Letters of Mrs Lucy Browne of Gorleston: 1835 & 1836

Two letters in the collection that I describe in The Revd William Atkinson of Kirkleatham & Cambridge (1755-1830) are filled with news from Gorleston in Suffolk.  

They were written from Gorleston on 8 May 1835 and 22 July 1836 by Mrs Lucy Browne to Mrs Elizabeth Williamson – she features in the blogpost about her uncle the Revd William Atkinson.

Mrs Lucy Browne is almost certainly the widow of William Atkinson's friend the Revd Thomas Browne, late rector of Gorleston.  Mrs Elizabeth Williamson is her friend and former neighbour, now living in Baxtergate in Whitby.

Mrs Browne's handwriting is not of the clearest, but I expect somebody who knows the area would recognise the names which my colleague has found illegible.  There are many names – her friends the Miss Brownes, Mrs Oliver, Mrs Sewell, Mr Worshop, Mr Salmon, to name a few – as Mrs Browne is anxious to keep her friend up-to-date with all the goings-on in Gorleston.  She includes such little snippets of news as:

My poor friend Mr Morrison's Death is much lamented, he was a kind friendly Man

Mrs Price is at present in the same Lodgings with Miss Tapp whose Mother is dead.  I hear the Match is quite off between Mrs P and Mr Wake. 

But I think the most tantalising bit of gossip must be about the Spalding-Astley marriage.  Mrs Browne herself was an Astley by birth, so she must have a very good source here:

You could not be more surprised than I was in the Marriage [of] Miss Astley.  Till after the sons Marriage then I thought it might take place, they have almost ever since been residing in a place that he purchased at Stockton about 17 miles from hence.  Mr Spalding is in bad health confined to a weakness [?] in his heart, and is attended by Mr Smith who recommends abstinence.  

She is never seen and I hear nothing more of her than if she was not residing in the Parish, she is certainly in a more respectable situation since her marriage, but I fear she will have reason to repent.  There is not any communication between her and her Brother, this affair has given him very much concern.  

Daniel Spalding and Mary Ann Elizabeth Astley had been married on 16 October 1834 at Gorleston.  Perhaps Mr Spalding tried abstinence – perhaps he didn't – but at any rate his health worsened and he died in June the following year at the age of 60.  In 1836, Lucy Browne wrote

the late Mr Spalding's House is still upon Sale – his Widow lives at present in part of a Farm House near [Haddiscoe?] but I hear she is going to leave shortly

Contact the North Yorkshire County Record Office at Northallerton, which holds the collection of letters, if you're interested!

Thomas Barlow Allinson writes a letter: 1836

Thomas Barlow Allinson's letter of 1836 was among the small collection mentioned in The Revd William Atkinson of Kirkleatham & Cambridge (1755-1830). These letters survived apparently by chance, but very probably because of the intervention of Mr John Gaskin, MBE, of Whitby.  He was a solicitors' clerk for many years with Buchannans of Whitby and may have come across the letters in their offices and thought them worth preserving – possibly for their unusual postal markings, as he had a keen interest in philately.  The collection is now in the Northallerton Archives.

This is the story of one of those letters, as far as we can make it out.  I say "we" because I'm indebted to my collaborator for contacting me in the first place and for all the research she has done.  I hope this chance survival from 1836 might help the people who are trying to disentangle their Allinson forebears.  The Allinsons you will meet in this blogpost lived in Whitby and near Penrith, in the parish of Dacre in Cumberland.

I'm quoting below from a transcript and I have made some alterations for readability's sake.

It's a story which begins with Dickensian echoes and goes to darker places …

Billiter Square: O.S. 1840s-1860s.  National Library of Scotland

It's 4 April 1836.  The writer of the letter is a 24 year old solicitor's clerk called Thomas Barlow Allinson.  He's an unhappy and worried young man, marked by a series of disappointments and trapped in a job he doesn't like.  When he came to London from Staffordshire in 1830, he had thought that his uncle Josiah Allinson would help him to a clerkship in a trading or banking house.  Six years later, he's still with Messrs Druce in Billiter Square off Fenchurch Street in the City of London, in a job that was supposed to be temporary.  It's the Easter vacation for the law courts, and he's writing a personal letter from his employers' offices in the City.

Thomas is only a few months younger than Charles Dickens, who is now beginning his startling career as a writer – the first instalment of The Pickwick Papers appeared in print only weeks before Thomas started his letter.  But Thomas's story has echoes of Dickens' much later and darker novels and the dark and dirty London of Bleak House is the one that Thomas knew.

Thomas is writing to a relation he has never met, a Miss Nanny Ellerby Allinson of Whitby.  He is offering her information she wants and he has carried out a favour she has asked for – and between these two sections of his long letter, he has sandwiched a tactful and carefully-written account of the financial difficulties and disappointments beneath which he, his mother and his 7 siblings are labouring.  Miss Allinson is now under something of an obligation towards him, and she might be able to help them.