Description:Amongst the many letters written to the Leveson-Gower family appealing for financial assistance is a detailed letter by a man named Samuel Woolley. Woolley’s letter describes the suffering of his family caused by ‘the horrors of a shipwreck’ and ‘the dangers of Fevers’ and ‘Plagues’.
Woolley wrote to George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758-1833), the Marquis of Stafford, on behalf of his father who he describes as one ‘whom misfortune has brought to the lowest ebb of misery and distress’.
Woolley emphasises his family’s close association with the Marquis’s household, particularly through his Grandfather who had lived in the Marquis’s family ‘fifty four years’. Woolley appeals to the Marquis to be ‘touched with those soft emotions of pity’ for the ‘miseries and misfortunes’ of his family.
Woolley’s father had worked as a ‘Manufacturer of Earthenware’ in Lane End on the Sutherland estates in Staffordshire. He had ‘maintained his family in credit and respectability’. However, by 1810 ‘through the failure of several houses in London and Liverpool and the badness of trade’, Woolley’s father had become ‘Bankrupt’.
Woolley tells the Marquis about his father’s various schemes to secure an income and live ‘in a respectable manner’. The letter describes his attempts to sell Earthenware in Malta which were ruined by the ‘distructive ravages’ of plague. Following this, the family endeavoured to make a living in Gibralta. However, the outbreak of a ‘malignant fever’ which ‘put a compleat stop to all business’ ruined the family. Woolley describes how he was forced to ‘return home with about a twentieth part of what I ought to have brought’.
Woolley’s letter illustrates the distress and desperation of his father, who was ‘utterly at a loss’ to know how to support his family. The letter describes the growing impatience of his father’s creditors who ‘threatened to arrest him’ if they were not paid ‘immediately’. His letter tells of the family’s desperation at the point of being ‘obliged to apply to the Parish’ for aid. He informs the Marquis that they were‘now literally without a shilling, almost driven to madness by the suffering of my Mother and Sisters’.
Woolley appeals to the Marquis for assistance to help the family move to Milan where their father hoped to ‘procure a livelihood’ by ‘ornamenting the Milan Earthernware’. He begs the Marquis to ‘pity our sufferings and relieve our distress’ by assisting them to move to Milan to find work and repay their debts. Woolley’s letter reflects the desperate circumstances of many poor families in the nineteenth century, forced to appeal to the generosity of wealthy and influential men like the Marquis of Stafford.