The sailor had returned home twice without ever setting eyes upon his son. On the first occasion, he was informed that little Richard had been put out to nurse, far from Gosport, for the benefit of the air and to ease him through the perils of teething. His shore leave drew to a close; he took to sea again without having embraced him. Upon his return, in November 1810, the child whom he believed to be three years of age had still not cut his teeth and was once more absent. This time, he would not be put off with a fresh letter. He demanded to see his son. His wife must either produce him or bring him forth.
In the narrative of Camden Pelham, this prolonged delay is no mere succession of untoward mishaps. It marks the span of time that Harriet Magnis was compelled to furnish with an imaginary child. She had written to her husband while he was afloat, announcing that she was with child. The gunner had remitted three hundred pounds—the hard-won savings of several cruises—with strict injunctions that the infant should want for nothing; if it proved to be a boy, so much the better. A second missive announced the birth and bestowed upon the newborn the name of Richard, after his father. The mariner had fashioned his hopes entirely from what the post conveyed to him. No cradle, however, awaited his homecoming.
The affair had begun in London, in Martin’s Lane, where the Dellow family resided. Tommy was playing near the house alongside his little sister. One day, he vanished. A strange woman had been observed in the neighborhood, but the initial searches failed to discover her identity. The account furnishes neither the precise date of the disappearance nor the hourly details of the search; it dwells rather upon the void left in the thoroughfare and upon an inquiry that fastened upon the wrong countenance.
Suspicion fell upon an innocent lady, the wife of a naval surgeon. Several witnesses swore to her identity during two separate examinations, and she was duly committed to the Old Bailey. At trial, the identification collapsed. The prisoner was acquitted for want of sufficient proof that she was the woman seen near the child. Yet this acquittal did not restore Tommy to his kin, nor did it point to the real culprit. The family remained in agonized suspense, while another woman had been forced to answer for an outrage she had never committed.
The clue came at last from Gosport. A magistrate wrote to the Dellows, informing them that their son was there and could be restored to his parents. The father set out immediately and returned to London with the boy. The narrative does not depict the scene of their reunion; it records only the simplest and most decisive fact: Tommy was alive and restored to his home. But the boy’s return necessitated another appearance. Before the Lord Mayor, the father met William Barber, keeper of the Gosport Bridewell, who was to bear witness against Harriet Magnis, an inhabitant of that town in whose lodgings the lad had been discovered.
Barber had seen a handbill describing the lost child. The information directed him to the Magnis residence. He asked Harriet whether she had a child and whether it was her own. She replied, according to Pelham, in an unsteady voice, yet led him without resistance to the chamber where the boy lay sleeping. There, she confessed that she had found him in London. This initial admission did not resolve every question, but it swept aside the tale of the infant she had sent to her husband: the boy was not Richard; he was Tommy Dellow.
She proceeded to explain the deceit. Her husband was fond of children and ardently desired an heir. She had pretended to be pregnant during his absence at sea, and subsequently announced the birth of a boy. At each of his returns, some fresh obstacle was devised to keep the child at a distance. Pelham imputes the abduction to the husband’s longing and the wife’s mounting dread; we possess neither the original correspondence nor the full depositions to ascertain precisely what each party knew or believed. The narrative simply states that Magnis sought to gratify this yearning, and that her husband had faithfully remitted his savings for the child he expected.
Upon his return that November, the fiction could no longer be sustained from afar. Magnis repaired to the capital to procure a boy. Walking down Martin’s Lane, she caught sight of Tommy outside a green-grocer’s shop, standing with his sister. She entered under the pretext of buying apples, caressed the children, and gave an apple to the lad. She then requested the little girl to direct her to a pastrycook’s to buy some cakes. In this manner, Magnis succeeded in carrying off Tommy, leaving the sister behind. By this brief stratagem, the infant who had formed the core of a domestic falsehood became the prize of an opportunist's journey, snatched from his sister in a single moment of diverted attention.
At Gosport, the husband had grown deeply attached to the child he believed his own flesh and blood. Pelham writes that he felt true paternal affection for him and was plunged into profound distress when the fraud was unmasked before the magistrate. He was compelled to surrender him to his lawful parents. The chronicle affords no glimpse into how Tommy remembered his sojourn, nor how the Dellows endured the weeks or months of fruitless searching. Nor does it preserve the name of the gentlewoman so wrongly accused. The thread of the narrative remains narrow: a child found, a father who conducts him home, a keeper who connects a handbill to an address, and a confessed imposture.
The judicial termination is far less distinct than the domestic reunion. After the production of the depositions related by Pelham, Harriet Magnis was committed to Winchester Gaol to stand her trial at the assizes. She escaped conviction, the author observes, because she had been indicted in the wrong county—the abduction having been perpetrated in London. He does not specify whether a fresh prosecution was instituted, nor what punishment, if any, was ultimately inflicted. There the chapter terminates. Tommy was restored to his parents, but the chronicle leaves the penal fate of his abductor unresolved.
The case thus opens with an error of identity and concludes with an error of jurisdiction. Between these two failures of justice, a father put his faith in letters speaking of a child he had never seen, and proof was finally furnished by a handbill minute enough to guide Barber to Tommy’s side in Gosport. Pelham’s narrative turns these circumstances into a homily on the perils of fraud; we, at least, may disentangle the facts he presents from the omissions he leaves behind. The true mother and father regain their son. The innocent lady is cleared. As for Harriet Magnis, the legal record remains unwritten.
Documentary Note: Narrative adapted from the chapter entitled “Harriet Magnis. Tried for Child Stealing,” in Camden Pelham, The Chronicles of Crime; or, The New Newgate Calendar, vol. I (London: T. Miles & Co., 1887), pp. 510–511, an edition preceded by a preface dated 1 July 1840. This retrospective account provides neither the exact date of the abduction nor the name of the lady falsely identified; it records that Magnis escaped at the Winchester Assizes owing to an indictment framed in the wrong county. No contemporary trial records were consulted.