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.
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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, reading
NG15 DE 15
1820
. Red wax seal, complete, adhered to page six.

Hands other than Mitford's noted on this manuscript:

Mitford’s spelling and punctuation are retained, except where a word is split at the end of a line and the beginning of the next in the manuscript. Where Mitford’s spelling and hyphenation of words deviates from the standard, in order to facilitate searching we are using the TEI elements “choice," “sic," and “reg" to encode both Mitford’s spelling and the regular international standard of Oxford English spelling, following the first listed spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary. The long s and ligatured forms are not encoded.
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Maintained by: Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (eeb4 at psu.edu) Creative Commons License Last modified: 2024-11-21T13:46:15.333056Z

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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

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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
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