The Female Husband or, the History of Mrs. Mary
$10.00
Charles Hamilton was an English 18th-century female husband. Named Mary Hamilton at birth, and initially brought up a girl, they took the name Charles and started presenting as male at age 14. In 1746, while living as a man, they married Mary Price. After Price reported she was suspicious of Hamilton’s manhood to local authorities, Hamilton was prosecuted for vagrancy, and was sentenced in 1746 to a public whipping in four towns and to six months imprisonment with hard labor.
Newspaper reports at the time claimed that there had been 14 marriages in all. A 1746 account in the Newgate calendar gave other details.
The justices delivered their verdict that “The he or she prisoner at the bar is an uncommon, notorious cheat, and we, the Court, do sentence her, or him, whichever he or she may be, to be imprisoned six months, and during that time to be whipped in the towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells, and Shepton Mallet
In the same year, Henry Fielding published a fictionalised account of the case under the title The Female Husband. n 1746, Fielding anonymously published a sensational pamphlet, The Female Husband, that gives a different account of Hamilton’s life. Fielding was himself the son of a judge and had trained and worked in law, contributing to the establishment of the London police force. The author claims that he had his information “from the mouth” of Hamilton themself. However, it is likely that he never met the person he satirized in his work.
Something interesting about Fielding’s version of The Female Husband was his use of pronouns. When Hamilton is passing as a male, Fielding uses ‘he/him’, a tactic which might seem to cast the author as complicit in the deception. In Fielding’s version the reader can be confused by the use of gender. London, 1746, 23 pp., colored folding frontispiece. A unique pamphlet certainly in tune with today’s culture wars. Side stitched printed blue wrap. $10.00
