Panic Over the Pig-Faced Lady: How Belief in an Urban Legend in 19th Century London Went Out of Control

 Manchester Square is a small garden landscape in the center of London.  Constructed in the year 1776 within the affluent neighborhood of Marylebone in the West End. The streets around Manchester Square are home to examples of some of London’s most stately 18th century Georgian architecture, and to this very day, the community around Manchester Square is one of affluence and influence.

Late in the year 1814, when the Georgian mansions lining Manchester Square were less than a half century old, and the streets of Marylebone were still covered by cobbles, something very bizarre took place in this upper class neighborhood. 

Strange stories of the existence of a wealthy woman with a pig’s face began to circulate in the press, and reports of this woman walking the streets around Manchester Square spread across London like wildfire causing a near panic among the residents of the city.

Manchester Square

The Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square was said to be the daughter of a nobleman.  It was reported that she only ventured out on foot at night and that when she traveled during the day, she did so in a carriage veiled by heavy black curtains.

Thousands across London between the fall of 1814 and the summer of 1815 reported sightings of the Pig-faced lady.  She became the talk of the town and most Londoners probably believed in her existence.

In early 1815 London newspapers began to publish the first of many portraits of the “Pig-faced Lady” and an autobiography, unauthorized of course, of the Pig-faced Lady was even published.  In this autobiography it was said that the Pig-faced Lady was an Irish noblewoman, who employed house servants that she kept under lock and key at all times for the duration of seven years in return for a handsome salary if her servants agreed to keep their mouths shut once the time of their indenture was up.

Contemporary Drawings of the Pig-Faced Lady

On February 9, 1815 the London Times published this advertisement which purportedly originated from the pen of an acquaintance of the Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square:

“For the attention of Gentlemen and Ladies--A young Gentlewoman..to undertake the care of a Lady who is heavily afflicted in the face…whose friends have offered a handsome income yearly and a premium for residing with her 7 years…an answer to this advertisement is requested as the advertiser will keep herself disengaged.  Address Post Paid at Mr. Ford’s baker 12 Judd-street Brunswick Square.”

This advertisement in the Times veritably confirmed the existence of the Pig-faced Lady for the residents of London and she became the talk of the town.  After all, if a newspaper as widely read and as well respected as the Times could publish an advertisement seeking services for the so-called “Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square” then she must be real.

With talk of the “Pig-faced Lady” at a fever pitch all across London on February 16, 1815 editors at the Times received another letter regarding the Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square.  This letter came to the newspaper from a man who gave his initials as M.D. in care of Mr. Spencer’s address 22 Great Ormond Street, Queen’s Square.  In this letter the man who went by the initials M.D. proposed marrying, or at least living with, the Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square.  This prospective suitor’s letter read as follows:

“A single Gentleman aged thirty-one of a respectable family and in whom the utmost confidence may be reposed is desirous of explaining his mind to the friends of the Lady who has the misfortune in her face, but is prevented through want of an introduction.  Being perfectly aware of the principal particulars, and understanding that a final settlement would be preferable to a temporary one, presumes he would be found to answer to the full extent of her wishes..”

The prospective suitor of the Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square then goes on for a few dozen more lines to describe how his intentions are sincere and his heart is chaste.

Realizing that rumors regarding the so-called “Pig-faced Lady of Manchester Square” might be getting a little bit out of control across the city, the editors of the Times, refused to publish the prospective suitor’s letter.

Contemporary report on the Pig-Faced Lady

Instead, the Times sought to backtrack and discourage belief in the existence of a “Pig-Faced Lady” of Manchester Square.  Only a week after publishing the Pig-faced Lady’s advertisement the Times reported, “There is, at present, a report in London of a woman with a strangely deformed face resembling that of a pig, who is possessed of a large fortune, and we suppose wants all the comforts and conveniences incident towards her sex and station.  We, ourselves, unwittingly put in an advertisement from a young woman offering to be her companion…”

After retracting the advertisement that the paper had supposedly “unwittingly” published the week prior, the editors at the Times went even a step further and completely denounced the rumor of the Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square as false, even going so far as to compare believers in the existence of the Pig-Faced Lady to cult followers or misguided believers in false religious prophets.

But despite damage control on the part of the Times it was too late.  Belief in the Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square had, by the spring of 1815, fully taken hold in the city of London.  And though the London Times may have refused to publish the marriage proposal to the  Pig-Faced Lady, their rival newspapers the Morning Herald and the Morning Chronicle promptly did.

A full blown newspaper war over the existence of the Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square was on among the rival London rag sheets.

            The editor of the Morning Chronicle, for his part, stated that, “while deformities of a pig-faced nature were unknown to doctors, it was certainly possible that a facially disfigured woman existed and that her deformities may have been exaggerated in some accounts.”

Both the Morning Chronicle and Morning Herald continued to publish near daily reports of sightings of the now notorious “Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square” as the year 1815 went on.  While the supposedly more respectable Times continued to ridicule and denounce belief in the “Pig-Faced Lady” even taking to referring to her as London’s “little Miss Piggy”.

In spite of the London Times campaign to discredit belief in the Pig-Faced Lady, reports of her existence still continued to circulate throughout London in 1815.

During a grand illumination in Piccadilly Circus to celebrate the victorious end of the Napoleonic Wars that summer hundreds, perhaps thousands of witnesses, fervently reported seeing a veiled woman with a pig’s snout sitting in a black carriage during the festivities.

Some even took to following the Pig-Faced Lady in her coach that night and reported that her carriage pulled into a fashionable residence located in Grosvenor Square.

Though arguments over the existence of a “Pig-Faced Lady” raged all across London during 1815, it seems as if, over time, sightings of the Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square slowly began to die out.

It should be noted that legends pertaining to the existence of pig-faced women in Europe date all the way back to the early seventeenth century and that they seemed to have somehow all simultaneously originated in England, Holland and France during the 1630’s.  Of course, unlike the later Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square craze that gripped London in 1814-1815, these earlier legends pertaining to pig-faced women all contained an element of witchcraft, which was later dropped from the urban legends as the first industrial revolution took hold across Europe.

17th Century Depiction of a Pig Faced Woman

In fact, until the middle of the 19th century belief in the existence of so-called “pig faced” women was fairly commonplace.  As the legend went, the pig-faced lady was always noble or aristocratic in birth, lived the life of a near total recluse, and despite possessing the face of a pig, was always attractive of figure.

Despite being largely forgotten today, the urban legend pertaining to the existence of pig-faced women was thought to be real by many and as late as 1924 the last major work treating the phenomenon as real was published.

For one brief year, 1814-1815, the legend of the “Pig-Faced Lady” became real to the residents of London and plunged Europe’s then most populous city into a war of words and accusations.  

So what did ever happen to the “Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square?”  Was she ever a real person in the first place or was she simply a figment of London’s collective imagination that flourished for a brief time and then simply faded away into the ether from whence she came?

Truthfully we have no way of ever knowing.  But interestingly enough, over forty years later in April of 1861 a man who signed himself simply with the letters M.A. wrote a letter to the London weekly magazine Notes and Queries in reference to the “Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square” asking, “Could any of your readers kindly inform me whether there exists any account, medical or biographical, of this person?  She lived, I believe, about forty years ago; and I am acquainted with two authentic instances of her having been seen, in one of the two, by a gentleman still living…”

Perhaps, time will tell,  that the urban legend behind the “Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square” was more real than anyone ever thought.