Historical newspapers are a great source for finding out details about our ancestors’ lives – not only the basic facts of their lives, but also details of their personal lives. One story might give you one impression of their lives, but if you’re lucky enough to find a variety of different stories, they can build up quite a picture of their lives. When I was researching a Victorian dentist, I originally thought of him as man who had transcended his humble origins in Wales to become a successful man, operating in Liverpool and London. He appeared to be someone who had been let down by his wife, who had, he believed had an affair, and who never married again after he petitioned for divorce from her.

A more careful look at the stories that appeared in the newspapers about him – only a few stories, but spaced out over the decades – presented a more complex picture, however, one which highlighted the differences in how men and women were expected to live, and the problems that women faced when presented with successful men who sought to use them.

The story I had initially been researching was the divorce of Liverpool dentist Evan Abraham Morgan, born as Evan Abraham in Merthyr Tydfil in 1842. He had married an 18-year-old Liverpool girl, Sarah Stopford Taylor, in 1874; Evan had been 32 at the time. The couple soon had a son, George, but Sarah was clearly dissatisfied with married life, particularly as her husband was often away on business. In 1886, Evan Morgan petitioned for a divorce from Sarah on the grounds of her alleged adultery with Liverpool shipping manager Ephraim Fry Angell, with the final decree being issued nearly two years later.

The press eagerly covered the divorce case. Sarah was described in negative terms as a somewhat flighty young woman who refused to do what her husband asked, going to balls and dancing with a man who was not her spouse. Evan told her it was ‘not advisable’ to do so, but she laughed at him and continued. She was also described as ‘star struck’, being bored and wanting to start a career on the stage rather than settle to a domesticated life. Evan came across in these initial accounts as a traditional husband, wanting his wife to wait at home for him, and anxious to avoid scandal. However, he was also seen as supportive of her, even weak and unmasculine, in agreeing to his wife starting a theatrical career, funding it, but still being there for her when the fledgling career failed.

However, when Sarah gave evidence, a different picture emerged. Evan Morgan regularly went out to a card club or to play billiards after work, without Sarah, but did not like her going to the theatre or balls without him because of the perceived impropriety of doing so. Sarah stated in court that ‘if all the nights he spent in my company were put together, they would not make two months in the whole 13 years of our married life’. She also accused her husband of shouting and gesticulating at her in public, and being violent towards her. His denials of this seemed shallow given that he did break open his wife’s cashbox after she refused to give him her keys for it, and that he admitted frightening her by putting a carving knife close to her (he said ‘it was only a joke’).

Showing Sarah’s lack of control over her own life, Evan had colluded with Sarah’s father to try and monitor her behaviour, and her movements were also followed by the family servants (aware of who paid their wages) and reported back to Evan. Evan also forced Sarah to write a letter to her alleged lover, Angell, saying that she would no longer be connected with him. Although Morgan had paid for Sarah to go on the stage, he had made clear that it was against his wishes, and after she gave up, he was pleased, but still resentful that she had put him to ‘considerable expense’ in supporting her ambitions. Finally, Evan had hired a well-known Liverpool private detective – a former disgraced city police detective named Mathew Maguire – and his employee, Charles Williams (who would later form his own, successful, private detective agency) to investigate Sarah and Angell.

In court, Morgan had to refute suggestions that he too had committed adultery. This was with one Mrs Walker, who was separated from her husband, and who had come to live with the Morgans for a while in 1882. He admitted that Sarah’s allegation that Mrs Walker had ‘come into his bedroom… when he was dressing for dinner’ was true. She had also sat on his knee in front of the fire on a different occasion – a very intimate action in Victorian society.

This story had everything the press wanted: a young woman, a romantic intrigue on both the part of the husband and the wife, and sex (or rather, a lack of it, for Sarah stated that she had not had sex with her husband for five years, since having a miscarriage that she blamed him for, and further claimed that ‘she hated kissing’). The divorce was duly granted, and Sarah faded from the archival record; she certainly did not stay with, or marry, her alleged lover.

However, the case was neither the first nor the last one involving the dentist: back in 1876, Evan had been the subject of newspaper stories after a woman he had administered chloroform to had died and he faced court – but he was absolved of all blame. He was not so blameless in another case that was heard a decade after his divorce, in 1897. In this case, heard at the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court, he was charged with seducing one of his female patients, and supplying her with drugs in order to make her miscarry. The woman in question was referred to in court as ‘Lena Bull’, but I believe she was really Charlotte Maria Bull, from Lambeth. The case was brought by Lena’s outraged mother, also called Charlotte Maria. Evan admitted having been ‘intimate’ with Lena, but denied that he had ever given her drugs. Lena had argued that on her first visit to him, in 1894, he had called her a ‘dear little girl’, told her that she had a ‘kissable little mouth’, and tried to kiss her. An affair then started.

Evan Morgan – described in the press as short, stout, and bald – gave the appearance of something of an elderly roué, using his respectable job and status as a means of seducing women. Appallingly, his defence was that Lena was not an ‘inexperienced young girl’ but a woman in her 20s who had worked and therefore ‘must have had considerable experience of the world’. The jury found in favour of Mrs Bull, but it’s hard to see how the trial helped Lena. The still single 30-year-old is listed in the 1901 census with her mother and younger brother, living in Lambeth, and with no job.

Evan’s appearances in the press point to a couple of things common in the Victorian newspapers. His position as a respectable member of society, a qualified dentist with his own practice, made any scurrilous stories relating to him newsworthy. However, the stories also suggest a man who made the most of his position, and who sought out younger women to have relationships with, because these were the women most likely to be impressed with his position. Yet his last act was to help one woman he came into contact with.

After the final court case, Evan moved to Sussex, and when he died in 1913, he left his housekeeper, Elizabeth Lake Richings, a bequest of £26,000. This gift was so generous that it was still being mentioned in the press four years later, but it also led to another woman in Morgan’s life being the recipient of unwanted press coverage. Poor Miss Richings was doorstepped by a reporter in Hove, and asked what she would do with the money. She plaintively said to the journalist, ‘Don’t say any more than you can help, will you, please?’

Elizabeth Lake Richings, would live to the age of 80, enjoying her bequest until her death in 1950. It’s nice to know that at least one woman benefited from her association with the difficult dentist, but others were not so fortunate.