Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  This leads to a segue in which she laments, ‘Dear Brothers, my getting on is very slight I asure yo for I am obliged to work to mine for a bit of bread so you must need think that is bad enough.’ Women and children worked either breaking rocks or sorting through the detritus brought up from the mine, or even within the mine itself. There is a clear feeling here that Elizabeth Walsey has slipped right down the rungs. Indeed, she feels it keenly herself. Hence: ‘Dear Brothers, I hope your circumstances is better than mine and I hope you will not take it in offensive light in my asking of you if it is in your favour to assist me with a trifle of money to enable me to rebuild the end of our Old House for it is nearly down.’ This shows a degree of cleverness; she is not asking money for herself but rather for rebuilding the stone family house, the end part of which has tumbled down and is open to the winds of the North Atlantic — just before winter. If the house cannot be repaired, ‘I see nothing but the Union before us’ — that is, the workhouse.

  She does not press her case, but returns to a piece of subtle emotional blackmail: ‘… dear Brothers we that is left should be very glad to see you. Depend upon it, if you have any wish to see the Old House you must come home while it is dry weather. From your ever affectionate sister Elizabeth Walsey.’

  The letter was sent to the Coppersville Post Office, Union District, South Carolina. We do not do know whether she received a reply.

  THIS BEGGING LETTER IS IN stark contrast to the brisk and even ebullient letters from her cousin, Elizabeth Ereaux, a bustling businesswoman whose words convey a lively sense of personality. (In many ways these people remind me of Dickens’ characters, lively, poignant, tragic, and both patriotic and sentimental. The arc of their lives could be just as dramatic: either survive and flourish or diminish and end up in the hulks or the workhouse.)

  Elizabeth Ereaux’s better grasp of written language and grammar naturally conveys authority and energy. (John and his sister were probably taught writing and reading at a Methodist charity school set up to teach children to read. Its point was that they could read and understand the Bible. All of their letters invoke God in the form of a ritualistic greeting.) But in her letters there is also something as ineffable as a life force. She was what might be called a bit of a goer. Already by 1848, at the age of forty-six, she has been married once and widowed. She had then married a much younger French Huguenot, resident of Jersey, having passed herself off as at least a decade younger. John Ereaux was a school teacher, good-looking if feckless. Remarkably for a penniless migrant from an impoverished periphery, she is listed as ‘head of household’ and the household is made up of six people in the 1851 census. She also has servants. How did this happen?

  What few biographical scraps we know of Elizabeth Ereaux are expanded and enriched by the somewhat unruly seas of language which move so moltenly through her letters. These letters are like windows into her personality. We may know very little of the historical detail of her life — who in particular taught her reading and writing, for example; when she left for London; the name and occupation of her first husband; even her later life and the year of her death — but we feel her speedy pulse through these Cockney-esque epistles, brimming with vigour and vulgarity.

  Our opening letter from Elizabeth Ereaux was sent probably as far as it was possible to send a letter in the nineteenth century — from London to New Zealand. There is information on the back of the letter — that is, the blank page in which the letter was wrapped, like a packet (hence the other name for letters at the time, ‘a packet’, which Elizabeth herself uses in her 1848 letter). The letter is addressed to her brother, ‘John Northey, Barrack Sirjeant [sic], Auckland, New Zealand’. It does not bear a stamp, although stamps had been in existence since 1840. It has been franked three times: first in London in June 1848; then, after the six-month boat voyage, twice — first in Auckland on 16 January 1849, then, after the letter was forwarded by an unknown, slightly exuberant hand (and using red ink) to ‘Rufsell’ (Russell) in the Bay of Islands, where it was stamped on 27 January 1849. It had taken eleven days to get by ship from Auckland to Russell.

  The first notable aspect of her letter is the curious address at the top: ‘139 half Cheapside London’. This immediately establishes Elizabeth Ereaux as that proud thing, a Londoner. In the nineteenth century there was as centrifugal a push in migration to London, as much as there was a centripetal push out to the rest of the world. London within a British context was immensely magnetic and, with the introduction of the railways, relatively easy to access. It also grew at a staggering rate, from one million people in 1800 to 6.5 million people a century later.

  This did not mean it was easy to find work there or a place to live. London was a vast honeycomb of a city, rackety, dense, smoky and putrid. It was full of beggars, street dwellers, prostitutes and men, women and children who made a living off the pickings of the rest of humanity. It was also the home of monarchs, aristocrats and a wealthy mercantile class. The nineteenth century saw the development not only of civic spaces of imperial splendor like Trafalgar Square but also of utilitarian wonders like the underground railway. Most sewerage, however, went straight into the Thames, and when London wasn’t overcast with soot from coal fires — it was impossible to keep white clothes clean — it was stinking from raw sewage. (Parliament regularly had to stop sitting because the fumes from the Thames were so toxic.) Nevertheless, London was exciting, tumultuous, and in a ceaseless cycle of rapid change.

  Elizabeth Ereaux found her own small niche as that most English of institutions — a boarding-house keeper. This was an ambiguous title, as large houses became almost rookeries of apartments, with small areas broken down into flats and sub-let. It is notable, however, that in her 1852 letter Elizabeth refers to her ‘house’, although the fact she had seven boarders implies a relatively small space — perhaps the floor of a house, hence ‘the half’. It was an achievement of sorts that a migrant from Cornwall could find any sort of niche in the great wen, even if it was only with a ‘half’ address.

  Cheapside was a major thoroughfare of shops in a primarily commercial district — the City of London. (Charles Dickens Jnr called Cheapside ‘the busiest thoroughfare in the world’.)9 It was just behind the magnificent cathedral of St Paul’s and further away was the Bank of England. All around were the smaller Wren churches of exquisite beauty, including St Mary Le Bow, the sound of whose bells defined a Cockney. It had once been an address of historical importance (and was still sufficiently processional for Queen Victoria to be driven along it in one of her triumphant Jubilee outings), but by the time Elizabeth Ereaux was resident there Cheapside’s status was fading. It was now rivalled by the elegantly Georgian Regent Street in the West End.

  The 1851 census lists Elizabeth Ereaux’s address as being in ‘the North West District of the City of London within the Parish of St Vedast, Foster Lane, Middlesex Farringdon’. What would this have looked like? It’s hard to tell today, as the past vanished in the Blitz. In fact, to walk along Cheapside today, or to look at it on Google Earth, is to feel how abruptly the past can be screened off from the present. All the buildings, or nearly all, are post-war or even later. There is nothing to suggest that this was a street of remarkable history. All now seems bland and ‘international’ — that is, it could be any street anywhere in the world. (A melancholy thought.) The closest you can get to a feel of the past is a single plane tree at the corner of Wood Street and Cheapside, and a single two-storey building at 152 Cheapside. The tree is remarkable and was already 600 years old when Elizabeth Ereaux lived in the street. She would have seen it every day as she bustled about. The small building at number 152 reminds us that Cheapside was taken up with lower, more domestic buildings. The street was originally a lot wider, too — it started life as a market street for medieval London.

  But our question is: how did Elizabeth Ereaux come to live there? Why a boarding house there, rather than anywhere else in city? I often wondered about this until I read online that The
Cross Keys at the corner of Wood Street and Cheapside marked the end of provincial coach routes into London. It was a terminal — an ideal place for a friendly, personable provincial like Elizabeth Ereaux to set up what was effectively a small hotel. (Dickens himself had arrived at Cross Keys from Kent when he first came to London in 1815 and he has his character Pip do likewise in Great Expectations, commenting, ‘I was scared by the immensity of London, [and] I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.’) To offer friendly lodgings in such a place gave Elizabeth Ereaux’s ‘hotel’ a complete logic.

  It is hard to work out the level of affluence or poverty in which Elizabeth Ereaux lived in 1848. Charles Booth’s map of poverty and affluence in London, made nearly half a century later, portrayed Cheapside and the Parish of St Vedast as ‘Poor’, with ‘an income of 18 shillings to 21 shillings per week for a moderate family’.10 But this was half a century later, when the area’s downward trajectory had accelerated. It’s of significance that in Pride & Prejudice, published in 1813, Cheapside features as a place of residence for Elizabeth Bennet’s much-loved Uncle Gardiner, a warehouse owner. The snobbish Darcy, still denying he is in love with the ‘low-born’ Elizabeth, mocks the address.11

  In the 1852 census, Elizabeth Ereaux is not merely listed as the ‘head of the house’ (for reasons her letter discloses), but she also has seven guests. They include her seventeen-year-old niece, Juliet Ereaux, who possibly doubled as ‘help’, and three lodgers: Phillip Pellier from Jersey, a married man aged fifty-five who worked as a traveller; a fellow Jerseyman and traveller, John Le Boutillon, forty and unmarried; and an Irishman, Thomas B. Murphy, unmarried from Dublin. This gives some sense of the chain migration from the periphery (Jersey and Ireland) to the centre; possibly the Jerseymen were friends of Elizabeth’s husband. There were three other guests on the night of the census: Mary Grove, aged forty, unmarried, from Stafford Walsall; Mary Harrod, also aged forty, unmarried, from London; and a widow, Elizabeth Chippendale, aged sixty-eight, from Essex — she is possibly ‘the Old Lady’ mentioned in Elizabeth’s 1852 letter. She refers in the same letter to ‘some of the gentlemen’, which suggests she had long-term lodgers close enough to count as acquaintances. ‘I am surrounded with kind friends in the summer, they always laugh at me and tease me to death when they see me a little low …’

  WE KNOW ELIZABETH EREAUX TODAY from a tiny watercolour, one of four she sent out to her brother John in 1852 — she described them as ‘likenesses of your two brothers and sisters’ (that is, the two sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, and their husbands). Only this one survived. It is unsigned, and appears to show someone who is unhealthy, even sick. It is in distinct contrast to her letters, which are full of vitality and humour. She wears what is perhaps a blue silk dress, with a locket and some mourning hair jewellery, wide lace cuffs and collars. Photography was in its infancy in the mid-1840s, and painting watercolour miniatures was still regarded as a working job. This one may have been done in payment by a lodger or been commissioned when Elizabeth had some funds.

  We have two letters from her. One is undated but is clearly from 1848 from its franking. The second letter is dated 28 February 1852 and is partially cross-written. This means she wrote down the page as is usual. Then she turned the letter sideways at a right angle and carefully wrote across the existing writing, creating a kind of plaid of prose. It was an economy measure and it required careful disentangling when reading. She described her own handwriting as ‘a scrawl so badly written you will never be able to make it out but I cannot do better’.

  The two letters are survivors from an ongoing correspondence, mentioned intertextually. Sergeant John wrote to his sisters, and Elizabeth and Maria both wrote to him, as did Maria’s unnamed but concupiscent husband. (‘It is a great pleasure to see Maria and her husband so happy as they are. He was here this morning to see if I was writing to you or else he would have written by this packet.’) The letters are affectionate, sentimental, with occasional flights of fancy as well as moments of seriousness when Elizabeth attempts to answer her brother’s sober queries about political conditions in Britain. (If Sergeant Northe was ill at ease with writing, he was obviously a good reader, as Elizabeth refers to sending him quality broadsheet newspapers like The Times.) The correspondence makes it clear that the two siblings, John and Elizabeth, had a close, affectionate relationship; there are frequent references to ‘my Dear Brother’ (always capitalised) and to the sending of endearments: ‘They both send kindest love to you all and lots of kisses to the Dear Children,’ she says to her sister and brother-in-law and their children. She had a completely confident sense of the formatting of letter writing, how to greet, farewell, and fill the contents with lively personal information.

  This has interesting relevance to the other women letter writers in this book. Writing letters is often regarded as a ‘gendered activity’. As the American essayist Siobhan Phillips has commented, ‘Letter writers are allowed a sensation of power over the narrative of their lives.’12 In its own way, a letter is a personal kingdom (or rather queendom) over which the female writer reigns as author. This sense of power was unusual in the nineteenth century, when church and state-enforced gender roles emphasised the subordination of women. Women did not have the vote in Britain until the twentieth century, but they could vividly recreate their sense of reality, and their priorities, within the personal schema of a handwritten letter.

  Perhaps if Elizabeth had written to another woman she might have left off occasional self-denigrating descriptions of herself as, for example, ‘a giddy old woman’ — as if aware of ‘performing’ in front of the mirror of her brother’s masculinist regard. She also refers several times to her childlessness, as if emphasising her failure to fulfil gender expectations and hence hinting at self-diminishment. But there is enough in the rest of the letters to point to a very healthy ego: she may describe herself as a ‘delicate plant’ but she also has a vibrancy that points in the opposite direction.

  The two surviving letters illustrate her energy and joie de vivre. She was the main wage earner, ‘the head of the household’ and a small-business owner on whom her husband depended. She was no fool. This leads us into the heart of the first letter, which concerns the difficult economy of the 1840s and the extremely tense political situation in Europe. Revolutions had erupted throughout the capitals of Europe in 1848, and it appeared for a time that Britain, too, might succumb to an armed uprising against the antiquated, undemocratic established order. For someone like Elizabeth, a boarding-house keeper, this would have seemed frightening: it would bring disorder and interfere with business. The circumference of her world was small and limited to the essentials of survival. She had already told her brother she was surprised to hear he was going to New Zealand, but approved so long as he could ‘live and do well and that is all we can expect in these very bad times for I can assure you my dear Brother that everything in England and in fact every other country is dreadfully bad in consequence of the Chartists’ meetings which have taken place of late. France and Ireland are in a most dreadful state at present. Nothing but fighting and bloodshed. And God knows how everything will end.’

  The reference to events in France allows us to guess the probable date of this letter. In February 1848 the French monarchy was expelled for the final time. There had been a series of poor harvests, deepening poverty, as well as financial scandals and bank failures. Alexis De Tocqueville wrote, ‘We are sleeping on a volcano … a wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.’13

  The storm exploded in June 1848 in Paris, and in July there was a brief and violent nationalist uprising in Ireland. The unrest in Europe bled back to Britain. ‘We have sent you several papers giving an account of all the riots here which we hope you have received,’ Elizabeth writes. She uses the term ‘riots’ loosely, as the Chartist gatherings were tumultuous assemblies rather than riots (although riots and bloodshed had occurred elsewhere in Britain)
. The Chartists wished to work within the parliamentary system, democratising it rather than overthrowing the whole system, but had begun to stage mass demonstrations in London during March. The appalling excesses of the French Revolution, especially the period of The Terror, were a constant reference point for what could happen if a revolution got out of control.

  The reactionary Duke of Wellington was called out of retirement to ‘defend London’. Special constables were sworn in. Queen Victoria was sent to the Isle of Wight for her safety. In the end, however, the Charter was sent to the Houses of Parliament not in the hands of an unruly mob but in three cabs — the very image of British civic order. Perhaps as a warning shot, though, all the lights were smashed on the way to Buckingham Palace.

  The effect of the uneasiness and unrest on a London businesswoman whose business lay in tourism and travel was clear: ‘It has made trade so bad there is nothing to be done. We have done worse this summer than ever before since we have been in business. But must hope for better times … We will write again by next Packet and my Husband will give you a better account [of the unrest] than I can.’

  All this implies a frequent and up-to-date communication: ‘Though absent ever dear, for I am sure you are to me,’ she writes. Elizabeth now backs out of the letter with some fond allusions to all the children her brother has — and how she, by contrast, has none. ‘My Dear John I think it’s quite time to stop now and not have any more children, for if you go on this way you will indeed be obliged to make Parcels of them and send them to those that have none, for you certainly will be overstocked, bless their little hearts.’ (John and Nancy Northe in fact went on to have another five children in New Zealand.) She continues: ‘How I wish I could see them, give them my kindest love and kiss them and your dear wife for us. And accept the same yourself from your ever affectionate Brother and Sister. John and Elizabeth Ereaux.’