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Transcription from Camden Farm & Village Life Book
The power that even maidservant exercise is she had a little money of her own can be understood from the case of Mary Ann Charker, a servant in the older Mrs Oxley's house at Kirkham. she was the daughter of a local butcher. Soon after coming to Mrs Oxley, in 1846, she and a fellow servant, James Watson, decided to marry. Watson went to the butcher's house to get his blessing but was turned away. Over the next 12 months Mary Ann seems to have put her wages by and in the new year of 1848 she decided to wait no longer. She was still only 19 and normally no clergyman would marry her without her father's consent. She therefore went to Watson's stepfather, a farmer on Kirkham, and gave him three guineas - probably a third of her yearly income - and told him to arrange a marriage by licence at the Presbyterian church at Campbelltown.
The poor were commonly married not by licence but by banns, their names called out in church three Sundays in succession before their marriage day. A licence was expensive but it cut through this procedure. A licensed marriage might take place more secretly and at shorter notice than a marriage by banns. Watson's stepfather was surprised at her instructions.
I advised her to get married the regular way by banns, as it was a great sum of money to pay away foolishly - she replied that she did not care it if was three times as much for that she would not have her name called in church.
Mary Ann herself said afterwards that she had permission from her father to marry 'any suitable person I might meet with', and, she said, 'I thought Watson a suitable person'. The minister at Campbelltown asked about her age but he was satisfied with a signed statement from Watson that she was over 21. They were married on Sunday morning, 6 February. The butcher in a frenzy sued the stepfather, but he could not undo a marriage once made. (1)
Mary Ann's reason for moving when she did is not perfectly clear. She gave the stepfather to believe that she was 'rather forward' with child, this being her excuse to him for an early and secret marriage, to 'prevent scandal'. In fact her first baby was born a little less than nine months later. She may have known that she was pregnant, or she may have simply known that she and Watson had come to a point where she could not long avoid it.
So far marriage has been considered as a thoroughly rational step tied to economic circumstance. Mary Ann's story uncovers other angles. For at least a year she and Watson had aimed to marry, and her pregnancy, assuming that she was already pregnant, was the result of this old relationship. How far she risked pregnancy because she was now able to marry, and how far the risk brought about the marriage it is impossible to say. Between 1841 and 1880 a large number of women at Camden were in Mary Ann's position. Their determination to marry, their marriage itself and the conceiving of their first child all came very close together.
As in Mary Ann's case, the normal order of events was different from what we in the twentieth century once thought was decent and proper: betrothal first, then marriage, then pregnancy. At Camden, and in England for centuries beforehand, engagement in some form or other was the great initiating event. It was this which bound the couple together for the future and which was recognised even in the courts of law.
Source: Camden Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales, Alan Atkinson. Australian Scholary Publishing Pty Ltd. 2008 ISBN 1 74097 1396
(1) Camden Bench Book, 26 February, 4 March 1848, NSWSA 4/5527.
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The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Friday 5 July 1861, page 1
DEATHS.
On 1st July, at her late residence, Camden, Mary Ann Watson, eldest daughter of Mr. William Charker, of Primrose Hill, Cobbity, Camden, and sister of Mrs. Hugh G. M'Laurin, of William-street, Woolloomooloo, aged 38 years, leaving a disconsolate husband and three children to lament their loss.
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