Stuart Bursill tells a tale of Dickensian poverty
Stuart Bursill’s research revealed uncomfortable truths about the life of his great great grandmother, who struggled to make ends meet in Victorian London. Jon Bauckham finds out more
Long before the creation of the welfare state, the poorest members of society were forced to rely on charity in order to scrape by. If the situation became truly dire, they would have to enter the workhouse – a dehumanising, and often traumatic, experience.
Women were particularly at risk. If their father or husband died, fell ill or abandoned them, one of their few options was to take on low-paid work as a servant, or perhaps as a laundress.
If they had any illegitimate children, the odds were stacked against them even further.
This month, Stuart Bursill reveals how he made a sad discovery regarding his great great grandmother using a combination of online sources.
My Brick Wall
“Simply type in a name” is what the advert for ancestry.co.uk says, and that’s exactly what I did when I got a computer in 2005. Even with spelling variants, ‘Bursill’ is a relatively unusual surname, so researching my forebears seemed quite straightforward. Soon I had a tree, including my grandchildren, going back 13 generations.
However, one part of my tree troubled me. Despite being able to trace my Bursill ancestors all the way back to Francis Bursill of Westminster, who married Margaret Kelly on 28 April 1698, it was not an unbroken male line.
The fly in the ointment was my great great grandmother, Sophia Bursill, born on 31 August 1838 in St Pancras in London. The third of ten children, Sophia had passed her surname down to me via my great grandfather, Charles Alexander Bursill. He had been born illegitimately without any indication of who his father had been.
As I followed the paper trail, the tragic story of Sophia’s life began to unfold in front of me. It made grim reading, even worthy of a place in a Charles Dickens novel.
In 1847, aged nine, Sophia and her family were living in an area known as Agar Town, which was then described as “the worst slum or shanty town in London”. It was while they were living there that her younger brother, Stephen, died of dysentery.
Further tragedy struck days before Sophia’s 13th birthday, when her father died following a freak accident. Sophia had been listed as a “scholar” in the 1851 census a few months earlier, but the incident meant she was
probably forced to go into service and provide financial support for the family. In the next census, she was working for a family in Dalston while her young son, Charles, stayed with a different household in Homerton.
By 1871, Sophia had had two illegitimate children and was living in Islington. Despite never having married, she was described as a “widow”, with her occupation listed as “laundress”. I suspected that she was having to make ends meet another way, but there was no proof.
My Eureka Moment
In 2013 I found a baptism entry from St Pancras Old Church dated 1 October 1863 for a William ‘Bussill’, whose mother’s name was Sophia. It was then that I realised that my great great grandmother had actually given birth to three illegitimate sons, rather than two.
Intrigued, I managed to order a matching birth certificate for a William ‘Bursell’, which listed the place of birth as St Pancras Workhouse. I knew that Ancestry had a large number of workhouse records from London Metropolitan Archives, but that they had not been transcribed.
However, as I browsed through the admission registers and reached the page for entries dated 7 September 1863, my hunch was finally proved correct. In the occupation column, Sophia Bursill was described as a “prostitute”.
My Breakthrough
According to the records, Sophia was admitted to the workhouse infirmary at 5.40am, along with a nurse named Ann Woodward, who was probably helping her until complications arose.
Sadly, William only lived for 11 weeks. On the certificate, the cause of death was recorded as “convulsions” and “inflammation of the brain”, which is also known as encephalitis.
The condition was possibly caused by a viral infection such as the herpes simplex virus, which is a common cause of nonepidemic or sporadic encephalitis. The virus, which can be passed directly from mother to baby during birth, had a very high infant mortality rate at the time.
Interestingly, William’s death certificate revealed that he died at 30 Johnson Street, Somers Town. In a strange twist of fate, Charles Dickens himself had lived at 29 Johnson Street some years earlier.
Sophia did eventually get married in 1872, but never had any children with her husband, John Tucker. She was admitted into the Islington Workhouse Infirmary on 14 January 1918 and died there of “senility” on 6 November 1922. She was laid to rest at Islington Cemetery four days later, in a burial arranged by the workhouse, aged 84.