Brad Verity gives some more details on how the Buttivants became poor. The 1799 bankruptcy wasn't really the main issue since James recovered from it. In 1806, he was appointed inspector of Norwich camblets for the East India and in 1809 he and his family moved to Kennington a suburb of London. James and Anne had a great family with 10 children but in April 1824 they received the news of the death of their oldest son John Henry Buttivant in the previous summer in Macau. It was fatal to James he died a month later in May 1824. His death was registered in the Gentlemen's Magazine showing he had achieved certain social status but it was also the peak of that status. Because of the deaths of both James and John the family was left in mourning and in a precarious financial situation. The widowed Anne returned to Norwich settling in the suburb of Bracondale with her eldest daughter Sarah a spinster who was the only beneficiary and excutrix of her will. Charles is the generation that starts from a mercantile middle-class family in a London suburb, and ends in the slums of Victorian London's East End he is a tragical figute. He was the third of five sons and only 19 years old when his father died. The 1827 bankruptcy of his father's trading business in East India House was actually fault of his elder brother James and of his brother-in-law Henry Illingworth husband of his sister Catherine however it still had a negative impact on Charles and his brothers with the family business lost they had to start their own careers. Charles started promisingly enough forming W. Goddard as coal merchants on Milbank Street in Westminster. In 1830 at 26 he married Mary Ann Frampton and starting in 1836 they had five surviving children but a decade after the birth of his first surviving child ie in 1846 things began becoming sour for Charles: his business partnership dissolved in 1846, and Charles went from being a coal merchant to being a secretary to coal merchants. About this time, he started up an affair with Hannah Wing who was 20 years younger and who bore him the first of six children a year later ie in 1847. In 1851 they had the second. In 1861 Charles said in the Morning Post that he would not hold himself responsible for any debts of his wife Mary Ann could incur having separated more than 12 years before. That same year's census has Charles and Hannah living as a married couple in Whitechapel with their growing famiy. In that time divorce was very expensive only the upper class could afford it. Common law wifes such as Hannah could assume the surname of the man they were living with but they had no legal rights or recourse. However at this point Charles's downward spiral was far more concerning than his bigamy. Eventually he suicided in 1865. At the inquest held at the Wellington Tavern, Cannon Street Road two nights aftet that Mr. C. Emerson George testified, "I was an intimate friend of the deceased. He had fallen into great difficulties in consequence of not being able to get cargoes for ships. He was a man of good ability and education, and he was always trying to get something to do, but the worst of it was that whenever a ship went in, somebody else, younger men than himself, always got hold of it. His furniture was going to be removed under a bill of sale...and the landlord had threatened to distrain for the rent. He had been summoned to the county court for one debt, and for another he had been served with a writ. He had been requested by the guardians of the poor to appear before them to show cause why he did not pay the arrears of the poor-rate...He failed through sheer misfortune" ['Suicide Through Misfortune', Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, July 16, 1865]. The physician at the inquest testified that Charles had "expired in consequence of taking a very large dose of oil of bitter almonds. He had drunk about one ounce." But the most heartbreaking testimony came from Charles and Hannah's 18-year-old eldest daughter, Hannah Martha Buttivant "The deceased was my father. He was a shipping clerk. He had latterly been very desponding in consequence of the reduced circumstances of his family. On Monday last I found him lying upon the bed in his room, groaning. There was a smell of bitter almonds in the room, and I said, 'Father, you have taken the bitter almonds!' He said to his youngest child, who was seated on the bed near him, 'Don't cry, dear.' I again spoke to him, and said, 'I cannot remain and see you suffering thus. I will go and call ma.' He gave a groan and exclaimed, 'Oh, my God!' He died in half an hour in the presence of three doctors. He had been given the bottle of bitter almonds at the docks by a person who brought it with him to this country from a chemist in Port Adelaide". The jury at the inquest returned a verdict that the deceased took his own life in a state of temporary mental derangement. Hannah Wing kept the Buttivant surname and the public status as Charles's widow for the rest of her long life. She married off all three of her daughters, and continued to hold her family together as a single mother in the East End working as a laundress. She died in the London suburb of Islington in 1909 at age 83. Charles's suice would have haunted all of his children but 14 years old Albert his eldest son by his second wife seemed to be more particularly affected. Though one of Charles's sons from his first marriage -- George Edward Buttivant spent time in and out of the workhouse in his senior years, Albert was the only one of Charles's eleven surviving children to suffer the workhouse during his 30s. He married Ann Howcutt, daughter of a Mile End blacksmith in early 1871, and they had a son who died in infancy and three daughters. Records from Mile End Old Town Workhouse on Bancroft Road show that Ann Buttivant and her youngest daughter, baby Mary Ann, were admitted as paupers in 1878. In in the 1881 census, both Albert and his wife are inmates at the workhouse. There are many further workhouse admission and discharge records for Albert Buttivant's family, including Mary Ann's elder sisters Eliza and Emma, with Albert and his wife in and out of the workhouse early into the 20th century, as late as 1920. It's not clear why poverty overcame Albert to a more devastating degree than it did his siblings. Steady work eluded him: he started off in a cigar factory, and by his forties was a general labourer. From a social status viewpoint, Albert is basically the rock bottom of this entire line of descent. But, boy, were he and his wife made of stern stuff - together they survived their living conditions, both in and outside of the workhouse, and made it to a ripe old age, each dying at 83. I personally note that if Ruvigny had seen this line he would probably say that Albert's illegitimacy was the reason for his fall to poverty however that is certainly not the case since Charles and Hannah had a stable relationship, lived together and he was the chief of the family and Charles was already having a very difficult life. I wonder if Albert even knew that his parents were not legally married.