Dangerous to Know: Women, Crime, and Notoriety in the Early Republic

PREFACE

Preface In the early spring of 1822 two women, just released from Philadelphia's Walnut Street prison on a robbery charge, hailed a passing carriage. They drove from boardinghouse to boardinghouse throughout the city. Though the women had sufficient money to rent a room, they were denied admittance everywhere. In a final attempt to find lodging for his passengers, the coachman took them to a brothel. But even the madam ofa house ofprostitution refused them entry. The worried coachman declared, "They must be a pair of she devils when even a brothel refused them admittance." Finally , someone did agree to take the infamous Ann Carson and her companion , Mrs. Stoops: Captain Parrish, who ran a gambling house on South Third Street. Even there, Carson was admitted only because Parrish cared more for her money than for his reputation; she and the more affluent Mrs. Stoops paid for a week's lodging in advance, ordered oysters and punch, and conspicuously displayed their cash. Shortly after this episode, Ann Carson contacted Mary Clarke, a respectable woman who earned her living by her pen. She asked Clarke to ghostwrite her autobiography. Clarke not only agreed to write Carson's book, she also invited Ann Carson to live in her home. Seven months later, The History ofthe Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson rattled Philadelphia society and became one of the most scandalous, and eagerly read, memoirs of the age. This gripping yarn told the story of a woman who tried to rescue her lover from the gallows (by blowing up the Walnut Street prison, if necessary), attempted to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania, and chose a life of crime over one of genteel poverty. It entertained readers with accounts oflove, murder, and criminal daring. Dangerous to [(now is a paired history of Carson and Clarke. An intertwined biography relates episodes in each woman's life that highlight the strategies these women used to succeed in a society that constrained women's activities and ambitions. Ann Baker was married at age fifteen because her parents were too impoverished to keep her. For twelve years, she led a tumultuous life with John Carson, an irresponsible sea captain whose unreliable income forced x Preface her to seek work. She opened a small shop, which brought her success. And John's long absences gave her a measure of personal independence; unfettered by her husband's authority, Ann Carson sought pleasure in several adulterous relationships. But a murder one cold January night in 1816 propelled Ann Carson irrevocably into the criminal underworld of robbers, counterfeiters, and conmen. She embraced this dangerous life; though it was rife with tenuous alliances and ever-present risk, Carson found the economic and personal freedom that had previously eluded her. Carson's ghostwriter was no less daring. Mary Clarke pursued dangerous associations and wrote scandalous exposes based on her experiences . Like Carson, Clarke was forced to become her family's breadwinner. Also like Carson, she found respectable work-as a playwright and journalist . But Clarke walked a fine line between respectability and notoriety. Her collaboration with Carson was just the beginning ofa series ofpublications that supplied readers with sex, scandal, and murder. Clarke immersed herself in the world of criminals and disreputable actors, and she used her acquaintance with this demimonde to shape a career as a sensationalist writer. The activities of Mary Clarke and Ann Carson seem far removed from prescribed female behavior in early nineteenth-century America. Both women deliberately violated gender conventions and courted publicity . Why would Clarke jeopardize her reputation, and hence her livelihood , through associations with a criminal? And why would Carson, already on a downward social and economic spiral, wish to publicize her infamy rather than disguise it? The answers lie in the two major sources for this study: The History ofthe Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson (1822) and The Memoirs ofthe Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson (1838). The first is Carson's autobiography (written with Mary Clarke). The second is Clarke's continuation ofCarson's life story. The books relate actual events in both women's lives-their family circumstances, work, and Carson's trials and incarcerations. But Carson and Clarke are unreliable narrators. Ann Carson and Mary Clarke used their writings, and manipulated their readers, to further their own ends. Few people know the histories of these two women, who did extraordinary things for their time. Yet their circumstances must have been familiar to a large group of people: middling women, fallen on hard times, who struggled...