Money for the Bastard

Money For the Bastard: A short history of Miss Johanna Worth of Cheetham Street, Rochdale for the past five years. The facts and circumstances relating to her acquaintance with Mr Frank Weston and Mr James Hamilton of Rochdale. How she first became acquainted with them and their subsequent conduct towards her.

By Frank Milner

A5, Paperback, 254 pages

Biography, social history

This is the story of Johanna Worth (1831–1890), a Rochdale dressmaker, who in 1860, wrote and published a pamphlet outlining the facts and circumstances relating to the men who wronged her and her sentence to hard-labour. The pamphlet has been reproduced and forms the central part of this book.

Published by Bookbinder
ISBN 978-1-9193568-2-2

"Here’s money for the bastard,” were the words Johanna Worth heard in 1860 when seeking two and sixpence a week support from her child’s father. This is the extraordinary account of one northern, working-class woman’s struggle against the forces of respectability, conformity and corruption. Johanna Worth was a twice-jilted dressmaker sentenced to two months with added hard-labour in Salford’s notorious New Bailey House of Correction. Her crime was to have kicked the leg of a Rochdale Conservative councillor’s wife: a woman who was the sister of the man who had left her with child. Johanna was defended in court by Karl Marx’s solicitor and helped by a radical printer to publish her own sensational story in a pamphlet which forms the central part of this book. In it she tells the real facts about her betrayal, her imprisonment, the beating of her baby, her penniless state, maltreatment by the police and the lies told by those wanting to throw her out of town.

Frank Milner is an art historian and descendent of Johanna Worth. He worked at the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside from 1977 until 2006 and has written several publications and exhibition catalogues which include works on George Stubbs, JMW Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Bill Tidy, Adrian Henri and the Stuckists: Punk Victorians. His other books on Degas, Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec and Matisse. He is currently working on a series of exhibitions on 19th-century Japanese prints.