Scenes from an unhappy marriage in Victorian Preston

Two sources reveal a side of middle-class married life in nineteenth-century Preston that is far from the usual, idealised picture of the Victorian home. The first is a collection of letters from a Lancashire priest to a Catholic convert and the second is a newspaper report of the scandalous bankruptcy of the convert’s wastrel husband.

The letters were from John Lingard, a 63-year-old priest and author of a widely-read History of England, to Mary Lomax. They began when she was aged 20 and recently converted to Catholicism and continued until his death aged eighty in 1851. The two became close and intimate friends.

While Lingard’s letters survive, Mary Lomax’s do not. It is possible that Lingard destroyed them, for in one of his letters he writes, addressing Mary as ‘Excellenza’:

‘What is your address? Did you not give it to me in your penultimate letter? Yes, you did: but I burn your letters, because I know not into whose hands they may fall, if I do not.’

When Mary converted to Catholicism while still in her teens her family disowned her and her banker uncle cut her out of his will in which he was leaving her £8,000, a small fortune at the time. She was taken in by a Miss Mary Anne Butler of Pleasington Hall near Blackburn.

The bankruptcy case was heard at Lancaster in 1855, when the disreputable life of Mary’s husband, Thomas Lomax, the son of an old Lancashire Catholic family, was laid bare along with a detailed description of the collapse of his fortunes.

The couple separated in 1842 and Mary Lomax moved into a house in Ribblesdale Place. Two years later Thomas was arrested for attacking a young girl in the town.

The couple were reconciled in 1851, but Thomas did not mend his ways, as was revealed at the bankruptcy hearing:

‘The subsequent acts of the insolvent were intended to be fraudulent. He had contracted all those debts in a course of reckless extravagance whilst in a state of intoxication, and could not have had any intention of liquidating them, knowing that he had no property and was without the means to do so.’

Whether Thomas finally mended his ways is not known, but it seems the couple continued to live together, for by the time of the 1861 census, the couple had moved to a more substantial property, Marsh House, on what was then the outskirts of the town.

Thomas died in 1865. Mary died in 1875 in Naples, by which time she had become a dame of the Catholic Order of the Holy Sepulchre.

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For more about the couple’s life and John Lingard’s letters to Mary see: https://prestonhistory.com/…/scenes-from-an-unhappy…/. There you will also find a full transcript Thomas Lomax’s bankruptcy hearing.