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Isabel King
good, so good, so good.
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Madeline Pelling
The Age of Enlightenment was one of rationality and scientific exploration, but people still fell for lies and deceit. In this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Madeline Pelling speaks to Isabel King about the fascinating world of hoaxes in the long 18th century. From the dangerous to the downright bizarre.
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Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
Welcome back to the podcast, Maddie. We're here to discuss your new book, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment. We're going to be delving into lots of fascinating stories, but before we do. Could you kick us off with some clarification of what a hoax actually is? How are you defining hoax in your book? And how would people living in the Enlightenment period have defined it?
- [03:04]
Isabel King
It's a really interesting and actually quite complex question off the bat, Isabel. Thank you. There's a little bit of a gap between how we might understand hoax today and how people in the Georgian period might understand it. For us today, we think of a hoax as possibly perpetrated by a single individual or a small group of people, and it's very much an anomaly. It's something that we discover is happening. Maybe it's an imposter, maybe it's a financial scam, something like that. We discover it, we bring those responsible to justice, and we move on. We don't consider it necessarily a symptom of our society, but rather a strange occurrence that we can forget about. Now, for the Georgians, that was slightly different. And the long 18th century is really the golden age of the hoax. And I don't mean by that that people celebrated the hoax quite the opp. In fact, but that it was just so prevalent, it was everywhere. And interestingly, the word hoax itself actually first appears in this period, and it is recorded in various dictionary entries as having come from the term hocus pocus. Now, hocus pocus refers to a street musician, someone who you'd find at the fairground traveling circus, this kind of thing. And usually they're someone who does sleight of hand tricks. They may have cards, they might have a bag that gold coins spill out of or bird flies out of. And the idea with that kind of trickery is that everyone suspends their disbelief, right? You all watch that together. There's an unspoken contract between the performer and the audience that, you know it's a trick, you know it's a falsehood, but you enjoy it for that moment, and then it's done. And the parameters of that kind of trickery are very clear. Audience are watching it, not participating. And the problem throughout the 18th century is really the hoaxer slips from the stage into the audience themselves, as it were. And in society at large, it becomes increasingly difficult, I suppose, to tell who is telling the truth, who is spreading falsehood. And hoax, as a term starts to cover all manner of strange and bizarre occurrences. And there are plenty of those in the book, sort of COVID three main stories, but there are so many little stories that kind of creep in on the edges along the way. And it's a really, really strange era for people's odd and misbehaving occurrences.
- [05:35]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
And why do you think the Enlightenment period itself was so susceptible to the prevalence of hoaxes?
- [05:41]
Isabel King
I think a lot like the time that we live in now, the Enlightenment is very, very sure of itself, or so it seems on the surface. The term Enlightenment is already being bandied about in the 18th century and it's, you know, it's hotly debated today and it carries all kinds of layered and sort of complex ideas with it now, but really at its most simple, it's this idea of bringing light to the dark, of banishing superstition, of instead turning to the light of scientific rationality and so called progress, ordering the world. You know, this is a period in which people are going out, certainly in Britain, across a vast empire and encountering, and I'm using that word in heavy quotations here, other people, other plants, other animals. And in Western Europe, there is an attempt to categorize everything, to order everything, to understand everything and to put a label on everything. That's how the world is. And what we see happening in counterbalance to that is that actually on street level in Britain and across its empire, doubt is creeping in. And there are these very loud voices proclaiming that they have got things right, that they understand how the world works. But also there are voices from the sidelines, the margins, the shadows, if you will, of the Enlightenment. Superstition still persists, and it does throughout the 18th century. Belief in magic, complete misunderstanding of the geography of the world, of the categories that are being put in place around things like race, around, gender, around, and people from the margins who are sometimes disempowered, who might have ill intent, who sometimes are just trying to survive, manage to find ways to bend these rules and to subvert them. And this is how we come across the hoaxes that are in my book, Strange moments in which the rules of that world, of the Enlightenment world, are being played with and are being shown to be bendable, essentially.
- [07:50]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
Now, of course, the Enlightenment was not the only time where hoaxes thrived. So, listeners, if you're interested in learning more, you can check out the article on the History Extra website about how and why one man created a fake Paris during the First World War. You can find the link to that article below. So you've mentioned already your book is split broadly into three key hoaxes of the period. So I just like to get into speaking about those. The first one is the Ghost of Cock Lane. Could you give us a quick summary of this case?
- [08:21]
Isabel King
Yeah, it's a really fascinating case and it was one that I've been aware of for several years before I wrote this book. And when I delved into the archive and started to really look at the primary source material, I realized that all the tellings of it really get it slightly wrong, that it's often presented as either a true ghost story about a real life haunting. And I will say straight off the bat, there are some moments in the story that I cannot explain in the book. And, you know, I do leave those a little bit ambiguous for readers to decide for themselves. But on the one hand, it is presented as a real ghost story, and on the other is presented as a cabal of women who make up some lies, because women are tricksy little things and we don't quite trust them. And of course, the truth really sits somewhere in the middle of those two. So we're in 1762 here. George the third has just come to the throne, he's crowned the year before. And there's all this hopefulness in Britain. As I say, it's the height of the Enlightenment. Everything across British culture, music, art, science, is seemingly moving forward. The Empire is expanding. Everything is about growth and exponential improvement again in adverted commas. And yet, in the heart of London, this case emerges as a really, really strange one. So we have two domestic settings that merge in this moment. This is very sort of common of the city in this time, where you have a family unit, in this case the Parsons. We have a father and a mother and two small girls. And Mr. Parsons is the curate at nearby St Sepulchre's Church. And they live in the lane behind, which is called Cock Lane. Into their lives, walk this couple, Fanny Lynes and William Kent. And William and Fanny are in love. But there's an issue. They've eloped from Norfolk. Fanny has been living with him for some time, but William was married to Fanny's sister, Elizabeth, previously. Because of Canon law and the survival of a child from that marriage, Fanny and William now cannot marry. So their hope is that they can come to the city and say that they are Mr. And Mrs. Kent, nobody will be any the wiser, and they can go about their business. And they walk into the lives of the Parsons by renting the attic rooms in their house. And what starts off as a very typical arrangement in this moment becomes full of tensions and anxieties. And there's drinking involved, there's various sexual tensions, there's tensions between William and Fanny as a couple. He's away for long periods and Fanny spends many nights asleep in the attic alone. And eventually One of the little girls from the Parsons family, the eldest, Betty, is brought upstairs to sleep with her in the attic room to keep her warm and to keep her company. And this interesting relationship between this woman, this grown woman who is now increasingly heavily pregnant, and this little girl really form the center of the case on. What happens initially is while William Kent is away working and Fanny is living with the Parsons. Knocking and scratching sounds start in the attic space where she's sleeping with little Betty. And at first they think nothing of it. They discuss the possibility of it being the neighbours. There's a cobbler who lives next door, a shoemaker, and so the suggestion is that it's just that, that it's, you know, environmental disturbance. But these noises continue and continue for weeks and weeks and weeks, and eventually Fanny can't take any more. She's progressing in her pregnancy. She's exhausted. She's feeling semi abandoned at this point from William Kent, who, as I say, is spending a lot of time away. And she becomes increasingly unwell and the relationship with the parson starts to break down. Money is borrowed, repayments are demanded, and getting to the heart of the matter is really difficult in this moment. But one night in this tense, unusual domestic setting, someone in the household sees a ghost on the stairs. The ghost of a woman. In some descriptions, a white dress, others a black dress. There are different interpretations in the primary source material, and this terrifies everyone. Now, Ghosts in the 18th century are really understood in terms of domestic disturbance. They can underscore difficulties between master and servant, between different family members. Often ghosts appear when someone has just died and will say, no, no, the inheritance should have gone to that person over there and not this person. So they're a way of sort of settling scores and articulating problems that you cannot say out loud. So whether or not a real ghost appears, we will never know. But my interpretation is very much that it is in keeping with this 18th century traditional of ghosts having this particular function. And the result is Fanny and William move out. She is now desperately ill. She does eventually die, sadly, before she can give birth to her child. It's very, very, very tragic. Now, William does not want to admit to the church in which he's buried that they are not married. But he also doesn't want to lie in front of God because, you know, this is the 18th century. He has this keen and certain belief that he must not do this. And so he buries her in an unmarked coffin with no mention of the child, and she goes into the crypt at St John Clerkenwell and that would be the end of her story. You know, it's tragic, but not untypical of women of the period. But months later in the Parsons household, the scratching and the knocking starts up again. And this time it's little Betty Parsons who is alone in the attic room now describing what's happening to her. And she has woken up at night and she hears these knockings, she hears these scratchings. And she says that the ghost is trying to communicate. She says that it knocks once for yes and twice for no. And soon her father gets involved and starts asking it questions. Now, the important context for this happening is that William Kent may have moved out and he may have ended his relationship with the Parsons, but he owes Mr. Parsons money from the time when they lived there. And what Parsons does, and whether this is an active decision, whether this is born from a true belief in the ghost that's haunting his daughter, we can't exactly know. But he invites another churchman to his house. He asks the ghost questions, the ghost responds, there are other witnesses to this ghost now. And the questions are pretty leading, let's say. And first of all, he's saying, who are you? And they go through various options of who the ghost could be. And eventually it says, yes, I am the ghost of Fanny Lynes, which, you know, is interesting in and of itself because she was living in that house when those scratching started. So this makes no logical sense. And she did not die in that property. She moved out before she died. But let's not let that stop us. Parsons certainly did not. And eventually at this seance, he says in front of witnesses, did you die naturally? No. Did William Kent kill you? And the ghost answers, yes. And all of a sudden, London explodes. This becomes the entertainment of the year, if not the decade. And suddenly hundreds and then thousands of people are flocking to Cock Lane, which is, you know, quite a run down part of London. It would have been very much, you know, not a salubrious address at this moment. And yet we see people like Horace Walpole, the Duchess of Northumberland, the King's own brother, the Duke of York, making an appearance at this house to come and see the ghost. And night after night, little Betty is put to bed in her little nightcap and gown in front of an audience. She climbs into the bed itself that she shared with Fanny before Fanny died. She goes to sleep, seemingly, and then the knocking starts up and people are invited to ask questions. And of course, what's happening outside of those four walls is that William Kent is now being accused of murder. He's been walking around, you know, dealing with the grief of his wife, for all intents and purposes, and his unborn child, and now suddenly he's accused of killing them both. And it creates incredible worry and anxiety in London at this moment. People are really invested in the story, so it becomes sort of increasingly nonsensical and quite farcical in some instances. And the press pick up on this and, you know, everyone's sort of divided into two camps. Is it real? Is it not real? Are we a logical society who believes in science? Are we a society that still believes in the residual ghosts of the last century? Can ghosts be scientifically proven? Let's see. You know, all of these questions start to circulate, and underscoring all of this is this idea that a woman can come back from beyond the grave and accuse a man of murder and destroy his reputation. This is an incredibly worrying thing in a patriarchal society that is built on, you know, ideas of reputation and men's power in particular. And it all unfolds from there. And it plays out in this really fascinating way. We see little Betty Parsons being carried from house to house in London to perform the seances every night. She is made to sleep in the beds of servants she doesn't know, men and women that she doesn't know. She is at one point, really tragically suspended on ropes where her ankles and her wrists are tied and she's lifted up above a bed and held there all night so that she can't do the knocking. And still the sounds are heard that night. So it's a really interesting case. It really takes on some very dark ideas, and at the heart of it is this very human story of death and loss and the experiences of women. And it's just such a remarkable case, and one that once you start to look into it, you just. Everywhere you look, there's a twist, there's a turn, there's a new piece of evidence or information that takes you off in a different direction and trying to get to the heart of who these people were and why they claimed this, what the ghost could possibly be, how the sounds were being created. It's really, really compelling. And I came away from writing this. Still are some questions, I think.
- [19:09]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
Yeah, absolutely. It's such a fascinating case. And I found myself questioning, oh, so who was making the noise? You know, you think someone was making the noises, but then was that just in that instance, and then somebody else was doing it. There's so many questions that you can see how people could fall for it at the time. Because even with that hindsight now, and looking back on it, we still can't tell.
- [19:30]
Isabel King
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one night, Betty is caught in the act. She is, as I say, moved from house to house, made to perform. And people get increasingly frustrated with her when she is tied up and restrained. And then the noises come or they don't come. It seems inconsistent. Sometimes her father is present in the room, sometimes he's not allowed in the house in which she's been kept. One of the nights, she obviously feels so much pressure. And it's reported in the newspapers later that the people whose house she's in loudly discuss the fact that if the ghost does not come, her and her father will be going to jail, they will be put in the stocks. There are serious consequences coming to them for lying and manifesting this nonsense. And she's so terrified of this that she waits till the servants have left the room. She climbs out of the bed. This time she's not restrained. She runs to the fireplace and there's a piece of wood on which the hot kettle is usually put in the fireplace. And she takes that and she puts it down her nightdress and uses that to wrap on. When the people come back and the servants are watching through the keyhole, they see the whole thing and she is accused of fakery and that should be the end of it, but it's not. The questions continue. She continues to perform. There is even a committee of learned and serious men set up to investigate her. And even they can't really get to the heart of it. And when they publish their findings, people are like, yeah, that's your opinion, you know, and it just shows the extent to which an idea can take root in people's minds. And even when presented with the evidence, they still can choose to believe it or not. That gray area that is created by doubt and by this kind of consistent lying across all levels of society, across the print media at this time, authority is really eroded. And what you're left with is this big question mark.
- [21:26]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
You mentioned there, the role of the print media. There was an explosion of print culture in this period. How do you think this affected how things like this hoax spread and fed into the rumours?
- [21:39]
Isabel King
Yeah, it's really interesting. So the print culture of the 18th century is always thought of in terms of advancing enlightenment, Right. That this is the idea. This is the age in which words, conversation, debate is driving forward people's thinking, people's communication. You know, there's a sort of network of correspondence across Europe that these great minds are writing to each other and that words are just being churned out and churned out and churned out. And of course, that is true that the print media is servicing that idea of enlightenment, but it also. It's there to make money and people love a good story. And so it also perpetuates the lies that are being told in this period. And really, that shows the power that the media could play in this. And it's no different in the Cocklane story. And, you know, some of the great writers of the time get involved in this. Samuel Johnson is the head of the Learned Men Society who come and deal with this case and try and investigate it. And he publishes his findings in the media. But also we have satirists like William Hogarth who, you know, come and really pick up on the humor of the story. And, you know, Hogarth's a very satirical and very dry man himself and takes a sort of wry look at the underclasses of Georgian society, anyway, and he pokes fun on at, you know, people who are investing in the story who believe it. He thinks it's nonsense, but also he pokes fun at the names. You know, the ghost is called Fanny and she is haunting Cock Lane. This is something that's, you know, a little bit funny to us today, and it is no different in the Georgian period. And he includes incredible little sketch of the ghost herself as a vagina with a little stick to scratch herself because she's, you know, scratching to make the sounds. And this idea of sort of almost venereal disease kind of creeps in and it's all a sort of big joke. We see the print media reacting in all these different ways. And sometimes in the same newspaper, even, you get letters written in by supposedly by readers. Sometimes they're written by, you know, the writing staff, the paper or the editor. But you get letters on the one hand saying, I went to the Cock Lane seance. It was incredible. I asked it all these questions. It knew all this information that nobody could possibly know. It's real, it's real, it's real. And then you'll have a letter next to it saying, this is all nonsense. There's one brilliant letter where someone says, you know, every time someone tells a ghost story, the ghost always appears at midnight. It's such a cliche. And then they sign off their letter saying, it's two minutes to midnight, I better go now. You know, the ghost is going to come for me. So there's. What we find in the media, I suppose, is just the sort of riotous debate of the time and the impact that this case had both on believers and non believers.
- [24:26]
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- [24:50]
Isabel King
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- [24:59]
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- [25:15]
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Isabel King
the
- [25:46]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
next hoax that you cover in detail is that of Mary Bateman, which starts out with a rather innocent but very strange story. Could you tell us more about this prophetic egg?
- [25:58]
Isabel King
The prophetic egg, yes. So now we've moved from 1760s London to early 19th century industrial Leeds. And in 1803, a woman called Mary Bateman, who is a wheelwright's wife. She should be someone who has disappeared from the historical record. You know, she has no important place in this society. Let's say, according to the time, people again flock to her house in Leeds to see an amazing thing happening, which is that her chickens are laying eggs, which when you peel them, there is writing that appears on the egg itself, and it says, misspelt, Christ is coming. And she misspells Christ as Christ. But nobody seems to be bothered by this. Now what she's actually doing is boiling her eggs that have already been laid, writing on them in vinegar. And this was something that happened throughout the 18th century. You see some of Washington spies in the American War of Independence doing just this. It's a way of communicating, passing messages, you know, in secret. So you boil the egg, you write on it in vinegar. When you peel the Shell back. You can see the writing on the egg. And she's writing, christ is coming. She is then, I'm sorry to say, inserting the egg back inside the chicken and then charging people to come and see it be laid. And this is, you know, you think that's an odd thing to do. You're prophesying the second coming of Christ. You're making a fast buck of it. Okay, so the motivation must be money. But this is really the tip of the iceberg of this strange woman's behavior. And she's. Out of all of the people in the book. Mary Bateman is someone who I cannot fathom, and I think she is genuinely terrifying.
- [27:40]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
You lead me nicely onto my next question, which is how did this hoax of a prophetic egg unravel into something much more dangerous, the, quite frankly, terrifying story that happens afterwards?
- [27:52]
Isabel King
Yeah. So Mary Bateman really has a career as what is termed at the time, as a witch. Now, the witchcraft act of 1735 means that it is illegal to accuse anyone of being a witch. And this is really a response to, again, the superstitious horrors of the 17th century and this idea that in Enlightenment culture we're better than that. Now, we don't believe in witches. You can't go telling people that women are witches. But she's a self professed witch and she is known in the local community as a witch. Now, her story takes place in the industrial north. People are moving from the countryside into the cities in their droves and obviously experiencing an incredibly difficult life when they get there. Long hours in the factory. It's dangerous, it's harsh. There's a sort of stripping back of joy and tradition. And, you know, people have to really hold onto the things that make their community what it is. And into this world, Mary Bateman comes and finds opportunity. She does things like she makes potions to make people fall in love. She makes revenge spells. If you have been wronged by someone, that you can then cast some kind of magic against them. And because people are coming in from the countryside and bringing with them these old traditions and these old ideas and beliefs, she is doing a roaring trade. Like she invents all these problems, of course. So she says to one woman, your husband's about to leave you and run off with someone. And if you pay me a significant amount of money, I can cast a spell so that the woman he's about to run off with, all her clothes will set on fire magically overnight, and then she won't be able to run off with him. And you'll be fine. You can keep him. And, you know, this poor woman hands over her coins, please. Yes, yes, yes. And there is no mistress. There's no one that the husband is running off with. So she's kind of doing these small, level scams, but she really wheedles her into people's lives. And she is someone who likes to hold power over people. And, you know, we think maybe these little charms and things are relatively harmless. They're bringing people a belief system, a way of feeling that they have control in what is, you know, a spiraling, dirty, smoggy, loud, complex place that they're not used to. They're trying to find meaning within that. And she offers it to them. Fine. But she wheedles her way into the life of a couple called the Perregos. And they live on the outskirts of Leeds. They've worked in the sort of cottage that's starting to disappear. And because of this, they are being plunged into poverty that they hadn't previously experienced. And they go to her again and again asking for spells that can help bring business their way, that kind of thing. And at first, it's working fine. They pay her some coins. She gives them various little items to put into their bed, to sew into their bed clothes to carry around with them, that sort of thing. And as time goes on, obviously things don't get any better for them. In fact, they get significantly worse. And they constantly come back and say, well, this hasn't worked. And Mary will be like, well, you didn't do it right, or you haven't done the spell hard enough. You need to really believe it. And she invents an alter ego who lives in Scarborough, who's made up that there's a kind of buffer between her and her clients. And she says, well, if you give me more coins, my mistress in Scarborough, who is a very powerful witch, will be able to sort this all for you. And eventually, these couples start to question what's going on, of course, and they're like, is this really working? Is Mary telling the truth? Or has she just been scamming us? And she sees this coming. She sees that they're losing faith, and so she tells them to make a pie. She gives them some powder to put in the pie, and they do. So they eat the pie and they become horrifically ill. And Rebecca, the wife, dies in the most agonizing way. And what Mary has given them is probably arsenic. The husband, William Perrigo, survives only just. It's incredible. And he is able to testify against her in court, she is arrested, she's taken to York prison, and she's put on trial at the York assizes. And it's a huge spectacle. And it's this idea that the belief system she represents that gave people hope in this industrial context, in this bleak existence, is actually a falsehood. And it really rocks people's belief and people's stability, their mental and emotional stability, how they view the world. She's really changed that for them. And when it is proven that she's making the whole thing up, it really challenges people. And she's dealt with in this really harsh way that she is not just brought to justice, she's really eradicated. So she's executed at York. She's hanged not for witchcraft, because that's not how the law worked at the time, but for the murder of Rebecca Perego and possibly two other women. But after she's executed, she is taken down from the gallows. She's taken all the way to Leeds from York on a cart, and hundreds of people line the route to see her, you know, to see that justice be done. And she's taken to the anatomy school at Leeds, and she is basically taken apart over several days and boiled down. And her skeleton is put on display at the anatomy school, and it remained on display in Leeds until 2015. It's a kind of fascinating revenge. This world, this enlightenment world, this idea of how do we preserve our power and our idea of order. Well, when these outliers show themselves in the shadows and challenge the world order that we have explained exists, we really have to destroy these people. And for all her crimes. And she did some really, really terrible things to people. You know, it's quite a sort of shocking reduction of her literally down to her skeleton. And I think it just shows the legacy of these ideas of who a hoaxer can be and what they deserve to happen to them for stepping out of line, telling lies, spreading false information, and how we deal with them. And the fact that that was still acceptable in terms of her display in 2015 is really, really fascinating.
- [33:57]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
And you also mentioned a couple of times there, of course, witchcraft was not an offense anymore. But do you see a lot of parallels between Mary's treatment after she was accused and convicted of these crimes and those of women in more famous witchcraft trials, such as those at Salem?
- [34:16]
Isabel King
It's a really interesting question. I think, really, the witchcraft takes a backseat in terms of it being the murder. That's officially the reason why she's executed. But I think there is an eradication of her because she is able to capture people's imagination and hold that power over them, whether that's magical or the power of persuasion or whatever it is. I think there's a certain level of shared context, maybe in terms of her being seen as an abomination, that she's somehow behaving in an unwomanly way, that she is monstrous. And that's very much what we see, of course, with the 17th century witch trials.
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Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
Now I just want to move on to the last hoax that you look at, which is one that is likely well known amongst our listeners from the southwest of England, and that is the tale of Princess Caribou. Can you sum up the case in a nutshell?
- [35:07]
Isabel King
So Princess Caribou is, I think, my favourite of the three hoaxes, partly because nothing that horrible happens, nobody is murdered, which is, you know, always a positive and never a guarantee in the 18th century. So this is the story of a young woman who one day appears in a village just outside of Bristol. Bristol, of course, at this time is a poor city. It's incredibly important in terms of slave trade businesses everywhere. You. There's huge amounts of money and commerce are passing through and it's a very international place. This is in 1817. So this woman appears in this village. She appears to be confused. She's speaking a foreign language, or so it seems. She's dressed in what are described as outlandish clothes. She has a cloth that's wrapped around her head a little bit like a turban. She's wearing a dress that isn't locally made or locally recognized. And she walks into a cobbler's house, supposedly asking for help. I mean, no one can understand what she's saying. She collapses and she's taken to the local magistrate. Now, at the time, if you were a vagrant, you'd be taken to the magistrate and asked to move on. You'd be moved to another parish. And so the understanding initially is that she's just a beggar, that she is unimportant, she's a bit of a nuisance, she just needs to be moved on. She's probably someone who's come in from the port. But when she's taken to the magistrate, she really sparks his interest. Now, he's a fascinating man, Samuel Worrell. He's described as the Devil Worrell. He's known as being a particularly harsh magistrate and, you know, to be taken before him was no small thing and it was a great personal risk. But he takes one look at her and she's incredibly beautiful. She's Described as having really dark eyes and dark hair and tanned skin and she's speaking this language. Now. He has a Greek servant who lives in his house. He summons him up to the drawing room and says, what language is she speaking? And the servant's like, well, it's not Greek, so I don't know. And she's chatting away in this language and she's quite emphatic. She's trying to sort of explain herself and it's not really communicating. And the magistrate's wife, Elizabeth Worrell, sort of has a fascination with this beautiful young woman as well, and they sort of adopt her. It's a really strange decision. And they basically, over the course of the next few days, they have her in their home, they talk to her, they show her a load of books with prints of exotic places. This is a moment in which the British Empire has changed, really, its focus on the Americas and has moved to the east now, the Far East. And they're showing her pictures of islands like the island of Java, modern day Indonesia, and. And she becomes really animated and she starts pointing at things and then she starts to say the word caribou again and again and again, and they're like, oh, that's her name. She's obviously from the Far East. Broadly speaking, her name is caribou. And they come up with this idea that they're going to take her into Bristol, they're going to parade her around the port. When people come off the ships from various parts of the world, they're going to say, what language is she speaking? Do you recognise her? Do you know who she is? And they do this again for a couple of days and people from all over the world come and see her and they can't tell what language she's speaking until enter Emmanuel, the Portuguese sailor, who has no bearing on this story other than this one moment and is completely fascinating. And he says, oh, I know what it is. It's from the East Indies, one of the islands I've been to several. I can't quite tell which island she's from, but she's definitely from that region. And she's telling me that she's a princess, that she was captured by pirates, stowed in a ship, brought to Bristol Dock, she escaped, she legged it into the countryside and she made her way to your small village. And the magistrate and his wife are like, yep, that checks out. Fantastic. That seems legit. And now they have a princess in their midst. And they're very ambitious people, they're social climbers and they basically, for the whole summer exhibit her at their house. And the great and good of Bristol and Bath. And, you know, let's remember this is the bath of Jane Austen. In this moment, the most fashionable resort in the country. People are always flocking to it for the season every year. And they can make the short trip out now to the Magistrate Worrell's house to see this extraordinary woman. And she performs for people. She's made to perform. She hunts with a bow and arrow in the grounds of the magistrate's house. She swims in the lake in very flimsy outf. She goes up onto the roof of the mansion and prays to the sun. People watch her. People watch her sleep. All of this stuff happens. And she becomes this sort of celebrity, I suppose. Meanwhile, the magistrate's wife sort of realize they need to legitimise her somehow and possibly send her back to the East Indies one day. Like they can't keep her forever, right? And so they enlist the help of a fascinating doctor who, I argue in the book, is the real liar of this. And he is called Dr. Wilkinson. He is a Bath physician and galvanist. So he's basically electrifying anyone and anything that he can. And Wilkinson, he specializes in women's health. He's often electrifying ladies who've just given birth. He sort of has this very dubious moral core and is very much an ambitious man wanting to make his name. And he is brought to the magistrate's house. He sits with Princess Caribou, he writes down her language. He gets her to draw a map of her voyage, which I've seen in the archive, and it's hilarious. It's very much written in his hand. And there are kind of, you know, real places marked on the map and then completely made up places as well. It sort of roughly shows the journey from the East Indies to Bristol in varying levels of plausibility. And he decides that he's going to go to the East India Company and pitch that they do an expedition out to the East Indies to find her island, which he decides is called Javasu. Now, there is an island called Java which is very famous at this moment. There was a book just published in the same year about it by the governor. But this is. Javasu is now an unknown island. So Wilkinson is going to make his name discovering this unknown island and returning the princess to her family, where he will be welcomed with open arms. And it's all going to be great for the British Empire, Fantastic world and everyone. And obviously it turns out not to be true. She is in fact, a cobbler's daughter from Devon. She has an amazing backstory, and I devote a whole chapter to the reality of her life and what's happened to her. She is obviously very mentally ill. She undergoes the most extraordinary journey to London. She passes through some of its darkest institutions. She has a child who's taken to the foundling hospital. This sort of tragic, adventurous life that sees her, and ended up in this little village outside Bristol becoming Caribou. And really what this case speaks to is people's complete illiteracy when it comes to race, when it comes to the Empire. The fact that the British Empire is so vast at this moment, but people at home don't really know anything about it, and they can't identify someone from Devon compared to someone from the East Indies. It has so many elements to it. Wilkinson is, as I say, really the liar of this. And the fun of this story, I think, is in trying to find where one liar ends and the other begins, really. And whether Caribou herself intentionally created this character or whether it's Wilkinson who completely manifests this version of her, it's my favourite by far because it's so ludicrous. And we think of this sort of Jane Austen version of Bath and the west country as very polite. It's all very Bridgerton esque in our cultural imagination. And yet there is this utterly bizarre and really quite dark story going on at the heart of it.
- [43:07]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
Yeah, absolutely. You've got all these people going to balls and just having a nice sophisticated time. And then just in the center of it all, you've got this much darker story of these people trying to work this out and then finding out all along that it was a lie.
- [43:19]
Isabel King
Yeah, and absolutely. You know, Caribou herself is really thrust into the heart of that world. And she shows it to be a falsehood. She shows it to be ridiculous. These people don't know anything. They're easily taken in and duped. And that's. That's the sort of scandal of it, I suppose, that she turns this world on its head.
- [43:36]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
And her reach isn't just limited to England, is it? She goes on to have a future in entertainment abroad as well. Could you speak a little bit more about that?
- [43:44]
Isabel King
Yeah, she does. So the Worrells, eventually, when she's uncovered as being a fraudster, realize they need to get rid of her. You know, their reputation is ruined and they send her off to America because that is where you send your unwanted people from Britain when they've disgraced the British Empire, they have to Go, go across to America. When she gets to America, she is treated very differently. So obviously she's already been exposed as a hoaxer, so she has no hope of rekindling that lie in the us and indeed the papers have taken her story before she even sets foot there. But what the Americans love about her is that she showed how silly the British are. And so she's put on the stage, she goes on tour, and the version that she does of Caribou on stage becomes progressively more and more silly and it becomes sort of stratospheric in its joke. So to begin with, it's Caribou who duped the British, who, you know, made John Bull look terribly silly. And eventually they talk about her language, which by the way, becomes a sort of amalgamation of, you know, a little bit of Chinese, a little bit of this, that and the other. There's some Greek symbols in there, there's some, like Arabic. You know, it's just complete garbage, cobbled together, collage of things. But the Americans decide it's the language of the moon and they call her the daughter of the moon, and, you know, kind of make the lie so big that it becomes a joke. And for several years she is in America. She tours alongside other unusual people, almost starting to move towards the freak show side of things, I think. You know, there's all these kind of bizarre and extraordinary things going on, but it's always with a tongue in cheek kind of pinch of salt vibe about it, because the American in this moment very much pride themselves on not being as silly as the British. And Caribou disappears a little bit here, or rather Mary Wilcox, the woman behind Caribou, disappears. Caribou as a character lives on in America and to caribou becomes common parlance. It becomes a saying to describe lying or taking on a character. Oh, you're Caribouing in America, which is kind of fascinating. But Mary Wilcox herself, the woman behind Caribou, does come back to Britain in 1823, and she comes back to a completely changed world, a world in which her old lies aren't going to pass muster anymore. Everyone knows that she's a liar. She can't perform in the same way. She does try. She brings her outlandish outfit from the stage in America back with her and tries to exhibit in London and Bath and nobody's interested. And she lives a really quiet life after that. She marries a man who is a leech seller. She goes on to have at least one child, possibly more. She lives well into the Victorian era and eventually she drops dead in this street in the 1860s and she is still remembered as Princess Caribou long into the 19th century. And her legacy really looms large again because I think she had really disgraced that Austen esque world of politeness in which the rules of society and behavior were so heavily coded. And she completely obliterated them and made everyone seem completely foolish.
- [46:51]
Interviewer (Isabel King's interviewer)
Now, we've covered all of the main hoaxes in detail and we've obviously learned a lot about each individual case. But I wondered if you could tell us, what do you think these hoaxes tell us about anxieties in Enlightenment Britain? How do they expose tensions between traditional knowledge, emerging scientific institutions and supernatural belief?
- [47:12]
Isabel King
What all these hoaxes do is show us the underlying tensions, right? That this world is so confident on the one hand, it's so invested in its own movement forward, its own progress, that actually when you look under that surface, you can see there are all these voices doubting what's going on, questioning it, injecting these other ideas. And you can see the appetite for that because people flock to these hoaxes. Some people enjoy them because they're easily satired, they're a bit of entertainment. But a lot of people really do believe what's happening. They really buy into these outlandish stories. And I think it reflects how fast the world was changing in this moment. As we've talked about, the empire was expanding, but people weren't very familiar with it yet. And so the descriptions of the expanding world at home are really unreliable. There's that kind of complete ignorance versus this idea of knowledge production that's being churned out constantly. So yeah, it really speaks to these tensions, this fast moving world. Obviously you have the Industrial revolution as well, and the, the absolute poverty and misery that plunged people into and the way that that imposed a very strict hierarchy, different from what had come before. You know, people moving out of small rural parishes into towns in which the way that they're living is organized differently. The way they're working, the hours that they're working, the way their family unit operates, all of that is changing. And so a lot of these lies and liars offered an escape from that. Essentially a sort of a little hint of magic or this idea that you could control something in your own world if only you could tap into these invisible powers. The hoaxes were incredibly, incredibly compelling for people, and I think they still are. But I think what the biggest takeaway of the book I'd like people to have is that it's not these single individuals that necessarily tell the biggest lies and that actually often it's institutions, it's people in positions of power. It's the people who represent the Enlightenment world who are the people lying, perpetuating the light, giving it a platform, making it bigger than it already is and taking advantage of it. And I think that's something that we can, you know, spy in our own world today.
- [49:36]
Madeline Pelling
That was Madeline Pelling speaking to Isabel King. Madeleine is a cultural and art historian specializing in 18th century Britain. Her new book, which shares even more stories of trickery, is Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment.
- [49:57]
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