‘PRETTY PURGATORY’: 1783-1820 Manuscript Autobiography of an Aspiring Woman Writer & Near Contemporary of Jane Austen
Full length, c140,000 word, manuscript autobiography of a young woman writer and near-contemporary of Jane Austen whose early life was spent criss-crossing Austen’s own terrain. Looking back on the closing years of the 18th century, this is a work of social commentary, a chronicle of an aspiring intellectual young woman’s usually thwarted attempts to acquire an education and to write, a bildungsroman, and as she finds herself ‘fast approaching womanhood…’ an uncannily Austen-like narrative of her engagement with the marriage market.
Born in 1783 in Dorset, Elizabeth Ham describes a childhood passed between relatives near the seaside town of Weymouth (where the fictional Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill fell in love), visiting Bath while Austen was living there, herself settling in the city after she returned from 5 years in Ireland and finally, in her mid 30s seeing ‘the utter loneliness of the life of a Governess’ (more Jane Eyre than Jane Austen) alleviated by the bookish company (not without the suspicion of his wife) of her employer and mentor Charles Elton (yes, Mr Elton) who oversaw Ham’s publication of her first books.
The quality of Elizabeth Ham’s autobiography was recognised in the mid 20th century with the publication of a bowdlerised version (Elizabeth Ham by Herself 1783-1820, Faber and Faber) whose editor Eric Gillett patronisingly notes that ‘it has been necessary to omit nearly fifty thousand words of almost maudlin self-pity and inconsequential gossip’. Gillett’s partial edition did at least ensure that Ham is incompletely cited in several of the bibliographies of Women’s Autobiography but our full autograph manuscript allows the ambition and extent of this work to be appreciated for the first time.
In this manuscript Ham, has written an ambitious fully self-aware autobiography that acknowledges the ‘Phantasmagoria floating over my memory’ and understands that the literary recreation of herself as subject is no easy matter as she tries to ‘trace out the influences that were most active in forming the present individual ME out of the little neglected girl of my earliest remembrance’ (1.13). She is an adept with the telling phrase, surely aping Austen when she passes observations such as: ‘Mary was at that age when every year, almost every month, added a grace to her appearance, and tho’ Anne was by no means handsome she was a pretty, compact, fair-looking figure.’ And writes still more damningly of the Goodfordes of Yeovil - ‘a remarkable family, remarkable for their deformity and plainness’. Her own romantic disappointments are disposed of in the same aphoristic style: ‘We struck up a friendship almost immediately, but alas, he could not withstand the superior attractions of my friend.’
Following her short account of a peripatetic, book-starved middle class childhood in Dorset and Somerset, Elizabeth Ham’s narrative turns on the moment when she was first strapped into a corset: ‘I was stood on the window-seat whilst a man measured me for the machine… what was called half-boned [stays]… pretty purgatory’ (1.47) Red-jacketed militia men excited the teenage girl but Ham the writer looks back clear-eyed on the bizarrely passive Austenian courtship rituals of her class, walking together and sharing books with such as Mr Valentine Hewlett who ‘had been in the habit of reading out to us of a morning. This he now renewed tho I was his ONLY auditor…’ (1.175) Ham swiftly learnt (like any Jane Austen heroine) that a ball is the most hazardous of environments, particularly alongside Mr Jackson: ‘During the next dance, in the whirl of the “Poussette” a hook in the breast of his regimental Coat caught in my lace Tucker, and we were thus hooked together in the most awkward manner. Fergus Langley, who was one of the Stewards uttered the word “ominous” in my ear whilst I was trying to disengage myself’ (2.123). But there is magic too in Ham’s account of being rowed out to a Royal Navy warship moored off Weymouth: ‘the long well timed sweep of the eighteen oared Barge over the dancing waters then the petite soins of the blue-coated Beaux wrapping boat-cloths and Bunting round the Ladies’ feet… to be hoisted on board…’ 1.131. And the evenings of balls and dancing in Weymouth, complete with regular appearances from George III, sometimes in his right mind, sometimes not, are wonderfully evoked, as ‘The open windows of the Assembly room gave light on the glancing plumes of the Dancers and the softened Music mingled with the low ripple of the waves.’
Ham acknowledges the troubled times in which she lives - her brief infatuation with Napoleon Bonaparte and the return of war in 1803 when ‘The short Peace had now come to an end, and consternation began to fill the land’ (2.8) as well as the generational change in ‘so great a transition in customs and manners’. Her time in Ireland (1804-1809 in the aftermath of the Wexford Rebellion and Union of the parliaments) with its raw unfamiliar social and cultural values is a constant surprise: ‘It was quite a new life to me to receive so many new ideas. And new ideas were not hanging on every bush in these days. The face of the country too was so fresh to me!’ (2.96) A single example must stand in for the many shocks Ham recounts from Ireland, occurring as she was out walking through the little town of Ballina (County Mayo). There she stumbled on a procession of condemned men carried on ‘a common Car[riage] surrounded by Hurdles, with four Coffins, on which were seated four men, with faces as white as the flannel grave-clothes they had on... the Hangman seated in the midst of them, in a hideous Mask… playing all sorts of Pantomime tricks to amuse the Mob.’ (2.113).
Running through the narrative is the aspirant writer’s hunger for books, actively confiscated in childhood - ‘if caught the Books were taken from us.’ (1.155) - sometimes as in a tutoring job in East Coker in Somerset only available if religious in tone: ‘They lent me books, Belsham’s controversy with Bishop Worsley, and the Life of Lindsay; and at a later period, Priestley’s works.’ Ham’s craving for intellectual stimulation is apparent in her overwrought response to hearing preach the young physician and sanitary reformer Dr Southwood Smith: ‘It was a great mental treat for here was a man of undoubted genius.’ But it is in the final section of the autobiography that Ham, now in her 30s, fell under the influence of a truly bookish mentor in Sir Charles Elton in Bristol who oversaw Ham’s publication of her successful children’s book, An Infant’s Grammar, and then her long poem Elgiva (present in this collection) whose publication ends the narrative.
DESCRIPTION:
Vol I Small quarto (17x20cm) bound in half red roan over marbled boards, rubbed. Blue, lined paper stock. Title in pencil precedes Ham’s text and is written in anothe later hand: "Recollections" by Elizabeth Ham. (Great Aunt of Henrietta F Holmes and Alice Chiari Richards.’ Text written in an easily legible forward sloping cursive hand, paginated to p178. C40,000 words. Occasional corrections in Ham’s hand with additional later pencilled notes and corrections sporadically. This volume covers early childhood, Weymouth, 1783-c1802 and runs as continuous prose though divided into chapters by Gillett in his edition.
VOLUME II Small quarto, half green roan over marbled boards. ‘“Recollections” by Elizabeth Ham’ precedes text, Britannia watermark, pp276 - c 60,000 words. Two ink plans inserted: 1 Ham’s family house at Ballina fronting onto the River Moy; 2 Map of the area around Ballina.
Largely relating to c1803-1808. The text begins ‘One whole Book finished before I am out of my teens’ - referring back to Vol I which finishes neatly at the bottom of the final leaf - and making all but certain that this is an autograph manuscript.
VOLUME III Small quarto, half blue roan over marbled boards. ‘Vol. 3. “Recreations” by Elizabeth Ham.’ pp274 - c60,000 words. 1803-1823, Ireland, Bath, Guernsey, East Coker, Bristol.
ADDITIONAL ITEMS:
[Elizabeth Ham] Elgiva, or The Monks. An Historical Poem, 1824, Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, London, Half calf over textured cloth covered boards. Inscribed on front pastedown: ‘Poem written by Elizabeth Ham, revised by Sir C[harles] Elton, bound and preserved by Anne Ham. 1862’. Among the ‘Minor Pieces’ are poems inspired by Irish myth and events in her native Somerset and Dorset, notably Corfe Castle.
COMMONPLACE BOOK of ‘Miss Ellen Ham, Wilson Street, Bristol’, small quarto, c75pp, conventional contents, Byron, Death of Sir John Moore, Miss Opie etc. This is Elizabeth Ham’s niece on her brother’s side - mentioned as an infant in the autobiography..
PROVENANCE: Inscriptions and associated items by Elizabeth Ham’s niece and great nieces, Ellen Ham, Anne, Ham etc, suggest that this collection of manuscripts and the single printed book was retained in Ham’s family for several generations. We acquired the MS from a Welsh bookseller who bought it from a junk-shop owner who was clearing longheld stock.