Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  THE SECOND LETTER, CROSS-WRITTEN, is much longer, and is dated 28 February 1852. By now the doldrums of 1848 have faded and Elizabeth is more bullish. The 1851 Great Exhibition has been a huge success — the Crystal Palace had more than six million visits in one year — and London has been flooded with visitors from around the world. She begins: ‘I was so extremely busy all last summer that I scarcely had time to breath [sic], I was just like a cat in a tripe shop, didn’t know what to do first, and then my Dear Brother I have had a great deal to contend with.’

  It is a slightly breathless introduction to a great drama: ‘This dear unfortunate husband of mine, he was twice during the summer taken with delirium tremors and at last was raving mad. They were obliged to put him into the Asylum which put me to a very great extra expense and, although he was not with me, still it gave me a very great deal of trouble. Perhaps it was well I was so busy for I had not so much time for fretting but I could not help it at times — thank God he is all right in his mind again but goes just the same as ever.’

  He is still drinking, in other words. He has also lost his looks. ‘It is astounding what an altered man he is, he is not a bit like he was, I mean in the face, quite changed.’ A raving alcoholic on the premises made it ‘impossible for me to manage my business’, so Elizabeth reports that he has been packed off to live with his father in Jersey, possibly with Elizabeth contributing to his upkeep. She had already had to stump up fees for him to stay in a private asylum, rather than the notorious London institution known as Bedlam. For a middle-aged woman living on her own, as well as carrying a business, it was a great strain. ‘It is very sad for us all but we must all submit to the will of God for no doubt it is for some all wise purpose, so you see my Dear Brother, although I have no family I am not without my trials nor can we expect to be on this side of the Grave.’

  Yet if this suggests a woman responding in a typically stoical Christian way, she bounces back in the very next sentence: ‘One thing I manage to keep up my spirits as they [her paying guests] all tell me in a most surprising manner, and the more business the better. I am plying here, there and everywhere — as the servants say, there is Missus again, she is here, there and everywhere but I am afraid I shall tire you with all this rubbish.’ She tails off here, as if aware of her brother watching her antics with a colder eye. At the same time, she has managed to tell him that she has a thriving business, has servants and a lively, even overactive life. She is ‘a cat in a tripe shop’ — in other words, so full of possibilities she hardly knows where to turn. Indeed, her business is doing so well that ‘… all winter I have been busy having my house painted and papered and all manner of new arrangements’ in readiness for another bumper summer of guests.

  She has forwarded several newspapers on the ‘eighth wonder of the world’, the Great Exhibition, and runs on: ‘My Dear Brother you tell me that I write in good spirits but I know you will be glad to know that I can do so under all my trying circumstances. I am rather a delicate plant to play with and I feel that if I were to sit down and give way to grief my business would go to rack and ruin and that would not do.’ This lightness of manner is both defensive and placatory. A powerful woman created awkwardness among men: it was better she present an almost foolish façade behind which a relatively cool intelligence operated. Or was she just ‘a silly woman’? Friendly laughter and teasing from her paying guests, she asserts, is ‘a much better remedy than Holloway pills’.

  At this point in the letter she refers to a decidedly more vulgar subject. ‘My Dear Brother, you say you think that me and the Sidney merchant would make it all right if anything happened to my Dear John, but I am afraid there is no such good luck in store for me; one thing I know he [the Sidney merchant] is very fond of me and told the old lady and some of the gentlemen in the house that he would give anything for such a wife, and that if she could wear gold she should have it, and I suppose by this time he could well afford it for he must be up to his neck in it by this time and he was incredibly rich before.’

  In other words, if she has the good luck for her current husband to die, she has another — stupendously rich — suitor in the wings. (There is no contextual information on who the ‘Sidney merchant’ was. Was he a returned convict sitting on a fortune in gold, a kind of Magwitch? Was he staying there through some kind of acquaintance with Sergeant John’s contacts in Australia? Or was it purely coincidental? We do not know. But the reference to wearing gold points to gold mining as a possible source of wealth.) There is something decidedly vulgar about the sentiments in this part of the letter: brother and sister talking about Elizabeth ‘making it alright’ with a rich man while her husband is still alive.

  Still, Elizabeth is wised up enough to knock that pipe dream on the head: ‘I know I have been teased enough about him since, but I can assure you my Dear John that if I were single tomorrow I should not think of taking another husband. I have had two already and that ought to be enough for any woman. There are several of them waiting they tell me in joke, but I tell them they will all be disappointed.’

  She actually prefers to be, effectively, a single woman. She has had enough trials with two husbands already. But this is not an acceptable view in the nineteenth century, so she apologises for what she feels is her feminine chatter. ‘I am afraid you will call me a giddy old woman for writing all this rubbish [she was not yet fifty; the average life expectancy for women at the time was fifty-six] but as I am no politician and I can tell you nothing upon that subject there is no particular news to tell you. I wish to give you something to read though,’ she says by way of explaining her depiction of her tiny corner of the world.

  Although she refers, by rote almost, to the Almighty, she is essentially materialist in outlook. ‘My Dear John, what a pity you left Bathurst just at a time all the gold mines were discovered. You might have made your fortune but I hope if Brother Sam does much in that way he will remember you and your family, indeed a little would be very acceptable in this part of the world.’

  By 1850 Samuel Northey had been given his freedom. Many convicts obtained this much more quickly, but recidivism kept him clawed back within the system. His presence in the letter, without any sense of moral underlining, implies he is completely accepted in the family and still fondly regarded: ‘Brother Sam’.

  She swiftly moves on to Sergeant John’s daughter, who she talks about sentimentally (‘the Dear little thing’), and to whom she plans to send a box of dolls. As if caught up in the excitement of the technological innovations on show at the Great Exhibition, she writes: ‘How I wish I could fly a craft and have a game of romps with them but I have nothing to play with but my parrot and my cat; the parrot is quite a companion, she talks so nicely. I have taught her to call the names of the children.’ And yet she is also invoking the stereotypical expectations of a nineteenth-century English spinster, often seen as a figure of fun, someone to be ruthlessly mocked. Possibly, she just didn’t care.

  Now the letter is almost at an end, she returns to a theme evident in the earlier letter, too: how Sergeant John and Nancy must stop having so many children. This is delivered on the level of ribald comedy. In the first letter she simply says, ‘My Dear John, I think it’s quite time to stop now and not have any more children’, but in 1852 she uses a more sexually explicit metaphor, telling John that Nancy ‘must not allow you to wind up the clock any more for it is quite time to stop when you have six of them’.

  A boarding-house keeper, and a twice married woman, could hardly be innocent of the facts of life. Indeed, she would have had to be sharp-eyed on that account as part of her job. Elizabeth’s vitality and Dickensian vulgarity seem part and parcel of her character, as well as a thin underlining of melancholy: she was, after all, a woman on her own, without the comfort of children or a partner. The paying guests were not friends, not really. Beneath the surface agitation of the letter there is a sense that her life is hard or, perhaps more realistically, the tension in her life is constant. She cannot risk
sinking into the lumpen proletariat outside her door — a dark river, like the Thames, clawing the weak and the drunk away. She has to remain ever vigilant, and this is the thin connecting wire of energy that runs throughout this letter.

  But now the performance of her prose is at an end. It is time to say farewell. She backs out in a shower of kisses and affection towards relatives she has never met nor ever will. Migration in the nineteenth century, especially for poorer people, was permanent. Letters had to carry all the information otherwise gained from casual conversation, from glances into a silent face, all the signals and pleasure of our eyes just resting on the face of someone we love. But that does not stop her asking John to kiss his wife ‘many times for me … and kiss all the Dear children for me and accept a thousand for yourself and believe me my Dear Brother and Sister, your ever affectionate and well wishing Sister’. And since John Ereaux has vanished from her life, she signs it in the singular, possibly even with a sense of pride and relief, ‘Elizabeth Ereaux’.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO ELIZABETH after this? She appears at a better London address, at 89 Guildford Street, Saint Pancras, Marylebone, in 1861, still head of the household. She had six male boarders and lived alongside solicitors and gilders and silversmiths. The boarders, too, had better jobs. One was a merchant, one a contractor for the government, one a commercial clerk. They were all young men. She also had a live-in servant. But after this date it is impossible to find any evidence of Elizabeth Ereaux’s later life. No later letters survive. Did she remarry and hence change her surname?

  Her 1852 letter with its giddy comment about several suitors in the wings, plus ‘the Sidney merchant’ who would dress her in gold, are possibilities to be set beside the watercolour, which shows a middle-aged woman no longer in the pink. An Elizabeth Northey appears with her christening date in a much later census as a retired ‘domestic servant’ living back in Cornwall. The words ‘boarding house keeper’ have been struck out. Did she slide down the scales, revert to her maiden name and creep home to a world she thought she had left behind? There were so many Northeys by the name of Elizabeth there is no certainty it is her. Whatever her future, there is no death certificate for an Elizabeth Ereaux. She vanishes into the murk of history.

  Why did these two letters survive? It is clear that many more were sent. Was it due to happenstance: some letters were placed in an obscure location and only ‘afterwards’, usually following the death of the writer, did they become valuable sentimentally? The same goes for the four watercolour portraits, of which only one survived. What happened to the others? We have no answer.14

  My purpose here has been not to give a blow-by-blow account of what are really two mundane letters, but to give some sense of the strong personality of Elizabeth Ereaux. I was a nascent writer when I first read copies of these letters, carefully typed out by my Great-uncle Percy Northe, the family historian. At thirteen or fourteen, reading them affected me strongly. Elizabeth’s words gave me a vivid sense of her personality. Her portrait hung on the wall in my grandmother’s bedroom, not too far from the french doors which allowed a watery, wavering light to play over her face, as if animating it. If I looked into her pinched face, with its curiously angled eyes, I seemed to hear her words: ‘So you see my Dear Brother, I am not without trials and cannot expect to be on this side of the grave although I have no family.’ But she also described herself as ‘a cat in a tripe shop.’ The vividness of the image spoke to me. I liked her sense of self-irony and robust energy.

  Her childlessness also appealed to my imagination. I am not sure if I knew at the age of about fourteen that I would never marry and have children (a family tree I constructed at the time put ‘m.’ by my and my brother’s names in preparation for our marriage, fitting in and continuing the family tree by having children). But Elizabeth’s bravura, against the odds, impressed me.

  Her letter was very much an energised kingdom of which she took charge, and she occupied all the space within. I felt close to her in spirit — such is the nature of letters, a kind of quiet whispering in the ear which seems to replace the awkwardness of speech. I was also searching for ancestors who spoke back to me. Of all those I found from that time, she came closest to answering back.

  One strange thing is that I somehow believed her name was ‘Heroix’. I cannot now think where this came from. The letters are clearly signed Elizabeth, and the name Heroix is never once mentioned. But it might have been a trick my brother played on me; sometimes he took pleasure in leading me astray. I was very gullible. And I seem to recall him telling me that ‘Heroix’ was a name that arose from the Napoleonic Wars and was the feminine version, in Latin or Greek, of ‘Hero’. It seemed infinitely possible amid the wide-ocean span of my ignorance.

  Thinking the portrait was of someone called ‘Heroix Northey’ set me off on a long journey of diary writing. All through my adolescence and into early adulthood I kept a diary addressed, nominally, to ‘Dear Heroix’. It was all in the form of one long confessional letter. Elizabeth was someone I felt I could tell secrets to, or, maybe more truthfully, she enabled me to erect a kind of facsimile self which protectively allowed my real, unknown, deeply contradictory character to grow. Everybody needs a mask in childhood, a horribly painful and naked state of being. Heroix was mine.

  I have often thought these endless diary entries were the beginning of my apprenticeship in becoming a writer. They were like the lengths a swimmer does in a swimming pool, endless laps during which you improve your strength and endurance and — you hope — style. These few lively epistles from Elizabeth Ereaux sent me off onto a lifelong study of self, of using words to express feelings and to fashion perceptions. For that I am grateful.

  Notes

  1 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). Quoted in James Wood, ‘On Not Going Home’, London Review of Books, 20 February 2014, 3.

  2 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21.

  3 Said, in Wood, ‘On Not Going Home’, 3.

  4 Naomi Klein, ‘Let Them Drown’, London Review of Books, 2 June 2016, 12.

  5 Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1981), 214.

  6 Klein, ‘Let Them Drown’.

  7 The Cornwall Industrial Settlements Initiative Report (Chacewater), http://www.historic-cornwall.org.uk/cisi/chacewater/CISI_chacewater_report%20.pdf (accessed 21 July 2017).

  8 Just how small-scale Sergeant John Northe’s ‘prosperity’ was can be seen if it is compared with Charles Dickens’ wages as a law clerk in the same period. Dickens as a fifteen-year-old started on 10s 6d a week, whereas John Northe as thirty-five-year-old was earning 7s, though this 7s also included his food and his ‘lodgings’, i.e. the barracks he lived in. It was still a very small wage. By 1838 he also obtained an additional pension, raising his weekly wage to 10s.

  9 Charles Junior Dickens, Dickens’ Dictionary of London, An Unconventional Handbook (London: Charles Dickens & Evans, 1879), 274.

  10 Charles Booth conducted and published a survey of London’s poverty on a street-by-street basis. He also founded the Salvation Army. ‘Charles Booth Inquiry into Life and Labour in London, 1886–1903’, https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/what-was-the-inquiry (accessed 21 July 2017).

  11 When Darcy was told that the Bennets’ daughters had relations who lived in Cheapside, he replied, ‘But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world.’ (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [London: Vintage, 2007], 33.)

  12 Siobhan Phillips, ‘Should We Feel Sad about the Demise of the Handwritten Letter?’, https://aeon.co/ideas/should-you-feel-sad-about-the-demise-of-the-handwritten-letter (accessed 21 July 2017).

  13 De Tocqueville, in a speech delivered on 29 January 1848, said, ‘I am told there is no danger becaus
e there are no riots … Gentlemen, permit me to say you are mistaken.’ (‘Gale of Revolution in the Air’, www.speeches-usa.com/Transcripts/alexis_deTocqueville-gale.html [accessed 31 August 2017].)

  14 Looking through a photograph album of my cousin Lawrence Northe, I spied a Victorian photograph of a watercolour. The watercolour, similar in style and level of competence to the one of Elizabeth Ereaux, is of a young pretty woman, within an oval. I believe this to be one of the missing watercolours, possibly photographed to share around the family.

  Silence Like a Bruise

  What can you say, or rather, how do you speak for people who cannot access written language? For me, the ability to write became part of who I am. You might almost say I wrote myself into being. I used written language and words to work out who I was and where I wanted to go.

  TO BE STRIPPED OF LANGUAGE is a terrifying concept to me. Not to be able to write would be a kind of death. I take pride in possessing the plumage of language and like lingering over unusual and esoteric words. How do I then possess the humility to approach those members of my family who did not possess this trick? How do you tell their stories when they left not a single sentence expressing their own point of view?

  Let’s take Samuel Northey, for example. We know so little about him: we know what he looked like, or rather we know how he was described, mostly as a way to identify him should he escape. We know the details of his imprisonment — death commuted to exile for ‘the term of his natural life’. We know about the hulk in Portsmouth in which he lingered for forty days awaiting transportation: the York, a warship from the Napoleonic wars which had seen service in Madeira and the West Indies, had then been dismasted and made into a stench-filled water-borne prison for five hundred men in Portsmouth Harbour.