Cranford

Jenkyns Family Letter Physical Traits

The rector’s letters, along with those of his wife and mother-in-law, were short, pithy, and written in a straight hand on yellowed paper with brown ink, sometimes filling only a scrap. The sheets were old original post stamped with a post-boy riding for life. The women’s letters were sealed with large red wafers, while the rector affixed an immense coat of arms, expecting recipients to cut rather than break the seal. The correspondence reveals that franks were commonly used both as free postage and as a means of paying debts by impecunious Members of Parliament.

Miss Jenkyns’s Letter Writing Quirks

Miss Jenkyns’s letters dated from a later period and were written on the old-fashioned square sheet. Her careful hand and fondness for many-syllabled words filled every line, and she took particular pride in crossing her letters. Her prose grew increasingly sesquipedalian toward the end, to the confusion of her sister Miss Matty, who once misread “Herod, Tetrarch of Idumea” as “Herod Petrarch of Etruria” and remained satisfied with her error.

1805 Newcastle Invasion Letters

Around 1805, during a visit to friends near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Miss Jenkyns wrote her longest series of letters concerning preparations to repel a feared invasion by Buonaparte at the mouth of the Tyne. She described packed bundles of clothes ready for flight to Alston Moor, church bells rung as a warning signal, and a genuine alarm raised during a Newcastle dinner-party. Recounting the breathless shock of the false alarm, she reflected on the triviality of past fears—though Miss Matty interrupted to recall her own night-time terrors, her father’s sermons casting Napoleon as Apollyon and Abaddon, and parish talk of hiding in the salt mines.