The Last Days of Business as Usual
The coronavirus pandemic has officially gotten bad enough to awaken our sense of historical consciousness. How bad is it compared to pandemics from the past? The Black Death in the 14th century? The Spanish flu outbreak of 1918? Will 2020’s COVID-19 make the history books?
Even the Renaissance scholar and New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt published a piece in The New Yorker, “The Strange Terror of Watching the Coronavirus Take Rome,” observing that in times of crisis, we turn to history and literature to make sense of what we are going through:
. . . even in the popular press, there was no end of epidemiological articles, often quite serious and detailed ones written by experts, along with the familiar lists of advice: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, clean all surfaces, keep washing your hands, move away from people who are coughing, avoid crowds, try to stay at least one metre away from everyone else. But, however informative all of this is—and we consumed a vast amount of it in only a few days—in situations of stress, it is, as usual, literature that offers the most powerful ways of grasping what is happening or may come to pass, not in the precise biological sense but in its narrative unfolding. So our conversations turned to Saramago’s “Blindness,” Camus’s “The Plague,” Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” and, above all—the greatest of these fictional depictions—the opening chapter of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.”
Death and Life Contrasted, or an Essay on Woman by Robert Dighton, 1784. British Museum
Unlike Greenblatt, I’ve not seen the effects of the virus firsthand. There have been no cases yet in Austin, so like the unnamed protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), I am lucky to say, “I went about my Business as usual.” Business as usual has included almost daily visits to the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, our rare books and manuscript archive, where I’ve been reading through the manuscript correspondence of Charlotte Addison (1719-1797), daughter of the celebrated essayist Joseph Addison. When her father died in 1719 and her mother in 1731, the orphaned teenager inherited her father’s estate, Bilton Hall in Warwickshire, and lived there unmarried until her death. Not much is known about her, but there were plenty of wild rumors about her that persisted well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: that she was “feeble minded” but could recite her father’s complete works from memory; that she was hoarding valuable Addisonian manuscripts; that “She was always fancying herself in love”; that her ghost haunted her old room at Bilton.
Unfortunately, the hundred or so odd letters housed at the HRC, that Charlotte Addison received from various family members between 1753 and 1789, can neither confirm nor deny these rumors. But what I’ve been so struck by and reminded of while reading her letters during the global coronavirus crisis is the degree to which ordinary life 250 years ago, even outside the extraordinary circumstances of an epidemic, was lived in the constant shadow of disease and death.
Death and Life Contrasted, or an Essay on Man by Robert Dighton, 1784. British Museum
Health, illness, and death are the constant theme. Lady Charlotte Rich, a relative on Charlotte Addison’s mother’s side of the family and who lived in London, habitually reports poor health among their family and friends, who all seem to suffer from constant sickness. “I have a cold wch has been up-on me above these three Weeks,” Lady Rich wrote, and “Mrs. Cotes has been confin’d with illness ever since she came to Town.” In a letter dated January 3rd, 1769, she reports, “London is at present very Sickly,” and in another writes, “I have heard of many Deaths, but no Weddings” (August 24th, 1774?). Her letters often express hope that Charlotte Addison will avoid “the fashionable colds” ravaging London (December 1st, 1767), and joy “to hear you have escap’d the Colds wch has been so general.” Illness often gets in the way of other pursuits. Elizabeth Cotes, another relative, reports missing out on the public diversions of London life to attend to a sick friend (December 20th, 1777), and Charlotte Addison’s relations often blame their poor health for not writing to her sooner. Lady Rich wrote, “repeated colds in my Head, and Eyes, has deprived me from the pleasure of writing to you sooner” (May 4th, 1768), and Elizabeth Cotes apologizes that “the reason of my omitting writing, was occasion’d by the Inflammation of my Eye, which is now better by applying seven Leeches to my Temple; which drew 8 ounces of Blood, but is still very weak” (October 1st, 1777). Charlotte Addison herself was almost a permanent invalid, often unable to spend time with her guests when they travelled to Bilton to visit her. In one letter, Lady Rich writes, “it affords me great pleasure to hear that you are well & sincerely wish you may Continue so, as its very uncomfortable to yr self & Mortifying to your Friends to have you so often out of order” (November 29th, 1758).
To get a sense of just how all-consuming the topic of sickness and health is in these letters, here’s the transcript of one full letter Lady Charlotte Rich wrote on Christmas in 1753:
Decr. ye. 25—1753
My Dear Miss Addison
I have done myself the pleasure writing two or three Letters (sometime ago) to enquire after your health w.ch I hope you received. I hear Mrs Daniel is dead poor Woman she had been long ill, yet as she had lived with you so many years, doubt it must have been a Shock to you. My maid Jenny Dyed abt. a fortnight ago, she suffer’d so much that her was a Happy release, but I had been so long used to her that I must confess it gave me some concern.
I met Lady Jane Cook who enquired after you. She told me Mrs Skipwith had been very much out of order for sometime past w.ch I was sorry to hear, I think her a most agreeable woman.
I left Hampstead but last Wednesday, I stay’d there much later than I intended, my Lord was attack’d with a fit of the Gout, w.ch confined us there, indeed I was quite tired of the Country for we had some very cold Weather, that I severely felt upon the Summit of the Hill. Miss Corbet was so obliging as to favr. me with her company yesterday she looks extremely well I think her fatter, she wont allow it. I hope you will keep your Resolution of coming to Town this Spring, & that we shall meet often, for believe me (my Dear) I shall be ever glad to see you or wait upon you when it’s in my power. if my Papa, Mama, or self can at any time be Serviceable to you, we shall be always ready to obey your Commands. We unite in wishing you many Happy Xmas’s, and am my Dear Miss Addison with real regard.
Shall I trouble you to your Aff.te Friend
make my Comp.ts to Mr Plomers Ch. Rich
Family
The world of mid-eighteenth-century London as seen through the correspondence of Charlotte Addison is both a world where chronic illness calls for years of patient suffering and where death comes swiftly without explanation. Lady Rich’s own sick mother died in 1769 after being confined to her bed for three years. In a letter dated October 29th, 1760, Lady Rich notifies Miss Addison of the unexpected death of a mutual acquaintance: “I must now inform you that poor Mrs. Boden was seized with a Paralytick fit as she was walking by Oxford Chapel she was carried home in a Chair, never recover’d her Senses, & expired last Sunday Morning” (October 29th, 1760). It was not without reason that Hobbes spoke of human life in the early modern period as “nasty, brutish, and short.” The Atlantic’s recent article, “The Coronavirus Is No 1918 Pandemic” rightly observes that “pandemic remains a benchmark, and many commentators have rushed to compare it to the current coronavirus outbreak.” However, “[w]hat’s most striking about these comparisons . . . is not the similarities between the two episodes, but the distance that medicine has traveled in the intervening century. Whatever happens next, it won’t be a second 1918.” I would even hazard to say that if we want to make sense of the coronavirus outbreak in a historical context, it might be more accurate, in some ways, to compare the current pandemic to what ordinary life was like 250 years ago than to history’s worst epidemics, like the Spanish Flu of 1918 or Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever outbreak of 1793. At the very least, reading the correspondence of Charlotte Addison has been a timely reminder that, no matter what new challenges coronaviruses will pose to local communities and national governments, we are immensely fortunate to be living in an age when modern medicine has come far enough that, under ordinary circumstances of contemporary life, illnesses can be accurately diagnosed, pain alleviated, and cures found.
