What’s on : Lectures

Letters from America

Lectures
Date
15 Nov 2011
Start time
7:30 PM
Venue
Tempest Anderson Hall
Speaker
Dr Michael F Hopkinson
Letters from America

Event Information

“Letters from America”: nineteenth century emigrants writing home to Yorkshire
Dr Michael F Hopkinson
Joint Lecture with the Royal Geographical Society & PLACE.

Most of the migration from Europe to North America took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century and later. However, there is a significant archive of written material on earlier migrants, in the form of their letters home, which reveals the difficulties of travel and early settlement faced by pioneers both in towns and countryside. It also throws light on social ambitions, family relationships and the efforts, successful and otherwise, to “keep in touch” in a period when postage charges and unreliable communications made “writing home” difficult.

This illustrated talk focuses on the period before reliable steamer and rail services opened up a continent to mass migration, and is centred on the examination of collections of letters at the London School of Economics and in record offices in West Yorkshire. It will be given by Michael Hopkinson, who has worked on trans-Atlantic migration topics since the 1960s.

Report
by Ken Hutson

Unlike enforced flight from Scotland (the highland clearances) and Ireland (famine), 18th-century emigration from Yorkshire was mostly voluntary with people such as merchants, artisans and military seeking a better life in the States. Records in this country are sparse but a collection of some 130 letters sent home from America reveal a picture of conditions here and on arrival in the States. There were no scheduled sailings then; ships only departed when full. The better off could afford passage on small vessels, others, taking larger, crowded ships, often had to wait weeks for a sailing and suffered during the voyage. On arrival in America, immigrants headed west and those with means bought small parcels of land and built basic homes. Farming was good but for those seeking other work, their inappropriate skills were a problem: expertise in hand-loom weaving, for example, at a time when machine looms were becoming widely used. Low wages and high prices, particularly for clothes and tools, were unwelcome surprises. Overall, emigration was worthwhile for some, very borderline for most.

Sponsored by Royal Geographical Society & PLACE