The Water Doctor's Daughters by Pauline Conolly

Author:Pauline Conolly [Pauline Conolly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719814815
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Carmichael-Smyth said she had spoken to Mr Rashdale (John Rashdall) at length about Dr Marsden. The minister had assured her a more generous, kindhearted and affectionate father did not live, but that he had erred by ‘weakly suffering himself to be alarmed by this horrid woman upon a matter which he could not arrive at but through her’.

Further on in the letter she returned to the Doudet case. She had been out walking when an acquaintance called to her from a carriage saying the governess was acquitted. Mrs Carmichael-Smyth told Anny she had retorted, ‘…is she I’m glad of it wretched woman for her punishment is her own conscience & may God forgive her’. When the acquaintance suggested she was judging the governess unfairly, her response was, ‘I can do no other, knowing what I do.’ She claimed to have inside knowledge of the case: ‘Some circumstance proving her guilt & the terror in wh she kept the poor children, from one of their own people who was not a witness.’

Unfortunately she did not name the person, or explain why they did not present their evidence. The old lady was even more upset when her walking companion entered the fray: ‘There’s a dilemma; if she’s innocent the others [the Marsden sisters] are guilty [i.e. of masturbation].’14 Mrs Carmichael-Smyth was speechless with fury, but the woman was merely voicing what many people felt.

Thackeray’s daughters passed news of the verdict to their father. In a letter dated 22 April 1855 he could not resist a dig at the ‘fire and brimstone’ brand of religion his mother shared with the Calvinistic Mrs Erskine and Jane Stirling, ‘The girls told me about Mrs Erskine & the Doudet flare up. So here’s another instance in wh. religion isn’t peace but a sword. I suppose they are so interested in the woman because she is a convert – and they wont see the truth about her, and hate those who do.’ His last words referred to the fact that his mother, a friend of Mrs Erskine and her sister Jane Stirling, had fallen out with them over the case. Pronouncing his own judgement on the governess, Thackeray added, ‘What a fiend! I wish she could be locked up in that closet where she kept the poor girls.’15

At the very time Mrs Carmichael-Smyth was railing against Doudet and the French jury, an American correspondent was filing a report on the trial for the New York publication Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It appeared in May, amid pictures of the season’s promenade gowns, silk bonnets and fashionable black lace mantillas. After explaining the background to the Doudet case, the correspondent highlighted the widespread shock at the governess’s acquittal:

There was what the French called a ‘grande sensation’ in the courtroom. Everyone was taken by surprise; and the next day nothing was talked about in the salons or in omnibuses but the strange verdict of the Doudet trial. Some attributed it to bribes; others to the influence of the royal recommendation

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