Crime in the nineteenth-century Irish home

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the Irish home as the scene of a crime. Using a sample of nineteenth-century textual records, namely coroners’ inquest documents, police and witness statements, judges’ reports of trials, and newspapers, it showcases how the home could become a focus of attention in court. Police (and sometimes the general public) infiltrated these domestic spaces in their search for clues; they often interfered with domestic materiality, or confiscated objects or fragments therefrom. In court, maps, plans and models illustrated the physical space and layout of the home for those who had not crossed the threshold. Witness testimonies accounting for the crime inadvertently reveal how the homes looked, some of their contents, and the nature of relationships between occupants and neighbours. These Irish homes were typically ordinary domestic spaces but as this article shows, the crime brought the intimate space to a more public arena. It also demonstrates how the home could both protect or expose a suspect.

At around ten past five on the evening of 29 April 1881, Sub-Constable Thomas Dickson surveyed Artillery Street, Derry, from the door of the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks.¹ Suddenly, a crying woman in her thirties rushed up to him, pleading with him to follow her to nearby Fountain Street ‘to see the sight’. Acting Constable Andrew Farry, overheard this conversation from inside the barracks, and joined his colleague outside. The woman in front of them was around five foot two, with light brown hair and blue eyes. Dickson pressed her for more details and after initially hesitating, Elizabeth Buchanan confessed her fears that her eighty-four-year-old husband had killed himself at their home. This information prompted an immediate response from the policemen at the station; suicide was still a criminal offence and, along with the associated link with insanity, could carry a stigma for surviving relatives.² Dickson accompanied Elizabeth back to her house, and Farry followed a few minutes later. By the time they arrived, neighbours and other curious spectators had already gathered outside, evidently having heard of the incident. Dr James MacCullagh entered the house shortly thereafter, to examine what was determined to be the decreased body of David Buchanan. A gunshot wound pointed to the cause of death.

Elizabeth Buchanan’s extraordinary statement brought a public gaze to her domestic space. In the Buchanan case and in others, suspicion of criminal activity drew nineteenth-century Irish policemen and other officials across the threshold of what has sometimes been considered a personal or private sanctuary. There in the domestic space and among the domestic materiality they looked for clues: signs of blood, weapons, evidence of a break-in or a struggle, displaced or out-of-place objects. Using a sample of nineteenth-century textual records, namely coroners’ inquest documents, police and witness statements, judges’ reports of trials, and newspapers, this article interrogates the Irish home as the scene of a crime. Although no contemporary photographs of the objects and homes under analysis in this article could be located, rich textual sources offer an intimate insight of the nineteenth-century Irish home.³

This article focuses in particular on the investigation that followed the death of David Buchanan, alongside other illustrative case studies from the latter half of nineteenth-century Ireland. The circumstances of David Buchanan’s death are unusual but the rich testimonies in this case are by no means uncommon. The first section of the article examines the ways that policemen and other officials identified and collected evidence from the home. It demonstrates that in their search for evidence at the scene of a crime, policemen infiltrated intimate domestic spaces, touched personal objects, and took pieces of the home away with them. Later at the petty sessions or court trial, as the second section of this article reveals, policemen and other witnesses described domestic spaces in detail, sometimes presenting to the court the confiscated objects and thereby offering a material link to the home. These Irish homes were typically ordinary domestic spaces but as this article shows, a highly unusual event or series of events exposed the intimate space in the more public arena of the courtroom. The ordinariness of the home typically contrasted with the extraordinary crime. In exploring these themes, this article contributes to the wider scholarship on domestic crime in Ireland, which has largely centred on spousal abuse and child neglect.⁴ It shifts focus away from familial relationships within the home, and instead examines the space itself and what the home reveals about the crime and the people who lived therein. In doing so, it also contributes to scholarship on domesticity and privacy outside Ireland.⁵

Investigating the home

The typical nineteenth-century Irish home included the long, single-storey rural thatched dwelling in which might live a multi-generational family (Figure 1), with outhouses for animals and farm supplies, as well as the more urban terraced building, divided into smaller tenements with shared outdoor privies and stairways (Figure 2).⁶ Elizabeth Buchanan lived in the latter type of home. Following her visit to the police station, she led Sub-Constable Thomas Dickson to 59 Fountain Street, which, like most of the buildings that lined that section of the Derry street, was a multi-family occupancy. Although the residents in number 59 lived in close physical proximity and shared a common hallway, stairs, and landing areas, they were not, according to a local journalist, ‘very intimate with one another, and they were not in the habit of visiting each other in their rooms’.⁷ Close physical living did not necessarily lead to emotionally close relationships.

Figure 1. Male members of an unidentified intergenerational family outside a thatched cottage. NMNI Dundee/McKinney collection, HOYFM.DUNDEE.317. Courtesy of National Museums NI.

Figure 2. Shared buildings and outdoor privies on Thomas Street, Dublin, c.1880–c.1920. Thomas Mason Collection, BOX07_033. Courtesy of Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

At five to five that evening, the sound of a gunshot had drawn the occupants out of their rooms. One of the residents of number 59, Elizabeth Walsh, recounted: ‘I heard an explosion; I did not know then what it was. I ran to my door and lifted the latch; I ran to Mr. Moore’s door, that faces me, and called—“Did you hear that?” Mr. Moore and Mrs. Moore came rushing out, my daughter came after me.’ Minutes later Elizabeth Buchanan emerged screaming and crying from her room on the second floor. She gestured from the top of the stairs, calling desperately for someone to come into her home. But one of her neighbours, John Moore, prevented his wife and several other women from going up. He directed Buchanan to summon the police instead, ‘for if there was anything wrong, they were the men to fetch’.⁸ Either the noise of the gunshot, Buchanan’s audible reaction, or neighbourhood gossip meant that spectators had gathered outside the building by the time the police got there.

On arrival at the scene of the suspected suicide, Sub-Constable Thomas Dickson and a retired policeman, Mr Sproulle, entered the hallway that led from the front of the three-storey building to a large, roofed yard at the back that had formerly been a theatre. Elizabeth Buchanan followed. On the way, they passed rooms on the ground floor occupied by carpenter William Kennedy and his wife Ann. Climbing the stairs in the yard, they reached the next floor, where John Moore, an army pensioner and upholsterer, resided with his wife Mary, and in the rooms opposite Elizabeth Walsh lived with her husband, a porter at the quays. It is not clear if their daughter Bridget Elliott lived in the house with them permanently, but she was certainly a frequent visitor. The trio ascended a wooden staircase between these two residences to the shared landing on the next floor. Archibald Dutchfield had occupied the rooms opposite the Buchanans for the previous three months. He considered himself ‘on good terms’ with the couple and had been in their home a few times, most recently the day before when he ‘went in to warm two irons’. Elizabeth had not been there at the time, but Dutchfield had chatted to David Buchanan, who was sitting beside the lighted fire, while he waited for the irons to heat. Dutchfield was absent at the time of David Buchanan’s death but had reached home before the police arrived. In fact, he had crossed paths with Elizabeth a few minutes earlier, as he made his way home and as she hurried to the police station.⁹

Elizabeth Buchanan walked ahead of the two policemen into the rented rooms that she and her now deceased husband David had occupied since their move from Donegal around a year earlier. The couple had met in Inishowen Workhouse in Carndonagh around eight years earlier when Elizabeth and her mother were pauper residents and David was a patient in the hospital.¹⁰ Elizabeth’s widowed mother, Mary Anne Montgomery, still lived in the workhouse.¹¹ David was a military pensioner in receipt of £18 5s per annum and Elizabeth supplemented this income through begging and char work. An elderly lodger, Mary Anne Logue, lived with the Buchanans intermittently, sleeping on a make-shift bed on the floor in the kitchen. This time she had been with them for around a fortnight. She liked the couple, considering David ‘a very nice mannered man’.¹² Before Logue left the house that morning, she had seen David in bed smoking his pipe, waiting for the breakfast that Elizabeth was preparing for him. Elizabeth regularly made her husband breakfast in bed and, according to Logue, ‘always treated him kindly’.¹³ Logue left the house to cut briars. This type of work, along with her begging efforts, kept her out of the workhouse. She returned to the Buchanan residence after the incident and was met by a crowd of onlookers outside the building.

Sub Constable Thomas Dickson followed Elizabeth Buchanan into her home. In her study of twentieth-century crime scene photography in Britain, Alexa Neale considers it ‘unlikely that any officer would fail to observe a home they were sent to without comparing it to their own'.¹⁴ Neale’s observation helps us to consider Dickson’s experience as he passed through an inner door off the front room (used as a kitchen), which led to a bedroom overlooking the roof of the two-storey building next door. Dickson recounted his sensorial experience on entering:

I went into the front room; I saw in the bedroom, off the front room, the deceased in bed. He was lying on his left side, with wounds on his head and face. He appeared to be quite dead. There was a large quantity of blood on the floor under the bed, and some pieces of flesh lying about the floor … There was smoke in the room, and the smell of powder when I went in first; the smell of discharged gunpower.¹⁵

The deceased’s arms were draped over a stool and his clothes and bedclothes were covered in blood. When Farry arrived a few minutes later, he too conducted a search of the Buchanan residence, looking around for out-of-place objects, or objects that jarred with the domestic scene. He observed a small leather bag of gunpowder on a box in the bedroom, beside the head of the bed. Farry later described that the bag ‘contained a little canister, or flask, with a little gunpowder in it; two empty shot cartridge cases’. He explained: ‘There was some shot in one, and two caps in another. I found seven lead pellets in a piece of paper in the same bag.’¹⁶ An iron hatchet or cleaver near the fireplace caught his attention but on inspection he noted that it was clean and dry.¹⁷ Farry also spotted a quilt on the landing between the rooms occupied by Dutchfield and David and Elizabeth Buchanan. It seemed to have been recently washed and wrung dry, and was sitting in a dry tub. Another basin contained dirty water.¹⁸

Domesticity relied on material culture.¹⁹ Documents relating to the scene of a domestic crime offer a glimpse of nineteenth-century domesticity. Nineteenth-century Irish policemen did not typically renumerate all the contents of a home nor record their detailed observations of a domestic space in real time. Instead, their sworn informations and depositions in the hours and days afterwards, recounted their initial searches and investigative processes, by which stage the realities of a case had often begun to unfurl. The domestic materiality mentioned in many police testimonies, therefore, was frequently directly connected to the case. Dickson and Farry likely examined much more of the interior and domestic materiality of the Buchanan home than they described, but their surviving testimonies only include the objects that were afterwards determined to have some connection to David Buchanan’s death. Some of the contents were everyday domestic items that served a practical or decorative function within the home. Others, like the gunpowder and pellets, disrupted the domestic scene.

Testimonies in other cases similarly show how policemen intruded on the domestic space. Constable Alexander Smith, stationed in Markethill, County Armagh, was tasked with searching the home of Elizabeth and John Thomas Evans in Newry Street in 1884. Like 59 Fountain Street where the Buchanans lived, the Newry Street building was a multi-family occupancy, partitioned into several homes. But unlike Elizabeth Buchanan, Elizabeth Evans had not summoned the police to her home. The discovery of a dead new-born baby in a bag in the locality, and local gossip about her physical appearance, had led the police to her.²⁰ The newly weds were not present when the policemen carried out the search; Elizabeth was in prison on suspicion of infant murder and her husband John Thomas was on the run. Smith described his search of the house:

On the 27th of June I went to the Evans’ room. I found a stool with a considerable quantity of blood on the end of one of the feet and on the end of the stool the blood appeared fresh looking. I saw a pair of trousers. On the left leg a considerable quantity of blood was besmeared over them. There was a bag also. I examined the paper at the bottom of the wall. A considerable quantity of what appeared to be sparks of blood was over the paper, on the left hand side as you enter. The bag was a small brown bag, of the material used for holding queens. I saw what appeared to be blood on the top of it also. … There was also a quantity of blood on a piece of paper immediately over the bolt of the door, having the appearance of a finger and thumb mark.²¹

Police Sergeant William John Eakins arrived at the Newry Street residence shortly after Smith. He recalled his search for evidence:

I got what appeared to be blood marks on the paper on the wall, and on the paper on the back of the door, between the latch, and the bolt. I took pieces of the paper away … There was what I thought lime wash on the blood marks. Afterwards I got a bag in the room with what appeared blood marks. … I got a sheet, and the linings of a quilt. The sheet appeared recently washed. So did the valance round the bed. I cut a piece out of the tick of the bed with stains. … I took some earth from under where the blood marks were on the wall. … I took another piece of paper where there was what I thought a blood mark. The whole piece of paper came off and I saw what appeared a sprinkling of blood. I scraped it off.²²

Eakins’ painstaking search of the scene of the supposed crime meant that he left the home with items of clothing and bedding, as well as furniture, wallpaper, and fragments of the wall and floor. The suspected infanticide seemed to have created a bloody mess.

A few years later in 1892, Sergeant William Grannery described his methodical examination of Sarah McAlister’s home in Cushendall, County Antrim:

I then searched the House and on a shelf in the Kitchen I found a Small jam pot containing some sugar and some sugar in a paper on top of the jam pot. I marked pot and paper all as no. 1 of articles seized. I found four other small packages of sugar in a closet off the Kitchen and each of the packages were partly used. Numbered each of these packages 2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively. Found a small bottle which appeared nearly full of medicine. marked it numbered six. Found a small bag containing a quantity of oatmeal. marked it number seven.²³

Grannery paid particular attention to provisions, potions, and jars in the home because McAlister and her ten-year-old daughter were suspected of having given poisoned sugar to at least six local children, one of whom, five-year-old Edward O’Hara, had died. In the end, only one of Grannery’s carefully labelled packages was determined to be connected to the case.²⁴

Elizabeth Buchanan had brought the police into her domestic environment. It is not known how she felt as she watched them search her home and rifle through her and her deceased husband’s belongings, if indeed she watched their work at all. Other residents resented the intrusion and were desperate to keep the police out or to thwart police efforts to find evidence of a crime at home. Sarah Cuthbert, suspected of infanticide in County Tyrone in 1867, put herself between police constable David Hannan and her blood-stained bed, shouting: ‘this is my bed. I will not allow you to search it’. According to Hannan, she also ‘caught hold of me by the arm and pushed me back. She knocked the candle out of my hand … again she put her hand to me and said “go away I wont allow you to search my bed”’.²⁵ Plain-clothed detectives who raided Mary Carroll’s home on Montgomery Street in Dublin in 1879 were similarly unwelcome. A shout from within the house, ‘The detectives are coming’, heralded their arrival. On entering, they saw Carroll throw pieces of a plaster of Paris mould for making counterfeit coin into a jug of water.²⁶ A journalist for The Standard pointed out in 1880: ‘It is always difficult to catch a coiner actually at work. With a few minutes’ notice he can destroy the chief evidences of his guilt.’²⁷

As the daughter of James Carroll, the notorious ‘king of the coiners’, Mary Carroll was well-versed in responding rapidly to police interruptions.²⁸ In 1891, a policeman described the scene after Mary’s sister Lizzie spotted him and his colleagues peering through her window: ‘she ran to the fireplace and I saw her jump on something on the hearth leaping on it with her feet’.²⁹ This object was later determined to be a 2s mould. As he entered the room, the policeman also observed Lizzie, ‘rush to the foot of the bed and throw something away’.³⁰ As Heather Shore notes, although the London press referred ‘to “gangs of coiners”, accounts of the capture and detection of coining gangs often described what was essentially a household operation'.³¹ The Carroll sisters were aware that out-of-place items in their homes could be incriminating and lead to conviction, and thus sought to destroy them before interception by the police. Their homes were the sites of their repeated criminal activity. The chemicals, metals, moulds and implements therein had no practical domestic use and were thus evidence of their illegal behaviour.³²

Eloise Moss observes that the burglar proofing of London homes through late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century alarm systems ‘collapsed the putative public/private divide between domestic and exterior worlds’.³³ Police surveillance of the Carroll family’s homes in England and Ireland similarly challenges any assumption that homes were private, away from a public gaze. Civilians too encroached on each other’s domestic spaces. While criminal cases provide much evidence of Ireland’s ‘squinting windows’ and ‘twitching curtains’, it is clear that people peered in as well as out. Joseph King, a farmer in Carna, County Galway, by his own admission, peered through his neighbour’s shuttered window in 1887:

When passing the window of the room, I noticed a light in it and I heard the cry of a child from the room. I then looked into the room through the window between the shutters and saw a baby on the floor on a cloth at the side of the bed. There was some one in the bed at the time but when I looked in, the place between the shutters was so narrow that I could not identify who it was.³⁴

Locals entered homes without permission. Donegal resident Cassie McFadden testified in 1893:

On Monday last I felt a bad smell coming from the house occupied by a woman called Elizabeth Gallagher. It was the evening I felt the bad smell. I was going past the door yesterday. The door was open. I went in. There was no person in the house. I went in and lifted the lid off the trunk that I saw a short time ago in the mortuary or house behind the workhouse. I put in my hand to the box. I felt a bag. I did not see what was in this bag till I opened it. When I opened the bag I saw the appearance of a child in it. I was frightened. The lid was down on the box but it was not tied. I put the lid down again and went away. I saw no person about the house on either day.³⁵

It is not clear if McFadden told Gallagher thereafter that she had entered her house but McFadden’s testimony does not suggest that she had any qualms about crossing her neighbour’s threshold in Gallagher’s absence.

The policemen who investigated David Buchanan’s death confiscated several items from 59 Fountain Street, including the metal hatchet found at the fireplace, the small leather bag that contained gunpowder, and the recently washed quilt from the landing between the Dutchfield and Buchanan homes. The policemen also had the gun in their possession. When Dickson was on his way to Elizabeth Buchanan’s house, following her initial report that her husband had shot himself, he had asked her about the weapon. She denied that she knew where it was. At the house, Elizabeth claimed to find the gun at the fireplace. But Dickson had been watching her as she moved around her home and spotted her taking the gun out of her pocket. She could not have found it at the hearth as she alleged, he explained to those present at the petty sessions court on 6 May 1881, because she had not gone near the fireplace.³⁶ Years after her trial, Elizabeth explained that she found the gun lying beside her husband just after she heard the gun shot, and ‘upon the impulse of the moment, stooped and took up the revolver, which she put in her pocket, and on some of the neighbours gathering in, to learn what occurred, they advised her to go for the Police, which she did, and on she being searched the revolver was found in her pocket, she having no intention to conceal it’.³⁷

Constable Edward Scott, who accompanied Acting Constable Andrew Farry to Elizabeth and David Buchanan’s home, asked Elizabeth where she had been when she heard the gunshot. She explained that she was descending the stairs to buy salt from her neighbour, Mary Moore, and had only taken three steps when she heard the noise behind her. Elizabeth had claimed her husband’s quarterly military pension on 25 April because he had been too sick to go for it himself. Two £1 notes that Scott found in an unlocked box in the house with papers and clothing was what remained after she had purchased tobacco for her elderly husband and coffee, sugar and other provisions for the home. Elizabeth’s account of events made clear that in managing, purchasing, and preparing the food for the household, she fulfilled expected gender roles for a woman who lived in an urban setting. But her home cast doubt on the truth of her story. Farry noticed that the stock in the house already included two pounds of salt and Elizabeth thus had little need to visit her neighbour to acquire more. A few hours after she had first reported the crime to the police, Elizabeth Buchanan was arrested for the murder of her husband. Dr MacCullagh’s post-mortem examination on the following day determined that death was not from a gunshot wound but was the result of a blow to the face, likely caused by a hatchet. ‘It must’, MacCullagh later surmised, ‘have rendered him unconscious the moment he received it’.³⁸

A little piece of home: the home in court

Witnesses at petty sessions and criminal trials relayed what they knew about the suspect or the crime. Policemen explained their searches and the evidence they had gathered, medics described the positions of bodies and the findings of their post-mortem examinations, scientists documented the results of their forensic analyses, and neighbours and bystanders recounted what they had seen and heard. In doing so, these witnesses inadvertently described the layout and contents of Irish homes, and the roles and relationships of those who lived therein. Undoubtedly some onlookers in the courtrooms relished the insights that testimonies offered into someone else’s home life and domestic materiality. Descriptions of intimate spaces, as they related to a crime, were also set out for those who read subsequent newspaper reports.

Under the direction of city surveyor William James Robinson, an architectural model of number 59 Fountain Street was created, at a scale of one inch to one foot.³⁹ Crime scene scale models ‘drew on creative skills associated with hobbies and handicrafts to create an object resembling a dolls’ house that had a practical demonstrative function and central role in court proceedings'.⁴⁰ The model’s purpose, the QC explained, was ‘to show the different apartments occupied by the lodgers, and more particularly for the purpose of showing the rooms occupied by the Buchanans’.⁴¹ Other criminal cases required the drawing of rough plans or maps of the surrounding areas, scaled interior plans, or the production or reproduction of Ordnance Survey maps. In advance of the trial of Richard Murphy for the murder of his sister Ellen in 1864, civil engineer James Bell produced maps of the local area, and builder William Boyle made a model of the house.⁴² In 1884, surveyor James Anderson was tasked with drawing a map of the area surrounding the Newry Street house in County Armagh where Elizabeth and John Thomas Evans were suspected of having killed an infant. Anderson explained while presenting the map: ‘I have marked the house pointed out to me as the house of the male prisoner, in Newry Street, Markethill.’⁴³ He also relayed his calculations of the distances between key locations in the case.⁴⁴ Such efforts, Neale concludes, ‘show how important the physical reference point was, with plan-makers invariably the first witness called in a murder trial at the Old Bailey’.⁴⁵ In Ireland too, maps, plans and models, when they featured in trials, were typically presented to the court right at the outset. Robinson was the first to testify at Elizabeth Buchanan’s trial, ensuring that the twelve men of the jury could envisage the spaces and places that subsequent witnesses described. Sub Constable Thomas Dickson also used the model as part of his testimony to show the jurymen the implausibility of Elizabeth Buchanan’s claim that her husband shot himself in bed and then, injured and feeble, threw the gun to the fireplace in the next room.⁴⁶

The courtroom presentation and display of the domestic materiality confiscated by policemen must have had a powerful effect on magistrates, jurors or others present at a trial. The objects were often unremarkable in themselves, but they provided a material connection to the scene of the crime. Mary Birmingham identified in court a petticoat and chemise worn by her daughter Bridget O’Donnell, suspected of infant murder in County Clare in 1893. Birmingham also identified a sack, and a piece of red flannel, which was ‘knocking about the house’.⁴⁷ The presentation in court of household items used as weapons allowed those in attendance to imagine the force with which these attacks were carried out. In 1895, Belfast labourer Patrick McKenna saw in court the sweeping brush with which his sister Annie had hit him on the head. He explained: ‘That blow inflicted a wound on my head and blood flowed freely from the wound. After she struck me she ran out of the house and I immediately afterwards walked to the royal hospital where I have been detained since.’⁴⁸ In the following year, Constable John McCaughey identified in court the household poker that his wife Annie had used to assault him.⁴⁹

Forensic science developed in the early decades of the nineteenth century.⁵⁰ Forensic examinations of confiscated objects exoticised everyday domestic items, rendering them scientific specimens. Professor J. R. Leebody of Magee College conducted a microscopic examination of the quilt given to him by Acting Constable Andrew Farry, which had been found on the landing between the Buchanan and Dutchfield homes. Leebody observed that it had been washed, but under a microscope he saw evidence of blood in three separate places, stains that were, he described, ‘invisible to the naked eye’. He explained to the court that ‘cold water applied to blood when “new” removes it so entirely that it is impossible to detect it’.⁵¹

Following his search at John Thomas and Elizabeth Evans’ home in Armagh, Sergeant William John Eakins sent several items of clothing and pieces of the domestic interior to Richard J. Moss, an analytical chemist to the Royal Dublin Society. Moss confirmed the presence of blood on a pair of trousers, a petticoat and chemise, a sheet, the quilt lining and bedtick, three sacks, wallpaper, wall plaster, the stool and a sod of turf. Bertomeu-Sánchez notes, ‘Being a common form of evidence in murder trials, bloodstains gained importance in the domain of expert witnesses during the 1820s.’⁵² But under cross-examination, Moss pointed to limitations of nineteenth-century forensic science:

I am not in a position to say absolutely that it is human blood. I would say that it is not of the same character as the blood of young kids, or goats. I would not swear. It might be. I can’t go further than to say that the stains were such as human blood would produce, but it might be the blood of other animals.⁵³

He further explained: ‘Everything depends on the size of the corpuscles. The clot of blood below the pocket of the trousers is a stain such as human blood w[oul]d produce, but I can’t swear that it is human blood.’⁵⁴

A local doctor who examined the sheet that Elizabeth Evans slept on after her arrest for infant murder confirmed: ‘There were stains on it, slightly coloured between yellow and green, such as one might expect to find on the clothes of a woman recently delivered of a child.’⁵⁵ The prison matron also showed the doctor Elizabeth Evans’ blood-stained chemise and petticoat and, like the clothing and bedding taken from her home, these items were displayed at the Armagh assizes as material proof of her connection to the crime. A few years earlier, Elizabeth Buchanan’s underclothing had been given to Dr MacCullagh for examination, likely taken off her in prison after her arrest on suspicion of her husband’s murder. MacCullagh testified at the petty sessions court on 6 May 1881:

I have this day examined a woman’s underclothing, produced to me by Sub-Constable Lucas; there are marks of blood on it; there is blood on the upper part of chemise, near the neck, and on the outside of the petticoat.⁵⁶

It is difficult to know how suspects felt as objects from home were presented in court, used as evidence against them. Perhaps the presentation of their personal items or domestic materiality was a visual reminder of the incident that led to their arrest, or induced nostalgia for home. Elizabeth Buchanan listened while the police described the interior of her home and the various items that pointed to her crime. Hearing the testimonies and observing some of the objects, she cross-examined a policeman: ‘Mr. Farry, did you see anything in the house that ought not to be in it?’ The constable admitted: ‘No; I did not, except the position the deceased was in.’⁵⁷ In posing her question, Elizabeth recognised that her home and contents could form part of her defence.

The decorative or functional objects taken by policemen left a gap in the home. The missing pieces of furniture, equipment, crockery, cutlery, bedding, or floor or wall fragments, were visual reminders of the suspected crime and police investigation, until such time as they were replaced, repaired or the space redecorated. It is not always clear where these objects and fragments ended up, and not all confiscated objects were presented at trials. Neale observes that some ‘Objects and materials from the crime scene itself were variously stolen or sold as souvenirs and treasures, displayed in private homes, museums and waxwork exhibitions as independent curios, parts of collections or elements of entire tableaux.’⁵⁸ Some objects may have been returned to the home. Other items connected to the case have ended up among the historical papers.⁵⁹

Caitriona Clear has observed that it ‘is comparatively easy to find out about the public perceptions of women of the house over the years. Finding out about their everyday experiences and values is much harder’.⁶⁰ Witness testimonies recounting a crime within the home inadvertently described the circumstances in which a suspect or victim lived and can offer some insight into experiences of home. In 1894, seventy-year-old widow Catherine Manaher explained that she was unable to identify in court the man who sexually assaulted her on Easter Sunday in her own home because ‘the little cabin I lived in was so dark’.⁶¹ Joanna Bourke observes that ‘nineteenth century Irish houses were reputed to be the worst in the United Kingdom’.⁶² Manaher’s account from 1894 points to persistent poverty in old age:

when the cabin was made it was intended only for pigs and bonhams, but I was so poor I had to live in it. I had no candle lighting only a little ‘bottle’ lamp and when this man wanted to do me the harm he quenched the lamp first.⁶³

Manaher’s neighbours were able to identify Eugene ‘Cottoner’ Reidy as the assailant as he left Manaher’s home, and he was later found guilty of attempted rape.⁶⁴

Investigations into crimes within the home also shed light on domestic roles. Gender expectations of the day determined that the wife was responsible for the organisation, decoration and management of the home, preparation of the food, household spending, and comfort and care of the family.⁶⁵ Descriptions of the home in court could thus cultivate an impression of a suspected housewife’s character and identity, through an evaluation of how she fulfilled these roles. The evidence presented before the courts suggested that Elizabeth Buchanan was an attentive wife and housekeeper. She insisted:

I am innocent of it, for there is no proof against me at all; for I liked him too well. I cookered him like a child from ever I got him: and attending him and getting everything I could get for him. From the first day I met with him we never had ‘you lie’ or a word of crossness. We lived very agreeable.⁶⁶

One after the other the residents of number 59 Fountain Street were called upon to testify as to the relationship that they imagined behind closed doors. Mary Anne Logue, who sometimes resided with the couple, confirmed that she ‘never heard an angry word between David Buchanan and his wife … I never saw Mrs Buchanan drunk, nor a better attending woman about a man’.⁶⁷ She recounted Elizabeth fixing David’s breakfast, giving him his pipe to smoke in bed, dressing him and aiding him ‘to bed like a child’. Elizabeth pushed the witness further, evidently anxious to portray the nature of her relationship with her husband: ‘Mary Anne, did you ever hear any outfalls between me and him?’ ‘No; never’, Logue replied.⁶⁸

This view of the couple’s relationship was repeated by the neighbours who lived in the surrounding rooms. Elizabeth Walsh ‘never heard a loud word in their room above me’.⁶⁹ John Moore ‘never heard a word between Buchanan and his wife’. When Elizabeth Buchanan asked, ‘did you ever hear any disturbance between me and my husband for twelve months?’, Moore responded, ‘No, never in my life.’⁷⁰ Anxious to ensure that she was presented favourably, Elizabeth Buchanan pushed again: ‘Did you ever see the track of drink on me?’ Moore confirmed: ‘I never did, to the best of my opinion, in my life.’⁷¹ Elizabeth Walsh’s daughter, Bridget Elliott, responded similarly when asked the same question.⁷² Mary Moore ‘never knew anything indifferent to her [Elizabeth Buchanan] in my life, nothing of drink or anything of that kind; they appeared to be on good terms. I never heard any wrangling or fighting between them’.⁷³

In her analysis of forensic science in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English sexual crimes against women, Victoria Bates observes: ‘Scientific, legal and moral questions were blurred in the courtroom.’⁷⁴ The questions put to Dr James MacCullagh demonstrate this blurring of expertise. MacCullagh commented on his medical treatment of the elderly David Buchanan in the year following the Buchanans’ move from Donegal to Londonderry, the results of the post-mortem exhibition that he carried out after David’s death, and his observations of Elizabeth Buchanan’s bloody underclothing. He also confirmed what other witnesses had sworn about the couple’s relationship when he noted that over this year, ‘The man never complained to me of ill-treatment on the part of his wife.’⁷⁵ Archibald Dutchfield was the only witness to hear Elizabeth and David Buchanan talking ‘“purty” loud … louder than usual’ on the morning of 29 April.⁷⁶ But he made clear: ‘So far as I could tell she appeared careful of the old man.’⁷⁷ The prevailing view was that Elizabeth was an ideal wife, sober, and, in neighbour Mary Moore’s words, ‘a proper woman’.⁷⁸ Witnesses do not appear to have been questioned about the forty-year age gap between Elizabeth and David Buchanan, likely because it was not deemed relevant to the trial: the couple had no children who might be left orphaned by the death of their elderly father, and there was nothing to suggest that either party had been having an affair.⁷⁹ The presiding judge, Justice Fitzgerald, determined from the evidence that ‘their lives as far as appeared seemed to have been peaceable and quiet’. He confirmed that Elizabeth ‘seemed to have acted well and kindly by the old man, and of late when he was very infirm tended him carefully’.⁸⁰

Despite her protestations and the lack of evidence as to motivation, Elizabeth Buchanan was found guilty of the murder of her husband (Figure 3). A journalist in the courtroom as Elizabeth was sentenced to death observed that she ‘looked haggard, but was calm and composed in her demeanour’.⁸¹ When asked if she had anything to say, Elizabeth responded: ‘I am not guilty, sir—I am not guilty, sir. I was rather kindly to him—too kindly to do anything on him, for I am not guilty. I am innocent; for I am not guilty at all, sir. I never done anything on him.’⁸² As Justice Fitzgerald pronounced the sentence of death, to be carried out the following month, Elizabeth continued to interject, insisting on her innocence.⁸³ A journalist observed that she seemed to ‘change colour several times, but otherwise betrayed no symptoms of emotion’.⁸⁴ Her execution was scheduled for 23 August. In the interim, the jury unanimously recommended her to mercy on the basis of perceived weakmindedness.⁸⁵ Londonderry residents also raised a petition for mercy, explaining that ‘no execution has taken place in the City of Derry for nearly sixty years and that we look with horror on the idea of the execution of the wretched woman’.⁸⁶ The death sentence was later commuted to penal servitude for life and Elizabeth was transferred to Mountjoy Female Convict Prison in Dublin.⁸⁷

Figure 3. Prison mugshot of Elizabeth Buchanan on transfer to Grangegorman Female Convict Prison, 1883. PEN/1892/31. Courtesy of National Archives of Ireland.

Conclusion

A suspected crime within the home made an intimate domestic setting more public. As demonstrated in the cases presented here, nineteenth-century Irish policemen tasked with solving a crime committed in the home moved furniture, picked through personal belongings for evidence, and confiscated ordinary domestic and out-of-place objects . Their testimonies, and the statements of other witnesses, brought these domestic interiors to a wider audience in the courtroom and, when reported in newspapers, to a general public beyond. Recreated models and plans offered judges and jurors a visual aid and placed the home, and the criminal activity around it, in its physical context. Material objects shown in court provided a tangible link to the scene of the crime. They were often everyday items that the jurors could likely have imagined, but their presence offered a visual connection to the crime. Forensic analyses of these items rendered them extraordinary, as objects of curiosity.

While these objects have not typically survived, the rich textual sources generated by suspected crimes capture the details of ordinary nineteenth-century Irish homes at the moment when the incident occurred. The charge of murder against Elizabeth Buchanan, preserved in writing details about her home’s layout and contents in April 1881. As the police sought to determine her involvement in her husband’s death, they uncovered much about the ways that people moved through and negotiated the space. Mary Anne Logue was a temporary but regular guest who slept on the floor in the kitchen. David Buchanan’s infirmity meant that he spent much of his time in bed in the other room in the house. The various occupants of the building lived in very tight confines and could hear one another through the walls and floors, but that did not mean that they were on intimate terms. The testimonies point to some sharing of resources, but largely the occupants of 59 Fountain Street lived independently of each other. Descriptions of the victim and crime in this and other cases were often a stark contrast to the ordinariness of the home.

Witness testimonies also often reflect contemporary expectations of how a home should look or how those within the home should behave. The Buchanan case is revealing of the domesticity of the poorer classes, and expected roles and responsibilities within the home. Elizabeth kept her house clean, and although it does not appear to have been lavishly decorated, descriptions of the space and material objects therein point to functionality and attention to comfort. There was also little to fault in terms of Elizabeth’s behaviour at home in the lead up to her husband’s murder; she managed the household budget, purchased provisions for herself and her husband from his military pension, and contributed to the household economy through begging and charring when needed. Neighbours made clear that she was neither a drinking nor a loud woman. She attended to her infirm husband, prepared his meals, provided tobacco for his pipe, and dressed him as required.

Elizabeth Buchanan’s home could thus both defend and incriminate her. Her attentiveness towards her husband and household, the absence of any overheard arguments through thin walls, and her careful management of the household income rendered her an unlikely suspect in his murder. Yet her home also offered the policemen clues. The ample supply of salt, the metal hatchet, and the bloody quilt, pointed to her involvement. There in her home lay the evidence of what was determined by the presiding judge to be her attempt ‘to conceal the deed in the clumsy manner’.⁸⁸ Other suspects also sought to destroy evidence before the police could confiscate it or to thwart police searches. It is likely that many were more successful than Elizabeth Buchanan.

From behind the walls of the female convict prison, Elizabeth Buchanan continued to maintain her innocence and petitioned at least seven times for a further commutation of her sentence. In 1885, she wrote in the third person (as was the norm in petitions of this kind), explaining: ‘she is innocent of the crime with which she is charged, her husband being a man addicted to drink and on several occasions threatened to take his own life which he finally succeeded in doing’.⁸⁹ In 1887, she again ‘fully maintains, she is innocent of the crime with which she is charged’. She explained:

On the morning of the sad occurrence, petitioner had gone out for some provisions for the day, and on returning, was ascending the stairs leading to her room, when she heard the report of a shot, and on entering the room, was horrified to see her husband, lying on his side in the bed, and blood pouring from his face, and his revolver lying at a distance on the ground.⁹⁰

The following year, for the first time, Buchanan admitted her guilt. She explained that ‘her husband was a very violent man and led petitioner a wretched life, being seldom sober and although in receipt of a good pension from the 1st Royal Artillery, petitioner was obliged to earn her living as charwoman’. She explained that ‘although she committed the deed, she had no intention of doing so until she entered the room and saw deceased lying on the bed drunk with the pistol beside him, on the impulse of the moment and labouring under a sense of her wrongs, she took up the pistol and fired in his face’.⁹¹ In November of that year, she offered further details:

[On] the morning on which the unhappy occurrence took place, her husband had been drinking very heavily and swore if she did not get plenty of drink for him he would take her life, and kept a pistol beside him for that purpose. She went out as he told her to get some whiskey for she was really terrified at his conduct and on her return found him lying on the bed, without a moment hesitation petitioner took the pistol and fired, not really meaning to kill him but to frighten him.⁹²

She added that she ‘is truly sorry for the crime which in a thoughtless moment she unfortunately committed’.⁹³ In the petitions that followed, Elizabeth emphasised that she committed the act ‘in a moment of desperation’ and ‘which she now deeply deplores’, and ‘believes she has to some extent atoned after these weary years’.⁹⁴ Elizabeth never mentioned using a hatchet.

Katie Barclay has shown that the concept of having a ‘home-place’ was important in rural nineteenth-century Ireland.⁹⁵ But for Elizabeth Buchanan, that home place was associated with the death of her husband at her own hands and her subsequent incarceration. It is unclear if she desired to return to 59 Fountain Street, even if it were available. Elizabeth’s mother died around eighteen months into her prison sentence and she may not have wanted to return to Donegal either.⁹⁶ Some women who committed violent acts had their sentences commutated on the explicit condition that they did not gohome, the decision made for them.⁹⁷ In January 1892, Elizabeth Buchanan sought early release, promising to emigrate to her siblings in the U.S.⁹⁸ The chairman of the General Prisons Board supported the application on the basis that she ‘has been over 10 years in prison, and on the whole well-behaved’, ‘Her conduct before the commission of the crime was good’, ‘the jury considered her weak-minded’ and ‘she is now at an age when she could earn her livelihood’.⁹⁹ The implication was, of course, that delaying Elizabeth’s release would mean that she might then be too old or infirm to emigrate and thus become entirely dependent on public funds. The lord lieutenant agreed. In March 1892, Elizabeth Buchanan boarded the S.S. Teutonic at Liverpool bound for New York, from where she intended to make her way to Boston. She would find a new home on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.¹⁰⁰

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants of the AHRC Network, ‘Challenging Domesticity in Britain, c.1890-1990’, for shaping some of my ideas on this subject, and to Eloise Moss and Charlotte Wildman for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elaine Farrell

Elaine Farrell is a Reader in History at Queen’s University Belfast. She is a social historian with interests in women’s history and crime in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ireland. Her monographs include Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland: Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and ‘A Most Diabolical Deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society, 1850–1900 (Manchester University Press, 2013). With Leanne McCormick, she leads the AHRC-funded Bad Bridget project, which examines criminal and deviant Irish women in nineteenth and twentieth-century North America.

Notes

1 I have used the term Derry in this article to refer to the city and the term Londonderry to denote the county.

2 Georgina Laragy, ‘“A Peculiar Species of Felony”: Suicide, Medicine, and the Law in Victorian Britain and Ireland’, Journal of Social History 46, no. 3 (2013): 732–43.

3 Crime scene photography was not typically used in nineteenth-century Irish crime investigations, although photographs were taken in some notable cases, such as the killing of Bridget Cleary in Tipperary in 1895. See Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London: Vintage Digital, 1999), 132–4.

4 See, for example, Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary; Karen Brennan, ‘Murder in the Irish Family, 1930–1945’, in Law and the Family in Ireland, 1800–1950, ed. Niamh Howlin and Kevin Costello (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 160–80; Sarah-Anne Buckley, ‘The Cruelty Man’: Child Welfare, the NSPCC, and the State in Ireland, 1889–1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘“Behind Closed Doors”: Society, Law and Familial Violence in Ireland, 1922–1990’, in Howlin and Costello, Law and the Family in Ireland, 142–59; Maria Luddy, ‘The Early Years of the NSPCC in Ireland’, Éire-Ireland 44, no. 1&2 (2009): 62–90; Maria Luddy and Mary O’Dowd, Marriage in Ireland, 1660–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), chapter 10; Richard McMahon, Homicide in Pre-Famine and Famine Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), chapter 3; Elizabeth Steiner-Scott, ‘"To Bounce a Boot Off Her Now and Then … ": Domestic Violence in Post-Famine Ireland’, in Women in Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain, ed. Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997), 125–43; Diane Urquhart, ‘Irish Divorce and Domestic Violence, 1857–1922’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 5 (2013): 820–37.

5 See, for example, Eli Osterweil Anders, ‘“So Delightful a Temporary Home”: The Material Culture of Domesticity in Late Nineteenth-Century English Convalescent Institutions’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 76, no. 3 (2021): 264–93; Amy Helen Bell, Murder Capital: Suspicious Deaths in London, 1933–53 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Amy Helen Bell, ‘Abortion Crime Scene Photography in Metropolitan London 1950–1968’, Social History of Medicine 30, no. 3 (2017): 661–84; Eloise Moss, Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), chapter 6.

6 Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Country Furniture and Furnishings, 1700–2000 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020), 7–17. See also Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

7 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

8 Deposition of Mary Moore, 6 May 1881 (National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI), Convict Reference File (hereafter CRF), B-2-1892).

9 Deposition of Archibald Dutchfield, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

10 It is probable that David and Elizabeth Buchanan were not legally married. After David’s death, a constable reported that the couple had tried to get married in Carndonagh but had not completed the necessary paperwork to do so (Thomas Hogben to County Inspector Quin John Brownrigg, 13 August 1881 (NAI, Penal File (hereafter PEN)/1892/31)). On the legality of marriage in Ireland, see Luddy and O’Dowd, Marriage in Ireland, 1660–1925, chapter 1. For nineteenth-century long-term cohabitation, see Ginger Frost, Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).

11 Penal record of Elizabeth Buchanan (NAI, PEN/1892/31).

12 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

13 Deposition of Mary Anne Logue, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892); Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

14 Alexa Neale, Photographing Crime Scenes in Twentieth-Century London: Microhistories of Domestic Murder (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 38.

15 Deposition of Thomas Dickson, 10 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

16 Deposition of Andrew Farry, 10 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

17 Ibid.

18 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

19 Anders, ‘“So Delightful a Temporary Home”’, 5–6.

20 For more on this case, see Elaine Farrell, ‘A Most Diabolical Deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society, 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), chapter 4.

21 Alexander Smith in William D. Andrew’s report of the trial (NAI, CRF, E-5-1886).

22 William John Eakins in William D. Andrew’s report of the trial (NAI, CRF, E-5-1886).

23 Deposition of William Grannery, 17 August 1892 (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI), Crown Files for County Antrim, 1892, ANT/1/2/C/2/64).

24 Belfast News-letter, 18 August 1892.

25 Deposition of David Hannan, 26 May 1867 (NAI, CRF, C-50-1867).

26 Freeman’s Journal, 7 April 1879.

27 The Standard, 19 May 1880.

28 Liverpool Mercury, 11 December 1890.

29 Deposition of William Stratford, 14 February 1891 (NAI, CRF, C-75-1893).

30 Ibid.

31 Heather Shore, London’s Criminal Underworlds, c.1720–c.1930: A Social and Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 122–3.

32 For more on this case, see Elaine Farrell, Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland: Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 81–91.

33 Moss, Night Raiders, 135.

34 Information of Joseph King, 1 August 1889 in Infanticide in the Irish Crown Files at Assizes, 1883–1900, ed. Elaine Farrell (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2012), 37.

35 Information of Catherine (Cassie) McFadden of Letterkenny, 1 June 1893 in Infanticide in the Irish Crown Files at Assizes, ed. Farrell, 174.

36 Deposition of Thomas Dickson, 10 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

37 Petition of Elizabeth Buchanan, 20 April 1887 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

38 Deposition of James MacCullagh, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

39 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

40 Neale, Photographing Crime Scenes in Twentieth-Century London, 9.

41 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

42 Freeman’s Journal, 10 February 1865.

43 James Anderson in William D. Andrew’s report of the trial (NAI, CRF, E-5-1886).

44 Ibid.

45 Neale, Photographing Crime Scenes in Twentieth-Century London, 8.

46 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

47 Deposition of Mary Birmingham, 14 March 1893 in Infanticide in the Irish Crown Files at Assizes, ed. Farrell, 168.

48 Information of Patrick McKenna, 19 January 1895 (PRONI, Crown Files for County Antrim, 1895, ANT/1/2/C/5/17).

49 Deposition of John McCaughey, 20 April 1896 (PRONI, Crown Files for the City of Belfast, 1896, BELF/1/2/2/6/17).

50 For discussion of nineteenth-century forensic science and toxicology in the courtroom, see, for example, José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez, ‘Managing Uncertainty in the Academy and the Courtroom: Normal Arsenic and Nineteenth-Century Toxicology’, Isis: A Publication of the History of Science Society 104, no. 2 (2013): 197–225; Ian Burney, Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Alun Evans and Breandán MacSuibhne, ‘Forensics and Folklore the Theft of “Human Lard” in Nineteenth-Century Clare’, History Ireland 20, no. 6 (2012): 26–9; Christopher Hamlin, ‘Forensic Cultures in Historical Perspective: Technologies of Witness, Testimony, Judgment (and Justice?)’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (2013): 4–15.

51 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

52 José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez, ‘Chemistry, Microscopy and Smell: Bloodstains and Nineteenth-Century Legal Medicine’, Annals of Science 72, no. 4 (2013): 490–516.

53 Richard J. Moss in William D. Andrew’s report of the trial (NAI, CRF, E-5-1886).

54 Ibid.

55 Henry Fraser in William D. Andrew’s report of the trial (NAI, CRF, E-5-1886).

56 Deposition of James MacCullagh, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

57 Deposition of Andrew Farry, 10 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

58 Neale, Photographing Crime Scenes in Twentieth-Century London, 9.

59 A stained piece of material sent to Sir Charles Cameron for analysis survives among the trial records for the Queen vs McKeon (NAI, Crown Files for County Sligo, 1891). For photographs of items confiscated in twentieth-century infanticide cases, see Cliona Rattigan, ‘What Else Could I Do? Single Mothers and Infanticide, Ireland 1900–1950 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012), plates.

60 Caitriona Clear, ‘Women of the House in Ireland, 1850–1900’, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Angela Bourke et al., iv (5 vols, Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 596.

61 Deposition of Catherine Manaher, 3 April 1894 (NAI, Crown Files for County Kerry, 1894).

62 Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery, 206.

63 Deposition of Catherine Manaher, 3 April 1894 (NAI, Crown Files for County Kerry, 1894). For a discussion of the challenges women faced in old age, see Sarah McHugh, ‘“Who of Us Care to be Seen Assisting an Old Woman?”: The Institutional Care of Ireland's Elderly Women, 1845–1908’ (Unpublished PhD, Queen’s University Belfast, 2021).

64 Kerry Sentinel, 14 July 1894.

65 Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery, chapter 7; Clear, ‘Women of the House in Ireland’, 596; Maria Luddy, Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), chapter 1; Mary O’Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland, 1500–1800 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), chapter 3.

66 Statement of the accused, 10 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

67 Deposition of Mary Anne Logue, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

68 Ibid.

69 Deposition of Elizabeth Walsh, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

70 Deposition of John Moore, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

71 Ibid.

72 Deposition of Bridget Elliott, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

73 Deposition of Mary Moore, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

74 Victoria Bates, ‘Forensic Medicine and Female Victimhood in Victorian and Edwardian England’, Past & Present, no. 245 (2019): 141.

75 Deposition of James MacCullagh, 6 May 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

76 Londonderry Sentinel, 21 July 1881.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 For a discussion of community disapproval of age gaps within marriages in nineteenth-century Ireland, see Linda May Ballard, Forgetting Frolic: Marriage Traditions in Ireland (Belfast: Queen's University Belfast, 1998), 32; E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 286.

80 Justice Fitzgerald to Dublin Castle, 24 July 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

81 Belfast News-letter, 22 July 1881.

82 Ibid.

83 Freeman’s Journal, 22 July 1881.

84 Belfast News-letter, 22 July 1881.

85 Justice Fitzgerald to Dublin Castle, 24 July 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

86 Petition of inhabitants of the county of Londonderry, n.d. (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

87 Illustrated Police News, 30 July 1891.

88 Justice Fitzgerald to Dublin Castle, 24 July 1881 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

89 Petition of Elizabeth Buchanan, 11 August 1885 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

90 Petition of Elizabeth Buchanan, 20 April 1887 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

91 Petition of Elizabeth Buchanan, 28 February 1888 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

92 Petition of Elizabeth Buchanan, 13 November 1888 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

93 Ibid.

94 Petitions of Elizabeth Buchanan, 30 January 1892; 3 July 1892 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

95 Katie Barclay, ‘Place and Power in Irish Farms at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, Women's History Review 21, no. 4 (2012): 575.

96 Montgomery died in Inishowen Workhouse in February 1883 at the age of eighty-three (Death record of Mary Anne Montgomery, 17 February 1883, available at civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie (last accessed 10 May 2022)).

97 Farrell, Women, Crime and Punishment, 249.

98 Petition of Elizabeth Buchanan, 30 January 1892 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

99 Memo of Charles Bourke, 3 February 1892 (NAI, CRF, B-2-1892).

100 Penal file of Elizabeth Buchanan (NAI, PEN/1892/31).