Late-Adolescent English Gentry Siblings and Leave-Taking in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Florence Smyth was a desolate young woman. The long-awaited trip to visit her beloved elder brother John, or Jack, at his Oxford college was over and now she and her many sisters were home again without friends in the depths of the English West Country in the county of Somerset. Scarcely arrived back, she penned Jack a short epistle in her characteristically large scrawling letters. ‘You were so kind’, she began, ‘to desire you might hear how we got home, which I take the first opportunity to let you know that we go very well to Ashton. The place I must needs tell you seems very dismal after being in so much good company. The remainder of our journey after we left you we [sic] was very melancholy’.¹ This exchange of information was grounded within a pre-existing sibling bond. Florence’s letter, most likely from 1719, was written in response to Jack’s request for news of her safe arrival. His sister complied and then went on to describe the interlocking relationship between her present low emotions, her physical location and her memory of the moment in which her depression began. She contrasts the gloomy setting of Ashton Court to the excitement of Oxford and she names their departure from Jack as the point in which her emotions shifted from happy sociability to grief at their separation.