Eliza Fenwick

Early Modern Feminist

Lissa Paul

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781644530108, 9781644530092
• eBook ISBN: 9781644530115
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This captivating biography traces the life of Eliza Fenwick, an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country as writer, teacher, and school owner.Lissa Paul brings to light Fenwick's letters for the first time to reveal the relationships she developed with many key figures of her era, and to tell Fenwick's story as depicted by the woman herself. Fenwick began as a writer in the radical London of the 1790s, a member of Mary Wollstonecraft's circle, and when her marriage crumbled, she became a prolific author of children's literature to support her family. Eventually Fenwick moved to Barbados, becoming the owner of a school while confronting the reality of slavery in the British colonies. She would go on to establish schools in numerous cities in the United States and Canada, all the while taking care of her daughter and grandchildren and maintaining her friendships through letters that, as presented here, tell the story of her life.Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

1

Daughter of Methodism

At age seventy-four, Eliza wrote to her twenty-one-year-old friend, Reuben Moffat (1818–1894), reflecting generally on family life, values, and ties that bind. She reminisced about her childhood, claiming that her own “family ties” had all too early been torn apart. “They scarcely ever existed,” she wrote, “for being when almost an infant the only remaining one of 16, I had no brothers or sisters to struggle with me for supremacy of affection or yet to check my grasping self-love by the realisement of mutual sacrifices.” Warming to her theme, Eliza developed her affecting family portrait: “Losing my father while very young & continuing a spoiled child of prosperity I still had sense enough to see the beauties of family union & often in my day dreams have pictured to myself a group of brothers & sisters & fancied how I should divide & distribute among them the lavish supplies which were mistakenly lavished on me” (EF to Reuben Moffat, 26 May 1840). Everything about the picture has the ring of authenticity—a perfect backstory for the cultured person Eliza was at seventy-four. As a gentlewoman who had been able to rely on her own resources, having been well-educated and well-nurtured, she fit the profile of a woman whose girlhood had been shaped by a moneyed, stable, loving, intellectual late-Enlightenment family. A talented writer, fluent in French, accomplished in music and dancing, and well-versed in art, literature, philosophy, and politics, Eliza must have had the look and sound of a “spoiled child of prosperity,” the sole recipient of “lavish supplies.” Any man, husband, or father assumed to have been a part of Eliza’s early life in Britain would have been relegated by her young American correspondent Reuben Moffat—or by any other correspondent—to some distant, misty past. Far removed from the genteel 1770s girlhood to which Eliza alluded, her story must have made matter-of-fact sense to Reuben, something to be taken at face value. The historical evidence, however, suggests a different story.

In order for Eliza to have been “almost an infant” when she was the “the only remaining of 16,” her fifteen phantom siblings had to have died before she was born or when she was very young. But the dates don’t appear to work. Eliza’s father, Peter Jaco (1728–81), did not marry Eliza’s mother, Elizabeth Hawksworth (1727–94), until 1763. He would have been thirty-five and she thirty-six and that just doesn’t leave enough time for so many other children to have been born and died while Eliza was still “almost an infant” (she was born in 1766), unless Hawksworth had borne and lost most of those children before marrying Jaco.

The only clear information about Jaco’s meeting with and marriage to Hawksworth comes primarily from a group of letters in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, where some of the Methodist archives are kept. According to a note in the manuscript, the letters written by Jaco in the 1760s to his friend George Merryweather (another of John Wesley’s itinerant preachers) are “copies made from the originals” and given by Merryweather’s daughter to an early Methodist archivist, James Werrell, in 1829.1 In a letter dated February 26, 1764, Jaco refers to his future wife as “Mrs. Hawksworth,” suggesting that she might have been previously married, but even that is not certain because the honorific “Mrs.” was commonly used in the period for older women in general. Mrs. Hawksworth was a housekeeper and what was called a “class leader,” a kind of lay, spiritual den mother, at the Methodist headquarters in Bristol, the Bristol New Room.2 Built in 1742, the New Room was the meeting place John and Charles Wesley established after the Methodist societies, formed just four years earlier in 1739, had started to expand exponentially. What the Wesley brothers had needed was a central place of congregation, a venue suited for Christian worship and study, but not designated as a church.3 Although Charles and John Wesley did encourage women who showed talent to take up leadership roles in their local religious study groups, Mrs. Hawksworth must have been particularly gifted in order to take her place at the center of Methodist life in Bristol. Jaco would have regularly visited the New Room as it was the organizational hub for the movement, the place where the evolving brotherhood of Methodist preachers would gather. It is where the Wesley brothers planned preaching “circuits” to the clusters of towns to which they would send their small rotating teams of preachers. And it was in the New Room that the traveling preachers would find a little respite before going on the road again.

Jaco, in the 1764 letter to Merryweather, sketched the events leading up to his marriage. He began with a profile of his ideal mate: “Ever since I first knew God,” he wrote, “I thought that an agreeable companion must certainly sweeten many of the afflictions incident to this fluctuating state of things, & that this companion must be truly pious, independent of Riches, beauty or any personal accomplishment as any of these seldom meet in the same person. I therefore determined to chuse the former and leave all other events to God.” Elizabeth Hawksworth fit the bill. She also fit Wesley’s profile of the ideal candidate for the position of an itinerant’s mate: “A preacher’s wife,” says Wesley, “should be a pattern of cleanliness, in her person, clothes and habitation. Let nothing slatternly be seen about her, no rags, no dirt, no litter. And she should be always at work, either for herself, her husband or for the poor.”4 In describing his first encounter with his future wife, Jaco used terms that were almost identical to Wesley’s:

Accordingly, four years ago [presumably in 1760 since the letter is dated 1764] I became acquainted with Mrs. Hawksworth the Housekeeper at Bristol Room, a serious, useful woman, & after a critical observation of her conduct I thought she was the most likely woman to make my Life agreeable that I had ever met with. After some time I communicated my thoughts to Mr. Charles Wesley who told me that it would be a sin to remove her from the place she was in, that she was surprisingly blest in her classes, and in short gave me so much discouragement that I determined I would make no more confidents, but as she had nothing and I did not like her [text is unclear] to the church, we agreed to wait for a more favourable prospect.

Charles Wesley was obviously reluctant to lose someone who was contributing actively to the spiritual life, as well as presumably to the housekeeping, of the community in Bristol.5 A formal covenant from 1752 survives in the Methodist Archives, outlining “The Rules of an Assistant,” explicitly discouraging itinerant preachers from marriage:

1. 1. Be diligent never be unemployed for a moment.
2. 2. Be serious. Let your motto be “To worship to the Lord.”
3. 3. Converse cautiously and sparingly with women.
4. 4. Take not considerable step toward marriage without first acquainting us.6

Peter Jaco followed the rules. He had consulted Charles Wesley about Elizabeth Hawksworth and had been refused. He took the advice to heart and waited for two years until “a more favourable prospect,” in the shape of a business opportunity, made him feel that he could generate enough income to support a wife. He explained what happened next:

Abt [about] two years ago [1762], some of my London friends communicated a scheme to me under the seal of secrecy which when carried into execution would in all probability being exceedingly profitable to the proprietors in which I was to have a fourth part; and added to this had the advantage of preferring any person I thought fit to look after the affair with a Pension of £50 per annum.

Jaco obviously felt that with an income of £50 he would have enough to support Hawksworth on his own. As Paul Langford explains in A Polite and Commercial People, fifty pounds was the magic number in the mid-eighteenth century, as it was “treated as the minimum at which it was possible to aspire to membership of the middling rank.”7 There are no further specifics of the “scheme” in question, but contemporary documents suggest that a common venture entered into by preachers was to purchase a share in a ship. There is, however, a marginal note in the manuscript explaining that “several old preachers engaged in secular concerns in which most of them failed of success,” and that, “They were tempted to this from the slender allowance granted for board, travelling & most of them being poor men.”8

Jaco had no income other than the support provided by the Connexion,9 the name for the members of the growing numbers of Methodist preachers in the mid-eighteenth century. They were literally a connected group, defined by their “connexion” to the Wesley brothers and to each other. The money raised in the individual study groups they served supported the material needs of preachers on the road. Accounts were kept and they show, for example, that the new shoes Jaco needed in 1763 cost the Connexion six shillings.10 The glaringly unavoidable conclusion derived from extant letters and the Methodist accounts demonstrates that, as an itinerant preacher, Jaco was not a man of wealth. Eliza’s claim that she was “a spoiled child of prosperity” therefore seems more wish fulfillment than fact.

With the promise of an income, Jaco felt able to move forward with his desire to marry Mrs. Hawksworth. “I now thought the way made plain,” he says in the letter, “and accordingly to our agreement married Mrs. H. last May.” Unfortunately, as is typically the case with get-rich-quick schemes, things didn’t work out as planned. “But alas!” he proclaims, “How transitory all human prospects!” He confides that in July 1763, two months after the marriage, he “received a letter from [his] fellow adventurers,” saying that there were problems and that the scheme “would never go forward.” He says that: “This together with a letter from my wife that she was with child and was uneasy in her mind that she was absent from me, threw me into greater difficulty.” At that point, Jaco was ready to quit the Connexion and go back to his home in Cornwall where he had been involved in his family business, a local pilchard fishery. Mr. Wesley, however, reluctant to lose one of his itinerants, decided to support the marriage of Peter Jaco and Elizabeth Hawksworth, especially as she was pregnant. Jaco concludes:

But blessed be God, Good Mr W had reclaimed me from such a desperate procedure, and roused me to my duty by shewing the dreadful consequences which (he thinks) will infallibly attend my deserting the work. I am now more satisfied in my mind, and find unspeakable serenity in my soul. My wife is on her way to me, and hope the storms I have meet with will be followed by a heartily said “Amen.”

The letter indicates that the marriage took place in May 1763, as Elizabeth had written in July that she was pregnant, and if she was traveling to her husband at the end of February she would have been about to give birth.

The next surviving letter, written six months later and dated September 12, 1764, confirms that a daughter was born to them, but this child was probably not Eliza. Although I’ve not been able to find a birth record for her, she always claimed her birthday to be February 1, and when she identified her age, the math would put the year of her birth at 1766 (although the date carved on her gravestone is 1767). Unless Eliza consistently lied about her age, it does appear that she had one older sister, likely born in early March 1764. Given the absence of official documentation, I can only say that there are no references in any of Jaco’s surviving letters to another pregnancy or another child.

In the September 1764 letter, Jaco also explains that he had been ill with St. Anthony’s Fire (a painful fungal infection related to contaminated rye or wheat). He then provides a glimpse of family life:

When I began to mend my dear little girl fell into the small pox and was soon given over by the doctor that attended her. Her affliction so affected her mother who was obliged to attend her night and day, that she had a very bad time, so that our house has been an infirmary. Blessed be the Father of Mercies we are all at present in a hopeful way, and trust that a few weeks will set us on our legs again.

A few months later, in a December 1764 letter, Jaco wrote with a brief update: “My little family are much better thro mercy.” Then there is a gap. Nothing more appears about his domestic life in the extant record for several years.

It wasn’t until May 14, 1771 that Peter Jaco next wrote about his family. In a letter to Charles Wesley he said he had heard that Wesley’s children had survived their recent illnesses, and that he could commiserate as his own “less & little family” had experienced a similar cycle of illness and recovery, but without—as the reference to “less” suggests—the same completely happy ending. The sign-off to the letter registers loss: “My little family,” he says, “& the McCownleys and the preachers join me in much affection to yourself, Mrs. Wesley and the young ones.”11 The likelihood that the child born in 1764 had died sometime before 1771 is confirmed by John Lenton, who in his detailed study of Wesley’s itinerants says that “the maintenance for [only] one child appears in the (defective) London stewards accounts 1766/7 and 1774/5.”12 That information would accord with Eliza’s birth on February 1, 1766 and make sense of her being the only living child of her parents by 1771.

That Eliza grew up to be the only surviving daughter of Jaco is certain and can be demonstrated through two pieces of evidence. One is a letter, dated October 24, 1779, to Richard Rodda (another preacher), in which Jaco writes first about his failing health. As the records in the Methodist archives indicate, Jaco had been based in London for some time in the late 1770s, as the rough life of an itinerant had obviously taken its toll on him physically. Despite his deteriorating health, he continued to preach: “[A]nd the assistant excepted,” he says, “I labour more than any preacher in London. ‘Tis happy for me that I never looked for my reward from men!” Then he alludes to what his “little family” had been doing: “Had the business that Betsy [a diminutive of Eliza or Elizabeth] & her mother are answered in according to expectations, I should perhaps have been too happy in this line.” The intent of the business was apparently to supplement the allowance from the Connexion, because Jaco states first that, “it was always my ambition to preach Gospel without charge,” and then concludes philosophically, “But the Lord’s will be done.”13

Although there is no indication as to what the “business” was, at his death his occupation was listed as “hosier,” someone who made stockings. Jaco died in 1781 at age fifty-two just two years after the letter to Rodda was written (when Eliza was just fifteen), and his one remaining reference to Eliza is in his will, where he named her as his primary beneficiary. “To my daughter Elizabeth Jaco,” he bequeathed “the sum of one hundred pounds of lawful money of Great Britain to be paid unto her at the age of twenty one years or on the day of marriage.”14 In the end, the only detail that I can verify from Eliza’s 1840 letter to Reuben Moffat is that she was indeed “very young” when her father died.

In an age of electronic records, DNA testing, and ever-increasing ways of tracing genealogical records online, it is difficult to imagine that the most basic details of an eighteenth-century identity—date and place of birth, names of parents and siblings—could be so hard to confirm. Even the venerable Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), normally the first stop for scholars in search of biographical information, did not have the correct information for Eliza in 2017. Then, the entry still read: “Fenwick [née Jago], Eliza [pseud. Revd David Blair] (1766?–1840), writer, was probably born on 1 February 1766 to Thomas and Elizabeth Jago and baptized Elizabeth on 25 June at Pelynt, Cornwall.”15 There is something fitting in the fact that the adventure romance of Eliza’s life story should begin with a feature consistent in formal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Text
• List of Abbreviations
• Prelude
• 1. Daughter of Methodism
• 2. Mother and Author
• 3. Children’s Book Writer and Friend
• 4. Governess and Networker
• 5. Colonist and Slaveholder
• 6. School Owner and Mourner
• 7. North American Grandmother
• Coda: And Beyond . . .
• Notes
• References
• Index