Straws, Making a Straw Man

William, the Cipher.

Last week's discovery that William was involved in some legacy-related dispute with his "family" circa 1870-71 has, alas, been completely ineffective as a way of opening up his life to inspection. As I can find no coverage of Emma's public lectures in London during the period, I can find no coverage of those lectures being disturbed, as Emma claims they were, by William's family.

And while my reconstruction of Emma's forebears seems to be holding up, I'm increasingly uncertain about my identification of William's family; it's that damned "Daniel and Jane" on the 1870 marriage certificate, eating a hole in my confidence.

I'm reminded of the mantra of the protagonist in Pi -- when in doubt, restate your assumptions.

But the problem with William isn't a decryption problem -- he's not a cipher, for which we need a key. It's more fundamental than that. With William, we don't have enough ciphertext to even think about decryption. We don't even have enough trace material to be sure there is a key -- he could be, like some of the Zodiac ciphers may be -- uncrackable because there is, actually, no plaintext, no key that can yield sense. William, I have to keep reminding myself, may not even be William.

Here's what I think I know about William's early life, and its poverty-stricken.

1. Born in London in 1826 -- plenty of evidence for that. Census reports, baptismal records, statements he made during his own life.
2. In the 1841 census, living with father Daniel (laborer, b. 1791 or so), Daniel's wife Elizabeth (not Jane, mainden name probably Mimpress, born 1791 or so), Sarah Britten (b. 1831), Mary Ann Britten (b. 1831), and (double-take) Sarah Britten (b. 1839), all in St. Leonards, Shoreditch (a mile or so from Emma's birthplace)
3. Absent from Daniel's household in the 1851 census (Daniel is at that time a journeyman carver and gilder, the family is living in Goldsmiths Terrace, and Mary Ann has had a daughter, Mary Ann).
4. Arrives in the US on Sept 28, 1858, on the City of Washington, cabin class, denoted "gentleman"
5. almost immediately thereafter, provides aid and assistance to Cora Hatch in a Connecticut hotel (according to Hatch's promoters, who seem to be anti-Emma)
6. (If William's mother was Jane Britten, she died in the first calendar quarter of 1844, and her death was registered in Camberwell)

Bugger all. And I'm mindful that other people have identified a different William Britten as Emma's husband, which doesn't reconcile to the marriage record -- but there's no real reason to assume that the marriage record (the origin of 'documentation' on Emma's faux widowhood) is accurate with respect to William.

It's this...undecidability that makes me grasp at straws like this one:

A question of probabilities, and the probability that this is our William is low. Vanishingly small, really.

Yet I have to account, in his life, for an apparent 17-year gap in the public records between the 1841 UK census, and his arrival in the US in 1858, and then another twelve-year gap until 1870, when Emma marries him and makes his life a matter of public record thereafter.

And the public records databases are just not cooperating. Every day, tens of thousands of pages of historical information are pouring into these sources, and nothing pertaining to William under any variation of his name we know he used during his later life. I can track Mrs. Foye, week by week for a decade, and I can't get a single glimpse of William for decades. That is in itself significant, but I don't know what absence means. We never do, as Lacan reminds us.