Elizabeth Griffiths

In the novel

Elizabeth Griffiths enters Young & Condemned as Allen’s younger sister, one of the few members of his immediate family still beside him during his childhood in Nottingham.

The historical record

Elizabeth was born on 24 August 1832 and baptised the following month. Her baptism records her as Maria Elizabetha Griffiths, daughter of William and Cecelia Griffiths.

The 1841 census places her in Earl Street with her mother and Allen. She was eight years old when the census was taken. Within two years, Allen would be before the courts, and by the beginning of 1844 he had been removed from Nottingham into the prison system. What happened to Elizabeth afterwards is unknown.

No later census, marriage or death record has yet been identified with sufficient confidence to follow her into adulthood. The difficulty is compounded by the common surname Griffiths and by her appearance as both Elizabeth and Mary Elizabeth in the surviving records. Unlike Allen, whose conviction generated an increasingly detailed documentary trail, Elizabeth simply disappears from the records so far identified.

That absence is itself revealing. Allen survives in the historical record in extraordinary detail largely because, as a child, he came into contact with courts, prisons and the transportation system. Elizabeth did not leave the same institutional trail.

For now, our last certain glimpse of her is in 1841: eight years old, living with her mother and brother in Earl Street, Nottingham.