Reference
X955/1/54
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Date free text
23 Jan 1889
Production date
From: 1889 To: 1889
Scope and Content
Park Hill, Carshalton Surrey
In another month we shall leave this place. We have had a greatest difficulty in finding a house, because we want a bedroom on the ground floor. At last we have taken a farmhouse at Ashtead, about as far in time
from the office as Carshalton but more in the country. In many respects it is very inconvenient, but it has the three rooms downstairs. It has also a large garden and a paddock. What we shall do with these white elephants I don’t know. I wish your husband were near. I send you our address when we leave.
Ernest has gone to Gateshead. The works at Thames Ditton were entirely burnt down and as there seemed no prospect of work for some months, we decided upon a change. He is at Clarke, Chapman & Parsons the
engineers. Poor fellow, we had such an experience when he got there. He was seized with a most violent attack of melancholy, despair and home-sickness. He wrote the wildest letter declaring he could not stop a day and it was with the utmost difficulty that we staved off his return from hour to hour, till in about a week he became a little calmer under the influence of a visit to friends there and a promise that one of us would come to him. I never saw such a case before and it was very horrible to me. In these nervous troubles the assigned cause is nothing. There is in us a capacity for misery altogether self productive- we say we are wretched because of this that and the other and it is all nonsense. “This that and the other” would not touch us if we were in health. Ernest I am grieved to say inherits a fatal nervous temperament, the only one
however of the children who is cursed with it.
Dr. Johnson used to laugh at Boswell because he pretended that the weather depressed him. Johnson thought no rational man ought to allow clouds or fog to influence him. Yet he himself was tortured by
hypochondria, and his rebuke to his friend most likely, like many censure which we pass of the same kind, was a judgement on his own weakness. I wonder what Johnson would have thought of this winter. Never in all my life have I seen such gloom. We have had literally no sunlight, but darkness aggravated by solid fog. Travelling has been an adventure, and the trains have gone anyhow or no how. It is possible that the myth of the day of judgement is really true, only that it is a kind of centralized picture of what is going to happen really by degrees, and that smoke and not fire will be the end of us?
Ask your husband, if he wants to refresh his memory with the most vivid description of Dissenting life in country places which has been written for a long time, to turn to the collected fragments of Richard Jeffries just published, called Field and Hedgerow, and read „The country Sunday..
Best love to him, yourself and the children
Faithfully yours
W.Hale White
1)Jefferies, Richard, 1848-1887 Field and Hedgerow British Library gives 1890
Level of description
item