Offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight.
Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country.
Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson's letters and her sister Mary Howitt's
Our Cousins in Ohio (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.
Writing Home offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson's unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations. The notes and introductions provide background on nearly all the places, individuals, and events mentioned in the letters.
About the Author
Emma Botham Alderson (1806-1947) was a Quaker woman who immigrated to Ohio from Liverpool, England, in 1842, with her husband and other family members. She was the sister of popular English poet and author Mary Howitt.
Donald Ingram Uin is an associate professor and Director of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford in Pennsylvania. He has published journal articles and book chapters, mainly on constructions of the countryside in nineteenth-century literature, including one on William Howitt's radical appropriation of William Wordsworth for the radical reform movement.
