Abstract
In early November 1861, Mary Hawks Moody received a box in the post.1 Sent by her mother in northern England to New Westminster, British Columbia, the parcel contained a wide range of items for Hawks Moody and her family, including a book for her daughter Zeffie, a doll for her daughter Susan, and eyeglasses for her husband Richard. The majority of the box, though, was filled with children’s clothing: shoes, boots, frocks, socks, trousers, collars, pinafores, shawls, cloaks, hoods and hats, among other articles. In a long letter dated 14 November, a heavily pregnant Hawks Moody wrote to thank her English relatives for the box, offering responses to the fit, style and appearance of each item. Both Susan and Zeffie ‘look so nice’ in their frocks, she wrote for example; ‘I wish you c[oul]d see them’.2
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Notes
See, for example, David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)
Jean Barman, Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003)
Erika Rappaport, ‘The Bombay Debt’: Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India,’ Gender and History 16, no. 2 (2004), 233–60
David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006)
Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds, Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (New York: Palgrave, 2006)
Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
E. Jane Errington, ‘Webs of Affection and Obligation: Glimpse into Families and Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Communities,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 19.1 (2008): 1–26.
Margot Finn, ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, c. 1780–1820,’ Modern Asian Studies 40 no. 1 (2006), 203–31.
Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 80–5.
Robert Burnaby Land of Promise: Robert Burnaby’s Letters from Colonial British Columbia 1858–1863, eds, Anne Burnaby McLeod and Pixie McGeachie (Burnaby: City of Burnaby, 2002), 150.
Leonore Davidoff, et al., The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999).
John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 17.
Janet C. Myers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 2.
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© 2014 Laura Ishiguro
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Ishiguro, L. (2014). Material Girls. In: Moruzi, K., Smith, M.J. (eds) Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356352_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137356352_15
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