Material from the Romantic Circles Website may not be downloaded, reproduced or disseminated in any manner without authorization unless it is for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and/or classroom use as provided by the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended.
Unless otherwise noted, all Pages and Resources mounted on Romantic Circles are copyrighted by the author/editor and may be shared only in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Except as expressly permitted by this statement, redistribution or republication in any medium requires express prior written consent from the author/editors and advance notification of Romantic Circles. Any requests for authorization should be forwarded to Romantic Circles:>
By their use of these texts and images, users agree to the following conditions:
Users are not permitted to download these texts and images in order to mount them on their own servers. It is not in our interest or that of our users to have uncontrolled subsets of our holdings available elsewhere on the Internet. We make corrections and additions to our edited resources on a continual basis, and we want the most current text to be the only one generally available to all Internet users. Institutions can, of course, make a link to the copies at Romantic Circles, subject to our conditions of use.
BL Add. MS 28268, ff. 386–87
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editors wish to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
All quotation marks and apostrophes have been changed: " for “," for ”, ' for ‘, and ' for ’.
Any dashes occurring in line breaks have been removed.
Because of web browser variability, all hyphens have been typed on the U.S. keyboard
Dashes have been rendered as —
Bloomfield's spelling has not been regularized.
Writing in other hands appearing on these manuscripts has been indicated as such, the content recorded in brackets.
& has been used for the ampersand sign.
£ has been used for £, the pound sign
All other characters, those with accents, non-breaking spaces, etc., have been encoded in HTML entity decimals.
I shall write you a Diary, and begin with
—Saturday—
Started from Shefford ill, and without food—Dined or breakfasted, at Wellwyn, got to town rather better, sleept with little Jack who had the tooth ache all night, had only 2 hours sleep.
—Sunday—
Got up as ill as the day before, could not eat, nor was I able to go to Putney or any where else.
—Monday—
Not able to go before eleven oclock to Putney by the stage. Got there just as Charles returnd from his
first morning’s trial. Dined, and went with him to the school at one and staid
till 5. Charles exerted
himself much more than I could have believed had I not witnessed it. He was
totally unprovided with slates, and with half his quantity of Books. He had to
meet 60 Boys without knowing a single face amongst them, 30 of these composed
the late town Charity-school, and 5 or 6 from the workhouse, and these 36 were
by far the most abandon’d and audacious rascals I ever beheld in my life. Not
one of them had the least
knowledge of the system, nor did they want. It was utterly impossible to keep
them in squares or order, so they made game of the plan, and almost defied the
master. I assisted him when they had made me angry enough, by pushing half a
dozen at a time into square and some degree of subjection, this, with Charles’s arm with a good
stick at the end of it, at last brought them to a little silence. I also stood
guard over the nessisary door; and the front door at the time of dismissal,
compelling them to retreat in order and by name. Charles the schoolmaster is
not anything like Charles
any where else, he is quite another creature, as I always told you. He read
prayers with a voice and manner that would have done honour to a parson, and
made them sing the last verse of the 100th psalm. We returnd
home to his lodgings both out of heart at seeing what scoundrels he had to
govern, and the task he had undertaken. He however consented that I should
return to town to see Miss Ansted,
and write my opinion of the case to Mr Sandilands. Charles lookd completely
pale and faggd, and dreaded the next day intirely by himself.
—Tuesday—
Caled on Miss Ansted to report progress, and wrote to Mr Sandilands, that for so young a lad to tame 60 of the worst boys I had ever seen was not to be expected without an immediate assistant to help him the organization and to get some of them in training &c &c—
—Wednesday—
Went to Putney again; found Mr S had attended to my representations, and promised an assistant & Charles had gone through his Tuesday’s work better than he expected, but the boys were still very unruly, and yielded to nothing but wooden arguments: but it fell out luckily for him that Mr Sandilands was in the girls school and heard the young hellhounds roaring and swearing in Charles’s department! He came round to know if it was possible that the noise he had heard could come from the boys? ‘Oh yes indeed Sir, I could govern the younger part of them who are much the best, but the Charity schoolboys are abominable, particularly these five.’ Mr S. collard the chickens one after another, and threshd them severely with his stick. So your Brother has a parson for his whipper-in! On the day when I arrived [word cut off] had dismissed his Lions, and being half holiday we had a walk, and much conversation; he seemd quite cheerfull, and lookd well, and much more determined from the opposition he had met with. He had begun to train 4 pickd boys for teachers who promised well, and evinced a wish to learn, particularly one little fellow of the name of Bussell—promised to go to him again on Saturday—walkd al the way home, after walking from Hyde Park in the morning.
—Thursday—
Confoundedly weary, but in good health, having no stomach complaint, writing this scribble all the afternoon, and intend to see Charlotte tomorrow who does not yet know that I am in town! For I was determined to do one thing at a time. Diary to be continued—Thursday night Apr 2d—
—Miscellaneous—
Mr S. askd Charles if he did
not want a cane? Ch. yes Sir I do sadly. S. Well Ill take care you shall have
one.—The inclosed letter would have been posted if I had not been here. Miss Ansted laughs at Mrs Napier’s
proposal and says that in these things ladies are as mean as dirt, much more
than they would with menial servants. She gives her own servant 10 guineas. And
little Mary Hawyes at the age of 19 is out at service at 6 pounds. Aunt George
has had a narrow escape for her life, being blown into a ditch on Farnham heath
on the 4th of March during the storm, when she stood to her
knees in water from eight in the evening till eight in the morning, when she was
relieved by some man who pulled her out and gave her some Brandy.