Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/Elizabeth Canning

Elizabeth Canning
This nomination predates the introduction in April 2014 of article-specific subpages for nominations and has been created from the edit history of Today's featured article/requests.


 * This is the archived discussion of the TFAR nomination for the article below. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests). Please do not modify this page. 

The result was: scheduled for Today's featured article/September 17, 2013 by BencherliteTalk 18:44, 4 September 2013‎ (UTC)



Elizabeth Canning (1734–1773) was an English maidservant who claimed to have been kidnapped and held against her will for almost a month. She disappeared on 1 January 1753, returning 28 days later, emaciated and in a "deplorable condition", to her mother's home in the City of London. Consequently, two women, Susannah Wells and Mary Squires, were identified as her supposed captors and arrested. Local magistrate Henry Fielding, intrigued by the case, investigated Canning's story. He interviewed several witnesses, and following further arrests, Wells and Squires were tried and found guilty. However, the trial judge, Crisp Gascoyne, was unhappy with the verdict and began his own investigation. Upon being questioned, some witnesses recanted their earlier testimony. Gascoyne had Canning arrested, and at her trial in 1754 she was found guilty of perjury, for which she was imprisoned for a month and transported for seven years. She died in British America in 1773, but the mystery surrounding her disappearance remains unsolved, and her case remains one of the most notorious in 18th-century English law.

A woman and a mystery, birthday, 2010 FA, 3 points, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:28, 14 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Support:TFA of an article about a woman, also a legal case. Good variety.   Montanabw (talk) 17:49, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:12, 24 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Support - interesting and unusual. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:28, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, essentially per, above. Cheers, &mdash; Cirt (talk) 03:33, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Support - Per Montanabw. – Shudde  talk 12:06, 4 September 2013 (UTC)