Jane Clark or Robertson - "she was deserted by her husband, and left entirely destitute"

To be a working class, single woman in Victorian Scotland was often to court precarious financial circumstances. Jane Clark, at the time a domestic servant, had married Robert Robertson, a mason, in Perth on 29th December 1865. Whatever went wrong in their relationship, Jane found herself single by November 1868 when she was arrested for stealing several armfuls of blankets and other items from a house in Dundee. As The Dundee Advertiser of 9th April 1869 reported, 

"Jane Clark or Robertson was charged with having, on the 27th or 28th of November last, entered the dwelling house on South Tay Street occupied by Margaret McPherson or Lindsay, widow, by breaking a pane of glass in the window and having thereafter undone a sneck by which the door was fastened, and having thus gained entrance to the house, stole a bed-cover, a double blanket, two half-blankets, and a sheet, the property of Margaret McPherson or Lindsay; and also four coats, a pair of trousers and two vests, the property of August Arnold, teacher of music, residing with Margaret McPherson or Lindsay. The accused pleaded guilty".

"Mr. J.C. Smith, for the prisoner, stated that she was a person of somewhat simple intellect - that was to say that she was easily deceived and misled and had been unfortunate on that account. At the time she committed this offence she was deserted by her husband, and left entirely destitute. She fell into the company of two women who pawned some of the articles for her. They were bad characters, probably worse than the prisoner herself, and they induced her to become the active party in committing the theft to which she has pleaded guilty. She had been convicted before the Circuit Court in 1859, but that was ten years ago. She had evidently had other means of acquiring a livelihood than stealing, for there had been no serious convictions since 1859".

Sentencing Jane Clark to seven years' penal servitude, the judge mentions this earlier conviction, before the Aberdeen Circuit Court, as an aggravating factor. She evidently had some connection to the city and it is to Aberdeen that she went on her discharge in December 1873, when her picture was taken and pasted into the Register of Returned Convicts.

Between December 1873 and February 1874, Jane is noted as living at number 63, The Green, which was then a bustling area with bakers, a basket maker and a fish curers in close proximity, not to mention the large textile mill of Hadden's just around the corner. From information within the Post Office Directory of 1873-1874, it looks like Jane may have rented one of the rooms at this address, located directly opposite the Back Wynd Stairs.

Map Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland

Ordnance Survey Town Plan of Aberdeen

Sheet LXXV.11.18

Surveyed 1867

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