Surprising Histories: A Comparison of Two Pamphlets

Abstract

ON 13 September 1746, Mary (alias ‘George,’ or ‘Dr Charles’) Hamilton was arrested for posing as a physician and marrying Mary Price of Wells. Hamilton was found guilty of fraud under an obscure clause in the vagrancy act and sentenced to public whippings in four market towns, and to six months’ imprisonment. Newspaper accounts of the arrest focused primarily on Hamilton's audacious personality and the fact that she had deceived Price, and at least two other women, into marriage, not on the sexual details of the case.1 Later that same year, however, an account of the case was published anonymously, and subsequently attributed to Henry Fielding. This pamphlet, The Female Husband: Or, The Surprising History of Mrs. Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton2 focused more intently on the titillating aspects of the case; sales were brisk.3 Since its re-discovery in 1957, Fielding's pamphlet has attracted a good deal of critical attention.4 However, another version of this pamphlet, published sixty-seven years later (in 1813), is much less well-known.5 Although this later text, also published anonymously under the title The Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband!6 retains some of Fielding's prose, many alterations have been made which, like the more sensationalized title, point suggestively to differences in purpose and audience, as well as corresponding shifts in historical and cultural context. I offer here a comparison of these two pamphlets.