Eliza Fenwick, State Street, New Haven, Connecticut, to Mrs. M. Hays, Vanbrugh Castle, Maze Hill, Blackheath, near London, 24 March 1824.1 State Street Newhaven March 24th 1824 How gratifying dear
dear Friend was your letter of Novr 18 1823 to me, which however did
not arrive till January. The
flow the vivacity with which it is written proves equally with your assurances
that you are established more to your satisfaction & taste than you have
been for many years before. Long may such domestic comfort be yours & long
may the amiable family with whom you are domesticated continue to appreciate
your value. I feel an additional interest about Mrs
Browne from her following the same laborious occupation with myself but I envy
her station. I am
silly enough to think sometimes when encountering difficulties & vexations
that I could suffer much more with tenfold patience in such a house as yours or
any where in Black-heath – that is to say in or near London where all my early
habits & all my fondest associations were engendered. I never pined
half so much for England in Barbadoes as I do in America & yet my taste
& reason both prefer America to We have had an English winter – such a one as has scarcely been known in the memory of man for this climate. But little snow & much rain, mist, & fog, & such perpetual changes that we dared not part with our fires or our comfortables & have been paying all the penalties without any of the enjoyments of an American winter. Two of my Grandchildren have had low fever but are recovering & the spring will quite restore them I trust. How much younger you
are than I am my dear friend[.] Without spectacles I can neither write or read,
and I am very deaf at times so much so, that when I fall in with people who do
not speak articulately I make the strangest mistakes imaginable. This gives me
a distaste to going into strange company & I should avoid it if Mrs
R— would let me. I have not the vestige of a tooth in the whole upper gum
therefore what remain Your accusation is
unjust. I do not destroy your letters. The drawer of my desk is now almost full
of them & it must be because self & the dependencies of self engross me
so much when I write that I forget Our critics here do
not like St Ronans Well,4 but I think W. S. has shewn the pen of a Master by
making a hackneyed story & commonplace incidents highly interesting. I was
pleased certainly but must own some of his characters well outlined are not
appropriately fitted up. The arrangement of the story of Reginald Dalton I
thought admirable & all the Oxford scenes highly delineated. The book was much read in our College here & I told some of the Students whom I know
that I feared it had roused them to some experiments they had lately tried to
get rid of a very obnoxious tutor but which only terminated in the expulsion of
several members of the senior classes. You could not suppose yourself near a
college ^in Newhaven^5 for all you see or hear of the students, generally
speaking, is, when they are playing ball on the college Green or taking their Eliza offers most affectionate remembrance with these of dear Mary Yrs ever E. Fenwick
What family has Mr Hays9 & how are Mr T Hays sons now going on? Address: Mrs M. Hays | Vanbrugh Castle | Maize Hill Blackheath | near | London Postmark: Illegible 1 Fenwick Family Papers, Correspondence, 1798-1855, New York Historical Library; Wedd, Fate of the Fenwicks 230-33; Brooks, Correspondence 357-59. Hays spells her location as "Maize Hill" but the modern spelling is Maze Hill. 2 Fenwick is not quite correct with the name (Brownell), but the Bishop had just established his own school (Washington College, now Trinity College) in Hartford, and no doubt saw potential in Fenwick's expertise both as a teacher and writer. 3 Another of Fenwick's many paragraphs of enquiry into the lives of Hays's large extended family. References here are to Elizabeth Dunkin Francis, the schoolteacher with 12 children living at that time on the same street (Maze Hill) in Greenwich with her aunt and who will die prematurely in 1825; Marianne Dunkin Bennett, who had formerly lived with Hays in Islington c. 1807-08 and who was now, like her older sister Elizabeth Francis, living on Maze Hill in Greenwich; George Wedd, the husband of one of Hays's favorite nieces, Sarah Dunkin Wedd; Mr. and Mrs. J. Dunkin and Joanna would be a reference to the oldest son of John Hays Dunkin, Sr., (1775-1858) and his sister, Joanna Dunkin Palmer (previously mentioned in this correspondence); the "Mr. Lanfear" mentioned above is not the husband of Elizabeth Hays Lanfear, for he had died in 1809, but rather his son and her step-son, Ambrose Lanfear, Jr. (1787-1870), who would marry his cousin, Mary Hills, in 1826 and emigrate to New York City and eventually to New Orleans. He was for a time a haberdasher, but by this time had embarked on becoming an American agent and was traveling often in America, as Fenwick notes here and in a subsequent letter; the final reference is to Thomas Hays, Mary Hays's brother and in whose home she lived for several years in the previous decade. 4 St. Ronan's Well (1824) was the only novel by Sir Walter Scott to be set in the 19th century. 5 Yale College, now Yale University, is located in New Haven. 6 Adam Blair (1822) was another novel by John Gibson Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law; Margaret Lindsay was the main character in John Wilson's novel, The Trials of Margaret Lindsay (1823); Valerius (1821) was also written by Lockhart. 7 The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821) was another of the early novels of James Fenimore Cooper. 8 Felicia Browne Hemans (1793-1835) became one of England's most prominent woman poet in the 1820s and '30s. She was born in Liverpool, raised mostly in Wales, and married Alfred Hemans in 1812, and they soon settled in Daventry, Northamptonshire. She published three volumes of poetry through the London firm of John Murray between 1816 and 1819, the year she separated from her husband. She later removed to Dublin, but, unlike Fenwick's claim above, she never lived in Boston. Her best known works in her lifetime were The Forest Sanctuary (1825) and Records of Woman and Songs of the Affections, both appearing in 1830. 9 John Hays, Mary Hays's other brother, who had married in 1812 and who gained three children from his wife's first marriage and, by the date of Fenwick's letter, had three children of his own, including Matilda Mary Hays (1820-97), who would later become a prominent feminist and writer much like her aunt, Mary Hays.
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MARY HAYS: LIFE, WRITINGS, AND CORRESPONDENCE > MARY HAYS CORRESPONDENCE > 1820-1829 > 1824 >