by Stephen Wade
For these reasons, we need to look at the way Sarah Jacob and her fast were depicted and transmitted, filtered into Victorian culture – and in the metropolis, for the nation, beyond Carmarthenshire.
The basis of this sensation and spectacle, was the fact that it was concerned with wonder. Popular spectacle was at odds with the world of assured fact and objective scientific certainty in Fowler’s ideology. Popular cultural spectacle is in opposition to anything in the normal setting, anything circumscribed by established knowledge. It is the antithesis of routine, of the daily clock-dominated framing of time. Of course, scientific knowledge also begins with wonder – the sense of curiosity about the truth of what is before us as a mystery. The beginnings of what we now think of as science were in the staggering wonder, the awesome spectacle of something marvellous, something beyond normal comprehension. Questions follow the wonder, naturally, and so they did with Sarah Jacob. Strangely, although looking at the Victorian rise of science presents oppositions, the core of the curiosity of the scientific mind lies in the word ‘cura’ which means ‘care.’ The student of science was one who took care to research and observe methodically.
Sarah’s notoriety came at just the right time for a media frenzy and for a general tourist outing. The new railways had arrived, so a trip from Paddington to Pencader was possible; the revolution in print and popular reading – summarised in the previous chapter – opened up attitudes of enquiry and curiosity, and most of all, that age of wonder was rampant, albeit in a framework of science, in every way. The birth of the concept of ‘social science’ was very close too, but none of the rationalist statements could prevent the farmhouse in rural Carmarthenshire becoming a tourist magnet. In addition to all this, the subject was a young girl: it was an age when attitudes to childhood, and to female children in particular, was arguably trying to come to terms with the fact that these little entities were mysteries. For the rich, they were creatures placed out of sight for nannies and governesses to worry about, and for the working class they were sources of income. Police regularly reported at the time, that finding bodies of dead children in the streets was as common an experience as finding dead dogs. Paradoxically, the periodicals were packed with images and tales of the specialness, the special worth and fascination, of children.
On the surface this might seem to be a paradox: that in a time when the intelligentsia were putting the case for scientific enquiry, rational deduction and methodical study of nature, wonder was all the more urgently pressed on people’s sensibilities. Yet, on reflection, it soon becomes possible to believe that the idea of comprehensive knowledge destroys something we need to exist in spite of the rational faculty – something of the soul, perhaps, or simply the desperate need to have something beyond explanation.
How could a child exist for almost two years on no more than a little water and, in the early phase, small amounts of stewed apple? Add to that another question and we have the reason why the world took notice: how could a child, and a farmer’s daughter to boot, confuse and perplex the learned men of the cloth and the men of medicine? Wasn’t she deeply religious? Wasn’t it the case that she lay like a medieval holy woman, studying and writing, and more than that, suffering for her faith and in her faith? The literature of the tracts, stories, sermons and fables made it plain that a true Christian child should focus on the life to come, being aware of the struggle through the water to heaven, perhaps, like little Tom in Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863). Readers of Sarah’s situation would have perhaps thought of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, who, on her last journey, weaved by night and day ‘a magic web with colours gay’. They were also well aware of the general tenor of poems addressed to good children in the annuals and periodicals, writings with such titles as ‘Stepping Heavenwards’ or ‘Preparing for The Finest Light’.
Most of all, they came to look. It was an age of narrative painting, and the gallery walkers were well familiar with such images as Millais’s image of Ophelia in the water, a beautiful corpse, flower-strewn and serene.
They came to look with these aspects of art and people in mind, but they expected a prodigy, something awesome, to compare with what the press and popular entertainment considered to be ‘preter-natural’. After all, what the media called prodigies were often merely medical marvels – no more than anomalies and very rare diseases or physiological disfigurements. For instance, back in the 1820s, the female dwarf Caroline Crachami, just 19 inches tall and only eleven inches around the waist, had become known as ‘the Sicilian Fairy’ and was brought to London for ‘exhibition’. An Irish impresario called Gilligan charged the public a shilling to stare at her. Caroline sat on a small throne, in a posture of, as one writer put it, ‘in seeming mockery of regal state’.
To illustrate just how much the bedroom scene at the Jacob house became a cultural tableau, we may note a case before the magistrates at the Thames Police Court ten months after Sarah’s death. It concerned a certain Francis Palmer and his waxwork exhibition at Whitechapel Road. Two teenagers were charged with destroying ‘A Welsh Fasting Girl and her Medical Attendant’. They destroyed her in her bed and ‘crumpled up’ the physician. Mr Palmer told the court that Madame Tussaud’s exhibition was no better than his, and the court laughed when he said plaintively that ‘The Welsh Fasting Girl was no more’. It had already cost him 25 shillings to procure another model after his first was destroyed. The two men charged were given a few weeks in gaol. The case illustrates just how much, in the year after her death and even before, in the midst of her notoriety, Sarah was a phenomenon.
People in crowds like to travel and look, admire, feel a sense of wonder as such ‘prodigies’ and in one sense, Sarah falls into that category. After all, the press reported her as ‘The Welsh Fasting Girl’ – a phrase exactly relating to ‘The Celebrated Sicilian Dwarf’. A little girl from rural Wales with a puzzling malaise had become a phenomenon, much more than a medical enigma: she was defying the laws of nature, apparently.
All kinds of strange events and reports began to emerge as Sarah became a celebrity. She may have been a ‘sensation’ but she was also, because hundreds of visitors began to arrive and leave donations, an attraction to all kinds of extreme individuals. For instance, in her collection of autobiographical memoirs, the spiritualist Emma Hardinge Britten writes about a visit to the ‘Welsh Fasting Girl, and although she calls her ‘Frances Jones’ this appears to be a mistake, as it was surely Sarah that she and a certain Professor von Marx visited. Her book, Ghost Land, was published in 1897 and in it she recalls that she and the professor called on the girl en route to Cumbria. Even if the girl in question was a Frances Jones, what matters here is what happened, and the way in which Britten writes about the experience:
We were induced to take a detour from our route for the purpose of visiting…. known as ‘The Welsh fasting Girl’. This case, which had attained considerable Celebrity, presented most of the features which accompany protracted fasting, Namely, long continued fits of somnolence and remarkable intervals of lucidity During which the girl delivered trance addresses of wonderful beauty and exhibited Striking powers of clairvoyance and prevision…
I have been able to find no trace of Miss Jones. If this was in fact Sarah, it seems totally unlike any other report on a visit to Lletherneuadd. If it was someone else, the very fact that she was a celebrity and a ‘Welsh fasting Girl’ is curious – and of course, significant. Even more bizarre is Britten’s statement that she herself was put into a trance by the professor after she had fasted; he had, apparently, ‘surrounded me with a circle of powerful magnetizers’.’ Interestingly, Britten also reports that Frances’ parents told her that the girl was in one of ‘her fits’ while the visitors spent time there, and she also later cut out paper flowers and cut out pictures.
People came from all over Britain, to be greeted at Pencader by boys with directions to the Fasting Girl fastened on them. Transport was available and there was good business for all. Those who went to the
house and stared or asked polite questions left coins. A typical visit would be easy to imagine: Evan proprietorial and a little overzealous in his acting as gatekeeper and security, as it were; the rest of the family standing back and yet obviously feeling curious regarding the hundreds of strangers who called at the house and usually chatted to Sarah, who, like it or not, was the main attraction.
All this has echoes of the kind of rural attractions offered on the interior Grand Tours of the previous century, when men and sometimes ladies made the obligatory trip to Cumberland and to Wales, to enjoy the ruins of abbeys and fine picturesque views, stopping en route to stare at the paid hermits in their grottos on some aristocrat’s carefully ‘improved’ parks and landscaped slopes.
But how ironical that is, because such a comparison seems heartless: this was not a ‘scene’ or a tableau. The people involved appear to have forgotten that here was a girl of almost twelve who was suffering from an undefined illness, something that, in spite of all current studies, entailed being without food yet somehow surviving. It was a great and mystifying paradox that lay behind the apparent sickbed tourism: this was a girl who appeared sometimes healthy and normal, as depicted in the best image we have of her, printed after her death, in January, 1870, in The Illustrated Police News. There we have an image of Sarah reading in her bed, with posies of flowers strewn around her and a crown of leaves on her head, bedecked in ribbons, with a nurse standing by her, hands folded and a hard stare fixed on her charge. The room depicted has books on chairs and shelves and a folded curtain to the right of the girl almost suggests a regal image. It evokes mistress and servant rather than nurse and patient.
To contemporary readers it would have suggested an angelic image – just the kind of childhood image for which popular culture longed. Young girls across the land were praying over cards of religious images with texts such as ‘Soon to join my Maker’ and ‘I will arise and live again with Him’. As noted earlier, it was an age of booming print culture and Sarah was in fact cocooned in a den of books, allowed time and space to read at will – something denied to most in that age of child labour. To more intellectual readers it might have suggested something further: an affirmation of the egregious travesty of rural working life, a lady of leisure among the working class!
Readers at the time were also well acquainted with images of girls reading, in the ubiquitous narrative painting of the time. Typical is Alfred Provis’ painting ‘Interior-Girl Reading’ in which a girl sits among images of the simple rural life such as the dog asleep at her feet, a cottage wood-fire burning and a sack of grain nearby. All is depicted beneath the low beams of a cottage. Typical of the narrative painting of the time is the symbolism of the material world conveyed. She sits by a Jacobean chair, suggesting the durability of her lifestyle embedded in the English country traditions of simplicity and permanence. Images in the room depict merely bread and water as her diet, and there are brooms by the door, hinting at her lowly physical chores. She is a worker in Christ’s hierarchy. In contrast, Sarah, in the magazine, is shown as a more forthright, bold disciple of Christ. A picture of Golgotha is on the wall by her head; flowers in wreaths and bunches on her bed proclaim death as she sits with maternal power overlooking her. Yet it is subversive: the mass of books, many of them secular, suggest far more than the one plain bible that Provis’s girl is studying. Sarah’s image tells a story of that odd paradox: that renunciation of this fallen world – the vale of tears – may suggest worldly comfort and solid middle-class security.
It prompts one to reflect today on what lies beneath this rush of interest, and the packed trains going from London to Pencader. The more knowledge was professionalised, markedly so with the rise of specialisms, the more the hunger for mysteries intensified. The Victorians wanted a dark shadow over the intellectual landscape, rather than the endless sunshine of understanding and definition. Flora and fauna across the world were being located and classified, but in the deep interstices of this new world there were fragments of the unknown, areas of the human species beyond comprehension.
The other way to spin the image and the reality behind it (and many did spin the tale this way) is of course that the whole business was a sham and a gold mine for Evan Jacob. Visitors left coins, though these were not an entrance fee. But no-one would have the hard-faced cheek not to leave something there. The fact was, many thought, that here was a case of a young girl faking hysteria and manipulating her soft-headed parents. Incredibly, she had also fooled the local vicar and other professional men who were apparently ready to believe that a young girl could live on air and a little water for eighteen months.
It was as if there was a deep need for a shrine, for a new nineteenth century focus for pilgrimage. In fact, what the celebrity of Sarah shows us is that the age-old phenomenon of anorexia mirabilis was still built into the iconic saintly woman in cultural narratives. In the Middle Ages, female ascetics had practised fasting as part of a strict Christian regimen, something integral to their lifestyles of denial. The idea of the strict regulation of desire was very appealing to the Victorians. The bedrock of the cultural narratives we see in their art and literature is concerned with the need for renunciation. Looking at the lives of the saints who fasted, they saw ideals representing the kinds of renunciation preached from the pulpit and in Christian tracts. Sarah, along with most of her generation across the land, would have read stories about such sensual denial, but more generally, it was something embedded in the Victorian need for control – of the desires and passions.
Popular poetry was loaded with notions of renunciation too; Christina Rosetti’s poem, ‘Passing Away’ was published in 1862, typified the kind of sentiments young Sarah would have been familiar with:
A canker in thy bud, they leaf must decay.
A midnight, at cock-crow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;
Watch thou and pray
Then I answered: Yea.
Young Sarah was indeed dressed ready for the ‘bridegroom’.
Where did excess lead one? That was a question running through the lurid crime stories and trial dramas – even to the scaffold tales. Extremes of lust, desire, wrath and covetousness led to the prison cell, but more agonisingly, to a hell in the self. As Milton had written of Satan, ‘he was himself his own dungeon’.
The Medieval ascetic women who fasted were well known to Sarah’s contemporaries. In the medieval world the control of eating in the lives of holy women was all about showing the nature of suffering and deprivation, the quelling of carnal desires; to the layperson, it was a control of appetite as something instructional to those who had to consider the nature of sin every week, in sermons and prayers.
Anorexia mirabilis was also, in the world of the Middle Ages, part of a metaphor integral to Christian lifestyle and values: eating food was linked to the hunger for God and the ‘banquet of God’ that awaited the holy. Of course, taking the wafer at mass and sipping the blood of Christ in the altar wine was the universal expression of how ‘taking’ food to the body was a metaphor for accepting Christ in one’s life.
The contrast between that version of anorexia and the versions which were to be described just a year or so after Sarah’s fasting by the great doctor Sir William Gull, was immense. The medieval version was built into the life and the culture of renunciation; it was a primary expression of ascetic beliefs and life. Whereas Gull, as will be discussed in chapter 7, was dealing with forms of eating disorder close to what we understand today.
The visitors kept coming and Sarah’s fame grew. But the local dignitaries were bothered by the negative image and the disgusting distortions of what they saw as the truth. The time for a second watching came, a collective will to test their local celebrity and to defend the honour of Wales.
4
Invasion of the Nurses
The bed should stand with its head towards the wall and
the foot towards the centre of the room or wa
rd…
Black’s Medical Dictionary
The head to head confrontation could not be denied. In his letter, Fowler had cast aspersions on the Welsh men of religion. There would have to be a response, something to defend the nation and to continue to demonstrate that young Sarah’s situation was nothing to do with hysteria, and everything to do with something beyond the knowledge of the men of science. There would have to be a far more thorough ‘watch’ on her.
The man of the moment was John Griffith, known to readers of the Baner ac Amserau Cymru as ‘Gohebydd’ – the correspondent.’ John Thomas took a photo of Griffith around 1870 in which we see a short, smart man, with long coat and stick, bow-tie and waistcoat, with his left hand magisterially tucked into his top trouser-pocket. He stands by his top hat, placed showily on a chair, with a copy of Y Faner put prominently into the hat, for the viewer to see. Here was a man of words. By his other side is a panel with a watercolour of a castle in a Welsh landscape – possibly Harlech.
Griffith was eager to put his energy and words behind a good cause; these were usually radical causes, in an age in which Wales had a bad press in Britain. People remembered the Rebecca Riots and the Chartist violence of twenty years before Sarah’s case. More topical was Griffith’s anger at the widespread loss of land suffered by people who had voted against the Tory landlords. As Iwan Meical Jones has pointed out, Griffith was ‘the first professional Welsh language journalist’.
He rallied to the cause as far as the Jacob family were concerned. Griffith set to work to organise a second vigil over the girl, and he enlisted the help of a Dr Phillips, who was assistant physician accoucheur (a man-midwife) at Guy’s Hospital in London. It was a case of a London Welshman helping a fellow countryman, and it was all about ensuring that this time, the establishment of medical power would be involved. Phillips was later to become Assistant Obstetric Physician at Guy’s in 1870; earlier in his career he had been Demonstrator of Anatomy and was also Assistant Physician at the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street. The historian of Guy’s, H.C. Cameron, wrote that ‘during his brief career few men were more universally esteemed and beloved and the hospital was plunged in sorrow at his loss.’