Victorian Crime. Hidden Neglect

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A doctor and Mr Hedley were called, and Mr Hedley was so shocked at the sight of Mrs Smith he issued a warrant for her husband's arrest for neglect. This would be too late to save Mrs Smith, after three years of starvation, freezing and beatings she was dying.

 Knowing she was dying and no longer afraid she told of her beatings and starvation to the doctor and Mr Hedley. She told of how she was left lying in the dark filthy smelling room starving, while her husband and Isabella Johnson his mistress went out drinking. When they came back they would sing and dance and feast on meat before going to their new bed together. Also how the mistress not much older than their daughter was pregnant by her husband, having told this sad story Mrs Ann Smith died.

The inquest was heard in the Londonderry Arms on the 18th March, where they heard harrowing tales from the neighbours about Mrs Smith's suffering. One young girl described how Mrs Smith had pleaded with her to buy a turnip to ease her hunger, with a farthing she had found and still no one thought to get the poor woman help.

Because Mrs Smith died, Mr Smith had been charged with murder. In July when he appeared before Durham Assizes Mr Smith produced several drinking pals who told the court he was a kind and generous husband. Incredibly the jury acquitted Mr Smith of murder and he was free to go, and so he escaped the blame for his wife's death and neglect but Sunderland's respectable public did not.

The story caused such shock the editor of the Sunderland News wrote an article commenting on the moral state of the town: In this great borough, with it's wealthy traders and merchants, in this religious town, so full of Christian people, a fellow creature famishes for months in a living tomb, and finds nobody to relieve her torture until death, 'the poor man's dearest friend' steps in and releases the weary soul. We speak in terms of indignant horror when we hear of innocent people incarcerated in loathsome foreign cells but here, at our very doors, a poor woman was kept for years in a domestic bastile.

A more dreadful picture could scarcely be conceived than of this female, worn to skin and bone, crouching upon the low seat her tyrant allowed her while chewing a piece of tin in a vain attempt to cheat the fiend of famine that was preying mercilessly on her. Had the case been known in time, Ann Smith would not have been allowed to die of starvation.

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