In June 1663, a well-mannered woman who seemed foreign walked into London’s Exchange Tavern carrying jewels and letters addressed overseas. Within weeks she had married the tavern-keeper’s young brother-in-law, a lawyer’s clerk named John Carleton. Within months she was at the Old Bailey on a bigamy charge, and the pamphlet presses had found their story of the year. Laura Kolb’s essay for the Public Domain Review reconstructs Mary Carleton — born Mary Moders in Canterbury, probably in 1642 — and the publishing boom she set off.

  • More than a dozen pamphlets and broadsides appeared in 1663 alone, plus three self-defenses in Mary’s voice, two rebuttals from John, and printed trial reports.
  • An estimated five hundred visitors came to “view” her in prison while she awaited trial.
  • She was acquitted — the Carleton side produced only one ineffectual witness, and Steadman, the alleged first husband, reportedly wanted money for travel expenses before he would testify.
  • In 1671 she was transported to Jamaica for stealing a tankard, returned to England illegally, resumed thieving, and in 1673 was convicted and hanged.
  • Elaine Hobby’s count: by her execution, more texts had been published about her misdeeds than about any contemporary criminal.

Mary wrote her own version early and well: an orphaned heiress raised in a convent, fleeing an estate dispute in Cologne and two appalling suitors, arriving in England by chance — where she became the victim of a con, semi-imprisoned by the Carletons for fear a courtier would snatch up this rich foreign lady. She concedes the small stuff. She did display her jewels “to gain credit and respect.” And once she spied “plain and public signs” of their plot to ensnare her, she hatched her own counterplot, insinuating a larger estate and a nobler lineage than she may have possessed. “It was very difficult to personate greatness for so long a time without slips or mistakes,” she notes, and takes that as grounds for applause rather than censure.

Kolb’s sharpest move is economic. Early modern London’s expansion allowed urban anonymity and self-reinvention, and in a society where divorce was nearly impossible, runaway wives made their way to the capital to start over. But licit opportunities for women were thin, and marriage — including bigamous marriage — was one path to security. Coverture meant a wife’s possessions belonged to her husband: acquitted of bigamy, Mary asked the court to restore her jewels and learned they were now John’s. The period’s misogynist writers register this without understanding it. William Gouge imagines sneaky wives purloining household money for “silken gowns”; Joseph Swetnam warns that a woman will “pick thy pocket, and empty thy purse.” Both blame bad women rather than a bad system, and in doing so describe deception as a function of women’s disenfranchisement.

  • The frontispiece verse to The Case of Madame Mary Carleton turns on a period double meaning: “counterfeit” was also the word for a portrait. “Behold my innocence after such disgrace / Dares show an honest and a noble face / Henceforth there needs no mark of me be known / For the right Counterfeit is herein shown.”
  • Ernest Bernbaum’s 1914 study calls the Carleton narratives “a missing chapter in the history of the English novel.” Literary historians note Defoe’s debt in Moll Flanders; Kolb places her at the head of a line of fictional female cheats running from Becky Sharp to Amy Dunne.
  • Thomas Porter’s play A Witty Combat (1663) gives “Madam Moders” the epilogue that titles the essay: “You think me a bold Cheat” — but “which of you are not?”

The nearest modern echo is Anna Delvey, who also claimed to be from Cologne and whose grift likewise converted into entertainment almost overnight. But Kolb’s real argument is about performance, not fraud: Mary “wants us to notice the holes in her story and to look on, bug-eyed, as she dances right up to them then darts away.” She worked her marks and her readers the same way, and invited us to admire her for it. Truth is not the point here; performance is.