Reference
X955/1/137
Title
To Mrs Sarah Colenutt
Scope and Content
Lord's Well Lane, Crowborough, Tunbridge Wells
My dear friend
I am very glad to hear you are well. I have not been fortunate lately. About a month ago I fell down some steps under a railway and hurt my side. Then followed influenza. I am better now, but a cough remains which is rather troublesome at night.
Molly is well. She was in an unhappy condition in the early part of the winter and was away from home for nearly seven weeks, part of the time with Mrs Bright and part with Willie in Cornwall.
Ernest, who lives in Rugby, is to be married in the summer. The young woman’s name is O’Hara. She is half Irish. I have seen her from a Saturday to Monday and that is all. She is 22, good looking, fond of
outdoor amusements, a gay kind of creature, but at present I do not really know her – I can only hope that her liveliness may tend to Ernest’s happiness.
Whether we shall stay in Crowborough I cannot tell. I am in negotiation for a house at Groombridge which will be much more convenient for Willie and other friends., but there is not a complete settlement at present. I am very loath to move. I do not like the bother, and at my time of life I do not look forward to change with any enthusiasm. But Crowborough is so cold and so blasty , as little Dora Wordsworth (1) used to say, that I do not think I could stand another winter.
Talking about Dora reminds me that I have now read through all those Dorothy letters, which you will recollect Mrs Arthur Tennyson was going to send me. What a job! Folio sheets closely written, crossed
and re-crossed such as women wrote before the penny postage. They are mostly domestic, news of the children, events in the village, &c. &c. The poverty of the Wordsworth household, combined with study, intelligence and high breeding in the proper sense of the word, is most interesting. In one of her letters Dorothy explains the method by which, turning hind part before, she has succeeded in adapting a pair of her brother’s breeches into some kind of nether garment for her nephew. The next day she and Coleridge are talking poetry, philosophy and religion.
Best love from both of us.
Your ever affectionate friend
W. Hale White
(1) Dorothy [Dora] Quillinan (1804–1847), writer, the second child of William Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson. 21st March 1903
Level of description
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