Mary Russell Mitford

Mary Russell Mitford, the enormously successful author of Our Village and a huge portfolio of other profitable works, applied to the Literary Fund in 1843 after the death of her father, who she had both cared for and supported financially. Her case demonstrates how even authors with considerable reputations might find themselves in pecuniary difficulties due to family circumstances or book trade ructions.

Post 1841, Royal Literary Fund case files often begin with a formal application form, but an enquiry from the applicant or from a friend of theirs is usually the first document by date. Mary Russell Mitford’s application was supported by the judge, politician and author Thomas Noon Talfourd, who sent two letters on her behalf to the Fund’s secretary, Octavian Blewitt. The first transmits information from Mitford and provides a strong informal endorsement.

The second Talfourd letter is a cover for the Fund’s application form, at the time a relatively recent innovation. Talfourd confirms that he has co-signed the form with George P Dawson and attests to the truth of the statements Miford has made.

Mitford’s application form lists her numerous works and details her pending Civil List pension of £100 a year.

In an account that overspills the box designed for it, she describes her father’s long illness and financial trouble resulting from disrupted copyrights of work published in Finden’s Tableaux, on which Mitford worked as editor and contributor.

Writing on black-edged mourning paper, Mitford elaborates on the account she gives on the application form, stating that her father’s long illness had left her with debts of £800 or £900, a situation worsened by the failure of one of her publishers. She also details a subscription friends are raising to assist her, writing that she is ‘so worn out by fatigue and anxiety that even the precious resource of the Press is at present out of the question.’

This published appeal sought to raise money to assist Mitford in discharging her father’s debts, stating that while these would ‘fall with crushing weight upon one solitary and destitute woman’, they would be ‘but little felt when divided among the many’. The signatories include aristocrats, MPs, the supporters of her Literary Fund application and notable writers such as the poets Henry Hart Milman and Thomas Moore.

The Literary Fund sent Mitford £50 in response to her application, a relatively substantial sum at the time. When replying, Mitford asked Blewitt to thank the Committee ‘From the bottom of my heart’ for a donation ‘so ready and so generous’. She also thanked him for his own role in assisting her. An additional note states that Mitford would be very glad to receive a visit from Blewitt.

This more formal note thanks the Committee for their ‘prompt and generous donation of £50 received today through the kind and practical agency of my excellent friend Mr. Blewitt.’ In closing, Mitford writes that she considers the donation ‘as gratifying to my feelings as it is beneficial to my interests.’

Press cuttings concerning the subscription raised for Mary Russell Mitford from The Times (Feb 1843), the Literary Gazette (Feb 1843) the Morning Chronicle (13 Feb 1843) and one other (8 Feb 1843); Also an obituary notice from the Athenaeum (13 Jan 1855), a letter to The Times following her death (15 Jan 1855) and a notice on a plan to raise a monument and found a school in her memory (8 Feb 1843-1855?).

Blewitt often compiled information on authors who applied to the Fund; here, clippings record press reactions to the subscription raised on Mitford’s behalf, as well as responses to her death in 1855.