SHE was so beguiling, the innocent young girl was easily taken in.

As a fortune teller, Charlotte Morris told Mary Ann Blandford exactly what she wanted to hear.

The impressionable teenager had been introduced to Morris by her aunt, so entranced that an amazing future lay ahead of her that she visited her time after time, paying 6d on each occasion to have her fortune told and 3d of having “a wish out of a book” as she expressed it.

Eventually their conversation turned to the Great Exhibition in London which Morris described in such glowing terms Blandford determined she and a friend would save their money and go and see it.

“But hasn’t your father got any money?” Morris teasingly inquired. “Yes,” she foolishly replied. “He won’t miss some and can easily get more.”

So the teenager and her younger friend Susan Newman rashly decided to sneak out of their parents’ home and clandestinely leave for London. But first, she had to prise open her father’s savings box and remove £5 or £6 for their great adventure.

She took 5s in loose change to “pay the woman for her trouble” and wrapped the notes in a shawl – but in her heady excitement, left them on his bed.

Blandford went directly to Morris’s home to pay her the 5s she had requested, with the money to be left on the table and not picked up until she had left, enabling the scamster to claim she had not directly received any cash.

But as she dipped her hand into her pocket, Blandford realised she had left the notes behind and went to retrieve it. However, as soon as she slipped back indoors she was challenged by her irate father who had found the money on his bed.

He demanded an explanation and the girl tearfully revealed all. The police were summoned and Sgt Foster detained Morris, recovering the money from beneath the table cover.

In interview, Morris steadfastly denied theft, a stance she retained when she appeared before Southampton Quarter Sessions in 1851, where she was charged with inciting the teenager to steal money from her father and receiving the money knowing it had been stolen.

Mr Saunders, who was defending, launched a scathing attack on Blandford and Newman in his closing speech, denouncing them as “very bad girls”.

Imploring the jury to acquit Morris, he implored: “Their statements are unsupported by any creditable and impartial witness and there is nothing on which you can satisfactorily convict her.”

In his summing up, the judge, Recorder Edward Smirke, derided fortune telling as “anything but respectable”.

There was no doubt, he said, the 5s had been stolen and the only question was whether Morris accepted the money in the knowledge it had been stolen.

He directed the jury: “If you believe the girl’s statement as to the conversation between her and the prisoner, you will convict her, there could be no doubt of that point. But equally, under consideration of all the facts, you cannot believe the statements of the two girls, you must acquit her.”

The jury briefly consulted before returning a verdict of guilty, leading the judge to pour scorn on the heinousness and magnitude of her offending.

“This case is one of such a very serious character that I feel it is my duty to pass upon you the severest punishment the law can allow and that you be transported beyond the seas for a term of 14 years.”

Morris swooned and had to be carried out of the dock by the three police officers to the cells where, on recovery, she screamed hysterically.