Anna Beddoes to Davies Giddy, [19] November 1803 [1]
Saturday
Your last melancholy letter told me what I very little expected and what you may be sure, I was much concerned to hear. That walking did you harm, and for me to be the means of injuring you is indeed cruel. [2] – But your health has returned and restored your most agreeable sensations – Do not reopen your Euthanasia and all her [word illeg.] train. Tell me you Mimosa [3] how you could possibly wish to be without feeling? I cannot reason you out of this I would not laugh at you but certainly I think you are wrong – this is saying more than I ever did before, for you know I believe you morally invulnerable, could even a heel be discovered, where is the Paris treacherous enough to wound you. [4] Shall I be your little Thetis [5] but alas! where should I find the strength to carry the refulgent armour [6] ... what shall I say to you for having once sent me a letter without revising & correcting, that I was disappointed for I thought you always did so and that I value such letters a thousand times more than all the labour and studies of the most coldly correct, faultless, elegant compositions that ever was penned – It teaches me one thing by which I hope you will profit, henceforward to weigh word, ponder every thought before I hazard them to your scrutinizing glance – yet this is more than I can do, for you always force me some way or other to betray the very thing I think in the very first words that offer – so I must often unsay as fast as I say. – I am on the tiptoe of expectation for the answering letters of our happy day of meeting. – Your sister charges me with fighting – it is a pity as Lady Teazle [7] observes that these things should be said for nothing, so as I have the scandal, I am resolved to have the pleasure of quarrelling. Know then that I am as angry as I can possibly be with you – what do you care ... not a straw – no but if I can continue to torment you anyway, you shall care a whole sheaf and more. - And what am I angry for ... a cause that will outlast the mighty wrath of Achilles – yea it will last my whole life should it even be protracted to the uttermost limits of human existence which dreadful misfortune may the Fates avert. – You must first know that I had possessed the presumptuous wish of being as good as D. G. and by xxxing my understanding – Though past the midday it is absurd to attempt what ought to have been begun at the very dawn – Yet I had hoped by proper application to attain some of that rationality and diversity of knowledge which I do justly admire. But it cannot be – and I am angry with you for humbling my proud or rather vain hopes – I think I perfectly comprehend that two parallel straight lines produced ad infinitum can never meet – provoking truth! If I did but understand the three first books of Euclid [8] I should not have to grieve at this. – How shall I confess to you that the very letters you have written about Maria T [9] have prevented me saying a word to her, and wrong, very wrong it is, but the almost certainty of failing with the consciousness, that in some measure I was the unfortunate means of increasing the feelings she so strongly expresses against her parents, has stopped my pen every time I took it up to write to her – Still I will do it before you come otherwise you will scowl upon me, and I should not like to deserve that. What you say about our behaviour to parents is what I very sincerely lament I did not see in the light I now do, sometime back – probably my poor friend had escaped much of what she has suffered; for we are insensibly guided by those we have an opinion of, and their sentiments good, or bad, soon become our own and so it was here, her sentiments became mine and mine hers, and probably both infused the other.
She has, as I told you, a strong mind but a strong mind is so much the more capable of mischief when in the wrong. Maria T is so circumstanced that let her conduct be what it would towards her parents she would never be kindly treated and her behaviour would purposely be misinterpreted towards themselves, and misrepresented to others – so that she would have a thankless, and very discouraging task to go through – still you will say she would be doing what she ought, and would enjoy the greatest of all possible satisfactions, the consciousness of doing right. – Come! When are you coming! Time passes away, the weather is growing very cold and wet. Make haste shall you ride any part of the way? Tell me all about it make haste I say for I want you to help me about many things. – Emmeline is getting quite well a little weakness she is as well as ever she was. But her poor infant [10] has suffered a great deal chiefly through the carelessness of the nurse, its poor little arm was dislocated – farewell I often think how miserable I should be if little Anna as she grows up lived upon such terms with her mother as you know who [11] – But then I cannot help feeling a certainty that she never will for her mother will never deserve such treatment – were you a parent you would soon know how much your child’s conduct depends upon you.
Farewell once more.
Address: Davies Giddy Esq / Tredrea / Marazion / Cornwall [re-addressed Doctor Beddoes / Clifton / Bristol]
Endorsement: 1803 November
Notes
[1] This letter arrived at Giddy’s address in Cornwall after he had left it, on 23 November, to travel to Clifton to see the Beddoes. It was then redirected so that it went back to the Beddoes in Clifton for him to find there. Given that letters took three or four days to reach Cornwall from Bristol, and that 19 November was a Saturday, then it must have been written 19 November and posted that day or on Monday 21st.
[2] Anna had walked with Giddy regularly during her stay with him in September.
[3] The mimosa is a touch sensitive plant. It had featured in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (1789):
Weak with nice sense, the chaste MIMOSA stands
From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands;
Oft as light clouds o’er-pass the Summer-glade,
Alarm’d she trembles at the moving shade;
And feels, alive through all her tender form,
The whisper’d murmurs of the gathering storm;
Shuts her sweet eye-lids to approaching night;
And hails with freshen’d charms the rising light.
[Canto 1, ll. 301–08]
[4] Alluding to Homer’s Iliad, in which the Trojan warrior Paris wounded the Greek hero Achilles in his heel.
[5] Achilles’ mother, a goddess in The Iliad. In Greek mythology, Thetis dips her son in the waters of the River Styx to make him immortal – but his heel, which she is holding him by, does not get immersed and so becomes his one point of vulnerability.
[6] In The Iliad Achilles lends his armour to his friend Patroclus and loses it when Patroclus is killed. Thetis then commissions the god Hephaestus to forge new armour – and a refulgent shield.
[7] Lady Teazle is the young, flirtatious, naive wife of an old London man in Richard Brinsley Sheridan‘s comedy The School for Scandal (1777). The suggestion is that there’s no point in gaining a reputation for being quarrelsome unless being so gives one pleasure.
[8] Euclid, the Greek mathematician. His Elements were a ubiquitous textbook of geometry.
[9] Maria Thompson. Anna had asked for Giddy’s advice as to how to counsel Maria in her letter to him written on or shortly before 31 March 1801.
[10] Zoe King.
[11] Maria Thompson.