BIB_ID
409825
Accession number
MA 4647.20
Creator
Cleland, Lucy, d. 1763.
Display Date
undated [1752-1763].
Credit line
Purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 1989.
Description
1 item (1 page) ; 23.1 x 18.7 cm
Notes
A line at the top of the page reads: "Copy of a Paragraph in Mrs. Cleland's Letter to Mr. Auld." It is not known in whose hand this excerpt is written.
This excerpt is undated. Based on internal evidence, it appears to be from the period when John Cleland and Lucy Cleland were communicating through the lawyers Allan Auld and Edward Dickinson, a period which began in the early 1750s and lasted until, approximately, her 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 this correspondence.
John Cleland appears to be referring to this letter in his letter of November 23, 1752 (MA 4647.3).
This excerpt is undated. Based on internal evidence, it appears to be from the period when John Cleland and Lucy Cleland were communicating through the lawyers Allan Auld and Edward Dickinson, a period which began in the early 1750s and lasted until, approximately, her 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 this correspondence.
John Cleland appears to be referring to this letter in his letter of November 23, 1752 (MA 4647.3).
Provenance
Purchased at Sotheby's, London, December 14, 1989 (lots 11 and 12).
Summary
Writing that she has learned from Edward Dickinson that her son John Cleland is "firm as ever in refusing the kind offer I have made him"; continuing "He say [sic], it is impossible, and I say on my side, and with much more reason that it is impossible for me to serve him in any other shape: and indeed, if I could, I would not, and Mr Dickinson is desired by me to hold no farther correspondence with him, because Mr Dickinson has no power to alter my resolution, or do anything in that affair but execute what by you I so often have offered"; adding "I must also assure you that for the future I will not pay a shilling that any one may furnish him for subsistence, because He may, when he pleases have his wants supplied, by accepting the Offer that I made him, and if he does not, He has no right to complain, or trouble any body for reliefs which it is in his own power to procure himself."
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