Memoranda and Documents

Memoranda and Documents “DON’T SPEAK TO ME, BUT WRITE ON THIS”: THE CHILDHOOD ALMANACS OF MARY AND KATHERINE BYLES michael j. eamon “ EAR Katy, Don’t speak to me, but write on this.” Thus, on a D blank page in her almanac, did ten-year-old Mary Byles (1750– 1832) scribble a note to her seven-year-old sister, Katherine (1753– 1837).1 “Do go in mothers Room and Look for my Book . there’s a good girl.”2 During a period of at least seven years in the mid– eighteenth century, when a new edition of Nathaniel Ames’s annual An Astronomical DIARY: or an ALMANACK, for the Year of our Lord Christ appeared, the Reverend Doctor Mather Byles (1707–88) of Boston handed down his superseded almanac to his daughters.3 In the margins and empty pages, between the monthly astrological and meteorological accounts, the girls wrote down books they had read, places they had visited, and gifts they had received; they also practiced their handwriting by meticulously copying the uniform, yet slightly askew, typeset print. Because few diaries by young girls have survived from eighteenth-century America, these juvenile, occasional 1My essay is based on a collection of seven annotated almanacs found in the Rare Books Department of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario (LAC, Rare Books, AY201B7A44, Nathaniel Ames, An Astronomical DIARY: or an ALMANACK, for the Year of our Lord Christ . (Boston: J. Draper, 1757, 1758, 1759, 1762, 1763, 1764, 1767). I would like to express a special word of thanks to Elaine Hoag and Kevin Joynt for their invaluable assistance in researching this collection. 2Ames, An Astronomical DIARY, 1759. According to annotations inside the front cover, it appears that the almanac was acquired by Mary Byles in 1760 andthenbyher sister two years later: “Mary Byles the Gift of her FATHER / Mary Byles her writing Book Anno Domine 1760 &c. / Ladyfly Lady / Katy Byles 1762.” 3The most complete biography to date is Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton, The Famous Mather Byles: The Noted Boston Tory Preacher, Poet, and Wit, 1707–1788 (Boston: W. A. Butterfield, 1914). The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXV, no. 2 (June 2012). C 2012 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 335 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00189 by guest on 02 October 2021 336 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY jottings by the Byles sisters are a particularly valuable addition to the known corpus of American life writing. Moreover, by converting their father’s almanacs into their own commonplace books and diaries, the sisters contribute to our un- derstanding of the plasticity of the popular eighteenth-century publication. Better known for astronomical calendars, folk maxims, and practical knowledge, almanacs could also serve a more private func- tion as repositories for writings of an informal, even whimsical, nature. The resulting hybrid form of these twice-used almanacs—part public print periodical; part private manuscript document—lends them a unique cache.´ Their distinctive quality also tends, however, to con- found library catalogers, who in classifying annotated almanacs as publications, remove the readers’ annotations from the public’s eye and, thus, obscure their historical importance. Such was the fate of the Byles sisters’ cast-off almanacs. Recovering the ways in which the girls put their gifts to use, then, serves to remind us of the value of annotated print in colonial America even as the domestic workings of one elite household are glimpsed through the play of its children. The Byles Family and Their Use of Almanacs The Byleses were an eminent family in eighteenth-century New England. Mary and Katherine4 were the great-granddaughters of Reverend Increase Mather (1639–1723) and the grandnieces of the Reverend Doctor Cotton Mather (1663–1728).5 Aside from his status as a Congregational minister, Mather Byles Sr. was a humorist and poet of note in Boston. Before the American Revolution, he had many admirers, including the hymnist and Nonconformist theologian Isaac Watts (1674–1748), who once responded to Byles’s modesty about his literary skills, “You surprize me when I hear you say, you have no Genius for writing Poetry which I think appears abundantly, and Demand Ye Approbation of persons of a good Taste among you.”6 4In later correspondence and in secondary accounts, Katy Byles’s name is written as Catherine. When she wrote her complete first name in the almanacs, however, she spelled it Katherine, and so that is the form I will follow here. 5Some additional relations include the sisters’ cousin the Reverend Doctor Jeremy Belknap (1744–98), founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society and nephew to Mather Brown (1761–1831), painter and proteg´ e´ of Benjamin West (1738–1820). 6Isaac Watts to Mather Byles Sr., 20 April 1742,MG100,vol.244,#10e, Nova Scotia Archives and Records Administration, Halifax (NSARM). I would like to acknowledge the efforts of archivists Philip Harding and Garry Shutlak for their assistance. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00189 by guest on 02 October 2021 MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS 337 Indeed, by the time Watts made his observation in 1742, Byles was already known in literary circles from his various poems in the New England Weekly and the publication of his Poems on Several Occa- sions (1736).7 Young Mary and Katherine grew up in colonial Boston; by their early twenties, tensions with Great Britain and concerns over its impe- rial policy, which would eventually result in the American Revolution, were ever-present in town affairs. Although Mather Byles proclaimed that politics had no place in the pulpit, his extra-ecclesiastical support of the ideas and institutions of the British-American establishment was undeniable. His once admired acerbity began to irk his parishioners, and in August 1776, he was summoned before the congregation of his Hollis Street Church and formally removed from office. For his loy- alist views, he was later sentenced to deportation, but the aging Byles was granted a small mercy and instead placed under house arrest. Under mounting stress, the sisters’ affectionate half-brother, Mather Byles Jr. (1735–1814), rector of Christ Church, Boston,8 moved his family to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1776, while Mary and Katherine stayed behind with their ailing father.9 Mary and Katherine’s seven annotated almanacs date to an era before such sorrows, when as happy children they were encouraged to use their imaginations, write, read, and indulge in games. Unlike the regimented format of the sisters’ copybooks (preserved at the Mas- sachusetts Historical Society), the almanacs offered a play space that could be as free or as structured as the sisters desired.10 The writings, which progress from early, lighthearted scribbling to more mature 7Eaton, The Famous Mather Byles, pp. 92–98. 8Christ Church is also known as the Old North Church. Its steeple, to the chagrin of Mather Byles Jr., was famously used on 18 April 1775 as a signal tower to alert residents of impending British invasion, an activity immortalized in the poem Paul Revere’s Ride (1860) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 9The Byles Family Papers, preserved by the Massachusetts Historical Society, illus- trate the lifelong love that Mather Byles Jr. shared with his half-sisters Mary (“Polly” and Katherine (“Katy”). In one letter typical of the amicable correspondence, Mather writes, “Dear Sister Polly, I think you say I owe you a Letter & dear me! Well, if I must write one I must, I think: but I have got Nothing upon the living earth to write about, only to send my Love to Katy. Your Joyful Brother, M. Byles” (Mather Byles to Mary Byles, 17 June 1759,MsN-38, Byles Family Papers, P-114,roll1, Massachusetts Historical Society [MHS]). I would like to thank Peter Drummey (Stephen T. Riley Librarian), Tracy Potter, Anna Cook, Andrea Cronin, and all the staff of the MHS for their help concerning the Byles Family Papers, which are cited here with permission. 10Commonplace Book, Mary Byles, 1763, Copy Book Mary Byles, 1763, and Copy Book Catherine Byles, 1763,MsN-38, Byles Family Papers, P-114,roll2,MHS. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00189 by guest on 02 October 2021 338 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY musings, clearly document the initial stages of the sisters’ lifelong intimacy. Intellectual growth can be traced most effectively and is most pronounced in Katherine, or Katy, the younger of the two sisters. At first Katy received her almanacs as hand-me-downs from her sister Mary, each girl signing her name respectively and recording the date of receipt. The 1767 almanac—the final in the collection— appears to have been the sole property of the fourteen-year-old Katy, who declares in a style set previously by her sister, “K. Byles / Given her by / her FATHER, 1767.” The sisters’ remarks are interspersed throughout the pages of the almanacs. Although on rare occasions, one sister would pen a command or question for the other to read immediately, for the most part, the girls’ writings appear not to have been concurrent. Instead, the almanacs reveal two separate threads of text, proceeding from two separate consciousnesses, sharing the same space though being written upwards of two years apart. Making use of almanacs as all-purpose journals, commonplace books, and scribblers was a typical practice in the Byles family. Their particular almanac of choice was that produced by Nathaniel Ames (1708–64).11 Ames’s almanacs were passed on from the senior Byles to his daughters and were also used by his son from a previous marriage, Mather Byles Jr. Also mailed among family members, the almanacs offered grist for long-distance conversations.

Load more