Eliza Southgate, the writer of the letters here collected, was the
daughter of Robert and Mary Southgate, and was born in Scarborough, Me.,
September 24, 1783. She was the third in a family of twelve children.
Her father came of English stock, and was born in Leicester, Mass.,
where his family had long been settled. Here he studied medicine, and
when he had finished his course he left his native place, where there
appeared to be no room for another practitioner, and settled in
Scarborough. We are told that, after the primitive fashion of the time,
he set out to seek his fortune on horseback, with all his worldly goods
in a pair of saddle-bags. In this way he entered Scarborough, where his
character and talents were not long in getting him a good position. He
had picked up some law, and in a new and small community was able to
make his knowledge useful, so that in course of time he was appointed a
Judge in the Court of Common Pleas.
He had not been long in Scarborough before he married Mary, the daughter
of Richard King, a large landholder in the District of Maine. “Pretty
Polly King,” as Mary was familiarly called by her friends, was the
second daughter of Mr. King by his first wife. The eldest child by this
marriage was Rufus—well known for the distinguished part he played in
the early history of our country. A third child, Pauline, married Mr.
Porter; their son Moses, whose name often occurs in these letters, was a
young man of great promise. He engaged his cousin Eliza in a
correspondence, after the somewhat formal fashion of the time; only her
letters remain to indicate its character, but they are among her best.
In her lively tilting on the well-worn subject of the education of the
sexes, the lady shows herself a clever mistress of the foils, and there
are not wanting indications that the combatants did not escape from the
encounter heart-whole. But however this may have been, all was ended by
the sudden death of Mr. Porter from a fever caught in boarding an
infected vessel in the transaction of some necessary business.
Scarborough was not a large town, but its position as a seaport gave it
some importance, and the society was far above what is ordinarily met
with in such places. The Hunnewells, Bragdons, Bacons, Emersons,
Wadsworths, names that are distinguished in the social history of New
England, belong to the early settlers of the neighborhood, and are still
represented there. Zilpah, one of the daughters of General Peleg
Wadsworth, who are frequently mentioned in these letters, married
Stephen Longfellow, a cousin of Mrs. Southgate, and became the mother of
the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The Southgates gave their children the best education to be had in those
times. They were first sent to school in Scarborough; but, later, were
placed—to be “finished,” as the old phrase was—at boarding-schools near
Boston. When she was fourteen years old, Eliza was sent to a school at
Medford, and a letter written from that place gives a rather
uncomfortable notion of her surroundings. In these few childish lines,
however, the character of the woman is plainly prefigured—her
observation, her power of clear, terse statement, her playful humor, her
cheerful submission to duty, and her affection for her parents, making
her willing to put up with whatever was disagreeable rather than give
them uneasiness. However, Dr. Southgate, as a physician, could see that
a school where the pupils slept, four beds in a small chamber and two in
a bed, was not the place for a growing girl, and he therefore took his
daughter away and put her at the school at Medford, kept by Mrs. Rowson.
This, for its time, was an excellent school, and Miss Southgate remained
there until the day came when “studies” were to be thrown aside, and
“life” was to begin. She seems by her letters to have been very happy
while under Mrs. Rowson’s care—the varied and somewhat romantic life led
by that lady perhaps fitted her, better than would have been thought, to
be the guide and friend of a girl of Eliza Southgate’s peculiar
character.[1]
Her life after she left school is so fully described in her letters that
there is no need of following it in detail. She tells her own story far
better than another could do it, and much that would inevitably be dull
and commonplace narrated in plain prose, sparkles with life under the
swift pen of this lively girl. She tells of her visit to Saratoga, with
her friends Mr. and Mrs. Hasket Derby; and no school-girl of our time,
writing from Paris or London, could describe the wonders of her tour
with greater ecstasy. She sees this new corner of the world with the
miracle-working eye of youth, and accepts everything with youth’s
unquestioning heart. Previous letters had described Salem in terms
equally ecstatic, and after her account of the country-seat of the
Derbys, there could be nothing left to say of Versailles or St. Cloud.
But what then? Was not this a fine old country-house, with its formal
garden, its provincial but still solid stateliness, and, above all, with
its hearty, cheerful hospitality? It was our heroine’s first glimpse of
the gay world of fashion of her time, and she enjoyed it to the full.
The story of her first meeting with her future husband, of her
engagement to him, of their wedding-journey, is told with the simplicity
and unaffected candor that were characteristic of her. The letter to her
mother in which she asks her consent to the marriage, shows mother and
daughter in the happiest light; it is the highest praise that could be
awarded the training the Southgates had given their children. Perfect
love had bred perfect confidence, and it is certainly pleasant to know
that the hearts and judgments of the parents could only confirm the
decision of their daughter. Mr. Walter Bowne was everything that the
most exacting parents could wish as the husband of a daughter so dear to
them.
But the new life of happiness thus entered upon was brief, and in a few
months more than six years it had come to an end. In 1803 Mr. Bowne and
Miss Southgate were married. In 1806 their first child, a boy, named
Walter, after his father, was born; and two years later, in July, 1808,
came their second child, a girl, named Mary, after Mrs. Bowne’s mother.
After the birth of this child, Mrs. Bowne did not recover her strength,
and as winter was coming on, the medical men recommended a sea-voyage
and a visit to a warmer climate. It was determined to send the invalid
to Charleston, S. C.; and accordingly Mrs. Bowne set out, accompanied by
her sister Octavia and her husband, Mr. Browne, leaving Mr. Bowne in New
York, where he had some business-affairs to settle before he should join
his wife later in the season. Unhappily, the sea-voyage proved a
disastrous experiment; and when the party arrived at Charleston, Mrs.
Bowne was in so enfeebled a condition from its effects that her sister
gave up all hope of saving her life. She failed rapidly, and died on the
20th of February, only two months after her arrival. Mr. Bowne, who, in
common with her family, had probably no idea of the serious nature of
his wife’s illness when she left New York, yet made all the haste he
could to follow her, but had the inexpressible grief to arrive too late.
His only consolation was in the fact that her suffering had been brief,
and that her departure was serene, while all that a sister’s
affectionate devotion could avail to comfort her had been given without
stint from a full heart; and even strangers in a strange city had been
moved, by the beauty and loveliness of this young mother, and by her
pitiful case, deprived of husband and children, to shield her and cheer
her with all that the warmhearted Southern hospitality knows so well to
bestow. She was buried in Charleston and her grave was hid in flowers
sent by the people of the town and the neighboring plantations, many of
whom had only heard her name and story.
There is little need for an editor’s help in following the story of the
life which these letters portray. They are, in fact, an almost complete
diary of that life, for the earliest bears date when the writer was a
child at boarding-school, and the last was written only a few days
before she died. Of the years that came between, the record is almost
uninterrupted; so that the task confided to me resolves itself into
little more than a statement of the few facts connected with the
personal and family history of their author, that naturally have no
place in the letters themselves.
No doubt we have gained much, so far as the material convenience of the
great public life is concerned, from the inventions that, for all
practical purposes, have reduced time and space to comparative
insignificance. We have, however, lost some good things, which those who
lived in younger days must always regret, and for which there is small
compensation in the material gain we have received in exchange. Among
these losses, that of letter-writing is perhaps the most serious. A
whole world of innocent enjoyment for contemporaries and for posterity
has been blotted out, and, so far as appears, nothing is taking its
place. Is it the newspapers? But how scattered, how disjointed, how
impersonal, the record they contain! We might as well hope to recall the
charm of some old garden loved in youth, by turning over the leaves of a
_herbarium_ in which its flowers had been pressed, as to make the
domestic life of a time gone by, live again in reading the files of a
newspaper. Nor do memoirs or biographies give us what we want. They are
too formal, too self-conscious; they want the spontaneity, the vividness
of impression, the lightness of the recording hand. These things letters
give us, and letters alone.
Science has many fairy-tales to tell us, but the most magical of all her
inventions is that toy, the phonograph, invented by our own Edison. It
listens to the words that are whispered in its ear, to the songs that
are sung to it, to the gossip that buzzes about it, and the record made
on its revolving surface, replaced at any time upon the cylinder—after
the lapse of an hour, or of a hundred years—will repeat what has been
confided to it in the very voice of the speaker, with every tone and
every inflection as clear as when first it spoke.
Familiar letters are privileged to play the same magical part. To the
readers of successive generations, they speak with the living voice of
the writer; they recall the fugitive emotions, the joys, the sorrows,
the whims, the passions, and as we read we persuade ourselves that we
are part and parcel of the times they record.
What a difference in our enjoyment it would make, were the letters of
Fanny Burney and Horace Walpole taken from us! Even Hannah More becomes
entertaining; for though her circle was a narrow one, there were
delightful people in it, and the letters make us at home in her little
world, as no formal biography could do.
Nowadays no one writes letters, and no one would have time to read them
if they were written. Little notes fly back and forth, like swallows,
between friend and friend, between parent and child, carrying the news
of the day in small morsels easily digested; it is not worth while to
tell the whole story with the pen, when it can be told in a few weeks,
at the farthest, with the voice. For nobody now is more than a few weeks
from anywhere. In the spring my neighbor came home with his wife from
the Philippine Islands, to pass a few weeks with his friends and hers.
Yesterday he ran back to the islands, to buckle to business again. Why
take the trouble while here to detail the gossip of his home-circle to
his Philippine friends, in letters, when in a fortnight or so he would
be recounting it to them at their own tables?
The letters here printed have more than the interest of contemporary
records; they paint in words, with a thousand delicate and expressive
touches, the portrait of a lively and beautiful girl, with a character
as striking and individual as the face that Malbone has drawn for us on
ivory. Never was a reigning beauty more spirited, never was a spirited
girl of fashion more truly lovable, than Eliza Bowne. Whether she be at
boarding-school, writing letters to her “honored parents,” and hiding
her little homesick heart in vain under the formal phrases dictated by
the starched decorum of the day; or stealing an hour for her pen amid
the whirl of the gay world in which she sparkled, such a cheerful star,
and rattling off to her mother the story of the day’s doings—she is
always the same generous, unselfish creature; impulsive, but with her
impulses well in hand; a heart brimming over with mirth, its clear
crystal clouded by no drop of malice; witty, but with a friendly glint
in her mischievous eyes, even when, as now and then happens, she gives
formality or presumption a fillip. Love and friendship followed her
wherever she went in her too brief span of life, and fortune heaped her
girlish lap with all good things; but she showed herself worthy of her
blessings, and kept herself unspotted from the world.
Something should be said of the literary merit of these letters. The
name of Richardson has been mentioned; but Richardson never wrote
anything so fresh from the heart, so playful in their sincerity, as some
of the letters to her cousin, Moses Porter; nor could Richardson have
touched with so light a hand the story of the drive home in the
snow-storm after the Assembly ball, or the account of the game of Loo,
when, with a fluttering heart, she stands, divided between the eager
desire to read the letter she has just slipped into her pocket, and the
impatient calls of her partners to join them at the game. Fanny Burney,
and Fanny Burney alone, could have written letters like these.
They are not, however, the letters of a practised writer, nor was there
ever in her mind any thought of publication. It was the age of
“epistolary correspondence:” all the girls of Miss Southgate’s
acquaintance were writing letters to their friends, long ones, often,
made up in the manner of a diary, with a week’s doings recorded day by
day; for postage was dear, and to send blank paper an extravagance, and
no doubt, like her friends, she forgot her letters as soon as they were
sent off. Her correspondents were not so indifferent, however, and they
kept her letters carefully. Her mother, to whom the most of them were
written, left those sent to herself as a bequest to her granddaughter,
Mrs. John W. Lawrence, the “little Mary” of the later letters. Mrs.
Bowne died in the same year in which this daughter was born; but her
sister-in-law, Miss Caroline Bowne, who devoted herself to the care of
the little girl after her mother’s death, instilled into her heart such
an affection for her parent’s memory that she came to cherish it with an
almost religious devotion, and guarded as a sacred relic everything that
had belonged to her. To the letters left her by her grandmother, Mrs.
Lawrence added all she could collect from other persons with whom her
mother had corresponded. They came to her in a sad state, from much
reading and passing about from hand to hand; and to preserve their
contents she copied the whole collection, with the greatest care, in her
neat, methodical handwriting, into two small books, and these, in her
turn, she bequeathed to her children, as her grandmother had bequeathed
the originals to her.
They are now given to the public, enriched with a considerable number of
contemporary portraits and other illustrations, carefully reproduced
from original miniatures and old prints; and with an abundance of
biographical notes, industriously collected by a competent hand, which
cannot fail to be of value to the social chronicler of our time. While
the importance of these letters as illustrations of the domestic life of
our country at a most interesting time is considerable, their chief
value, after all, lies in the picture they give of the writer. It is a
picture drawn, as we have said, with a thousand graceful touches, and
the natural girlish loveliness of the portraiture shows best when it is
read from end to end. Then, as we look up from the printed page to
Malbone’s portrait, the vision takes shape:
“A hair-brained, sentimental trace
Was strongly markèd in her face;
A wildly witty, rustic grace
Shone full upon her;
Her eye, even turned on empty space,
Beamed keen with honour.”