BIB_ID
409800
Accession number
MA 4647.13
Creator
Cleland, Lucy, -1763.
Display Date
undated [1752-1763].
Credit line
Purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 1989.
Description
1 item (3 pages) ; 18.7 x 15.3 cm
Notes
A note in pencil on the first page reads "To Allan Auld" but it is not known when this note was added or who added it. Allan Auld was a lawyer employed by Lucy Cleland.
The letter is undated. However, given the contents, it appears to have written around the same time as John Cleland's letters to Edward Dickinson (MA 4647.1-11). This correspondence began in the early 1750s and continued until, approximately, Lucy Cleland's death in 1763; the first dated letters from the correspondence are from 1752. See Hal Gladfelder's book Fanny Hill in Bombay (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pages 180-193, for a discussion of the correspondence between Cleland and his mother's lawyers.
The letter is undated. However, given the contents, it appears to have written around the same time as John Cleland's letters to Edward Dickinson (MA 4647.1-11). This correspondence began in the early 1750s and continued until, approximately, Lucy Cleland's death in 1763; the first dated letters from the correspondence are from 1752. See Hal Gladfelder's book Fanny Hill in Bombay (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pages 180-193, for a discussion of the correspondence between Cleland and his mother's lawyers.
Provenance
Purchased at Sotheby's, London, December 14, 1989 (lots 11 and 12).
Summary
Writing that she is sorry to hear that her son John has refused the proposal she made to him: "I cant help his opinion of it, but I have an undoubted right not to part with my own, I shall not enter into the abundance of reasons He must be conscious off, why I might excuse my self from doing Him any service. They are well known to you, and the world, but I consider only his present situation as you represented it to me, Involved in Debt, and wanting necessaries"; continuing "[t]he proposal you made Him, was to save Him from the consequencies of the first, and provided for the Latter a certainty many an honest Man would be glad off [...] He shou'd thank God that even that, is in my power, for I have cause to wonder He has never ask'd Himself the question, how I shou'd be able, either to lend money or pay his Debts, knowing as He does, that his poor Father had nothing to leave me and that I have lost all I had in the world by Mr. Friers Death"; adding "I dont feel the least resentment for all his abuse of me, in his Letter to you, and when on better refflection He is pleas'd to accept of the offer, you will find me as ready as ever, to fulfil what I promised"; telling Auld he need not trouble himself with bringing any more letters or messages from her son until he is ready to accept her proposal: "You know already all I can, and will do, and that as He very well observes, I am unchangeable in my Resolutions"; adding in a postscript that she is keeping John's letter "to add to the large Collection I am already possessed off, of the like and worse abuse. but be assur'd 'tis the last I ever will read."
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