Women’s history is, broadly speaking, about putting
women back into history by, for example, telling the story of forgotten and
marginalised women or reassessing women’s contribution to history. I think
there’s another important aspect to women’s history, and that’s how we approach
the sources we have. We have to learn how to be critical, how to assess the
material before us, how to “read against the grain”. This was recently brought
home to me (yet again) while I was reading the introduction to The Memoirs
of James Hardy Vaux edited by Noel McLachlan and published in 1964. Written
over fifty years ago, the introduction itself is now effectively a historical
document.
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| A view of Sydney |
Vaux (1772–?) was an English pickpocket and swindler
who operated under a number of aliases. Vaux himself uses the words “pickpocket
and swindler” in the title of the first edition of the Memoirs published
in 1819, although McLachlan’s edition omits them. He was transported to
Australia on three separate occasions, and as far as is known ended his days
there.
In 1839, the fifty-seven year old Vaux was once
again on trial, this time in Sydney, Australia, and for a much more serious offence. He had, said the
prosecution, lured an eight year old girl to his room with sweets, placed her
on his bed, given her a penny, and indecently assaulted her. At his trial, Vaux
admitted having the girl in his room but denied assaulting her. He also
admitted that he had offered the girl’s mother money to ignore what had
happened, saying that this was so he could avoid being accused of such a
revolting crime. He called a number of character witnesses. In spite of all
this, the jury found him guilty.
McLachlan, however, does not. His feeling, he
writes, is that “this may well have been one crime of which Vaux was really
innocent”. His reason is that “the scope for false accusation and blackmail in
such cases is obvious, and the only eyewitness in this one was the girl herself,
who had probably been too terrified by the dark stairs on the way up to Vaux’s
room to give a reliable account of what took place”.
So far as the suggestion of blackmail goes, apparently
Vaux made no mention of this in court. Given that this would have strengthened
his defence, I can only conclude that there was none. The evidence for the
darkness on the stairs is not cited, and it is possible that this detail is
mentioned in the depositions. But even if the stairs were dark, I am baffled by
the suggestion that this in itself was sufficient to terrify the girl, or that
once terrified she was unable to accurately recall what had happened to her. But
that isn’t what McLachlan is implying. It is not that the girl was confused, it
is that her accusation was “false”.
Now, I am not concerned here with proving or disproving
the case against Vaux. What I am concerned with is McLachlan’s account of the
case. It is an account based on a concoction of “probably”, generalisations
(“such cases”), and insinuation through language that discredits the
girl’s testimony: false accusation, blackmail, the doubt cast on the
reliability of her account. It is founded on the assumption that if one of the
parties is at fault, it is the girl.
But how differently things appear if I rewrite the
account with the opposite bias!
“My own feeling is that this may well have been one
crime of which Vaux was really guilty. The scope for falsehood and bribery in
such cases is obvious, and the only other witness in this one was the defendant
himself, who had probably terrorised his victim by taking her up the dark stairs
on the way to his room in the hope that she would be unable to remember what
took place.”
Well, that doesn’t quite work either. It relies on assumptions
just as much as the original version. We don’t know, for example, what the girl
could or couldn’t remember or what Vaux hoped. McLachlan does go on to comment
that the evidence against Vaux was not “wholly consistent”, but he doesn’t
expand upon that. It may well be that the records support this interpretation. On
the other hand, given that the jury found Vaux guilty, the documents may also
support their interpretation of the evidence.
Whatever the records do or do not reveal, it is of
course possible that Vaux told the truth and that the girl’s evidence was, for
some reason, unreliable. It is equally possible that the girl was telling the
truth and that Vaux was lying. There are no other witnesses and we will never
know the truth of what exactly went on in that room. It is a problem to which
we still have no solution: as a Rape Crisis representative recently told the BBC, “gathering
strong evidence for rape cases was particularly difficult as there was usually
no-third party witness”.[i]
It’s not that I want to single out McLachlan as a
particularly bad offender when it comes to gender bias in historical accounts.
His work on Vaux was prompted by his interest in the history of Australia’s
convicts: two of his own ancestors had been convicts. Given that they were sent
there by a legal system stacked against the poor, marginalised and
dispossessed, his studies contribute towards recovering these overlooked
histories.
Nor is there anything unjustified in his questioning
of that legal system in Vaux’s case: history is littered with legal injustices.
But, like many histories before and since, there’s that dreadful blind spot. The
female perspective, if it is acknowledged at all, is immediately discounted in
favour of the male. Indeed, I can’t help but wonder why McLachlan felt the need
to question the justice of this conviction at all, given that he found no fault
with any of Vaux’s other convictions, in spite of the fact that Vaux himself
was vociferous in his protestations and self-justifications. Even if there are
grounds for doubting the justice of the 1839 trial, they must surely be more convincing
than the unsubstantiated suggestion that the girl’s evidence is worthless and
the mother a liar.
But it all sounds so objective, so plausible, so reasonable.
That’s how “such cases” are. What’s more, having put the suggestion forward, McLachlan
immediately qualifies his remarks by acknowledging that the evidence, if not consistent,
was circumstantial, and hastily adding, “So the feeling does not amount to conviction,
and it is not difficult to understand why the jury were persuaded of his guilt”.
It is magnanimous of McLachlan indeed. However, it
does nothing to rehabilitate the plaintiff. The conviction is not based on the
evidence of the girl and her mother, but on the circumstances of the case. The decision
of the gentlemen of the jury rests on firmer foundations than the (false) evidence
of an eight-year old girl and her (blackmailing) mother. When he sentenced
Vaux, the judge regretted that the maximum sentence he could impose was two
years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Property crimes, of course, carried much
heavier sentences than crimes against women and children – Vaux had got seven
years transportation for stealing a pocket handkerchief – as women’s suffrage campaigners
were still pointing out a hundred years later. McLachlan attributes the
justice’s comments to his irascibility.
Somewhere in all this an eight-year old girl has got
lost, her evidence discounted, and any feelings she might have had about the
case ignored. Yet we hear plenty about Vaux’s feelings – how he “reprobated”
the offence against which “his own feelings revolted”. And this is what I mean
by the need to be critical about how we approach history. Her voice, her experience
and her perspective are there, hidden away. It is our job to find them – or at
least acknowledge that they existed.
Lest we congratulate ourselves on our own enlightenment,
however, it is worth reiterating that McLachlan is not a villain by any means.
He’s trapped in the attitudes of his time – as are we all. In another fifty
years someone might be reading our work and shaking their heads over our own
blind spots – our speciesism, perhaps, or militarism – as we shake our heads
over previous generations’ sexism, racism, or homophobia. And we can hardly
claim to have eradicated these in our time.
The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux including his Vocabulary of the Flash Language, edited and with an Introduction and Notes by Noel McLachlan (London: Heinemann, 1964)
Image: From The History of New South Wales,
including Botany Bay, Port Jackson, Pamaratta [sic], Sydney, and all its
dependancies..., George Barrington (London: M Jones, 1802), British
Library on Flickr, No Known Copyright Restrictions
[i] ‘Why are rape
prosecutions falling?’ BBC News, 12 September 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48095118
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