Notes and Queries, No. 65, January 25, 1851 - Softcover

9781443237147: Notes and Queries, No. 65, January 25, 1851

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443237140 ISBN 13: 9781443237147

Publisher: General Books, 2010

This specific ISBN edition is currently not available.

Excerpt: ...a small greengrocer's shop, in West Bar, Sheffield. She says she was born in Spring Street in the same town, on the 29th Sept. 1781; well remembers wondering why she was so much looked at when a girl: and her surprise, when afterwards told by her mother, that she was one of ten children born at the same time. Had often been told that she was so small at birth, that she was readily put into a quart measure; and for some time, lay in a basket before the fire "wrapped in a flannel like a newly hatched chicken." 2. The improbability of finding any living gossip who was present at the birth, must be obvious: but I have conversed with old women who had heard their mothers describe the occurrence from personal knowledge. 3. One ancient dame had no more doubt of the fact than the cause of it. Having apparently heard and believed a monstrous tradition of a multitudinous gestation extant in common "folklore." "It was," said she, with all gravity, "the effect of a wish," intended to spite the father; who, having had two children by his wife, and an interval of nine years elapsing before the portentous pregnancy in question, did not desire, it seems, any further increase to his family. 4. The parents died, the daughter married, and the "story of her birth" was forgotten: until the publication of White's Sheffield Directory in 1833, when, among other local memorabilia, the strange announcement of "ten children at birth," was reproduced on the contemporary authority of the Leeds Mercury. From that time Mrs. Platts has been more or less an object of curiosity. 5. The Directory paragraph is as follows:

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