The Leadams of Tooley Street

The Leadams of Tooley Street

Tooley Street in Southwark is the location of my new novel Sinclair. Today is it’s one of London’s best known streets, home to London Bridge Station and the London Dungeon, and is close to the London Shard and City Hall.

Running parallel to the Thames on the south side Tooley Street is one of the oldest streets in London. Its name is said to be a strange corruption of its former name, St. Olave’s Street, which is hard to believe but I suppose we’ll just have to accept what the local experts tell us on that one.

It’s a thriving place today with state of the art offices, clean and tidy streets and modern communications and although it was no less thriving in the past it was a very different place then. Here are some of the residents and trades listed as living and operating in the area in the 18th and 19th century:

Wharfingers (warehouse owners), merchants, instrument makers, factors, and agents; outfitters, biscuit-bakers, store-shippers, ship-chandlers, slop-sellers, block-makers, rope-makers, engineers, and then there were the surgeons who worked at the great charitable hospitals: Guy’s, St Thomas’ and the London.

My novel is set in eighteenth century Tooley Street in a house inhabited by my family’s ancestors for three generations. They owned an apothecary shop at No. 65 and worked as surgeons at Guy’s Hospital just a stone’s throw away. Members of the Leadam family pop in and out of the historical record; appearing in trade directories, hospital correspondence, or as witnesses in Old Bailey cases or giving evidence to Government enquiries on issues such as public health.Some members of the family are mentioned in magazine and newspaper articles of the day and some have published obituaries and their own publications.

In my story which is a fiction not a family history, a Scottish doctor down on his luck comes to live at No 65 Tooley Street after the unexpected death of Christopher Leadam who is based on the real Christopher Leadam who was born in Yorkshire and worked at Guy’s hospital as a surgeon and was secretary to one of its weekly committees. He died young leaving a widow, whom I have called Charlotte Leadam in the book and a teenage son. My story focuses on his widow’s struggle to keep the apothecary shop open and get her son, John, trained as a surgeon.

Illustration: Guy’s Hospital, London, opened 1725.

You can read my fictionalised account of life at No. 65 Tooley Street in Sinclair.

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From Mistress to Mrs Man

From Mistress to Mrs Man

Rarely do we see the word ‘mistress’ in its full-length today, and when we do it usually refers to a woman in an illicit relationship with a married man.‘Mistress’ in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries normally designated a woman of higher social standing. It was the female form of ‘master’, and it was variously abbreviated in the pre-standardised age as Mrs or Ms.

However, it could also apply to a woman with a dubious sexual reputation, but then so many words of female address can, including dame, madam, miss, hussy (derived from housewife), mother, wife, lady, and queen.

The title Mrs, however, gave a woman, even a servant social status in the past and its use became widespread in the increasingly urbanised 18th century just as Mr became more widespread too.

When a woman did marry, England was the only country in Europe in which she routinely took her husband’s surname – a consequence of the distinctive property regime of coverture whereby a man took possession of his wife’s property in return he gave her his social standing. Which was great if you were on your way up the social ladder but not so good when you were deprived of all control of the wealth you owned before marriage.

The total annihilation of wifely identity that assigned a woman her husband’s first name as well as his last name has been called the ‘Mrs. Man’ form, and it only appeared in around 1800. The earliest example found is in Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811). There, the appellation ‘Mrs. John Dashwood’ distinguishes our heroine Elinor’s sister-in-law from Elinor’s mother, who is also a Mrs. Dashwood (with no first name because she is the senior).

Source: Amy Louise Erickson is a lecturer in British social and economic history at Cambridge University and author of ‘Mistresses and Marriage: or, a Short History of the Mrs’, in the autumn 2014 issue of History Workshop Journal.

Illustration: Mrs. Stratford Canning, née Mehetebel Patrick (1777–1831), with Her Daughter Elizabeth by George Romney

Julia Herdman is a novelist writing about 18th and early 19th century London. Her debut novel Sinclair is about a family of apothecary surgeons working at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals at the dawn of modern medicine.

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