I first ran across this Oct 1866 report of Sarah “obtaining a dozen bottles of Burton ale at Southsea, under false pretences”, while researching Hilsea. The combination of “a dozen bottles of ale” and “clergyman’s daughter” caught my eye.

The first reports I found painted Sarah as a charming, almost roguish heroine in the modern mould: a young, educated woman of independent means, flitting from one fashionable seaside resort to another, leaving a trail of slightly dull, outraged tradesmen in her wake. I had the impression of someone having fun while thumbing her nose at Victorian society.

But as I dug deeper, it became clear she had serious problems. Sarah’s “fun” was never sustainable, and she couldn’t quit while she was ahead. As her antics attracted increasingly harsh punishments they appeared less like rebellion and more like compulsion. Her inability to evade the attention of the law, even when facing serious consequences, suggested deeper issues. The reports from her later years paint her as a woman whose compulsion to deceive had utterly wrecked her life.

Looked at from our perspective, Sarah’s trajectory seems both inevitable and tragic: a decades-long descent from a charming, insouciant grifter to a desperately poor, often homeless offender who could never escape her own compulsion to indulge in grandiose, risky behaviour.

Her compulsions seem, to me, to be rooted in a craving to be accepted by the class she emulates. She never seems happier than when she’s being invited to tea by clergymen and colonels. It reminds me a little of the suicide of Robert Henry Marshall, who apparently shot himself because “his father, who was in business as a house decorator, had a reverse of fortune, and since then the deceased had to obtain his living by manual labour”. The Victorian obsession with class really did a number on both of them.

I do wonder if she was suffering from bipolar disorder. Maybe we’re only seeing the manic episodes in the record because the depressive episodes don’t generally result in her breaking the law. Her very early stays in lunatic asylums might have been for depression. In 1859 a newspaper article mentions that “she has a cut across the throat, which she says was given by a desperate and jealous lover”. Are we looking at a suicide attempt there?


List of her aliases, in no particular order:

  • Sarah Westwood
  • Sarah Rosa Westwood
  • Sarah Rose Westwood
  • Sarah Rose Edith Westwood
  • Sarah Edith Westwood
  • Edith Florence Westwood
  • Weston
  • Miss Wyndham
  • Miss Rabbits
  • Sally Rabbits (I love this)
  • Sarah Rabbits
  • Miss Douglas
  • Rose Douglas
  • Mrs. Colonel Douglas
  • Edith Vernon (This is, IMO, most likely to be her birth name)
  • Edith Vernon Purton
  • Edith Harcourt Vernon
  • Sophia Edith Harcourt Vernon
  • Hon. Madeline Harcourt
  • Miss Westhead

Did she tend to stick to seaside towns because the traders there were easy marks due to the high turnover of well-heeled visitors, or was it because she wanted to emulate those well-heeled visitors?

I wonder if she even understood why she did what she did. By 1874 she’s so well known she’s basically being jailed just for turning up.

It’s a story that’s going to end in tragedy - you can see her move from “fair young woman” to “fashionable middle-aged woman” to “frail elderly woman” throughout the newspaper reports, and she’s already being described as “an elderly woman” around the age of 48.

Oof. I’m very much no longer enjoying it. That’s rough. I’m really coming around to the idea that she doesn’t understand.

She’s middle-aged again in 1894 - I’m oddly thankful for this. Here, she’s returned to Shrewsbury and she’s obviously out of money, and either too old or too notorious to pull of any more scams.

It’s not a rare name, but there’s vagrancy charge in 1895, and a death in the workhouse in April 1900. They’re both near Shrewsbury, so I consider them likely.

Wow. I didn’t expect to find a picture of her.

(There’s a Sarah Westwood, aged 45, executed at Stafford in 1844. Not our Sarah, obviously.)