For the past year, I've been putting together an anthology of letters written in English in the period 1800-1840 but not housed in any archive other than my own. I have transcribed and written introductions to over fifty letters but have not (yet) succeeded in finding a publisher. If all else fails I will create a new blog which will probably reach more readers than a printed book though books are a much better way of reading anything of any length. Meanwhile, here is my draft Inroduction:
Introduction
Two days
after I had despatched the foregoing long letter to Fanny, the little
post-woman – for we had no post-man; but a good old soul who used to trot …
came down the hill with a lanthorn, the mail-bag coming into Charmouth at ten
o’clock at night. Eliza Edmond and I had watched this poor creature every night
during a fortnight, from my little window, as the light of her lamp appeared
for an instant and was lost again, while she stopped to deliver her letters. At
last, she stopped at our door ….
Harriette
Wilson Memoirs (1825)
The past
is everywhere, often overwhelmingly so. Some is immoveable Heritage, some
portable but archived in libraries or vaulted in museums. The immoveable is
sometimes demolished; the majority of the portable circulates, passing from
parents to children, attic to auction, dealer to collector, and sometimes ends in
the bin or bonfire. Even without those terminal fates most things suffer some
deterioration or damage.
Paper
collectibles, as they are called, are the stock in trade of a worldwide market:
bank notes, deeds, letters, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, postcards, posters,
stamps. They are readily portable objects and often end up far from their
origin or first destination. A small number are taken out of circulation when
gifted to or purchased by libraries and museums, though even then they can
suffer war-time looting and peace-time theft. Organisations, business and
charitable, supposedly archiving their past can be careless or inconsistent: a
letter might be taken home by somebody to read and, as with library books,
never returned; when moving offices, someone might decide to clear out
paperwork taking up far too much space already. A hundred years ago British banks,
solicitors, and insurance companies sent vast nineteenth-century
correspondences to paper mills for pulping. But on arrival it might be realised
that it was collectible material and the mill would sell on to dealers.
The
letters transcribed in this book were all written in English in the period 1800
to 1840. None were in archives; I found them browsing dealer boxes at table-top
fairs or buying at auction attic accumulations or well-presented collections,
sometimes bidding without having viewed but confident I would find something to
include in the anthology I was trying to create. It all started with just one
letter, now included here: the 1825 extortion demand written by the English
courtesan Harriette Wilson. It’s only the third recorded of a couple of hundred
letters she is believed to have despatched from exile in Paris. Most were
probably burnt by the compromised men who received them. Two are in archives.
But
perhaps this book also owes something to a much earlier experience. I spent the
academic year 1971-72 in Paris and participated in Michel Foucault’s seminars
at the Collège de France. He set us the task of reading an obscure memoir,
chanced upon in a provincial archive, written in 1835 by Pierre Rivière who had
murdered his mother, sister, and brother. The idea of working from something
discovered accidentally was new to me, as was the focus on a text which had
been completely forgotten but which astonished Foucault who saw that it could
provide an entry into study of then-contemporary ways of thinking about
criminal insanity. I made use of the possibilities opened up by this approach
in my own research over the next few years and it may be that I am returning to
it here in a book which foregrounds the accidental and forgotten. I don’t have a memoir but do have an 1837
letter from a solicitor later murdered on his own doorstep by an aggrieved
client, judged at the Old Bailey to have “a strong predisposition to insanity”.
Like Pierre Rivière, he was sent to an asylum instead of being executed.
*
Machinery
for making envelopes cheaply was not developed until the 1840s; before then
envelopes were hand-made and expensive. Letters were almost always sent through
the post as folded and tucked sheets of paper, often closed with a wax or paper
seal. Such letters automatically preserve name and address of the recipient,
written on the front panel, so that the identity of the Dear Mother or Dear Sir
is always present and without which I could not have researched them. But when
seals were broken a word or phrase might be lost. Thoughtful correspondents
left blank spaces on the unfolded written page roughly where they thought their
seal would fall on the folded outside, but not all correspondents were
thoughtful or able to perform the origami-like mental feat involved.
None of the letters I was buying bore postage stamps, first introduced in May 1840 when over a period of eight months sixty-eight million copies of the Penny Black were distributed to post offices across Britain and Ireland to serve on a small part of the correspondence of a population of twenty-seven million. The Penny Reds which succeeded the Blacks in 1841 were printed in vast quantities. Older stampless letters did receive markings indicating post towns of origin and destination, dates, postal charges, and so on. There are collectors for these pre-stamp or pre-philatelic letters. Hobbyists are very focussed in their habits and pre-stamp collectors no different in this respect; very often they do not see the wood for the trees. Surprising as it may seem, when they view and buy a folded letter for its outer postal markings they may not read the inner contents which, it’s true, often enough present themselves in faded ink or some apparently indecipherable cross-written scrawl. But I chose to view them the other way, projecting scans of the elusive characters onto my desktop magic screen.
I thank you if you feel I prove my case, that these letters are interesting and provide insights, sometimes surprising, into both private lives and wider histories: a woman writes to her husband that she has suffered a miscarriage; a medical student from Barbados describes protests in Edinburgh against the Tory threat to the Great Reform Bill of 1832. There is some comedy, including the unintentional as when nine-year old James Forbes, writing to his father the Seventh Baronet Pitlsligo, identifies the excellent family Library as the place - no doubt it had a polished wooden floor - where you practice spinning your top. There is rather more tragedy; the histories I record are strewn with early deaths: James Forbes lost his mother in early infancy; Mrs Darwin sees all four of her children culled by natural selection; going out to India in the service of the East India Company is quite likely to prove terminal and quickly. Medical science had barely begun to triumph over any of the very many fatal conditions and diseases, remedies for which we now take for granted. People were much more ready to place their faith in God and money into church building than into understanding the human body and its frailties. I find it strange that childbirth should have been so readily accepted as perilous and that when one of the main perils which women faced was eventually identified it was denied and the discoverer (Ignaz Semmelweis, 1847) ridiculed. Doctors did not like to be told to wash their hands.
With
perhaps a couple of exceptions, the letters I have selected were not written in
hope or expectation of securing a wider readership than the person they
addressed and sometimes other family members who would want to hear the latest
news. It is this which gave them an immediacy as I read them, even if at the
same time I was struggling to decipher a word or make sense of an argument. Some
are clearly crafted and not simply spontaneous; Martha Wilmot’s family letter
is just a small addition to a large body of skilful constructions, recording
her travels, which were published in fat volumes in the 1930s based on originals
now housed in Dublin archives. And one correspondent, Hugh Baird, writing home
from Rio de Janeiro in 1828, reflects on the power of the pen: when I sat
down to my Desk I never imagined I would have got so far on, one subject drove
hard after another, and we often find that there is no way in which one’s mind
can be better known than by the good quill.
The
letters are not in any sense representative. In early nineteenth century
Britain and Ireland, literacy was far from universal; schooling was not
compulsory and rarely free. The illiterate do not appear here though their
dictated letters can occasionally be found. A handful of writers resort to
phonetic spellings, as does Mary Epps in a heartfelt letter which dates from
1801: Now all my famley is goan to bed I am sete Down to Rite to you for I
reley can never geat by my Self no other time.
But women
are numerically under-represented in this book; the identity politics of the
period almost completely excluded them from public life and from professions
which generated vast correspondences. They were unlikely to travel either
independently or as wives to the main destinations, India and the Caribbean,
from where very many letters were written home to recipients who carefully
saved them. There were women like Martha Wilmot who did travel independently
within Europe; Catharine Rossiter who appears here was another Irish woman who
did.
Colonial
identity politics classified the Jamaica-born Richard Hill as a free man of
Colour and for part of his life (but not all) subject to civil disabilities. He
is the only writer here who is clearly not white but I hesitate to declare that
everyone else clearly was. It is likely that several of the men living overseas
formed enduring relationships with non-white women and had children with them;
in the case of James Drummond Campbell I document provisions made in a will for
both partner and children. I have no expertise in the matter, but I form the
impression that it is only later in the Victorian period that casual racism
decked itself out with scientific pretensions; in this earlier period, and
perhaps because of the influence of Christian beliefs, the background
assumption - despite slavery - is that there is just one race, the human race.
As early as 1808 the proto-Darwinian scientist James Cowles Prichard FRS (1786-1848),
coming from a Quaker background, sought to combine the idea of a single origin
for humanity with some kind of explanation for its subsequent visible differentiation.
But in 1813, rather than place human origins in the biblical Middle East,
Prichard switched it to Africa, “On the whole there are many reasons which lead
us to the conclusion that the primitive stock of men were probably Negroes”. I
learnt this from researching a letter written by his son but not included here.
About
sexualities, readers will probably make inferences but I think it would be
unwise to infer from bachelor or spinster status same-sex sexual preferences.
There were many reasons for not marrying and, for women at least, some pretty
good ones.
For the
rest, vocabulary and spelling are already fairly standardised; just
occasionally an obsolete dialect word appears and even a word about which I
cannot retrieve any information. But punctuation is definitely a matter of
personal taste though lack of enthusiasm for apostrophes is widely shared. Punctuation
is affected by the quill pen: commas and dashes are preferred to full stops
because stabbing a stop with the quill risks creating a blot. Effort is reduced
by using abbreviations: the ampersand (&) is more frequently used than the
word it replaces. These habits persisted when steel pens began to replace the
quill in the 1820s because they were not a magic solution to these practical
writing difficulties. I learnt to write with a steel pen in a 1950s primary
school and have the ink-blotted exercise books to prove it.
In my
transcriptions ellipses (….) signify either that I cannot read a word (and nor
can anyone else who has peered at it) or that damage to the letter, most often
occasioned by breaking the seal, has removed a portion of text. But the letters
are not abridged except in the chapter devoted to a connected group of letters
from Admiral Crown and Count Vorontsov to the same recipient. Very
occasionally, it is only possible to make sense of a passage by assuming that
there has been a slip of the pen, Freudian or otherwise. But this is noted, not
silently corrected.
Is there
an overarching theme? Editorial choices have, of course, been made: I chose
letters which appeared to me and several pre-publication readers to have some
intrinsic interest and, additionally, invited informative introduction. But this
is an anthology: chapters are loosely grouped by theme but are standalone and
not cross-referenced; they can be read in any order and could be used
separately in discussion groups. They are found letters and that is important,
at least to me, rather like the anthropomorphic stones I scavenge from beaches
and downlands.
The
personal and historical settings provided are based on both internet sleuthing
and commissioned reports from professional researchers in archives. But I hope
to open the way to further research and discussion, not prove it unnecessary.
There are no footnotes; sources, acknowledgments, and reading suggestions are
given, chapter by chapter, in the End Notes.
And
should you, after all, want to begin at the beginning then Miss Beeby would
like to tell you what she has been up to: