Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

Notice of Auction Sale on 25 August 1831, London Morning Post (4 August 1831), p. 4.

AL Bk 1, L. 630.

Edward B MB to EBB 5 September 1809, #1. He offers £24,000 against an asking price of £27,000.

p. 15

EBB to Elizabeth Moulton c.15 July 1810, #3. Elizabeth Moulton to EBB 18 July 1810, #4.

Bro started life as ‘Buff’, Edward B MB to EBB 5 September 1809, #1. As an unaccompanied seven-year-old, E B MB crossed the Atlantic on a ship auspiciously bearing his mother’s name. The Elizabeth’s arrival in Bristol is recorded in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal 29 September 1792, cited in Kelley and Hudson, eds, The Brownings’ Correspondence, fn. 2 to Elizabeth Moulton to EBB c.June 1826, #232. Elizabeth seems to have stayed behind because her youngest child, George Goodin, born at the end of 1789, was too young to travel; he died on 8 January 1793, just after his third birthday. R. A. Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica (Winfield, Kansas: The Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, The Browning Society, Wedgestone Press, 2000), p. 184.

Pinkie is immortalised in Thomas Lawrence’s 1794 oil portrait, now at Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Edward B MB to EBB 5 September 1809, #1.

p. 16

Mary MB to Arabella Graham-Clarke 12 May 1809, SD123. In this letter sent four months earlier to her mother, Mary both describes ‘a journey to the dear North, as the Summit of happiness’ and praises Hope End: ‘Nothing in short Ever was so picturesque and beautiful.’

Graham-Clarke co-owned the glassworks with executor, Joseph Lamb: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/42836 [retrieved 9 August 2018]. In 1774 he contributed to the subscription for a new Infirmary and in 1776 to that for the Assembly Rooms. John Charlton, Hidden Chains: The Slavery Business and North East England 1600–1865 (Newcastle: Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2008), pp. 120, 124.

In 1750 sugar, not wheat, was ‘the most valuable commodity in European trade – it made up a fifth of all European imports and in the last decades of the century four-fifths of the sugar came from the British and French colonies in the West Indies’. Clive Ponting, World History: A New Perspective (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 501.

The well-connected Arabella (b.1755) was the daughter of Roger Altham (b.1706). Called to the Bar in the year of her birth, his distinguished career included serving as Seal Keeper of the High Court of Admiralty, Registrar of the Archdeaconry of Middlesex, and for the Dean & Chapter of Westminster. In 1746 Roger married Mary Isaacson of Fenton in Northumberland; Fenton Hall later passed into John Graham-Clarke’s hands (see Charlton, op. cit., p. 121). Arabella’s elder sister Mary married Newcastle banker Aubone Surtees the Younger, and became sister-in-law to the Lord Chancellor.

Born John Graham in 1735/6, with Hull merchant relatives, Ba’s maternal grandfather came to Newcastle with the East Yorkshire Grenadier Militia, http://hector.davie.ch/misc/Graham.html [retrieved 5 July 2018]. The Rutters were merchants, master bakers, brewers, church wardens and a High Sheriff. Elizabeth Rutter died 20 August 1772.

p. 17

AL Bk 1, Ll. 1129–31.

A lengthy legal battle will follow Graham-Clarke’s death. The original will leaves his property to his wife and his two sons, and a cousin, Thomas Clarke. James Losh, a close friend although an abolitionist, testifies that he was mentally sound in 1817 when he created a codicil which added William Baker as an heir, and mentioned his five daughters. (Another son, John, takes on the running of both Newcastle business and his West Indian trade.)

The first Boulton & Watt steam-driven sugar-cane mill arrives in Jamaica in 1810; other steam mills have already been in use there for four decades. Veront M. Satchell, ‘Early use of steam power in the Jamaican sugar industry, 1768–1810’ in Transactions of the Newcomen Society vol. 67 no. 1 (1995), pp. 221–31.

Man-hours measured on the Indian subcontinent in 2003. R. N. S. Yadav, 1 Yadav, Raj Kumar Tejra, ‘Labour saving and cost reduction machinery for sugarcane cultivation’, Sugar Tech vol. 5, no. 1–2 (2003), pp. 7–10.

Graham-Clarke’s Arabella and Mayflower advertise ‘excellent accommodations for Passengers’. Newcastle Chronicle (31 January 1794).

p. 18

Edward sent his mother a tear-stained glove as a keepsake. Elizabeth Moulton to EBB c.June 1826, #232.

p. 19

Edward B MB to Philip Scarlett 30 November 1807, SD74. Edward’s father-in-law will never pay this debt; over half a century from now his own son George Goodin will be pursuing it. George Goodin Moulton-Barrett to John Altham Graham-Clarke Jr 7 January 1860, SD2317 et seq. ‘A sweet, gentle nature…’ EBB to RB 27 August 1846, #2565.

‘I rejoice…’ Mary Moulton-Barrett to EBB 4 April 1826, #229.

To say nothing of modern slavery. UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/context [retrieved 19 September 2019].

p. 20

AL Bk 1, Ll. 1132–35, 1137–38, 1143–44.

The Rt Hon C. W. Radcliffe Cooke MP is the Member for Cider.

Farm labourers receive on average less than half what building labourers are paid; in Herefordshire they earn less even than the national average.

If they have at least four children, as is usual, they can’t support their families. Gregory Clark, ‘The long march of history: farm laborers’ wages in England 1208–1850’ in New Economics Papers (24 September 2001), p. 10. https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cla:najeco:625018000000000238 [retrieved 29 July 2018].

The hop industry suffers particular transport difficulties. ‘Out of sight / The lane was: sunk so deep, no foreign tramp / Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales’ could see out. AL Bk 1, Ll. 588–90.

p. 21

London Morning Post, 1831.

EBB ‘Untitled Essay’, c.early 1840s, Kelley and Hudson, eds, The Brownings’ Correspondence vol. 1, pp. 360–62.

Elizabeth Moulton to EBB c.May 1817, #45.

To lose only one child is a remarkable achievement at a time when one child in three dies before the age of five: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality [retrieved 1 August 2018]. Mary is memorialised as a footnote to her parents’ memorial tablet on the east wall of the north transept of Ledbury Parish Church.

p. 22

EBB identifies the poodle in ‘Untitled Essay’. The miniaturist Charles Hayter paints Ba aged around nine. William Artaud paints the six eldest children in two groups of three.

William Artaud to Wager Tayler 29