Making the Case to Reprieve Annette Meyers

Abstract

In 1848, Annette Meyers, a domestic servant, murdered Henry Ducker, a private in the Coldstream Guards, as he walked through St. James’s Park. Meyers freely admitted to having shot him and claimed she had long planned to do so. In spite of these admissions, the media constructed a version of the events in which she was the greater victim, and the murdered man was the villain. This article examines how two broadsides, a chapbook and extensive newspaper reports promoted sympathy for Meyers, and why the public believed it appropriate to see her as an object of sympathy. It also demonstrates the complicated nature of ideological transitions: they are not straight forward linear progressions but can be complicated and contradictory. New notions of gender — bourgeois masculinity and the cult of domesticity — and shifts in legal thought, especially with respect to the legal defence of provocation, caused tensions between the media and the courts. Defending older understandings of provocation, the newspapers made rare criticisms of the trial judge, the sentence, and the justice system itself, critiques which were widely shared by middle-class readers, and which might have proven dangerous during a turbulent decade like the 1840s. The various forms of media acted together, although not in an orchestrated fashion, to force the Home Secretary to overrule the judge, and to reduce Meyers’ sentence to two years imprisonment to be followed by transportation for life to Australia.