Uncovering the Archive: The Monster and Sarah Sophia Banks’s Ephemera Collection: Sexual Violence and Print Media

Content Warning: This piece contains references to and descriptions of sexual assault.

Between 1788 and 1790, the Monster preyed on women throughout London, cornering them in the dark, making lewd and sexually “obscene” comments, and poking them (often in the bottom) with a long, sharp pin. When finally brought to trial, the man accused of being the Monster, a Welshman named Rhynwick Williams, was said to have “cut the clothes” of a woman named Ann Porter and to have used “the most gross and abusive language.”[1] Williams was a twenty-three-year-old artificial flower maker, and the weight of the accusation rested in part on Williams’ trade and the access it would provide to the types of pins and knives the Monster used in the attacks. Though Williams was eventually tried and convicted, the general confusion about the Monster’s identity, even after Williams’ arrest, incited fear and panic among men and women alike—men forming clubs and wearing pins announcing that they, in fact, were not the Monster. One woman even claimed in The Lady’s Magazine that the Monster’s attacks made the men “feel like men.”[2] Adding to the confusion, the media promoted the idea that the Monster only attacked “beautiful and virtuous” women, causing an onslaught of seemingly false accusations and self-inflicted wounds from women who wanted to claim these qualities as their own by “pretending to be maimed.”[3] The Monster’s actions and the subsequent trial caused a frenzy in the media, with questions swirling about the Monster’s identity, the legitimacy of the accounts of the attacks and the accusations, and the impact of these assaults on ideals of femininity and virtue.

Though rape was a criminal offence, the Monster’s attacks represent an early collision of other forms of sexual assault with print media. The violations committed by the Monster even presented difficulties in determining how to try such crimes, the authorities lacking a legal statute that would make his crimes a felony, for which he would be transported to Botany Bay.[4] The initial case revolved around the crime of cutting clothes. The magistrates and judges, in fact, relied upon a statute from 1721 that made protests surrounding the import of calico from India a felony. These protests, also called the “calico riots,” included silkweavers attacking women who were seen to be wearing calico, cutting the fabric from their bodies. This statute was more broadly connected to the Calico Acts (1700, 1721), which banned the import of cotton textiles into England in response to the dominance of India and especially Bengal in the textile market. These Acts reflected not only larger concerns of English merchants over the economic impact of trade with India but also their underlying xenophobic and racist motivations as connected to empire. [5] After extensive media attention, much of which called attention to the inaccurate indictment by which the conviction had been made a felony, the case resulted in a mistrial. Williams was then re-tried for a misdemeanor and was convicted. Looking at the printed material on the Monster within the context of ephemera collections and the broader print matrix in this period offers an opportunity for fleshing out underlying connections with India and colonialism revealed through Williams’s mistrial.

Surprisingly, with the exception of work by Jan Bondeson, Robert Shoemaker, and Cindy McCreery, the Monster’s attacks and their coverage across print media have remained understudied by scholars.[6] Additionally, the work that has been done on the Monster has primarily looked at the attacks and the media frenzy in connection to moral panic and mob mentalities in late eighteenth-century London. McReery, however, delves more deeply into how the attacks illustrated anxieties about middle-class white women and their behavior. She writes that the attacks and their media coverage point “to deep-seated fascination with, and anxiety over, women’s sexual assertiveness and visibility on the streets of London.”[7] Her work opens up further possibilities for examining how the Monster’s attacks resonate with other anxieties about female sexuality across the British colonial print matrix. While McReery’s analysis does not take race into account, her work does suggest that the anxieties provoked by the Monster’s attacks illustrate how middle-class white women’s sexual purity is essential to the British empire’s social order and racial hierarchy.

Continued work on the depiction of the Monster across print media could reveal further connections between the depiction of the “fair” and pure women who were victims of his attacks and the racialized assumptions about purity that shape the depiction of the rape and exploitation of Polynesian women in the print matrices of the late eighteenth century and the Romantic period.[8] The ephemera dealing with the Monster’s attacks and trial in the scrapbook of collector Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818) held at the British Library offers significant links connecting the Monster, print culture, women’s narratives, and the imperial ambitions and exploitations of the Banks family.[9]  Joseph Banks was the botanist on the first of the Cook voyages and was popularly satirized for his sexual encounters with the women of Tahiti during the voyage’s extended stay on that island. Banks, known for his imperialist views, later became president of the Royal Society. The focus on the Monster in his sister Sarah Sophia Banks’s ephemera collections offers an opportunity to further reflect on the media documentation of sexual assault alongside the widespread accounts of her brother’s exploitation of Polynesian women.

Ideas about female sexuality in Polynesian culture circulated via the colonial print matrix in the period following the Cook voyages (1768-1780). Polynesian women, like those with whom Joseph Banks had come into contact, were depicted as not only open to but encouraging of the sexual advances of European men. The violations against these women occurred alongside the presentation of Polynesia in popular print as a Garden of Eden, a place free of sexual inhibition. Major influences on these perceptions of Indigenous women include John Hawkesworth, who, in his official account of James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific (1773), used Christian symbolism to code Polynesian women’s sexual violation as part of “ceremony.” The widespread depictions of Polynesian women in print lend themselves to examination alongside the explosion of printed material on the Monster. The print illustrations surrounding the Monster’s attacks reinforce ideals of sexual purity that ultimately connect purity to whiteness and to the continuation of the culture of exploitation of non-white women. Figure 1, for instance, illustrates the change in the attacked woman’s dress and demeanor following her violation by the Monster.

Fig. 1. “The Monster Cutting a Lady,” May 1790, Robert Isaac Cruikshank, Collection of British Prints, The Huntington Library.

PICTURE 1

Fig. 2. “The Monster,” Sarah Sophia Banks, “A Collection of broadsides, cuttings from newspapers, engravings, etc.,” L.R.301. h.3, The British Library.

PICTURE 2

Future work on the Monster and sexual assault is especially significant in our own historical moment. While the ephemera in Banks’s collection reveals the complex nature of the popular narrative being told about The Monster’s attacks, it simultaneously demonstrates the understood position of that narrative being that the victims of his attacks were women who were white and “pure.” The accounts of the Monster’s attacks resonate today, not only in regard to questions about women’s dress that too often follow accusations of rape, sexual assault and harassment, but also in the ways that women of color are left out of conversations and moves for reform. Women of color and Indigenous women continue to be depicted as outlets for white men to act out their sexual aggression, as the Polynesian women were following the Cook voyages, while the purity of white women is protected and assaults against this purity are loudly decried.

Dr Kacie Wills

To hear more about Dr Wills’ work, check out her website, or follow her on Twitter.

Further Reading: 

• Barbara M. Benedict, “Making a Monster: Socializing Sexuality and the Monster of 1790,” “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body, edited by Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, U of Michigan P, 2000, pp. 127–53.

• Jan Bondeson, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale, U of Pennsylvania P, 2001.

• Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770– 1845, Pandora, 1987.

• Darryl Jones, “Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies: Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s,” Literature and History vol. 4, 1995, pp. 1–24.

• Arlene Leis, “Cutting, Arranging, and Pasting: Sarah Sophia Banks as Collector.” Early Modern Women, vol. 9, no.1, 2014, pp. 127-140.

• Cindy McCreery, “A Moral Panic in Eighteenth-Century London? The Monster and the Press,” Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, edited by D. Lemmings, and C. Walker, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009.

• Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti, U of California P, 2009.

• Robert Shoemaker, “The Monster,” The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England, Hambledon Continuum, 2004, pp. 275-299.

• Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, Routledge, 2003.

References: 

[1] The Lady’s Magazine July, 1790.

[2] The Lady’s Magazine June, 1790.

[3] Diary May 31, 1790; World May 15, 1790.

[4] Jan Bondeson, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale, U of Pennsylvania P, 2001, p. 85.

[5] For more on the connection of the Calico Acts to empire, see Jonathan P. Eacott, “Making an Imperial Compromise: The Calico Acts, the Atlantic Colonies, and the Structure of the British Empire,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 69.4, pp. 731-762.

[6] Robert Shoemaker, “The Monster,” The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England, Hambledon Continuum, 2004, pp. 275-299.

[7] Cindy McCreery, “A Moral Panic in Eighteenth-Century London? The Monster and the Press,” Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, edited by D. Lemmings, and C. Walker, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009, pp. 195-220.

[8] The New Lady’s Magazine July, 1790.

[9] [A Collection of broadsides, cuttings from newspapers, engravings, etc., of various dates, formed by Miss Sarah Sophia Banks. Volume 3: Balloons, sights, exhibitions, remarkable characters: Katterfelto the Monster] L.R.301. h.3, The British Library, London.

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