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About Elizabeth Jesser Reid

Elizabeth Jesser Sturch was born on 25 December 1789 in London, daughter of William Sturch, a wealthy Unitarian ironmonger. In 1821 she married John Reid, M.D., author of 'Essay on hypochondriasis and other nervous affections' (1816). His father and brother had been hosiers in Leicester, but the family's roots appear to have been in Scotland, and John had inherited land on the River Clyde at Glasgow which had become extremely valuable as the port grew in size.

The death of John in July 1822 gave Elizabeth Jesser Reid an independent income with which she patronised various philanthropic causes. Active in liberal Unitarian circles, she was an anti-slavery activist, attending the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 and taking a close interest in the American Civil War (1860-1865), and was in contact with leading figures in the revolutions in France and Germany in 1848, and the struggles for Italian independence.

In 1849 she founded the 'Ladies College' in Bedford Square, London, which became Bedford College for Women. Unlike other institutions for women's education, Bedford College sought to provide an education that would widen women's cultural lives, rather than simply prepare them to be governesses. It also included women on its governing body, as Reid believed that women should have a say in the College's future direction. While the College initially struggled to gain support, especially from educated men, and applications, it continued to grow throughout the nineteenth-century. Early students included the novelists George Eliot and Diana Craik, the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond, and Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, and the first woman on the Medical Register of the General Medical Council.

Reid died on 1st April 1866, leaving the governance of Bedford College to three female trustees, including Eliza Bostock

To find out more about other figures in the digital archive, click here

Navigating the Digital Archive

There are several ways to browse and search the Archive.

  • By Collection: Letters from each of the four main correspondents are separated into individual collections. There are also collections of Miscellaneous Correspondents, and of Autograph Letters; the latter are letters from especially famous correspondents, which were separated before the archive was donated to Royal Holloway, perhaps by Reid herself.
  • By Location: All letters in the Archive that have an identifiable place of writing have been mapped. You can use this map to see the geographical span of the correspondence, or to view letter from a particular location. Please note, the map groups together letters from proximate locations, so please zoom in to see exact locations of letters.  
  • By Simple Search: You can search the metadata of all items (including description and, when available, transcriptions) by entering terms in the search bar on the top right of the menu. You can adjust the parameters of your search by clicking the "..." button to the right of the search box.
  • By Advanced Search: The Advanced search allows you to narrow searches to a particular field (e.g. Author or Date). You can also limit searches to particular collections, or search letters written within a radius of a particular location. This is the best way to search letters by date sent.

How to Read the Letters

Many letters are written double sides on a folded piece of letter paper. These have been scanned as two images, of the front and reverse of each sheet. For a four page letter (two halves of each side of a piece of letter paper), the correct reading order is usually top right, bottom left, bottom right, top left. If the letter goes over more than one piece of paper, the first sheets are positioned above later sheets. 

Some letters are "cross written" - a technique used in the nineteenth-century to save paper, where a writer would turn the paper 90 degrees and write across previous writing. If you see this, the writing that flows down the page (top-bottom) should be read before the writing that flows across the page (left-right). If you see a cross-written letter, the correct reading order for pages is usually top right, bottom left, bottom right, top left, top right. Locating the signature is the best way to work out where the letter ends. 

Notes on Metadata

The metadata for the digital archive is largely taken from the Royal Holloway archives catalogue. Please be aware that many datings of letters are provisional, especially in the Bostock collection.

Notes on Geolocation

We have attempted to map the location from which each letter is written on this map. Some letters can be more accurately mapped than others. For example, Bostock's letters from family homes in Liverpool are located to the general area of the city in which her relatives lived; the vague nature of her addresses, and changes to the topography of the city over the last 150 years make it challenging to map these more accurately. However, many of the London addresses from which Bostock wrote still exist, and these are mapped specifically.

If you want more information about the location of particular letters, or have corrections for the map, please contact us at the email address below.  

About the Digital Archive

The digital archive was produced as part of a year long project (September 2018-July 2019) on Radicalism and Reform in the Long Nineteenth-Century, jointly sponsored by Royal Holloway's Humanities and Arts Research Institute, and Centre for Victorian Studies. The project was led by Dr Katie McGettigan, Lecturer in American Literature, who also created the digital archive in collaboration with Annabel Valentine, Royal Holloway's archivist. 

If you find any errors in the website or metadata, or want more information about items in the Collection, or to enquire about permissions for publication, please contact: archives[at]rhul.ac.uk.