Seventeenth-century manuscript sources of Alice Thornton's life.(Critical Essay)

Among the "seminal women's autobiographies" of early modern lives, (1) the only edition of the seventeenth-century life written by Alice Thornton (1626-1707) omits large amounts of important material from this Yorkshire gentry woman's memorable representation of her self and family. At her death she bequeathed to her elder daughter "three Books of my owne Meditations and Transactions of my life," (2) which later became the basis of the Surtees Society's nineteenth-century Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, of East Newton, Co. York, "one of the best-known early modern English women's life-histories." (3) The second of these manuscripts has since disappeared, but the other two, currently in the possession of a private collector, significantly supplement and revise the published version of her life. Unlike the self-representations of Lady Ann Fanshawe, Lady Anne Halkett, and Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, which were also written at this time and first edited in the Victorian period, that of Thornton gives new dimension to both the domestic and spiritual memoir. (4) Her re-creation of a life defined in relation to family and faith affirms an image of the dutiful, caring, and devout woman apparent only to some extent in the published version. Minimized in the Surtees edition is the complex sense of social and spiritual self fashioned in the different manuscripts, a search and struggle for self-validation unique among other seventeenth-century lives dependent upon traditional familial and religious sources of identity. Though the complexity of Thornton's autobiographical achievement would be more fully apparent in a new edition, which ought to be prepared, a comparison of the available text and its manuscript sources enriches an appreciation of her original intent and accomplishment.

The three autobiographical manuscripts form a lengthy occasional piece written in response to a personal and family crisis caused by slanderous rumors about the marriage of the Thorntons' fourteen-year-old daughter Naly. (5) While the origins and nature of the slander are obscured in the manuscripts' differing accounts, at issue are the reputation and social standing of a family allegedly compelled to bolster its diminished fortunes through the marriage of the elder daughter to the local minister, Thomas Comber. Within three months of the private wedding, which occurred soon after the funeral of Thornton's husband, the newly widowed mother began writing a defense of her own character and that of her family. "About Candlemas 69," Thornton later recalls, she had "begun a Booke, wherein I had entred very many & great remarkes of my cource of Life, what God had don for me since my Childehood, in my youth & younger yeares till continued to my married Estate. And for my husband, Relations and Children haueing writ downe most remarkes of my Life, wth obseruations of mercys, deliurances, & thanksgivings therevppon." (6) Referred to in the subsequent manuscripts as "my first Booke of my Life," the autobiographical recollections were then circulated "to sattisfy all my freinds of my Life and Conuersation that it was not such as my deadly Enymyes sugested" and "wch I know would take away all those scruples and fallse Calumnyes against my Proceeding in yt match" (3:195). This book or a holograph copy is the volume of 303 numbered pages now in a private collection; it begins chronologically with a childhood accident in 1629 and ends with the death of Thornton's husband in 1668. (7) Edited material from the second volume of 291 pages implies that the now lost manuscript recounts at considerable length the earlier family narrative: (8) several passages from the second manuscript are interpolated or footnoted in this sequence; then from this manuscript the edition adds accounts of her husband's financial affairs and her father's will concerning her widowed estate. A third manuscript, 216 pages containing memorable events from the first year of Thornton's widowhood, forms the basis of the edition's conclusion, providing further interpolations and footnotes to the earlier chronology. (9) Apparently, this holograph manuscript was copied, if not revised, some time after the first year of widowhood, though neither this nor the manuscript "first Booke" can be dated with any certainty. (10) They provide, however, the text for the published life and as such offer an important corrective to the edition, even without the missing second manuscript.

When Charles Jackson accepted the Surtees Society's invitation to edit the autobiography, he based the 1875 edition on the transcription of Charles Best Norcliffe, who had "abstracted, & arranged" the three manuscripts' lengthy, sometimes loose and repetitious mixture of autobiographical prayers and episodic narratives. (11) The aim of both editor and transcriber was "to preserve to a certain extent the chronological sequence of events" by responsible deletions and transpositions. (12) Given the nature of the three manuscripts, the edition favors the chronological narrative in the first and third volumes. Approximately two-thirds of the text comes from the first manuscript; most of the remaining pages, again about two-thirds, are from the last source. Footnotes complement the edited life often by reproducing parallel passages "when the language is different" (p. 22n), brackets or ellipses note omissions, and parentheses indicate corresponding manuscript pages. Especially in editing the material from the first manuscript, Jackson retains Norcliffe's documentation of omissions and transpositions. He does not, it should be noted, supply the pagination missing in some of the manuscript citations or clarify the transcription's tendency in later sections to shift and blend unattributed passages.

The result is a responsible edited, albeit limited version of Thornton's original autobiography. In reducing and refocusing repetitious, loosely structured material, the edition of necessity alters contexts and emphases. Passages subordinated to the text in lengthy, sometimes distracting footnotes tend to lose their forcefulness and meaning. When relocated in the main body of the text, they create a chronological continuity at the risk of distorting authorial intent. Omissions or deletions intended to tighten the structure also lessen the impact of the original composition. Despite the editor's assurance that "[e]verything ... has been inserted that is of any interest and value," (13) the emotional significance of events is no longer always contextually apparent. When Thornton reflected upon the meaning of her life and defended her actions, she defined herself in relation to religion and family. Praising and serving are fundamental values in a life devoted to God; they are also basic to the duty she owes her parents, husband, and children. In the context of the unedited remembrances, this spiritual and secular commitment reflects a dependency that alters between the first and final manuscripts, an alteration obscured in the Surtees edition. Paradoxically, the religious faith that determines Thornton's self-representation is ultimately both more and less significant than the edited autobiography suggests. The bond between religion and family is similarly more complicated in these manuscripts. The private, spiritual expression of an unquestionably religious woman as well as the public, rhetorical vindication of a maligned reputation, her self-construction both confirms and redefines a conventional autobiographical concern with divine deliverance. For the sake of chronological clarity, the edition diminishes the complex and paradoxical relationships apparent when editorial changes that limit Thornton's intent are reconsidered.

From the outset of the remembrances, God is the center of a life Thornton devoted to prayer and thanksgiving. A self-described handmaid of the Lord, she dedicates herself to the praise and service of God. The initial prayer and dedication to God excluded from the edition liken her life to the Old Testament journey "through ye Red Sea of this World, into the Land of Promisse" and express the hope that she may live until her soul "has tould, /The gracious goodnesse of our blessed God" (1:2-3). The subsequent preface to the manuscript--the first entry in the Surtees edition--further emphasizes a Christian duty to memorialize God's beneficence. The "vnworthy handmaide," who has been sustained by a beneficent mercy likened in another biblical allusion from Exodus to the dropping of a divine dew, acknowledges the obligation to record remembrances of these temporal and spiritual ...