by Stephen Wade
When the papers headlined a miracle, and in rural Wales just a few years after the Essays and Reviews debate, it is no wonder that men like Dr Fowler emulated the Baden-Powell approach. In fact Wales was prominent n the debate. There was a view expressed in the mid-1860s that Welsh ministers and clergymen fell short of the required standard. This attitude appears to have been aimed at any man of the church who was not fully informed of the current debates and who was not perhaps actively engaged in improving Christian education. A letter to The Times in response to one of these attacks summarises the general charges: ‘The clergy of Wales are not the rude, rough, ignorant people your correspondent “Saesneg” would have them believed to be. Those I am acquainted with in Wales are decidedly superior, as well as in refinement as in education, to the class of country parsons I happen to know in the north of England. Even the Welsh Methodist ministers have mostly had the benefit of a regular course of education at a college…’.
The attack on the Welsh is absolute nonsense, of course. In fact, Sarah herself, as a Sunday School student, would have been well read. The literary culture around her circle of school friends and relatives was impressive indeed. In a feature called ‘Our Library Table’, the North Wales Chronicle in 1860, gives us a clear idea of that culture; its report on the Abbot Street Sunday School includes a list of prizes and related activities. At a well attended meeting, a list of books and prizes was given, and the categories were: best essay upon a theme; best lines upon “the power of prayer”; best translation of a poem from English to Welsh; for the best reading of Welsh poems and for other recitations. Popular reading included Y Brython, the national magazine of Welsh literature, and the Bibl yr Addoliad Teuluiad (The Family Worship Bible) printed by the London Printing and Publishing Company, which was produced in 24 monthly parts, with pictures and notes – a Bible in Welsh. The bedrock of all this learning there was the British and Foreign Bible Society’s circulation of tracts, and the figures for their production had grown from 30,000 in 1804 to 65 million in 1859-60, with works in 158 languages, including Welsh. Henry Richard wrote that in 1866 there were periodicals in Welsh with a circulation of 120,000. There was also the Gwyddoniadur Cymreig, a massive undertaking from the publishing firm of Gee: an encyclopaedia in ten volumes.
This determination to educate the Welsh, and more importantly, for the Welsh people to get an education for themselves, was no doubt partly a consequence of the notorious ‘Brad y Llyfrau Gleision’ – the Treason of the Blue Books – a report on Welsh education published in 1847, and spanning 1,252 pages, which painted a picture of mass illiteracy and abysmally inadequate basis for education. But as historian John Davies has explained, the (English) commissioners who wrote it ‘… asked complicated questions and depended upon inadequate translation and…misinterpreted the answers of the children’. One result was a moral crusade, as transgressions of all kinds were linked to poor education, but another was that a lust for learning was engendered, present in Wales to this day. Readers were born, and was there reading matter in abundance.
Sarah, as we noted earlier, was a voracious reader and she also loved creative writing; she would have been immersed in all this learning, at home and school. That same solid basis of education was also present for poorer students. But the national English popular feeling (what might now be called tabloid opinion) included a certain amount of anti-Celt expression at the time, through which the Welsh were denigrated. The Irish were depicted in magazines as brutal, semi-simian creatures, as if they were debased from humanity, mere repulsive bog-trotters, and the Welsh, being Celts, had similar stereotypes applied. These ideas were propagated in a book by John Beddoe, The Races of Britain (1862), in which he claimed that intelligent people had jaws which did not protrude; the Celts were supposed to be prognathous in that respect. As Anthony Wohl has written on the subject, the Celt became something of a malevolent cliché of Victorian racism.’
Had there been something ‘miraculous’ at Lletherneuadd? Some Victorians would have expected no less from a people who were subject to these kinds of prejudices. People must have read about Sarah, considered that it was sensational, and then wondered how a little girl could live on air for two years. Some would have no doubt simply laughed, but there were many who wanted miraculous events as often as possible. In the fifteenth century, a person could be burned as a heretic for claiming they had performed a miracle. But in 1869, when these things were allegedly true, or at least a subject worthy of investigation by doctors and lawyers, there was a possibility that it was the kind of thing they read in the bible and in the Sunday School stories.
If there was a miracle at Lletherneuadd, how could it be explained? Did the survival of a child even without food mean that she was somehow specially marked out by God as a saint on earth? In broader terms, was this supernature – something defying the divine laws of creation?
Again, we need to remind ourselves that the world around the communities of South Wales was still that of the dynion hysbys and folk beliefs, fringe medicine cures and even necromancy. Alongside the new medical manuals there were still adverts such as this in the local paper: ‘INTERESTING TESTIMONY IN FAVOUR OF DR LOCOCK’S PULMONIC WAFERS’. An eminent Wesleyan minister, the Rev. W.H. Evans, in writing the biography of his father says, ‘He had been very painfully affected by an asthmatic complaint and a troublesome cough; but by the use of Dr Locock’s wafers these were removed’, and John Harries, the dyn hysbys, was said to have an annual ritual in the woods in which he read incantations, while the next day he would be a regular medical practitioner.
Fasting Girls were a familiar phenomenon though, as suggested earlier, having a place in the public imagination not far removed from what they might see in Madame Tussaud’s new 1864 season in London, where the public could study the ‘Chamber of Comparative Physiognomy’ and be convinced that evil criminals had grotesque facial features that marked them out as extraordinary – spectacles of wonder in fact. The deepening during the period of the opposition between knowledge and ignorance lay behind this urge to inform and organise knowledge on the one hand and the need not to know on the other.
The fasting girls’ existence as ‘spectacles’ had a strange legacy. The subject of a long fast became first of all an aspect of medical research, and later the creation of the phenomenon of the ‘hunger artist’. My earlier account, in chapter 3, of the Victorian love of freeze frame narrative and tableau symbolism, and its extension into narrative painting, circus shows and exhibitions, gives evidence of a twisted affection for what might be called the fascination of still life. This, once fasting had been established as a mesmeric attraction for the masses, found these two new lives: as experiment and as supernature.
Essays and Reviews may have caused the society generally to revise its views on biblical miracles, and on miracles in general, but nevertheless, in the last decades of the century spiritualism ascended into immense popularity, and with that went also the potential of attracting the media (and the medical world once again) by living on air for a considerable time.
The case that most reached into the public interest was that of Dr Tanner. He undertook a forty-day fast at Clarendon Hall in New York in June, 1880. He shed forty pounds in weight, and then quickly took to eating with a voracious appetite soon after the fast period ended. The media could not write about him without including comparisons to Sarah Jacob, but as one of Tanner’s colleagues wrote long after the event, the whole business was for a medical experiment. The anonymous author in 1930 wrote that he or she wanted to ‘dissipate the fiction that the fast of Dr Tanner was made in order to attract notoriety’. In fact, the ordeal he undertook was done for reasons he explained in a private letter to the writer of The Pioneers of Therapeutic Fasting in America: ‘I was at such a low ebb physically and mentally at the time that I did not care whether I lived or died, and I determined that, since the drugs gave me no relief, I would starve myself to death ere I again would suffer the physical misery that I had for nine months p
receding…’. Tanner’s fast cured him. He was healthy after the ordeal, and all his symptoms disappeared. It was all haphazard – ‘no plan had been arranged’ wrote his colleague, adding that there was no aim to bring the matter to public attention.
Of a very different hue was the advent of the hunger artist, and only twenty years after Sarah’s death, a Signor Succi began a forty-day fast in a canopied space at the Aquarium, Westminster. The Daily Graphic published an illustration showing Succi sitting by a table piled high with paper, while two supervisors sat at the other end of the table, tucking into a square meal. The scene is watched by a crowd of gentlemen, held behind a strong wooden fence. Spectacular fasting had become a branch of entertainment. That same periodical monitored his progress with a reports such as: ‘Succi maintains his spirits well, and participated heartily in the merriment aroused among the watching committee when one of their number… opened a registered letter addressed to Succi… which contained a packet of quill toothpicks.’
Then the Graphic did something which was clearly intended to drive a point home and to illustrate the rather despicable and shoddy side of showing off malnutrition as a jolly jest and a performance. It printed, in the same issue as a Succi report, a feature (with a very powerful emotional picture of Florence Brook ‘aged 11 years 8 months, weight 36lbs 13ozs Rescued by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which holds its meeting at the Mansion House today.’ Florence was found in a starving condition at Barnsley, ‘gnawing a piece of rotten wood to satisfy her craving for food’.
The age of the hunger artist had arrived, but in a world in which children were starving. References to Sarah Jacob would have been packed with irony for those readers who recalled the Welsh case and its outcome. For Succi though, the commercial motive was well to the fore. The Times reported in April, that ‘A very high charge was made on Saturday to his receptions, and the stalls and seats were raised in price at the time when the first meal was to be eaten.’
There had been a transmutation, then, through the century, from fasting through illness or mental condition, to one of showmanship and profit. What was it all about, and how are we to delve into the psyche behind these fasts? Modern analysts have numerous theories to account for Sarah and for Succi, but maybe it’s worth turning to an imaginative writer for some insight into the performance in this fasting. Sigal Gooldin has written that fasting girls are a ‘hybrid phenomenon, attracting simultaneous gazes, not a single unified gaze… there were no secular forms of admiration for the miraculous.’ That is, in Sarah’s case, there was the complexity that she clearly enjoyed being seen as a ‘wonder’ and yet, unlike Succi and other ‘artists’ there was no commercial motive, openly made, and there may not have been one at all, in spite of the decision at Carmarthen assizes.
For further insight into underlying possibilities, we need to look at Franz Kafka’s short story, A Hunger Artist, published in 1924. He was obviously thinking of the examples in the canon, as it were – from the early fasting girls to Succi and Tanner, but Kakfa is interested in the mind games, the strange narcissism of the commercial imperative. His artist, described in a third-person narrative, is eager to be a professional, stressing the ‘artist’ element in him, not simply the passive spectacle. That is at the heart of the hunger artists, and of Sarah. We might call it the aim to please, to satisfy what became ‘a public’ as when the narrator of Kafka’s story says, ‘He had learned from experience that by gradually intensified publicity the interest of a city could be kept alive for forty days…’. It is as if this activity really has become an established genre of a set art-form.
It has to be asked of the Jacob case, then, did Sarah interact with her ‘public’ and purposefully put on a show, or was the tableau that became the ‘Fasting Girl in her Bed’ nothing but a chance spin-off from real suffering? There is no doubt that she and most likely her mother and sisters, took pleasure in arranging the yellow ribbon, the flowers and the books around Sarah. The effect was to make everything static, to create a microcosm in which there was stasis, nothing ever changing but the dressing, the superficial features. In a way, Sarah Jacob was willed to be a permanent attraction. This provides the oddest paradox of all in this intriguing story: that a genuinely sick young girl could also be on show, with the sense of interaction that Kafka understood. That the audience’s habituation to the performance was something that would become jaded. The story is one of the jaded palate in a world that lapped up every form of entertainment that society could offer.
There is no doubt that Sarah Jacob had an illness. But there is equally no doubt that she was able to join in with the collusion that her father wanted. Other family members became minor players in the family defences as the outside world impinged. The world beyond the long house at Lletherneuadd was a menacing one. It was a world of uncertainty and threat. A house full of the laughter of children, surrounded by a moderately successful farm and good, solid parents, an outfit able to afford a live-in servant – all this was exceptional in the Welsh context at the time when farm labourers and small tenants had a very hard time indeed, and most went to the wall in a society without a safety-net for economic failure.
That greater world – of English authority, of the church’s constant regulating presence, of the duality of language and of identity – was a world in which fact and knowledge was increasingly influential as the determinant of what your identity is and why meanings were stamped on life from well beyond the confines of your home. What better way to keep clear of all this than to play the games of collusion, to enjoy the fantasy that family members could sustain? Then, in the centre, the place of honour, there was the emergence of the sick girl whose illness that meant she was separated, sanctified as something very special. Daddy’s little girl was equal to a place in heaven, like all those fated suffering children in the stories, the tracts and the sermons.
All this would have been enough: it would have meant that there was a harmless episode of mind-playing in the back of beyond. It was no more harmful than John Harries Davies and his astrology and spells, or the inspired poetry in the visions of the bards at the eisteddfod (held in Carmarthen only recently) in which the literary people also had their ritual and their ways of imaginative escape.
The stories stepped over the line into the public gaze. The fantasy that could have stayed at the table and the furrow, the cattle shed and the dairy, crept across into the world inhabited by men of authority such as the vicar and the solicitor, the men dressed in sober black who sorted out destinies and made things happen.
Evan and Sarah Jacob, and their company, had a performance to create, but it was highly unusual, in that there was suffering in the midst of it; the leading lady was maimed, somehow singled out by Dr Mawr to bear the pain, to carry sin. The performance seemed to be manageable though, and the men of fact and knowledge played the game as required. Duw, there was an audience: Saesneg as well from that London.
The last thing young Sarah would have understood was to be called a hunger artist, and yet that is what the decision of the jury at the assize said, or implied. If they were guilty of an imposture, why then they had put on a show? There was no anorexia or emaciation going on. Sarah did not hate the fat on her body. She was happy to have it and to read aloud, sometimes to laugh, to move from English to Welsh in her talk to visitors. Yet she presented problems when the slightest inch of routine was taken by outside authority. Those outside, when all said and done, were not in the collusion. This was a family affair.
The story I am assembling allows for the silence of the other siblings, and the place of Hannah in the shadows. The legal minds were happy that the law of coverture gave them a chance to leave her there and to shine the beam of suspicion on Evan. He was the easiest target one could imagine. Everything he uttered in the whole saga from first to last, could have been designed to condemn him to that year in Swansea gaol.
The one picture we have of Evan, from the prison record, is of a sturdy, steadfast man, the kind
who would keep to his word, and he continued to claim that that was exactly what he did. His is the tale of a man and his vow, obdurate and fixed on letting no-one down: coming across like a criminal, many a criminal in fact, who had stood in that dock and kept saying they had not done anything wrong.
The small world of the Jacobs had to exist in a big world though, one in which there were questions that would not go away, like Dickens’ Mr M’Choakumchild in his schoolroom, insisting, ‘What .I want is facts, nothing but facts…’ The truth is that, as T.S. Eliot famously said, ‘Humankind cannot bear much reality’. When facts keep on explaining and defining reality, then something has to be done to protect the beliefs a family and a locality have always had, wrapped up in their faith.
11
The Problems Being an 1860s Girl Can Bring…
Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I have repeatedly drawn into my story the decade in which little Sarah Jacob lived. The bare story in the Carmarthen long house has been crowded in my telling of the fast with references to publications, shows, religious tracts, diseases, professional men and their lives, animal ailments, political viewpoints, and most of all, with knowledge. The way in which Victorians understood their knowledge of the world and of God wraps around Sarah like a very uncomfortable, stifling garment.
Al these things have been considered because of the particular importance of the 1860s for children and working families. It was a time when the revolution in print and popular entertainment gave hints at what sort of cultural enrichment was on the horizon, notably with the 1870 Education Act. In 1867 the electorate was extended to include more working men, but trade unions still had a long struggle to endure for legality.