19 May 1795

Letter 4. Eliza Gould at South Molton to Benjamin Flower at Bridge Street, Cambridge, Tuesday, 19 May 1795.[1]

Southmolton May 19 1795

Dear Sir

As my last paper has not yet come to hand, which I should have rec’d yesterday morning, I have been rather uneasy, lest you might have enclos’d in it an answer to mine, dated I think the 27^th of March. Your acknowledgement of it together with your promise sometime since of writing again, has given me some reason to suspect that the letter has been miscarried or intercepted.

As you have heretofore found the newspaper a safe mode of conveyance, you might probably have adopted it now, & perhaps it has been supposed at this time, to undergo an examination—the paper has many times come irregularly to hand, which I did not notice thinking the cause might originate at any other post office than Molton tho I could not but wonder that one of the two papers always came—that which I send to Northmolton was irregularly received about a fortnight since.[ii]

The person who keeps the post office here is starongly leagued with my adversaries, & would I doubt not, take any undue measure to gratify their invidious curiosity—this I have reason to suppose—the last letter which I wrote you, he took particular notice of, & remark^d on the size and height—as few of the Moltonians are strangers to the name of M^r Flower[iii]—he observed particularly to whom it was address’d—soon after this I wrote to Lord Fortescue, on the subject of his interference for which (in order to vindicate my conduct) I felt myself oblig’d to address him. I form^d no other than what I thought a reasonable wish, & desired he would candidly investigate the matter, & inform me, why he had taken those active (& I might have added tho I did not) arbitrary measures against me; but he has not condescended to return any answer, wisely considering for his own sake, & that of his adherents that to be explicit in this instance, would tend more fully to convict them & himself. In consequence of my writing his Lordship a variety of conjectures have been form’d—& some surmise, that I was tempted to act in this manner, through the persuasion of my abettors, one of whom perhaps they consider you.[iv] However in regard to the suppression of the paper &c I shall suspend my judgment, untill I hear from you, & in order to act with more certainty, I shall put out of their power to retain this, having an opportunity of sending to Honiton to morrow, I shall desire a friend I have there, to put it in the office. In order to elude any unwarrantable curiosity here, (& on the receipt of this you will better know whether I have a reason for acting this cautiously) I shall be glad when you favor me with an answer, if you will address M^r Feltham Rich’d Northcote Esq^r, Honiton, Devon—by your marking the Letter in the corner thus X, he will know it to be mine, & forward it accordingly—you might (not knowing the general character of the people here) wonder at my precaution. I would not wrong them—but after the many mean actions they have had recourse to, (& very many have I detected) I find the necessity of being strictly on my guard. I would have sent you the copy of my Letter to Lord Fortescue, but time will not permit[v]—& I am really ashamed to send you a letter so replete with interlineations &c I have written in haste, & it did not occur to me that I ought to write you on this subject till the moment of my addressing you.

I have been at Tiverton lately, it looks very gay, I think, & appears to me wonderfully improved; some streets especially. I pass’d a day with your dear Friend & mine, M^rs Dennys[vi] her prisoner now no longer, yet I could not but recollect the state [of] uncertainty to which I was once reduced there. M^r Hogg[vii] was of the party. M^rs D appeared in high good humour, & altogether I pass’d an agreeable day—they are making Ashley[viii] a pretty place, by raising the roof a story higher, & adding a wing to the building, she means I believe chiefly to reside there in the summer. Duryard[ix] is advertised for sale—& I am told that M^r Dennys & M^r Hogg, mean to build a manufactory, on their own account somewhere near Bolham[x]—the Dennys’s are all in deep mourning for old M^rs Gould, of Trencherloo (M^rs Barings mother).[xi] Miss Dennys[xii] is much altered for the better, she is grown fat & handsome, & has acquired that steadiness & pleasing manner, which agreeably surprized me. Belfield is yet at home,[xiii] & still under the direction of the old Lady of the Bedchamber, M^rs Betty, & more is the pity, for he is a beautiful boy, & of a charming disposition—tho a [illegible] child, thro her over indulgence, in the Road to [illegible] she acts the part of sub Governor (or I ought to said sub [illegible] his lessons, repetitions &c. & helps him to [illegible] as usual. Denny[xiv] has left Hackney & is with M^r Coleridge at Ottery,[xv] tho I hear he is soon to assist in the counting House, which is since the fire removed to M^r Hoggs—& the old one, converted into a play room for the children. I was twice at Tidcombe, or I might say Liberty Hall, without speaking seditiously.[xvi] What an Honor to Society & himself, is M^r Lardner,[xvii] & how worthy the appellation of a truly good Man—would that more in this persecuting world were of this happy description. M^rs Lardner looks & smiles good-nature, & her manner unaffected & engaging. Tidcombe appears to me the center of peace & Happiness—they wish’d me to have staid some time there, & desired I would make it my Home when I visited that neighbourhood again. I mean to go to Tiverton &c before I leave Devonshire. M^r Q-[xviii] spoke much of M^r Flower, for whom he expres^d a sincere regard—he ask^d me when I would in his name say, that he hop’d you would peruse & reference carefully, before you inserted—for that he often was anxious for you—I believe those were merely words. What do you think of our Irish plan, I believed I asked you in my last—my father wishes to settle in Dublin, he prefers it to any other part of Ireland, because there he has some connection. I shall go from hence at midsummer, have defer^d it till that time thinking that the public affairs of Ireland might be in some degree adjusted.[xix] I shall write my friends in Tiverton & the neighborhood before I leave England—this I have promised to do.

M^r Mar^tn Dunsford & his brother[xx] are going to build a mill at Bampton, on M^r Heathfields plan—in order I hear to throw into some line of Trade, M^r George Dunsfords sons,[xxi] & [illegible] of late M^r Besly[xxii]—do you ever hear any thing of M^r Salter[xxiii] whether he is pleased with his change or not. I have been trying to recollect whether I can think of anything respecting your Tiverton friends particularly interesting, or worth sending so far as Cambridge but nothing occurs—& I subscribe myself abruptly

Your sincere Friend

Eliza Gould

Wednesday Morn^g

*the post is in but no paper come

Notes

Text: Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: Politics, Romance, and Religion: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould, 1794-1808 (Aberystywth: National Library of Wales, 2008), pp. 11-16.

[1] This letter was begun on Tuesday, but Eliza did not finish it until Wednesday morning. This is not an uncommon occurrence in the Flower Correspondence. In Flower’s hand on the back page of the letter is written, “Gould May 29, 95,” which is most likely the date he received the letter.

[2] During the height of anti-radicalism in England in the 1790s, the mail of suspected radicals was routinely intercepted and examined by local authorities and government agents, largely as a consequence of the Traitorous Correspondence Bill of April 1793.

[3] A reference not only to Flower’s reputation as editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, but also to his former role as an employee of the Tiverton firm of Smale and Dennys from 1785 to 1791.

[] In January 1794, Luke Pennington, one of Flower’s employees at the Intelligencer, was charged with making “seditious” statements after having consumed several drinks at a pub. The Cambridgeshire Grand Jury dismissed the charges against him, which greatly pleased Flower, who viewed the entire episode as harassment of his paper for taking an anti-government stance. “The impartial investigation of a Grand Jury,” he wrote on 18 January 1794, “has ... happily defeated the scheme and given, we trust, a salutary check to those wasps of society, who have for this twelvemonth past, in various parts of the kingdom, been stinging their fellow creatures by prosecutions of this kind.”

[5] See letter 6 for Eliza’s copy of her letter to Fortescue.

[6] The Dennyses, for whom Eliza served as a governess, 1792-94 (see Introduction, xxvii), were a prominent Tiverton family. Nicholas Dennys (1752-1840) came to Exeter from London in 1772 to work in the woolen trade, eventually joining with William Smale to form the firm of Smale and Dennys. In 1778 Dennys married Lucy Lardner (1753-1849) of Wandsworth, Surrey, daughter of William Lardner, surgeon; she was the sister of the James Lardner mentioned in the above letter. In 1778 the Dennyses purchased the Ashley estate, near Tiverton, where their five children were born: Nicholas (1781-1868); Lucy (b. 1782); Belfield (b. 1783); Frances (b. 1787); and Lardner (1791-1864) (Burke 201). Both Smale and Dennys were Dissenters, attending the Steps (Independent) Meeting House, where Flower worshiped during his time in Tiverton. John Gabriel Stedman (1744-97) also attended the Steps Meeting. His Journal records numerous meetings with Dennys, Smale, and Flower, all of whom participated in local efforts for Parliamentary reform during the 1780s and early 1790s.

[7] John Hogg was a Devon banker. Formerly, he had been a Presbyterian (Unitarian) minister, first at Sidmouth (1759-71) and later at the Mint Meeting in Exeter (1772-89); he also served as a tutor at the Exeter Academy (Murch 402; Register of the Births). Hogg edited the Unitarian Nathaniel Lardner’s posthumous work, The history of the heretics of the two first centuries (1780). He appears on several occasions in Stedman’s Journal, but Stanbury Thompson sometimes confuses the elder Hogg with his son, Joseph, a merchant (UBD 4.619). Stedman writes on 20 December 1786, “Mrs. Dennys & Hogg dined with us &c.” (Thompson, Journal 306). Thompson identifies this individual as Joseph Hogg, but since Joseph would have only been fifteen at the time, it seems likely that it was his father who attended the dinner. In a footnote Thompson cites a journal entry from another individual concerning a dinner party at the Dennyses, this one on 14 July 1793, in which “Mr. Hogg, a young Jacobin, said something improper about the army. The Colonel [Stedman] frightened him, dragged him back and made him join the party again. Mr. Dennys &c are not displeased as it may make Hogg more careful” (Thompson, Journal 342, n. 3). This was most likely Joseph Hogg, who would have been twenty-two in 1793.

[8] Ashley, the Dennys’s home, lay on the outskirts of Tiverton; it was once part of Ashley Park, a 1600-acre preserve dating back to the reign of Henry VIII. The house, unfortunately, collapsed in late 1794, which explains the recent building projects mentioned by Eliza. The Dennyses had rebuilt Ashley at least once prior to 1794.

[9] Duryard House, now a part of Exeter University in the parish of St. David’s, is an impressive brick house dating from the early 1700s.

[10] According to Dunsford’s Historical Memoirs, during the late 1780s Smale and Dennys purchased large tracts of land in and around Bolham, a neighboring village to Tiverton (284). In 1791 Dennys joined with Thomas Heathfield (a prominent mill-owner in Sheffield), Smale, and James Lardner to build a cotton mill in Tiverton (Thompson, Journal 336). Smale died on 4 August 1792, not long after the opening of the Tiverton mill. In 1798 Dennys joined with Heathfield, Richard Lardner, Henry Dunsford and several others in creating a new business called Heathfield, Dennys and Co. Three years later Nicholas Dennys retired, the business now becoming Heathfield, Lardner and Company (Harding 1.202). The fate of the proposed business venture between Dennys and Hogg, mentioned above, is unknown. Nicholas Dennys was still listed in 1805 as a “manufacturer of woollen goods” in Tiverton (Holden’s [1805]: 2.276), but not long afterward he experienced severe financial setbacks. In February 1809, he and his family left Tiverton for Teignmouth to join James Lardner, who had already moved there. Nicholas Dennys died at Teignmouth in 1840.

[11]. Mrs. Gould was the wife of William D. Gould. Their only son died without issue in 1788. Their daughter, Margaret, married Charles Baring of Courtland, Exmouth. Upon Mrs. Gould’s death in 1795, her grandson, William Baring, assumed the name of Gould and continued the family’s residence at Lew Trenchard, a large estate on the edge of Dartmoor (“Gould Family”). Baring-Gould married Diana Amelia Sabine, and their grandson was the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1923), for many years rector of the parish of Lew Trenchard and author of the popular hymn, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (“Gould Family”). Whether Eliza was related to these Goulds is unknown.

[12] Lucy Dennys would have been thirteen at the time of this letter. She married the Rev. Richard Lane in February 1800 at St. Peter’s Church, Tiverton (Cambridge Intelligencer 1 March 1800).

[13] Belfield Dennys, eleven years of age at the time of the above letter, attended Blundell’s School in Tiverton from 22 October 1790 to 19 October 1792. He re-entered on 15 May 1793, and completed his studies there on 29 August 1795.

[14] Apparently this was the name used to refer to the oldest son, Nicholas, aged fifteen at the time of this letter. He attended Blundell’s School in Tiverton from 14 February 1787 to 19 October 1792, after which he attended Newcombe’s Academy in Hackney, London. He eventually settled in London, living first at Savage Gardens, Trinity Square, and later at Cambridge Terrace, Regent’s Park.

[15] George Coleridge (1764-1828), after graduating from Wadham College, Oxford, became a schoolmaster at Newcombe’s Academy in 1784. In late 1794 he returned home to Ottery St. Mary as Chaplain Priest and Headmaster of the same grammar school at which his father had served. Apparently, Nicholas Dennys, Jr., had been George Coleridge’s student at Hackney and was now attending his school at Ottery. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was George Coleridge’s younger brother. During his final year as a student in Cambridge, S. T. Coleridge became friends with Flower, who published some of Coleridge’s earliest poems in the Intelligencer, as well as Coleridge’s poetical collaboration with Robert Southey, The fall of Robespierre, an historic drama (1794). Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and others, in the fifteenth century, printed by Flower in 1794, included the first printed version of Coleridge’s “Monody on Chatterton.” Coleridge‘s admiration for Flower was sufficient for the former to recommend in the final edition of his short-lived paper, The Watchman (1796), that his readers switch their subscriptions to Flower’s Intelligencer. Flower also published works by two of Coleridge’s college friends: Charles V. LeGrice (1773-1858) and Joseph Hucks (1772-1800).

[16] Eliza is probably referring here to the popular ballad opera Liberty Hall (1785) by Charles Dibdin (1745-1814), English songwriter and theatrical entrepreneur. Set in a beautiful estate, much like Tidcombe, the opera’s opening air echoes Eliza’s good-humored sentiments about the Lardners’ estate:

Here’s the true seat of Liberty;

We sit, sing, chat, and sip our tea,

Dispense the modish topics round,

While jest, and jibe, and joke abound;

Abusing, as it serves our ends,

The state, the weather, and our friends.

Later, in Act II, the leading character, Sir Ephraim Rupee, speaking to his servant, says of his house, “Every thing here wears an air of tranquillity, and the place announces itself by the title you have given it-the Mansion of Content.”

[17] James Lardner, Esq. lived at Tidcombe, located about a mile from Tiverton. His brother, Richard, resided in Peter Street, Tiverton (UBD 4.619). James Lardner left Tiverton for Teignmouth sometime in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Richard went bankrupt in 1809, but remained in Tiverton.

[18] William Quartley of Stallenge Thorn.

[19] Eliza is referring to the unrest within Ireland that developed after the rise of the radical Society of United Irishman in 1791. Led by Wolfe Tone, the United Irishmen were secretly working throughout 1795 to gain the assistance of France in their struggle to rid Ireland of British rule. Flower gave extensive coverage of the political situation in Ireland throughout his years with the Intelligencer, discussing in his editorial on 18 April 1795 the “serious tumults in different parts” of that country.

[20]Martin Dunsford (1744-1807), author of Historical memoirs of the town and parish of Tiverton, in the County of Devon (1790), and his brother, George (d. 1822) were woolen merchants in Tiverton. They came from a Devonshire family rich in the traditions of religious and political Dissent.

[21]According to his obituary, George Dunsford suffered “many domestic afflictions and severe pecuniary losses in the latter years of his life, which greatly reduced his circumstances” and most likely that of his sons (“Dunsford” 245). Martin Dunsford did not escape the effects of the decline in woolen manufacturing either, becoming bankrupt in 1802 (Cambridge Intelligencer 16 October 1802).

[22]Francis Besly, sergemaker and freeman of Tiverton (UBD 4.619).

[23]William Salter, Tiverton “printer and perfumer” (UBD 4.620). In 1795-96 he served as the Tiverton agent for Flower’s Intelligencer (see letter 6). Like Flower and his other Tiverton friends, Salter was also a political reformer.