Emma Tayler was born 29 May 1831 at Dedham, the daughter of John and Sarah Tayler. In 1851 she was living in Grinstead Road (now Greenstead Road?), Colchester, with her sister Eliza. They are listed as the ‘daughters of Mrs Tayler, absent’, as their mother was visiting at Elmstead the night of the census.

Like her sister, she married in London. Her wedding to Charles Stokes, a baker of 19 Barbican, took place on 4 October 1854, at St Giles Cripplegate, London. The witnesses were Emma’s sister Eliza and brother Rowland.

The Stokeses were at 40 Exmouth Street, Clerkenwell by 1861. This was the Clerkenwell immortalised in George Gissing’s The Nether-World, of 1889. Its industrious streets were lined with small shops, above which were multifarious lodgings and rooms, and Exmouth Street, with its milliners, tailors, cheesemongers and drapers, was typical (and, in fact, not dissimilar to Walworth). ‘Clerkenwell isn’t such a beautiful place that one can be content to go there day after day, year after year, without variety,’ comments Gissing. ‘Go where you may in Clerkenwell, on every hand are multiform evidences of toil, intolerable as a nightmare. … Here every alley is thronged with small industries; all but every door and window exhibits the advertisement of a craft that is carried on within.’ In 1891, Rosebery Avenue cut through Clerkenwell’s maze and reduced Exmouth Street from a main thoroughfare to a street market, but in the 1860s and 70s it was still a good address, if on the fringes of poverty.

Exmouth Street residents must have witnessed the explosion that shook Clerkenwell on 13 December 1867, when a bomb planted by Irish republicans was detonated in the exercise yard of the prison in the next street (Bowling Green Lane). The ringleader of the attack, Michael Barrett, was the last person to be publicly executed in Britain.

Emma and Charles Stokes were close to the Simson family, especially their nieces, the daughters of Emma’s sister Sarah. The Simson girls lodged in London in the 1870s and were apparently fond of their aunt and uncle, who perhaps acted as guardians following the death of their father Edward Simson in 1869. My great grandmother Polly Simson gave her address as Exmouth Street when she married in 1878 and her sister [Ann] Eliza Simson was lodging with the Stokses in 1871.

In 1881 an Emma Stokes, born at Dedham, aged forty-five and a widow, was living in Colchester. She seems to have died in Colchester aged sixty-seven in 1898.