Mary Carr @ A Thousand Blows
Why is Mary Carr so elusive? Inspired by A Thousand Blows and Dope Girls, we dip back into the world of British Gangs.
To my mind British Gangs had perhaps three female protagonists: Alice Diamond, Kate Meyrick and Josephine O’Dare. Not Mary Carr. I wouldn’t be prepared to choose between the other three either. The one person I did not know about, and sorely wish I had found out about her, is Billie Carlton, immortalised by Umi Myers as Billie Cassidy in BBC’s Dope Girls.
The ‘real’ Mary Carr is shown below in a painting by Frederic Leighton, say some people. There is no photography of Mary Carr that anyone knows about. Mary is elusive, a trait which makes her all the more alluring to my fertile imagination. There are striking similarities between the modern day Erin Doherty as shown above (bottom right) and the Leighton painting below.
My Halloween post for Pen and Sword covers all of these women in more detail. Hard if not impossible to understand now that when I wrote that piece I had zero knowledge of either of these amazing TV shows. Dope Girls is available now on BBC iPlayer and the first six episodes of Stephen Knight’s A Thousand Blows is on Disney+ but will surely be shown on terrestrial television at some future point.
Impossible also to choose between these two shows. For all of their similarities in raw material, they are incomparable. A Thousand Blows feels realistic and of its time, quite drab and light on production frills. It would be wrong to call it a serious drama in case it makes you think it dull or boring. It is neither of those things. The cast, led with genius by Erin Doherty, shines.
Dope Girls is an altogether different production, with Gen Z frills such as captions over key shots that call hashtags to mind. It’s high on fun but also has a dark underbelly. The real names of the three main leads have been changed, or the surnames have, which underlines that this is only very loosely inspired by real events.
Looking back on my Instagram feed since Christmas, when I first heard about A Thousand Blows, I realise that it might almost look like Disney is sponsoring me to talk about their show. I make no apology for this, although they are not.
I know from painful experience how small the market will be for my book British Gangs. Equally well, I know how enormous the global audience will be for these two sexy, thrilling female-led dramas. All of these girls are real and they deserve to be remembered. That millions more people will remember them due to these series is not something that bothers me. I am just thrilled that you get to see them as I have seen them since starting work on British Gangs in 2021.
Additional Note
I have been chatting to the Mary Carr expert Emma Woodhouse, author of the novel Mary: Queen of the Forty and a forthcoming nonfiction book. Emma claims that Leighton did three paintings that may include Mary. She discounts The Bath of Psyche as being Dorothy Dene, one of five sisters who modelled for Leighton. The British Museum claims all the Denes used assumed names. Just in case things were not confusing enough already.
Emma states that Dorothy was in America around the time the Maid with Golden Hair was being painted. However, to illustrate the amount of concentration and determination you need to unpick all this, Emma thinks that (wait for it) the face is Dorothy’s but the body must have belonged to another woman, probably Mary Carr.
Others say perhaps therefore Dorothy’s place was taken by sister Lena. The more complex painting, with many faces, Captive Andromache, might have included Mary but Emma has identified at least two women in that picture with the face of Dorothy Dene. She asserts her belief that Mary Carr was indeed the model for the Maid with Golden Hair. And for the avoidance of doubt, the hair is auburn. To my mind golden wrongly implies blonde hair.
Just one more juicy thought from Emma: she believes Mary is so elusive to us now because she was so subtle and sophisticated. She operated in the shadows to protect herself. In this respect the character in the early episodes of A Thousand Blows corresponds quite well to Emma’s opinion here.
I am so grateful to Emma for helping out on a Saturday night. This again shows that Crime Guy is more than the sum of its parts. It takes a village just to get one article out! Many thanks also (as so often!) to Nafisa Tosh for the idea and the conversation about Mary that prompted this piece.
If you are feeling generous then Emma’s book is available now at Amazon.