The village of Turville sits in a fold of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England — about 35 miles west of London, close enough to the capital to receive its newspapers and far enough away to feel like a different century entirely. In 1871, roughly 400 people lived there. They were farm labourers mostly, their lives governed by seasons and soil, their world small and bounded by the hills on every side.
In the spring of that year, something happened in a cottage on School Lane that would make the entire country stop and stare.
A girl went to sleep. And for nine years, she did not wake up.
The Tenth Child
Ellen Sadler was born on May 15, 1859, the tenth of twelve children born to William and Ann Sadler. Her father died while she was still an infant. Her mother remarried a farm labourer named Thomas Frewen and the family — large, impoverished, crowded into the cottage at the corner of School Lane — scraped by as most families in Turville did: through hard labour and not much else.
At eleven years old, Ellen was sent to work as a nursemaid for a family in the nearby town of Marlow. She was not a sickly child by any particular account, but shortly after starting her new position she began to exhibit periods of unexplained drowsiness. She was inattentive. She could not stay awake. Her employment was terminated.
A local doctor named Henry Hayman, from Stokenchurch, was called in. He found glandular swellings at the back of her head and symptoms that suggested possible spinal disease. The parish vicar, the Reverend Studholme, arranged for Ellen to be admitted to Reading Hospital, where she remained for eighteen weeks. Her condition did not improve. In March 1871, the hospital discharged her, formally declaring her incurable, and sent her home to Turville.
Two days later, Ellen had a series of seizures.
And then she closed her eyes.
The Position She Never Left
Dr Hayman arrived at the cottage as quickly as his pony and trap could carry him. By the time he got there, Ellen could not be roused by any means he attempted. Her breathing was almost imperceptible — shallow enough that visitors later described pressing their faces close to hers simply to confirm she was still alive. But alive she was.
She lay on her left side, knees drawn up, one hand tucked under her face. That is the position she would occupy for the next nine years. Hayman noted a paralysed spine and complete unconsciousness. She showed no response to stimuli during his visits — including, on at least one occasion, the passing of a galvanic electric current through her body, a test her mother was not told was being performed and to which Ellen showed no reaction whatsoever.
A correspondent from The Bucks Free Press visited Ellen and recorded what he saw with the clinical precision of a man trying very hard to make sense of something that did not make sense: her breathing was regular and natural, her skin soft, her body warm. Her pulse ran rather fast. Her hands were small and thin, her fingers quite flexible. But her feet and legs were almost ice cold — like those, he wrote, of a dead child. Her eyes and cheeks had sunken. The overall appearance, he said, was that of death. Except that she was breathing. Except that she was warm.
One of the most astounding, inexplicable, physiological phenomena ever known.
— The Times, London, 1871, on the case of Ellen Sadler, the Sleeping Girl of Turville
The Toy Teapot
Ann Sadler — Ellen's mother — faced a problem that no medical textbook could help her solve: how do you keep a completely unconscious child alive for what was beginning to look like an indefinite period of time?
In the early months of Ellen's sleep, Ann could still open her daughter's mouth slightly and administer small amounts of food. She developed a routine: port wine, sugar, and milk, given through a small toy teapot, three times a day. It was not much. It was barely enough. But Ellen's body, in whatever state it inhabited, continued to process it.
After approximately fifteen months, Ellen's jaw locked completely shut. Her muscles had contracted from months of rigid stillness until the jaw would no longer open at all — except for a small gap at the corner of her mouth, where a missing tooth had left a narrow channel. Ann adapted. She tilted the toy teapot and trickled the mixture through that gap, a few drops at a time, three times a day, for the remaining years.
This went on for nine years.
What nutrition Ellen actually received, how her body sustained itself on what amounted to tiny quantities of wine-sweetened milk delivered through a locked jaw, is among the many things about this case that Victorian medicine could not explain and modern medicine can only speculate about.
The Circus That Grew Around a Sleeping Child
The Times of London called Ellen's case one of the most astounding, inexplicable physiological phenomena ever known. That description, published in 1871, travelled. Journalists arrived in Turville. Then doctors — from England, Scotland, Ireland, and eventually America. Then the merely curious, who came by coach and later by train, drawn by the simple human compulsion to see something that should not be possible.
Ann Sadler did not turn them away. She welcomed them — carefully, on her own terms. Visitors paid for admission to Ellen's room. Some paid additionally for small cuts of Ellen's hair, a trade that continued until, as one contemporary observer drily noted, the supply began to run out. The family was earning approximately two pounds a week from donations — a substantial income for a household of farm labourers who had previously had almost nothing.
This money was, for many observers, deeply suspicious. The press began to link Ellen's case to that of Sarah Jacob — a girl from Wales whose parents had claimed she could survive without any nourishment at all, through divine intervention. When Sarah was subjected to a supervised test, she died of starvation. Her parents were convicted of manslaughter. The shadow of that case fell heavily over Turville. A journalist for The Observer wrote that it was to be hoped that the story of Sarah Jacob was known in that obscure village — because what was being claimed there looked very much like a deliberate imposture.
Sceptics arrived alongside the curious and the medical. Some came concealing sharp objects — pins and needles smuggled past Ann's watchful eye — which they pressed against Ellen's skin to test her response. She did not react. Her mother, Hayman later reported, was acutely aware of this risk and actively resisted allowing anyone to handle Ellen freely, citing the danger of hidden instruments as her reason for controlling access.
On at least one occasion, a visitor arrived and was told by Ann that she could not come in yet — she needed to get Ellen ready first. What that preparation consisted of was never explained.
Rumours circulated among the village that neighbours had sometimes seen Ellen sitting up at the window at night. Nobody could prove it. Nobody could disprove it either.
And then the Prince of Wales — the future King Edward VII — visited. He laid his hands on the sleeping girl, as people in that era believed a royal touch might cure the afflicted. Ellen did not wake up.
