Dr. Maddy Pelling

speaker

671 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 5 May

Dr. Maddy Pelling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · The Fake Princess Who Fooled Georgian England · 5 May 2026 podcast

You think of like Hogarthian progress, you know, sort of Hogarth prints that show like a young character arriving in the city and then it'll all go downhill and these stories happen.

And she becomes a character like this.

And it's really hard to kind of find the truth of what really happened to her in London and this kind of mythical, fantastical version.

But we do find her in the archive at certain points.

So we know, for example, that she goes from the workhouse.

There's a vicar who works in the workhouse, who sort of comes to sermonise to these poor people who really don't need to be sermonised to.

But he does help her to find a position as a servant.

So she ends up being a servant in Clapham for a little while.

that doesn't work out inevitably because that's what she's like.

We then find her, and we do find her in the record, in the Magdalene House for Penitent Prostitutes, which, you know, the name tells you everything.

Again, you'd be stripped of your clothing.

There was a sort of hideous brown uniform that you had to wear.

And you're expected to go to the chapel all the time.

You're doing menial work.

And this was an institution that inevitably, I mean, it sounds sort of so obvious to say it, but it was full of the people who were involved in this at a higher level.

So the people who ran it, the patrons of institutions like this were themselves involved in all kinds of scandalous affairs and having sex with various different partners and all of that.

But there was so much judgment on these poor women who were coming into the place.

So she ends up in there.

We know that she actually wasn't working as a sex worker.

She's not selling sex because she's just such a liar.

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