Jennifer Brookes Jennifer Brookes i(26477359 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 ‘The Law Must Take Its Course’ : Serving Dr Halloran’s Time Jennifer Brookes , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , no. 7 2023; (p. 53-74) 'Lydia Ann’s position during the winter of 1819 was precarious. Any income from
sales of Newgate was essential if she were to survive her ‘most afflicting reverse’ of
circumstances.3 Her distress was caused by the arrest, imprisonment, conviction
for forgery, and sentencing to seven years’ transportation of her children’s father,
Laurence Hynes Halloran (1765–1831). The case was notorious, and the conviction
calamitous. In 1816, to add credence to his application for the vacant curacy
at Broseley in Shropshire, Halloran had forged the frank of an eminent barrister,
using the alias ‘WC Gregory’. An argument with his rector, Townsend Forester, led
Forester to refer to his clerical agents in London. It was soon proven that Halloran
was an imposter with a long record. Government and ecclesiastical files were thick
with damning detail, commencing with a murder charge in 1783 while a young
naval apprentice (for which he was acquitted), failed attempts at ordination, exposure
at Bath in 1806 after supplying bogus clerical credentials, the circumstances of his appointment as chaplain to the forces at the Cape in 1808, and subsequent behaviour causing exile from there in 1811. From that moment to further damage his reputation, he was known to have abandoned his wife. With Lydia now his partner, he had used aliases and forged credentials to gain clerical appointments throughout the country, concurrently supplementing his meagre income with published poems and sermons, until his arrest in mid-1818. When he sailed on the convict ship Baring seven months later, authorities were pleased to be rid of him. He had embarrassed the Church by causing confusion in marriages, such that ‘it was his bad character and not his crime which transported him to Botany Bay’.' (Introduction)
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