Magic and Matrimony: The Dark Doings of Madame Prewster

Mrs. Prewster, from Philadelphia, tenders her services to the ladies and gentlemen of this city in astrology, love, and law matters, interpreting dreams, etc., by books and science, constantly relied on by Napoleon; and will tell the name of the lady or gentleman they will marry; also the names of the visitors. No. 59, Great Jones Street, corner of the Bowery. Ladies 50 cents, gentlemen 1 dollar. --Advertisement, 1854


"Who has not heard of Madame Prewster?" asked Henry Morford in his 1863 novel, Shoulder-straps. She was famous, Morford wrote, for predicting the future spouses of both ladies and gentlemen, and for being able to tell the names of her clients before they introduced themselves.

Caroline Prewster was a fortune teller in the 1850s and early 1860s in New York. She lived at several addresses in this period, all in the neighborhood of the Bowery: 59 Great Jones Street, 76 Madison Street, 411 Grand Street and 373 The Bowery. By 1860 she had moved uptown to 251 Third Avenue (between 20th and 21st Streets). Her name was familiar to most New Yorkers of the time; out of the two hundred or so fortune tellers working in New York then, she was arguably the most famous.

Unfortunately, though, this was because she was infamous for the sinister business she ran on the side. This was ostensibly a matrimonial bureau, but she was not so much a matchmaker as she was a procuress.

The journalist Fitz-James O'Brien wrote about a visit to Prewster in the early 1850s, entitled "Magic and Matrimony." He inquired about her matrimonial services and she said that for ten dollars she provided matchmaking services, introducing gentlemen to young lady school-teachers and shop-girls, on receipt of ten dollars from the gentlemen. Why, she had made over 300 successful matches. "Sometimes singular things happen," she said (as indeed was quite true, but not in the sense she meant). She told O'Brien that once a rich man had asked her to represent him as poor to the young lady, and that once they were married "he landed her to her great astonishment in a new house of magnificent splendour."

O'Brien asked if the ladies were not in some danger from these introductions, which led not to matrimony but rather to "unfortunate [results] as regards the female." Madame Prewster, "visibly swelling like a hen whose brood has been outraged," said:

No, Sir! Never, Sir! I will and am able to purtect all the ladies who confides themselves to my charge. Nothing of the kind have ever occurred to me. I would never introduce the gentleman no more to ladies, and he would lose his ten dollars. That's the way I'd serve him.

The sad story of one of these young ladies is told in a letter which her mother wrote in 1853 to the Mayor of New York, Fernando Wood. It was printed in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Her daughter, the lady wrote, was almost 15 and had answered a gentleman's advertisement for a wife in the New York Herald. Her mother had had no idea of this, "or it would not have happened." The girls "were directed to Mrs. Prewster's, Great Jones St., corner of the Bowery" to meet the man. Prewster said that for $5 she would tell the girls all about him and to come back the next Friday:

She thought at first she would not go, but the other girl had been there, and found a beau to her liking, and been to Coney Island with him, and she told [my daughter] such a story that she thought she would go and see Madame Prewster again. When she went in she saw a man, who said, 'Mrs. Prewster, what a charming girl that is! O, my dream is completely out! That lady has been in my midnight dreams for months past.' 'O ho!' said Mrs. Prewster, 'did I not show this man in the cards, with such black eyes.'

The man told the girl not to tell her parents and he would not tell his father "where he got his wife from" - and that they would "keep company until winter came on" and then marry. They would meet at Madame Prewster's "when convenient." Unfortunately the girl became pregnant and this is when her mother noticed, of course, that all was not well:

She said that she had gone away from her home, with a very bad man and lived with him in a very bad house...The man that made her [pregnant] is a married man, with a wife and four children. He had deserted them and ruined my child. If I expose him I shall also expose my whole family...Do, Sir, all in your power to send those fortune tellers away, or make the press not advertise such people's business. This is the first letter I ever wrote to an officer in my life. I am so worried I do not know what to do or say.

Enclosed with this letter were Prewster's ad (very similar to the one quoted at the beginning of this post) and the matrimonial ad from the Herald. The latter stated that the gentleman is a 38 year old widower "of some wealth" wishing to meet and wed a "well-bred lady" but that he is not particular about her age. His mailing address was in Jersey City; Prewster's reputation was not limited to New York City, it seemed.

The journalist Mortimer Thomson, who wrote under the name Q.K. Philander Doesticks, also visited Prewster in the 1850s. Like O'Brien, he considered he to be "one of the most dangerous" fortune tellers in the city. She had been known to the police for at least 14 years (he wrote in 1858) and that "the amount of evil she has accomplished in that time is incalculable."

Prewster was certainly in New York City by 1850, in which year she is listed in the census with daughter Caroline. Prewster seems to have been born in Philadelphia* about the year 1811, and possibly first practiced fortune telling there. She may have known Madame Morrow, who was from the same city and roughly the same age. She was still in New York in the 1860 census but I have been unable to trace her beyond the year 1863, when she is listed in a New York directory.

Note: Madame Prewster's actual fortune telling exploits, as described by O'Brien and Thomson, are worthy of a separate future post - as this one is already quite long.

*Additional Note: In the 1860 census Prewster is listed as being born in England, but this is contradicted both by the 1850 census and by John Netten Radcliffe, who says that she is from Philadelphia.

Sources

Caroline Prewster household, 1850 US Census, New York City Ward 13, New York, NY; #481/1317, Roll M432_550, p. 368.
Caroline Prewster household, 1860 US Census, New York City Ward 18 District 3, New York, NY; #223/277, Series M653, Roll 813, p. 735.
"City News and Gossip," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 7, 1855, p. 3.
"Fortune Tellers and Fools," New York Times, Nov. 23, 1855, p. 4.
Doesticks, Q.K. Philander [Mortimer Thomson]. The Witches of New York (1858), pp 29-50.
Morford, Henry. Shoulder-straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862. (1863), p. 184.
O'Brien, Fitz-James and Wayne R. Kime. Selected Literary Journalism, 1852-1860 (2003), pp 70-75.
Radcliffe, John Netten. Fiends, Ghosts and Sprites (1854), p. 66 [advertisement quoted at top of post]

Images

The illustration "Faces In the Fire" is from Arthur's Illustrated Magazine, Vol. 44 (1876), p. 191
Postcard scene of the Bowery from NYPL Digital Gallery.
Bowery old clothes shop/street scene (1871) from NYPL Digital Gallery.