On Not Writing Biography

Abstract

The archives of Frances Hamilton (1742-1802) of Bishops Lydeard near Taunton, Somerset, were a gift to a historian wanting to remake the English working class by entering domestic servants--as workers--into historical accounts of England's transition to capitalist modernity. (1) She was born Frances Coles, the daughter of a local attorney. After a brief marriage to Thomas Hamilton, a Bath medical man ('My dear Mr Hamilton [died] 7th June 1779 ... Married 5 Years & five Weeks ...' she brooded in her diary) she returned to the small family estate at Bishops Lydeard, which she farmed up until her death. She kept painstaking household and farm accounts and records of her reading, over twenty volumes and twenty-two years. She employed a labour force in her house and on her farm; she thought about labour, in the abstract, and practically, in order to manage and pay it. And every farthing that left her purse had its passage recorded. Once, in 1796, she could not recall exactly how much she had paid her washerwoman at 6d a day ('Catherine paid her abt 2s'), but that was one tiny faltering in twenty years of reckoning up her profits and losses. (2) Anyway, she often lent Catherine money, and their meetings to settle accounts always involved complicated calculations on both sides. On this occasion Hamilton remembered that she had lent her 2s after a previous wash, as well as paying her. These were highly useful accounts, and they have been called meticulous. (3) She moved with evident ease between old prescription books of her husband containing builders' bills and indoor servants' wages, and an old volume of inventories where she recorded payment to her casual workers. Borrowings from the local Book Society were listed next to her washerwomen's accounts. When she kept a diary--what she called a 'Day Book'--it was in an old ledger of lawyer's bills, probably her father's. (4) She used all these volumes regularly, to transfer records from her daybook to her housekeeping or farm accounts, and quarterly, to compile a statement of farm outgoings and income. She owned less than a hundred acres and was perhaps unusual in keeping such detailed records; it is said that the practice was more likely among men and women with larger holdings than hers. (5) The model of writing and recording at work in Hamilton's volumes was modern and secular. She did not use her notebooks and ledgers as an aid to worship in the way that Michael Mascuch has described for other eighteenth-century diary-writers. (6) Hamilton sat through many a sermon at Bishops Lydeard, but made notes on not one of them. Each birthday she inscribed a prayer asking that she might be granted an increase in goodness over the coming year, but she did not write in daily conversation with God, as did some of her contemporaries. (7) She only rarely copied out aphorisms or extended passages from her reading; rather, when she made a comment it was brief and succinct--an expression of her opinion on the matter. Compared with some of her contemporaries, her relationship with the texts that furnished her religious and political imagination was one of some independence. She was a woman--and a reader--who not only knew her own mind but also how it had been cultivated. Her brief assessment of Dugald Stewart's Philosophy ('a Book I have a high opinion of ') was initialled. (8) This indicates a sense of an audience for her writing, even if the audience was just herself. But writing '1 pound Mackaroons', '1 pound of Sausages', 'Oisters 1/2 C', 'Worsted for my Apprentices', 'Straw', '[paid] Spiller Haberdasher in full', '[paid] Dinham shoemaker in full', was not done for an imagined audience in the same way. It was done so that she knew how much money she had spent, and though she might read these entries again (and again) she had not the intention of communicating something by them. By way of contrast with the journal-keeping of another gentleman's daughter of the same period, the Lancastrian Elizabeth Shackleton, Hamilton's focus was on production rather than consumption, on the men and women, their labour and their wages for labour, that allowed her to wrest a living from her own acres. …