Of goose quills and the penny post: how the Georgians wrote and sent letters

There is a fascinating post here on the mechanics of writing and posting letters in the eighteenth century.

Literacy in the eighteenth century

A horn book from the Derby Museum,
by Mainlymazza -
Own work.
Licensed under Creative Commons
via Wikimedia Commons

For the pre-eighteenth-century background, this post owes a great deal to David Cressy, ‘Literacy in context: meaning and measurement in early modern England’ in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (Routledge, 1993), 306) and to Margaret Spufford's famous and ground-breaking, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Methuen 1981). For the eighteenth century, Susan Whyman's The Pen and the People: English Letter writers 1660-1800 is a ground-breaking study.

A problem for historians

Literacy is difficult to define.  Does it just mean reading very simple sentences or does it require more sophisticated reading skills? It is a problem for historians because it is  an ambivalent indicator of cultural attainment  It was by no means a necessity as a mark had the same legal standing as a signature, and many activities, particularly rural ones, did not need literacy. Every community contained at least one literate person, who could meet the needs of his illiterate neighbours.  

Far from being distinctive, the oral and print cultures interacted and fed off each other. Jests and proverbs that originated in folklore appeared in printed editions. Printed ballads were heard by illiterate bystanders. Sermons were delivered orally but many of them were also printed. Proclamations were proclaimed as well as posted. The town crier, a walking bulletin board, had to be literate as he had to deliver his information from a text delivered in writing.

There was a spectrum between illiteracy and full literacy, and a hierarchy of skill may have developed as readers learned to decipher writing in different forms. The commonest was Black Letter (Gothic) print, used in the ABC horn book, the catechism and much popular literature. In the eighteenth century this was giving way to Roman type.

Reading, by its nature, leaves no direct record, so there is no reliable guide to the extent of reading ability within the population. But it seems certain that more people could read than could write. Reading and writing were taught as separate skills and often by separate masters. Reading was seen as a skill that could be taught by anyone; writing required masters; it also required a high level of manual dexterity and initiation into the arts of cutting quills and preparing ink. Only the more privileged reached this level. 

The royal family and smallpox

Queen Charlotte, by
Thomas Gainsborough,
Royal Collection.
Public domain.

The ongoing research into the Georgian papers held at the Royal Archives is throwing up fascinating information. Here is the latest research on the attitude of Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, to smallpox inoculation. She lost two of her children, Princes Alfred and Octavius, to inoculation, but because of her belief in divine providence, she did not lose her faith in the process, or in the doctors who administered it.

Georgian philanthropy

St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, London'
by Unknown -
Licensed under Public domain
via Wikimedia Commons. 

Although its Victorian successors frequently criticised the eighteenth century for its lax morals, it was an age of moral earnestness and of burgeoning philanthropy. One of the key moral values was ‘benevolence’. Both the aristocracy and the middling sort founded and contributed to numerous and varied charities, which acted as a sort of proto-welfare state. See this site for more information about the range of charities to be found in London.

Besides ‘benevolence’ there were other motives for charity. One was ‘social control’ – fears of a moral collapse among the ‘common people’ and the desire for trustworthy servants. Another was the unfounded fear that the population was declining and the consequent need to save lives – especially young lives.

The most modern forms of charity were subscription charities, which appeared in the 1690s alongside other forms of subscription association such as the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. Certain features marked the new charities out:

1. They were not linked by any formal ties to the apparatus of local government and they drew no revenue from any form of taxation.
2. They devoted considerable care and energy to wooing subscribers, often publishing annual reports and subscribers’ names.
3. They commonly gave subscribers a voice, even outright control over management.

Britain and the slave trade

There is a huge literature on this subject. A good starting point might be this website. The UCL database on the British slave-owners is a ground-breaking work of digitized history.

The trade

Here are a couple of typically bland items from the 20 November 1762 issue of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal.

‘Arrived at Virginia, the Hector Chilcott, last from Angola, with 512 slaves.’
‘Tuesday died in Queen-square Mr King, Commander of a Ship in the African Trade.’

The British slave trade had flourished since the 1713 when the  Treaty of Utrecht awarded Britain the contract (asiento) to import slaves to the Spanish Indies. Between 1721 and 1730 the British carried over 100,000 slaves to the Americas, the majority going to Jamaica and Barbados. 

Bristol  soon overtook London as the main base for dealing in slaves, but it was itself overtaken by Liverpool, the Mersey basin being deeper than the Avon and Frome, the rivers on which Bristol was built. The first recorded slave ship was the Liverpool Merchant of 1700 which carried 220 slaves to Barbados. By 1740 it was sending thirty-three ships a year to Africa. Thereafter the total grew. While Bristol merchants tended to remain faithful to safe old anchorages in the Gold Coast and Angola, the Liverpool merchants struck out anew to seek Africans in Sierra Leone, Gabon and the Cameroons. Unlike the Bristol traders, the Liverpool slavers were the founders of dynasties: the Leylands, the Cunliffes, the Bolds and the Kennions. Penny Lane is thought to have been named after the slave trader James Penny. The facade of the Liverpool Exchange carried the heads of Africans with elephants in a frieze and one street was commonly known as ‘Negro Row’.

Jamaica overtook Barbados as the prize colony. The richest planter, Peter Beckford, owned at his death (1735) nine sugar plantation and was part-owner of seven more. His son William, MP for the City, was the most powerful businessman in the City and was twice Lord Mayor.

The Georgian clergy

Anyone interested in the Georgian clergy - men like the naturalist,  Gilbert White, or Jane Austen's father and brother - you might two posts from an excellent blog on the period very illuminating. You can access them here and here. Were they as idle and corrupt as many Victorians believed? Or is the truth a little more complex?

The Evangelical revival: John Wesley, John Newton, and Olaudah Equiano

John Wesley

Religious revival

Although the eighteenth century is seen as the Age of Reason, it also witnessed a profound religious revival that encompassed parts of central Europe, the British Isles and North America. New religious groups, most notably the Moravians sprang up to meet needs that the more established churches, whether Anglican or Dissenting, seemed inadequate to deal with.   

The Methodists 

The first prominent Methodist was not John Wesley but George Whitefield, (1714-70), who was converted three years before Wesley and who at the time of Wesley's conversion was already using open-air preaching to dramatic effect. John Wesley (1703-91) entered Christ Church, Oxford in 1720. He and graduated in 1724. In 1728 he was ordained priest. In 1729 he returned to Oxford to fulfil the residential requirements of his fellowship. There he joined his brother Charles and others in a religious study group, the ‘Holy Club’, one of a number of societies of devout young men. These societies were concerned with the ‘reformation of manners’ – attacking swearing, blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking. The ordered lifestyle of the Oxford club earned them the nickname ‘Methodists’. 

 Following his father’s death in 1735 Wesley sailed to the new American colony of Georgia to oversee the spiritual lives of the colonists and to do missionary work among the Indians as an agent for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. On the voyage out there, the ship ran into a storm, and he and Charles were impressed and put to shame by the piety and courage of their Moravians fellow-voyagers, who, alone among the passengers showed no fear. 

Wesley's time in Georgia was an unhappy one, and in December 1737 he virtually fled the colony, an unhappy and disappointed man.

Back in London he met a Moravian, Peter Böhler, who convinced him that what he needed was simply faith. On 24 May 1738, he attended a Moravian mission in Aldersgate - an experience that was a turning point for him. Following his conversion he embarked on a lifetime’s mission throughout the British Isles in which he travelled over 200,000 miles and preached over 40,000 sermons. He quickly found that the ancient parochial structure of England was inadequate to his purpose and was not adapted to new population movements. 

Georgian travellers: 2. Outside Europe

For this post I am indebted to Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder. How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Harper, 2009); Patrick O'Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (Collins, 1988); P. J. Marshall Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind. British Perceptions of the World in the age of Enlightenment (Dent, 19820; the entries on James Cook, Joseph Banks, and Mungo Park in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography;  Block 3, 'Religion, Exploration and Slavery', from the Open University Unit, A207, Enlightenment to Romanticism; and Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa (Wordsworth Classics, 2002)

From the sixteenth century Europeans had been exploring lands beyond Europe. This exploration began as a competitive search for markets and trade routes, but it was also inspired by the wish to survey the new territories more accurately and by simple intellectual curiosity. 

James Cook: navigator

Captain James Cook, by Nathaniel Dance
National Maritime Museum
Public Domain

The career of James Cook (1728-79) shows how a young man of humble origins (he was the son of a Yorkshire farm foreman) could rise to a position of distinction through a career in the navy. (You can read an outline of his career on the National Maritime Museum site.) He learned seamanship and navigation in the North Sea coal trade. In 1755 he enlisted in the Royal Navy as an able seaman. He passed the examination for master and during the Seven Years War he was in North America, involved in hydrographic surveying. During the winter of 1758-9 he complied a chart of the Gulf of St Lawrence and the St Lawrence River, and it was the work of Cook and his fellow-surveyors that enabled the British fleet to pass safely through the river and attack Quebec. 

With the British recapture of Newfoundland in 1762 Cook carried out a number of surveys of the island. His captain was so impressed by the accuracy of his work that he informed the Admiralty 

‘that from my Experience of Mr Cook’s Genius and Capacity, I think him well qualified for the Work he has performed, and for greater Undertakings of the same kind’. Quoted Andrew C. F. David, ‘Cook, James (1728–1779)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 

With the ending of the war in 1763, Cook was back in Newfoundland, and the next four years were spent in surveying. 

Cook's map of Newfoundland
Courtesy of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies,
Memorial University of Newfoundland,
St. John's, Newfoundland.
Public Domain

One of the difficulties Cook initially faced in his surveying was his inability to observe for longitude, though the problem was partially solved by computations deducted from the observation of an eclipse of the sun on 5 August 1766.

The transit of Venus and the voyage of the Endeavour, 1768-71

Cook returned to England in 1767. On 25 May 1768 he was appointed commander of the Endeavour and appointed to head an expedition to Tahiti (whose longitude had just been observed astronomically) to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This would enable the distance between the earth and the sun to be calculated and help the calculations of longitude. The expedition was organised by the Admiralty, but also partly financed by the Royal Society, which supplied £4,000 towards astronomical observations. Accompanying Cook was the astronomer Charles Green, appointed by the Royal Society, and the amateur botanist, Joseph Banks (1743-1820).

Unlike Cook, Banks was born into the elite, the son of a landed gentleman, and educated at Harrow, Eton, and Oxford. In 1766 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. He corresponded with the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus. He was therefore already a serious naturalist rather than a gentleman dilettante. The Endeavour voyage was to turn him into an internationally respected figure.

Georgian travellers: 1. Within Britain

This post is particularly indebted to the Open University unit 'Industry and Changing Landscapes' in its course A207, Enlightenment to Romanticism (2004). The Welsh Historical Monuments guide to Tintern Abbey has also been extremely useful.

From Thomas West's Guide to the Lakes (1778)

Two travellers

‘Dr Johnson had for many years given me hopes that we should go together and visit the Hebrides. Martin’s Account of those islands had impressed us with a notion that we might there contemplate a system of life almost totally different from what we had been accustomed to see; and to find simplicity and wildness, and all the circumstances of remote time or place, so near to our native great island, was an object within the reach of reasonable curiosity.’ James Boswell, The Journey of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LLD (1784)

‘… They were obliged to give up the Lakes, and substitute a more contracted tour; and, according to the present plan, were to go no further northward than Derbyshire. In that county there was enough to be seen to occupy the chief of their three weeks [and view] all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak’. Pride and Prejudice (1813; written 1812)

Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and the fictional Elizabeth Bennet were part of a wider Georgian trend for travel within the British Isles.  This was made possible by the spread of disposable income, the improved condition of the roads, and the construction of more comfortable carriages. But above all, travel was growing because of a change in aesthetic preferences and a new appreciation of the British countryside.

Heroes and villains: the Georgians at war

War and Empire

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe
National Gallery of Canada
Public Domain

The great heroes of eighteenth-century Britain were not monarchs but successful generals and admirals (particularly the latter). The great villains were admirals who had failed. 

For sixty-three of the 144 years between 1688 and 1832 (44 per cent), Britain was at war with France (and sometimes Spain), though intense francophobia coincided with admiration for French culture and the French language. (See here for an example of francophobia in action - a riot in the Haymarket Theatre in 1749 when a French company dared to put on a play there.) The wars were over trade and territory and were fought in Europe, the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean, and North America. But they were not purely about trade and the economy. They were seen as part of a 'patriotic', Protestant project to establish Britain as the world's greatest nation. In that respect they succeeded. By the time they were ended in 1815, though Britain had lost the American colonies, it had emerged as a world superpower, the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

The wars were:
The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-48)
The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48)
The Seven Years’ War (1757-63)
The War of American Independence (1775-1783)
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815)

Admiral Vernon

In October 1739 a reluctant Walpole was pushed into a war with Spain which he did not want: the War of Jenkins’ Ear. He told the Duke of Newcastle: 'It is your war and I wish you well of it.'

The war achieved an early success when Admiral Edward Vernon, 
captured Porto Bello in Spanish-held Panama in November. The news reached England in  March 1740. Vernon was a stern critic of Walpole and he had earlier been opposition MP for Penryn. His victories were the only ones in the war. 

Samuel Scott, 'The Capture of Porto Bello'
Public Domain

On hearing the news, celebrations of his birthday occurred all over the country, most financed by the subscriptions of local merchants and tradesmen. In London a pageant was held in his honour. Prints, poems and ballads appeared at booksellers and print shops. Medals were struck and commemorative pottery manufactured. Thomas Arne composed ‘Rule Britannia’ in celebration. The country road west of London, formerly known as Green's Lane, was renamed Portobello Road.

Georgian crime

"Tyburn tree" by Unknown
Retrieved from National Archives website.
Licensed under Public domain
via Wikimedia Commons

This is a very well-researched subject among historians of the eighteenth century. Our knowledge is in the process of being transformed by the wonderful Old Bailey website. Do visit! For an account of how a trawl though local newspapers can highlight our knowledge of an individual crime see here.

Anxieties

To social commentators like the novelist Henry Fielding the key cause of crime was not poverty but ‘luxury’ - a word which symbolised the dangerous aspirations of those who sought material possessions and ‘diversions’ above their station. For example, the gin epidemic, made famous by Hogarth's print, 'Gin Lane' (1751) was seen as a cause not a consequence of poverty. The growth of crime was the obverse of the consumer revolution, fuelled by increasing expectations and the increase in the volume and range of goods in circulation.

"GinLane" by William Hogarth -
Transferred from en.wikipedia;
Licensed under Public domain
via Wikimedia Commons 

One strategy against crime, especially highway robbery, was the bill of exchange. But watches, silk handkerchiefs or even wigs could be stolen from individuals with relative ease from the swelling number of shops. The word shoplifting was first recorded in 1680.

The Georgians and the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment

Immanuel Kant
the German philosopher
who defined the Enlightenment

The eighteenth century is the age of the Enlightenment – the application of reason to all aspects of life. In France it is associated with Voltaire and the other philosophes. In 1784 the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (go here if you want a detailed philosophy tutorial!) published 'Was ist Äufklarung?' (‘What is Enlightenment’?)

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. … Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’,  is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

The origins of the British Enlightenment

The origins go back to the late seventeenth century. Two thinkers above all influenced Georgian Enlightenment thought. Isaac Newton described a universe based on rational principles.  John Locke constructed a theory of knowledge based on the accumulation of ‘impressions’. The human infant was born a ‘tabula rasa’(blank slate) and character was acquired rather than innate.

The Enlightenment in action: smallpox

Georgian doctors were largely ignorant of the causes of diseases and they still treated illness according to Galenic principles. However, there was one significant medical advance – the use first of inoculation and later of vaccination.

Inoculation was brought to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire 1717-18. In Turkey she had her son inoculated and when she returned to England her daughter received the same treatment. Both survived.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
by Jonathan Richardson the Younger
Public Domain

However, it took time for inoculation to be accepted. It came from the Muslim world, it was advocated by a woman, and, above all, it was counter-intuitive and risky (though of course less risky than the disease itself). It was first tried -successfully - on seven condemned criminals. It became more acceptable with Caroline, Princess of Wales, a highly intelligent and enlightened woman, had her daughters inoculated in 1722. 

The Wellcome Library has a couple of fascinating letters, written by George I to his daughter, the Queen of Prussia, urging her to inoculate her children. See here for more.

By the end of the Georgian period, inoculation was being replaced by the safer and more reliable vaccination, pioneered by the physician, Edward Jenner. From his observations of milkmaids, who were generally immune to smallpox, Jenner concluded that the mild ‘cowpox’ they contracted gave them immunity. On 14 May 1796 he vaccinated an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with 'cowpox' from blisters from the hands of a milkmaid who had caught the disease. 

Thanks to the twin treatments of inoculation and vaccination, smallpox was far less of a killer at the end of the Georgian period than it had been at the beginning. Instead, medical science was puzzling over how to treat the newer threats of tuberculosis and cholera.

Politeness, sociability, and the literary world

Two of the dominant values of the Georgian era were 'politeness' and 'sociability'. Together they give an insight into the values of the period, its leisure pursuits, and its intellectual interests.  

‘Politeness'

The term, derived from the Greek polis (city state), carried implications of good breeding and sociability. ‘Politeness’ united (most of) the aristocracy, gentry, and middling sort in a common culture of ‘gentility’. They frequented the spa towns of Bath, Tunbridge (not yet Tunbridge Wells) and Buxton. Those who could afford to do so spent the winter in London where they attended plays and concerts, and retreated to the countryside in the summer where they paid ceaseless calls on their neighbours and attended the provincial theatre and assemblies. Like Jane Austen's Fanny Prince in Mansfield Park, they subscribed to circulating libraries. See here for another account of circulating libraries.

Newspapers and periodicals

In 1695 Parliament had made the momentous decision not to renew the Licensing Act that had required all published works to gain government approval before publication. This was followed by what the historian Julian Hoppit (A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727, Oxford, 2000) has called ’an explosion of printed matter issuing from the press, be it books, pamphlets, sermons, journals, or newspapers’. One foreigner noted that 

‘England is a country abounding in printed Papers’. 

These catered for a reading public eager for news and the expression of opinion.

The Daily Courant (1702) was the first daily newspaper. 

Members of polite society also read periodicals, The Tatler, The Spectator, and (from 1731) The Gentleman's Magazine.

Title page of The Gentleman's Magazine
from 1759.

The Georgian period: an overview

George I in his coronation robes
by Sir Godfrey Kneller
Public domain

The Georgian period witnessed major developments in the British state and the lives of the people. It was far less dramatic than the seventeenth century but in a different way, the period was just as revolutionary.

The eighteenth century was the inheritor of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, which saw the overthrow of the Catholic monarch James II and his replacement by his Protestant nephew, William of Orange. It ended the prospect of a centralized and absolute monarchy. Power was increasingly located in the ‘King in Parliament’, and after 1689 Parliament became a permanent part of the constitution. It sat every year, and its work-load dramatically increased.

Religion played a major role in the state Although the eighteenth century is often seen as a century of religious apathy, Britain was a profoundly Christian country and witnessed two waves of a major religious revival, the first beginning in the 1730s, the second in the 1790s. Religious sectarianism had not disappeared and anti-Catholicism remained a ferocious force. The establishment in England was firmly Anglican. The monarch had to be Protestant. The Toleration Act (1689) granted freedom of worship to Protestant Dissenters, but they were (at least in theory) barred them from public office. In Scotland, Presbyterianism was the established religion. A series of penal laws, especially harsh in Ireland, discriminated powerfully against Roman Catholics.

The nation state of Great Britain had come came into being. Wales had been peacefully absorbed into England in the sixteenth century but until the Union of Parliaments in 1707 Scotland remained an independent state. The Glorious Revolution acted as a powerful catalyst for political and economic unity. It was fear of a disputed succession that had led to the union of parliaments. This was an economic as well as a political union. Scots now paid the same taxes and customs duties and competed for the same government and administrative posts. But since the Revolution settlement the Scots had been permitted to maintain their own law, and Presbyterianism remained the established religion. Ireland had its own parliament in Dublin, composed entirely of members of the Protestant ascendancy, even though 90 per cent of the population were Roman Catholic.

Georgian Britain was a hierarchical society Politics was dominated by the aristocracy who (along with the bishops) made up the House of Lords. Most members of the Commons were connected in some way to the aristocracy as heirs, relations, or clients. The aristocracy and country gentry retained enormous prestige throughout the period (though anti-aristocratic rhetoric increased from the end of the century). The ‘middling sort’ (not referred to as the 'middle classes' before the 1790s) were increasingly numerous and wealthy, but on the whole they did not aspire to political power. However, they mixed socially with the upper classes in 'polite' society. 

The majority of the population was poor – though the degrees of poverty varied greatly and most visiting foreigners were struck by the comparative prosperity of the English. Few believed it was appropriate for the ‘lower orders’ to have a political voice. 

Britain was an increasingly wealthy trading nation During this period national wealth doubled in real terms. The consequence (and the cause) was a growing domestic market which could only be satisfied through commercial expansion, both at home and overseas. London was the largest city in western Europe and the provincial towns grew in wealth. Britain sought and won an empire in the West Indies, North America, and Asia against international competition and by the end of the period was indisputably the world’s great imperial power.

Britain was also a major European power engaged in a series of wars against other European countries, notably France. She fought the ‘second Hundred Years War’ in 63 of the 144 years between 1689 and 1815 (44 per cent), all but one of them victories. These wars created their own institutions for tax gathering, financial investing and military administration - and in doing so they transformed the British state.

Conclusion

1. Georgian Britain was the inheritor of the Glorious Revolution. It was not a democracy but the monarch's power was restricted by Parliament.
2. It was a relatively prosperous country, a trading nation with a consumerist economy.
3. It fought a series of largely successful wars against France and by the end of the period the British Empire was the largest the world had ever seen.

Queen Anne and and George I: how they were related

This article on the History of Parliament blog neatly demolishes the often repeated story (which I've repeated myself many times!) that there were more than forty people with a better claim to the throne than George, Elector of Hanover. 

The first two Georges

The Hanoverian dynasty celebrated in
the Painted Hall in Greenwich
Sir James Thornhill
Public domain

At 6 pm on 18 September 1714 Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, landed at Greenwich, to be greeted by cheering crowds. In August, following the death of Queen Anne, he had been proclaimed King of Great Britain. He spent his first night in England at the Queen's House. The following day he held his first royal reception there. 

George owed his crown to the Act of Settlement of 1701, which settled the English succession in favour of George’s mother, the Electress Sophia of Hanover and her heirs, ‘being Protestant’.
It remains the law to this day and is the present Queen’s legal title to the throne. By the laws of hereditary succession, James Francis Edward (the Old Pretender), the son of the deposed James II, was the rightful king, but his Catholicism barred him from the throne.