On this day … 1 November 1858

The Rev John Clay died. He was Preston’s prison chaplain, from 1821 until shortly before his death. In recording his death, Anthony Hewitson, in his History of Preston, heaped on him the following praise:

‘During his chaplaincy he drew up some remarkable and excellent reports relating to crimes and criminals. He had a practical and comprehensive genius – was an earnest moral and religious teacher, a superior statistician, a notable analyst in respect to criminal matters …’

These were sentiments that were echoed frequently when his reports were cited by prison reformers during his lifetime and by historians after his death. Indeed, before its recent closure, the Harris Museum included a fulsome celebration of Clay in its exhibit devoted to him. And to cement his reputation, his biography was written by his son. It was, like so many biographies of famous Victorians, more hagiography than history.

And yet, even his lifetime his reputation as both a caring clergyman and as a reliable statistician was being questioned.

When he accused Preston’s working-class mothers of the wholesale murder of their infants to claim funeral money from the town’s friendly societies, he provoked a fierce denunciation from the feminist writer Eliza Cook, supported by her friend, the Preston historian Charles Hardwick.

She was outraged that Clay should place the blame for the deaths on the mothers, rather than the appalling conditions in which the poor of Preston were condemned to live. Conditions that were well documented at the time (see sources) and which continued right up until the end of the nineteenth century, when the infant mortality figures for the town were the worst in the country.

The Rev Clay saw himself as a caring man and identified the problems for the town resulting from rapid population growth coupled with inadequate or non-existent services. What he lacked was empathy with the poor who were the subject of his voluminous statistical reports.

It is hard to reconcile the John Clay in the 621 pages of the biography by his son in which he is treated as a secular saint with the man who provoked so much righteous anger from Eliza Cook

She was not alone in her vilification of Clay’s cruel and unjust libels against the working classes. Her friend, Charles Hardwick, a contemporary of Clay’s, was similarly critical, if less passionate, writing, ‘Mr. Clay’s well-meant labours showed an imperfect acquaintance with the subject on which he had written, and that he had consequently dealt unfairly towards the working people.’

Posterity has accepted the judgement of his son, who fully supported his father’s views on infanticide in poor families, writing in his biography, ‘the societies for the promotion of infanticide are in full operation to the present hour’. The son does, however, acknowledge that his father’s bizarre attack on working-class mothers was met with incredulity by the House of Commons committee to which Clay presented his ‘evidence’.

Wikipedia has a very good article on Clay (see sources). He was born in Liverpool, where he was brought up and began work in a merchant’s office. The failure of the business in 1817 left him jobless when he was aged twenty-one and brought him to Walton-le-Dale to live with his sister’s brother-in-law Charles Swainson at Cooper Hill.

While staying at Cooper Hill, he was taught by Robert Harris, headmaster of Preston Grammar School, becoming chaplain at Preston prison in 1821, shortly after he was ordained deacon.

At the time of the Preston strike of 1853-1854 he expressed his sympathy for the strikers was high, but came to feel they should compromise with the mill owners. It brought more evidence of his misogyny, for Wikipedia records that ‘he considered that the months of idleness had had a bad effect on the morals of the young women’.

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Sources
Child murder in Victorian Preston
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clay_(chaplain)
Edwin Waugh’s portrait of Preston