ABSTRACT
The Joseph Cree letters begin here and resume in Volume 3. Cree left the Manchester area in the early 1840s and eventually settled in Clarksville, Iowa, after spending time in upper New York State. His family is writing to him, requesting knife blades for sale in America, but the mother – still in the Manchester area – writes that father cannot get them for under 24 shillings per gross, from Sheffield. In these letters the northern accent is clear in the writing: ‘as’ is ‘has’; ‘is’ is ‘his’ and so on. The letter of 27 August 1846 was written from Philadelphia to New York by a family friend who also emigrated from the Manchester area. It makes it evident that this family and their associates were English cutlers, metal workers and file makers, ready to go west to buy land. The later letters (see Volume 3) record the dire and desperate circumstances of those who stayed behind in England and were suffering the economic troubles of the ‘hungry forties’.
