5th January 1810: On This Day 215 years ago
Ellen Hutchins wrote to Dawson Turner, beginning her letter with:
How shall I thank you, my dear Sir, for your kind wish to gratify me by writing as soon as my little parcel arrived, & for the pleasure your letter gave me. Its arrival on New Year’s day I take as a good omen, & sincerely wish that this & many succeeding years may be productive of peace & health to you & those on whom your happiness depends.
There are some lovely passages in the letter, including this on mosses:
Nothing delights me more than the sight of a great rock cover’d with a variety of mosses. In winter the rich shades of green they afford are very beautiful. I have a rock in my little flower garden, the north side of which is freely covered with mosses & ferns.
You can read the whole of Ellen’s 5th January 1810 letter HERE. (The letter she received from Dawson Turner had been written on 22nd December.)
A combination of letters and books that have survived give us some details of Ellen’s story in the first few days of January 1810. On 31 December 1809, Dawson Turner had written to Ellen, beginning, in his usual style, with an incredibly long sentence apologising for the delay in responding to her with information that she had requested.
They had been corresponding for more than two years and were developing a strong friendship as well as a close working relationship over the identification of seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts. They addressed each other as ‘my dear Sir’ and ‘my dear Madam’, which was about as intimate as was acceptable at the time.
His letter begins with:
If I have been tardy, my dear Madam, beyond what I either ought to have been or intended to have been, in sending you the opinion you wished upon the different plants contained in your last parcel, impute my delay, I beg of you, to any other cause than intentional neglect, & of this alone believe me to be incapable. The real cause has been a multiplicity of business, besides which I have enjoyed during the last week the society of my friend, Mr Hooker, & have been glad to give up to him all the leisure I could spare from my necessary employments.
His letter ends with a rather poignant piece:
I finished my letter just as the clock is preparing to strike the end of 1809 & beginning of 1810, & when I consider how much advantage & pleasure I have during the course of this year derived from your correspondence I feel the value of it most forcibly & sign myself with more than usual warmth of esteem my dear Madam your obliged friend Dawson Turner Yarmouth 31st December 1809
The picture below, a watercolour by one of Dawson Turner’s daughters, Elizabeth, shows the drawing room at the Bank House in Great Yarmouth where the Turner family lived. Could the clock in the picture have been the one that was preparing to strike twelve / midnight on the last day of 1809? Or perhaps it was a tall grandfather clock in another room or the hall. (The picture is held in the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery.)
You can read the whole of Dawson Turner’s 31st December 1809 letter HERE.
On 1st January 1810, as well as receiving a letter from Dawson Turner written on 22nd December, Ellen wrote her name and the date in a Natural History book she had acquired – Charles Stewart’s Elements of Natural History. The image above shows the book and one on botany also with her name in it (and 1808 as the date). See an article about these books and Ellen’s letter of 5th January 1810 in the Irish Heritage News HERE.
The full Ellen Hutchins / Dawson Turner correspondence from 1809 is available HERE. See the Ellen’s letters page for free access to almost the full correspondence from 1807 to 1814. 1810 is the last year being worked on and should be completed by the beginning of February.
The next letter in the 1810 correspondence is from Ellen on 10th January and will be covered in a post here.
Madeline Hutchins: researcher on Ellen and her great, great grandniece
5th January 2025
