‘I have not left my bed for 14 days’
Ellen’s letter to Dawson Turner written on this day, 18th January, 210 years ago, in 1814 is HERE.
Ellen thanked her ‘dear good friend for his two long kind letters’ and wrote about her ill health and her mother. She mentioned the weather and then she responded to Dawson Turner’s recent letter to her. Ellen’s world had closed in on her, confined as she was to her bed through illness.
At the same time, Europe had opened up again, allowing correspondence between Dawson Turner and botanists on the continent and the prospect of travel for British and Irish botanists to France, Germany and other European countries.
There are so many tantalising ‘what ifs’ in Ellen’s story. What if she had recovered her health and she had travelled to Great Yarmouth to stay with Dawson Turner and his family as planned? What if they had travelled to the continent to meet other botanists studying the same plants as they were? What if she had worked with Dawson Turner on a Lichenographia Britannica? What if she had had another eight years of ‘botanising’ or much more than that? What if she had not died aged 29 but had lived to her seventies or eighties, as was the case for many of her fellow botanists – Dawson Turner, William Jackson Hooker, James Townsend Mackay, Lewis Dillwyn and William Borrer?
Back to 1814 – the next letter in the correspondence between Ellen and Dawson Turner is a letter from Dawson to Ellen on 12th February.