We have recently published five new blog posts on Electronic Enlightenment. These blogs cover a range of insightful topics and will be linked through our announcement newsletter, offering fresh insights and valuable information to you.
Each blog is crafted to enlighten and engage, providing you with information and discussions on the history of the Barham Family, Charles Bertram, William Stukeley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, and the history of slavery through the letters of well-known historical figures. Check out the excerpts below and read the full blog posts and more on Electronic Enlightenment.
“The Plantation Papers of the Barham Family” by Tessa van Wijk
After the survey of 300 letters and some legal papers, the 16 letters for this mini-edition were chosen to represent seven themes relating to the management of the sugar plantations and, specifically, the enslaved workers. The seven themes present in these letters are the following: (1) providing for enslaved people, (2) efficiency and purchasing of enslaved workers, (3) punishment and reward of enslaved workers, (4) enslaved workers rebelling, revolting and/or running away, (5) pregnancy, birth, and enslaved children, (6) illness & health of enslaved workers, and, lastly, (7) (anti-)slavery debate and sentiment….
Several of the 16 letters from the Barham Papers’ Jamaica Correspondence added to Electronic Enlightenment can tell us about the health and well-being of the enslaved people working on the Mesopotamia Estate and Island Estate….
These letters also shed light on important political developments at the time. Specifically, when it comes to the rise of anti-slavery sentiment, abolition, and the unstable political situation in European colonies.
Read the full blog here.
“Colonial Myth-making and Anti-Scottish Sentiment in Charles Bertram’s Letters to William Stukeley” by Sophie Dickson
Charles Bertram urged William Stukeley to forgive his faults. These faults, he admitted, were his undying love for antiquities and his rude intrusion into Stukeley’s acquaintance. However, Bertram’s interruption of Stukeley’s professional and social circle birthed a collection of 32 letters spanning from 1746 to 1764, later collated by Stukeley. Early in their communication, Bertram revealed the spectacular discovery of what he claims were fifteenth-century manuscript fragments written by a “Ricardi Monachi Westmonasteriensis.” The manuscript detailed lost geographical information of Roman Britain, assembled from various contemporary Roman sources such as Beda, Orosius, Pliny, and Ptolemy. Through their correspondence, Bertram gradually shared fragments of the manuscript with Stukeley until its publication in 1757 as De Situ Britanniae(The Description of Britain).
Read about the manuscript here.
“Epistolary Form in the Letters from Charles Bertram to William Stukeley” by Olivia Flynn
Using the collection of 32 letters written by the literary forger Charles Julius Bertram to the Antiquarian William Stukeley between 1747 and 1763 as a case study, Flynn explores the different sub-genres of letters. The purpose and subject matter of letters of the eighteenth century vary greatly, according to the purpose and style of the letter. They included the consolation letter, familial letters, business letters, petitions, political missives, public letters to newspapers and periodicals, and, of course, love letters.
This blog post focuses on the introductory letter and the often overlooked medical diagnosis letter.
Read the blog post here.
“Slavery in the Electronic Enlightenment Collection” by Tessa van Wijk
According to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert to Voltaire [François Marie Arouet], 14 April 1760, the metaphorical use of terms such as ‘esclavage’ and ‘esclave’ is typical of eighteenth-century French authors. The connotation with the enslavement of African people or the Triangular Slave Trade was a lot less frequently present. Rather, the words ‘esclave’ and ‘esclavage’ are more often defined in opposition to freedom and liberty: “A slave, for the eighteenth century, is someone who was deprived of their freedom, whatever the form or cause of this deprivation”….
The top five letter writers with the most letters in the final list of results are Simon Taylor (57), Edmund Pendleton (42), William Cowper (23), William Fitzhugh (21), and Francis Fauquier (15). Except for William Cowper, these men all had interests in the continuation of the slave trade and slavery, and their letters can mostly be found in categories relating to the owning of and trading in enslaved people….
In Edmund Pendleton’s letters, we can clearly see that enslaved people are considered as personal property. Pendleton was an American plantation-owner and slaveowner, as well as an attorney. Several of his letters in Electronic Enlightenment discuss legal affairs, particularly inheritances.
Read the full blog post here.
“Phillis Wheatley Peters” by Kate Davies
Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) is one of the most important books to be published anywhere in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It is important because it is a book written by a black woman who was very well aware that her new professional status as an author held the key to her own freedom. It is important because it is a work of creative intellect, whose young writer displayed her imaginative prowess while revealing her adroit mastery of the contemporary literary forms of lyric, elegy, and ode. It is important because it is a work of faith that spoke profoundly to a committed culture of evangelical Christianity, out of which the humanitarian movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery was beginning to emerge….
What did this book contain? In her Poems, Wheatley Peters gathered a substantial collection of thirty-nine pieces, including a range of elegies and odes, and hymns. There were poems about the inspiration of breaking dawns, soft evening light and the power of memory; poems which took their cue from Old Testament verses; poems urging religious virtue upon wayward Harvard students; and poems in which Wheatley Peters shared the grief of members of her congregation at Boston‘s Old South Meeting House at the sad loss of friends and family members. One poem was importantly dedicated to Scipio Moorhead, the talented Boston artist, who, like Wheatley Peters, was one of the approximately 5,000 enslaved black people then living in Massachusetts.
Read the complete blog post here.
These excerpts have been lightly edited to fit the OUPblog’s style guide. No content was changed, and the full blog posts can be found at each of the above hyperlinks and on Electronic Enlightenment.
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