ABSTRACT
These are excerpts from the Edwin O. Kimberley letters. Some were written from Pinch-beck, Lincolnshire, to Wisconsin, and others in the opposite direction. They are highly religious in tone. Apparently, paying membership in their lodge made relief and emigration possible. The letters from Pinchbeck indicate that many others were ready to leave: Lincolnshire had relatively high rates of emigration during the early 1850s because the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had undermined farm prices, and farmers in some sections of Lincolnshire were on soils that did not lend themselves to the kind of improvement that could compensate for the falling prices. 1 The local accent is suggested: ‘warter’ is ‘water’. The letter of 23 July 1850 includes references that some have travelled much in America and found it disappointing – expectations were too high. The writer admits that ‘I think of Coming myself for the times are so very bad in England that we cannot get any money at all to go on with business’. These letters are very much about chains, with making preparations for other immigrants to join those already in America. The letter of 2 January 1854 is especially fascinating: ‘I have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin … and could not of supposed that America which stands so high in the estimation of other Nations should be guilty of such acts of cruelty …’. And in the letter of 31 October 1861, as the Civil War began to unfold, printed in Volume 4, they note ‘this calamity coming upon the United States’.
