Letter to B.R. Haydon, Esq.Benjamin Robert Haydon | Born: 1786-01-26 in Plymouth, England. Died: 1846-06-22 in London.
Benjamin Robert Haydon was a painter educated at the
Royal Academy, who was famous for contemporary,
historical, classical, biblical, and mythological scenes, though tormented by
financial difficulties and incarceration. He painted William Wordsworth's portrait in 1842 and
painted a cameo of Keats in his epic canvas
Christ's Entry into Jerusalem(1814-20). MRM was introduced to him at his London studio in the spring of
1817, and Sir William Elford was a
mutual friend, and Haydon’s own acquaintances included several prominent
British Romantic literary figures. He completed
The Raising of Lazarus in
1823
. He wrote a diary and an autobiography, both of
which were published only posthumously, and he committed suicide in 1846.
George Paston's
Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth
Century (1893) contends that Mitford was
asked to edit Haydon's memoir, but
declined.—rnes, ebb, February 9, 1824
Edited by Melissa J. Klamer Melissa Klamer, Editor, Ph.D. EnglishMichigan State
University
Melissa Klamer earned a Ph.D. in English at Michigan State
University, and served as a Research Assistant working with MATRIX: Center for the Digital
Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on Victorian
women’s life writing, particularly letters and diaries.
.
Sponsored by:
- Mary Russell Mitford Society: Digital Mitford Project
- Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
First digital edition in TEI, date: October 26, 2017. P5.Edition made with help from photos taken by Digital Mitford editors. Digital Mitford photo files: DSCN2551.jpg, DSCN2550.jpg, DSCN2549.jpg, DSCN2548.jpg, DSCN2547.jpg .
Digital Mitford Letters: The Mary Russell Mitford Archive
Repository: Reading Central Library. Shelf mark: qB/TU/MIT Vol. 4 Horizon No.: 1361549 ff. 481
Folio sheet of paper, with four surfaces photographed. Four pages (1 leaf), folded in half, folded again in thirds. The first three surfaces are written as pages of the letter; the fourth contains the address leaf. Address leaf bearing the folowing postmarks: 1) A black mileage stamp, partially legible Ct Surrey [gap: reason: illegible.] . 2) A sepia-inked oval Delivery stamp, double lined rim reading 8*MORN*8* FE * 8 *
1824 3) A sepia-inked oval Delivery stamp, reading 10*F*Noon*10
* FE * 9 *
1824 A large 3 denoting the posting fee has been written in black ink by the postal service across the address leaf. Sheet (pages three and four) torn on right edge of page three where wax seal was removed. Red wax seal, partial, adhered to the corner of pages three and four.
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. A red line is drawn from top left to bottom right of each of the first three leaves. There is no red crayon across the address text block.
- 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. The pencil has inscribed the date "Feby 9th 1824" at the top left of the first leaf. This letter is also numbered "18" in the top center of the first leaf to the right of the opener.
- 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 labeled "To B R Haydon Esq."
Maintained by: Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (eeb4 at
psu.edu) 
Last modified:
2024-11-23T10:10:08.380343Z
Benjamin Robert Haydon was a painter educated at the Royal Academy, who was famous for contemporary, historical, classical, biblical, and mythological scenes, though tormented by financial difficulties and incarceration. He painted William Wordsworth's portrait in 1842 and painted a cameo of Keats in his epic canvas Christ's Entry into Jerusalem(1814-20). MRM was introduced to him at his London studio in the spring of 1817, and Sir William Elford was a mutual friend, and Haydon’s own acquaintances included several prominent British Romantic literary figures. He completed The Raising of Lazarus in 1823 . He wrote a diary and an autobiography, both of which were published only posthumously, and he committed suicide in 1846. George Paston's Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century (1893) contends that Mitford was asked to edit Haydon's memoir, but declined.—rnes, ebb,
I have to thank you for two very charming letters—to congratulate you most heartily on your escape from two such disagreeable oddities as your late landlord & landlady, & to wish you all prosperity in your new abode—I do not wish you happiness—for you have it—With such a wife & such a boy, & such a consciousness of [gap: reason: torn.]
[th]ose blessings I do really think you the happiest man in the world. Does Mrs. HaydonMary Hyman Haydon
The daughter of the Rev. Benjamin Cobley, the Rector
of Dodbrooke, Kingsbridge, Devon, she was widowed with two children when she
married Benjamin Robert Haydon on 10 October 1821.—ghb ever see your letters to me? If not I will lend them to her sometime or other just that she may see how a married lover can write of his "mistress"—that being our country phrase for wife—& I think a very pretty one.—must take—& who even in this age of can't
& can object to the moral? Was not it the finest comic moral in the world?—The moral of the [gap: 1 word, reason: unclear.]
page 2
Depend upon it the picture will take—It must & it shall. I quite long to see it. I had prepared all my discretion to keep the secret when I on the intelligence in print in the last No. but one of the New MonthlyNew Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal.
Periodical edited by Thomas
Campbell and Cyrus Redding from 1821 to 1830, after it was restyled with a more literary and less political focus than it had had at its founding in 1814 as a Tory competitor to the Whig
Monthly Magazine.
Talfourd and Mitford were contributors.—ebb, & then I treated my dear father & mother with reading them your letter. I found there too in one of M. HazlittWilliam Hazlitt | Born: 1778-04-10 in Maidstone, Kent, England. Died: 1830-09-18 in Soho, London, England.
Essayist and critic, acquaintance of Mary Russell Mitford. Author of
Table Talk (1821)
and
The Spirit of the Age (1825). Also authored collections of critical essays such
as
Characters of Shakespeare (1817),
A View of the English Stage (1818), and
English Comic Writers (1819). In a letter of 2 October 1820
, Mary Russell Mitford writes of Hazlitt
to their mutual friend Haydon, He is
the most delightful critic in the [world]— puts all his taste, his wit, his
deep thinking, his matchless acuteness into his subject, but he does not put
his whole heart & soul into it [. . . ] What charms me most in Mr. Haslitt is the beautiful candour which
he bursts forth sometimes from his own prejudices [ . . . ] I admire him so
ardently that when I begin to talk of him I never know how to stop. I could
talk on for an hour in a see saw of praise and blame as he himself does of
Beaumont & Fletcher & some of his old
[favourites].
—lmw, cmm
's delightful Table Talks the terrible story of Mr. WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth | Born: 1770-04-07 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Died: 1850-04-23 in Rydal Mount, near Amberside, Cumberland, England.
First-generation poet of the Romantic era, Lake Poet and friend of fellow poet Coleridge, who co-authored Lyrical Ballads with him and to whom his major poem The Prelude was originally addressed. Poet Laureate from 1843-1850, succeeding his sometime friend and fellow Lake Poet Robert Southey in that role. Mitford mentions in her Journal that she was reading and copying Wordsworth's poems in September 1819.—lmw, rnes, hjb
's letter to you—which spoils his poetry to me—for there was about his poetry something personal—we cling to him and to CowperWilliam Cowper | Born: 1731-11-26 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England. Died: 1800-04-25 in East Dereham, Norfolk, England.
Poet, hymnodist, and author of the most important translations of Homer since Pope. He was deeply committed to the anti-slavery movement and wrote several poems on the subject. His poetry continued to be much-admired and reprinted in the Romantic and Victorian period.—lmw
—& now—It will not bear talking of—"Jeremy Bentham" is also I think by Mr. HazlittWilliam Hazlitt | Born: 1778-04-10 in Maidstone, Kent, England. Died: 1830-09-18 in Soho, London, England.
Essayist and critic, acquaintance of Mary Russell Mitford. Author of
Table Talk (1821)
and
The Spirit of the Age (1825). Also authored collections of critical essays such
as
Characters of Shakespeare (1817),
A View of the English Stage (1818), and
English Comic Writers (1819). In a letter of 2 October 1820
, Mary Russell Mitford writes of Hazlitt
to their mutual friend Haydon, He is
the most delightful critic in the [world]— puts all his taste, his wit, his
deep thinking, his matchless acuteness into his subject, but he does not put
his whole heart & soul into it [. . . ] What charms me most in Mr. Haslitt is the beautiful candour which
he bursts forth sometimes from his own prejudices [ . . . ] I admire him so
ardently that when I begin to talk of him I never know how to stop. I could
talk on for an hour in a see saw of praise and blame as he himself does of
Beaumont & Fletcher & some of his old
[favourites].
—lmw, cmm
—I wonder if he ever heard a story told to me by your Countryman Mr. NorthmoreThomas Northmore | Born: 1766 in Cleve, Devonshire, England. Died: 1851 in Furzebrook House, near Axminster, England.
An acquaintance of Mary Russell Mitford, friend of John Johnson and co-founder with him of the Hampden Club. A Radical, Northmore ran unsuccessfully as Member of Parliament for Exeter and for Barnstaple. In a letter to Haydon dated 9 February 1824
, Mitford refers to Northmore as a great Devonshire reformer, one of the bad epic poets and very pleasant men in which that country abounds
(
Life of Mary Russell Mitford ed. L'Estrange Vol II, page 22). In an 1819 letter to Elford, Mitford gives this description of Northmore, and mentions his authorship of an epic poem on George Washington: what a man! How loud & shrewd & full of himself & sharp all over from his eagle nose to his pointed hook toe! What a perpetual sky rocket bouncing starting & flaming! What a talker against time! Well might Mr. Hobhouse call him
. Mitford may not have seen the poem, since it was published in Baltimore, MD. Northmore's poem was entitled Washington; or Liberty Restored. A Poem in Ten Books.—kab, lmwthe gentleman who came all the way from Devonshire to tell us that he was a great man at home.
And he is a Poet too. Has written an Epic, which must have appeared incognito–for I never remember to have heard it mentioned in my life. An Epic Poem about Washington
—a great Devonshire Reformer—one of the bad epic poets, & very pleasant men in which that country abounds. He said that Jeremy Bentham being on a visit at a ShewShow house in those parts at a time when he was little known except as a Jurist through the translations of M. Dumont—certainly before the publication of the Church of Englandism or any such enormities—Mrs. Hannah MoreHannah More | Born: 1745-02-02 in Fishponds, Bristol, England. Died: 1833-09-07 in Clifton, Bristol, England.
Hannah More began her career in 1770s
London as a successful playwright and
associate of David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth
Montagu, and Joshua Reynolds. She was a
prominent member of the
Bluestocking
group of women following Montagu’s salon. In the 1780s, she brought the working-class Bristol poet
Ann Yearsley to public attention, and became
increasingly active with abolitionists and evangelicals such as
William Willberforce and Beilby Porteus,
Bishop of London. With her sister Martha,
More became active in philanthropic activities intended to improve the living
conditions and education of the poor, including setting up Sunday
Schools
to teach reading. Between
the 1780s and the 1830s she was a prolific and popular author of
novels, conduct books, and ethical tracts, including
Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education
(1799) and
Practical Piety (1811). She wrote numerous moralistic poems and prose sketches
aimed at literate working-class poor audiences, including
Village Politics, by Will
Chip (1792), and later worked
with Porteus on the series
Cheap Repository Tracts (1795 to 1797), the most famous of which is
The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain
.—lmw
, being at a Wateringpage 3
place in the neighborhood was m[gap: reason: seal.]
[inded] to see him, & availed herself of the house being one which was shewnshownshewn on stated days to pay a visit to the Philosopher. He was in the library when the news arrived—& the lady being already in the ante chamber & no possible mode of escape presenting itself, he sent one servant to detain her a few minutes, & employed another to build him up with books in a corner of the room—when the folios & quartos rose above his head the curious lady was admitted. Must not it have been a droll scene?—The philosopher playing at bopeep in his [gap: reason: torn.]
[e]ntrenchment, & the pious maiden, who had previously ascertained that he was in the
[gap: 3 characters.]
room, peering after him in all the agony of baffled curiosity.— Your Frank must be a charming little fellow—Give my love to him & his dear Mother—How well I can fancy you darting about in your half furnished house, doing half every body's work with your own rapid hands. No wonder that when the babble was over you should feel a little languid like a young lady after a ball.—God bless you my dear friend—All happiness be with you & your'syours—.
M. R. MitfordMary 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
.
B. R. Haydon Esqre Benjamin Robert Haydon | Born: 1786-01-26 in Plymouth, England. Died: 1846-06-22 in London.
Benjamin Robert Haydon was a painter educated at the Royal Academy, who was famous for contemporary, historical, classical, biblical, and mythological scenes, though tormented by financial difficulties and incarceration. He painted William Wordsworth's portrait in 1842 and painted a cameo of Keats in his epic canvas Christ's Entry into Jerusalem(1814-20). MRM was introduced to him at his London studio in the spring of 1817, and Sir William Elford was a mutual friend, and Haydon’s own acquaintances included several prominent British Romantic literary figures. He completed The Raising of Lazarus in 1823 . He wrote a diary and an autobiography, both of which were published only posthumously, and he committed suicide in 1846. George Paston's Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century (1893) contends that Mitford was asked to edit Haydon's memoir, but declined.—rnes, ebb
57 Sovereign Terrace
Connaught Place
Edgeware Road