Marianne Czisnik - Nelsons Letters to Lady Hamilton and Related Documents

Pastels of Nelson and Lady Hamilton by Johann Heinrich Schmidt (done in Dresden in 1800) [NMM] National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Frontispiece

This edition has had many supporters in the course of the more than ten years that I have been working on it. It would not have been completed without the help of a great number of people in archives and libraries. Friends and family gave advice and a Caird Fellowship of the National Maritime Museum supplied financial aid. Among the many supporters Professor H. T. Dickinson, and Professor Roger and Jane Knight stand out. Harry Dickinson has read the introductory texts, corrected mistakes and made important suggestions as to how to clarify the contents. Roger and Jane Knight have provided me with a wealth of support, ranging from historical advice to accommodation in London. I am grateful to have experienced their friendship in the long journey leading to this edition.

Sadly, this volume cannot be called Correspondence of Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton. In order to justify such a title, more of her letters to him would need to have come down to us. Nevertheless, it is worth publishing what is left of this correspondence.

It is fortunate that nearly all of Nelsons letters to Lady Hamilton can be traced and read. The business of tracing them, however, is so difficult that this alone would have justified publishing them in one volume. The original manuscripts are spread over public and private collections across Britain and America. Those that have been published are distributed over several printed sources and have not always been transcribed reliably. Apart from changes in spelling, punctuation and the like, whole paragraphs have sometimes been omitted. The aim of this edition is therefore to render a complete and easily accessible collection of as much as there remains of this correspondence.

Nelsons part of the correspondence alone is worth publishing as a whole, because even more than in his other letters Nelson is out-spoken in expressing his views and feelings. The story of his last and historically most interesting years is here told by himself. The value of this collection is enhanced by the authenticity of Nelsons compositions. He appears never to have composed a standard letter, but rather wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style and often in haste. As a result his rather curt style, trained by years of writing logbooks, often conveys the impression of listening to him talking. This immediacy of style is also reflected in the subjects covered. Nelsons letters deal with the great variety of matters that were on his mind at the time of writing, from political and strategic issues, through practical worries of the day-to-day running of a fleet at sea, to private and intimate matters. The lack of inhibition that some of the letters betray may be explained by strength of feeling towards the addressee or by the confidence (at least in 1801) that she would burn his letters. As a consequence the lack of much pondering is a value of Nelsons letters to Lady Hamilton rather than a weakness.