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Mary Allott Victorian Recipe Book: Domesticity as Defence
In 1860, the Mary Allott Victorian recipe book began when a twenty-four-year-old woman abandoned by her husband opened a blank notebook. Over the next fifty years, she would fill it with over 280 recipes—each one a defence against the accusation that she had lost her husband through domestic inadequacy. This recipe book sits within the…
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Mary Allott Fought Back: Victorian Divorce Court 1875
In 1875, Mary Allott sat in a Sheffield office facing a pivotal moment. She was an improperly married woman about to testify in the Victorian divorce court 1875—a system designed to judge women like her. Every word would be recorded, sent to London, and published in local newspapers for all to read. She testified anyway.…
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The Recipe Book That Sustained a Life: Mary Allott’s Victorian Story of Abandonment, Scandal, and Survival
In 1860, a young woman with a newborn opened a blank notebook with an A-Z index and began to write. Mary Allott, née Hopkinson, was about twenty-four years old, a mother of two. A few days before she gave birth, her husband Charles had sailed for New Zealand, leaving their two-year-old son with his mother…
