It is not the first or last report of a sudden family death that I have found on searching a newspaper database, but it might be the strangest. After finding the notice of my great-grandfather’s inquest in the Manchester Evening News in 1939, a few pages on in the search results is another hit for Robert Voss, also in the Manchester Evening News. The date of this, however, is 1886.
Intrigued, I click and am met with the following:
SINGULAR DEATH OF A TRACT SELLER.—In Liverpool, yesterday, an inquest was held on the body of Robert Voss, aged 65 years, a cripple, who for some years past obtained a living by selling tracts in the neighbourhood of the Exchange. He lodged at 84, Circus-street, but had been missing since February last. On the 17th of that month he was seen by a police-constable and the head stageman on the Prince’s Landing Stage, and to them he stated that he had been drinking, and wished to walk about until he got sober before he went home. The attention of these officers was taken away from the deceased for a few moments by some boys, and then they heard a splash in the river on the other side of the stage; and missed the deceased but his hat and crutches and pedlar’s licence were found on the stage. A strong flood tide was running at the time, and the deceased was carried away before he could be rescued. His body was not recovered until Tuesday afternoon last, and was then in a very decomposed state. It was found floating down the river past the Landing Stage. The jury returned a verdict of “Found drowned.”
Manchester Evening News, 16 September 1886.
There is far too much to unpack here. I note, however, that like my great-grandfather, his namesake and grandson, he was disabled, though maybe by a different form of war. That he did, despite this, peddle his wares as far away as Exeter throughout the 1870s, according to records of pedlar licenses that were newly required under the Pedlar’s Act of 1871, which applied to:
“any hawker, pedlar, petty chapman, tinker, caster of metals, mender of chairs, or other person who, without any horse, or other beast of bearing or drawing burden, travels and trades on foot and goes from town to town or to other men’s house, carrying or selling or exposing for sale any goods, wares, merchandise immediately to be delivered, or selling or offering his skill in handicraft.”
To be added to the record that he was born in Portsmouth, the son of a mariner; that he married another pedlar, Anne Walsh, in Liverpool in 1871, and although they apparently sold reading matter, both signed the marriage register with an X; that he can be found in the rate books living with his children in Hanover Street, Manchester until the year before his death; that he clearly lived an extraordinary life before this ‘singular death’.
As a historian of the press, this phrase stays with me. What does it mean? Isn’t every death singular, in a manner of speaking? Was it a simple euphemism? I track the sub-heading across the rapidly expanding print matter of the nineteenth century, now digitised, of the kind that was fast making tract sellers like Robert Voss seem like a passing quirk of history. Singular deaths, it turns out, were multitudinous but bizarre, unexplained, accidental, without blame: a woman killed when squeezing a lemon and the juice entering into a wound, a man whose stomach exploded when he ingested a spider in his claret, an eleven-year-old boy who was wrongly accused of hurting his baby sister and reeled three times before dropping dead on the spot with ‘a rush of blood to the head’. So far, so very ‘the past is a foreign country …’.
But Robert Voss’s death on Prince’s Landing doesn’t seem like that. It feels depressingly familiar, even predictable, his body bobbing up and down on the water, unnoticed, while his children waited for their father to return.
I'll have to write something about the changes in inquest reporting over the 19thC: they get increasingly lurid. Which I guess makes it more vivid now but shocking.
Just saw this – what a haunting insight into the lives of the Victorian poor. As if there weren't enough ways to die without lethal lemon juice and exploding stomachs…