Ellen’s letters
Ellen’s letters are the most important resource in discovering her story. They mean that we learn much of her story through her own words, and letters that she received and read.
The letters give an insight into her character, the family setting and her circumstances, as well as her ‘botanising’ and her strong friendship with Dawson Turner. They are also ‘period pieces’ and give a picture of aspects of everyday life in the early 1800s.
Explore Ellen’s story through her letters in blog pieces and read and listen to some extracts below. If you want to go further into Ellen’s correspondence, there is also access here to PDFs of the whole correspondence between Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner and the surviving letters between Ellen and James Mackay.
Correspondence was vitally important to botanists in the early 1800s as the main way of sharing knowledge and there were instances of strong friendships (usually between male botanists) developing through letters alone. Ellen Hutchins corresponded for over seven years with Dawson Turner, an English botanist specialising in seaweeds, mosses and lichens. One hundred and twenty letters survive from their correspondence. They developed an incredibly strong friendship and they never met. See here for information on a podcast based on their correspondence from 1812 and HERE for the recording of a Zoom performance / talk based on their correspondence in the Summer of 1811. These feature Karen Minihan reading Ellen’s letters. (The podcast is Pay what you wish and the Webinar is €6. All other resources listed here are free.)
All the letters between Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner have now been transcribed and are available here. Their correspondence is available in PDFs of each year: 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 and 1814 Individual letters and series of letters (On This Day) are available with notes through posts on the News & Stories page and see below for direct links to these and other free resources.
Ellen and James Townsend Mackay, botanist at Trinity College Dublin wrote to each other, also over a long time period, but only a handful of letters by each of them have been found. Ellen’s letters to Mackay are HERE and Mackay’s letters to Ellen are HERE.
Ellen wrote many letters to two of her brothers, and nearly fifty of these have survived, but none that they wrote to her.
Blog posts about Ellen’s letters
The four on this page below provide a good introduction.
To take the story further, there are five series of ‘On This Day’. The first has letters from 1807 when Ellen was telling her brothers that she had been ‘amusing’ herself with botany. 1807 The second has letters between Ellen and Dawson Turner in 1810 HERE The third continues the correspondence in early 1811 HERE The fourth covers late 1812 and early 1813. HERE and the fifth covers all of 1814, the last year of Ellen and Dawson Turner’s correspondence HERE There are also ‘one off’ On This Day posts, see list with links below. All the blogs have both the full text of the letter and notes explaining who’s who, what’s what and any period vocabulary.
On This Day
Many letters of Ellen’s have survived and are the most important resource in discovering her story. There are one hundred and twenty letters between her and fellow botanist, Dawson Turner. Those from Dawson Turner to Ellen are held by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and those from Ellen to Turner are at Trinity College Cambridge. Kew also has six letters from James Mackay to Ellen…
Dawson Turner, in Yarmouth, England, was preparing a book on seaweeds. He received some of Ellen’s specimens from James Mackay, assistant curator at the Botanic Gardens in Dublin. Turner was delighted and in April 1807 he sent a parcel of plants to Ellen as a thank you. This was the beginning of a seven year…
210 years ago today, Ellen wrote to her youngest brother, Sam. The following portions of the letter deal with her botanising, her attempts to get a copy of Lewis Dillwyn’s book British Confervae, a gift of plants on its way to her, and her cousin Thomas Taylor, also a botanist. Ballylickey June 18th 1807 My dear…
Ellen absorbed herself in natural history, specifically the study of plants, as a healthy outdoor occupation and something to occupy her mind as a distraction from her responsibilities of caring for her elderly and sick mother and disabled brother, and her own intermittent ill health. She often felt lonely, living fairly remotely and without anyone…
Click on the images below to see selected extracts from Ellen’s letters to the botanists Mackay and Turner, and her brothers, Samuel and Emanuel.
Listen to readings of extracts from Ellen’s letters to botanist Dawson Turner that show her character and her spirit beautifully, and which tell us something about her life and her botany.
Link for listen to extracts (1 min 30 secs.) here.
The letter extracts are read by Sarah Jane Scott, and form part of the Ellen Hutchins Heritage Trail Audio Guide produced by Abarta Heritage. See the Heritage Trail page for the full trail and guide.
See also The Early 1800s, for information on letter writing and the postal system.
See Researching Ellen for information on where Ellen’s letters are held.