Preface

Historians collect and edit immigrant letters because it is always interesting to read other people's mail.The letters of Petworth immigrants give first-hand accounts of the immigrant experience; they capture for us impressions of individuals from over a century and a half ago.And they are fun to read.Their stories are of adventure and tragedy.The people writing (or dictating) these letters led lives of hardship and deprivation by the standards of anyone likely to read this book, but they were resourceful and took advantage of opportunities that came their way.Many of them had a good turn of phrase and an eye for vivid detail in describing a scene or situation.Our first object in preparing this collection is to bring the letters of Petworth immigrants together in one place and to make them better known.As a collection, these letters are noteworthy both because they were written by steerage-class passengers and because they date from early in the nineteenth century.We hope that by tracing the individuals and families who sent the letters, and by placing them and the letters in their contemporary context, others will be encouraged to use a very interesting source.This edition of letters grew out of a project on the history of the Petworth emigration scheme.At first we thought of these letters only as part of the story of the emigrations sponsored by Lord Egremont and Thomas Sockett's Petworth Emigration Committee.We soon found, however, that the challenges facing the people in charge of assisting Petworth immigrants were different in kind from those facing the immigrants and that they brought different sources into play.Our plans evolved to include a edition of immigrant letters in addition to a book on the history of the Petworth emigrations.When Charlotte Erickson prepared Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America, her classic collection of written by people from England in the United States, published in 1972, she chose to report the results of her work on census manuscripts, county histories, and port records in separate articles now collected into the book Leaving England.Robin Haines intends Emigration and the Labouring Poor:Australian Recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831-60 to provide an overarching framework, the separate context needed to interpret the personal experiences described in the letters and diaries written by British immigrants after they settled in Australia. 1 In our companion volume to this one, Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada:The Petworth Project, 1832-1837, we write of Canada using sources different from Erickson's and Haines's, but we have made a similar division of our material.Assisting Emigration discusses the unfolding ofThomas

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