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PRICE, 12 1-2 CENTS.
THE
LIFE AND DEATH
OF
MRS. MARIA BICKFORD,
A Beautiful Female, who was
INHUMANLY MURDERED,
In the Moral and Religious City of Boston, on the
night of the 27th of October, 1845, by
ALBERT J. TIRRELL,
Her Paramour, arrested on board the Ship Sultana,
off New Orleans, December 6th.
[Illustration]
BY A CLERGYMAN, OF BRUNSWICK, ME.
BOSTON:
PUBLISHED AND FOR SALE BY ALL THE
PERIODICAL DEALERS.
1845
SECOND EDITION,--REVISED.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845,
by SILAS ESTABROOK, in the
Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
PREFACE.
“I COME NOT TO DESTROY.”--_Our Savior._
For the principal facts embodied in the following narrative, the Author
is indebted to the ill-fated female who is the subject of them. It was
his lot to be the bearer of a letter to her, in the spring of 1845, from
a companion of her childhood. Aware of her forlorn condition, and of
many acts of atrocity which characterized the latter part of her erring
life, he made it his purpose to learn the history of her career, which
was frankly communicated by her own lips.
The Author tenders his acknowledgments to the person who generously
placed in his hands the original letters which reveal the passion flame
of her FIRST LOVE with a medical student of Brunswick, in Maine. The
contents of these letters establish the fact that this student became
her seducer, and that he afterwards heartlessly abandoned her to
remorse, and the jeers of a scoffing world. She was but fifteen years of
age at the time of writing the letters, and they evince not only much
purity and depth of feeling, but likewise a mind endowed with rare
gifts.
It is not a pleasing duty to record the vicissitudes of the unfortunate.
To draw aside the veil which conceals the cherished treasures, the
blighted hopes, and the undying remorse of an erring soul, traced
through long seasons of unredeeming, rayless wo, is to perform a labor
for the benefit of the living. In this the author has striven to be
faithful, impartial, and truthful.
Life, as a spectacle, is but dimly seen and feebly comprehended; as a
mystery, it is unfathomable indeed. Blown, as it were, a bubble--dark as
the transgressions by which it is checkered, it bursts in an hour we
know not, as the globe of glass is dashed into fragments. We look on the
wreck, and wonder why it had a being, to gather in its train a
multitudinous throng of evils, and make its exit in ignominy and shame.
The author, it will be seen, is a fatalist--a believer in an unalterable
destiny. It is unnecessary here to enter into a defence of that
belief--he hopes that all people have an opinion of their own upon this,
as on other subjects.
Ye rich and great! ye poor and destitute--children of sin and wanderers
from virtue--ye world wronged! cast your eyes over the panorama spread
out to your view in the following pages, and, from the sounding depths
of crime, learn lessons of wisdom.
CHAPTER I.
_Maria’s Birth--Strange Omens at the time of it--Speculations of
the Old Maids and Old Women concerning the same--Singular Traits of
her Youth--Mysterious Spiritual Visitings--Meditations in the Woods
and Fields--Theology and Philosophy--Penitence--Remarks--What
constitutes True Religion?_
Mrs. Maria Bickford was a native of Oldtown, a small parish near the
city of Bangor, in Maine--the daughter of poor but respectable parents.
Her maiden name was Dunn. She was born in the year 1822, and was,
consequently, twenty-three years old at the period of her awful and
untimely end. It is said of her, that, from earliest childhood, she had
been the sport of ill omens and startling reverses. At her birth, which
occurred before sunrise on a beautiful morning in autumn, a light of
strange radiance shone into the apartment, and a sparrow fluttered
against the window panes, uttering a plaintive wail, as if seeking
admittance.
Whether these occurrences were the results of unexplained natural
causes, or were the foreshadowings of an invisible fate, the judgment is
not for us to pronounce--perhaps a future life and another world will
interpret them. But certain it is, that their recital made a most
fruitful theme for conjecture with the wonder-loving neighborhood, at
the time. Old maids tied their cap-strings with a double knot for many a
night thereafter.[1] Old women spun long yarns while smoking their
old-fashioned iron pipes in the chimney corners--and the old men scoffed
at what they declared to be ridiculous. However it might have been, a
marked singularity of thought and action was developed in the succeeding
years of Maria’s youth. Her childish prattle was unlike that of other
children--she saw not as others see--she heard not as others hear--she
laughed not as others laugh--but in all and with all there seemed to be
a new development--a strangeness.
At about the seventh year of her age, those visitings of mysterious
thoughtfulness which, in after years, imparted to her a peculiar fame,
first began to be observed. During the recurrence of these periods she
would remain for hours unmoved, regardless of all that was passing
around her--as if in communion with the ascended spirit of some loved
playmate, or in happy contemplation of the joys to be realized far away
in the dim future. It was then that she discovered charms in solitude,
Alone, in the fields and in the woods, she laughed with the flowers, and
talked with the shadows of the trees--and that oaken giant, near her
father’s house, which had sternly derided the blasts of many centuries,
creaked as though it were glad when Maria came, as she often did, and
leaned against its brawny trunk, and exchanged salutations with the
sentinel of time.
“They say I have a soul,” she would say, in a revery, “an immortal
soul--that a good man, who was the son of God, died for me, that I might
live. What have I done to need such an awful atonement? Is it very wrong
to while the Sabbath hours away, out here, with these birds, and bees,
and squirrels? Is it a sin to love these pretty violets?--And this cool
shade, too, and the breeze which fans me so gently--how calmly I sleep,
and how pleasant are my dreams, in their refreshing presence! But they
tell me it is not right to cherish the endearments of this world. It is
neglecting God. I will kneel down here and pray.”
And this was Maria’s theology. What a mistake it is to teach the young
to restrain their love of nature in the desire of “serving God!” As
though his works had not the impress of his greatness and beneficence!
We cannot but regard this very prevalent practice as the vulgar
offspring of ignorance: and we trust that the time is at hand when the
religion of nature will assume, in the human mind, the place and
importance so long usurped by the hypocritical and soul-deadening
religion of formality.[2] What honest heart can entertain a doubt that
Maria returned from her Sunday rambles amid the luxuriance and
enlivening beauties of nature, a purer and better child than when she
had, all the tiresome day, been listening to the dry and repulsive
jabbering of a hireling pulpit sycophant? Oh, had the wisdom of the
child been the monitor of the woman, varied and sweet would have been
the closing years of the life of Maria Dunn.