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In October 1850 Weir Mitchell and his sister Elizabeth sailed for England on the clipper ship Tuscarora. According to the plan, Elizabeth would spend the fall and winter months with their sister Saidie Neilson, who was living with her family in Liverpool. Mitchell, after a few days there, would travel to Manchester , then London, and finally Paris to study. In the spring Elizabeth would join him, and together they would travel through Europe before returning to Philadelphia in September. During the twenty-one-day voyage, there was some wretched seasickness, a fire onboard, and a violent forty-eight-hour storm. Mitchell wrote that “at each fresh puff we careened under it till our bulwarks touched the water and at times vast waves crashed over the bow and along the deck. Below stairs it was a matter of moment to cross the cabin, and when any thing broke loose from its lashings, there was wild waltzing to wilder music.” Only one other passenger was aboard the ship, a Mr.Williams, and Mitchell wrote that he was “quite in love with himself” and provided “grave statements of his own feelings about twenty times a day.”Stuck for six long days in St.George’s Channel beating against the winds,“which commonly means not—that you beat anything or any body, but that you are beaten,” Mitchell could smell Liverpool a league off and described the city as wrapped in mist and smoke with a “look of chronic Jaundice.”1 He spent the next day with his brother-in-law William Neilson while he attended to various business matters in the city. They dined on sole, muttonchops , Stilton cheese, ale, and an octave of sherry, all for two shillings. Mitchell heard “cotton talked” and “saw men with peony complexions—which by the bye gives to any mans face however handsome a low bred expression. Those I 2 letters home e 02 Chapter 2_Cervetti 6/27/2012 1:54 PM Page 24 was introduced to (some prominent men) had a cordial but boisterous manner speaking in a tone which often in the streets makes me jump as two talkers pass by me.”While walking alone in the city, Mitchell noticed how the “architectural grace” of the buildings was destroyed by the dirt and damp, and the “white gets leaden and black gets blacker so as to make what would be with us a fine city, nasty—and ugly here—what strikes me most—as I walk, are the donkeys.” He was surprised by the number of fat men and the “ugliness of the women and by the height to which they lift their dresses—Here and there you see one with her dress fastened to her waist by a hook called a‘Page.’Our women who have little feet seem as anxious to hide them as these who have not feet but yards are to show them.Yesterday I asked a gentleman the way—He said there’s a police man and walked on. So I gained a wrinkle.” Brother and sister took the obligatory trip to Chester to see the Roman walls—twenty feet high, made of red sandstone, and surmounted by a beautiful walk that commands a view of the “queer quaint and olden” town and the Snowden Hills.“A large part of these walls is overgrown with ivy,” Mitchell wrote,“which seems to be the natural dress of everything out of doors in this damp climate.” They traveled to Bangor,Wales, staying at the Penrhyn Arms, and after a pleasant dinner “Sis says her head feels queer which is not to be wondered at as she has been drinking beer and wine.”2 After Mitchell left Liverpool,Elizabeth became increasingly unhappy.Saidie was seven months pregnant and gave birth to a daughter in January, but rather than being helpful, Elizabeth seemed to be in the way. She was told that her manners were “very French” and her accent “somewhat Irish.”3 Unhappy and lonely, she tried to convey in letters home her sense of being ignored and unwanted in her sister’s home. Mitchell also filled sheet after sheet and complained about being“quite done up by excess of letter writing which gets to be hard work.”He wrote different types of letters depending on the audience: the letters to his mother were relaxed and sentimental,whereas letters to his father were deferential and often strained by Mitchell’s habitual effort to impress him. Early in the trip he...

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