An opium using con woman was jailed after defrauding many shops and businesses with stories of an expected legacy. The article gives a warning of her appearance to alert future potential victims.
“A woman, calling herself by the different names of Dickenson, Dickson, Sharp and Smith, was committed to Lincoln city gaol last week as a vagrant, after practising for several weeks upon the good-natured confidence of some of the inhabitants. By a well-managed story of a large sum of money daily expected from some place near Boston, she induced the landlord of the Brown Cow to trust her for more than three weeks’ lodging, leaving him at last unawares, and unpaid. – Messrs. Baldwin (cook-shop), Kidney, of Corporation-row, and Maplestone, of St.Peter’s at Gowts, also suffered in the same way, for longer or shorter periods. A poor washerwoman was persuaded to lend her 10s., in expectation of a ‘handsome present’ when the long-looked-for remittance should arrive; and a druggist gave her credit for a considerable quantity of opium, from an unwillingness to suspect one certainly among the most plausible of her sex. Various were the names and characters under which she defrauded these different parties: at one time she was on the point of receiving a large legacy, and in much anxiety as to the rate of duty chargeable, &c. &c. As, upon being discharged, she will be very likely to return to what she has found a profitable occupation, it may not be amiss to add to the above, that she appears to be from 30 to 40 years of age, rather low and broad-set in stature, with features which perhaps might not be disagreeable, but from the disgusting disfigurement caused by opium* of which she will consume about half an ounce a day; manners of course insinuating; an abundance of ready lies and inventions, and ‘the very d—-l to talk,’ as one of the aggrieved parties expresses it; –has, moreover, a little boy with her, which she suckles, although he is three or four years old. – One person who has seen her, thinks that she comes from Pinchbeck, that her real name is Vandyke, and that her husband was transported.”
The Stamford Mercury, 2nd February, 1827.
*generally early signs of ageing, skin blemishes and sores.