“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies
In a world where nothing is certain… and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness. – David Lodge (“Sense and Sensibility”)
1Leon Edel expressed the central puzzle of writing biography as “every life takes its own form and a biographer must find the ideal and unique literary form that will express it” (qtd. in Novarr 165). My primary challenge in writing Poisoned: The Trials of Mary Dean – a biography in the form of a (fictionalised) first-person memoir purportedly written by the subject herself – was the location of a textual voice for Mary that, if not her own, could have credibly belonged to a woman of her time, place and circumstance.
2The ‘Dean case’ caused a sensation across Australia in the mid-1890s when George Dean was arrested for the attempted murder of his 20-year-old wife, Mary. George was a handsome Sydney ferry master who had played the romantic lead in a series of spectacular rescues, flinging himself into the harbour to save women passengers who had fallen overboard. When on trial for repeatedly poisoning his wife, his actions and motivations were not probed; instead, Mary’s character and behaviour and, by extrapolation, those of the entire female sex, were examined and analysed. This approach climaxed in defence counsel claims that Mary poisoned herself to frame her husband, but George was found guilty and sentenced to hang, the mandatory punishment for attempted murder at that time.
3Despite the persuasive prosecution evidence and the jury’s unanimous verdict, the Sydney press initiated a public outcry. After a series of inflamed community meetings and with a general election approaching, the Premier called for a Royal Commission into Dean’s conviction. This inquiry came to the extraordinary conclusion that:
the facts, as shown, are quite as compatible with the hypothesis that Mrs. Dean ... administered the arsenic to herself – possibly at the prompting of her mother and without any intention of taking a fatal dose – as that the poison was administered to her by her husband with an intent to kill. (Regina v George Dean 16)
4George was freed with a Royal Pardon and Mary was publicly reviled as a pariah of the lowest order. This unhappy situation continued even after it was revealed that her husband had confessed his guilt to his solicitor, and charges of conspiracy and perjury were brought against George and his lawyers who were then members of the New South Wales Parliament. Although the lawyers both escaped relatively unscathed, George Dean was gaoled for 14 years.
5I first came across this story in 1995. In 1998, proposing to write Mary Dean’s biography, I was soon faced with the fact that, despite her undeniable centrality in events, I could find only limited personal information about my subject. She did not leave a diary, journal or any other sustained autobiographical reflection, and accounts for the past century have focused on George (as fallen hero) and the notable figures involved in the judicial scandal. Two relatively recent exceptions which show some interest in Mary Dean include works by Judith Allen (1990) and Juliet Peers (1992), but neither provided the level of biographical detail I was seeking.
6This was despite Mary’s story having obvious potential for a compelling biographical narrative. To begin with, she experiences the terror of suspecting her own husband is poisoning her as she convalesces after the birth of their child. She survives repeated doses of strychnine and arsenic, only to confront the humiliating certainty that her husband was desperate to be rid of her. Then, weak and ill, she has to endure the ordeal of police-court proceedings and a criminal trial when she is damned as a witch conspiring with her wicked mother to ruin her husband. Withstanding assertions that her childhood home was a brothel and she a prostitute, she spends long weeks in hospital knowing her husband is under sentence of execution, only to be released, destitute, with a sickly child she has poisoned with her own breast milk. Still physically debilitated, she is called before a Royal Commission where she is again violently cross-examined and, on the day of her twenty-first birthday, is confronted with the knowledge that not only was her mother a transported convict, but that she is, herself, of illegitimate birth.
7When the Commission finds in her husband’s favour, Mary has to watch her poisoner pardoned, freed and feted as a popular celebrity, while she faces an increasingly viperous press, and is jeered at and spat on in the streets. Next, she is forced to testify at yet another series of public trials and finally, even when her husband confesses his crime and is gaoled for perjury (his Royal Pardon saving him from again facing an attempted murder charge), she is ostracised as the penniless wife of a common criminal and illegitimate daughter of a transported convict. Despite this, and having little more than the shame of divorce to look forward to, Mary nevertheless regains her health and, four years after her final court appearance, marries a respectable shopkeeper. A year later, in 1902, she gives birth to her second child.
8But how to write a compelling biography around this skeleton, when the historical record is so lacking? Inspired by letters in her own hand that were presented as evidence in her husband’s trials and reproduced in the legal transcripts and newspaper reports,These letters were written under Mary’s maiden name of Seymour. together with examples written by women of her time, class and education, fabricating an extended letter (written by Mary, but based on historical evidence) seemed a viable textual solution. For centuries, domestic letters were a major means of autobiographical expression for ‘non-literary’, working-class women and, moreover, a textual format within which Mary (silenced for over a century) could finally relate her own version of events.
9Having decided the most likely audience for such a missive would be her own children, I contemplated having Mary write to her mother but this was illogical, as her sole living parent was a daily and intimate participant in the events Mary would chronicle. The father whose existence was so shockingly revealed to her during the Royal Commission was another possibility, as was the half-sister she had never met, but I have no evidence Mary ever made any attempt to communicate with either of these relations. Putting her feelings in writing for her ex-husband’s elucidation seemed overly melodramatic, as well as highly improbable as the historical record suggests she wanted no further contact him after he was finally found guilty and gaoled. I started the letter (and therefore ended Mary’s ‘autobiographical’ narrative) at the moment when she disappears from the historical record when her second child was born. This birth is not only one of the life-changing events that can provoke a memoir-writing act but, in keeping with biography’s requirement to be a researched history, did not demand excessive imagination of a life history of which I had little evidence.The extended convalescence after birth which was desirable (but not always attained) by women of her time also provided the unusual leisure necessary to write an extended narrative. These decisions aligned with what John Burnett has identified as the most common motivations for a working-class person to write an autobiographical narrative: “belief that he [sic] had some important … personal triumph over difficulties and misfortune … to leave for one’s children or grandchildren” (11). This relatively common human desire also tailored neatly with a central theme animating Mary’s life – that ignorance about the past can poison your future.
10To create a textual voice for Mary in her narrative, I utilised the literary process of ‘ventriloquising’ or providing a believable (fictional) voice for a historical character – the term ‘literary ventriloquism’ was coined by David Lodge in 1987 for how novelists create (and readers ‘hear’) the various voices in literary works (100). While biographies including Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner (2000) and, as Richard Freadman has noted, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) have effectively employed varieties of biographical ventriloquism, this is a literary device more frequently used by fiction writers. It is also interesting to note that when skilled fiction writers employ ventriloquism, their resulting works are often perceived as much as biography-histories as imaginative pieces. Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is the invented document of which Kelly biographers dream, an autobiographical account supposedly written by Kelly so his infant daughter might “comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered” (5), but the voice Carey created was so credible that historians (including Ian Jones and Alex McDermott) debated its authenticity. This was despite Carey making no claims for the historical accuracy of his work.
11I checked the validity of my ventriloquising of Mary’s narrative against the (limited) available examples of nineteenth-century working-class women’s speech. Autobiographical narratives of the late nineteenth century were largely written by middle- and upper-class women. (Holmes 3; Spender 3) These included Australian (often bush pioneer) diaries and letters, U.S. women’s frontier reminiscences and a number of British life histories in Brunel University’s Working Class Autobiographical Archive. The Working Class Autobiographical Archive at Brunel University (U.K.) includes over 230 autobiographies, half by women. Together, these provided considerable insight into the question of how ‘literary’ a narrative by a working-class woman might be, Burdett noting that “the first and most obvious characteristic of working-class autobiographies and diaries is the generally high quality of the writing itself” (13). This chimed with journalists’ (often quite surprised) remarks on how “well-spoken” Mary was. Mary was interviewed by the North Shore Times in April 1895, a lengthy interview which was reprinted verbatim as ‘Interview with Mrs. Dean’ in the Truth, 5 May 1895 (7); and gave further extended interviews in the Sydney Morning Herald, 9 October 1895 (8) and 10 October 1895 (5); and the Daily Telegraph, 9 October 1895 (5). Of course, I primarily tested my text against such press interviews, Mary’s own letters and the articulations of her voice reported in the trial and other court records.
12Not that the latter group of texts can be taken as ‘verbatim’ transcriptions. Although court and other legal records provide, as Karen Dubinskyhas noted, “a window into instances of personal life … we can hear people talking about love, emotional and sexual intimacy, power, betrayal and broken promises” (4), such texts are profoundly mediated documents. The citations we now read in print passed through many hands – Mary’s testimonies would have been initially noted by the court stenographer, then transcribed, corrected, edited, typeset, corrected again, printed and bound – with each stage in the process incorporating inaccuracies, omissions and changes into the text. And, however accurate, such transcripts are never complete, neither indicating the tone in which answers were given, nor the speakers’ hesitations, pauses or accompanying gestures. The transcripts I used also record many examples of Lyndal Roper’s “forced discourse”, where Mary was directed to give only usually abbreviated responses to questions, questions which no doubt often directed the tone, content and even wording of her answers (54).
13Despite these limitations, it was following Mary in court through these texts, cringing at the humiliation and bullying she was subjected to, rallying when she showed spirit and almost cheering when she was finally vindicated, which allowed me to feel a real human connection with her as my subject. It was via these texts (and her own letters) that I also became aware that Mary Dean had been a person who, at the same time as she was living her life, was also (as are we all) remembering, forgetting and, probably, fabricating stories about that life – stories which, at times, challenged and contradicted each other. My aim was always to move beyond finding a persuasive textual voice for Mary, that is one which seemed authentic (and suitable for a novel), to one able to tell some of the contradictory stories of Mary’s life, as she no longer could. Ultimately, I wanted every utterance of my textual rendering of her speech to declare (as J. M. Coetzee has one of his characters say): “I live, I suffer, I am here. With cunning and treachery, if necessary, I fight against becoming one of the forgotten ones of history” (3).
