by Stephen Wade
The females of the species were still downtrodden, but there were signs of change. The year 1858 saw a debate on women’s situation regarding work and legal entity, in such places as The Englishwoman’s Journal. Then in 1865 the first stirrings of a women’s suffrage movement were heard in the petitions created by the Ladies of Langham Place. This was reinforced by the publication of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women in 1869.
But what about being a young girl at that time? My account of deprivation and starvation of children, linked to the workhouse and the poor law, has shown the precarious nature of life for young adults. Child prostitution was a problem in the cities; cruelty to children was a huge problem, and not until 1884 was there any kind of society to protect children. The establishment of the NSPCC came in 1895.
Children like Sarah, in the rural areas and in the towns, worked very long hours. The inspection which gathered evidence on this in 1866 reported this statement by a boy in Suffolk: ‘At bird-keeping I had to stay from 6 till 6, except at barley, and then from 5 a.m. till 8 p.m. Sunday was the same as other days.’ There was a general need for child labour on the land in the country areas, and school log-books always list of large numbers of children away from class to work in the fields.
Sarah was more fortunate, in that she had brothers and older sisters, so she and the youngest girl would have worked more indoors. There is no doubt that she was given time with her books, and her destiny would have been to marry and be a good wife – that is, have all the domestic skills of cleaning and cooking, as well as knowing about child-rearing. Sarah was well-read and had a creative side. The 1860s girl in the middle class was closer to Sarah’s lifestyle and acquisitions than was the typical working class labouring girl.
Images of girls like Sarah in art, such as ‘The Farmer’s Daughter’ by William Lee Hankey, painted in 1899, show such girls working in the fields and lanes; here an aproned girl carries a stick and looks after a dozen geese. It would be understandable for some to respond simply that Sarah welcomed the attention generated by her illness, and was on some kind of ego-trip. That image would never match with her being genuinely ill and, regardless of what the illness was, we have to look for an understanding that goes way beyond that kind of link to an outlook that provokes yet more questions.
Looking at Sarah’s story from the standpoint of the 1860s, one aspect stands out; it relates to the idea that the advent of starvation casts a dark shadow of criticism and blame over the society in which it exists. For Victorian Britain starvation was a stigma, a source of shame and embarrassment. The Pax Britannica might have stretched across all the distant places on the globe that were painted pink, but back home, in Wales, that fabled backwardness identified by the Llyfrau Gleision had become even more shameful than the poverty in the London streets. Sarah was a young girl in a place which had become a thorn in the flesh of the great Empire on which the sun never sets, comparable to Ireland, as discussed, in the racial perspectives of the time.
The Jacob trial at assizes was deliberately made an operation of media spin. If we consider eating n the context of how knowledge was understood and applied in the society then, we find that Sarah represents the nature of girlhood, in terms which modern thought cannot comprehend. She did not starve in order to be accepted by the culture she was in; but there is a factor of the time that applies: as some commentators have pointed out, the fasting girls came along at a time of a shift to modernity, that ‘it was no longer enough just to survive’ as Lucinda Kunkel puts it. Anorexia, whatever the cause, when it was taken up by Dr Gull, related to aspects of modernity, of the changing perceptions of the self in a paternalistic culture.
Clues as to the larger picture abound in the two letters by the local professional men. Knowledge generally was being relocated and redefined across the land, backed by such thought as was embodied in Essays and Reviews, and yet ‘H.H. Davies, surgeon, Llandysul’ could write to Seren Cymru of Sarah:
About sixteen months ago, she expressed a wish to have the Sacraments Administered to her by the clergyman of the parish, and since then all the inmates, who are considered respectable and truth-telling people, protest that she has not taken anything into her mouth in the form of nourishment or otherwise… I do not comprehend the motive… The readers may wish to know my unflinching opinion. I really and truly am perplexed, well knowing that nothing is impossible in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of all mankind.
Sarah, he states, asked for the sacrament; this must refer to extreme unction, suggesting that the girl thought she was in her last hours and had not long left to live. She asked for it – not the parents. That was well before any notoriety, so it surely confirms that there was a serious illness in her, far more than Davies seems to have understood, and he wrote that, when called out at around that time, he ‘expressed an opinion accordingly, that dissolution was not near at hand’.
Davies’ knowledge came from long years of work in therapy, and from acquired medical information through reading. He labelled the illness ‘catalepsy’ when he wrote to the paper. He knew that the illness was ‘extraordinary’ and that was yet another generic term for what was not understood. One definition expresses it like this: ‘The subjects of catalepsy are in most instances females of highly nervous or hysterical temperament. The exciting cause of an attack is usually mental emotion operating either suddenly… or more gradually in the way of prolonged depression.’ That is, his stock vocabulary and second-hand knowledge had let him down, and there were obvious limits to his experience in ‘hands-on’ doctoring. There was space in his intellect for the thought that ‘nothing is impossible in the sight of the Creator’.
When we turn to the Rev. Evan Jones, we need to be reminded of what he said in his letter to The Welshman: ‘Medical men persist in saying that the thing is quite impossible, but all the nearest neigh-bours… entertain no doubt whatever on the subject and I am myself of the same opinion…’. He clearly places ‘medical men’ in a lesser category of knowledge organisation than the Creator.
Both Davies and Jones are voicing their need to have a place in the intellectual and spiritual scheme of knowledge for the numinous, the unseen, the workings of a divine power. It is useful to recall here that in this period, the ‘cunning folk’ who practised cures and astrology were still referred to as ‘wizards’, and phrenologists liked to study their skulls. One analysis of a ‘wizard type’ was this: ‘I have been both astonished and affronted by their effrontery, as they revealed the tricks they adopted to work on the feelings of the credulous and superstitious.’
The Welsh Fasting Girl lived at a time when the axis of accepted knowledge and the way it was organised was being reconfigured. Her condition was close to anorexia mirabilis, and what was ‘admired’ in 1869 shifted from the realm of the miraculous to the bizarre, the ‘beyond nature’ phenomenon. Those who had put boundaries on their knowledge saw a sham; the ones who still saw the Creator, a being capable of anything, remained impervious to change, and in the 1860s, for all kinds of reasons, the challenge was out in the open.
In that context, a court of law usually brings out the very centre of such oppositions, showing the fault lines in all mind-sets; but at Carmarthen assizes in 1870, the law machine had been well-oiled to attain its target – to gun down the forces at work in a place where, it was becoming more and more apparent, the miraculous might eclipse the new enlightenment.
12
Conclusions and Theories Abound
All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.
John Locke
The story of Sarah Jacob has been subject to many revisions as the years have passed. The fact that she was never a ‘living skeleton’ places her between the hunger artists and the medieval saintly women. Yet that has not included psychological and sociological accounts from being advanced. In my interpretation, I have tried to pitch the language somewhere between the theoretical and the historical narrati
ve. What emerges from this, increasingly as different perspectives are adopted, is that it was a spiritual impetus initially: there was in the girl a belief that she could be some kind of focus for the assertion that the stories were true, but also that through food a child could achieve notoriety, as her reading would have told her. In my examples from the 1830s Methodist narratives, the children on their death beds are important; their deaths matter.
Historians have located the medieval and the post-industrial periods as the defining contexts of food rejection and self-starvation; but in the latter, the usual motive is to attain a physical ideal. I see no reason why Sarah, appearing on the scene, when the first great social upheavals had occurred, could not become some kind of champion of the cause of the communal past. After all, the great social documentarists such as Mayhew and Binny, in their monumental work on London in the 1850s, The Criminal Prisons of London, made it perfectly clear that modernity in the shape of urban life was failing fast. If the new towns and cities were the locations of that modern thinking in which knowledge directed and organised everything, then the result was misery. In the popular imagination, if there were to be miracles, then they belonged in the country, where some changeless factor of known community and culture still counted for something. It was in the middle years of the century that fairs were suppressed; that enclosure was having its effects of depopulation acutely felt; that the new ideas still met with resistance, as George Eliot showed so brilliantly in Middlemarch, (1871-72), with the opposition in the country community to the new Dr Lydgate and his fancy ideas.
People at the time wanted a ‘wonder of nature’ to be more than the grotesque sights in the travelling shows. If there was something miraculous in a small place out in Wales or in Tutbury, then that appeared to confirm the views expressed in the letters of Jones and Davies, as it did when accounts of ghosts were given in the press.
In the end, with all the theories and interpretations scrutinised, writers on this case have to sum up. For me, the answer lies, most likely, in Sarah contracting a definite physiological illness, probably a zoonotic one from the calves under her roof, the results of which were, naturally, evident in both body and mind. In fact, with today’s knowledge of myalgia and glandular fever, there was ample evidence in her behaviour and condition to support the view that the enemy inside was invisible to the eyes of the doctors of the time.
Time passed, and her ongoing condition created the family dynamics of survival and coping we now understand. From this there developed the collusion that Laing explains. That would be a tight family network, visible to the law and to modern medicine as something else entirely – an imposture and a case of hysteria. These family dynamics are for me satisfactorily explained by the theory of collusion. We all know the invisible but known potency of a family relationship based on ‘phantasy’ – to use R.D. Laing’s term. Since his time, it has had a new life in the philosophical writings and social commentaries of a number of writers, all interested in the idea of how ‘phantasy’ (spelt that way to distinguish it from the more common and general use) takes over from the grasp on the reality of the immediate social world. If a child, succumbing to what she is wanted to be by a parent, sees the playfulness in that, then the phantasy will be sustained.
If this is convincing, then it is a most enlightening example of how twentieth century theories explain something that perplexed contemporaries in the Victorian period.
The new professionals needed to classify and then work on applying knowledge. We still do it, and so the study of Sarah Jacob goes on. Many might see all types of eating disorders now as ‘hunger politics’ – that there is an act of resistance in such matters. That would make all cases, through time, hunger artists, and it has to be said that Sarah’s ‘performance’ as the Fasting Girl was always going to downgrade the miraculous to the meretricious. We would struggle to find evidence for an act of resistance on her part. Unlike her wealthy middle class counterparts, those studied by Dr Gull, Sarah had little to resist, at least on the evidence we have. There will not be any more evidence, that is, of anything relating to Freudian interpretation. The doctors after her death, writing on the case, must have been longing for some kind of discovery on that score. But no, the Jacob family dispersed, not quite into oblivion, but into anonymity.
The reference works and the internet will go on giving the same facts, but they will always elude us. What always suggests itself is the kind of intimation the poet Robert Graves had when he wrote ‘Welsh Incident’. In the poem, Graves recounts a series of actions, always saying ‘I was coming to that’ and the last line repeats the mystery: ‘I was coming to that…’. Sarah’s story will be the same. There will always be the kind of question that the detective asks, and there will always be a source that says, ‘I was coming to that’.
Llanfihangel-ar-Arth is still a place where the historian looking for clues will be frustrated in the search for the ultimate truth, but then, that is an illusion anyway. It is still a small place, and one where local people are aware of the mystery in their local history. Richard Ireland wrote about being there, and not simply studying records but ‘walking around country lanes and looking over hedges’. This story pushes one into that kind of closeness, because there is always the feeling that truth will trickle away.
How we all long for the discovery of a lost journal, perhaps by the mysterious and silent servant of the house or one of the older sisters. But then, this will always be willed to stay the story of the girl who lived on air, and until there is definitive proof otherwise, that is what she was. My final thought, after looking at this case as a social historian, was that we are still really doing what Herodotus, the father of history, relished in: embellishing the probable facts, dwelling on what we think are certainties, and at the same time being unable to resist the rumour, speculation and gossip that was, almost definitely, within earshot of the Rev. Jones, when he wrote that the neighbours were ‘thoroughly acquainted with the case’.
They were, like us, thoroughly acquainted with as much as we have, and the gaps remain. Sarah Jacob’s fast, imposture or not, happened at a time when the organisation for knowledge in British society was on the cusp between the old orthodoxy and the first inklings of modernity. To understand the perplexity of her contemporaries, high and low, ultimately we need to leave modern theorizing to one side and concentrate on a girl who enjoyed the limelight but who was almost certainly physically ill – and seriously so. If we never lose sight of that, then all the above discussions and suggestions can be applied without a loss of common sense, and that was in short supply around the long house in the late 1860s when people appear to have longed for something extraordinary in their perfunctory, circumscribed lives in a world of fact.
Bibliography and Sources
As with all historical enquiry, writers generally find themselves indebted to those who have gone before in the mainstream paths of intellectual and social history. In this respect, credit goes to Joan Jacobs Brumberg, whose work on anorexia through history opened up potential lines of thought to all future historians on the subject. In contrast, with a close focus on the Welsh context only, there is John Cule’s book, a source for other writers who tackled the subject before I began the project. Mr Cule was able to apply his medical as well as his historical knowledge – something called for ever since Fowler’s early work, listed below.
Yet the story of Sarah Jacob is not simply a medical enquiry: it has a complex legal entanglement, and help with that has come notably from Richard Ireland, of the Welsh Legal History Society.
Many of the following sources are obscure indeed, and such is the nature of this remarkable case that it has entailed some persistent searching in several areas of secondary importance, but which have opened up some enlightenment in some of the darker rooms of that great mansion that is Welsh social history.
One of the most helpful and informative sources was not verbal at all: the photos of John Thomas, from the archive at the National Library of Wales
(and published by Y Lolfa) bring the material world of rural Wales in the mid-Victorian period very much to life.
There is a vast and still growing library of scholarship on Sarah’s story too: academics from areas such as gender studies, women’s history, the social history of medicine and legal history have all shown an interest, and more reflection and analysis continues to arrive in print. I have consulted much of this, even to the borderline yet related subjects of hunger artists and ‘performance studies’ in general. As with all intellectual history, some is focused clearly on a line of thought with close relevance to the topic in hand, and some is essentially linked to other disciplines.
Naturally, there are sources in Welsh, also, primarily from the periodical press of the time, and I have consulted and used these only to a limited extent; the most directly influential ones are, naturally, the narrative, edifying texts for children on religious themes, and the newspaper reports for Welsh readers.
The most significant of the related legal issues is arguably the notion of manslaughter and its problematic in Victorian legal discourse and debate. It became prominent in official reports and enquiries, so these feature prominently here and I have tried to make these appear below with some sort of accessible rationale.
It still fills me with wonder, when I reflect on how a regional tale like this grew and grew, like Topsy, and in consequence, the bibliography of research on this also grows apace, so my selection is far from exhaustive, but will prove more than helpful for anyone who wishes to add more to the work already done. I hope that some readers will want to explore areas I have merely touched on, and perhaps continue the enquiries into the truth of the case.