Updated 16 August 2026: This provides an introduction to a project which is being realised at www.otherpeoplesletters.com where I transcribe and introduce letters of historical and human interest written mostly in the period 1750-1850 which I have discovered mostly by chance. As of today over 100 letters are online, none of them in archives other than what I must now suppose is my own.
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 I have transcribed were mostly written in the period 1750 to 1850 and mostly in English. 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 add to my project. 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 my project 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 in this project 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. One could wrap a letter in an
outer sheet to avoid the problem and businesses often did; but it doubled the
cost of very expensive postage which was charged by the sheet and usually paid,
at least in part, by the recipient not the sender. It was to keep down the cost
they would impose that family correspondents often resorted to cross-writing,
filling the sheet in the normal way and then turning it through ninety degrees
and writing across what had already been written.
The introduction of envelopes seriously complicates research; envelope and letter were very often separated, the envelope either discarded or given to the stamp collector in the house if it bore postage stamps, first introduced in Great Britain in 1840 as a means of pre-payment. It then becomes in many or most cases impossible to identify the "Dear Mother" or "Dear Sir" addressed in the letter. Fortunately, envelopes and postage stamps were only gradually introduced in other countries - France introduced postage stamps in 1849 - and folded letters from abroad into Great Britain remain common into the 1860s.
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
seemingly 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 quite often 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
in Russia and which in the 1930s were published in a fat volume 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; 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 and writes a vigorous letter in 1817 from British-occupied Dieppe.
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 I have so far discovered who is clearly not white but I hesitate to declare that
everyone else clearly is. 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
his Persian 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”, where “primitive” derives from a Latin primitivus meaning
original or coming first. I learnt about Cowles Prichard from
researching a letter written by his son.
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 usually abridged
though in two cases (so far) they are when I am dealing with a large group of related letters.
Is there an overarching
theme? I choose letters which
appear to have some intrinsic
interest and, additionally, invite some contextualisation by way of
introduction. But my website presents the letters as if an anthology; they can be read in any order and
can be used separately for discussion. 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 whose help is acknowledged in each case. But I hope to
open the way to further research and discussion, not prove it unnecessary. .
