Remembering Sidney
Photo of puppet Sidney, taken by Ulysses Black, June 2023
On 12th June 1871, 152 years ago to this day, four-and-a-half year old Sidney Albert Barker died after eating a chocolate laced with strychnine. Little Sidney was the only fatality of the poisoning spree of Christiana Edmunds, the infamous chocolate cream poisoner of Victorian Brighton.
Pictured here is the little puppet actor that portrays Sidney in my puppet show, The Sorrowful Tale of Sleeping Sidney. A couple of weeks ago, Ulysses Black (my partner and co creator of the show) pointed out that the anniversary of the real little Sidney’s death was approaching, and that we should do something to commemorate it. This evening, we headed to the beach with little puppet Sidney and his crocodile Mr Snaps, a thermos of posh hot chocolate and a box of Bakewell slices. Ulysses said a few words about the little boy who had died such a horrible, painful death so many years ago, and we toasted him with our chocolate drinks.
We tried to find out more about Sidney’s short life before his fateful trip to Maynard’s chocolate shop, but it is not easy to find information about him. There are many extensive articles and books about the chocolate cream poisoning case, but little Sidney Barker is rarely given much more than a paragraph. Even in my own show, a dark, tragic-comedy, most of the content revolves around Christiana herself. We are so fascinated by true crime, and what drives humans to commit such ghastly acts, that the victims’ lives are often left in the shadows, reduced to their role as victim by a sensation-seeking public.
Little puppet Sidney was created by my own hands from cloth and papier mache, solely to portray this one story - the story in which he dies an agonising death. His tiny fate was sealed before he had even been born, or cast from his plaster mould. I didn't know what Sidney really looked like, so I made his puppet avatar blond with big blue, wonder-filled eyes, with the perpetual look of a hungry child in a sweet shop. The aesthetic of the “children” puppet characters were inspired by the sickly-sweet chocolate or soap advertisements of the Victorian era, wherein the “innocence” of children was made a commodity.
Sidney himself was perhaps reduced to a concept or an idea; a device to move the story along; a puppet.
But little Sidney Albert was a real person. A real child. He really existed. He came to Brighton for a day trip on the still novel London-to-Brighton railway with his mum and dad, uncles and little sister, and died twenty minutes after eating his chocolate cream.
I sometimes wonder if I have exploited his death in the show - whether I have made light of it. The show is about many things, one of which is our tendency to sugarcoat things to make them more palatable, or more easily consumed. The Victorians seem to have had a morbid sense of humour, plus an obsession with death. Death was much more present in daily life. Jelly babies, for instance, first made in 1964, originally were named “unclaimed babies”, casually referencing the high infant abandonment rates as a result of poverty, high infant mortality and the ever looming threat of the workhouse for poorer children. The late Victorian era also birthed the term “the cult of the child” - the idea that children are characterised by innocence, and free from sin (though of course, class was a factor here too). Infant death kept the child in a state of perpetual innocence; frozen in time, like the little puppet version of Sidney.
The real Sidney Barker, though, was not a concept, and he wasn’t just part of someone else’s story. And, as we sat on the beach this evening, and spoke the names of Sidney’s young parents, Albert and Leticia Barker, real people who mourned their child 152 years ago, and Sidney’s baby sister Florence, I felt deeply moved by the family’s loss. And as I looked at the tiny puppet version, with his hands outstretched in eternal, insatiable wanting, and his large, unseeing eyes full of naivety, I felt even sadder. We wondered what the real little Sidney could have grown up to become, and whether any of his family’s descendents still remained today.
We left a Bakewell slice on the pebbles, for if his ghost was around and hungry.
We have decided to make Sidney’s death part of our yearly calendar and commemorate it every year.
