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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And this is the story of thousands of women in London at this time.
And one of the things I did when I was researching this book is to go to the archive and look at her petition.
And I looked at the petitions for the whole summer.
of the year that she applies.
And every single woman has a similar tale to tell.
These women who've been abandoned by men or the fathers of these children simply cannot help.
They are not in a position to support the woman and the child or women who've been sexually assaulted and that kind of thing.
There's all kinds of circumstances, but they're all equally desperate for their child to be taken in and looked after.
And for some reason, because of, I think, her charisma, there's something about Mary Wilcox that she is sort of fascinating to people, whether it's her physical beauty, the way she moves, she has this kind of elegance that everyone picks up on.
She is successful and her son is taken into the hospital in a way that others aren't.
And it broke my heart.
It really broke my heart sitting in the archive reading those petitions.
Yeah, and you think, what happened to these women and these children who don't get in?
They disappear from the record.
We will never know.
Do they just starve on the street?
Probably.
You know, it's really, really grim.
And Mary's so close to that.
But her son does get in to the workhouse.
Showing 501–520 of 671 · page 26 of 34
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