In London, that city gorged with wealth, and where palaces filled to the full with treasures extend over a space of several leagues, there are frightful dens,—dens without a name, inhabited by cadaverous souls in hideous bodies,—dens, the like of which do not exist on any point of the globe. Louis Blanc, writing on the ‘Rugby Romance’, Letters on England, September 21st, 1861
As we saw last week, child neglect is common currency in the lives of the Victorian poor, the tales of misery so extreme as to invite parody. But The Rugby Romance was the name given to a startling news item from 1861, a story that made the news because a child’s plight crossed class boundaries.
January, 1859. Richard Guinness Hill, a brewer from Dublin (but no relation to the famed Guinness dynasty), was visiting England in the company of his heavily pregnant wife, Amy Georgina. Mrs Hill was ‘a young lady of great personal attractions and large fortune, the granddaughter of the late Sir Francis Burdett, and niece of Miss Burdett Coutts, who had taken a great interest in her welfare.’ Amy Georgina was only eighteen when she married Hill and her youth and sheltered upbringing may account for some of the events that followed. The couple were en route to London from Liverpool when Amy went into labour; they were forced to break their journey in Rugby and the baby was delivered in a room in a local inn, the only lodgings that were available. As his wife was recuperating, Hill visited the local registrar’s office and registered the child, a boy, under a false name. He then insisted that the newborn should be put out to nurse and went ahead to London to seek ‘appropriate care’ for the child. Upon arrival in the capital, Hill traipsed from Euston to Piccadilly, where he noticed a woman begging in Great Windmill Street; the woman was parading a pair of shivering, barefoot children to elicit pity and Hill spotted an opportunity. He slipped her a coin and made his proposition:
‘Will you take charge of a child? It will not be necessary for you to treat him as if he really belonged to you, and you can dispose of him by putting him into a workhouse, or into an asylum.’
After a little prevarication, the woman conferred with a friend and both women agreed to accept the child and Hill’s offer of £16 ‘ a year’ for the infant’s care. He then wrote to Amy in Rugby and assured her that he had secured suitable provision for the child and asked for the infant to be sent to London by a specific train, in the care of a fourteen-year old serving girl from the inn. This girl, Catherine, was to be a crucial witness, as was the begging woman with whom Hill had contracted the deal. Catherine later testified that she cradled the ten-day old child from Rugby to London, arriving at Euston at midnight. There, she was met by the child’s father and two shabby women, both of whom were drunk. In Catherine’s presence, the father gave his child into the care of the pair of street drinkers. The baby was wrapped in a shawl that had sentimental value for Amy, and she had specifically asked for it to be returned; but the new nursemaid obstreperously insisted on keeping it, and so the shawl went with the child. On returning to Rugby, Catherine voiced her misgivings to the child’s mother but Hill emphatically dismissed the child’s protestations; and Amy, presumably browbeaten by her controlling husband, acquiesced.
Two years passed. Mrs. Hill’s anxieties for her son grew as her husband’s assurances of his welfare became more spotty. Finally, he changed his story and said that the child was dead. Or that he had been sent to Australia. Clearly, Hill was ‘gaslighting’ Amy to an appalling degree, and by now was physically abusing her as well. The couple separated and Amy’s family instigated a search for her missing toddler. The Burdetts’ solicitor hired a sharp London detective, officer Brett, who posted a £20 reward for information. After searching ‘all the holes and corners of St. Giles’, Brett finally arrived in Lincoln’s Court, a ‘filthy alley’ off Drury Lane. This is how the story was reported in The Annual Register’s chronicle of 1861:
‘After searching various rooms, Brett proceeded to a small apartment on the second floor. In one corner lay a man, nearly naked and apparently dying, and squatting all over the floor were several women in a most ragged and miserable condition. … On the floor in this horrible den Brett discovered the heir to £14,000 almost nude, and covered with vermin and filth. No shoes were on his feet, and only one dirty rag enveloped the entire body. One of his thighs had been broken and had been badly mis-set, his toes were terribly scarred with wounds, and the head and body generally showed unmistakable marks of neglect and ill-usage. The house, from top to bottom, appeared to be occupied by prostitutes and beggars.’
The child was positively identified by the recovery of the shawl, which the beggar had pawned, and of a box that had once contained the child’s linen. For eighteen months the woman had used the child as a beggar’s prop, holding it in her arms when panhandling in the street, and leaving it in a workhouse for a couple of spells when she’d been in prison. £14,000 in 1861 would be worth something like £1.4 M today, and that would have been the child’s annual income. Hill’s motivation seems to have been pure greed; if Amy had no children, he would receive her inheritance upon her death. (One really does recall the plot of Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight, from which the term ‘gaslighting’ derives.) The boy was reunited with Amy, who had gone to stay with family in Brussels; rather incredibly, Hill followed them there in an attempt to effect a reconciliation. Unable to arrest Hill on the continent, the police lured him into a trap: Amy returned to London, Hill followed in pursuit and was promptly arrested when he tried to make contact. When the case finally came to court, Hill was charged merely with false register of a child’s birth, a crime that carried a maximum penalty of seven years hard labour, and ‘ …therefore out of all proportion to the cruelty and unnatural conduct of the prisoner; but it seems to have been the only legal mode of securing his apprehension’. Hill’s solicitor made unsavoury implications about Amy’s character, implying that Amy’s child was not fathered by Hill. But public sympathy was firmly on the side of the poor child, even if there was widespread incredulity at the credulousness of the boy’s mother. This was a famous case in its day and reads like the plot of a Wilkie Collins novel. However, I’m afraid I can’t tell you the outcome of the trial. I read that Hill couldn’t find anyone to stand bail for him, in spite of him writing ‘copious letters‘ and having ‘an unlimited supply’ of writing paper. But I hit a brick wall; the ultimate fate of the family is obscure. What happened to the son and heir in later life? Maybe I’ll find out when the libraries re-open.
‘The story itself is strange and romantic enough, and yet it is at the same time sufficiently commonplace. It is very like the story books, and as nearly as possible fills out the recognised and traditional tale familiar to nurseries and school-rooms, of the little boy who, being a bad little boy, was given to the gipsies.’
