The Doctor's Wife Is Dead by Andrew Tierney

Author:Andrew Tierney [Tierney, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241979105
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

It was brave of Ellen to move back into Barrack Street, but not entirely suprising, given the grimness of her situation in Pound Street. There was, indeed, legal precedent for the view that if a man deserted or ill-treated his wife, a court of equity could compel him to provide for her from her own property.17

Ellen, on Langley’s account, behaved guilelessly in revealing to her husband the chain of events she hoped to provoke by moving back to Barrack Street. Langley, not lacking in guile, happily thwarted this plan. ‘I did not fall into the trap that was laid for me by those wily hypocrites. I at once ordered her up to her garret, where she shall live and die, sooner than I shall allow myself to be so imposed on as to give a bitch of her kind £60 a year, when I draw but £21 17s 6d on her account.’

Relishing the hand he had just played, he said his wife would live a life of misery unto death unless a financial settlement agreeable to himself was reached.

‘So you may tell Tom Poe,’ he continued, ‘[that] I will never give her a fraction more than the interest of her own money, which, if she and her friends are not satisfied with, she may stay where she is and drag out a miserable existence during the remainder of her life.’18

In Langley’s eyes, his wife and her relations – themselves desperately short of funds – were plotting against him. Despite having an annual rental income from the Donnybrook estate of £523, William Poe, like his father before him, owed money to several creditors. The following January, these creditors attempted to force the sale of the estate – though it was so calamitous an economic time no buyer could afford to buy it at a reasonable price and the sale had to be withdrawn.19 Ellen’s surviving brother, Tom, had money problems too. He had owed his father’s estate £600 on his death in 1830, and had spent several years in and out of court, battling his wife’s family for her marriage settlement.20

The Solsboro Poes were also in financial difficulty. Landowners, unable to acquire rents in a time of mass destitution, were likely defaulting the tithe payments necessary to provide the Rev. Mr Poe’s full £600 salary.21 In May 1849, as the workhouse struggled to gather funds, he applied for a 150 per cent increase in his income as Protestant chaplain there (from £20 to £50 a year). Although only 1 per cent of the 3,000 or so inmates were Protestant, he argued that the risk of having to enter the workhouse at all was so high that it demanded better remuneration.22

Although he once had expectations of inheriting Solsboro from his childless older brother, John, much of its value had been squandered. An acquaintance later commented of John, ‘Being childless, he lived a careless, thoughtless life, and far beyond his means – as was the fashion of the day – and consequently went to the usual nameless place that spendthrifts generally go to.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.