Curé

1850 · réf. 37267 — New York April 30th 1850. 1850. Good. - Over 80 words penned on 6-1/4 inch high by 7-3/4 inch wide buff paper. Under the heading of "A card - To the Public" Rev. William K. Hoyt addresses his letter to the editor of the Police Gazette. Complaining of an article which appeared in the Police Gazette the previous week entitled "A gross case of Swindling" which implicates Hoyt. The Reverend claims that it is "calculated to do me great injury while the facts of the case have not yet transpired by an investigation." He goes on to request that "the community may suspend their opinion." until he's had opportunity to defend himself in court from "the base charges thus made against me". Signed "Wllm K. Hoyt". Folded for mailing the letter is creased and soiled with some tiny specks of ink touching the word "Gazette" at the top. An anti-Catholic Protestant minister in New York the Reverend William K. Hoyt published sensationalistic claims made by Maria Monk in a nativist periodical the "American Protestant Vindicator". Several of the stories were probably fabricated by Hoyt. They were subsequently published in a book entitled "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" a work supposedly written by her. A young prostitute Maria Monk had been confined in the Charitable Institution for Female Penitents by her mother. Her behavior having led to her expulsion Maria ran off to the United States with the Reverend Hoyt. The book supposedly narrated by Maria Monk to the Reverend John Jay Slocum claimed she'd been a nun at the Hotel-Dieu convent in Montreal. According to the book and stories Maria supposedly claimed that nuns were forced to have intercourse with priests and she had witnessed a nun being killed for resisting a priest's advances and that babies born to the nuns were strangled and buried in the convent's basement. Pregnant when she arrived in New York which was not a surprising condition for a prostitute in the 19th Century the book claimed that the father was the Abbe Patrick Phelan. The stories played into the anti-Catholic nativist's convictions of the period. The appearance of another supposed nun who was said to have also fled from the convent drew even more attention. The tales of secret passages scandalous behavior and crimes at the Hotel-Dieu convent came under investigation by journalists including the American journalist William Leete Stone who very quickly recognized the lie after gaining access to the convent. Stone wrote that "After 10 minutes the imposture had become as plain as day. I now declare more openly than ever that neither Maria Monk nor Francis Partridge have ever set foot in the convent of Hotel Dieu". Meanwhile the Reverend Hoyt and his cohorts had pocketed most of the profits from the best seller and additional sensational books which supposedly related Maria's experiences as a nun were published. Interest in the Monk affair finally declined after a Protestant organization was given permission to visit the Hotel-Dieu and Iles des Soeurs. In 1849 Maria Monk was arrested in a "house of ill repute" for stealing from her "client" and incarcerated in a New York prison. She died there that Summer. A rare letter from one of the 19th century's most notorious charlatans. New York, April 30th, 1850. unknown