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This Wonderful Village

Letters to Australia and India 1839-1845

There are nothing but changes in this wonderful village.  People say there might be a good novel written upon it.  What with love stories, bailiff sales, houses to let and deaths, there is always something stirring.

Some time ago, I came into contact with thirty letters written between 1839 and 1845.  The letters came from Aston Upthorpe and Aston Tirrold, two villages in Berkshire, England, facing each other across a road.  The recipient of the letters, Henry Slade junior, had gone to seek fortune and forgetfulness in Australia and later India.  A broken relationship had triggered the trip.  The writers of the letters belong mostly to his family, particularly his mother, Charlotte.  Charlotte and her husband belonged to one of the main farming families in the locality.

On one level, the letters demonstrate that maternal anxieties do not change much: make sure you have clean underwear, please write more often (and when you do, please write legibly), when are you going to pay us back the money you owe, could you tell us a bit more about what you are actually doing, what are the girls like out there and so on.  At a different level the letters paint an amazing story, as Charlotte says above, much like a novel.  We follow the human cycle of courtship, marriage, births (sometimes the other way round), and death.  Endless tea parties held in the freshly mown meadows occupy the leisure hours of the local gentry and their friends.  We hear about bankruptcy, thievery and rowdy behaviour, black sheep, and business.  Just occasionally, we learn about care for the poor, but also about dismal suicides.  We learn about how people got jobs, whether they wanted employment as a shepherd and came to negotiate their wage, or whether they wanted to sell their medical practice and buy another in a better area.  Meanwhile, we watch the teenagers grow into adults, much of their leisure time spent on the hills coursing, hunting, and shooting, playing cricket in the evenings, riding and falling off their horses, or just scaring the maids half to death so that the doctor needs to visit.  Finally we have a truly gothic denouement involving Henry and his erstwhile mother-in-law, the unstable Mrs Fuller. Although the facts recorded must have happened, we could be forgiven for believing that we had fallen into a mixture of Trollope, Dickens, Austen and the Brontes.

When we set the events of the letters against a detailed analysis of the parish records and the census for 1841, then we find a truly exciting and three-dimensional picture: a fusion of official and highly personal source material.

This document contains an account that amalgamates these two sources - letters and official archives - but not the letters themselves, since they run to about two hundred pages.  Part of the fun came from assembling the story and looking at the sources, but just as much came from transcribing the letters themselves.  Pouring over the letters, following the pen as it scratched its way over the paper over 150 years ago, hearing the train late at night just as Charlotte did as she thought about her son on the other side of the world.

This is good primary source material for anyone studying this period of social history.  I hope you find it useful, but most of all I hope you find it enjoyable.

Thanks very much to David Slade for making available photocopies of the original letters.

Any comments or questions just get in touch with me.

Martin West

Aston Upthorpe, 2002

Last updated: 29/03/02

 

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