Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The Many Histories of Charlotte Badger

by Jennifer Ashton

Charlotte Badger is a woman around whom many stories have been the thief sentenced to death in England and then transported to New South Wales; the pirate who joined a mutiny to take a ship to the Bay of Islands; the first white woman resident in Aotearoa; the wife of a rangatira, and many more. In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Jennifer Ashton shows what we know about Charlotte Badger, and how the stories about her have shifted over time. From a Worcester courtroom to the outskirts of Sydney, from the English countryside to Wairoa Bay, Ashton brings to life the maritime and wider imperial world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—and the convicts and runaways, sailors and soldiers, governors and missionaries who filled that world. The author shows how history and historical figures like Charlotte Badger are made and remade over time by journalists and historians, painters and playwrights. Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife tells the fascinating story of a remarkable, curious, ordinary woman and her place in history.

Genres: Biography

200 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2022

About the author

Jennifer Ashton is a Board-certified Ob-Gyn, author and TV medical correspondent. She is chief health and medical editor and chief medical correspondent for ABC News and Good Morning America, chief women's health correspondent for The Dr. Oz Show, and a columnist for Cosmopolitan Magazine. She is also a frequent guest speaker and moderator for events raising awareness of women's health issues.

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Christy fictional_traits · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘This is a book of doubt’, the ‘Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife’ begins. But, in fact this is a book of historical detail; both environmental and social. Avoiding potentially inaccurate deductions and supposition, Jennifer Ashton augments what small facts exist on Charlotte Badger with contemporaneous accounts of the life and times she was a part of.

Charlotte Badger, with one criminal conviction at the age of 18, is transported to Sydney at the beginning of the 19th Century. That much more of her history exists at all, during these tumultuous years, demonstrates just what an eventful, if not somewhat mysterious life she lead.

Jennifer Ashton does an admiral job tackling a biography with so few facts to go on. Ashton is at pains to ensure that no inadvertent inferences are made, and further regularly questions the reliability of her sources. However, in giving such robust context, it’s easy to feel that you’re down a rabbit hole, somewhat divergent to Charlotte’s story. Despite this, the ‘Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife’ is a fascinating insight into the life of convicts and early settlement of Sydney and trade with New Zealand.

[Michaela · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I appreciated the author re-grounding Charlotte Badger's life in the most probable vs the most exaggerated. In telling what often happened to women in her circumstances, you learn how harsh it was to be poor, and doubly so for a woman. How frustrating that so much of your life was beyond your ability to control, and yet you were damned for it all the same.

She quotes novelist Hilary Mantel, "We reach into the past for the foundation myths of our tribe, our nation, and found them on glory, or found them on grievance, but we seldom found them on cold facts...As soon as we die, we enter into fiction...Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted."

The author notes how crime appears tied to dearth or want, as it parallels rising requests for poor relief. However, it is also tied to the rise of a middle class trying to protect what is theirs as the proportion of victims choosing to prosecute executed 10, 20, or even 50 times more influence on indictment levels than changed in the number of actual thefts. "Victims of theft, particularly those who had accumulated wealth in the new industrial age and could now afford to buy the type of consumer goods that demonstrated their affluence and respectability, were reluctant to see their possessions taken from them and were determined to do something about it."

In addition, jurors were all property owners who were more likely to align with the aggrieved victims.

At any rate, each generation of writer has reinterpreted her life story to meet their needs and fit the author's times and morality, as opposed to the reality of Charlotte's life. This is especially evident if you look at the themes of female convict, NZ frontier, and her place in both.