Abstract
As ‘a central part of everyday life in eighteenth-century Britain’, letters were fundamental markers of free speech and the free circulation of ideas, whether about business, politics, religion, the arts, or quotidian details of human existence—as well as a formal literary genre. To explore the quarter century following 1800, in which women’s correspondence has received proportionally less attention than that of the previous century, I examine here the correspondence of the rural Irish Quaker Mary Leadbeater (née Shackleton; 1758–1826) and the urban Irish writer Melesina Chenevix (later Trench; 1768–1827), which formed the nexus of a paradigmatic epistolary salon that approximated the social dynamic of more familiar eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons. In doing so, I draw upon social networking models propounded especially by Charles Kadushin, and upon Lewis Hyde’s studies of gift culture.
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Notes
- 1.
Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 1. According to Paul Magnuson, between 1700 and 1800 more than twenty-one thousand publications included “letter” in their titles. Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), p. 37.
- 2.
I have discussed their letters as collaborative life writing in ‘“There Is No Second Crop of Summer Flowers’: Melesina Trench and Mary Leadbeater in Correspondence’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 52.2 (2016), pp. 130–43.
- 3.
See especially Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) and Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983); see also Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations ([1922]; rpt. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955).
- 4.
Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 11, p. 16.
- 5.
Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), p. 304.
- 6.
Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), p. 43.
- 7.
Kadushin, p. 15.
- 8.
Hyde, p. 4, pp. 55–56.
- 9.
Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Third-Party, Counter-Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium’, Life Writing 8.2 (2011): 135–52; 140.
- 10.
An alternative scheme based upon Georg Simmel’s work represents these social networks as constellations, with major fixed points (representing the principal correspondents) connected by lines to one another and to some but not all subsidiary, lesser points, some of which are themselves interconnected. See Georg Simmel, Soziologie, Berlin, 1908 and Peter M. Blau and Joseph E. Schwartz, Crosscutting Social Circles: Testing a Macrostructural Theory of Intergroup Relations (Orlando: Academic P, 1984). A recent application of this model is Deborah and Steven Heller, ‘A Copernican Shift; or, Remapping the Bluestocking Heavens’, Bluestockings Now! The Evolution of a Social Role, ed. Deborah Heller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 17–54.
- 11.
Kadushin, p. 17.
- 12.
Hyde, p. 16.
- 13.
Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2014), pp. 122–23.
- 14.
M. H. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990), p. 293.
- 15.
Kadushin, pp. 18–22.
- 16.
Kadushin, p. 58.
- 17.
Susanne Schmid, British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 2.
- 18.
Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 9.
- 19.
See Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott and Louise Duckling, ‘Introduction’, Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Carolyn D. Williams, Angela Escott, and Louise Duckling (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2010), pp. 19–45; p. 19, p. 24.
- 20.
Schmid, p. 9.
- 21.
Clare Brant, ‘Varieties of Women’s Writing’, Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 285–305; pp. 295–96.
- 22.
Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), p. 34.
- 23.
Howard Anderson and Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century: Some Generalizations’, The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Howard Anderson, Philip B. Daghlian, and Irvin Ehrenpreis (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1966), pp. 269–82; p. 269, p. 274.
- 24.
Texts are from The Leadbeater Papers: A Selection from the MSS and Correspondence of Mary Leadbeater, ed. Elizabeth Leadbeater, 2 vols (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), hereafter LP; and The Remains of the Late Mrs. Richard Trench, being Selections from her Journals, Letters, and Other Papers. Edited by Her Son, the Dean of Westminster, ed. Richard Chenevix Trench, 2nd ed. (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1862), hereafter Remains.
- 25.
For Leadbeater, see C. J. Hamilton, Notable Irishwomen (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1900), pp. 45–57; Maureen E. Mulvihill, ‘Mary Shackleton Leadbeater’, Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Alexandria: Alexander Street P, 2008), p. 16; The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), p. 639.
- 26.
The Annals comprises the first volume of The Leadbeater Papers. See also Susan B. Egenolf, ‘“Our Fellow Creatures”: Women Narrating Political Violence in the 1798 Irish Rebellion’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.2 (2009), pp. 217–34.
- 27.
For information on Trench, see Katherine Kittredge, ‘The Poetry of Melesina Trench: A Growing Skill at Sorrow’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (2005), pp. 201–13, 201; ‘Melesina Chenevix St. George Trench’, Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, p. 24; Frances A Gerard, Some Fair Hibernians: Being a Supplementary Volume to ‘Some Celebrated Irish Beauties of the Last Century’ (London: Ward and Downey, 1897); The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, p. 1095.
- 28.
The volume’s full title reveals Trench’s characteristically philanthropic motive: Ellen: A Ballad: Founded on a Recent Fact. And Other Poems. Sold for the Benefit of the House of Protection (in Bath, where the book was published). She also composed and ‘published’ or circulated privately pamphlets on education, the slave trade, and the oppression of chimney sweeps.
- 29.
Charles Knight, Half-Hours with the Best Letter-Writers and Autobiographers, Second Series (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1868), p. 146.
- 30.
Williams et al., ‘Introduction’, Woman to Woman, p. 29.
- 31.
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1980), pp. 5–6, p. 11.
- 32.
The Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (London, 1797); subsequent reports appeared frequently, with the fortieth in 1817.
- 33.
The full title is self-explanatory: Fragments in Prose and Verse, by a Young Lady lately deceased, with some account of her life and character, by the Author of ‘Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity’ [Henrietta Maria Bowdler]
- 34.
The two most widely accessible collections of Leadbeater’s and Trench’s letters to one another (the editions quoted in this essay) entail complicated historical, cultural, psychological and editorial considerations, including the principles of selection and editorial interventions to eliminate, expurgate, or simply falsify records to present their authors most attractively. When Richard Chenevix Trench in 1862 published the Remains of his mother, he self-servingly expunged and bowdlerized her writings. See Katharine Kittredge, ‘Missing Immortality: The Case of Melesina Trench (A Neglected, Celebrated, Dismissed and Rediscovered Woman Poet of the Long Eighteenth Century’. ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 1 (2001); http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol1/issi/4. Other less intrusive inconsistencies arise from editorial errors in transcription and from publishers’ limits on size and space.
- 35.
The work had reached its ninth already in 1807; in 1808 appeared An Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life by Harriet Corp, an English writer of religious and didactic fiction whose work exhibited and addressed the spiritual and material condition of the poor. The year 1809 saw a sequel to the Antidote, also by Corp. Leadbeater inquired in 1808, ‘Hast thou read the “Antidote to the Miseries of Human Life”? I think it is a tale capitally told’ (LP II, p. 160). That Trench read and enjoyed the ‘Antidote’ is clear from Leadbeater’s letter of 20 July 1810 (LP II, p. 194).
- 36.
Kittredge, ‘The Poetry of Melesina Trench’, p. 205.
- 37.
Emily Agar, sister of Henry Welbore Agar (1761–1836), Lord Clifden, was according to her son ‘one of [Trench’s] oldest, and beyond the circle of her own family, by far her dearest friend’ (Remains , p. 298).
- 38.
Barrington’s book is Historic Anecdotes and Secret Memoirs of the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1809). A Sketch of the State of Ireland Past and Present (1809) is by John Wilson Croker.
- 39.
When she wrote to Leadbeater in mid-July 1812 about her infant daughter (whom she usually called ‘Bessy’), Trench remarked that Bessy ‘in sweetness of temper and countenance is quite a Mrs. Placid’, indicating that she still remembered the Antidote to The Miseries.
- 40.
For more about Trench’s reactions to her daughter’s death, including her poetic tributes, see Kittredge, ‘The Poetry of Melesina Trench’, and Stephen Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), pp. 195–99, and ‘“There is no second crop of summer flowers”’.
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Behrendt, S.C. (2020). The Letter and the Literary Circle: Mary Leadbeater, Melesina Trench, and the Epistolary Salon. In: Callaghan, M., Howe, A. (eds) Romanticism and the Letter. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_3
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