sort of goodness, but because they see that this is an opportunity. And one of the first things that they do in the following days is they take her down to the ports of Bristol and they sort of parade her up and down and they ask people of different nationalities coming off ships, what language is she speaking? Scientific and. Yeah, exactly. We have really good process way of doing this and you know, everyone's like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I've just come in from South America. She's not speaking a language from there. She's, I've come in from the Caribbean, she's not speaking any kind of language that I've encountered there, blah, blah. And then we get a Portuguese sailor. And this is one of the most fascinating moments in this and throughout the book and particularly in this story, I try to get the readers to pay attention to who is the liar in this story because we have the woman at the center of this story. But everyone here has some kind of skin in the game, some money to make, some advantage to have. And this Portuguese sailor comes forward and by now they're offering a reward for anyone who can name the language or country that she's from. And so he's like, right, okay. And he has this conversation with her in a language and she responds to him. And there's a back and forth that goes on for a few minutes and both seem to understand each other. And then he turns around to the magistrate and his wife and says, okay, she's from an East Indian island. I've been out in the East Indies for a long time. I'm not sure quite which island, because she's speaking a strange mixture of dialects. But. And this is where, again, it becomes laughable. But everyone buys into it. He says, she's a princess from one of the islands, she's been kidnapped by pirates, she's been stowed aboard a ship, and she's made it all the way to Bristol port before escaping and running off into the countryside.
- [18:28]
Kate Lister
Just before we go any further, can we clarify straight away, is any of that true?
- [18:33]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Well, Kate.
- [18:34]
Kate Lister
No, no, it's complete nonsense. He's just.
- [18:36]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It's complete.
- [18:37]
Kate Lister
He's just made this up.
- [18:39]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. So everyone watching, their perception of this scene is that he has spoken to her and she has explained this to them. What has actually happened is that he has spoken gibberish to her, she has spoken gibberish back to him. This is. No one is speaking the real language here. So he is a random person off the street. He just wants a little bit of.
- [18:58]
Kate Lister
He's not in on this at all.
- [18:59]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. And he, even though he's. I mean, he's literally like not even a side character in this story, he just walks in, drops this bomb that then has all these knock on consequences
- [19:09]
Kate Lister
in the story, Takes his fiver and he's off.
- [19:12]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. Exit stage right. It's wild. So his little lie suddenly explodes. So you'd think the magistrate would be like, okay, pull the other one, you know? Yeah, exactly. You're not getting your money. You can do one. But no, he's like, here's your bag of coins. This is amazing. We have a princess from the east in our house. Love it, love it, love it. So what they do is they start to let people know that they have an East Indian member of royalty based
- [19:40]
Kate Lister
on the testimony of a random sailor that they paid down the docks.
- [19:44]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yep, yep, yep, yep. Okay. And this woman, she gives only a little indication. So the question really is how much is she going along with this? The only thing that she says is her name. They keep asking her, what are you called? What are you called? And eventually she says, caribou. Caribou. She keeps saying this over and over again. She says it really slowly at first. She's like, ka ra boo. And sort of spells out for them. They're like, okay, so this is Princess Caribou from an East Indian island that we don't know where she's from. She's staying with us now. This is grand. Nobody's questioning this. And so for the whole summer of 1817, people, the great and good of Bath and Bristol, and of course, you know, think about Bath in the age of Jane Austen. It's this fashionable city where the sick are going to get healed. But it's also, you know, a sort of riotous marriage market. It's full of scandal. It's exactly. It's a party city. And so people are now nipping across to Knole park, where this grand house is, to see this young woman. And she becomes a spectacle. She becomes, you know, something part of a sort of fashionable itinerary. You do your morning promenade and bath, you go and pay your calls. And then, oh, in the afternoon, you go and see Princess Caribou. And her life in these weeks becomes incredibly performative. She's sort of put to work by the magistrate and his wife by the Worrells. She does things like she'll hunt in the Deer park with a bow and arrow, and people will watch her doing that. She will pray on the roof of the building. People will climb up to the roof to watch her.
- [21:08]
Kate Lister
This is a very weird story.
- [21:09]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It's so weird. It's so weird. And she. Again, the question is, how much is she leaning into this? And we will get to, like, who exactly she is and why she goes along with this in a little bit. But on the surface, she seems to embody this character. She's performing for them. She even does things. And this makes me so uncomfortable and angry. She does things like she will strip half naked and swim in the lake, and people will sort of get their chairs and sit on the side of the lake and watch her. And she becomes this kind of exotic, sexualized object for people that she represents the fantasy of the east, that she's this, you know, sort of incredibly petite, beautiful woman with this dark hair and this sort of gorgeous body, and she's, you know, emerging Mr. Darcy Esque out of the lake with all this wet clothes on, and she's invited to do things like to fence with and sword fight with the gentlemen who come to visit her and things like that.
- [22:03]
Kate Lister
Back with Maddie and Princess Caribou after this short break, May, it's time to come out of hibernation. Walk, run, cycle, skip. If the mood takes you with a sense of renewal in the air, it's also a good time to pause and hit refresh on your emotional well being. That is why May is Mental Health Awareness Month, where the goal isn't just to talk about mental health, but to take action and get real support. But when you try and do that, it's still way harder than it should be. A lot of online therapy doesn't accept insurance at all, which means even during a month focused on mental health, you're stuck paying out of pocket. Ruler does things differently. They partner with over 120 insurance plans, making the average CO pay just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that makes sense. Ruler sticks with you throughout your journey. Checking in to make sure your care is actually helping you move forward. Mental Health Awareness Month is your reminder to finally take that first step. This is one of the easiest ways to actually follow through. No wait lists, no frustrating back and forth appointments can be available as soon as tomorrow. Go to ruler.comsheets to get started today. That's R U L A.com sheets for quality therapy that's covered by insurance.
- [23:34]
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- [23:39]
Kate Lister
I thought it was safe.
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- [24:16]
Kate Lister
Who's funding this? Who's paying for her to hang out and shoot arrows and have sword fights with gentlemen and go skinny dipping?
- [24:24]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
The magistrate, he had to go skinny dipping. I love that. The magistrate, this is putting him on the map. Essentially. He is, you know, now the center of this little world. People are like, oh gosh, you're so lucky to have found this princess. And it's so exciting and you're so cultured and you know, this is the house that they live in is just full of, you know, quote unquote sort of oriental decoration and stuff and they really lean into it and they redecorate some of the rooms. And they're like, you know, we're in the palace. That's bonkers.
- [24:52]
Kate Lister
Right, we'll redecorate as well.
- [24:54]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're like, we're. This is an art theme park.
- [24:57]
Kate Lister
Like, we're going, our house needs to match the princess. We found it.
- [25:00]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Absolutely. Yeah, it absolutely does. I mean, that's. Obviously, that would be your first step.
- [25:05]
Kate Lister
Who doesn't redecorate their house after a house guest? That's exactly.
- [25:09]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It really depends on the house guest. Yeah. So the other thing that they do is they do try and legitimize this a little bit more. And I suppose they're thinking about, how can we make this story bigger?
- [25:18]
Kate Lister
It's too fucking late now. At no point. Has anybody checked this? Has anybody looked into this? Has anybody asked any questions whatsoever?
- [25:26]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
There's no fact checking happening at all. No. So they decide the way to deal with this. And I don't think this is because they're suddenly thinking maybe this isn't real. I think they're thinking, can we make this bigger? So, you know, they've already attracted the great and good of the west country, but we want. We want more than that. They invite a doctor from Bath to come and spend some time with a young woman to try and understand her language. And the idea is that he will gather a load of information that he can get from her, publish it to make his own name as well, and that they will take that to the East India Company with the proposal that they will then take an expedition out to find the island that she's from. And they're all going to make their names and be incredibly famous because they found this far off country. Yeah. So the doctor that they pick is called Dr. Wilkinson and he is. I think he's something of a charlatan. So he lives and works in Bath and he's there in the cold, miserable, dark year of 1816 into 1817. Now, he is a galvanist, so he is electrocuting people and animals left, right and center.
- [26:31]
Kate Lister
Oh, that's the 19th century that I know and love. There they are, the mad doctors. Just go, we found electricity. Let's electrocute women's uteruses. First place.
- [26:42]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
He is doing that every single day.
- [26:44]
Kate Lister
So there they are.
- [26:45]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. His particular specialism is the treatment of women. You know, and he describes. And so much of his writing survives and he's like, you know, oh, I attended a woman who'd just given birth and she had really bad mastitis in one of her breasts. So I electrocuted her head, her breasts and her groin. And then she got really upset with me for some reason and it's like,
- [27:03]
Kate Lister
yeah, it's not funny, but like, there's so much Victorian medical testimony that's like that from just these absolutely mad as a jar of twats. Physicians who are like. And they just didn't seem grateful for it at all.
- [27:17]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. Why was she getting upset? She's so hysterical.
- [27:19]
Kate Lister
I electrocuted her breast at great expense to myself and she wasn't. She wasn't pleased at all.
- [27:24]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Walked all the way to her house with my equipment on a Sunday and she wasn't grateful. That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah, sorry.
- [27:30]
Kate Lister
Right, okay. I've had. I'm on a side quest already. Let's get back on track. Okay. Dr. Wilkinson and his electricity.
- [27:36]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. So the other thing to say about him, and this is where the Frankenstein element comes in, is that he is performing every day in Bathsura, as well as electrocuting ladies. When he's not doing that, he has a sort of side hustle as a show showman in Kingston Buildings, which is just.
- [27:48]
Kate Lister
That's someone you want to seek medical advice from, isn't it?
- [27:52]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
And he has this show where he basically cranks up the galvanistic machine and he will electrocute a frog or a toad that's dead and he's cut it up with a scalpel and briefly its legs will come back to life and kind of move or contort or whatever. And this is a well known trick. He was involved early in his career, so 10 years before this, in the electrocution of a man who'd murdered his wife and child in London. And supposedly at that experiment, the man sat up on the bench and his eyes opened and one of his arms moved or something. And you can see where I'm going with this, because at the end of 1816 into 1817, who is also in Bath living meters from where this guy's doing his experiments. It's Mary Shelley. She's finishing the manuscript of Frankenstein. And we don't have records that she went to see his experiments and his shows, but she was literally like three doors down from her.
- [28:39]
Kate Lister
You can join the dots, can't you? It's a possibility.
- [28:41]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. And a little bit like Frankenstein and the monster, Wilkinson becomes involved with Princess Caribou. And the question really is, who is the monster here? Who is the liar and who is the victim? And so he. He is brought in to Noel for that summer and into the autumn, and he starts to spend time with her. Now he doesn't electrocute her, which I think she was probably very grateful for.
- [29:02]
Kate Lister
It's a low bar, but thanks.
- [29:03]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly like it's a win. So he does things, like he starts to note down her language and this is where things start to get murky. He gets her to draw a map of the voyage she supposedly took from the East Indies to Bristol, and it exists in the archives still. And what's interesting, Kate, is that the ink and the handwriting that are used on this map are exactly the same as everything in Dr. Wilkinson's archive. So it's almost like he's the one drawing this and not her. And, you know, this map has. It's sort of a squiggle across the page and it has this kind of fantastical journey. And there are sort of. There are places on there that you would recognise on a world map today, but then there are made up places as well, that is he making up the names of. Is she giving him the names? It's so hard to know. The other thing that's happening is they're working together in the library at Knoll House, which is full of reference books to other languages, other places. We have Captain Cook's voyages, the accounts of those voyages are in that library. We've got Fry's Patagonia, which is story of different languages and things like that. So how much of this is actually coming from her, that she's speaking a real language? How much is just Dr. Wilkinson flicking through some books and writing things down? Oh, dear. But whatever the case is, he rushes to publish in the local press and he's like, I, Dr. Wilkinson, galvanist extraordinaire, have discovered this exotic princess and her language. And I, you know, a champion for doing this and I would like to go and find her island. And she becomes even more famous and more famous and more famous. And he sends off samples of her handwriting to various people who should be experts. He sends some to Oxford and gets a letter back where they're like, babe, no, this is not a language. Nobody speaks this. This is not a thing. And he sends another letter to Sir Stamford Raffles, who is a sort of career colonist and he's the founder of Singapore. He spent his time in the East Indies. He is like, I don't recognise this language, but it could be somewhere in the East Indies. Like, I recognise lettering in this, I recognise some words, some phrases it might be. And that is all Dr. Wilkinson needs. So he heads off to London, puffed up, ready to go to the headquarters of the East India Company to pitch this expedition. And as that's happening, everything goes to shit back in Bristol, and the people are about to come out the woodwork and tell the truth of what is going on.
- [31:31]
Kate Lister
Okay, well, because that's the thing with these cons is they're not sustainable. No, the cracks are there, and once someone starts, you know, tugging at one thread, the whole thing's gonna unravel.
- [31:40]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Absolutely. And, you know, this has gone on now for weeks, if not months, across 18, 17. And as the lie gets bigger and bigger and becomes, you know, more ridiculous and more people get involved and more people hear about it, at some point, somebody's going to call it out, especially in a place where, close to Bristol, where, you know, there really are people who have traveled the world and been to the East Indies, spent time there, interacted with the locals, spoken the language, learned the language. Something is going to click at some point and people are going to call this out. So while Dr. Wilkinson is off making his name in the big smoke, thinking he's going to become the most famous explorer of the 19th century, two people come out of the woodwork in Almond Spree. One is a wheelwright's son. And I love this element of the story, that it's the lowliest people in this society who come forward and show the truth and show just how credulous and foolish and ignorant the ruling classes are in this moment. So the wheelwright's son comes forward and he says, I recognise in the local paper the description of the young lady who's staying with you. And I remember her from the previous summer. She walked past my workshop on the road and she spoke English to me and I offered her some water and we had a whole chat and I thought she was incredibly beautiful, and I remember blushing at the time. But she's not a foreign princess, she's a vagrant. Now, another person who comes forward to corroborate this is a Mrs. Neal who is a landlady in Bristol, near the docks. And she says, this young woman stayed with me last summer. Again, she's English. She legged it without paying her bill and left all of her belongings in my lodging house. And I still have them.
- [33:23]
Kate Lister
Oh, dear.
- [33:24]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
And, you know, at this point, Caribou, as she's known, has been painted by society portraitists. There's an account of her life being written. This is an absolute disaster for the Worrells. They're like, oh, shit, this is embarrassing. And the whole thing falls apart and the Worrells are humiliated. It's only a couple of years after this that. That the magistrate's bank that he owns goes tits up and collapses, and he loses everything.
- [33:50]
Kate Lister
So was it just the two people coming forward and what did they put that in the papers to say? That's so. It was reported that that isn't who this is.
- [33:57]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
So they come forward to the Worrells themselves. And Elizabeth Worrell, the wife of the magistrate, who has become quite close to Caribou over this summer, she challenges her, and she calls her into the drawing room, and she's like, I know that you're lying to me. Who are you? And this young woman says, I'm Caribou. Caribou. Caribou. Caribou. She's like, stop it. Tell me the truth. Who are you? Just cut this. And there's this incredible moment where she just turns around and she says, okay, my name is Mary Wilcox. Uh oh. And there's just, like, silence. Elizabeth Worrell's like, oh, no, I see what's happened. And Elizabeth Wilcox, slash, Princess Caribou, has, I think, the most incredible life story. Far more interesting than a princess who's escaped from the East Indies and been, you know, brought here by pirates. She's such a remarkable person who has endured and survived some of the darkest elements of life in this period and has found herself, by accident, swept up in the story and the silliness of the ruling classes.
- [35:00]
Kate Lister
Well, was she. Before we get into who she was, was she crazy? Was she a con woman? Did she really think that she was a princess?
- [35:08]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Like, what?
- [35:09]
Kate Lister
What the fuck?
- [35:12]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, what the fuck? Exactly. It's. It's hard to get to the bottom of this. Now, my theory in the book is that everyone around her is the liar, and she is severely mentally unwell.
- [35:23]
Kate Lister
She might have been telling a bit of a lie, though, Maddie. Like a little. A baby lie.
- [35:28]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
So I think when she's taken up, when she walks into Armondsbury in the cobbler's house, and she collapses and she's taken to the magistrate. I think at that point when she's brought before the magistrate, she's like, well, I can't speak English now. I'm stuck in this situation, and they're offering me bed and board and a comfortable life.
- [35:43]
Kate Lister
It's just got a bit. It's snowballed.
- [35:46]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It's snowballed, yeah. And she's like, they're offering to, like, literally feed me and clothe me, and, you know, they dress her in fine silks for the summer.
- [35:54]
Kate Lister
Why do you think that she even wandered into the cobblers going,
- [35:59]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
because she's ill. She's definitely.
- [36:00]
Kate Lister
She's not a well person.
- [36:02]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, she's not well. She's not well. And I think that continues over the summer when she becomes a celebrity. But I think the lines of what she's aware of and what she's not aware of do become blurred. And it is complicated, okay? But everyone around her is so keen for the fame that comes with this that they all jump on the lie. They all create it. Who is the person who initiates this? Is it Caribou herself? Is it the magistrate? Is it that Portuguese sailor who's like, oh, yeah, she's a foreign princess?
- [36:31]
Kate Lister
I mean, you couldn't have plotted this, could you? This isn't like.
- [36:34]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
If you wrote this as a novel, the editor would be like. Like, this is too much.
- [36:37]
Kate Lister
It's too much. Like, you couldn't possibly think, I'm gonna wander into a cobbler's and then somehow I'm gonna end up being a celebrity that summer. That's not. No, no, you couldn't have planned that.
- [36:49]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
No. She. She. It's not her intent. It's definitely not her intent. So who is Mary Wilcox? She is certainly not from the East Indies. She's not a princess. She is, coincidentally, a cobbler's daughter, which, you know, maybe that's why she felt at home walking into the cobbler's house. She's from Devon, so again, very white, very English, not someone from the East Indies. And she is born to kind of respectable poverty in a tiny rural place. And she has an early career as a servant in various places. Now, whether this is a sort of character trait, whether this is ongoing mental illness, it's really hard to tell. But she has this kind of pattern of behavior where wherever she works, wherever her situation is, she's always walking away from it. Within a few months, something always happens. She's kind of pissing other people off. She's. Maybe she. She won't be told what to do. So she's. She's not good as a servant. Basically. People say, you know, you have to work this day. You can have this day off. She's like, no, no. Yeah, that's not having Tuesday off.
- [37:49]
Kate Lister
Great in domestic servitude, that one.
- [37:51]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Exactly. Yeah. She's like, I'm better than this. If anything, she does see herself as a little bit of a princess, I suppose. So she, you know, she's just constantly kind of moving from job to job. And in her sort of late teens, early 20s, she finds herself out of work, walking across the Salisbury Plain towards London. She's left the west country behind. And she describes this herself later on. And this is written down as part of her life story that's published at the end of 1817, that she starts to have these blinding headaches and she's close to suicidal thoughts. On the road, she does think about, unfortunately, taking her own life. And she's picked up by some people who were heading into London, who find her in this sorry state. And she's sort of. She's speaking gibberish, interestingly, already at this point. She's not making sense. She's kind of delirious. And they pick her up in the cart and they take her into London and they take her to St. Giles Workhouse. And they just deposit her on the step steps of the workhouse and are like, we found this lady on the road, she's not well. Help her. And she spends almost a year, I think, in the workhouse, during which time, you know, entry to the workhouse in this period, you would be stripped of your clothing, you would have your body inspected for sexually transmitted disease or other diseases. You know, so very kind of intimate humiliation already, especially for a woman. Her head is shaved and she's kept in the hospital wing. And she has this treatment for cupping. So sort of hot cups are applied to her scalp. Yeah. And it leaves scars forever. And the scars are noticed later on when people think she's a princess. And they're like, oh, she's so exotic. She's got these strange markings on her head. It's like, nope, they're from torture. In the workhouse, it's completely wild. And she has this kind of horrendous time in the workhouse. She's not allowed to leave for ages. And at one point, she's begging the doctor, saying, I just want to go. I don't want to be here anymore. And the doctor says, okay, we see that huge vat of boiling water at the end of the ward. If you can pick that up, you're strong enough to leave. Not a great doctor. And so she tries. Yeah, she tries to.
- [39:49]
Kate Lister
What test is that?
- [39:51]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. Yes. This is not the days of the nhs. So she tries to pick up this boiling vat of water, she pours it all over herself and scolds herself, and he's like, yeah, I told you, get back into bed.
- [40:00]
Kate Lister
What a dick.
- [40:01]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Right?
- [40:01]
Kate Lister
Okay.
- [40:01]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, it's wild. It's wild. But she has this kind of, you know, in the 18th century, we talk about this idea of, like, the progress of different characters. You think of, like, Hogarth in progress, you know, sort of Hogarth prints that show, like, a young character arriving in the city and then it'll all go downhill and these stories happen and she becomes a character like this. And it's really hard to kind of find the truth of what really happened to her in London and this kind of mythical, fantastical version. But we do find her in the archive at certain points. So we know, for example, that she goes from the workhouse. There's a vicar who works in the workhouse who sort of comes to sermonise to these poor people who really don't need to be sermonised to. But he does help her to find a position as a servant. So she ends up being a servant in Clapham for a little while. That doesn't work out, inevitably, because that's what she's like. We then find her, and we do find her in the record in the Magdalene House for Penitent prostitutes, which, you know, the name tells you everything. Again, you'd be stripped of your clothing. There was a sort of hideous brown uniform that you had to wear, and you're expected to go to the chapel all the time. You're doing menial work. And this was an institution that inevitably. I mean, it sounds sort of so obvious to say it, but it's full of the people who were involved in this at a higher level. So the people who ran it, the patrons of institutions like this, were themselves involved in all kinds of scandalous affairs and having sex with various different partners and all of that. But there was so much judgment on these poor women who were coming into the place. So she ends up in there. We know that she actually wasn't working as a sex worker. She's not selling sex because she's just such a liar. It's so fascinating. She creates these characters for herself and she gives a false name, by the way, when she goes into this place. So she's already kind of embodying different versions of herself. And one day one of the women in there says to her, you know, what were your tricks then? What did you used to do when you were selling sex? And she's like, ah, I would never. How dare you. And everyone's like, whoops. What? And so they're like, like, yeah, you need to leave. Like, if you're. If you're not a penitent prostitute, this
- [42:00]
Kate Lister
is a home for you.
- [42:01]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Exactly, yeah, yeah. So she's gone from there and she's on the streets again. Now we know at some point that she becomes pregnant. Is she then forced into sex work? Is that an active choice? Is she in a relationship? In some versions, she tells people. Different versions of this time, she's married. In other, she falls in love with a soldier who leaves her. In other versions, it's a bricklayer from Devon. We don't know. We don't know. Mary is making this up left, right and centre. We do find her, though, in. So this. By this point, it's like. Because obviously we've gone back in time before she becomes a princess. So this is sort of, I think, 1815 at this point. We do find her at the Foundling Hospital, which, for listeners who don't know, was a charity at the time that took in children whose parents couldn't look after them for whatever reason and would try and rehome them into apprenticeships, train them up in skills that would be useful in service and that kind of thing. And it was a sort of lottery system of getting in there. And we know that she has a son called John.
- [42:58]
Kate Lister
So she definitely was pregnant and that definitely happened, Right?
- [43:01]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yes. So he's born a few days before she enters a workhouse. She spends a few days in the workhouse postpartum to sort of recover. I mean, if that's your only option. Postpartum is not great. And we find her applying to the Foundling Hospital to take her son because she simply can't look after him. She's very mentally unwell at the this point. She has no employment, she's living on the street. And this is the story of thousands of women in London at this time. And one of the things I did when I was researching this book is to go to the archive and look at her petition. And I looked at the petitions for the whole summer of the year that she applies. And every single woman has a similar tale to tell. These women who've been abandoned by men or the fathers of these children simply cannot help. They are not in a position to support the. The woman and the child, or women who've been, you know, sexually assaulted and that kind of thing. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they're all equally desperate for their child to be taken and looked after. And for some reason, because of, I think, her charisma. There's something about Mary Wilcox that she is sort of fascinating to people, whether it's her physical beauty, the way she moves. She has this kind of elegance that everyone picks up on. She is successful and her son is taken into the hospital in a way that others aren't. And it broke my heart. It really broke my heart sitting in the archive, reading those petitions.
- [44:15]
Kate Lister
Yeah. Devastating.
- [44:17]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. And you think what happened to these women and these children who don't get in, they disappear from the record. We will never know. Do they just starve on the street? Probably. You know, it's really, really grim. And Mary's so close to that. But her son does get in to the workhouse. Unfortunately, he dies a short time later. So he doesn't survive the foundling hospital. And she finds this out. And I think this is the kind of trigger for her descent into very, very severe mental illness. And we know that she.
- [44:42]
Kate Lister
That makes sense.
- [44:43]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
She makes her way back to the west country and we find her in the Bristol docks where she is living on the street. She's possibly working as a sex worker at this point. She's desperate, she's starving, she's begging for change. And one of the things she notes about this time, it's the other women along the dock, especially French women, who tie their hair with a turban in a certain way and dress in this slightly sort of performative, characterized, sort of exotic way that's playing into the fantasies of the sailors who are coming in and out of the dock and they're making a lot of money. And Mary's sat there, you know, just with her hand outstretched, begging. And she's like, okay, I see what's happening here. This is another character I can embody. And that, I think, is how she ends up. Up exhausted, unwell, but dressed in this slightly odd way in Almondsbury when she becomes Princess Caribou. So it's. It's a wild story, but I think that isn't it. Yeah, it's. It's completely nuts. And it's also. It's like a tour of every charitable institution in this era. It's a tour of like, the very highest, the very lowest of society. The absolute luxury you could live with. And what's so fascinating is that really it's a story about Empire and the fantasies. Fantasy of Empire. But nobody in this story is ever leaving the shows of Britain.
- [45:58]
Kate Lister
Anything about Empire whatsoever.
- [46:00]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Mary Wilcox is from Devon and has made it as far as London and back again. That is it. Wow, it's crazy.
- [46:10]
Kate Lister
Back with Maddie and Princess Caribou. After this short break,
- [46:21]
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- [47:35]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
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- [47:37]
Kate Lister
What is this, your first date?
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Kate Lister
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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Liberty Mutual Advertiser
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- [47:50]
Kate Lister
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. When you first started telling this story, I was ready for, like, a big, you know, manipulative con artist. Like. Like some of the greats, you know, I shouldn't say greats. They're all shitheads, but, like, you know, like, people can make millions out of spinning yarns and, you know, like the Tinder swindler. And all of these people have their own Netflix special. This just sounds like she wasn't very well. Like, she'd been absolutely through the wringer, and she's been reduced to the point where she's wandering around Bristol and Bath with a turban on her head talking gibberish. And then she just went with it. She just went with it. She got somewhere to sleep. She got. I mean, she was homeless, right? Like, that's. That's.
- [48:44]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
She was homeless and she got someone to look after her. You know, she had someone to. To care for her. And it's, you know, in the book, the other stories that I look at, there are those manipulative, very dark people in there. And, you know, we have other instances of really kind of scary individuals who know how to manipulate people in their darkest, most vulnerable moments, but she is not that. And she, you know, I think in this story, the liars of the people around her.
- [49:06]
Kate Lister
Yeah, definitely that Wilkinson, he's the prick, isn't he? They're the ones that have clearly, knowingly lied. They're the ones that have made up a language. They're the ones that have sold it to the world as this exotic princess. They're the ones that have attempted to bolster this bullshit story. I'm afraid this one is on them and I don't feel remotely sorry for them.
- [49:26]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, well, you'd be glad to know that, you know, like I say, in the case of the magistrate, his back, his bank collapses, his reputation is ruined. He's sort of socially pushed to the side in Bath and Bristol and eventually they leave Knole House and sort of disappear off into the countryside in obscurity. And Dr. Wilkinson has his career ruined. He doesn't publish any more work for another 15, 20 years. Something like that.
- [49:47]
Kate Lister
You're not gonna bounce back from that. But what about Mary? How does she go after this? After this weird Scooby Doo sort of ending to the story of just like. No, sorry, I'm just Mary and I'm from Devon. Sorry.
- [49:59]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, sorry about that, everyone. So she has an extraordinary afterlife as Caribou. So initially, even though it comes out in the press, you know, guess what, everyone? Princess Caribou is not real. She's a cobbler's daughter. This is wild. And for a little while, she's taken in by someone else house in Bristol. And people will clamor to see her day after day, but eventually they all realise they need to get rid of her because she's humiliated everyone, she's upset, the status quo, she needs to go. So they put her on a ship called the Robert and Anne, which heads to Philadelphia and she's off to the New World.
- [50:30]
Kate Lister
What a perfectly sensible solution. Well done, everybody.
- [50:33]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, exactly. We'll just ship her off, it's fine. And what I sort of love about this story and her resilience is that she's put on the ship with two nuns of a sort of obscure religious order who are meant to, you know, take her to the New World and they'll find her a position as a servant. They're sort of responsible for her moral recovery. And, you know, the whole journey they're sort of lecturing her and saying, you shouldn't lie and it's really bad and you should just know your place and you're going to be a servant in America and that's going to be your lot. Be really grateful for this. We're helping you. Blah, blah. When she gets to Philadelphia, the newspapers have already Gone ahead of her saying about this story of caribou. And she gets so many offers and she sort of falls in with this one guy who takes her on the stage and they do a tour of American theaters with her as Princess Caribou. And it's so interesting because the joke for the Americans is that aren't the British stupid for having fallen for this? And so she's exhibited as a famous hoaxer. Nobody's taking this seriously now.
- [51:30]
Kate Lister
See, she knows how to monetize this.
- [51:32]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
I respect the hustle, absolutely. She really does. And she, you know, she does make quite a lot of money. She is described. It gets sillier and sillier. At one point, she's described as like, the daughter of the man in the moon. And, like, that's the nation she's from, and that's where her language is from. And she does this whole bit on stage where she, like, leans down to the audience and talks in the language of the moon. And everyone's like, oh, very good. You know, hilarious. Well done. And so she talks for a few years. We don't really know what happens. We think it peters out. She disappears in the archive. And eventually, by the early 1820s, she does make her way back to Britain, where she tries to exhibit as caribou again, keeping the hustle up. And she's, you know, brought all her sort of American costumes on stage and stuff, and everyone in Bath and Bristol's like, fuck off. No, we're not doing this again.
- [52:10]
Kate Lister
It's too soon.
- [52:11]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, we're just. Yeah, exactly. Nobody's recovered from this, like, no, we're not doing it. And so she sort of falls into a life of obscurity. We find her again in the late. Later, sort of, I don't know, 16, the 1860s, I think, where she is married. She works as a leech seller. So really the lowest of the low. You know, her and her husband wake up early in the morning with the other leech sellers and they sort of trudge out into the bogs outside of Bristol. And the leeches, you know, you pull your skirts up, the leeches attached to your legs.
- [52:37]
Kate Lister
Oh, fuck. Oh, that's grim. Right, okay.
- [52:40]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
You pick them off and you put them in a jar and you take them to the hospitals and they're big business, you know, in medicine at the moment, or leeches.
- [52:46]
Kate Lister
That is a shit job.
- [52:48]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It's a really shit job. You know, it's. It's sort of parasitic in all kinds of ways. Right? Wow. Literally kind of being leeched off by the Medical profession. So she. She does that for a little bit. We think potentially. There's a report of her husband. We think it's her husband who is arrested and taken before a court in the 1860s for having buried a number of their children who die before they're baptized in their garden. Very tragic. And he's. It's not good. No. So she. She has multiple. She does have a daughter who survives, but she has multiple children potentially, who. Who die. And, you know, they're not baptized. They're. They're just buried in the backyard. And it's really tragic. So she has this tragic life and she eventually dies. She has a heart attack on Christmas Eve in the street. And it's. You know, I describe it in the book as this kind of like one last final dramatic performance. Yeah.
- [53:39]
Kate Lister
What a good way to go out.
- [53:41]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah. And she's buried. She's buried just outside Bristol, and you can go to her grave today. And, yeah, she's a sort of. She's a fascinating person, but she has, Yeah, a life of stability in some ways, afterwards with her husband and her daughter. But, you know, there's a lot of tragedy in there as well. And let's not forget her son who dies in the foundling hospital as well. You know, there's a lot of loss in there, and children in the street shout after her Princess Caribou. And she gets really upset by it and she just wants to. To sort of forget that period of her life. So, yeah, it's a bleak history, but it's one that I think, yeah, as I say, sort of takes you on a tour of the early 19th century in Britain and how people understood their place in the world. The sort of global stakes of empire and actually how no one knew what was going on. And she exposed it all, whether she meant to or not. She really upended the power structure of that time.
- [54:28]
Kate Lister
Maddie, you have been fabulous to talk to. Thank you so much. What an amazing story. That's a wild ride.
- [54:35]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
It really is.
- [54:36]
Kate Lister
That's a wild one. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us about it. You've been absolutely fascinating. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
- [54:44]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Well, my new book, Truth and Lies and the Age of Enlightenment, is out on the 7th of May. You can pre order it. It's available online, it's available in stores. It will be available as an audiobook. I am reading it.
- [54:53]
Kate Lister
Amazing.
- [54:54]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
I did read it seven months pregnant and it's very breathy. Let me tell you so if that's your thing. Enjoy that. But yeah, it's out now.
- [55:02]
Kate Lister
And of course you are the co presenter of After Dark.
- [55:07]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yes, thank you for reminding me. It's a good job.
- [55:08]
Kate Lister
Sorry. I'm here, baby brain. Yeah, I'm here for you.
- [55:11]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thank God for Cait Lister, everyone. Yes, I am the co host of a little podcast called After Dark with Dr. Anthony Delaney. I am on and off it while I'm on Matt leave. We've pre recorded some stuff. I'm making some appearances. I'm gonna be back in the summer. So by the time this episode goes out, I might be slightly on a hiatus, but I am available as a back catalogue of episodes several hundred.
- [55:32]
Kate Lister
Mate, thank you so much for coming by and best of luck. You're gonna smash this. Is Caribou, a name that you're considering?
- [55:39]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
Yes, that is the only name that I'll be taking under consideration at this point.
- [55:43]
Kate Lister
Thank you.
- [55:44]
Dr. Maddie Pelling
You've been wonderful. Thank you very much, Kate.
- [55:50]
Kate Lister
Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Maddie for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along along wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just want to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtoryhit.com this podcast was edited by Tim Arstell and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets. The History of Sex, Scandal and Society. A podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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Dr. Maddie Pelling
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Kate Lister
What is this, your first date?
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Kate Lister
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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Kate Lister
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