Reference
X955/1/113
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Date free text
16 August 1899
Production date
From: 1899 To: 1899
Scope and Content
c/o Mrs. Everest, Windmill Hill, Hailsham, Sussex
My dear friend
We have been here for nearly a month, and go back the day after tomorrow. We migrated in order to escape the worst of the Hastings excursionists. Never has the town been so vile as it has been this summer, so drunken and so indecent. Our retreat has not, however, been very successful, for the drought, heat and north-east wind have made the country look pitiable. It seems almost impossible that the fields can
recover, and to-day there is as little chance of rain as there was six weeks ago. The water also in the villages is failing.
I write because I want to know how you both are, and how this extraordinary weather has affected you. Tell me also how the children are. Is Kate going to leave Whitby? How I should like to see her! If I
ever go northward again, a very doubtful , if, I would go round by Whitby on purpose to spend an hour or two with her. My youngest boy, Ernest, is no longer at Gateshead. He has taken a post at Rugby.
When I get home I shall have to face a curious condition of affairs. I have received notice from a solicitor representing the mortgagees of the house in which I live that I am to pay my rent to him and not to the landlord. The landlord under these circumstances will do nothing to the house: he will not even repair the roof. I have applied to the mortgagees, but neither will they do anything, so that I shall give notice to quit. Perhaps this will induce them to make the place habitable. Meanwhile I have been obliged to spend money which I ought not to be called upon to spend. I suppose I might legally deduct this from the rent, but I have such a dread of a squabble with the lawyers.
Since I have been here I have been reading Clarissa Harlowe (1) , seven volumes! I forget whether I have read it before. I wonder if in your youthful days you permitted yourself to look at that book. I cannot say
that I find it wearisome. This is the complaint most people make, but to me the genius of Richardson is sufficient to carry me on without any sense of fatigue. But this incessant circling and hovering round one idea or rather round one image makes the story more immoral by far than anything Fielding ever wrote, although there are not perhaps half a dozen gross phrases in Richardson.s three thousand pages. His rate of progress, that slow walking pace, which allows us to see everything by the way, never hurrying past anything of interest, turning back often to look at it again, is delightful. Bad, no doubt, Clarissa is on the whole, but as I grow older I thankfully accept anything great and good I can find, no matter with what evil it may be mixed. God has determined that His Spirit shall be incorporated in as body which at many points is rather disgusting.
Best love to yourself and your dear husband.
Write soon
Affectionately yours
W. Hale White
1) Samuel Richardson. 1868
Level of description
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