Letter to Sir William ElfordWilliam Elford, Sir, baronet, Recorder for Plymouth, Recorder for Totnes, Member of Parliament | Born: 1749-08 in Kingsbridge, Devon, England. Died: 1837-11-30 in Totnes, Devon, England.
According to L’Estrange, Sir William was first a friend of
Mitford’s father, and
Mitford met him for the first time in the
spring of 1810 when he was a widower nearing the
age of 64. They carried on a lively correspondence until his death
in 1837.
Elford worked as a banker at Plymouth Bank (Elford, Tingcombe and Purchase)
in Plymouth, Devon, from its
founding in 1782. He was elected a member of
Parliament for Plymouth as a
supporter of the government and Tory William
Pitt, and served from 1796 to 1806. After his election defeat
in Plymouth in 1806, he was elected member of Parliament for Rye and served
from July 1807 until his resignation in July 1808. For his service in
Parliament as a supporter of Pitt, he was made a baronet in 1800. After his
son Jonathan came of age, he tried to
secure a stable government post for him but never succeeded. Mayor of
Plymouth in 1796 and Recorder for Plymouth from 1797 to 1833, he was also
Recorder for Totnes from 1832 to 1834. Sir William served as an officer in
the South Devon militia from 1788, eventually attaining the rank of
Lieutenant Colonel; the unit saw active service in Ireland during the Peninsular Wars. Sir
William was a talented amateur painter in oils and watercolors
who exhibited at the Royal Society from 1774 to 1837; he
exhibited still lifes and portraits but preferred landscapes. He was elected
to the Royal Society Academy in 1790. He was also a
talented amateur naturalist and was elected to the Royal Linnaean
Society in 1790; late in life, he published his findings on an
alternative to yeast.
He
married his first wife, Mary Davies
of Plympton, on January 20, 1776 and they had
one son, Jonathan, and two daughters,
Grace Chard and Elizabeth. After the death of his
first wife, he married Elizabeth Hall
Walrond, widow of Lieutenant-Colonel Maine Swete
Walrond of the Coldstream Guards.
His
only son Jonathan died in 1823, leaving him without an heir.
—ebb, lmw
, December 12, 1820
Edited by Elisa Beshero-Bondar Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Principal Investigator and Technical Coordinator, Founding Editor, Poetry, Program Chair, Digital Media, Arts, and Technology (DIGIT), Professor of Digital Humanities, and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Elisa Beshero-Bondar organized the Digital Mitford project in the spring of 2013. She maintains the project’s documentation and manages the programming involved in storing, checking, and publishing the project’s editions and prosopography data, as well as its customization of the TEI Guidelines. With Gregory Bondar, she has photographed Mitford’s manuscripts at the Reading Central Library and the John Rylands Library. She is involved in preparing and checking editions of letters and plays, and leads the training of editors and assistants in TEI XML and related coding and programming at the Digital Mitford Coding School. Her work on the Digital Mitford project began with research of Mitford for her book about women Romantic poets, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. Her published articles in ELH, Genre, Philological Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle investigate the poetry of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Lord Byron in context with 18th- and 19th-century views of revolution, world empires, natural sciences, and theater productions. An active member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), she has served since 2016 on the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines..
Sponsored by:
- Mary Russell Mitford Society: Digital Mitford Project
- Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
First digital edition in TEI, date: 2018 July 13. P5.Edition made with help from photos taken by Digital Mitford editors. Digital Mitford photo files: DSCF8076.JPG, DSCF8077.JPG, DSCF8078.JPG, DSCF8079.JPG, DSCF8080.JPG, DSCF8081.JPG, DSCF8082.JPG, DSCF8083.JPG, DSCF8084.JPG, DSCF8085.JPG, DSCF8086.JPG, DSCF8087.JPG, DSCF8088.JPG, .
Digital Mitford Letters: The Mary Russell Mitford Archive
Repository: Reading Central Library. Shelf mark: qB/TU/MIT Vol. 4 Horizon No.: 1361550 ff. 426
Two sheets of 23.5 mm x 38 mm paper, six surfaces photographed. Folded in half vertically then folded in thirds horizontally. Address leaf bearing black postmark, partially illegible, readingNG15 DE 15
1820
. Red wax seal, complete, adhered to page six.
Hands other than Mitford's noted on this manuscript:
- Red crayon or thick red pencil. Probably a different hand from Mitford's that marks many of her letters, sometimes drawing diagonal lines across pages, and sometimes writing words overtop and perpendicularly across Mitford's writing. Red lines are drawn from top left to bottom right of leaves one, three, four, five, and six. Page seven has a red diagonal line across the first three lines of the text block and two diagonal lines across the last nine lines.
- Someone, apparently other than Mitford, perhaps cataloging letters and describing them, who left grey pencil marks and numbered her letters now in the Reading Central Library's collection. This letter numbered "23" in the top left of the first leaf.
- Someone, apparently other than Mitford, perhaps cataloging letters and describing them, who left grey pencil marks on her letters now in the John Rylands Library's collection.
- Someone, apparently other than Mitford, who occasionally left notes in a spidery thin hand to explain or document details in Mitford's letters in the margins of her pages, noted in the manuscripts held at Reading Central Library. This may be William HarnessWilliam Harness | Born: 1790-03-14 in Wickham, Hampshire, England. Died: 1869-11-11 in Battle, Sussex, England .
A lifelong friend of Mary Russell Mitford who knew her from their childhood in the 1790s, Harness launched the first major effort to collect and edit Mitford’s letters into a series of volumes, which was completed by his assistant, Alfred Guy Kingan L’Estrange a year after Harness’s death, and published as The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends. This collection was originally intended to be six volumes, but was cut back to three by the publishers, to Harness’s distress. Harness and Byron were also friends from their schooling at Harrow, as Byron sympathized with Harness’s experience of a disabled foot, crushed in an accident in early childhood. Byron considered dedicating the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to Harness, but refrained so as not to taint Harness’s reputation as he was taking orders as an Anglican curate. Harness admired and encouraged Mitford’s playwrighting in particular, and she commented that he was one of the few of her friends who thought she should prioritize the drama over prose. When William Macready was attacked in an anonymous Blackwood’s Magazine piece in 1825 for his demands and rudeness to Mitford over revisions to Rienzi, Macready assumed that Harness was the author of the anonymous piece, though in 1839 after many years of distance, Harness assured Macready in person that he was not the writer, though he may have shared word of the poor treatment his friend had endured. William Harness was the son of John Harness, M.D. and Sarah Dredge; he was baptized at Whitchurch, Hampshire on April 13, 1790. He received his B.A. in 1812 and his M.A. in 1816 from Christ’s College, Cambridge. He served as curate at Kelmeston, Hampshire (1812) and Dorking (1814-1816). He was preacher at Trinity Chapel, Conduit Street, London and minister and lecturer at St. Anne’s in Soho. He was Boyle lecturer in London (1822) and was curate at Hampstead from 1828 to 1844. In 1825, he published an eight-volume edition of Shakespeare, including a biography; his friends would later endow a prize in his name at Cambridge for the study of Shakespearean literature. He also authored numerous essays and reviews, some for the Quarterly Review. From 1844 to 1847 he was minister of Brompton Chapel in London. He undertook to raise the funds to build the church of All Saints, Knightsbridge, in the parish of St. Margaret’s Westminster, which opened in 1849, and he then became perpetual curate of that congregation. At the 1851 and 1861 censuses, he lived at 3 Hyde Park Terrace, Westminster St. Margaret, Middlesex, with his sister Mary Harness and his first cousin Jemima Harness, daughter of his uncle William. He died while on a visit to one of his former curates in Battle, Sussex. At the time of his death he living at the same address at 3 Hyde Park Terrace; he is buried in Bath.Sources: Duncan-Jones, Miss Mitford and Mr. Harness (1955); Lord Byron and His Times: —ebb, lmw
or A. G. L'EstrangeAlfred Guy Kingan L’Estrange | Born: 1832. Died: 1915.
L’Estrange was a curate working for William Harness, and assisted him with the first edition of Mary Russell Mitford’s letters until Harness’s death, at which point L’Estrange took over the editing and produced the collection of letters as the three-volume The Life of Mary Russell Mitford under his own name. [Sources: Frances Needham’s notes on Mitford’s papers and the Harness/L’Estrange edition. VIAF ] —ebb. This letter has the addressee identified on the top left of the first leaf.
Maintained by: Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (eeb4 at
psu.edu) 
Last modified:
2024-05-03T03:13:35.758057Z
page 1
Mary Russell Mitford | Born: 1787-12-16 in New Alresford, Hampshire, England. Died: 1855-01-10 in Swallowfield, Berkshire, England.
Poet, playwright, writer of prose fiction sketches, Mary Russell Mitford is, of course, the subject of our archive. Mary Russell Mitford was born on December 16, 1787 at New Alresford, Hampshire, the only child of George Mitford (or Midford) and Mary Russell. She was baptized on February 29, 1788. Much of her writing was devoted to supporting herself and her parents. She received a civil list pension in 1837. Census records from 1841 indicate that she is living with her father George, three female servants: Kerenhappuch Taylor (Mary’s ladies maid), two maids of all work, Mary Bramley and Mary Allaway, and a manservant (probably serving also as gardener), Benjamin Embury. The 1851 census lists her occupation as
.
Three Mile CrossThree Mile Cross, Berkshire, England | Three Mile Cross | Berkshire | England |
51.4047211 -0.9734518999999864
Village in the parish of Shinfield in Berkshire, where Mary
Russell Mitford moved with her parents in 1820. They lived in a cottage there until 1851. —ebb
Decr. 12the 1820.
Ah you knew very well that I should write when you coaxed me to prettily—Did you not my dear Sir William? And besides
& is an ampersand
page 2
Mary Russell Mitford | Born: 1787-12-16 in New Alresford, Hampshire, England. Died: 1855-01-10 in Swallowfield, Berkshire, England.
Poet, playwright, writer of prose fiction sketches, Mary Russell Mitford is, of course, the subject of our archive. Mary Russell Mitford was born on December 16, 1787 at New Alresford, Hampshire, the only child of George Mitford (or Midford) and Mary Russell. She was baptized on February 29, 1788. Much of her writing was devoted to supporting herself and her parents. She received a civil list pension in 1837. Census records from 1841 indicate that she is living with her father George, three female servants: Kerenhappuch Taylor (Mary’s ladies maid), two maids of all work, Mary Bramley and Mary Allaway, and a manservant (probably serving also as gardener), Benjamin Embury. The 1851 census lists her occupation as
authoress,and lists her as living at Three Mile Cross with Kerenhappuch Taylor (lady’s maid), Sarah Chernk (maid-of-all-work), and Samuel Swetman (gardener), after the death of her father. Mitford’s long life and prolific career ended after injuries from a carriage accident. She is buried in Swallowfield churchyard. The executor of her will and her literary executor was the Rev. William Harness and her lady’s maid, Kerenhappuch Taylor Sweetman, was residuary legatee of her estate. —lmw, ebb
.