1860

The year 1860 is a documentary break as well as the date of Blanche Glover’s death: Blanche drowned herself at Putney in June, while the record of Christabel LaMotte’s life is missing for the year before it. The juxtaposition makes a death, an archive’s silence, and an ambiguous explanation of absence converge around a single moment in the chronology.

Blanche’s Death

Blanche drowned herself by jumping from the bridge at Putney. She had wetted her clothes and filled her pockets with large round stones to make certain she would sink. Her preparation was associated with her interest in Mary Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempt from the same bridge: Blanche had noted that Wollstonecraft struggled to sink because her clothes floated. The details make the act deliberate, and connect Blanche’s death to a precedent she had considered closely.

The explanation preserved in the account is both material and bleak. Blanche’s note said she could not pay her debts and described her as a superfluous person, of no utility in the world; she had no money in the bank. The coroner, meanwhile, attributed her death to a temporary female imbalance of the mind and generalized that women underwent strong, irrational changes of temperament. The account sets Blanche’s stated financial desperation beside a diagnosis that converts an individual crisis into a gendered medical category.

The Missing Year

June 1860 marks the point at which the surviving record catches up with LaMotte after a prolonged gap. Scholars had assumed that she was present when Blanche died, but LaMotte had given evidence that she had been away from home at the time. Her wording does not establish how long she was absent: the assumption that it meant only a day or a week or two is exposed as uncertain once the archive’s silence over the preceding year is considered.

For that year, the archive contains no information about LaMotte until Blanche’s death. The exceptions are a set of letters from Lincolnshire, fragments thought to belong to Melusina, and a few fairy tales she sent to Home Notes, including one about a Hob who cures whooping cough. These traces establish continued writing, but do not settle where LaMotte was or whether she was with Blanche. Even the Hob story cannot serve as proof: it might have come from someone who told it to her, or from another source.

Archival Significance

The chronology makes 1860 a hinge between a documented death and an undocumented interval. Blanche’s death is described through concrete particulars, including her note, her debts, and the stones in her pockets; LaMotte’s whereabouts remain inaccessible despite the surviving fragments of her writing. What can be established about Blanche therefore sharpens, rather than resolves, the question of LaMotte’s absence.

The episode also shows how an archive can turn a gap into an interpretive problem. LaMotte’s statement that she was away is evidence of absence, but not a measure of its duration; the scattered Lincolnshire letters and literary fragments offer clues without a definitive narrative. June 1860 consequently matters not only as the date of Blanche’s death, but as the point at which assumptions about LaMotte’s life must be distinguished from what the record actually reveals.