The Cotton Factory Times. — 1885-02-06 (Manchester, Greater Manchester, England)

HISTORY OF LUCILLE DUDLEY.  The Frees Association says further inquiries made in this country respecting the woman Dudley, who is charged with the attempted assassination of O'Donovan Hosea, show her to he a most extraordinary character, and her career to have been eventful beyond description. With the exception of her relatives, to whom ' her birth was a disgrace, and her peculiar temperament a constant anxiety, no one probably knows more of her than a lady now living at Walthamstow, with whom she boarded. Lucille Yseult Dudley, as she calls herself, came to this lady's boarding house, then kept at New Barnet, in 1879. She at first declared that she Was married, and that her husband was a Frenchman, colour being given to this story by her own unusual Proficiency IS the French language. But the truth speedily became known that the child to which she shortly afterwards gave birth was illegitimate, that its father was a clergyman, and that the young woman had herself only shortly before been on the stage. This much seemed certain, though Miss Dudley's habit of romaneing cast sonic doubt upon the circumstances with which she bad embellished her narrative. She declared, for instance, that the had been a dramatic pupil of Mr. Terry. The part she played in a Manchester theatre pantomime, that of mermaid, did not give countenance to her tale of high professional culture. The man who Was responsible for her moral lapse put, she said, laudanum in her tea when he came to visit her. Otherwise she would never have been in her then unfortunate situation. She named her child Lucille Marguerite. An allowance was made to her by its father, and while it lived its mother, who was de, votedly attached to it, conducted herself with great propriety. There were, however, many indications of an ill-balanced mind. Though her intellecteal faculties were of the sharpest, it was noticed that she had but an ill-defined sense of moral responsibility, more especially with regard to human life. Her perversions of truth were notorious, yet she was most warni-bearted ;and on one occasion, when her landlady, being ill, stood much in need of friendly offices, nothing could exceed the devoted attentions of Miaa Dudley. She was also extreruely, successful in making friends whenever she chose to exert herself in this way ; but the death of her chili, when little more than two years old, seems to have totally upset her unstable mind. Though lies' money allowance ceased with its life, and she was in the most straitened circumstances, she spent £5O in putting a tombstone over its grave. A great marble cross was set up, its pedestal being covered with hymns, engraved entirely in leaden lettering. Her grief knew no bounds, and fears began to be entertained that she would commit suicide on its grave. Her acquaintances in Barnet succeeded, through the intervention of a solicitor, in procuring a few pounds for her from the father of the deceased child, which was the only child she ever had, notwithstanding the general report that she has had two. When her money was spent she cast about in various directions, is the hope of earning store. One of the lines she tried was that of model to sculptors. She possessed a good figure and ladylike manners; and although reports about her handsome face are somewhat modified by those who know her intimately, there seems little doubt that she was a well-favoured attractive woman. Her spectacles appear to have been worn more to cover a cast is one of her eves than to aid defective sight. Posing ss a model could not. however, procures living for a young person of her tastes, and, becoming beset with pecuniary difficulties, she made, one after another, those already reported attempts on her life, which resulted first in her imprisonment, and finally in her incarceration in a lunatic asylum. She puzzled the doctors a good deal in these institutions. She could converse rationally on almost any topic that was started amongst her acquaintances but the glib indifference with which she would talk about shooting herself or any other person was evidence of a strange tendency to homicidal mania. This the physicians seem to have feared and it was only after many professional misgivings that she was allowed to depart from their restraint. Her escapades at Hastings, where she went hunting, calling forth magisterial notice for furious and reckless horsewomonahip. and her almost succeeding in getting an old surgeon to marry her, were characteristic freaks. She was very bitter in her denunciations of those who prevented the match with this elderly gentleman, even though the latter had daughters not her junior. She left, it is said many unsettled debts there, as elsewhere. Her obligations to her landlady, now removed to Walthamstow, she sought to discharge by making a will and promising her a quittance out of a policy of insurance effected on her lite originally in behalf of her child. But poverty had compelled her to stop payment of premiums. The marvel so how an insurance office should have accepted the risk, for her lungs and heart were affected. She was laid up for some time with hemorrhage of the lungs, and in one of her letters she acknowledged her consumptive tendencies. The endeavour to make a sick nurse of her and payment of her passage to America were parts of other plans by her friends to put her in the way of earning a living.