Evidence Type: Newspaper Report
25 December 1828
THE CATASTROPHE.—A case, curious from the defence set up to it, was brought before the Police Bench the other day. An elderly man who “gets his bread by baking bread for others,” was called upon to say how it came to pass that he was detected in a most unholy state of concubinage with a refugee from the Factory, who was lugged forth from his dwelling in the midst of the silent night. To this the fellow avouched, that on the night adverted to, having set his batch, he threw his weary limbs upon a pallet, when lo and behold in walked a female whom he did not know from Mother Eve, and with peculiar delicacy laid her down beside him. A baker is flesh and blood, and flesh and blood are carnal, ergo, he being a baker, could not well be less frail than his fellows; but whilst half sleeping, half waking, in marched two constables, who choused him of his love, and brought himself to dire disgrace. “One story is good till another be told,” they say; the constables swore that the baker had a wife, whom, after living together in connubial joys for two and twenty years, the inconstant baker had discarded. He
“———whistled her off
And let her down the wind — to prey at fortune” —
and, naughty, nasty man took this Factory Belzebub [sic] to be his love. Is that is, exclaimed the Bench. So the carnal baker was fined in eleven dollars, and found to afford his proper rib, alimony—whilst my lady was trotted back to the Factory, to while away the hours she would rather devote to love and love’s delights, sighing to a spinning jenny, with bee-soup, brown George or burgoo, and the We’ll a sup of “the crathur”—-withal.
CITATION
Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Law Report of UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/law-reports/p18281225/, accessed [insert current date].
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