Old Liverpool Street, Hobart. Item Number LPIC33/1/251
“She Will Do Very Well Where She Is”: The Grim Case of Ellen Wilson and her lousy husband James, 1859
In February 1859, the Liverpool Street neighbours of a Hobart carpenter named James Wilson* began to notice a smell. Not the kind of smell you could ignore, or wave away, or attribute to something else. This was, as one witness would later testify in court, a smell that could be detected thirty yards from the house.
Inside, lying uncoffined on a sofa, was the body of Ellen Wilson — James Wilson’s wife.
Ellen had died on 13 February 1859, after a long illness with dropsy**. Her husband had been in the house when she died. He was also, by every account given at the subsequent hearing before the Hobart Police Court, comprehensively, continuously, and catastrophically drunk.
The first to raise the alarm was Mr J. Smales, a missionary who had been visiting Ellen during her illness and continued to call at the house after her death. He found James Wilson in no state to make arrangements of any kind. When Smales pressed him on the urgent need for burial — decomposition had set in almost immediately — Wilson’s response was a masterpiece of alcoholic indifference. “If she is not buried today, she will be tomorrow, and if not then, the day after, and if not then, she will do very well where she is.”
She was not buried the next day, nor the day after that.
Wilson’s employer, Mr Alexander Clarke of the firm Clarke and Davidson, had tried to help. Told that his carpenter’s wife had died, Clarke gave Wilson £1 toward the cost of a coffin and told him he could select timber from the yard, with another worker to assist him in making it. Wilson chose his boards. He never built the coffin.
The £1, Wilson later admitted to the City Inspector, had been spent. He had been “troubled,” he said. He was, witnesses confirmed, very drunk all the time.
It was not until 18 February — five days after Ellen’s death — that the Government intervened and had the body removed to the Hospital. James Wilson had been, in the magistrate Mr Tarleton’s measured phrase, “wallowing in a state of beastly drunkenness” throughout.
Tarleton committed the case to the Supreme Court, requiring Wilson to find bail of £100 with two sureties of £50 each — a considerable sum for a man who had just spent the £1 given to him for his wife’s coffin on booze.
At the Supreme Court, James Wilson was found guilty of wilfully neglecting to bury his wife. He was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment with hard labour.
Ellen Wilson, who had suffered through a long illness and died on a sofa in her own home, does not otherwise appear in the record.
Source: The Courier (Hobart), 16 March 1859, p. 3; via Trove, National Library of Australia.
*James Wilson bio:
Transported from Scotland to VDL in 1842 on the Emily, for ‘habitual theft’ with a sentence of 10 years. His conduct record shows a series of misdemeanours, but only enough to see him sentenced to hard labour or time in solitary. 11 Sept 1849 – ticket of leave, 7 July 1857 – Free certificate. No record has yet been found of his marriage to Ellen, nor any other record of her existence, death or burial.
**A note on dropsy
Dropsy — known today as oedema — was not a disease in itself but a symptom of underlying illness: an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the body’s tissues, causing painful and often dramatic swelling, most commonly of the legs, abdomen, and lungs. In the nineteenth century it was a commonly recorded cause of death, appearing on countless death certificates and in countless newspaper notices, because it was the visible end-stage of so many serious conditions — heart failure, kidney disease, liver failure, and severe malnutrition among them.
For a woman in colonial Hobart in 1859, a likely underlying causes could have been chronic heart or kidney disease, though advanced liver disease — itself sometimes a consequence of living with a heavily alcoholic partner in conditions of poverty and poor nutrition — cannot be ruled out. Whatever its origin, dropsy was a slow, uncomfortable, and undignified way to die, involving progressive swelling, breathlessness, and exhaustion over weeks or months. Ellen Wilson endured all of that, and then what came after.
