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Margaret Catchpole
Margaret Catchpole (14 March 1762 – 13 May 1819) was an English servant girl, chronicler, and deportee to Australia. Born in Suffolk, she worked as a servant in various houses before being convicted of stealing a horse and escaping from Ipswich Gaol. Following her capture, she was transported to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes her as "one of the few true convict chroniclers with an excellent memory and a gift for recording events".
Catchpole was reputedly born at Nacton, Suffolk, the daughter of Elizabeth Catchpole and according to one source of Jonathan Catchpole, head ploughman.
Catchpole had little education and worked as a servant for different families until being employed in May 1793 as under-nurse and under-cook by the writer Elizabeth Cobbold at her house on St Margarets Green in Ipswich. Cobbold's husband was a brewer and member of the prosperous Ipswich Cobbold family. Catchpole was close to the family and was responsible for saving the lives of children in her care three times. She also learned to read and write while employed by the Cobbolds.
Archival materials relating to Catchpole and her relationship with the Cobbolds are held by the Suffolk Archives, the Ipswich Museum, the National Library of Australia, and the Mitchell Library in New South Wales. Some of her surviving letters are roughly transcribed on the Mitchell Library website and reproduced in Laurie Chater Forth's Margaret Catchpole: Her Life and Her Letters (Richmond, 2012). They are discussed, with excerpts, by Marthe Jocelyn in her Scribbling Women: True Tales from Astonishing Lives (Toronto, 2011).
Catchpole's letters describe Hawkesbury River floods, frontier conflict with Indigenous Australians, the countryside and its wildlife, economic developments such as the use of convict miners at Coal River (Newcastle), and the savagery of colonial manners and customs — "by her writings [she] added greatly to Australia's early history".
Rev. Richard Cobbold (son of her former employers) made Catchpole the subject of a novel, The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl (London, 1845), which has often been reprinted. While Cobbold says in the preface that "the public may depend upon the truth of the main features of this narrative", he takes some liberties and also gets some things wrong, for example:
Later works, many of which rely to varying degrees on Cobbold's novel, include:
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Margaret Catchpole
Margaret Catchpole (14 March 1762 – 13 May 1819) was an English servant girl, chronicler, and deportee to Australia. Born in Suffolk, she worked as a servant in various houses before being convicted of stealing a horse and escaping from Ipswich Gaol. Following her capture, she was transported to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes her as "one of the few true convict chroniclers with an excellent memory and a gift for recording events".
Catchpole was reputedly born at Nacton, Suffolk, the daughter of Elizabeth Catchpole and according to one source of Jonathan Catchpole, head ploughman.
Catchpole had little education and worked as a servant for different families until being employed in May 1793 as under-nurse and under-cook by the writer Elizabeth Cobbold at her house on St Margarets Green in Ipswich. Cobbold's husband was a brewer and member of the prosperous Ipswich Cobbold family. Catchpole was close to the family and was responsible for saving the lives of children in her care three times. She also learned to read and write while employed by the Cobbolds.
Archival materials relating to Catchpole and her relationship with the Cobbolds are held by the Suffolk Archives, the Ipswich Museum, the National Library of Australia, and the Mitchell Library in New South Wales. Some of her surviving letters are roughly transcribed on the Mitchell Library website and reproduced in Laurie Chater Forth's Margaret Catchpole: Her Life and Her Letters (Richmond, 2012). They are discussed, with excerpts, by Marthe Jocelyn in her Scribbling Women: True Tales from Astonishing Lives (Toronto, 2011).
Catchpole's letters describe Hawkesbury River floods, frontier conflict with Indigenous Australians, the countryside and its wildlife, economic developments such as the use of convict miners at Coal River (Newcastle), and the savagery of colonial manners and customs — "by her writings [she] added greatly to Australia's early history".
Rev. Richard Cobbold (son of her former employers) made Catchpole the subject of a novel, The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl (London, 1845), which has often been reprinted. While Cobbold says in the preface that "the public may depend upon the truth of the main features of this narrative", he takes some liberties and also gets some things wrong, for example:
Later works, many of which rely to varying degrees on Cobbold's novel, include: