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.