I first came across the story about Elizabeth and Pasley in Jenny Uglow’s marvellous biography of Elizabeth Gaskell. It was just a short paragraph that suggested that Elizabeth was inspired to write her second novel Ruth when she visited the young girl in prison. I was intrigued enough to buy a volume of Elizabeth’s collected letters and look up the correspondence with Dickens. In her first letter to him she says that Pasley was the daughter of an Irish minister who died when she was 2 years old. Her mother didn’t want her and she was brought up in an orphanage, then apprenticed out as a dressmaker at the age of 14. When she became ill, one of her employers ‘connived at her seduction’ with a surgeon in the neighbourhood. After this, Pasley went into a ‘Penitentiary’ – probably a workhouse – and left there with a woman whose ‘sole purpose was to decoy girls into her mode of life.’ From that point on Pasley drank, stole, pawned even her clothing, considered killing herself and finally ended up in prison. The postscript to the letter says that when Pasley fell ill in prison she was sent to the same doctor who had previously seduced, or raped, her. When she saw him she fainted, while he had to sit down saying ‘Good God, what are you doing here?’
This letter became the foundation of my novel and the basis for further research, since it raises at least as many questions as it answers. I’ll talk about some of these questions in my next post…
