ABSTRACT
Anon, quoted in the commonplace book of Jane Seabrook, Essex 1832
On a rainy afternoon in August 1832, a 12-year-old vicar's daughter recorded in her diary that, while walking near the rural parsonage, she had seen 'a poor miserable woman in a tent by the roadside . . . she has a bad drunken husband who has quite starved her; and now that they cannot pay their rent they have been turned out of their house. To add to her miseries, she is very ill, having just given birth to a child. Mama has been once or twice to see her and given her broth'. A few weeks later, she saw a figure lying by the roadside who she assumed was sleeping but later discovered was dead from cholera.1
