The Retreat Letters Project: The Proctor family

Many researchers into the history of mental health treatment will already be familiar with the Borthwick’s Retreat Collection, an extensive archive from York’s Quaker mental health asylum, established in 1796 by Samuel Tuke.[i] But the collection should also be helpful to many others, including social, family and Quaker historians. Of particular interest to this group will be the Retreat’s incoming correspondence. Following a recent update to the catalogue, summary information on the 12,000 letters the Retreat received between 1795 and 1852 is now available online.[ii] Each letter can also be viewed online at the Wellcome Collection (bundled by year).[iii]

The Proctor family’s story of coping with mental illness in the family is one of many told in these letters.

An 1826 envelope from the correspondence series

 “Stockton 24 / 3^mo 1826

Respected Friend,

I duly received thy acceptable favor this morning and it has indeed afforded us the greatest satisfaction to find that our dear son appears pretty comfortable and I trust that thro’ divine favor he will in time be restor’d to us. … … …

Thy Assured Friend, John Proctor”[iv]

John Proctor was plainly relieved to hear from the Retreat’s Superintendent that his son, also John, was settled and was optimistic about his chances of recovery. John Jnr had suffered from a fear of personal injury since he was twelve. Now, aged twenty-six, things had come to a head. His phobia was causing him such severe depression that after a particularly severe attack, his Quaker parents sought help from the Retreat in York.[v]^,[vi],[vii]

Sadly, despite many years of care and treatment, John never fully recovered from his mental anguish. Over his adult lifetime, John Jnr was discharged from the Retreat several times, only to be re-admitted following the recurrence of his symptoms.

Throughout that time, his family’s support and feelings for their son are evident in the letters they sent to the Retreat. In fact, the Proctor family were prolific writers, and their letters chart the highs and lows of their experience.

Many of the letters are very practical, and his family often advised the Retreat of parcels of food or clothing they were sending to make John comfortable. New coats were especially popular! Others share items of news that may interest him, such as family events or alerting him to their upcoming visits.

Letter from Jane Thomas to Thomas Allis, 1836

But the letters also reveal tensions. Two years before admission to the Retreat, John had married Jane Spence, and she often disagreed with his parents on his treatment. On one occasion in 1836, Jane was keen to see him return home, where she felt he would be less anxious and have a better chance of recovery.[viii]

His parents, especially his mother, Mary, disagreed with this, although later said there had been a misunderstanding.[ix]^,[x] On another occasion, John Snr was so frank that he ended his letter asking that it be burnt after perusal.[xi] Several more bursts of letter-writing can be found lobbying the Retreat regarding John’s discharge. Such family disagreements were not limited to the Proctors. For instance, in 1848, Isaac Wright asked that his sister-in-law Elizabeth Wright be prevented from meeting her husband and removing him from the Retreat.[xii]

Most letters in the Retreat collection use a distinctive writing style; kind, considerate, humble and supportive. However, the writer rarely gives you a glimpse of their underlying emotions, making you wonder, “what are you really thinking?” or “how do you really feel?”

Long-term correspondents like the Proctors occasionally relax their writing style, giving you a glimpse

Letter from John Bright to John Candler, 1845

of their underlying feelings. For instance, in her later letters, Jane’s writing strays beyond a ”functional” exchange about clothing and provisions. Instead, you get a deeper insight into her feelings for John and how his absence affects her. In a touching letter addressed to her “dearly beloved Husband”, Jane tries to lift his mood, assuring him, “thou are not forgotten, my love”.[xiii] She talks in poetic terms about the arrival of good weather, recalling his enjoyment of hay-time and how he used to like its “getting up”. “I hardly know what is sweeter than new made hay”, she says. In another letter, Jane is remarkably open with John Candler, the Superintendent at the time.[xiv] She explains that she had been unaware of John’s condition when they married and that “the sympathy of our friends is a mitigation”. However, she now finds herself quite embittered at their fortune and feeling “hardly [unfairly] dealt with in 19 years out of not quite 21, being so bereft”.

John died at the Retreat aged fifty-two, and Jane sent her final letter in July 1852, ending twenty-six years of correspondence.[xv]

Letter from Proctor and Son, 1849

The archive’s incoming correspondence is a fantastic research resource and is not limited to family letters. For example, there are regular letters from a wide range of Friends’ Meetings across England, sending subscription payments to support the Retreat’s work or paying the accounts of Friends they have placed there. In addition, prominent Quakers often made contact. Sometimes they requested admission for Friends in need or sought advice on setting up and running their own asylums. Occasionally they engaged in discussion about important topics of the day. For example, the 1845 Lunatics Bill prompted a flurry of letters expressing concern that the introduction of new commissioners could interfere with the smooth running of the Retreat.[xvi]^,[xvii]

The correspondence also gives a flavour of life in the early nineteenth century. For example, visitors

from afar often explained the types and routes of transport they would take, whether road, river, or rail. In addition, the postal options appear to be very efficient, with many letters being received the next day. Some even arrived on the same day!

There are letters relating to running the Retreat, such as introductions for potential employees or purchasing goods and provisions. The records show that the Retreat was a big consumer of cheese. It received regular deliveries from Proctors of Selby, transported by steam packet along the Ouse. A typical order could amount to 4cwt of cheese, costing the equivalent of £1,400 in today’s money.[xviii]

The catalogue has been created by a small team of volunteers whose work has not always been plain sailing. They developed a skill in reading a wide variety of handwriting – some of which appears to have been done under candlelight using a broken ink quill! The writing of William Nainby is particularly challenging, closely followed by the cross-writing some authors used as a way of saving precious paper.[xix]^,[xx]

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Borthwick’s Retreat Collection, information can be found at https://www.york.ac.uk/library/collections/named-collections/retreatcollection/

Index of Incoming Correspondence https://borthcat.york.ac.uk/index.php/ret-1-5-1

Images of Incoming Correspondence https://wellcomecollection.org/works/g522gcy8

Written by Paul Wainwright, Retreat Letters Project volunteer

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[i] The Retreat Collection https://www.york.ac.uk/library/collections/named-collections/retreatcollection/

[ii] Incoming Correspondence subseries RET/1/5/1 https://borthcat.york.ac.uk/index.php/ret-1-5-1

[iii] Wellcome Foundation Images https://wellcomecollection.org/works/g522gcy8

[iv] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/30 (1826) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ve2d7urv/items?canvas=102

[v] Admission Register RET/6/2/1/1 https://wellcomecollection.org/works/en2eated/items?canvas=68

[vi] Admission Papers RET/6/1/1 https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kvxqcqmq/items?canvas=683

[vii] Case Book RET/6/5/1/1A https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fe9cszjf/items?canvas=331

[viii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/5/22 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=399

[ix] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/6/8 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=472

[x] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/7/2 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=588

[xi] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/40/5/1 (1836) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/kqd8cjsv/items?canvas=429

[xii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/51/9/14 (1848) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cxhgsxx2/items?canvas=759

[xiii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/7/16 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=819

[xiv] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/5/17 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=637

[xv] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/55/8/23 (1852) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tndc2npc/items?canvas=689

[xvi] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/7/2 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=741

[xvii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/48/7/20 (1845) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/aqsvr7j8/items?canvas=767

[xviii] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/52/5/11 (1849) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pqquupp6/items?canvas=343

[xix] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/60/6/20 (1857) https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zmzwux7n/items?canvas=543

[xx] Incoming Correspondence RET/1/5/1/44/2/17 (1840)  https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pcu4jg6p/items?canvas=175

Using press cuttings to understand the early history of the University of York

 By Victoria Taylor

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Picture this: the year is 2546, and the University of York as it was in 1966 – and as we know it today, in 2021 – has long since ceased to exist. 

Only the ruins of the campus remain, with the lone surviving documentary evidence concerning the University’s origins to be found in the form of contemporaneous press headlines that have somehow survived the ravages of time. Perilously, you work to pull together broken pieces of a narrative, and your conclusions laid out are thus:

UOY/PC/1/13/12, Yorkshire Gazette (October 1966)

Ironically, and rather meta-textually, I stumbled across this press cutting from the Yorkshire Gazette discussing how headlines might be used to help piece together history during my very own foray into press cuttings concerning the origins and early history of the University of York which I have been undertaking as part of my Public History MA placement at the Borthwick. Thankfully, the archive that I was working with contained both articles and headlines, allowing me to discover slightly more about the early days of York! 

Whilst some of 1960s humour might be lost on us today, the satirical sketch – which was performed by some of York’s staff and students as part of an historical exercise after the appointment of York’s very first honorary doctorates in 1966 – highlights the importance and limits of archival holdings, and one way in which a specific kind of archive – namely press cuttings – might be used to help us understand and remember the past, distant or not. 

Although excavation of York’s hypothetical ruins would reveal a certain amount of information relating to buildings’ dating and development, only so much would be able to be garnered about the people – and ideas – behind them. For this information, it is into the archives that we must – as the brave researchers of 2546 will do in the future – head. For it is in archives that we find stories from the past. 

* * * * * *

York’s early years: stories from the press cuttings

The prospect of a university in York was a hot topic from the late 1940s onwards; consequently, there are thousands of cuttings detailing various aspects regarding the development of the University. From the early days of the summer schools, when the hope of a University was nothing but a distant glimmer on the horizon, to the graduation of the very first cohort in 1966, the press reported on a multitude of subjects. It would be impossible to adequately summarise the vast scope of the holdings, but I will take a moment to highlight the versatility of the contents by picking out some of my favourite cuttings and the stories they reveal.

The enduring popularity of family history

Today, if one wishes to research their family then they can hop onto one of the many ancestry sites that have popped up over the recent years and trawl over a variety of records (from archives!) that have been digitised or request them through the post. In the past, the onus was on archival institutions to deal with such requests for genealogical information, and the Borthwick Institute – officially opened at St Anthony’s Hall in 1953 – was one such institution that was inundated with requests.

UOY/PC/1/13/30, UOY/PC/1/2/58: Northern Echo (June 1966), 
Yorkshire Post, Northern Guardian (November 1953)

Several cuttings in the archive are concerned with genealogical requests at the Borthwick, which – indicative of the 60s' opinion that family history was a less worthy historical research pursuit – apparently impeded the ‘proper’ historical research being undertaken at the Borthwick due to the sheer number of them. Requests came from far and wide, including America, and led to, quite possibly, my favourite piece of wordplay throughout the entire archive:

“…it may not be possible to see the historical wood for family trees.”

 A diverse student population

UOY/PC/1/7/103, Northern Echo (October 1963)

If you were asked to guess at the relationship between the man and women in the adjacent picture, with the only context given that it depicted people linked to the University of York, a variety of conclusions could be reached. The most obvious answer, perhaps, would suggest that this was a lecturer talking to students. This explanation would certainly fit comfortably with traditional perceptions of what academics and students looked like. However, this was not the case. Every person in the photograph is a student: indeed, this is a group of students from the very first undergraduate cohort to pass through the gates of Heslington Hall in 1963. 

George Crofts – pictured seated – was 64 years old when he enrolled at the University of York to study Economics: he was, unsurprisingly, the oldest undergraduate. A World War I veteran and a pharmaceutical chemist, Crofts – following his retirement – moved from Newcastle to York to take up his place at the University and was successfully awarded his degree in Economics with Economic and Social History in 1966. 

Crofts was not the only mature student to enrol in 1963. Mary, a mother of four from the City of York, joined in her thirties to study Economic and Politics because she saw no reason for women her age being confined to making tea or knitting. Like Crofts, she was one of the first graduates of the University and set a fine example to her daughters. Anyone, seemingly, was welcome to study at York provided they had the qualifications: there was no conventional image of a ‘York student’ to be upheld. 

UOY/PC/1/13/37, Yorkshire Evening Press (July 1966)

Not only were mature students welcome, but so, too, were overseas students. Even in the earliest days of the Architecture and Archival summer schools, there had been a focus on establishing York as an internationally renowned place of study. In 1953, York was one of various cities cooperating with the British Council to host a yearly course in the spring entitled ‘Life in an Historic City’, which offered overseas students studying in UK universities the chance to experience the machinations of local government and life in British cities: a course which ran regularly in the following years. International students were commonplace in York, and it is unsurprising that there was talk of York becoming a ‘School of Britain’ at one point when it seemed as if the university dream was dead in the water. 

UOY/PC/1/1/24, 160, Northern Echo (August 1949), Yorkshire Gazette (August 1952).

(L) Michael Onafowokan of Nigeria, studying architecture at Glasgow University, undertakes measured drawing at York Castle in 1949 as part of a York Summer School on architecture. (R) Students from the UK, Malaysia and Sudan sketching and measuring features at the Treasurer's House, 1952.

UOY/PC/1/3/66, Yorkshire Evening Press (April 1966).

The first cohort of students in 1963 was not lacking in international students but, unsurprisingly, they were in the minority. Students arrived in York from India, Kenya, the USA, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Iraq, Sudan, France, and Germany, to name but some of the countries. A name that may be known to those already familiar with the University’s early history might be Pradip Nayak, a student from Kenya studying Economics and Politics, who was elected the first president of the Students’ Representative Council in 1964. Nayak was actively involved in student politics, with the Yorkshire Post describing him as “a leading light of the student movement”.

Following its official establishment, it did not take long for York to actively seek to develop its international links. In 1964, links were established with, what was then Northern Rhodesia, Zambia; in the 1964/1965 academic year, York – in association with the Ariel Foundation – hosted several African students studying Economics. The Zambian contingents of this group even celebrated their country’s independence at King’s Manor a day early so that they could travel to London the following day to take part in official celebrations.

UOY/PC/1/9/99, Yorkshire Post (23 October 1964)

Student activism

Universities in the 1960s were well-renowned for their student activism, and, despite York’s climate being tamer than some of the more radical establishments, York students proved to be just as committed to their causes.

In 1964, for example, students from the University of York and St John’s College joined together to protest the life sentences that had been handed down to South African anti-apartheid activists by holding an all-night vigil in King’s Square.

UOY/PC/1/9/21, Yorkshire Evening Press (June 1964)

York students also took to the streets in the winter of 1965 to condemn Rhodesia’s Universal Declaration of Independence (much to the chagrin of some York residents who were out to see Father Christmas). 

UOY/PC/1/11/155, [unattributed cutting] (November 1965).

The Vietnam War was also a point of focus throughout the early years: in 1965 York’s Debate Society passed a motion condemning American aggression in Vietnam demonstrations were planned, and signatures were collected for a petition to be sent to the Prime Minister that urged the government to encourage a peaceful resolution to the conflict. In 1966, some York students got into hot water with the British Legion for giving out white poppies for others to wear on Armistice Day in recognition of the impact of the Vietnam War.

Indeed, so fed up with the image of the protesting student in mid-1965, two York students protested the protests that had been taking place, positing contrary opinions on several subjects that had other University of York students up in arms!

It was not all protests, however. Students were often behind fundraising attempts. The York University Movement for Racial Equality worked in tandem with Keighley International Friendship Council in 1965 – as well as the Linguistics and Education departments at York – to help teach English to immigrants in Keighley. The Movement launched an appeal – which was successful – for £1,000 that was to pay for the upkeep of a rented social centre that would enable the scheme to develop. 

UOY/PC/1/11/150, Telegraph and Argus (November 1965)

'Sporting’ endeavours

Forget the annual ‘Wars of the Roses’ competition with Lancaster University: the hottest sporting action to be found in the archives concerns the University of Hull’s challenge of a Winnie the Pooh contest in 1966. Posted on University of York’s noticeboards, Hull students challenged York students to a game of Poohsticks and Pooh hums – for those uninitiated, Poohsticks is a game that involves two sticks, a body of flowing water, and a bridge (what better campus than York’s for such a competition with its largest plastic-bottomed lake in Europe and bridges, one might ask; one with faster running water, one might answer), and Pooh hums were to be songs that would be judged on their “Poohishness”. 

Sadly, I could find no articles discussing whether any courageous York students took up this most daring of challenges – should the University of Hull, or any students of the time, be able to clarify any information, I would gladly welcome it. [1] 

* * * * * *

Limitations and lacunae: memory and forgetting in the archives

 

Whilst there are many and myriad benefits from examining the archive to gain an understanding of the University of York’s early history, it is also necessary to recognise the archive’s limitations. The 1966 sketch acknowledged that, in the distant future of 2546, there would be no evidence of the sketch having taken place, and this observation highlights the fact that archives, no matter how varied their contents, cannot record everything, which can have a significant impact on what and who is remembered. 

The art of selection

In fact, archives contain only brief slivers of a vast, expansive past. For the researchers of the future to be aware that the sketch had taken place, an account of the sketch would have to have been documented in a newspaper headline. This would require: a journalist to decide the moment was worth documenting in the first instance; the volume’s compiler to decide that the cutting was worth including; an archivist to decide to keep the volume in an archive; a useful finding aid to be created to search through the surviving cuttings; and it would require this archive to be cared for to survive into the future (whether this survival would be in paper or digital form is a question for another day). For survival, selection is imperative at every point. 

Selection highlights just how easy it is for an event, a person, a group of people, to be consigned to the cutting-room floor: to be forgotten even in the quest for memory. The necessity of selection has, in the past, created lacunae in archives, and it is frequently the least powerful in society that suffer from this lack of documentation and lack of representation in the archives. Thankfully, action has been taken – is being taken – to redress this wrong: whether in state archives, or in more local, community archives, efforts are underway to preserve the histories of the most marginalised groups on their own terms.

Selection at work in the press cuttings archive

In terms of where selection fits into the archive that I have been working with, it is not necessarily a case of archival selection that delimits the contents – in fact, the collection process seems to have been rather indiscriminate, with the only criteria necessitating that articles must mention the University in some capacity – but rather the nature of the archive itself. It is an archive of press cuttings and press cuttings alone, which ultimately means that its contents reflect the interests of the press throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 

Stories included in the press cuttings can vary from the mundane to the scandalous, but there is little doubt that they do not – indeed could not – report on every minute happening concerning the University. Selectivity at work once again. Moreover, the articles often tease at information that they cannot further elucidate on. A case in point: a 1966 Yorkshire Evening Press article discussed an Eboracum article written by a first-year student concerned with the relationship between overseas and home students and the existence of unofficial segregation. The cutting acknowledges the existence of this tension but does nothing more to explore the matter: there are no interviews with international students documenting their experience at the time, for example. 

UOY/PC/1/12/89, Yorkshire Evening Press (March 1966)

Combating selectivity

How do archives avoid complacency and recognise the gaps in the historical record? I already mentioned the efforts that have been taken elsewhere in archives to combat the impact that such selectivity can have, and similar principles might be applied here. The early years of the University of York’s history are still within living memory, and this means that steps can be taken to counter archival gaps, helping to guarantee that the archival record will be more inclusive and representative of everyone involved in the University of York’s history. 

In other words, let us hope that the exploration of a press cuttings archive can be used to start conversations about the early years of the University of York as opposed to finishing them, creating a comprehensive and inclusive archive that might survive into 2546 and even beyond. 

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[1] Do you know if York accepted the challenge? Do you have a photographic record of the events or an original 1966 Hum or rhyme? If so, please contact the Borthwick and let us know!  

‘Where there’s a will’: Charles Dickens and York’s Church Court Records

By John-Francis Goodacre, Archives Trainee

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On the 12th of October 1850, an exposé reprinted in the York Herald sparked a small controversy in the city. Criticising the way that York’s ecclesiastical records were kept, the article generated a flurry of accusations and denials in the city’s newspaper over the subsequent weeks. However, no attempts were made to draw the author into this dispute, perhaps as the piece had appeared without direct attribution. We now know that the article, which was the second in a series of four under the title ‘The Doom of English Wills’, was written by the 38-year-old Charles Dickens and had first appeared in his weekly journal Household Words. But what made Dickens, one of Victorian England’s best-loved authors, so interested in the storage of historical records - the same records that are now housed at the Borthwick?

As the Borthwick’s current Graduate Trainee, a large part of my time has been spent providing access to the centuries of wills and probate records in the York Diocesan Archive. I was fascinated to learn that Dickens wrote about the very pieces of paper and parchment that I have been handling day to day. The tightly rolled documents, often covered with a layer of smoky residue that obstinately coats the fingers, sometimes feel like they belong to a Dickensian world of candlelit intrigue.

Rolled probate bundles from the York Diocesan Archive

Katharine Longley has already written a fantastic account of all four ‘Doom of English Wills’ articles and their place in record-keeping history in the Journal of the Society of Archivists. However, this left me curious about how they fitted into Dickens’ career as a writer. I am fascinated by the way Dickens brought his skills as a novelist to the investigation of York’s historical records, while exploring issues that would play a central role in his novels of the early 1850s.

The Doom of English Wills

The article that appeared in the Herald (subtitled 'Cathedral Number Two’) was the second in a series of journalistic investigations into the keeping of England’s historic records. A young lawyer and antiquary named William Downing Bruce had made expeditions to four of England’s great ecclesiastical registries (the church archives of the time), and Dickens, together with his assistant editor William Henry Wills, turned Bruce’s experiences into articles for his newly-established magazine Household Words.

Charles Dickens in 1850 (Wikimedia Commons)

Dickens gives Bruce the pseudonym ‘Mr William Wallace’, and narrates his experience in York. Wallace goes in search of the registry, where he wishes to look at some documents for the purposes of historical research. When he finally finds the registry, a shed sticking to the outside of the Minster ‘like a dirty little pimple’, his research is thwarted by its obstructive management. The Deputy Registrar questions Wallace’s motives, refuses to let him see any wills from after the year 1500, and repeatedly claims that the records he wants to see have been lost or stolen. After a week of apparently fruitless struggle, Wallace is forced to ‘beat a dignified retreat’.

Corruption and reform

Until 1858, the Church of England had jurisdiction over matters of probate in England and Wales. This meant that a small number of civil law courts had the (often lucrative) job of approving wills and giving grants of administration if a testator had died intestate - that is, without leaving a will.

Dickens was already familiar with the technicalities of these legal processes. After leaving school, he had worked for a year as a junior clerk in a law office, and spent a subsequent four years as a freelance legal reporter at Doctors’ Commons, the London Inn of Court for civil lawyers which played host to the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Doctors’ Commons and its record office even appeared in one of Dickens’s first forays into legal satire, an episode of his Sketches by Boz which appeared in the Morning Chronicle in October 1836.

The registries that housed the wills and other records created by the courts had an important function. The documents could be vital evidence in settling inheritance disputes, not to mention being rich historical sources. Public access was thus a serious matter. Yet despite parliamentary debates and inquiries throughout the 1830s and 40s, and the passing of the Public Record Office Act in 1838, the conditions of storage and ease of access to such documents was haphazard. Additionally, it was suspected that some registries were charging extortionate fees for their own gain.

In his novels of the 1850s, Dickens turned his attention to antiquated institutions that in his view were keeping England stuck in a morass of corruption and bureaucracy. David Copperfield, which was reaching the end of its monthly serialisation when ‘The Doom of English Wills’ appeared, gave him an initial chance to satirise the apparent corruption of the registries. David, who is apprenticed to a proctor (the civil law version of a solicitor), gets to observe the registry where the wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are stored. He remarks that the office is 'rather a queerly managed institution', where registrars with 'magnificent sinecures' store the public’s wills haphazardly, ‘having no object but to get rid of them cheaply'. 

Wallace’s misadventures in York take us deeper into these charges of corruption. With characteristic irony, Dickens claims that the registry generates ‘about ten thousand a year for the Registrar who does nothing, and the like amount for his Deputy who helps him.’ Dickens also intersperses the narrative with anecdotal accounts of York’s records being sold as waste paper or being used as a private source of income by the registry’s clerks. 

While ‘The Doom of English Wills’ portrays the immediate consequences of inadequate storage for records, Dickens would depict the wider repercussions in his next novel. Bleak House, published serially between 1852 and 1853, presents a dysfunctional society whose problems can be traced back to legal corruption and poor record-keeping. The novel’s central characters are all ensnared in the web of a legal case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has been going on for years and has become ‘so complicated that no man alive knows what it means’. The impasse stems from the multiple conflicting wills left by a testator. 

Dickens leads us to believe that the crucial will, which will allow the case to be resolved, is in a rag and bottle shop in the shadow of Lincoln’s Inn, filled with 'heaps of old crackled parchment scroll, and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers'. The shop is presided over by a grotesque and illiterate alcoholic named Krook who obsessively hoards documents that he has no means of understanding. To drive the point home, Krook is known by his neighbours as the 'Lord Chancellor' and shop as 'Court of Chancery'. This is Dickens’s nightmarish vision of a dysfunctional record office taken to its extreme - a place of filth and disorder where nothing can be found and documents lose their meaning.

Smoke and fire

When he first steps into the registry, Wallace finds himself in a ‘confined den’ with a ‘pestilent little chimney in it, filling it with smoke like a Lapland hut'. This first impression, its outlandish imagery contrasting starkly with the descriptions of York’s opulent mansions, primes us for the article’s other serious criticism of the registry - that the documents were at risk of smoke and fire. Despite the specific complaints made by an 1832 Ecclesiastical Commission, Wallace finds that the registry has done nothing to fire-proof itself. Reflecting on the prospect of spending a week there, he remarks that he ‘did not enjoy the notion of being smoke-dried; and of returning to the Middle Temple a sort of animated ham.'

Dickens was well aware of the danger that fire posed to historical records. He had been working as a journalist in London in 1834 when Parliament was consumed by fire, destroying centuries of procedural records for the House of Commons. It is quite possible he saw the blaze with his own eyes. Major fires at York Minster in 1829 and 1840, in which York’s records were rescued by local bystanders, are unlikely to have escaped his notice.

The Palace of Westminster on Fire, 1834, unknown artist (Art in Parliament)

Speaking about the burning of Parliament in an address to the Administrative Reform Society in 1855, Dickens dwelt on the irony that the fire was itself a product of poor record-keeping practice. The blaze had started when two cartloads of tally sticks - small notched pieces of wood used as tax receipts since the twelfth century - were used as fuel in a heating furnace designed to burn coal. Dickens mocked both what he saw as the ‘obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom’ well into the nineteenth century, and the perverse decision to incinerate them rather than distribute them to locals in need of fuel.

Yet for Dickens, the cause of Parliament’s incineration had a metaphorical significance that surpassed mere fire safety. The moral he drew was that ‘all obstinate adherence to rubbish which the time has long outlived [...] will some day set fire to something or other’. In other words, the failure to reform England’s stagnant institutions and outdated systems would lead to disaster. 

This image of a corrupt system consuming itself in flames is one that Dickens used to great effect in Bleak House. Krook, the ‘Lord Chancellor’ of the rag and bottle shop who parodically embodies the ills of Chancery, apparently dies of spontaneous combustion ‘engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself’. Smoke too, together with the thick London fog, is one of the abiding images of the novel, evoking the confusion and opacity that shrouds the lives of its characters. 

Krook’s smouldering remains, illustrated by Hablot Knight (Flickr Commons)

Humour and humanity

Finally, it is worth acknowledging quite how funny ‘The Doom of English Wills’ is. Dickens takes what could be a dry subject - the appropriate storage of historical documents - and makes it engaging, satirising corruption and using narrative intrigue and memorable characters to humanise the issue.

There is of course a real person behind the mask of ‘Mr William Wallace’, but Dickens takes advantage of the pseudonym to craft a likeable novelistic protagonist in the vein of David Copperfield. Rather than depicting Wallace as a hard-headed investigative journalist out to expose corruption, Dickens endows him with a naive optimism about the state of York’s ecclesiastical records. After listing the historical distinctions that make York the second city of England, Wallace exclaims 'this is surely the place for an unimpeachable Registry!'. 

We know from the start that Wallace isn’t going to find the flawless institution he is dreaming of, so his search among all of York’s grand buildings takes on a comic futility, and all of his efforts lead up to one big punchline. Unable to find his way to the registry, Wallace reflects that 'there must surely be a flaw in the old adage, and that where there was a will (and a great many wills) there was no way at all'. Having finally located the registry and started the arduous task of finding the information he needs, Wallace takes on the quixotic role of a ‘kind of knight-errant in the matter of rescuing ancient documents from their tombs of filth’.

The other ‘characters’ in the article seem to have stepped out from the pages of a novel: from the ‘farmer-looking man’ with the comedy Yorkshire accent who finally points Wallace to the registry, to the officious Deputy Registrar who laughs incredulously at the idea that Wallace might actually want to see the documents himself. (Dickens describes this reaction in a way that recalls the disbelief of Mr Bumble when Oliver Twist asks for more gruel.)

While Dickens is writing reportage here, describing people and events that have a basis in reality, his persuasive techniques are quite comparable to the ones he uses in his fiction. He could have advocated for reform using argumentative and factual prose (as William Downing Bruce would go on to do). Instead he uses characterisation and narrative to highlight the injustices of the situation. In the words of social historian David Vincent, 'Dickens’s fundamental claim [is] that contemporary abuses are best understood and communicated by means of an intense imaginative engagement with individual lives'. 

Dickens’s articles, along with the sustained campaigning of Bruce and certain sympathetic politicians, did help bring about reform. Efforts were made to improve the storage conditions in York’s registry, and in 1858 the entire probate system was reformed, transferring jurisdiction from the church courts to a new centralised Court of Probate with specific registries for the new records. 170 years on since the publication of ‘The Doom of English Wills’ (and 150 years to the day since Dickens’ death), the records are now kept safely in the Borthwick strongroom - but the persistent layer of smoky residue on some of the wills reminds us of this chapter in their long history.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2003).

Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield (London: Penguin, 1996).

Dickens, Charles, Sketches by Boz (London: Penguin, 2006).

Dickens, Charles, Speeches Literary and Social (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880).

Dickens, Charles, and William Henry Wills, ‘The Doom of English Wills: Cathedral Number Two’, Household Words, vol 2, pp. 25-28.

Longley, Katharine M, ‘Charles Dickens and the “Doom” of English Wills’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 14.1 (1993), 25-38.

Vincent, David, ‘Social Reform’, in John Jordan, Robert L. Patten, and Catherine Waters, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 420–435.