Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction

Introduction The concluding four chapters are case studies in the epistolary construction of selves that as much as possible let letters between immigrants and their families provide direction for the story. Letters cannot speak for themselves. But the effort is made to understand the narrative of the individual in relationship to his or her correspondents over time, and let that narrative guide the analysis. In effect, the exposition returns to the central themes established in Part I, but takes another path to discover them. Thomas Spencer Niblock, Catherine Bond, Mary Ann Archbald, and Thomas Steel have already been briefly and episodically introduced. Social historians write about ordinary people and daily life. There have been billions of ordinary people, and there have been many, many days in which they lived. There were in the nineteenth century two million British immigrants to North America. How then might we see these four lives as typical? On the surface, in terms, for example, of social characteristics, there are indeed commonalities shared among these four individuals and the general body of British immigrants and many other people, immigrant and nonimmigrant alike, in the nineteenth century. But such social characteristics are not central to this analysis. For example, each of the four shared to one extent or another the libertarian and physiocratic ideals of self-sufficiency and social independence through agriculture that were common to many British immigrants. While certainly not irrelevant, the practice of North American agriculture is not necessarily a significant aspect of the way these individuals explain their lives through their letters. The material world is here, of course, but it is only one context for the relationships embodied in letters. There seems, too, an effort in these case studies to balance the genders. Yet while men and women may be, during most of historical time, almost evenly distributed among humanity, they were not evenly divided in the British immigrant popula227 tion, which during the period of this study was skewed, as immigrant populations often are, toward male numerical dominance. Balancing off male and female correspondents is not convincingly representative, for the overwhelming majority of the collections of immigrant letters that form the evidentiary base of this study, like the large majority of immigrant letters, is based on the writings of men. Even when letters are signed by married couples, the male voice often predominates. None of these four correspondents can be realistically offered to the reader, therefore, as typical of women or men as population cohorts, or farmers. They were not chosen with that in mind. By way of a more systematic response to the problem of representativeness, we return to claims made throughout this book. Immigrants (and hence immigration ) cannot be understood exclusively through the study of nationstates , regions, and population cohorts. If we are to have a realistic psychology of immigration, immigrants must also be regarded as individuals involved in families and small networks of friends and kin. Taking the latter perspective, we find a dense thicket of personal relations and intense emotions that inevitably elude us at the macrolevel. Depending on how the analysis is framed, they might even elude us at the mesolevel , in which we may be tempted to see the family, both nuclear and extended, as an interdependent and functional social and economic unit, and lose sight of the individuals within it and the complicated human relationships they share. Personal relations, abiding attachments, and intense emotions are, in fact, inevitably a part of the baggage that all immigrants, and all human beings, whether sedentary or mobile, carry with them throughout their lives. They are an inevitable part of personal identity, because they form the continuities by which individuals know themselves over the course of their lives. In the specific instance of immigration, the salience of the personal dimensions of continuity seems even more intense and problematic for the individual, because separation serves to create an acute consciousness of relationships that otherwise may become so habitual as to be taken for granted. All letter-writers reformulated personal relationships through correspondence , because these relationships were vital to the individual personal identity narratives of the letter-writers. Archbald, Bond, Niblock, and Steel each gave evidence of a felt need to correspond, not merely of a habit of corresponding, and with varying degrees of self-consciousness , to work at a type of writing that sought to appraise the extent of 228 | Introduction loss and...