A Stroke Of Bad Fortune

A Victorian fortune, not in a cookie but a gum wrapper. The first patent for commercially produced chewing gum in the US dates from 1869, so I imagine this is from the 1870-1910 period.

The tragic and detailed fortune caught my eye as I plow along through NaNoWriMo, having thrilling and/or horrifying things happen to the characters:

No. 17. White's Red Robin Gum Girls Fortune.

Yours is a sad lot, indeed. At the age of seventeen, you will run away from home to marry a man thirty-five, and the third week after he will be killed in a railway accident, but his life is insured for $10,000, which you get. Five years after you marry again, this time to a man three years younger than yourself; you live together ten years, when he dies, after spending all your money, and you, to support yourself and children, accept a situation as matron of an orphan school, living to be old enough to see your grandchildren.

Did the Red Robin people really think that more than one person (if that) was going to have this very precise fate? It reads like a one-sentence yellowback novel...

I'm thinking about telling you a bit (spread out over a couple of posts) about the true case I'm basing The Black Mirror (NaNo novel) on - an 1873 Brooklyn murder case with a female detective, bumbling police, lots of interesting female suspects, and a clairvoyant/spiritualist. Oh, and a mysterious Spaniard who might not have been. And there is a character who is, come to think of it, the head of an orphanage - perhaps I can use this fortune as her back story.

The Red Robin fortune is from the Duke University Emergence Of Advertising In America. collection.