Remembering parentage and parents in life writings in Britain c. 1760—1830 served four functions. First, recounting parentage enabled the writer to situate himself or herself in terms of social status, personal value, and worth. Second, memories of parents helped an individual understand and make meaning of the path his or her life had taken. Third, the process was bound up with a range of emotions, which gave parents power after childhood and had repercussions and meaning throughout the writer’s life. Finally, the memories selected and accorded specific significance were often those from times of emotional crisis and disruption and recalling them may have enabled writers to impose some stability upon the insecurities of life. Overall, such memories offer insights into attitudes toward family, indicate the emotional significance of the role that parents played in their offsprings’ lives from childhood to old age, and were important in the formation of personal identities.
Three writers talk of ‘‘afterlife:’’ Francis Place , Sydney Morgan, and Samuel Courtauld.
2.
Morgan, Sydney.1862. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence. 2 vols. London , 23 May, 1812, p. 13; 7 June 1812, p. 19.
3.
Wright, Thomas, ed. 1864. Autobiography of Thomas Wright of Birkenshaw in the county of York, 1736-1797, pp. 1-2. London. For notes on the poem, see Web site: The Thomas Gray Archive. The poem is accessible at http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (accessed November 19, 2009). Writing in the 1850s, Benjamin Haydon remembered the ‘‘last, lingering look’’ in 1808 he took of his mother’s coffin, The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786-1846. Compiled from his ‘‘Autobiography and Journals’’ and ‘‘Correspondence and Table-Talk,’’ Ed. P. D. Alexander and M. A. Penrose. London, 1927, p. 58.
4.
David Amigonidefines ‘‘life writing’’ as a range of texts that are ‘‘spaces for forming identity,’’ ‘‘Victorian life writing: genres, print, constituencies,’’ In idem (ed), Life writing and Victorian Culture . Aldershot, Hants, 2006, pp. 1-2.
5.
Fletcher, A. 2008. Growing up in England: The experience of childhood 1600-1914. New Haven and London; Pollock, Linda. 1983. Forgotten children: Parent-child relations from 1500-1900. Cambridge.
6.
For a grandfather’s involvement in the medical care of his grandson, see James, Michael. 2006. ‘‘A Georgian gentleman: Child care and the case of Harry Tremayne, 1814-23.’’ Family & Community History 9:79-90; for grandmothers educating their grandchildren, see Charlton, Kenneth. 1994. ‘‘Mothers as educative agents in pre-industrial England.’’ History of Education. 23:149; for family businesses, see Robert Morris. 2005. Men, women, and property in England, 1780-1870: A social and economic history of family strategies amongst the Leeds middle classes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7.
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos. July 2000. ‘‘Reciprocal bonding: Parents and their offspring in early modern England.’’ Journal of Family History 25:291-312. Foyster, Elizabeth. 2001. ‘‘Parenting was for life, not just for childhood: the role of parents in the married lives of their children in early modern England.’’ History 86:313-27.
8.
Sherlock, Peter. 2008. Monuments and memory in early modern England. Aldershot. p. 39; Murison, Barbara. 2008. ‘‘Lapidary inscriptions: Rhetoric, reality and the Baillies of Mellerstain.’’ In Finding the family in medieval and early modern Scotland, ed. E. Ewan, and J. Nugent, pp. 99-112.Aldershot, Hants, England. Craske, Matthew. 2008. The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720-1770. New Haven and London, chap. 10-13.
9.
Lovell, Margaretta. 2005. Art in a season of revolution: painters, artisans and patrons in early America. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. pp. 10, 26; Retford, Kate. 2006. The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven and London. p. 151. For the growth of memorializing family members and the family home, see Gillis, John. 1997. A world of their own making: A history of myth and ritual in family life. Oxford, chapters 4, 5, 6.
10.
Holton, Sandra.2005. ‘‘Family memory, religion and radicalism: the Priestman, Bright and Clark kinship circle of women friends and Quaker history.’’ Quaker Studies9:156-75.
11.
Thompson, Paul.2005. ‘‘Family myth, models and denials in the shaping of individual life paths,’’ in Between generations: Family models, myths and memories, eds. Bertaux and Thompson.
12.
For the use of ego documents containing memories of childhood, see Colin Heywood. 2007. Growing up in France from the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic. Cambridge; Krupp, A. ‘‘Observing children in an early journal of psychology: Karl Philipp Moritz’s Know Thyself.’’ In Muller, Anje. 2006. Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century. Age and Identity, Aldershot, pp. 34, 40, 42; Schlumbohm, J. 1998. ‘‘Constructing individuality: Childhood memories in late eighteenth-century ‘‘empirical psychology’’ and autobiography.’’ German History 16:31; Dekker. 2000. Childhood, memory and autobiography in Holland from the golden age to romanticism, English translation, chap. 13; Colin Heywood. 2001. A history of childhood: children and childhood in the west from medieval to modern times, p. 25; Cunningham, Hugh. 2005. Children and childhood in Western society since 1500. 2nd ed. pp. 68-70; for relationship of childhood with formation of the self, see Wahrman. 2004. The making of the modern self: identity and culture in eighteenth-century England. New Haven and London, pp. 282-89.
13.
Cited in Dekker, Childhood, Memory, p. 110. It is translated as ‘‘if the reader is to know me as I am in my later years, he must have know me well in my youth,’’ In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, translated by Angela Scholar, Oxford World Classics, Oxford, 2000, p. 170.
14.
1800 is seen as the turning point in the Netherlands, with the generation born in the 1780s remembering their childhood, Dekker, Childhood Memory chap. 13; 1780s is seen as the key decade in Germany with the generation born at mid-century contributing, Schlumbohm, ‘‘Constructing individuality.’’
15.
Wright quoted substantively from Thomas Gray’s On a distant prospect of Eton College, 1747, to underline his theme of the transitory nature of childhood, Autobiography, pp. 17-20; F. F. M., Retrospections of Dorothea Herbert 1770-1789, London, 1929, p. 141; Mary Thrale, ed. 1972. The Autobiography of Francis Place. Cambridge, p. 5.
16.
Schlumbohm. 1982. ‘‘Constructing individuality,’’ 37-41; Burnett, John, ed. Destiny obscure: Autobiographies of childhood, education and family from the 1820s to the 1920s. Oxford, p. 219.
17.
Holcroft, Thomas.1816. Memoirs of the late Thomas Holcroft ..., ed. Hazlitt, W. 3 vols, vol. 1, pp. 17-8; Morgan, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, p. 126.
18.
Examples include Elizabeth Ashbridge, Quaker Grey: Some account of the forepath of the life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, written by her own hand many years ago. Guildford, 1904; Alexander W., ed. 1811. Some account of the life and religious experience of Mary Alexander, late of Needham Market, London; John Allen, The Life of Mr John Allen: Letter to the Rev John Wesley, September 1779; Bailey, John. 1810. The poor pilgrim: In a series of letters. Being some account of the life and experience of John Bailey, minister of the gospel, Zoar Chapel, Great Alie Street. London; Crowley, Ann. 1842. Some account of the religious experience of Ann Crowley, London; Saxby, Mary. Memoirs of a female vagrant, written by herself. With illustrations by Samuel Greatheed, Dunstable, 1806.
19.
For example: Angelo, Henry. 1828. Reminiscences of Henry Angelo with memoirs of his late father and friends, London; Knight, Cornelia. 1861. Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales, London, 2 vols; Mason, Simon. 1754. A narrative of the life and distresses of Simon Mason, Apothecary. Birmingham.
20.
See Mary Ann Ashford. 1844. Life of a licensed victualler’s daughter, London; Baker, Robert. 1809. The genuine life of Robert Barker, dictated by himself while in a state of total darkness; and commencing from the earliest period of his recollections in the year 1732, till this publication took place, in the month of November, 1809, London.
21.
Cappe, M., ed. 1822. Memoirs of the life of the late Mrs Catharine Cappe. Written by herself. London.
22.
Bewick, Thomas.1822. Memoir; Wright, Autobiography; Johnson, Elizabeth. 1901. Recollections of a Georgia Loyalist , ed. Rev. Arthur Wentworth Eaton.New York and London: The Bankside Press, M. F. Mansfield & Company.
23.
Wright, Autobiography, pp. vii; xxix.
24.
Kuhn, Annette.1995. Family secrets: Acts of memory and imagination. London and New York, new edition2002, p. 2.
25.
F. F. M., Retrospections, p. 1.
26.
Fivush, Robyn. 2008. ‘‘Remembering and reminiscing: how individual lives are constructed in family narratives.’’ Memory Studies 1:50-1. For the historian’s view, see Thompson, ‘‘Family myth,’’ p. 13. For a philosophical viewpoint, see Bachelard, Gaston. The poetics of reverie: childhood, language, and the cosmos, translated from the French by Daniel Russell, 1969, (1960), Beacon Press, Boston, 1971 paperback.
27.
For strengths and weaknesses of autobiographies as primary sources, see Heywood, Growing up, pp. 23-33.
28.
Green, Anna. 2008. Cultural history. Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2008, p. 94; Fivush, ‘‘Remembering,’’ 51; Hodgkin K., and S. Radstone, eds. 2003. Contested pasts: The politics of memory (London and New York), p. 5; Kuhn, Family secrets, p. 165.
29.
Bailey, Joanne. 2007. ‘‘Reassessing parenting in eighteenth-century England,’’ in Helen Berry, and Elizabeth Foyster, eds. The family in early modern England, Cambridge, 2007. Describing parents’ characters through prevalent ideals is evident in other autobiographies; see Schlumbohm, ‘‘Constructing individuality,’’ 35.
30.
Burnett, Destiny obscure, pp. 234-9.
31.
A similar point has been made about memories of childhood homes in Jason Tebbe, 2008. ‘‘ Landscapes of remembrance: Home and memory in the nineteenth-century Bürgertum .’’ Journal of Family History33:195.
32.
Hodgkin and Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts, p. 13.
33.
Blauvelt, Martha Tomhave, ‘‘The work of the heart: emotion in the 1805-35 diary of Sarah Connell Ayer,’’ Journal of Social History Spring2002:583.
34.
Thompson, ‘‘Family myth,’’ pp. 15, 36.
35.
Gillis identifies the turn of the eighteenth century as the point when social ranks beneath the landed elite began to record an interest in their forefathers. World of their own making, p. 14.
36.
Bewick, Memoir, p. 1.
37.
Cappe, Memoirs , pp. 39-40; Knight, Autobiography, pp. 1-4.
38.
James Northcote, The Life of the Painter James Northcote, R.A. Manuscript, pp. 14-23; Hannah Robertson, The life of Mrs Robertson, grand-daughter of Charles II. Written by Herself. Derby, 1791, p.5.
39.
William Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad: Pasquin v. Faulder: Epistle to Peter Pindar: To which is prefixed the author’s memoir of his own life, London, 1827, p. v-vii.
40.
Helen Berry, ‘Sense and singularity: the social experiences of John Marsh and Thomas Stutterd in late Georgian England’ in Henry French and Jonathan Barry (eds), Identity and Agency in England, 1500- 1800, Palgrave Macmillan , Basingstoke, 2004, p. 183.
41.
Ashbridge, Quaker Grey, p. 9; Allen, The Life of, p. 437; Thrale, Autobiography, p. 98; Bailey, The poor pilgrim, p. 1; Also, see Ashford, Licensed Victualler’s Daughter, p. 8.
42.
Northcote, Life of the painter, p. 122.
43.
Shepard.2008. ‘‘Poverty, labour and the language of social description in early modern England.’’Past & Present201:90.
44.
James Lackington was the only memoirist to reject this assumption about parentage. Nevertheless, he still went on to discuss his parents and their effect upon his life and identity. Lackington, James, Memoirs of the first forty-five years of the life of James Lackington, a new edition, London, 1794, pp. 37-8.
45.
Wright, Autobiography, p. 4.
46.
Northcote, Life of the painter, p. 13.
47.
Robinson, Mary Elizabeth, ed. 1801. Memoirs of the late Mrs Robinson, Written by herself. London, 4 vols, vol. 1, p. 7.
For a much more thought-out example, see extract titled ‘‘self, 1811,’’ written when she was thirty-three, from Sydney Morgan’s journal, printed in her memoir, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 429-30.
51.
Bailey, The poor pilgrim, p. 66.
52.
Bewick, Memoir, pp. 42-43. For a similar point in which a father was seen as determining a son’s future moral behaviour see Holcroft, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 25.
53.
Angelo, Reminiscences, p. 82.
54.
Morgan, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, vol. 1. p. 113; Ashford, Licensed Victualler’s Daughter, p. 10.
55.
Robinson, Memoirs, pp. 21, 25, 48, 62.
56.
Ashbridge, Quaker Grey, p. 17.
57.
Bewick, Memoir, pp. 12, 52, 89.
58.
Ashbridge, Quaker Grey, pp. 9, 10; Thrale, Autobiography, p. 21; Also see Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad, p. vii and Lackington, Memoirs of the first forty-five years, p. 41.
59.
Thrale, Autobiography, pp. 97-99. Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad , p. vii.
60.
Cappe, Memoirs, pp. 9, 347. Robinson, Memoirs, p. 17.
61.
Bewick, Memoir, pp. 68, 94.
62.
Josiah Pratt .1817. Remains of the Revd. Richard Cecil. Boston. pp. 150-1, 153.
63.
Hoare.1819. Hints for the improvement of early education and nursery discipline, pp. 172-3. 2nd ed. London.
64.
Northcote, Life of the painter, p. 124.
65.
Lady’s Magazine, 1804, p. 200.
66.
Christianson S., and M. Safer.1996. ‘‘Emotional events and emotions in autobiographical memories.’’ In D. Rubin, Remembering our past: studies in autobiographical memory. Cambridge, p. 219.
67.
Cappe, Memoirs, p. 145.
68.
For several examples, see Robinson, Memoirs, pp. 25, 27, 62, 68, 102, 132, 135, 163.
69.
Baker, Genuine life, pp. 66-7.
70.
William Cowper’s ‘‘Memoir, never published to the world,’’ pp. 2, 16. For regret at not being able to demonstrate love for father, see Cappe, Memoirs, p. 77.
71.
For characteristics of fatherhood, see Bailey J. Forthcoming. ‘‘A very sensible man:’’ Imagining fatherhood in England c. 1750-1830. History.
72.
Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad, p. viii. Similarly, see Lackington, Memoirs of the first forty-five years, p. 40; Cappe, Memoirs, pp. 18-9, 55; Robinson, Memoirs, p. 44; Northcote, Life of the painter, pp. 13, 30.
73.
Thrale, Autobiography, pp. 11. He said the ‘‘use in writing these memoirs’’ is the ‘‘knowledge they may perchance convey of the change of manners and the increase of intellect.’’ p. 11.
74.
Thrale, Autobiography , p. 279. Dekker, Childhood memories, p. 121.
75.
Morgan, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 3. See also Haydon, Autobiography and Memoirs, pp. 2-6, 57-8.
76.
‘‘Early life of George Courtauld I by Samuel Courtauld III, endorsed ‘‘fragmentary notice of my father’s earlier life in a letter to Sophia Dec 6 1873.’’Courtauld Family Letters 1782-1799, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1916, printed for private circulation, p. xxxv.
77.
Rubin, D.C.1996. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In Remembering our past: Studies in autobiographical memory. Ed. Idem.Cambridge, 1996 , p. 12.
78.
Robertson, The life of Mrs Robertson, pp. 7, 18. This phrasing may have alluded to Gray’s Elegy, ‘‘And melancholy marked him for her own.’’ Robinson, Memoirs, pp. 25-26.
79.
Lady’s Magazine, 1781, pp. 36-7.
80.
Saxby, Memoirs , pp. 1, 2. Elizabeth Johnston’s mother died when she was ten and she too was sent to an aunt; Johnson, Recollections, pp. 43-4.
81.
Morgan, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 98, 100. Also see Life of William Hutton, pp. 17-18.
82.
Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad, p. ix.
83.
Robertson, The life of Mrs Robertson, p. 3.
84.
Cappe, Memoirs, p. 21.
85.
Alexander, Some account, p. 21; Crowley, Some account, p. 6.
86.
Allen, The Life of, pp. 438-9.
87.
She would appear to have suffered mental breakdown and some degree of paranoia. F. F. M., Retrospections, pp. 387, 407. Haydon described the ‘‘first dark day of nothingness’’ following his mother’s death, Autobiography and Memoirs, p. 57.
88.
Gifford’s Baviad and Maeviad, p. viii.
89.
Bewick, Memoir, pp. 89, 90, 94, 115. See also Haydon, Autobiography and Memoirs, pp. 57-8.
90.
Tebbe, ‘‘Landscapes,’’ pp. 195, 207.
91.
Lovell, Art in a season of revolution, pp. 27, 46.
92.
This was often materialized. See Tebbe, ‘‘Landscapes,’’ 201, 203; Pointon, Marcia. 1999. ‘‘Materializing mourning: Hair, jewellery and the body,’’ in Material memories, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley. Berg, Oxford. For memories of childhood interiors as an ‘‘attempt to revivify what is lost’’ see Ann Colley, ‘‘Bodies and mirrors: The childhood interiors of Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson,’’ in Domestic space: Reading the nineteenth-century interior, eds. Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, 55. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
93.
Bachelard, The poetics of reverie, p. 125.
94.
For collagist quality of autobiographies, see Kuhn, Family secrets, p. 163.
95.
Donna Loftus , ‘‘The self in society: Middle-class men and autobiography,’’ in Amigoni. Life Writing, pp. 68, 73-7.
96.
Helen Rogers .2007. ‘‘First in the house: Daughters on working-class fathers and fatherhood,’’ in Gender and fatherhood in the nineteenth century, eds. Broughton T., and H. Rogers.Basingstoke, pp. 125-6, 135.
97.
Burnett, Destiny obscure, p. 219; Tebbe, ‘‘Landscapes,’’ passim.
98.
Gillis, A world of their own, pp. 36-9.
99.
Fielding, Sarah.1759. The history of the Countess of Dellwyn. In two volumes. By the author of David Simple. London. 2 vols, vol. 2, p. 291.
100.
To achieve this sense of unbroken continuity images were fabricated or manipulated if necessary, Retford, Art of domestic life, pp. 153-4, 163-5, and chap. 5; Lovell, Art in a season of revolution, pp. 117, 120-132.
101.
For autobiographies as a ‘‘memory bank,’’ see Kuhn, Family secrets, p. 166.
102.
Tebbe, ‘‘Landscapes,’’ p. 203. See also Baggerman, Arianne. 2002. ‘‘Autobiography and Family memory in the Nineteenth Century.’’ In Egodocuments, ed. Dekker.
103.
Blauvelt, ‘‘The work of the heart,’’ p. 586.
104.
Fivush, ‘‘Remembering,’’ p. 55.
105.
These are Dror Wahrman’s terms, The making of the modern self: identity and culture in eighteenth-century England, New Haven and London, 2004, pp. xi, xiii, 168; for this period as transformative in memory studies, see Hodgkin, K., and S. Radstone, eds. 2003. Regimes of memory, London and New York, p. 3.
For just two examples: Harry Cocks. 2006. Historiographical Review, ‘‘Modernity and the self in the history of sexuality.’’ The Historical Journal 49:1211-27; David Amigoni, ‘‘Victorian life writing: genres, print, constituencies,’’ in Amigoni, Life Writing and Victorian Culture, p. 2.
108.
This is the chronological model offered for the Netherlands, Dekker, Childhood Memories, p. 109.
109.
Baggerman, ‘‘Autobiography and Family Memory’’ p. 164. For psychological scholarship on this process, see Fivush, ‘‘Remembering,’’ passim.
110.
The Life of William Hutton, F.A.S.S. including particular account of the Birmingham Riots 1791. (published by his daughter Catherine Hutton) London, 1816.
