Image: David Loggan, Oxonia illustrata (1675). Yale Center for British Art. Public domain.

The Letters of a Dutiful Son

June 25, 2024

Adriana Benzaquén’s article, “‘These Small Sumptomes of My Obediense’: Negotiating Father-Son Conflict through Letter-Writing in Early Modern England,” appears in the Winter 2024 issue of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Digital Childhoods editor Alice Sage interviewed Adriana about her work, and the practical aspects of researching young lives in the seventeenth century.

Your article is a case study of correspondence between Edward Clarke and his father in the 1660s-70s. Could you introduce who these men were?

In the late 1660s and early 1670s, Edward Clarke was a student, first at Oxford and then in London, where he studied law at the Inner Temple. He was the only son and heir of the elder Edward Clarke, a Somerset landowner who acquired his estate, Chipley, through an advantageous marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Lottisham (Edward’s stepmother). Having recently risen to the status of gentry, Edward and his father were privileged and ambitious, but also somewhat insecure and eager to take advantage of new educational, economic, and political opportunities available to English men at this time. 

Edward’s life from his student years to his death in 1710 is very well documented. The letters I am using in this article are part of the extensive collection of Clarke family papers held at the Somerset Heritage Centre in Taunton. Edward wrote to his father from Oxford and London every week or every two weeks, and most of his letters have been preserved. 

In the 1680s and 1690s, Edward became the philosopher John Locke’s closest friend and one of his main political associates. He also enlarged the family’s estate and increased its wealth and status through another advantageous marriage (to heiress Mary Jepp), strategic land purchases, and investments in East India Company stock. 

You demonstrate how the father-son relationship is negotiated through conflict, resolution, petitions and gratitude. Did anything surprise you in the way the two Edwards communicated with each other?

In general, it is a challenge to reconstruct relationships between premodern children and their parents, because the most important elements of a relationship—how people interact and speak to each other, what they do together, and so on—leave few or no documentary traces. But during Edward’s time as a student his relationship with his father unfolded almost exclusively through their letters (Edward did not go back to Chipley at all during this period, nor did his father visit him in Oxford or London), and it was in their letters that father and son expressed and negotiated emotions (affection, gratitude, resentment, anger, fear, regret) and got things done (requests and commands).

What most interested and intrigued me was how Edward used the (quite rigid) epistolary conventions that were available to him at the time both to perform his identity as a dutiful son and to push the boundaries of what was permissible to a dutiful son. Historians often question the sincerity or authenticity of letters written by young people to adults in positions of authority, seeing them as less valuable than private writings or texts addressed to peers. I disagree with this assessment. Edward’s letters are formulaic and subtle at the same time, and they display the full range and complexity of his emotions. His love for his father and appreciation for his father’s efforts are forefront, while his understated but persistent requests for money and attempts at self-assertion demonstrate his growing confidence, even though he always avoided overt confrontation or rebellion and quickly apologized every time his father thought he had overstepped his place. 

The correspondence also reveals the intense concern father and son showed for each other’s health and their boundless trust in doctors and in the effectiveness of medical treatments (for instance, when Edward had smallpox in London). This questions or corrects the common perception of premodern medicine as barely distinguishable from quackery and therapeutically worthless, if not harmful.

Image: Edward Clarke to his father, July 4, 1669, reference number SHC DD/SF/7/1/15. Reproduced with kind permission of the South West Heritage Trust.

The article paints a vivid picture of the personalities of two individuals and change over time (e.g. Edward Jr. growing up). What do you think are the benefits and challenges of a case-study approach like this?

In many studies, historians mine a large number of sources for precise and limited purposes: to find examples or quotations that will support a specific argument (about parents and children, say) or will fit into a predetermined framework. In contrast, my purpose was to learn as much as possible about one father and one son and examine every aspect of their relationship. Rather than using the letters to illustrate points that were important to me, I let the letters themselves lead me to what was important to them. 

General studies and case studies should be seen as complementary. What a case study may lack in representativeness, it makes up for in depth of understanding. In studies of relationships, moreover—and, to my mind, children’s lives cannot be studied or understood outside the relationships in which they are immersed—only a case-study approach may do justice to their complex dynamics and ascertain what may have been unique, distinctive, or typical about them. I explore some of these questions at the end of the article, where I consider the extent to which Edward’s relationship with his father may have influenced the choices he made as a parent, and more broadly whether the differences between the two Edward Clarkes may point to a generational shift in parental attitudes and styles.

You use the word “eavesdropping” to describe what you are doing as a historian. Could you expand on that feeling of being an unintended reader?

These letters were private; they were not meant to be circulated or read by others, so for a historian to be reading them (and writing about them) now is equivalent to eavesdropping on other people’s private conversations. Yet the very fact that the letters have survived confirms that they were significant to those who wrote them and received them, as well as to descendants who preserved them and eventually deposited them in a public archive. Reading other people’s letters is a very personal act, and it is virtually impossible for the historian not to become emotionally involved, to some extent. 

One challenge is understanding why some letters were preserved while others were not. For instance, there are many letters in the Clark archive (none written by Edward or his father, though) that end with the request that the recipient burn them, and yet they were kept. On the other hand, there are many gaps and silences, letters that we know were written but are no longer extant. Were these missing letters simply lost or misplaced, or were they (or some of them) deliberately destroyed? And if they were destroyed, was it because they were considered unimportant or too important? There are topics that the letters say nothing or very little about (friends and sex, for instance), and it is impossible to know whether the omission is due to the writers’ choice to avoid them or to censorship by the recipients or later owners. 

There must have been a lot of information in the letters that you were unable to include. Were there any interesting stories you’d like to share of Edward’s life in late-1600s Oxford and London?

In some of Edward’s letters from Oxford there are brief references to the life of his college or the university. The most exciting event of the year was the Act (graduation), which in 1669 was held for the first time at the recently completed (Sheldonian) Theatre. Edward had been sending reports on the progress of the building for many months; “the Theater is now in a manner finished,” he wrote on February 9, “wanting nothing but a painted peice of Cloath which is to bee hung upp and spread all round directly under the roofe [sic].” A highlight of the Act, at least for the students, were the satirical and often scandalous speeches given by the Terrae Filii (“sons of the earth”), two students appointed by the proctors to entertain the audience, and Edward sounded proud when he announced that one of them was chosen “out of our house.” But just a few weeks later both Terrae Fillii were expelled “for abusing the Doctors’ wives”! Edward also told his father that, in time for the Act, the actors of the Duke’s Company arrived from London to perform at the Guildhall, two different plays each day for twelve days (Edward did not say whether he attended any of the performances, but I would like to think he did).

Some practical questions… How did you access these sources? Are they digitized or did you handle them physically? Did you need special paleographic skills to read 17th-century handwriting? 

These letters are not digitized. I was fortunate to be able to see and handle them physically at the archive, but I did not read them there. During two trips to Taunton, I took thousands of photographs of letters and other documents (account books, marriage settlements, wills, bills and receipts, etc.), and back in my office I spent countless hours deciphering them, transcribing them, and organizing them chronologically (at the archive the letters are not kept in any particular order). 

And yes, I did need special paleographic skills to read the letters. This was not something I had received training in as a graduate student, so I had to train myself, using online resources such as the National Archives’ paleography guide, for which I am very grateful. The non-standard spellings and the many abbreviations could be daunting at first, but after a while one simply gets used to them. 

Did your piece change significantly from first draft to final revision? 

I usually take copious notes and prepare very detailed outlines, but then once I start the actual writing of an article or chapter, I produce something very close to the final text. In this case, the article (like many others) began as a conference paper and benefitted from feedback from many different people before it reached its final form. The most important change was the expansion of the concluding section, where I compare Edward’s and his father’s parenting styles. 

This article is part of your larger project on John Locke’s circle of friends and correspondents. Could you explain more about how the Clarkes fit in?

Edward Clarke and his family played an unwitting but crucial role in the history of childhood and children, as the recipients of John Locke’s letters on education, written in the 1680s, the basis for Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). And they also play a central role in my larger project, a study of “Locke’s children”: the children who inspired Locke to write about childhood and education. 

I am using the term “educational designs” to describe how parents planned and implemented their children’s education (understood broadly to include not just academic or vocational training but all aspects of a child’s upbringing and wellbeing) based on their values and aspirations, and how they relied on others (friends, relatives, doctors, servants, tutors and teachers) to carry out those designs. I argue that for many of his friends, in particular the Clarkes, Locke played a new role: the “expert” on children and education whose advice parents eagerly solicited and relied on. This article on Edward and his father is a kind of prequel to my study of Locke’s children.

To end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things…

1) Favorite way of managing notes and/or citations?

My methods are very unsophisticated. I just use Microsoft Word! I have many separate files with hundreds, probably thousands of pages of transcribed documents. I use the outline view (to expand and collapse the text of the letters), color-coding (different colors for the documents and my own notes) and tags to be able to do quick searches of topics or people. It is a very simple system but works for me.

2) Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year? (Does not have to be something that was also published in the last year.)

Nicholas Orme’s Tudor Children (published by Yale University Press, 2023).

3) Best piece of advice you remember receiving as a child?

I cannot remember! Maybe I was not good at receiving advice, or didn’t think I needed any, at that time?

4) And in keeping with the theme of your article, did you ever write letters as a child or teenager, or have a penpal?

I did not regularly write letters as a child, but as a teenager I had a penpal in Saumur, France, as part of my high-school French class. 


Adriana Benzaquén is a Professor in the Department of History at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Canada. She is the author of Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006) and of many articles on children and youth, health and medicine, human science, and friendship in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. She is also the editor of A Cultural History of Youth in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2023).


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