Endnotes for Biography
Endnotes
[1] As expressed in Michael Ignatieff’s “A Just Measure of Pain,” a popular view of the utopic, ideal disciplinary state was one that actualized the confinement and reform of “every dependent social category,” i.e. the mentally unstable, criminals, paupers, elderly, and children. The Jones likely would have only been forced to enter the workhouse out of extreme financial need (pauper status).
[2] In the wake of wheat shortage in the late eighteenth century, rice often served as substitute for the poor, according to Carolyn Steedman’s “Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England” and her chapter on food and the poor. Ricebread could very possibly been the sustenance the Jones had been living off of the years prior to entering the workhouse.
[3] “The total character [of the total institution] is symbolized by the barrier to social intercouse with the outside,” Erving Goffman explains in “Asylums,” and that precise total character seems to come to life in the case of Mary Jones. Perhaps there were ‘locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forest or moors” preventing Mary from ever leaving; one can imagine.
[4] Reference to the ‘dead-fly-on-the-wall’ archetype will be further explicated. Under Irving Goffman and Michael Ignatieff’s paradigm of total institutions, it would be expected that Mary’s twenty-three consecutive years in the workhouse would transform her into nothing more than a shell of internalized regiment and a long foregone sense of identity. However, this does not seem to be the case in evidence of her acts of rebellion and childbirth in the workhouse.
[5] Figures of authority—masters, matrons, et. al.—are always referred to by last name in the Saint Andrews Undershaft minute books. In contrast, paupers are referred to by first and last name in the same documents. Thus, it is highly likely that Mrs. Hanks played a matron or authorative role.
[6] Although unlikely, these tools could have been at the disposal of Mary Jones to use as a weapon. There are things that were could often found in barns, according to an appendix of inventory from archival collections:
“Possible weapons:
Barn & Barn Yard: 1 Engine for Cuting [sic] Straw, 2 Muck Forks, 2 Shovls, 2 Long Forks, 2 Graving Spades, 1 Wheel, 2 Ladders, 4 Cockstangs, 5 Cows, 1 Barkam 2P&Hames[1] [sic], 1 Pair Traces, 1 Hackny Saddle, 1 Cart Saddle, & Trappings & Back Band & Belly Band, 1 Hors, 1 Cart, 2 Bridles, & 1 Halter, 2 Chists, Curry Comb, 1 Hay Knife, 1 Harrow, 2 Mattocks, 1 Crow, 1 Iron Mall, 1 Wheel Barrow, 13 Rail Polls [and added to the bottom of the section:] Pig Trough
In the Yard: 2 Water Tubs, Piggs Trough.
In the Yard.
A Large Wooden Cestern lined with Lead, a Brass Cock, a Ball Cock, a Pump.”
[7] Matt Kadane’s “Original Sin and the Path to Enlightenment” provides a few hints as to what would happen to drunkards who were overtly disruptive or exhibiting aggressive behavior. “The wine is from God, but the drunkard is from the Devil,” Kadane offers to highlight common perspective on drinking and its relation to spirituality. That said, it’s safe to say that Jones using weapons as force while drunk would have been a top priority offense. (123).
[8] In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James Scott outlines a useful theoretical model resting upon the ‘public transcript’ of the oppressed-oppressor relation and the ‘hidden transcripts’ of both parties. Mary’s consistent acts of rebellion are prime actualizations of the hidden transcript of the oppressed rupturing into the public discourse, formalizing and making known the ‘weapons of the weak.’
[9] In Matt Kadane’s “Original Sin and the Path to Enlightenment,” he wrote that a thought widely held about drunks during the mid 18th century was that, “drunks have no willpower and should admit to themselves their incapability of self-government.” It was likely that church ward as well as the overseers saw Mary Jones’ actions of drunkeness as immoral and an indication of her inability to “self-govern” and needed to be reprimanded for her actions.
