SIX thousand pounds – a tidy sum in mid-Victorian Britain and the sum for which a Hampshire woman sued her former lover in a headline breach of promise case.

However her suitor, William Joy, counter claimed Elinor Miller had lied to her when they first “walked out together” and he believed she was “a chaste woman and a widow”.

In reality, he claimed, she was a single woman with an illegitimate child, and he wanted £150 back he had given lent her.

The High Court heard in 1874 how the woman, whose maiden was Dredge, already had two customers at a business where she worked as a sales woman propose to her before she met an American at a function at the Crystal Palace in London.

He also proposed but warned her that if they did get married, his father would probably disinherit him.

So they just remained together for about five or six years, during which she fell pregnant and bore him a daughter, who was now about 15 years old.

The man then deserted her and married his brother’s “cast-off mistress”.

To protect her daughter’s honour, she adopted her mother’s name of Miller and set up business as a perfumer and a hairdresser.

It was then she met Joy, a man of considerable means who in addition to living in Seymour House, near Bournemouth, owned The Colonnade and the Arcade in the town.

Joy, a widower with a grown-up family, later proposed but she said she would not accept it until he had learnt of her past. He told her it would not make any difference to his feelings.

To laughter, she added: “In fact, he told me he preferred me as I was as he did not wish to be in competition with a deceased husband.”

Joy, she insisted, was so anxious to get married as quickly as possible that he wanted to buy her business and hold on to it until a new purchaser came forward.

For that purpose, he put £150 into her account as a deposit.

However, jurors heard he later asked to be “released” from their arrangement because his family were apparently opposed to it and he was being threatened with blackmail by another woman.

“He said he had been unduly intimate with her and she threatened him with an action if he married anyone else.”

Miller said when she refused, he told her he would ruin her business and drive her out of Bournemouth.

“Within a few months, he married another woman and because of the scandalous reports he set about me, I had to sell my house and leave Bournemouth.”

Under cross-examination, Miller was adamant she had never asked for the £150 as a loan.

“He paid it as a deposit on my business which I wanted to give to my daughter.

"I saw no reason as to why I should make Mr Joy a present for my business. I thought he was a Christian man until he behaved so disgracefully to me in my bedroom.

"I asked him three times to leave before I rung for my daughter.”

Joy, who was 62 and a builder, told the court he had first met Miller in the town’s pleasure gardens but they only “walked out together” after his wife had died, denying he had proposed to her and that he had visited her every day.

Marriage was never mentioned until he told her: “If everything is satisfactory, I do not see any reason why it should not be so.” She seemed “very agreeable” to that.

He then denied being pleased at not being “in competition” with another man and did not know she had lived with another man.

“I asked her that if she was in my place would she marry and she replied ‘most definitely.’

Refuting accusations that he had made “improper advances” towards her and that he had spread malicious gossip, he said: “I swear I never promised to marry her.

"Something may have been said about me marrying but not to her. I thought she was a widow woman.”

In his summing up, the judge Mr Justice Pollock directed jurors that he knew of no rule of law that would compel a woman to disclose the whole of her circumstances to make a promise binding.

ooking at the “peculiar features” of the case, he did not think it was one for heavy damages, unless they felt she had her feelings “outraged by a heartless man.”

The jury awarded Miller £2,350 damages and threw out the counter-claim.