An Account of the Cruel and Barbarous Murder of Mary Baker...
A Rare Regency Murder Broadside & Moral "Caution": OCLC and Library Hub Locate Only One Copy [Broadside]. [Murder]. Welch, Matthew. An Account of the Cruel and Barbarous Murder of Mary Baker, Supposed by Matthew Welch, (With Whom She Lived in Adultery) In Drury-Lane, London, Early on Monday Morning, June 21 1813. Being an Awful Caution and Warning to All Whoremongers and Adulterers. Newcastle: Marshall, Printer, [1813]. 11-1/2" x 6-3/4" (29 x 17.3 cm) broadside mounted to 13" x 10" (33 x 25.9 cm) backing sheet. Moderate toning, light foxing and soiling, small tear and a few tiny holes to broadside without loss to text, moderate toning and light foxing to backing sheet, which was removed from an album. Rare. $1,850. * A remarkably rare, luridly titled provincial broadside detailing a gruesome London murder. Mary Baker and Matthew Welch "cohabited as man and wife" in Drury Lane, despite both being married to other people. Following a violent domestic quarrel that required the landlord's intervention, Baker was discovered murdered, with "her brains beat out, several cuts on her head, and her breast black from the blows she had received." According to this account, the violence was triggered by jealousy, after Baker paid a visit to her actual husband, which "provoked the vengeance of her bloody paramour." While Regency-era street literature and true-crime broadsides typically balanced moral instruction with cheap titillation, this Newcastle printing adopts an exceptionally strident, fire-and-brimstone tone. Rather than casting Baker purely as a victim, the text frames her horrific murder as a consequence of her own sins-calling it "not only...an awful judgment of God upon the guilty offenders, but also...a salutary caution and warning to others, that they may avoid the paths which inevitably lead to destruction." An exceptional survival of regional popular print culture, capturing 19th-century attitudes toward domestic violence, infidelity, and divine retribution. Extremely rare. OCLC and Library Hub locate only one solitary copy globally, held at the British Library.
Price: $1,850.00
Book number 84390