John Wood Sweet’s The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A story of rape, gender, & class in late 18th century New York City

The reader will notice that a dazzling number of prizes are listed …

Dear Readers and Friends,

This in the spirit of say the TLS’s recent issue where supposedly famous people who are themselves often writers are asked what was your favorite, or did you think was the best or most important book(s) you read this year? For once I have a single candidate, and for once the number of prizes given are not in inverse proportion to a book’s merits — though I admit I am a year late. The Sewing Girl’s Tale was published in 2022.

But it’s as fresh and excellent and relevant a book as it was the day it was published, and as the story that’s recounted of a long series of connected events 230 years ago. Sweet offers a fully researched and documented account of the rape of a lower-middle class young unmarried female seamstress Lanah Sawyer by a well-connected upper class or aristocratic male — he led a life of privilege with access to opportunities for power and wealth — that occurred Wednesday-Thursday, September 4-5, 1793, in the late mid-night to dawn hours in a locked room in the brothel of Madame Carey in lower New York. What makes it doable is that her stepfather, John Callahan, a successful ship pilot (no easy job — he boarded other men’s vessels, assumed command, and guided the ships safely into or out of port), went to court to accuse Bedlow of rape; the case actually was tried at length, and much of what was said written down by an ambitious young lawyer, William Wyche. The jury’s decision resulted in angry class-induced riots and extended newspaper debates. The members of all the involved families, other individuals testifying, variously involved by proximity, family, friend, professional relationship left papers; that stage of capitalist colonialist society is already wash with property and other kinds of documents.

John Wood Sweet has studied all these to show in a rivetingly supple prose how from the outset Lanah Sawyer was at a severe disadvantage because the stance set up demanded she prove she had resisted vigorously, sustained conspicuous physical injuries, reported the crime quickly, and her “side” could not be shown to be going to court to destroy the reputation (life, career) of the male accused, especially if he was a man of property or standing. It never mattered that Bedlow lied to Lanah to lure her to walk out with him, intended to seduce and/or rape her, or any of the unfair tactics he used. All the savaging of her character that his side could do is listened to; the lies, for example, that the brothel madam concocted against Lanah are given credence after she is shown to be a liar. We see how much on top of gender-distrust of women nuanced levels of class, connections, mattered every step of the way. How important intelligent lawyers with teams of people providing evidence. Sweet remarks “the fact that Lanah Sawyer managed” to win over enough people is a “testament to her courage, to her emotional endurance, and to her ability to inspire trust and sympathy” (122). And none of it would have happened had her stepfather not been himself a man of strong determined character who would “not be circumvented.”

The case did not stop there Callahan went on to sue Bedlow in civil court (where point of view of the legal precedents were not so much about women’s sexuality as the loss of income) for seduction of his stepdaughter, damaging both her and her family’s reputation, loss of time and labor (equals money); and this time Callahan and Sawyer won an enormous sum for the time, $4,500, the payment for which landed Bedlow in debtor’s prison. So after all there were many people in the court who found Bedlow’s masculine predation unacceptable. Bedlow countersued over Callahan’s assault (now alleged) of him; more fascinatingly, one of the lawyers involved on Bedlow’s side of the case, Alexander Hamilton (himself), may have been involved (and was accused by Callahan’s lawyers) in the production of a forged letter allegedly written by Lanah retracting all she had said as lies. This takes us into one of the more sordid love affairs of Hamilton, which itself involved clearly forced “love-sick epistles” written by Hamilton’s possible mistress.

Wood’s narrative study has been widely reviewed for such a book (e.g, New York Times, Kirkus, Amazon Publishers Weekly), the Gotham Center for New York City history, with interviews on C-Span, YouTube.

Sawyer’s is not the only non-fictional case of this type to have attracted a couple of centuries of attention: another is that of Elizabeth Canning who claimed to have been brutally abducted, and kept in a locked room for a full month, beaten, threatened and starved. I found the books on her and studies a lot less satisfying as there is seems the young woman has not been fully vindicated despite Henry Fielding’s heroic attempts to rescue her (whose pamphlet I’ve read) from calumny after a Lord Mayor and judge at the trial decided they could try her for perjury and won a verdict of guilty, whereupon she was transported. I’m as relieved as Sweet to be able to say both young women eventually married and seem to have lived a calm respectable life eventually, but sorry to have to say Canning’s case was taken up by Josephine Tey in her fictionalized version of it as The Franchise Affair where class more than gender prejudice led Tey to re-smear the girl and resurrect the seemingly deathless idea that women are prone to make false accusations to cover up their transgressive sexual activity.

Moore’s book is a study in the ambiguities of all the testimonies and how what people paid attention to tells us more about them at that moment, who they are, how they relate, and the class impositions of variously prejudiced attitudes towards far more than sex itself at the time

That Sweet firmly believes Lanah’s story and sees the trial’s first outcome as the result of misogynistic and class prejudice enables his book to have the clarity it does. I think it also part of the book’s singular virtues that he does see what happened in terms of today’s psychology as it comes down to us from the eighteenth century — as for example, found in Richardson’s Clarissa, which I wrote my dissertation on and have written two recent papers, one directly on rape in the 18th century and today, and the other the film adaptation by David Nokes.

A scene from the movie where the brothel prostitutes help the rapist hold Clarissa down

Among the pleasures of this text are revealing descriptions of the places in New York City where all the different scenes take place; it is written like a mystery-thriller so we never learn what is going to happen next until it happens. So at one point we are told evidence shows that Lanah Sawyer hanged herself, and we have to read into the next chapter, several paragraphs on to discover that she survived. Sweet’s research went well past immediate documents; he discovered this act of Lanah’s by a couple of lines written by the novelist, Susannah Rowson (Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, 1797), who happened to be in New York at the time of the Bedlow trial, and was the cousin of the editor the Vermont Gazette where this detail was published as “the event that provoked the riots — news of the inconsolable young lady’s suicide attempt” (219-220).

The kind of dress Lanah would have been wearing: printed cotton held together with straight pins and drawstrings — from Sweet’s book

Here, though, we do come upon the one drawback of the book: all the words we have left by Lanah herself are the testimony she gave that was written down, testimony necessarily shaped the questions put to her. We are left without any look into the real tone of her mind, the subjective thoughts she must have had; we are left to guess why she does what she does by what is left of her outward actions. We have a great deal — like who she went to directly after she escaped the locked room, and the sequence of events that transpired among her relatives and associates, but nothing of a subjective inwardness. The book is not a novel, and my guess is that Sweet decided not to fictionalize at any point on the grounds it would weaken the effect of his book, and I think he made the right decision.

At any rate, no woman reader or anyone interested in the issues the case swirls round upon, should miss this book. An appendix tells of where Sweet did his research and what he found of particular interest; the notes include full sources and are of great interest in themselves.

Ellen