Trevor Pateman, Not In The Archives: Personal Letters 1800 -1840

 

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.

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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: