On September 30, 1793 at about 8:15 p.m., the Herefordshire militia fired into a crowd of unarmed people gathered on Bristol Bridge killing eleven and wounding forty-five men, women, and children. This outrage, which was also reported in the London papers, produced extensive and varied commentary for weeks following the incident. Pamphlets, poems, ballads, and broadsheets circulated as well as commentaries in Bristol’s weekly newspapers
Bristol resident Jane Cave Winscom (1754?-1813) published a response to the Bristol Bridge shootings with her poem, “Thoughts Occasioned by the Proceedings on Bristol-Bridge, and the Melancholy Consequences, on the Awful Night of Monday Last, Being the 30th of September.” Published anonymously, “by a Lady,” the poem was sold for three pence within a week of the event.
Jane Cave was born in Wales, probably at Talgarth in Brecon, where her father, John Cave ,was an exciseman. In her poems ,Jane suggested she was born to a “humble station, remote from those of rank and fashion” and that her “infant mind” “inclin’‘d” to “books and poetry” and from which she appears to have largely educated herself.
She lived in several places before her marriage, probably in employment. In Bath she had friends who were like parents to her, and she wrote a poem for two young women being bound as apprentices to a milliner. She moved to Winchester in November 1779 and in 1783 she had printed by subscription there, ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac, and Religious’. It bore her name and a portrait showing her pen in hand. It included a lengthy list of subscribers, arranged by their places of residence. This work became the basis of her publishing career. The next edition, published in Bristol in 1786, added ‘Now Mrs. W—‘ to her name.
Thomas Winscom, whom Cave married on 18 May 1783, was an exciseman like her father. They had two chikdren, Thomas Cave Winscom and Harriett Winscom (one of whom she memorialized in “Written a Few Hours before the Birth of a Child”). Her husband’s job entailed moving to a new place on a regular basis: they were at Chagford in Devon before moving in 1792 to Bristol, where he was still working in 1797. The subscription lists to her Poems suggest that these travels gave Jane a wide range of contacts from which to later draw her patrons. She enjoyed a network of links all over the west country, though it was probably not of her own building, since she says she did not have the honour of being known to most of her subscribers.
The first edition of “Poems on Various Subjects” is dedicated in a poem ‘To the Subscribers’, and mentions the author’s humble admiration for the ‘Celebrated Poetesses’ Anna Seward, Anne Steele, and Hannah More, whom she does not presume to emulate. The poems are arranged more or less by genre: occasional poems (many written at some specific request), pieces on love, marriage, and family affection, elegies, epitaphs, and hymns.
She also wrote advice to unborn children, an address to her baby son, poems on religious topics, and about her own relationship to poetry (notably being too busy with domestic duties to give proper attention to the muses when they call). She also addresses the perennial topic of a reader who disbelieves that she can, as a woman, really have written her works herself.
On 25 May 1793, the year before her final volume appeared, she published ‘The Headach, or, An Ode to Health‘ in a Bristol newspaper, including a request for suggestions from any readers who might know of a remedy. From the 1780s onwards, she says, she was losing twelve days every month to excruciating headaches and felt that her effectiveness as wife and mother was seriously impaired. She was scathing about the efforts of the medical profession.
In 1794 she wrote “Written the First Morning of the Author’s Bathing at Teighmouth,” about bathing in Teignmouth as a proposed cure for headaches and a later poem was titled “An Invocation to Death“. When she first tried sea-bathing she found it terrifying, but later she came to revel in the experience. It did not cure her headaches, but she may have persisted in the practice none the less, for her Gentleman’s Magazine obituary says that two years before she died she had a ‘miraculous escape’ while bathing.
In 1801 and 1806, she published poems describing a difficult time in her marriage to Thomas. The book was titled “Prose and Poetry, on Religious, Moral and Entertaining Subjects,” and it was published under the name of “Mrs Rueful“. If her account in the poems is autobiographical, her marriage could only have exacerbated her headaches – it certainly gave her gonorrhea.
In addition to many of her existing work, the attached “Brief, but Authentic, & Affecting History of Orenzo and Sarah, from the Year 1793 to the Present Day“, was patently biographical, detailing Jane’s attempts to disguise herself and catch her husband frequenting brothels.
The story’s outlines are conveyed in linking prose passages, whose titles are reminiscent of stages in traditional romance: “The Apology”, “The Protest”, “The Desertion”, “The Disguise”, “The Fatal Discovery”. The poems narrator says that her husband has been “a late principal supporter of that sink of abomination, D—’s Brothel” (probably an actual Bristol establishment), and stresses in a footnote that her story is not fiction, and not even “exaggerated by the flight of poetical imagination.“
In the story Sarah begs her husband, Orenzo, to give up this vice; he promises to reform; but she discovers he has lied to her when she tracks him to the brothel. She then takes the children and goes home to her family, but is persuaded back to her husband by further false assurances of his reform. She again exposes his lies by disguising herself as a washerwoman and going to the brothel, supposedly to launder his clothes. After this, she discovers that her husband has given her a sexually transmitted disease, probably gonorrhoea. (He has tried to quiet her earlier fears on this score with the assurance that the whore he had been with had been with nobody else.) At last, after further iterations of promises made and broken, Sarah finally leaves Orenzo and takes the children with her back to Wales.
Jane did go back to Wales and Thomas either did not want care of the children or did not want to be taken to court for “ill usage,” a legal precedent available at the time.
In 1793, Jane published “Thoughts Occasioned by the Proceedings at Bristol Bridge on the Awful Night of Monday, Last […]” as a pamphlet, attributed, probably due to its political content, to “a Lady.’ Yet by 1794, she added it to her latest work, along with another political piece, “On the General Fast, April 19, 1793,” which bemoaned the violence of her time, including the French Revolution, the rise of imperialism, and the slave trade. Her poems reached four expanded editions by 1794. From this point, she published under her married name, Winscom.
The original Bristol Bridge poem recounts the events of the night of the shooting, offering the perspective of both the innocent victims and the militia. Notably, it rejects all justifications for retribution or vigilantism, advocating instead a faith in divine justice. By contrast, the 1794 version of the poem that appears in “Poems on Various Subjects” has a new, additional, opening stanza. The poem follows “An Address to the Inhabitants of Bristol, Occasioned by the Present Calamities and Recent Observations,” which also responds to events in Bristol.
It begins by asking the citizen to “pause” and reflect on “the sins our house conceals” that cause “ruin and distrust [to] pervade our streets;”
“. . . sins of deepest die infect the place,
And sink the Man below the brutal race”
Although she laments the shooting of innocent citizens, she is also aware of the untenable situation of the militia, compelled to fire as ordered or risk charges of insubordination and the punishments that follow. The attention to the individual British soldier appears throughout this poem and other poems.
“What private soldier durst withstand
“His stern superior’s dread command?”
In the face of a desire for retribution by Bristol citizens, she urges “forbearance! kindness! love!” for those seeking “redress,” not always available through legal means. She fashions her poem as the means for deterring those seeking immediate, physical revenge:
“let this Page your minds impress,
Who by revenge would seek redress;
For limbs or friends that’s torn away”
Jane Cave Winscom died sometime before 1813 probably in Newport, and was lauded in an obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine as ‘a woman of extraordinary genius and vigour of intellect’.