THOMAS JEFFERSON’S GRANDDAUGHTER
IN QUEEN VICTORIA’S ENGLAND
Ann Lucas Birle
and Lisa A. Francavilla, editors
University of Virginia Press, $45
She was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite granddaughter, and spent her teenage years at Monticello, in central Virginia, under the same roof as the retired ex-president. In 1825, the year before “Grand Papa’s” death, Ellen Wayles Randolph married Bostonian Joseph Coolidge in the mansion’s parlor. Joseph was a young member of the merchant elite, active in the China trade. His business gave her occasion to travel to England in 1838, during which time she kept a remarkable diary.
Ellen Coolidge, the mother of five, had inherited “a happy talent for composition,” to repeat John Adams’ description of her grandfather’s facility with language. She could write about something as mundane as the English weather: “There is no fierceness in the Sun.” The “cool white light” turned easily into “gray misty clouds,” while back home in America, the climate had “many moods of bright and sullen, smooth and stormy, essentially tyrannical … The American is shaken spurned and sent shivering.” Overall, the pen-wielding Mrs. Coolidge comes across as a woman with charitable aims, if hypersensitive when confronting the overly pious and openly bigoted — she is much like Thomas Jefferson.
This fastidiously edited, colorfully illustrated diary is filled with gems of description. It can be read in a number of ways: as the recreation of a lost world, a tour of an uncommon mind, or a piece of history that centers on the life of a proud American in the company of a people who, in 1838-39, still refused to give credit to the revolutionary energy that Jefferson unleashed.
It was Queen Victoria’s first year on the throne, and early in Martin Van Buren’s presidency, when Ellen arrived in England. She took umbrage when individuals maligned her grandfather — less concerned with policy than the character issue — and defended his optimism about the educability of ordinary Americans. “He was the friend of the many,” she wrote in the diary. “His confidence in the powers virtues of man was unlimited.”
She found something surreal in the appearance of the masses on her first day out and about in London — they appeared as creatures lacking free will, “like flocks or herds obeying the impulse of a voice a hand from behind.” She was saddened, she said, by the absence of individuality in the scene presented. Ants (as a recent scientific study suggested to her) had castes, “pastoral military orders,” made war, enslaved, and kidnapped. “I am something of a conservative myself in politics,” she affirmed, “yet change, the power of improvement, the restless desire for a better order of things is what distinguishes the man from the insect.” Oddly, this learned woman was still susceptible enough to be convinced that the English phrenologist who measured her skull was able to assess her character with “extraordinary accuracy” — it’s the equivalent of falling under the spell of a French Quarter palm reader.
People confounded her: “I was asked by a lady the wife of a Professor of languages, what language was spoken in the U.S.” The wife of a clergyman inquired whether New York was located in America. But, day by day, introduced into high society, conversing with esteemed poets, artists and writers, and attending the queen’s speech opening Parliament, Ellen marveled at all there was to excite the senses. There is scarcely an uneventful day or a page without incisive commentary. Jefferson’s granddaughter writes charmingly about her annoyances and soberly about her excitement in visits to famous museums and national landmarks.
One of the characters who frequently appears in the book is Harriet Martineau, whom Ellen had met at a Washington dinner party three years earlier. The nearly deaf Englishwoman, who used an ear trumpet, had just published her American travelogue, replete with high-toned British belittlement of the former colonies. Martineau took direct aim at Jefferson’s indefensible position on slavery. No surprise, then, that Ellen reserved some of her most undisguised invective for the author: “She is loud, noisy, disputatious and dogmatic. … She calls our ministers of religion time-servers, our lawyers tories, and our women drunkards.” After taking such offense, Ellen finally succumbed to Martineau’s “affectionate” note and invitation to pay a call, and they ended up on quite civil terms, though Ellen never adjusted to her notion “that American women are spoiled by too much attention from the men.”
The visceral vocabulary Ellen draws on to detail her “weary dreary” voyage home gives the volume a suitably convulsive ending. “The ship is dirty, crowded, uncomfortable — full of disgusting sights and more disgusting odours.” The captain was “an incompetent, lazy”; after “weeks of giddiness nausea, wretched days followed by wretched nights,” she and her cabin mates made attempts, “not altogether abortive,” at conviviality. What Ellen seems to have learned in her time abroad may be compressed into one of her Jefferson-like observations: “The unreasonable listen to nothing but their own prejudices passions.”
Thomas Jefferson’s Granddaughter in Queen Victoria’s England offers a slice of 19th-century life. Reading the diary, one gets caught up in the gossip of Victorian times, while making the acquaintance of one whose rich life in a way symbolizes both intellectual and emotional aspirations of the founders’ offspring.
Andrew Burstein is Manship Professor of History at LSU and author of books on American politics and culture. His website is: http://www.andburstein.com.