Tweet
If anyone thinks that the diary's failure to mention Sir Jim's illegitimate brood points to post-1987 hoaxers who didn't know their facts, may I gently remind them that Bernard Ryan's Poisoned Life of Mrs Maybrick, first published in 1977, and in Penguin Books in 1989, has been proposed by modern hoax conspiracy theorists as a (if not the) major source of the Maybrick info that appears in the diary.
However, on page 28 of my Penguin edition, Ryan writes that by 1887:
...Florence Maybrick had learned of her husband's mistress. She learned that he was the father of three children born out of wedlock before his marriage, and that he had sired two more children by the same woman since he and Florence had been married.
...Somewhere in Liverpool, she now knew, there was a woman who loved her pompous husband as much as she did, a woman who depended on him and had been willing to continue to bear his children after he had married another.
On page 96, there is the following reference to brothers Michael and Edwin breaking the seal on James's will and reading it:
It was written in James's rather shaky hand on blue paper.
And yet this did not prompt the diary author to access James's shaky handwriting in order to copy it.
The inference is pretty clear: either Ryan's book was not consulted by the diary author or a deliberate decision was taken not to mention Maybrick's second family and not to make the handwriting look like his.
Love,
Caz
X
However, on page 28 of my Penguin edition, Ryan writes that by 1887:
...Florence Maybrick had learned of her husband's mistress. She learned that he was the father of three children born out of wedlock before his marriage, and that he had sired two more children by the same woman since he and Florence had been married.
...Somewhere in Liverpool, she now knew, there was a woman who loved her pompous husband as much as she did, a woman who depended on him and had been willing to continue to bear his children after he had married another.
On page 96, there is the following reference to brothers Michael and Edwin breaking the seal on James's will and reading it:
It was written in James's rather shaky hand on blue paper.
And yet this did not prompt the diary author to access James's shaky handwriting in order to copy it.
The inference is pretty clear: either Ryan's book was not consulted by the diary author or a deliberate decision was taken not to mention Maybrick's second family and not to make the handwriting look like his.
Love,
Caz
X
Comment