steepholm

It's almost a year since I bought my great-great-great grandfather Weeden's rather antsy letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, and tomorrow it will be exactly 200 years since he wrote it. As I promised at the time, I subsequently hung it above my desk as a stern warning to myself (as an author) to show patience with editors, and also (as an editor) to do the same with authors.

1821 was perhaps the last year Weeden can be said to have been happy. His wife Annabella, adored father (also Weeden) and daughter Emma, were all were dead within the year, and he appears to have gone into a deep depression. In the words of Annie Robina Butler, his granddaughter:

The very foundation of the earth must have seemed to those poor Cheyne Walk children to be shaking, more especially as their father——too utterly crushed to take further active interest in either home or school——buried himself in the study amongst his books, in a perfect abandonment of grief, and left them, practically, to bring themselves up.

That, unfortunately, is another occupational hazard - but one I've so far avoided.