Worn out stock.

How Victorian courts erased Mary-Jane Skaife’s voice, and what it tells us today

When James Atkinson stood trial in 1858 for the killing of Mary-Jane Skaife, the jury were told they had before them not just a young man, but the product of a “worn-out stock.”

They heard that Atkinson’s family tree was littered with madness: brothers labelled “idiots,” aunts called “lunatics,” an uncle described as “furious,” and a grandmother accused of bringing lunacy into the line. The claim went back six or seven generations.

The message was clear: Atkinson’s violence was not his own. It was destiny, bred into him by blood.

This was Victorian science and law working hand in hand, a courtroom narrative shaped less by fact than by fear. The language of: “idiocy,” “cretinism,” “lunacy” was not medical in the way we understand today. It was rhetoric, carefully chosen to persuade. To cast Atkinson as an unfortunate heir to hereditary madness was to remove responsibility from his shoulders.

And it worked. The jury found him: “Not Guilty of murder by reason of insanity.”

Ai illustration of James Atkinson’s trial at York Assizes, 1858.

But what of Mary-Jane? Court transcripts linger on James’s supposed family curse, yet they tell us almost nothing of the young woman he killed. Her voice was drowned out by a story that excused her murderer.

We tell this part of the story not to repeat Victorian prejudice, but to ask: Who controls the narrative when violence is done? Then as now, victims’ lives are often eclipsed by arguments over the state of mind, or the circumstances, of those who harm them.

This isn’t only history. A close friend of mine lived through a similar silencing in the courts. Despite enduring years of coercion and surviving cancer twice, when she sought justice the system weighed her voice against wealth and position, and found her wanting.

She told me it felt like being cut open all over again. In surgery, the knife had fought for her life; in court, the knife belonged to — judges, lawyers, her accuser — who used it to cut her voice away, to slice her story from the record.

The Victorian court excused James Atkinson by constructing a bloodline of madness. The modern court excused a man by dismissing a woman’s truth. In both cases, the institution of justice became a weapon, wielded by men in power against women who had already suffered enough.

Mary-Jane Skaife’s story and my friend’s remind us that this is not about one case in 1858. It is about how society still decides whose voice is preserved, and whose is erased.

This is why we are making Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor , to restore Mary-Jane’s voice, and to ask whose stories we choose to keep alive.