Moving backward and moving on: nostalgia, significant others, and social reintegration in nineteenth-century British immigrant personal correspondence

Abstract

Nostalgia among immigrants frequently has been conceived of as a brooding and obsessive homesickness that leads to depression, lassitude, and neurotic misery among those who have left their original home and resettled elsewhere. Recent social psychological, literary and philosophical work, however, has sought a reformulation of nostalgia that instead emphasizes the positive uses to which memory, even painful memory, may be put in the effort to confront the challenges to personal identities of such massive changes in the lives of an individual as immigration. Through exploration of the letters to family members of three British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century, this essay seeks to demonstrate how symbolic representations of the personal past inscribed creatively in letter-writing may function, or alternatively fail to function, to provide associations that bridge the gaps between past and present. The past may serve up mental images of pleasant circumstances involving people, places and events that serve as metaphoric building blocks by which the mind may ultimately place the individual in new circumstances, now made more familiar by virtue of their comparability to the past. Or, the tendency toward nostalgic memory may simply be overtaken by immersion in new circumstances that work in time to lead individuals realistically to draw pleasure from the past, while understanding its declining day-to-day relevance.

Keywords:

• Immigrant letters
• British immigrants
• nineteenth century
• nostalgia
• significant others
• personal identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this essay, I cite my own work in discussing the history of personal correspondence and the theorization of that history. When citing specific letters and letter-series analyzed in my published work, however, I make reference to the original letters in their published or archived forms, and not to my published analysis of them.

2. To cite Handlin’s The Uprooted after the critical pounding it has taken over the course of the last 50 years is to risk not being taken seriously by one’s peers. For all of its errors and overstatements and such failures of perspective as deeply emotionally wrought but uncritical extrapolations from personal history, it nonetheless has a point – the inner difficulties faced by individual immigrants in electing to leave their homelands amidst the pressures of modernizing economies and cultural modernity – that has always needed understanding, and has for too long been off the agenda of historical studies. The Uprooted is a resource that needs rediscovery in the service of a more rounded social history of immigration.

3. My definitions of homesickness and nostalgia differ significantly from the most recent and comprehensive historical treatment of the subject done by an Americanist; see Matt (2011). Matt devotes significant space to international migrants, but I believe errs on casting too wide a conceptual net for homesickness in their case, conceiving of a number of complex phenomena, such as ethnic neighborhoods or re-emigration, as homesickness (Matt, 2011, pp. 141–175, 238–247). She also errs, I believe, in conceiving of homesickness and nostalgia as apart from one another to the extent the latter is conceived as a mental state that represents a successful and progressive resolution of homesickness (Matt, 2011, p. 171).

4. For discussions of the history of nostalgia and research on nostalgia in the more distant past, see Naqvi (2007), Rosen (1975), Starobinski (1966); one of the earliest medical observations of nostalgia in English (of a Welsh soldier stationed in the north of England and suffering far from his home) is Hamilton (1787).

5. There is published edition of Mary Craig Cumming’s letters home to her Irish family (Irvine, 1982). This collection is based on the archives collection (T1475/2) at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), at Belfast, Northern Ireland. There are a total of 20 letters (1811–1815) in the collection, some to her father and to her brother, but the great majority to her sister, and they are faithfully edited and included in the published collection. We cannot, of course, know whether these are the only letters Mary wrote to her family in Ireland. In this essay, I cite the archived originals, as the true and unedited documents. For Mary’s family history and biography prior to emigration, see Irvine (1982, pp. 5–7).

6. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 31 March 1812, T1475/2, PRONI.

7. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 30 August 1811, 22 September 1811, T1475/2, PRONI.

8. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 24 February 1812, 24 April 1812, 26 May 1812, 24 June 1812, 17 November 1812, 9 March 1814, 4 June 1814 and Mary Cumming to Father, 6 December 1811, T1475/2, PRONI. On her decision not to attend the ball, Mary Cumming to Margaret, 10 March 1813, T1475/2, PRONI.

9. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 9 March 1814, 4 June 1814, T1475/2, PRONI. It is a bitter irony that Mary might well have returned to Ireland only to find that after her years in Virginia, both Ireland and she herself had changed, and that the place there she so desperately coveted no longer existed. She might even have come to lament the loss of her American life. Both responses, a type of dual alienation, and in an acute form placelessness, were a not uncommon experiences among re-emigrants (Matt, 2011, pp. 170–175).

10. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 9 March 1814, 4 June 1814, T1475/2, PRONI.

11. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 4 June 1814, T1475/2, PRONI.

12. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 26 May 1812, PRONI.

13. On Petersburg in the years Mary Cumming resided there see Scott and Wyatt (1998, pp. 24, 41); Lebstock (1984, pp. 4, 160).

14. Mary Cumming to Margaret, 14 October 1814, 17 November 1814, 9 February 1815, T1475/2, PRONI. Mary’s last letter, written in 1815, was sent from Baltimore, where she had gone to seek medical care, as her condition deteriorated. William was not with her, and hence her last letter was sent to him; Mary Cumming to William, 24 March 1815, T1475/2, PRONI. She urged William, ‘Go to our native land, there you will find peace. Talk to my beloved friends of me. Tell them we will meet in a better world. If I can I will hover round and bless you wherever you go.’ Perhaps then Mary also saw herself still returning, as a spirit, to Ireland.

15. For transcriptions of the original Hartley letters, see Drake (1964, pp. 222–264), numbering 27 letters ([1858–1876?]; two written by Rebecca Hartley after Joseph’s death). Endnote references to individual Hartley letters and the page numbers in parenthesis following the letter references are to Drake’s (1964) edition. I have written about Hartley in the context of these letters and of the meanings he attached to his resettlement in the United States (Gerber, 2009, pp. 7–33). In this essay, I cite this published work in discussing Hartley, unless quoting directly from or referring explicitly to his letters.

There is an ambiguity about the identity of those addressed in these letters that reflects on who the significant others were that Hartley sought to stay connected with through correspondence. In the early years, they are sent to ‘aunt’ and ‘cousin’, but whether these are always the same people is not clear. When the more comfortably literate Rebecca Hartley takes over the chore of writing from her husband, the letters are now addressed to ‘brothers and sisters’ or some variation on that formulation. Because tone and theme in the letters do not change, I believe these to be the same people that Hartley was writing at the start of the correspondence, and that Hartley did not, in fact, for some unknown reason, correspond with his own nuclear family. Rebecca Hartley felt more comfortable addressing his family in the fond and familiar ‘brothers and sisters’ than the more distant ‘cousins’.

16. Hartley did not like writing letters, most probably because he struggled with his limited technical skills. In January, 1868, he gave up the struggle, and henceforth his wife Rebecca wrote letters to his English family. These letters were signed with some variation on ‘Rebecca and Joseph’, replacing the previous ‘Joseph Hartley’. Internal evidence indicates that these letters were collaborative in their authorship. Rebecca frequently wrote in the voice of Joseph, who appears to have been in the room while she wrote. The likelihood that the letters were collaborative is, of course, increased by the fact that they were written to Joseph’s family and kin, whom Rebecca had never met and would need his help addressing (Gerber, 2009, pp. 11–12).

17. Joseph Hartley to Hant and Cussen, 15 April 1859 (p. 230); Joseph Hartley to Cusen, 27 August 1861 (p. 235).

18. Joseph Hartley to Hant and Cousen, 3 May 1860 (p. 232). In this, Hartley mocked contemporary commentators, whose gendered explanations of homesickness among British immigrants supposed that it was largely a female malady. As Matt suggests, it is possible that expressions of resentment of immigration decisions made by husbands and fathers in their behalf seemed to these commentators to be symptoms of longing for home rather than a plausible complaint about unequal power relations between men and women (Matt, 2011, pp. 55–56).

19. Joseph Hartley to Sisters, 18 June 1866 (p. 239); Joseph Hartley to Brothers and Sisters, 5 January 1868 (p. 240).

20. Joseph Hartley to Hant and Cusen, 12 September 1858 (p. 227).

21. Joseph Hartley to Hant and Cousen, 29 December 1858 (pp. 227–228).

22. Joseph Hartley to Hant and Cousen, 29 December 1858 (p. 229).

23. Joseph Hartley to Hont and Cusen, 21 October 1860 (p. 234).

24. Joseph Hartley to Brothers and Sister, 5 January 1868 (p. 241).

25. Unsigned [probably Joseph and Rebecca Hartley] to Sister and Brother, 12 December [1868] (p. 246).

26. Rebecca and Joseph to Sisters and Brothers, 12 December [1870] (p. 248).

27. Rebecca and Joseph to Sisters and Brothers, [December] 1870 (p. 250).

28. The originals of the Archbald letters are in the History of Women Collection (HoWC), Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. There are 46 letters written over 33 years (1807–1840) in the Archbald correspondence. We have no way of knowing whether this is the sum-total of the correspondence, though it seems doubtful there were not more letters than have been preserved. For the characterization of the Little Cumbrae, see, Mary Ann Archbald to Mr McFarlane, January 1817 (HoWC).

29. Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 7 May 1830 (HoWC).

30. Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 10 August 1822 (HoWC).

31. Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald to editor, Montgomery Republican, 1818 (or 1820); and Mary Ann Archbald to Governor Dewitt Clinton, October, 1821 (HoWC).

32. Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 1817, and 13 January 1822.

33. Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald to Margaret Wodrow, 31 December 1824 (HoWC).