Part of “Life and Death at the Parramatta Female Factory: The St. John’s Dataset,” a contribution to the St. John’s Online project.
Death’s Door
In his latter years, Reverend Samuel Marsden was so preoccupied with the fleeting nature of life, death and salvation that he ‘entered on the subject of death with feeling’ on more than one occasion with colleagues.[1] He could hardly have escaped such thoughts. In his role as parson, he had presided over the rituals surrounding the beginnings and endings of countless lives within his parish of St. John’s, Parramatta, and recorded them in the parish register for decades, and, in his capacity as Chief Cleric, he had dutifully collated those figures along with those gleaned from other parishes to keep the Mother Land—‘Home’ with a capital ‘H’ as he continued to think of it—well informed about the state of her colony.[2] On a personal level, too, like the old man stooping to enter ‘Death’s Door’ in William Blake’s illustration, he was inevitably facing his own mortality, made all the more real following the loss of his beloved wife Elizabeth in October 1835, and the sight of her grave every time he looked out his study window at St. John’s Parsonage.[3]
What is perhaps surprising, though, is that one such pensive moment of reflection on life, death and salvation had been inspired by a member of a class that had been so unfailingly low in Marsden’s estimations—‘a dying woman’ at the Parramatta Female Factory.[4] Alas, the woman in question has no name. Notwithstanding her anonymity, according to one of Marsden’s biographers, following a visit to her Factory deathbed, the ageing chaplain had been so ‘deeply impressed with the awfulness of a dying hour in the case of one who was unprepared to die,’ that he was moved to poetry.[5] Marsden purportedly recited ‘in a very solemn manner some lines from Blair’s once celebrated poem on The Grave—
In that dread moment how the frantic soul
Raves round the walls of her clay tenement,
Runs to each avenue, and shrieks for help,
But shrieks in vain! How wishfully she looks
On all she’s leaving, now no longer her’s!
A little longer, yet a little longer,
O might she stay to wash away her crimes,
And fit her for her passage![6]
He then concluded his spontaneous performance by speaking ‘on the plan of salvation and the grace offered by the gospel with great feeling.’[7]
On closer inspection, it makes perfect sense that an anonymous, ‘crime-stained’ Factory woman triggered such a powerfully emotional display. Around the same time Marsden reportedly shared with his colleague Reverend R. Cartwright his doubts about his own worthiness of salvation and feelings of ‘utter uselessness’—feelings that were evidently tangled up with the Factory women for whom Marsden had constantly advocated and endeavoured to reform.[8] The convict women and their legally ‘illegitimate’ progeny were, after all, members of Marsden’s parish, and, thus, improving their ‘melancholy condition’ was part of the ‘responsibility of his ministerial office.’[9] Indeed, as historian Carol Liston acknowledges, despite having been ‘condemned … for his frequent and scathing denunciations of women,’ Marsden was the convict women’s ‘most persistent advocate’ when it came to improving their conditions.[10] He voiced his concerns about the convict women’s welfare in the earliest years of the colony and supervised the construction of the Factory Above the Gaol.[11]
When it, too, proved inadequate to the task of accommodating the vast numbers of convict women who were constantly arriving in the colony, it had been Marsden once again who vociferously pressed those above him to build a new purpose-built factory to improve the convict women’s conditions, for the sake of their physical health as much as for their personal as well as public morality.[12] As one of Marsden’s own daughters noted: ‘The factory for the reception of female convicts was built entirely by his own suggestion, and to their religious and moral improvement he devoted a good deal of his time.’[13] Even this more ‘commodious’ building, however, would prove insufficient to the task of accommodating the ever-increasing numbers of convict women arriving in the colony as well as serving as a penitentiary for those who were committing secondary offences in the colony and a lying-in hospital when they fell pregnant.[14] And when those ‘Female Convicts … confined in the Factory’ gave birth, it was Marsden who raised the alarm in July 1823 that their children were unchristened, and urged: ‘Some thing must be done.’[15]
Citation
Michaela Ann Cameron, “Life and Death at the Parramatta Female Factory: The St. John’s Dataset: Introduction,” (Version 1.0), Female Factory Online, (2018), https://femalefactoryonline.org/essays/introduction/, accessed [insert current date].
NOTES
[1] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 230.
[2] “Government and General Order,” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1803 – 1842), Saturday 15 September 1810, p. 1. For ‘Home’ with a capital ‘H’ see: Reverend Marsden to Reverend Josiah Pratt, 12 July 1823, Marsden Online Archive, http://www.marsdenarchive.otago.ac.nz/MS_0057_095, accessed 22 March 2018. See Matthew Allen, “Samuel Marsden: A Contested Life,” Female Factory Online (2020), https://femalefactoryonline.org/bio/samuel-marsden/, accessed 13 August 2021.
[3] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 230. See also Michaela Ann Cameron, “Lost Landmark: St. John’s Parsonage, Parramatta,” especially “Part I: Georgian Parsonage,” St. John’s Online (2020), https://stjohnsonline.org/about/the-parsonage/, accessed 13 August 2021.
[4] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 230.
[5] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 230.
[6] Robert Blair, The Grave (1743).
[7] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 230.
[8] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 230.
[9] Regarding the legal illegitimacy of children born out of wedlock, see Michael Belcher, [PhD Diss.], “The Child in New South Wales Society: 1820 to 1837,” (Armidale: University of New England, 1982), pp. 254–9; for the ‘melancholy condition’ and ‘ministerial responsibility’ see John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), pp. 156, 230.
[10] Carol Liston, “Convict Women in the Female Factories of New South Wales,” in Gay Hendriksen, Trudy Cowley, and Carol Liston (eds.), Women Transported: Life in Australia’s Convict Female Factories, (Parramatta, NSW: Parramatta City Council Heritage Centre, 2008), pp. 32, 35.
[11] Carol Liston, “Convict Women in the Female Factories of New South Wales,” in Gay Hendriksen, Trudy Cowley, and Carol Liston (eds.), Women Transported: Life in Australia’s Convict Female Factories, (Parramatta, NSW: Parramatta City Council Heritage Centre, 2008), p. 32; Michaela Ann Cameron, “The Factory Above the Gaol,” Female Factory Online (2016),https://femalefactoryonline.org/about/history/the-factory-above-the-gaol/, accessed 22 March 2018.
[12] Carol Liston, “Convict Women in the Female Factories of New South Wales,” in Gay Hendriksen, Trudy Cowley, and Carol Liston (eds.), Women Transported: Life in Australia’s Convict Female Factories, (Parramatta, NSW: Parramatta City Council Heritage Centre, 2008), p. 35; Michaela Ann Cameron, “Parramatta Female Factory: Australia’s First Purpose-Built Female Factory,” Female Factory Online (2016) https://parramattafemalefactory.org/about/history/parramatta-female-factory, accessed 22 March 2018.
[13] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 79.
[14] Michaela Ann Cameron, “Parramatta Female Factory: Australia’s First Purpose-Built Female Factory,” Female Factory Online (2016), https://femalefactoryonline.org/about/history/parramatta-female-factory/, accessed 22 March 2018. For the source in which Governor Macquarie referred to the new purpose-built Factory as ‘commodious’ see: Lachlan Macquarie, ‘Appendix to the Report of Major General Lachlan Macquarie, late Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, being A List and Schedule of Public Buildings and Works erected and other useful Improvements, made in the Territory of New South Wales and its Dependencies, at the expence [sic] of the Crown from the 1st of January, 1810, to the 30th of November, 1821,’ 30 November 1822, ‘Enclosure marked A,’ in J.T. Bigge, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales, (New South Wales: House of Commons, 1822), accessed 24 June 2015.
[15] Reverend Marsden to Reverend Josiah Pratt, 12 July 1823, Marsden Online Archive, http://www.marsdenarchive.otago.ac.nz/MS_0057_095, accessed 22 March 2018.
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