Amy Heard Letters from the Gilded Age

184 Pages·2005·1.51 MB·English

Amy Heard
Letters from the Gilded Age
Transcribed, Translated, and Edited by
Robert M. Gray
(cid:13)c Copyright 2005 by Robert M. Gray
This document was produced using Otfried Cheong’s
Hyperlatex package.

Contents
Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Preface iii
1 Introduction 1
2 1881 5
3 1882 21
4 1884 47
5 1885 53
6 1886 71
7 1887 105
8 1888 127
9 1889 155
10 1891 159
Bibliography 162
i
ii CONTENTS
Preface
Famous or notorious people leave
tracks through history that are
easy to follow. Their letters and
writings are avidly preserved and
they are much written about by
others. Thepersistantbiographer
need only visit libraries and fam-
ily or historical society collections
topiecetogetherthedetailsofthe
person’s life. Simply because the
person was or is famous is usually
sufficient motivation to make the
effort to understand and describe
their life, even if it has been done
repeatedly before.
In contrast, people who do
not have a profound impact on
their contempory general public
can fade with time, leaving only
a few family anecdotes and pho-
tographs for their grandchildren
Amy Heard in Washington and great grandchildren. Occa-
sionally, however, such fameless
people do leave enough traces in
the forms of letters, notes, and journals to permit a determined researcher to piece
together bits of their life years later, but the motivation to do so is usually lacking
unless the person lost in the past is of particular interest to the sleuth of the present.
As an obvious example, the life of ancestors is often of strong interest to a descendent
who never knew them and knows little about them. Such research can be of interest
to more than just the family of an ancestor. The ancestor might typify an interesting
iii
iv PREFACE
time, class, or culture and their lives might by example provide an interesting ex-
cursion into an entire period. The ancestor might have come in regular contact with
remarkable contemporaries, people who have been written about and whose lives can
be found in books and newspaper files.
Even if these reasons are only
rationalizations, the process of
doing detective work on the past,
of being an amateur historian,
can be challenging and fun on its
own,regardlessofthefamousper-
son or unknown ancestor selected
as object for the search. It can be
satisfying to figure out who some
individual was, to find previously
unknown gossip, to find the de-
tails of a scandal only hinted
at, to find the futures of the
young people encountered, and to
find romantic aspects to lives pre-
viously described in biographies
as having had none. Reading
century-old letters and journals
for the first time can provide a
window into the past, a vicarious
adventure that is remote from the
present, yet strangely familiar.
Following the death of my fa-
ther, Augustine Heard Gray, in
1982, I found in his papers a let-
ter addressed to his mother, Amy
Amy Heard in 1876, Brighton Heard, from a V. Sackville-West.
The letter was in French and the
handwriting was so unlike any I had seen that I at first found it illegible. With hints
of a secret scandal and a hasty departure from the U.S., the letter caught my interest
and led to a search among my father’s papers as well as the boxed collections of
cousin Arthur Meeker Gray for further letters of the period. In parallel I began to
discover in both contemporary and recent books the identity of Ms. Sackville-West
and the other people who populated the letters, which proved to be full of Washing-
ton gossip concerning the diplomats and politicians of the age. Amy proved to be
a well-connected bystander to the political and diplomatic life in Washington D.C.
PREFACE v
at the end of the nineteenth century, with friends among the best known diplomats,
politicians, and writers of the time.
To date I have found approximately two hundred letters written to Amy, mostly
from the daughters of politicians and diplomats and from her family during the 1880’s
and the 1890’s, the period named the Gilded Age by Mark Twain [25]. These letters
provide an intimate picture of close friendships of young women of the time and an
insider’s view of many of the personalities and events of diplomatic and political
life in Washington, D.C. In addition, Amy kept a daily notebook with brief entries
describing visits, parties, dinners, receptions, and other Washington, D.C., social
functions as well as vacations to Niagara Falls and Bar Harbor. The notebooks for
portions of 1881, 1882, and 1886 survive.
Theearlylettersandthenote-
books supplement the published
letters of two of the most fa-
mous Washington women of the
time: Mrs. Henry Adams [2] and
Mrs. James G. Blaine[5], both of
whom refer to many of Amy’s
correspondents and to Amy her-
self. Many of the people men-
tioned can also be found in the
Dictionary of American Biogra-
phy and several books devoted to
that period such as Mrs. Jack
[24], The Proper Bostonians [4],
The Gentle Americans [14], and
Lady Sackville [3] and others that
will be cited. The later letters be-
fore and during the period when
Amy’sfatherwasU.S.Ministerto
Korea provide a story of Ameri-
can politics and diplomacy of the
time and of the difficult adjust-
ments required of an unprepared
diplomatic family in a new and
struggling country. The Korean
letters are the subject of a sepa- Victoria West
rate book, Max and Max.
Amy’s most famous correspondent was she who wrote the first letter I found: Vic-
toria West, later to become Lady Sackville. Her biography Lady Sackville [3] by Mary
vi PREFACE
Alsop provides a lively account of her life and times and was my first source once I
discovered her identity. Victoria was the mother of the writer V. Sackville-West
(known as “Vita”) and the grandmother of the writer Nigel Nicolson, who among
other things wrote biographies of Napoleon and Lord and Lady Curzon. Both daugh-
terandgrandsondescribedVictoriainbooks. Vitarecountedhergrandmother’searly
life in her book Pepita [22] while Nicolson’s biography of his parents, Portrait of a
Marriage [19] provide a brief account of his grandmother. Unfortunately the subse-
quent television production of Portrait of a Marriage provided a painfully inadequate
and unsympathetic portrait of an elderly Victoria.
This chain of literary progeny
and the notoriety of Victoria’s
and Vita’s lives make discover-
ing the family story a relatively
easy task in comparison to track-
ing down some of the less well
known names mentioned in the
letters, some of which remain a
mystery.
In addition to the letters from
Victoria, many letters exist from
friends and family. In partic-
ular, Victoria’s sisters Amalia
and Flora and Amy’s sister He-
len Maxima Heard (nicknamed
“Max”) wrote often.
Victoria’syoungersistersAmalia
(then 15) and Flora (then 17) ar-
rived in Washington in December
1883. Amalia was to become an
even closer friend of Amy’s than
her sister. While Amalia was
later to become a bitter spinster,
during this period she was bright,
witty, and enthusiastic, though a
Victoria, Flora, and Amalia
hint of her future sadness shows
and Mme Boumy in 1884
upinhermusingaboutmen,mar-
riage, and death. Although pub-
lished accounts suggest she never had a serious relationship with a man, the letters
imply a romantic, and ultimately tragic, liaison with the nephew of the Spanish am-
bassador.
PREFACE vii
These letters typify letters among close women friends of the Victorian period:
they are warm, affectionate, gossipy, and occasionally catty. All of the letters from
the West sisters and Max are in French. The journals are in French, Spanish, and,
only rarely, English.
The letters, journals, clippings, and photos became a hobby for me. I decided to
try to translate the letters into English, track down the identities and what informa-
tion I could about the people mentioned in the letters, and put together a book using
the letters and journal entries as an excuse to describe one aspect of Washington
diplomatic and political life during the Guilded Age, the view seen by the daughters
and wives of male politicians and diplomats of the time. The stories of the writers
and their friends are told, at least briefly, as their names occur in the journal and
letters. The book is intended to provide a small guided tour of the times through the
correspondence and notes of a participant.
One advantage of writing books as part of my profession is the possession of the
tools to try out a book for the fun of it, even if the potential audience comprises only
a few friends and family members (and possibly the Lady Sackville archives at the
University of Illinois and the small collection of avid Lady Sackville groupies that I
have met at Book Fairs). I hope that a few might enjoy peering back into the past
as much as I did.
At this writing the letters from the Misses West and the notebooks have been
transcribed and translated. The Korean letters have been transcribed translated and
are presented in separate book, Max and Max.
As time permits, I hope to add the original French (and other languages) of the
daily journals as well as other relevant letters.
A complete list of the letters follows.
Letters from Victoria, Amalia, and Flora West. All but one are to Amy Heard.
There is one letter from Victoria to Amy’s mother, Jane DeConinck Heard.
1. 7 May 1884, from Victoria
2. 23 December 1884, from Victoria
3. 19 March 1885, from Amalia (& undated note)
4. 22 March 1885, from Victoria
5. 31 March 1885, from Victoria
6. 2 April 1885, from Victoria
viii PREFACE
7. 3 April 1885, from Victoria
8. 3 May 1885, from Amalia
9. 8 May 1885, from Victoria (& Flora)
10. 3 June 1885, from Amalia (In London July-Oct. 85)
11. 28 February 1886, from Amalia
12. 6 March 1886, from Amalia
13. 9 March 1886, from Amalia
14. 11 March 1886, from Victoria (Ottowa)
15. 14 March 1886, from Amalia
16. 14 March 1886, from Victoria (Ottowa)
17. 27 March 1886, from Amalia
18. 31 March 1886, from Victoria
19. 13 April 1886, from Victoria (summer ’86 in England)
20. 19 July 1887, from Amalia (Paris)
21. 28 August 1887, from Victoria (Paris)
22. 21 October 1887, from Amalia
23. 22 October 1887, from Victoria
24. 12 November 1887, from Victoria
25. 12 November 1887, from Amalia
26. 26 November 1887, from Amalia
27. 30 November 1887, from Victoria
28. 22 December 1887, from Victoria
29. 26 December 1887, from Victoria
30. 23 January 1888, from Victoria