BIB_ID
193067
Accession number
MA 4555
Creator
Cleland, John, 1709-1789.
Display Date
undated [before 1763].
Credit line
Purchased on the Director's Fund in memory of Gordon N. Ray, 1986.
Description
1 item (2 pages, with address) ; 22.8 x 18.7 cm
Notes
The letter is undated but Lucy Cleland, John Cleland's mother, died in 1763, and the contents of the letter suggest that it was written while she was still living.
Addressed to "E. Dickinson Esqr." Edward Dickinson was Lucy Cleland's lawyer.
With a large red wax seal containing a classical figure.
See also MA 4647.1-21, a collection of letters between John Cleland, his mother Lucy Cleland, and his mother's lawyers Edward Dickinson and Allan Auld.
Addressed to "E. Dickinson Esqr." Edward Dickinson was Lucy Cleland's lawyer.
With a large red wax seal containing a classical figure.
See also MA 4647.1-21, a collection of letters between John Cleland, his mother Lucy Cleland, and his mother's lawyers Edward Dickinson and Allan Auld.
Provenance
Purchased at Sotheby's, December 18, 1986 (lot 18).
Summary
Entreating Dickinson that "whenever the blow falls upon me that I instantly expect, you will disdain to lend the sanction of your name to this inhuman procedure, nor suffer Mrs. Cleland to quote it, when shrugging up her shoulders, she will say that is my fault, which is her most ungenerous obstinacy"; urging him to "think of those extremities I now endure: extremities of which My mother is base enough to wish to take an advantage, to make me committ an action, for which, in her senses, she ought for ever to renounce, and abhor me"; lamenting "the parricide hand that has placed and keeps me on the rack"; writing "I am dying of every death at once"; concluding "I am not a little sorry that she can add a man of the worth and character I suppose you, to the catalogue of those deceived by her wretched passions. God forgive her, and show her that compassion which she denies me!"
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