Alan Crosby finds some plot holes in one of the most famous novels of the 19th century
OFF THE RECORD Alan Crosby shares his views on family history
A chance remark by a genealogist friend reminded me of Wilkie Collins’ celebrated novel The Woman in White (1859–1860). The plot is too complex to set out here, but the key feature from our point of view is that the villain, Sir Percival Glyde, baronet and prosperous landowner, has a terrible secret. He is illegitimate, and his inheritance was fraudulent.
Seeking the truth, the hero, Walter Hartright, undertakes genealogical detective work by visiting Old Welmingham Church to look at the marriage register. He finds the marriage of Sir Percival’s parents in September 1803. The entry is smaller than the space occupied by the marriages above and after, but otherwise “the register of the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde was in no respect remarkable… The information about his wife was the usual information given in such cases… ‘Cecilia Jane Elster, of Park-View Cottages, Knowlesbury, only daughter of the late Patrick Elster, Esq., formerly of Bath’.”
Walter copies the entry, but later in the story is able to find a duplicate of the register in a lawyer’s office: “A clerk was sent to the strong room, and after some delay returned with the volume… My hands were trembling… I felt the necessity of concealing my agitation as well as I could from the persons about me.” In the pages for September 1803 he finds the familiar entries before and after the one he had seen in the church, but “between these entries… nothing! Not a vestige of the entry which recorded the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde and Cecilia Jane Elster in the register of the church!”
Sir Percival forged the register entry to pretend that his parents were married. But you, dear reader, might have some questions, as have quite a few other family historians over the years.
The first concerns the original register. The 1753 Marriage Act required the use of preprinted marriage registers, each page having two or four blank forms. There were spaces for the names of the bride and groom, the date, whether by banns or licence, and the signatures of the officiating clergyman, the happy couple and the witnesses. These forms were completed in sequence, and numbered consecutively. Any that were accidentally left unused should have been crossed through, to prevent a forgery. So
