Note 238 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 2)

Elizabeth Canning (1734-73), a domestic servant in Aldermanbury, startled London in 1753 by the circumstantial story she told of her capture in Moorfields, and her subsequent imprisonment and ill-treatment at Enfield by “Mother Wells” and a gipsy woman, Mary Squires. After Squires had been condemned to death, and Wells had been burned in the hand, the case was revised, with the result that Squires was pardoned and her accuser transported for perjury. The affair, which had originally come before Henry Fielding, the novelist, at Bow Street, aroused an incredible amount of feeling in London.