Blogs by Dave Tabler
Strange trauma reaction from a jilted fiancé
1/27/2023 2:11:44 AM
Man builds a house for his bride-to-be. She dumps him. Rather than move into the empty house, or sell it, he simply locks the door and walks away. For a quarter century, the house sits untouched.
The story of Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” has long haunted generations of readers. A young woman has bedecked her home for her wedding day. The guests have all arrived; the table is covered in lace and gaily decorated with a tiered wedding cake. The appointed time for the ceremony comes...but the bridegroom does not show up.
Time passes, guests shuffle, begin to drift away, and the day ends in disaster. Miss Havisham has been dumped. Things like this happen. But Dickens doesn’t leave it there. Miss Havisham continues to live in the house, wears her wedding dress, and leaves the wedding decorations exactly as they were...frozen in that moment forever!
Miss Havisham’s bizarre reaction to her unfortunate predicament resonates with an alleged mid-19th century incident in the life of one Jacob Cannon. He lived in what is now Woodland, DE but was formerly known as Cannon’s Ferry. That ferry business made him and his brother Isaac the wealthiest men in western Sussex County.
Cannon’s episode captivated the curiosity of Delaware novelist George Alfred Townsend. The yarn appears nowhere else but in Townsend’s “The Entailed Hat.” Otherwise, the writer’s saga of Jacob Cannon’s life matched newspaper articles, government documents, and reputable historical journals of the day (1820s-1840s).
According to Townsend’s account, 42 year old Jacob Cannon built, not far from his family’s ferry, a splendid new home intended for his bride-to-be. However, the young lady failed to appear on their wedding day. Cannon locked the door, walked away from the house and never married. The empty structure stared forlornly day after day at the bachelor, as he traversed his ferry route back and forth. The jilted man remained unmoored till the day he died some 23 years later.
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• Red Demons, Green Flyers, and Knock-a-Bouts - Monday, January 30, 2023
• Strange trauma reaction from a jilted fiancé - Friday, January 27, 2023
• The Robin Hood we know today - Thursday, January 26, 2023
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