Judith Moore (2)

This is an academic study of the Elizabeth Canning case, and while I would consider it essential to anyone wanting to investigate the issue, it is a very incomplete treatment of the case on its own, although it has the considerable advantage of a bibliography and proper footnotes, enabling the reader to check up on the citations. In addition, it includes quotations from some important documents. Moore analyzes the case in terms of 18th century literature, class attitudes, and in relation to the Patty Hearst case.

Elizabeth, Betty, Canning disappeared for twenty-eight days. She returned to her mother's house in London in poor physical condition and telling a tale of being robbed, kidnapped and imprisoned. Hearing her story, a neighbor voiced the suspicion that she had been held at Susannah Wells's house in Enfield Wash. After obtaining a warrant against Wells, a large party went out to confront her. Betty identified the house as the place she had been held, and a lodger, Mary Squires, as the person who had stolen her stays and imprisoned her. Squires, and Wells as an accomplice, were tried and convicted. Wells was branded and imprisoned, Squires was sentenced to be hanged. One of the judges, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, was unsatisfied with the verdict, investigating further and gathering evidence that Squires had been in Dorset at the relevant time, and obtained a pardon. Canning was in turn convicted of perjury, and transported to the American colonies.

As far as Judith Moore is concerned, the central and unshakable truth of the case is that Elizabeth Canning was a virtuous, injured innocent, and it therefore follows that anyone who doubts her is almost certainly a liar and otherwise up to no good. Here and there Moore briefly considers the possibility that Elizabeth could have been mistaken, but she generally gets briskly past that. Moore makes many good points about corruption among elites, stereotypes about women and lower class people in general, but general truths can only cautiously be applied to specific cases. If one cannot assume that Gascoyne was right and Canning wrong because he was Lord Mayor and she was a servant, one cannot assume the reverse either. This is the same mistake, in reverse, that Moore faults in other writers.

Moore's analysis of the case in terms of class and gender is problematic in that Canning's adversaries, Susannah Wells and Mary Squires were also women and if anything more marginal than herself. Moore asserts that Gascoyne could not possibly have been moved to act by a belief that Squires was innocent, but rather that he was outraged that a servant would have the gall to suppose that the legal system should take an interest in her. He is therefore supposed to have paid to construct an alibi and have organized a large conspiracy in support of an elderly, ugly (Squires was deformed by scrofula), Gypsy woman who might have been taken as the image of a witch. The only evidence that she offers for this is that Gascoyne seems to have taken little interest in Susannah Wells. At one point, she does mention the fact that leaped to my mind as a reason: Squires, unlike Wells was sentenced to be hanged. Mostly she seems to dismiss and argues (most of the time) that if Squires was innocent, Wells, as an accomplice, had to be. Not so -- if Canning misidentified Squires, than Wells could have been the accomplice of someone else. Moreover, Wells had already been branded, and would have served a great deal of her prison sentence by the time a pardon was considered, so there was much less that Gascoyne could do for her.

Moore finds it suspicious that Gascoyne paid for the investigation of the Squires's whereabouts, and that there alibi came from people who knew them. It is certainly possible that there was corruption and lying, but what would Gascoyne and the witnesses have done differently if their motives were pure? Moreover, Moore argues that people who knew Betty Canning from her childhood should be taken as truthful and authoritative. Why wouldn't they be as inclined to lie for her as Moore suspects that Squires's supporters would lie to support the gypsies. Moore finds it suspicious that Mary Squires was portrayed as traveling with two of her adult children, that the alibi is too detailed, and that it isn't detailed enough. Who is more likely to know where someone was than people who know them? Moore leaps on discrepancies of timing, but the central point is whether or not Squires as in Dorset rather than Enfield Wash. In thinking about his, on March 5, I tried to remember details of the two snow storms in February. I could not remember exactly when the storms were, or which day I didn't go into work. I figured it out only by consulting a calendar. Nonetheless, whether I can remember the exact date or not, I still know that there were two large snowstorms. And so, if Squires thought she was in Town A on January 1, and another witness thinks that it was January 3, she was still not in Enfield Wash. Moore does an extremely poor job of presenting this evidence, preferring to dismiss it without much examination. i would recommend reading Arthur Machen's The Canning Wonder, which is as adamantly biased against Canning as this book is for her, or perhaps John Treherne's The Canning Enigma to address this serious deficiency.

As to Canning's veracity, I prefer not to speculate where she was if not at Susannah Wells's house. The only possible harmonizing resolution that I could imagine was that her story was true, but she was held at another house by other people. I do think, however, that given Canning's poor health, and what we know about the fallibility of memory, and the power of suggestion and group think, and the problems of eye-witness, that it is at least possible Elizabeth Canning was led astray by her own and her friends's expectation that she had been held at Well's house. Machen makes a good case that it was possible that Canning was inadvertently misled into thinking that Mary Squires was Susannah Wells.

Moore also has some odd contradictions. After working to establish that Canning was illiterate, she tells us that she has Thomas á Kempis's The Christian's Pattern in jail. She also holds witnesses to different standards depending on whether or not they serve her purpose. The man who claims to have seen two men dragging along a crying woman supports Canning's case; the question of why he did nothing at the time is dismissed as insignificant. On the other hand, when some Canning's original supporters come forth to say that they had doubts about her identification of Wells's house, their delay in doing so proves that they are liars.

For readers who want a one book review of the case, I would recommend Treherne's The Canning Enigma. Another book generally available is Elizabeth is Missing! by Lillian de la Torre.… (altro)