Scope and Content
9 High Wickham,Hastings
My dear friend
I was very glad to see your handwriting. It showed that you were not beaten by the weather of the last fortnight. Such weather! The foreshore frozen, fieldfares close to the house, a thing I never say before, and all in February. Nevertheless, yesterday, with such a low thermometer, the air was so still and the sun so brilliant, that I sat out of doors as if it was summer. It was a realization of Davos.
I did not leave home last year. I have not slept out of my own bed since the autumn of 1893. I hope I shall be more courageous in 1895, and, of course, if I am, I shall go to Ryde. We think of moving in a few weeks
to a house a little lower down, but still in High Wickham. We are so pinched for room here that we hardly manage to take in a very lean friend, and Molly needs society now and then. She has been unwell lately. No organic disease, but emaciation, depression, loss of interest in all her surroundings, and occasionally kind of fainting accompanied by hysteria. I have had the best advice I could command, but nothing seems to be of much service. She is a trifle better just now, but she had relapses. When the summer comes, I must try to persuade he to leave home for two or three months, but it is very difficult to get her to face a journey. The fact is she needs a mother like you.
As to myself, I have done nothing worth doing lately, and day after day passes rather too evenly. I miss London a good deal, and the one or two people there who are near to me, and if I could afford it and could stand the smoke, I would go back. I don’t know if you saw in the Times a report of a paper by me read at the meeting of the British Astronomical Association on sunspots. (1) It was not particularly interesting. The paper was only as long as this note, and it took me two years to write it. There was also a sort of biography in the Athenaeum of Chapman the publisher, which I contributed by request, as I knew him so well.
As to books, there is mercifully no need whatever to read anything new. We are entering another barren epoch in literature, and we must be thankful that we have lived through, or partly in, one of the most
glorious periods in English poetry, philosophy, and art. Excepting in the reign of Elizabeth, there nothing like the era from 1775 to 1885. Ruskin now is the last, and after him the deluge. To understand to what we
are coming, you ought to borrow from a circulating library one of the widely-read novels. I don’t mean the confessed trash, but one praised by culture. I particularly recommend to you a thing called Keynotes (2)
which is cracked up to the skies. It was sent to me as an example. Do get it and tell me what your verdict is.
I wish your husband were here. This place would amuse him. We are half a century behind Ryde. Hastings is an old-fashioned, corrupt, jobbing, rotten, borough, and its municipal government is a joke. It is
so odd. It knows no line of cleavage in thought, except between the most commonplace Dissent, and equally commonplace Church of Englandism; and Dissenter and Churchman go at one another, hammer
and tongs, in the weekly newspaper, column after column every week, upon all the old, dead difference, just as if all the world was included in All Saints or Bethesda and must belong to one or the other. I want to
hear also what Richard would have to say about Local Veto, which in another burning coal hear. I hope he doesn.t believe in it. We have learnt something about the Gothenburg system (3) from Mr. Bright, whose
family are staying here, and it interests me much. He thinks Birmingham would be prepared to try it if the house of Commons would permit. The teetotallers, however stop the way. They are rabid and implacable.
When you write again tell me something about all the children, each one of them, and how Minnie succeeds with her drawing. My boy Ernest, by the way, the one at Gateshead, had an offer to go to the Zambezi a few days ago, but I don't think he will accept it.
With best love from us both, to yourself, your husband, and all in Ryde.
Yours faithfully and affectionately
W.Hale White
(1) The Wilsonian Theory of Sunspots. This paper was read at a Meeting of the Association 30 January 1895; it was printed in the Journal of the Association, Vol 5. No.4 23 February, and the debate on the paper
reported in the same number.
(2) Could be by George EGERTON, pseud. [i.e. Mrs. Mary Chavelita Clairmonte, afterwards Bright.] 1893
(3) The Gothenburg or Trust Public House movement originated as an attempt to control the consumption of alcohol in the Swedish city of Gothenburg in the early 19th century. In 1855 a law was passed in Sweden making distillation of spirits at home illegal and the authorities in Gothenburg decided to award the retail spirits licenses to a single company run as a trust. This trust aimed to control pubs and off licenses in a way which would not encourage excessive consumption of spirits. 5% of the profit of the trusts went to the shareholders with the remainder being used to benefit the local community. The Gothenburg system
quickly spread. In Scotland, the system was adopted mainly in mining communities of Fife and the Lothians. Source: Internet.)