LiveTheirStory

Clarissa’s pregnancy at the hands of the Wicklewood porter in June 1839 was, as we have seen, dealt with by dismissing him but also labelling her as a ‘bad character’. Since the Guardians gave permission for bastardy proceedings to be commenced against William Standley in December of the same year, we can assume that she had given birth to a live baby. A birth registration of ‘male Burton’ appears in the Forehoe records from autumn of that year. However, there is also a death registration under the same name and in the same quarter, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the baby had not lived long.

The next sighting of Clarissa is in the 1841 census, when she was registered as not local-born, and living in the household of agricultural labourer William Abel/Able and his wife Mary, with Elizabeth Burton aged 20, Mary Burton aged 1 and John William Burton aged just 2 months (all born locally). Digging further, we find that William and Mary had married in Wicklewood in 1837, and that Mary’s maiden name was indeed Burton. Was this the point that Clarissa, at that point aged 18, entered the workhouse ‘much distressed’ (i.e. destitute)? Did William, who had a son of his own (but not living at home in 1841), draw the line at supporting Mary’s near-adult, and presumably illegitimate, daughters?

(William himself, in his later years, was a regular in and out of the workhouse, and died there in 1880. It was a last resort but one which was obviously familiar to this family.)

By September 1842 Clarissa was in the workhouse again, featuring in its Minutes being punished with a bread-only meal for her ‘disorderly conduct and bad language’ along with another young woman. But was she bandying around the story of her dalliance with the ex-porter, I wonder? Such a telling had the potential to embarrass the Guardians, given that the workhouse had regular visitations to examine how it was run.

I don’t think it is any coincidence that we next meet Clarissa in a different workhouse in nearby Hales/Heckingham, and since she is still listed as belonging to the parish of Wymondham it is likely that the Loddon and Clavering Union would charge Forehoe for her board. Between 1845 and 1850 we find at least six different admissions and discharges from the house, whose poor reputation suggests it might have been used as a dumping-ground for the ‘problem’ cases. It is no wonder that she discharged herself so often, only returning when desperate.

Desperation sums up our final records in this episode: in the 1851 census, taken in March, Clarissa Burton, born in Woolwich in 1822, was being held in Wymondham prison as a ‘lewd woman’. Is this our Clarissa? If so, she was soon let go, and by May was in Heckingham workhouse once again.

But her life was about to take a drastically different turn, which I’ll narrate in Part 3…