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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:35]
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- [01:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In a crowded London street in 1762, a ghost began to speak. Not in words exactly, but in knocks. Sharp, deliberate and terrifyingly precise. Within days, the small house in Cock Lane, Smithfield, was filled with clergymen, sceptics and the simply curious, all straining to hear messages they believed to be communications from the restless spirit of a murdered woman, Fanny Lyons. It was a spectacle that perhaps surprisingly grip London in the time of the Enlightenment, because this was an age we often associate with reason, science and progress. But it was also one that was equally captivated by hoaxes, imposters and elaborate deceptions. In this episode, I'm delighted to say that we're joined by our friend Madeline Pelling co host of our sister history hit podcast After Dark. In her new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, Maddie has uncovered a cast of extraordinary figures who didn't just trick society, but exposed its deepest anxieties. There's Mary Bateman, the so called Yorkshire witch who turned fear, superstition and desperation into a deadly business, manipulating those around her until her crimes drew the full force of the law. And then there's Princess Caribou, a mysterious woman who arrived in Bristol speaking, speaking an inventive language, performing an entirely fabricated identity so convincingly that she persuaded polite society that she was foreign royalty. What connects these stories is not just deception, but complicity. These hoaxes worked because people wanted to believe them. They thrived in a culture shaped by a rapidly expanding press, by social upheaval, and by a growing appetite for spectacle. Together, these tales reveal an enlightenment that was far less rational than we might imagine. A world where reason and credulity coexisted and where the performance of truth could be just as powerful as truth itself. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Maddie, what an absolute joy to welcome you to not just the Tudors.
- [04:28]
Madeline Pelling
Hello. Thank you for having me. Do you know, it's so long since I handed this book in to my publishers and I've created and birthed an entire human since then, that listening to that introduction, I'm thinking, oh, in my tired state, that sounds like quite a good book. I'm quite interested in that. And then my heart drops. I realized, oh, I have to now talk to Susie about this. We'll see how this goes.
- [04:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so funny, that period between writing a book and then having to talk about it, which is always, you know, some gap. And then I often speak to people who are talking about books. I ask them about books I wrote 10 years ago and, and I know exactly the experience of going back and reading things I've written and, and agreeing with myself.
- [05:08]
Madeline Pelling
Yeah.
- [05:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Oh, that's really interesting.
- [05:11]
Madeline Pelling
Yeah. Gosh, that was really well written. Wow.
- [05:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, well, let's try and start simple. Let's try and start with a bit of storytelling. The one I began with, the Cock Lane ghost story. It feels like an 18th century thriller. How did it start? And why do you think it captured the public imagination at the time?
- [05:30]
Madeline Pelling
It's just the most incredible and unlikely story. As you said in the introduction, Susie, the Enlightenment. You know, we think of it as a time of scientific rationality. This idea, idea of progress and modernity coming in. And the term enlightenment was in use in the 18th century. You know, this was a very self conscious fashioning of Britain and Europe in this moment. And yet here we have a haunting, a ghost that is accusing a living man of murder at the center of London. And it's just it, you can see why people bought into this so much. So it begins with two households. We have on the one hand William Kent and Fanny Lynes, who have eloped from Norfolk. William has been married to Fanny's sister and she has died, leaving a child behind. And because of canon law at the time, William and Fanny cannot marry. So they're unmarried, pretending to be man and wife. And they've come to the city to start over. And then we have the Parsons family. We have Richard Parsons, who's the head of a household. He has a very badly paid job at St Sepulchre Church in Smithfield, which incidentally is the church that sat opposite Newgate Prison. The bell would be rung just before the executions would take place in the 18th century. So it's kind of a very dark setting. And behind the church we have Cock Lane itself where Parsons lives with his wife and his two daughters. And what happens is we have Kent and Fanny Lynes looking for somewhere to live in London. They are looking to rent a house or at least some room somewhere. It's a very common experience of people living in this urban environment. At this moment, when London's a sort of transient place, people are moving through these communities and you can go largely unnoticed, especially if you are unmarried. And they meet the Parsons, they move into the house on Cock Lane and immediately things start to fall apart. There's all kinds of tensions in the household. There's Parsons drinking and the friends that he invites around at night to drink with him that are a problem. Fanny and Kent, who live in the top rooms in the attic, find themselves often separated. Kent is working away and Fanny is now pregnant and she's very lonely and it's cold in the attic room. She's feeling unprotected by the man who is not her husband. And as a sort of compromise in this strange domestic setup, the little daughter of the family, the eldest daughter, Betty, is sent to sleep upstairs with Fanny in the bedroom. And this continues for several weeks, possibly months. And they form some kind of attachment, a relationship. And there's this little girl looking at this older woman who's pregnant. She's more sophisticated, she's interestingly from a genteel background in the countryside, whereas Betty Parsons herself has grown up in the sort of dirt and grit and grime of Smithfield and the surrounding market. And over the course of the time that, that Fanny and William are in this household, knocking start to happen. Strange scratching sounds. And at first it's kind of discussed that it might be the cobbler who lives next door, it might be some other kind of environmental factor, but it really starts to get to Fanny and she becomes increasingly unwell, she is increasingly pregnant, and as she comes nearer to her time, she and William Kent actually move out. The tension in the household is too much, these noises are too disruptive and we don't really have a sense of who is causing them. Whether the belief is that they're supernatural at this point, we don't know. Unfortunately, Kent and Fanny move out and Fanny dies, possibly of smallpox and there should end her story. It's, you know, tragic, but not untypical of, of women of this period. But when they leave the house, they owe the Parsons money. And this is going to rear its head again because almost two years later, after Fanny and her unborn child have been laid to rest and Kent has moved on, he's actually getting married to another woman. The knockings at Cock Lane start up again. And little Betty Parsons claims that when she sleeps in the attic room, the ghost is speaking to her through the Knox. And what it has to say is truly shocking. This time, the Knox claim to be the spirit of Fanny herself, deceased now for two years. Not only this, but she claims to have been murdered by William Kent. Now, this sparks huge interest in London. At first, a handful of witnesses from the nearby houses are called in to essentially hold a seance. The curate from the local church is called, a priest from elsewhere is called in to witness this. And every time that people are brought into the house, the ghost says the same thing, that William Kent murdered Fanny Lyons, who has not paid his debt, incidentally. So we need to, you know, hold that context in our minds. And soon there are hundreds of people coming to Cot Lane to see this and then thousands and it becomes the fashionable event of the city. Right? We have even the aristocracy coming after a night at the opera. We have Horace Walpole, the Duchess of Northumberland, the King's own brother, the Duke of York, comes to watch the. This little girl dressed in her nightgown and cap to be put into bed and supposedly to fall asleep. And there's a question mark over how involved or otherwise she is in the performance that then takes place. But once she is visibly asleep, the knockings start up and the members of the public who are there are invited to ask their own questions about the murder, but also about other things. You know, people start to ask, will I win the lottery? Is the Prime Minister going to be outed? You know, all of these sort of the things that you would naturally want to talk to someone from beyond the grave about, I suppose. And it really takes off, it explodes in London. It becomes this extraordinary case in which the very nature of death, of life, of the boundary in between, of what it means for a ghost and a female ghost, no less, to come back from the dead and accuse a gentleman of murder and to destroy his reputation, what this all means, what the stakes are. And it's just the most deliciously messy. Strange, odd case that once you go into the archival material, you realise everyone involved is complicit in some way. Everyone has skin in the game, everyone has their own motivations. It's a huge, bizarre mess.
- [11:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And Samuel Johnson, of all the people that we might think of in Georgian London, gets involved, doesn't he?
- [11:55]
Madeline Pelling
He does. So when it gets to the stage where thousands of people are going to Cock Lane, the Lord Mayor of London is sort of called upon to sort this out. You know, there's a sense that this has gone too far now. People shouldn't be believing in ghosts. They can't be accusing respectable men of murder. We need to sort this out, we need to stop this, because God forbid, it might spread and other ghosts might pop up and accuse other people of things, and we can't be having that. So the mayor appoints a society or a committee of learned men, because that's what you do in the Enlightenment, Susie, of course, you. You gather a bunch of white men who know stuff and are authoritative and you get them to pronounce judgment on whatever's taking place. And the committee is led by Samuel Johnson, which I always think is so ironic, because on the one hand, we think of him as the ultimate Enlightenment figure that he, you know, he, of course, is compiling his dictionary at this time. He is the epitome of the Enlightenment ideas of ordering and taxonomizing the world around us, and yet he is open to the idea of ghosts. He writes in his letters. He regularly talks to Boswell, his good friend and biographer, about the possibility of ghosts, and he collects ghost stories. When friends see, you know, deceased relatives, for example, he writes down their accounts and scrutinizes them. And together the committee set out to prove that this is a falsehood. That is their remit. And the whole time that they're doing this, they are up against A frenzy of print media, the London papers, pamphlet satire at this moment has just exploded and has divided very neatly into two camps of believers and non believers. We have people like the artist and satirist, William Hogarth getting involved and playing very nicely on the idea that it's a ghost called Fanny and Cock Lane. You know, we think that's a little bit funny today. It's equally hilarious in the 18th century. And there's lots of sort of wordplay and image play on that. The committee hold their own seance, which seems sensible, a controlled scientific experiment. They remove little Betty from the scenario entirely and the Parsons family and they actually go down into the vault in St. John Clerkenwell where Fanny Lyons was buried two years prior. And this crypt, the vault underneath the church is. They claim that they find her tomb and that they open, they open the coffin in which she was buried. Now the crypt at that moment is piled to the ceiling full of coffins. Fanny is buried in an unmarked coffin because her and Kent aren't married. And even though he's happy to lie to living people, he's not happy to lie to God about it. And so when he buries her, he just really doesn't want to take any chances. So he's like, yeah, just, just whack her in there and we won't, we won't lie. It's fine, she's dead now, it doesn't matter, you know, Anyway, they supposedly open the coffin that is hers. They bring William Kent with them, which, you know, the likelihood is that she dies of smallpox. Kent has nothing to do with it. He's been grieving for two years and now he is confronted with the corpse of the woman he loved, still carrying his unborn child. You know, this is really grim stuff. They hold the seance, they call on her ghost to come and she doesn't come. And they emerge from the crypt triumphant. And Samuel Johnson publishes his findings and says, right, that's it, there's no such thing as ghosts. It's all sorted, we've discovered the truth. But the 18th century doesn't really work like that. And so in the papers, on the streets, people are like, okay, that's your version of the truth. That's the version you want to believe. We're going to still believe ghosts are real. What is truth anyway? And, you know, it's working on these stories really. It felt like there was such a parallel with our own moment of sort of the post truth world, if you like, and this idea that even if you see something with your own eyes or hear it with your own ears, that it still is up for debate somehow. And that's what we see in this moment. And again, it's just such a messy, messy case in which even the most rational, high profile Enlightenment men aren't able to get to the bottom of it.
- [15:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting, isn't it, that combination of skepticism and that apparently scientific investigation, though doesn't sound very scientific as you've just outlined it.
- [16:09]
Madeline Pelling
Scientific by 18th century standards. Yes.
- [16:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And yet the continuing belief, and I suppose you know, fundamentally in this book you are looking at these hoaxes and lies and fraud in this era, which is supposed to be the most sort of intellectually rigorous period that Britain has ever been through. Is that the contrast that appealed to you? Is that what drew you to think about this period and this particular sort of paradox?
- [16:38]
Madeline Pelling
I think so. I think what fascinated me about each of these cases and other cases that kind of creep in from the margins as well. Some that people will be familiar with, like Mary Toth, the woman who supposedly gave birth to rabbits, and some others they may not know as well, is the way in which they instantly provoke controversy and debate. That this era is all about conversation, about putting things to the test, about talking through possibilities and moving everything forward. And the hoaxes that emerge seem to be tied to all of these questions of British identity, of this idea of progress, of empire. Certainly in the Princess Caribou case that we'll come on to talk about, that they are absolutely at the heart of the question of Enlightenment and they're challenging it. And the minds of the Enlightenment who are involved in pushing forward ideas of progress and investing in that, have to have to come up against these problems and these individuals in these cases in order to dispel them, in order to disprove them, and they're not always able. And I think it just, it gives a sense of the complication of this period. It's an incredibly messy, often violent, dark period. I think a lot of people's view maybe of the 18th century is very influenced by the sort of late 18th, early 19th century Austens that we see on screen. You know, a sort of very polite, choreographed world. And it absolutely was that. But it was also a world of revolution, of global warfare, of slavery, all of these things that underpinned the so called polite world that we have in our cultural imagination. And I think hoaxes were an integral part of that because they were sort of the antidote to all of the light. And therefore you couldn't have one without the other. And so they are intrinsically tied to the idea of enlightenment.
- [18:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's really interesting. And one thing I'm struck by in your approach is that you are very empathetic towards the figures in. In this book, including the perpetrators. And I wondered if you sort of saw them as victims as well.
- [18:53]
Madeline Pelling
I think so. So I think this is the crucial thing. When we think about a hoax today or a scam or a fraud or an imposture, we think often about one individual who is an outlier, who is, you know, an anomaly, and that they are caught, justice is served, and they are sort of pushed to the margins again or, you know, removed from society. But what we see in the hoaxes in the 18th century, and I think it's a lesson that we could absolutely learn in our own moment, is these cases start with a single lie, often told by people at the lowest end of society with the least power. But actually it's the people around them who become most culpable. It's the people who take them in, who give them a platform, who investigate them, who legitimize them, who use them for their own ends. And these are people like magistrates, medical doctors, writers, journalists. You know, these are people who should be trusted and who are, again, involved in this idea of societal progress and enlightenment. And I think what fascinates me about the people who are at the heart of these, who are often women. And by the way, even though the book looks at the stories of three women, I didn't set out exclusively to look at women, but I think it says so much about the fact that often it is women. At the center of these is women who are telling the initial lies. It's women who are created into characters by the people around them. It's women who often face punishment for these hoaxes at the end of each of these stories, and there's a sort of violence there and an inequality that is specific to the 18th century, I think, but that speaks to, again, this broader sense of who is to be believed, who is given the authority, and who is. Is intrinsically understood to be less. Less valuable, less likely to be telling the truth. And I think that's a broadly universal issue that, you know, we're still grappling with today.
- [20:56]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [21:18]
History Hit Promo Announcer
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- [22:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's have a look at the other stories and let's talk about Mary Bateman, because that story is chilling. What did she do and how did she manage to wield quite so much power, power and fear in her community?
- [22:30]
Madeline Pelling
Mary Bateman is such a. You're right, she is a chilling character. She's like no other character in the book. And I think with the other two cases, I have more sympathy for the women at the heart of them. And this is the one where perhaps I wanted to step back a little bit, you know, some of her behavior is not very palatable, to say the least. So she. For this story. We're in early 19th century Yorkshire at the turn of the century, and Mary is born into a rural community, but she ends up in industrial Leeds. This is, you know, the Industrial Revolution is well underway in this area by this point, and Leeds has transformed from a small town into what is now a bustling city. I don't know exactly when you would make that distinction between the town and city, but it's certainly becoming an important economic centre and she lives as a wheelwright's wife. She has very little power in her community except for her perceived magical powers. She's known locally as the Yorkshire Witch and on the surface, at least at first, she seems relatively harmless. She is offering people who have moved from rural communities into this urban centre whose lives, family units, days, have all been recalibrated according to this new capitalist way of living within this sort of factory setting. She offers them an escape from some of that brutality, some of the mundanity as well of the Industrial Revolution, by providing magical services. So she does things like she offers love charms and potions. If your neighbour is making too much noise or their cat keeps, I don't know, crapping in your garden, you can go to her and curse the cat, you know, for a. For a penny or something. She will, she will make sure the cat dies. A horrible Death, no cats. Harmed in making this book, though, you know, and she. All of this seems relatively light. It's, you know, if you don't believe that she has any magical powers, then what harm is she doing? She's offering people a little bit of respite and a feeling of empowerment, I suppose, within this world. But she is a master manipulator and her hoax has just become more and more audacious, I think because of the setting, because of this industrial setting in this fast changing world, she sort of gets away with it. So she does things like she claims the second coming of Christ, which people in Leeds are very into and will pay to see. So she has a magical chicken, would you believe, who lays magical eggs that say Christ is coming, which she misspells as Christ, which I just love. And people still believe her. And what she's doing there is she's boiling an egg and writing on it in vinegar. And you can then peel the shell away and the writing will appear on the inside of the egg. And this was something that spies were doing in the American War of Independence and things at this time. This wasn't unusual, but unfortunately for the chicken, she was then popping the egg back into the chicken and charging people to see it laid. So, yeah, not very good animal welfare going on in this case. But again, so far so good. She is sort of, again, providing this kind of fantastical world that people can buy into. But when two of her clients, a married couple, start to suspect that maybe she's not all that, and she's been taking their money for several months, if not years, they start to investigate her and they start to ask questions. And her way of dealing with this is, unfortunately, to recommend that they make a pie that will solve all of their problems. They are not industrial workers. They've worked in a little cottage industry outside of Leeds. And because they're not working in one of the main factories anymore, they've been plunged into poverty and their lot is really, really difficult. So if they make this pie, it will all become better. She gives them some powder to put in the pie. Spoiler alert. It was Arsenic. And One of the couple, the wife dies a really, really grim and brutal death, which I have to say, I really enjoyed writing on the page. It was, I mean, poor woman, it was, you know, really terrible. But as a writer, it was quite a fun scene to write. And so she is eventually, Mary Bateman is eventually caught for this murder. Interestingly, she's not charged with witchcraft. You cannot be charged with witchcraft in the 18th century. Following the 1735 Witchcraft Act. But she does go to gallows for her crimes. And what is so fascinating about her and this sort of wider societal response to her is that it's not just enough to send her to the gallows. That is not enough justice for this woman who has undermined the new industrial order, the world in which the working classes must know their place, must know how much power or lack of they possess, and stick to the timetable and the hierarchy of the factory and that world, because she's offered them something other than that, even while still victimizing them and targeting them. She has to be fully destroyed and she is cut down from the gallows and she is taken in the back of a car, dead, all the way to Leeds from York, where she's killed and hundreds of people line the route, which is really testament to the belief, I suppose, in her power and the fear that she still provoked in people. And she's taken to the Lee's Anatomy School and she's anatomized on the table over three days. And people can pay to go and watch this. And what really struck me when I was looking at her story is that the anatomist, William Hay, he's been at the anatomy school for 30 years at this point. He's very experienced. He lays the body out and he says to people, she's just flesh and bone like any other. And he takes parts of her and holds them up and says, look, here's her womb, here her intestines, here's her stomach. She's just a person. And yet when he's done demolishing her after three days, members of the public who've watched walk up to the anatomy table and touch her for good luck because they are so terrified that she will come and mete out revenge on the people of Leeds. And eventually she's boiled down into a skeleton and put on display as a way really of showing, I suppose, enlightenment triumph over her old fashioned superstitious nonsense, as it were. And she was on display until 2015. So the legacy of this fear of her, this hatred of this woman with power continued into the 21st century.
- [28:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What's so interesting there is, it feels like there's a wrestling match going on, you know, at this time it's in the 18th century that women who are unable to conceive go and stick pins into the red velvet lining of Henry VIII's codpiece in the Tower of London for some reason thinking that's going to help them. And so there's this strange contrast between the profound Superstition, the way that her body has been dissected to demonstrate enlightenment, achievement, scientific truth prevailing, and yet they're still sort of touched, like they are relics.
- [29:39]
Madeline Pelling
And it.
- [29:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It feels like the, you know, which is going to triumph is being worked out in real time. And, of course, the truth of the matter is neither does, I would say. And the story we've told of the progress of reason is far too pat and too simple a story. Do you think that Mary Bateman's story also lets us think about social anxieties during the period of industrialization?
- [30:05]
Madeline Pelling
I think it does. And I think she is depicted at the time of her trial and certainly after her death and the anatomy slab as particularly monstrous. She becomes the sort of manifestation of all of these issues. And I suppose as well, a lot of that is to do with women's power. We know that she was working as sometimes as a midwife, sometimes as an abortionist as well. So she's offering services to women that are not just love potions, but, you know, very real treatments that will have a very, very real impact, not least in terms of, you know, thinking of the Industrial Revolution and the fertility of women and the requirement of women to keep producing bodies to work in the factory, that, you know, children would be sent to work at a young age. And so there is a kind of requirement of capitalism and women's bodies there and a sort of expectation that she is undermining in some way. I think what's so interesting as well about her, and again, thinking about this kind of monstrousness, is that she herself is a mother. She's a mother to several children. We know she implicates her young son, who's about 10, in a lot of her crimes, but that she's still breastfeeding a baby in York jail before she goes to the gallows. And at her trial, she claims. She pleads the belly. She claims that she's pregnant as a way to try and avoid the noose. And she is taken into a room, and the judge at the trial asks the room for women to come forward and to volunteer to examine her. And she is found by this random assembly of women with no expertise to not be pregnant and is therefore sent to the gallows. And when she is anatomised three days later, William Hay actually cuts her womb out and he holds it up in the room and to show that it's empty, he cuts it open. And so you have this kind of dehumanisation of her that she becomes so much the, yes, the manifestation, the poster girl, if you like of these anxieties, particularly around women in this industrial northern context, that she has to be utterly destroyed.
- [32:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's very sad in the end, isn't it? Although, I mean, obviously what she's done along the way is hardly forgivable. But she has a babe in arms at the time of her death and that's quite something. Let's turn to look at Princess Caribou, who. This is a story to someone who appears in Bristol in 1817. And this, it reads like a novel. How does it start?
- [32:30]
Madeline Pelling
This is my favourite of the three stories. You're not meant to pick a favourite child, but this is definitely, definitely mine. It's such a good tale. So 1817, as you say, we're in a small village outside of Bristol, and Bristol at this time, of course, is a huge international port city with people all over the British Empire passing through it and, you know, makes a lot of its money based on the slave trade. It has all these ties to this kind of global network of trade and commerce and all the darkness and violence that comes with that. And this woman walks into a cobbler's cottage, supposedly asking for help. Now, she is speaking a language that no one can understand. She's dressed in clothing that is described as outlandish. She has a shawl wrapped around her head, a little bit like a turban. She has very dark hair and dark eyes and quite tanned skin. And she is taken to be a foreigner. Now, of course, the question of racial identities in this moment, of attempts to taxonomize them, also just absolute British ignorance about anything beyond the shores of Britain at this moment all come into play in this moment. But she's understood to be a foreigner, to be quote, unquote, exotic. And she's taken by the overseer of the poor, who is convinced that she's something other than a beggar, that she's something interesting. He takes her to the local magistrate, who is a man called Samuel the Devil Worrell. Gives you a sense of his personality. He's an incredibly sort of infamous, harsh magistrate. He owns a bank in Bristol. He's a social climber who is building an empire for himself. And she's brought into his drawing room and she talks in this strange language. He can't understand what she's saying. He summons up one of his Greek servants. The Greek servants, like, well, she's not Greek. What do you want me to do? I don't know. And they decide to keep her as a sort of pet, and they take her down to the Bristol docks over several days and parade her up and down essentially and ask people coming in off different ships from different parts of the world to come and identify her for a fee. And this is the important part. There's a Portuguese sailor who is fresh off the boat and he meets Princess Caribou. And they have what seems to be a conversation. And he turns to the magistrate and he says, fantastic news. Her name is Princess Caribou. She's from the East Indies and an island called Javasu. She was captured by pirates, would you believe, and has just escaped them at Bristol Harbour. And, and instead of saying, sorry, what? This is clearly nonsense, the magistrate is like, fantastic. We have a princess in our midst. This is wonderful. And he sees this opportunity for more social climbing and more importance. So he pays the Portuguese sailor his fee. We never hear from him again, even though he has such a pivotal part in the story. And for an entire Summer in 1817, she becomes the talk of Bristol and Bath. And this is, you know, this is the Bath that Jane Austen was familiar with. This is the place where people are flocking to it to take the waters, to go to balls and assemblies. This is the most fashionable city in Britain at this point. And here is Princess Caribou at the center of this, an absolute fascination. And people come to the magistrate's house, they can watch her hunting with a bow and arrow. She swims in the lake in sort of semi see through muslin dresses. She can be watched praying on the roof of the house. All these kind of strange performances that she, she does. She's painted by various society artists. There's a fantastic portrait of her that still survives in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery today. And the magistrate is, you know, he's absolutely elevated by this. He's suddenly the, the talk of the town, as is his wife. Until it turns out that the woman under their roof is not only not a princess, she is from Devon, she is Caucasian, she is the daughter of a cobbler and has the most incredible backstory. And when I was researching this, I found her backstory to be so much more interesting and compelling than the fantasy version of her that is invented. And the question of who is culpable in her so called misdemeanors. They're not crimes exactly. It is so fascinating because she, she is investigated. They bring in different experts to confirm her identity, including a Dr. Wilkinson who is a galvanist from B. So someone who is dealing in electricity and who spends most of his time electrocuting women who've just given birth for science. Apparently not great. He's one of the supposed inspirations for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And despite this, they have been humiliated and they've been left with this woman who really represents the realities of life in the lower classes in the Georgian world. And her story is incredibly bleak, it's tragic and it really holds a mirror up to all this wealth and this power.
- [37:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, before we get to that, I want to know about her story, but two questions, two sides of a coin. How does she sustain this fabricated identity for so long and how is it revealed? How is the fraud unravelled?
- [37:44]
Madeline Pelling
So the question of how she sustains this and how is she performing this role is a really interesting one. For the entire summer. As I say, she plays the part really well. She does what is required of her and she does it to such an extent that she will do things like she has fencing matches with the gentlemen who visit. She's quite flirtatious, she's very much into the performance or she's really giving it her best shot. But as we will discover with her backstory, there is a history of severe mental illness there that's coming into play. And so the question of how aware she is of what's happening to her, how much she's in control of it, I, for my money, don't think that she is. I think this initial bursting into this world of elite grandeur that happens when she's discovered in the village and then when the Portuguese sailor gives her essentially gifts her this identity. I think from that moment it's a case of survival. And the likelihood is that she knows she's under the roof of one of the most severe magistrates in the the area in that part of Britain, and that she has no choice if she is even aware of that to that extent. Instead, I would place the blame at the door of Dr. Wilkinson himself. So he is invited to spend a significant portion of that summer with so called Princess Caribou. And he spends that showing her books of engravings, books of different languages written down, and basically drip feeds her the information that she needs to continue. This character, he writes out her language and he sends it to experts at Oxford and also to Sir Stamford Raffles, who has recently returned from the East Indies. He was the governor of Java, which sounds suspiciously like the island of Javasu that Caribou is meant to be from. Neither the experts at Oxford nor Raffles himself recognise the language written down, but they can't rule it out. Exactly. And you know, when we go to the archive, what we find is actually all the evidence that is described as being in her hand is really in his. And so there is a sort of question there of to what extent he is leading her. And towards the end of this hoax, while it's still ongoing and she hasn't been unmasked, Wilkinson actually goes to London to the headquarters of the East India Company, which, you know, is one of the most powerful institutions in Britain at this time. It has its own private army, it has probably more, well, wealth than the Crown in this moment, and more power globally. And he proposes an expedition to go and find the island of Javasu. So I think he is very much invested in his own career, his own name, in sort of claiming victory for this quote, unquote discovery of this woman and the mysterious land that she's meant to be part of. So that is a sort of complicated muddying of the waters when it comes to her performance.
- [40:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how was the fraud unravelled?
- [40:41]
Madeline Pelling
This comes at the end of the summer and again reads like a novel. We have this kind of, you know, blistering hot summer in which all of these things happen and tension builds and builds and then we have this sort of breaking of the storm, as it were. And it comes in two parts, remarkably, because Dr. Wilkinson just cannot wait to claim this victory. He's already published in the local papers in Bath and Bristol a description of this woman, an engraved image of her and, you know, description of the language she's speaking, etc. Etc. So there is a young boy who has seen so called Princess Caribou on the road a few months earlier, and he's remembered her because she was so intensely beautiful. She has this dark hair and these dark eyes and he was really captivated by her and he remembers kind of blushing when she asked him for a glass of water. Interestingly, she was not speaking a foreign language, she was speaking English. And he recognises her and so he decides he's going to walk all the way to the magistrate's house outside Bristol, hopefully claim some kind of reward, George, for telling the truth. Now, almost within a day of this happening, there's a woman in Bristol, in the centre of the city, down by the port, who also recognises her description and says that this young woman passed through her boarding house a few months earlier before disappearing, leaving all of her things behind, simply getting up and walking away. And this is very much in keeping with the caribou that we find at the beginning of the story when she makes her first, first appearance that she's carrying very little on her person, she has no luggage, she has a bad penny. So A forged coin in her pocket and a bar of soap. And that is it apart from the clothes on her back. And these two people sort of come out of the woodwork at the same moment and contact the magistrate and the magistrate's wife and she's unmasked. And the way that they choose to do it is so dramatic and again it just, I mean it's just begging to be rendered on screen I think. Is there that they actually take her to the house in Bristol, the, the boarding house of the woman who claims to know her and sort of do a dramatic reveal. They open the door to the parlour and say, ha, we've got you. And that is the moment where, you know, they sort of say who are you really? Stop all this nonsense now. And she, she turns to them and for the first time in their presence after several months she speaks in English and she says, my name is Mary Wilcox. And they're completely astounded and shocked. Obviously the magistrate's wife is, you know, her reputation is ruined. She's held this woman up as a princess, she's treated her like a member of a royal family. She's paraded her in the most fashionable parlors in Bath and Bristol where she'll no longer be able to show her face. This is a complete disaster. And she starts to tell her tale and yeah, it's far from the polite, polished world that the magistrate and his wife are used to moving in.
- [43:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And. And so what does this tell? Who is Mary?
- [43:28]
Madeline Pelling
So Mary, poor Mary. She was obviously an unusual person and someone who was very. Spent a lot of time in her own head. She was obviously very imaginative and I think that's really important in the story. She's often making up characters from childhood onwards. She is born in the rural village Witheridge in Devon, which is still beautiful and rural and her parents cottage still exists there. I drove through it last in an incredible storm in January and it was fantastically dramatic, as it should be for Mary's story. And she has a sort of on the one hand, idyllic childhood, playing in the fields of Devon, swimming in the rivers, you know, helping the farm, the local farmhand. And she goes into service. She works as a servant in various places in Exeter, but she can never hold down a job. There's something not quite right. She is always off imagining futures for herself that are above and beyond those that have been allocated to her station. Her parents despair of her and basically kick her out. They have many other children to deal with and she's too much trouble and she very quickly, into her sort of teens and early womanhood, finds herself on the streets, jobless and walking from the west country towards London. And according to her testimony that is later published, and we have to take some of it with a pinch of salt because it's published as a sort of sensational pamphlet, you know, the Extraordinary Life of Princess Caribou kind of thing, the title, something like that. And it is kind of, you know, very novelistic in the way that it's presented. But the version that we have is that she starts to hear voices in her head. She has a fever, she passes out somewhere on the road, probably sort of around the Salisbury Plain area. And she's picked up by some kindly people on their way to London and put in the back of their cart and they take her all the way to a workhouse in London and dump her on the doorstep. And so suddenly she's gone from this relatively sort of safe life in the rural west country to being in the centre of the metropolis alone, friendless and very mentally and physically unwell. And she spends a good time in the workhouse. She is treated medically there. She has her head shaved, she has what was known as cupping done, which was a form of sort of suction. And she's left with these circular burn marks all across her scalp for the rest of her life. At one point she tells the doct doctors in the workhouse that she wants to leave. And the doctor says, okay, if you're fit enough to leave, you can walk to the end of the ward and pick up this big vat of boiling water that we're boiling to use on the patients. And if you can pick it up, you can leave. And so she tries to. She drops it over herself and schools part of her body. And the doctor says, well, I told you you weren't ready. Get back into bed. So there's, you know, this huge sort of lack of care and sympathy for her. And she really is alone. And over the course of a few years we see her move, move through every institution in London. Essentially. She finds herself in and out of different workhouses. She sometimes works as a servant before always losing her position because she's invented an alter ego because she has disobeyed her master or mistress in some way thinks that she is above the work that she's being given. At one point she ends up in the Magdalene Institute for so called penitent prostitutes, that's the title of it. And she spends a good few weeks in there before having a conversation with some of the women who say, you know, oh, what services did you offer? And they're all sort of comparing notes and she says, oh, I've never sold sex. I would never do that. And of course, she's overheard and everyone's like, well, get out. So she's kicked out of there and eventually we know at some point that she has a child. Now, Mary's version of this story, there are so many different versions. One version is that she goes back to the west country and marries a bricklayer who abandons her. In another version, it's a Frenchman who she meets in a bookshelf shop and he takes her all the way to the south coast in Kent before leaving her. Whatever the truth is, we know that she enters the workhouse pregnant, she gives birth. She is there for a couple of weeks before she's out on the streets, and she is forced to part with her child because she simply cannot care for him. It's a little boy called John. And she takes him to the only place in London that would take children in, in this moment, the Foundling Hospital, which is just. Just for any listeners who haven't been to the Foundling Museum, it's still in the same location, near to the British Library. It's such a special place. It's. It had a sort of, you know, a contested and difficult history in the 18th century, but essentially it did good work in that it took in children who their parents could not care for them. The way that you would get your child in is, unfortunately, as a woman, you would have to come before a committee of learned men. Again, there's a theme here and be judged. You would have to tell your story and if you were deemed morally palatable, I suppose they would take your child, who would then be taught a trade, an apprentice, or maybe taught, if they're a girl, to be a servant. They would learn laundry and sewing and that kind of thing. So she leaves her child, she hands him over to the foundling hospital because she has no choice. And very, very sadly, he does die there. And this seems to really cause a serious mental break for Mary. She manages to make her way back to the West Country. Again, we have different versions of her journey. There's a version in which she joins a gang of robbers whilst dressed as a boy, and when they discover she is in fact a woman, they threaten to murder her and she escapes. There are other versions where she just gets on a stagecoach and travels there, which is probably more likely. But this is the version of her that we then find right at the beginning of the story. When she appears as Caribou, she makes her way to Bristol. She walks around the Bristol docks for a while as a beggar. And there she sees women dressed in exotic clothing. There are French women, there are Spanish women. And she notices that because of their quote unquote outlandish appearance and the way that they dress themselves, they seem to do better at begging than the British women who are there. And so she fashions herself an alter ego based on on the women that she's seeing successfully begging. And this is the version that she walks all the way out to the village where she is eventually discovered. And by this stage, is she conscious of what she's doing? Is she so unwell that she has no sense of who she is or where she is? The lines of her identities are so blurred that it is impossible to know. Is Caribou her invention? I think think it is not. I think it is the Portuguese sailor who wants to make a fast book and gives her that identity by assigning her that role. And then it is built upon by Dr. Wilkinson and the magistrate. And what we find is, you know, when she is unmasked as the hoaxer, she is dismissed by the Worrells, the magistrate and his wife, and she is popped on a ship and sent to America. Because that's what you do with troublesome women who've embarrassed you.
- [50:36]
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- [51:14]
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- [52:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We've got this story of a hoax that very much is something that's about collaboration. It's complicity. It complicates this idea of a single imposter. But actually, I would even go further to suggest that it feels like this line between what is a hoax and a fraud and what is a misfortune is blurred here. And it's almost as if these moments that you're looking at are kind of fissures through which we have. Have. We can look into the realities of life in the 18th century, its anxieties and its misfortunes and its sadnesses and hopes. I mean, there's so much here that this can tell us about, and it's much more than you might expect from something that looks literally like, oh, people are having a bit of fun.
- [52:57]
Madeline Pelling
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, this is. This is the sort of paradox, I suppose, of the cases in the book. On the surface, they sound vaguely ridiculous. There's, you know, a supposed haunting of a woman speaking beyond the grave. There's a woman offering magical charms and industrial leads, and there's a woman pretending to be a princess. These all sound quite light and quite almost fun. But beneath them, all this, the societal tension is crackling away the whole time. And what we have in the Caribou story, I think, is Mary Wilcox's story. Her backstory, the way that she ends up. Up becoming Caribou is really a tour of the worst parts of the Georgian world. If you are a woman in the lower classes, it is a sort of who's who of the worst things that could happen to you and the institutions that you might end up in. You know, the way that she moves through the institutions in London is. Yeah, kind of. It's a guidebook of what life might be like if you found yourself in that circumstance. It's sort of a moral warning, I suppose, at the time, that's how it's framed. But to us today, I mean, it just gives. It's a lens, a way in to think about the lives of people who, if they hadn't been involved in these particularly bizarre moments, these lies that spiral out of control, they would be lost from the historical record. We would not ever go looking for Mary Wilcox. We have flashes of her in the archive. We have an entry for her in the workhouse when she gives birth. We have her petition to get her son into the Foundlings hospital. So we know some elements of her story are true and we can verify them. But beyond that, she would completely disappear. I mean, when I was researching this book, and I spent time in the Foundling Archive, which is run by Coram, an adoptive charity today, that do incredible work, and I got the pile of petitions for just the summer that she got her son in, and for her petition that was successful. There were 30 or 40 that were not. And I sat and read through all of them. And I'm not ashamed to say I cried in the archive reading these women's stories. And there was absolutely nothing to separate their stories from Mary Wilcox's. There was no reason why her child was taken over theirs. And, you know, you think most of these women and their children would have gone on to have terrible lives if they survived at all, and have disappeared from the record. And so it's these anomalies, these moments of strange occurrences that give us this insight into these incredible lives and the motivations and the decisions made by people who are otherwise invisible to us.
- [55:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Lastly then, can I ask you, Maddy, why do you think that people in the 18th century were willing to believe the claims that were made in these hoaxes? Do you think it was something particular to that age, or do you think that there's something universal about.
- [55:49]
Madeline Pelling
About it? I think this is going to be such a historian's answer. I think it's a bit of both. I think that on the one hand, the long 18th century in Britain and across its empire sees society changing at such a rapid rate. There is, as I said at the start, you know, there's global conflict, there's slavery and its eventual abolition. At least in Britain and its empire, there is huge industrial progress, which does not look like progress at all for the people at the bottom of. Of that particular ladder and, you know, who give their bodies and their energy and their time and their skill to a system that just eats them up and spits them out with that kind of mechanized grind. The world is changing so, so fast, and scientific advancements, medical advancements, are extraordinary in this moment. We have vaccinations coming in. We have, as with Dr. Wilkinson, galvanism, this idea that you might be able to electrocute someone who has died and bring them back to life. And Wilkinson himself actually is involved in an incredibly famous experiment, and I think about 1803, 1802, where he does just that. Well, he doesn't bring someone to life, but he electrocutes a man who's been executed himself for the murder of his wife and child and his corpse, when electrocuted sits up and his eyes open. You know, this is a world in which anything seems possible. And there is something magical about that, even though it is framed as rational enlightenment, and that it is all about calm ordering of the world, about putting everything and everyone into their rightful place and understanding it according to those rules and those frameworks. There is something intrinsically fascinating, compelling about those rules not quite working. And I think there was something both reassuring and terrifying to the people living through this time that you could find these anomalies, that there were people out there and events out there that might give an alternative worldview. And I think we have that today, right? This idea that conspiracy theories on the Internet have so much power and we can see the impact that they have in the political systems that we now exist within. They have shaped the outcome of elections in countries. This idea of fake news, of no longer being able to see with your own eyes the truth, that you can't trust the evidence before you. All of these things are coming into play again. And I think, much like the enlightenment, we live in such a time now where we feel incredibly confident on the one hand that we are right, that we know how the world works. We have mapped it all. We've sent people to the moon, you know, very recently, we've seen the far side of it. There is nothing left for us to see. In the same way that the British Empire expanded and, you know, encountered in heavy, adverted commas all kinds of faraway lands, indigenous people, indigenous plants, animals. There's a sense, I suppose, in our most confident moments that with that comes a sort of flip of the coin, I think, and there is always doubt that creeps in and there's always, I suppose, a sort of post truth alternative that is very unruly and difficult to deal with, and its consequences can be massive. So. So the hoaxes in the book look on the surface to be quite benign, quite silly, almost, but actually their legacies, the impact they have in their own moment, but also the legacies that they continue to have today are huge and unimportant and sometimes very troubling.
- [59:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What a wonderful summary. Thank you, Maddie, so much for coming on and giving us a sense of how important these stories are today. I love that these individual stories from the 18th century have that long legacy, and that actually can speak to us very much about how we analyze truth and hoax and fraud and injustice and all that today, because it touches on every aspect of that and all of the anxieties it reveals as well. It's been absolutely fascinating to listen to you as it is to read your book, which is Hoax by Maddie Pelling. Maddie, thank you so much for coming on. Obviously, normally people can hear her on After Dark, but today we got on
- [60:01]
Madeline Pelling
Not Just the Tudors and for that I rejoice. It's exclusive. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.
- [60:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Thanks also to my researcher Max Wintle and my producer Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at notjusthetors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors From History Hit.
- [60:44]
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- [61:13]
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