"Murder Heaped Upon Murder"

In 1798, Martha Washington writes her niece asking her to make a rather specific purchase on her behalf. “Dear Fanny,” she writes, “I see the Children of the Abbey advertised in a bookstore in the city. If you can get a set with plates or cuts, I beg you, get a set for me.” The copy of Martha's Children of the Abbey today resides at the Washington Presidential Library inside the Mars Rare Books Suite, where Martha's books occupy a single shelf. This book is more than just a novel, however. It offers a tantalizing glimpse into the mysterious, private life of the First First Lady. 

For inside the cover of this novel, written in faded pencil, are the words, “I, E. P. Lewis, value this old novel because my revered and Mrs. M. Washington read and liked it.”

Today, on the Secrets of Washington's Archives, we're introducing you to the spooky world of Gothic novels by exploring the books read together by Martha Washington and her granddaughter Nelly. What made these sensational novels so popular among the women in the 18th century? And what do they reveal about the relationship between Martha and Nellie? 

And now your hosts, Dr. Ann Fertig and Samantha Snyder.

ANNE FERTIG: Welcome to the Secrets of Washington's Archives, a special podcast celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Washington Presidential Library at George Washington's Mount Vernon. In this podcast, we're showing you the life of George Washington through his books, the books held here at the Washington Presidential Library. And we've already talked in this series quite a bit about George's books, but what about Martha's books?

Occupying a single shelf in the Mars Rare Book Suite is a collection of books known to belong to Martha. So today we're going to be talking about one of Martha's books in particular, a sensational Gothic novel from the 18th century titled Children of the Abbey. We're also going to mix things up a little bit with our format. Today joining me is Samantha Snyder, research librarian for the Washington Presidential Library. But she's going to be leading today's conversation with today's guest, who happens to be none other than myself. So welcome, Sam. 

SAMANTHA SNYDER: Well, thank you so much, Anne. So I will go ahead and introduce you. With me today is Dr. Anne Fertig, who is the Digital Projects Editor in the Center for Digital History here at the Washington Presidential Library. So welcome, Anne. And could you explain to me a little bit about what you do here at Mount Vernon and maybe what the Center for Digital History is? 

FERTIG: Yes, Sam. So the Center for Digital History is our hub for digital scholarship. We do research here and then we bring it straight to you, the public. There's no closed doors behind journals. You don't have to rush to a university library to check out this research. When we do research, we make it public facing, public oriented, through digital avenues. And so as digital projects editor, you know, it's been so wonderful to talk with everyone else at the library about what they do. Well, what I do is exactly this. I help develop many of our podcasts here and many of the podcasts that we have coming up. I also work on projects such as the Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington or assist with the development of exciting new digital portals like American Revolutionary Geographies online. There's a very exciting to be, one making podcasts like this, but also to reach out to the public in different and exciting digital platforms. 

SNYDER: You will be here today talking about Martha Washington's books. So what is so important about her books and what can we tell from her reading habits? 

FERTIG: So we don't have a lot of extant letters from Martha. We are very lucky that those that do exist have been recently published in a volume, the Letters of Martha Washington. 

SNYDER: Which is amazing. Everyone should buy it. 

FERTIG: Absolutely. It's an invaluable resource for anyone working with Martha Washington. But the relative scarcity of her letters means we don't really know as much about her as we might about other early first ladies or other important women from the same period. Martha was a very public figure, but she was a very private person. She did her duties well as First Lady, but we know that she really enjoyed her life at home and she wasn't as comfortable with being that big public figure. So the great thing about her books is that they're a way for us to start getting into her mind a little bit more, piecing together what she read, piecing together what she enjoyed and how she enjoyed it.

One of the great things that we have, one of the great artifacts, are these inscriptions written in her books by her granddaughter, Eleanor Park Custis, known to us as Nellie. Nellie often wrote in the books that she inherited from Martha that they belonged to her grandmother. And sometimes she even leaves some tantalizing other details such as the case with today's book, The Children of the Abbey. 

SNYDER: I think one thing that's interesting about Martha's books is that you can also see how she would have been having her own discussions with people. She might have been private, but just how she would have been talking about with other women, with Washington himself, with Nellie. I just have always thought that's interesting. Good conversation pieces in a way. 

FERTIG: One of my favorite examples of Martha's readings, habits. Martha read a lot of books about medicine, and this actually fits in very well with what we know about her life. She lost many of her children while they were very young. She was very anxious about her surviving children, about her surviving grandchildren, and about George himself when it came to health problems. We can see her buying a lot of these medical books. During the time of the yellow fever, we see her ordering books about cures for the yellow fever. There were a number of cures available, one of which was known as the wine cure, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's for wine. Treat yourself to wine.

SNYDER: Salutary groups or something like that.

FERTIG: And when Alexander Hamilton got sick, she sent him the quote-unquote wine cure. She sent his wife several bottles of wine and Hamilton recovered. And from that point on, Hamilton to Congress was actually advocating the widespread adoption of this wine cure. 

SNYDER: Yes. Versus Benjamin Rush, who I spoke about briefly in my episode, was the ultimate opposer of that. He was operating with the heroic medicine of bleeding.

FERTIG: Yes. Very different. So thanks to Martha, perhaps, of course we can never really know with these 18th century medicines, but perhaps she contributed to keeping Alexander Hamilton around for a few more years at least, and for influencing him and advocating for this particular cure. So just, amazing things that we can pull from these stories around books where Martha, we can see her reading and engaging and really going out there in the world with what she has learned.

SNYDER: Well what’s so interesting about one of the main books that we're focusing on today, which is called Children of the Abbey. Which is a novel, correct? 

FERTIG: It is a novel, and this is delightful because George Washington is not known in particular for his love of novels. We have a few novels that he owned when he was a younger man, but it does not seem like he read many of them later in his life. This is not to say he wasn't reading them at all, but relative to other types of books in his collection, he does not have many. But Martha seems to be reading them. 

SNYDER: Yes. 

FERTIG: And Martha seems to be enjoying them. So I'm just going to describe this book real quick. This is called Children of the Abbey, and it was published by a woman named Regina Mariah Roche, who was a popular Irish novelist who was known in particular for her Gothic novels. What we mean by Gothic is this is a genre that became popular in the late 18th century. It was primarily written by women and primarily read by women. It's considered the progenitor of the horror genre. Gothic novels features heroines and distress, supernatural wonders, spooky ruins, and exotic landscapes. And Roche is known as belonging to one of these really early cohorts of Gothic writers. In fact, one reviewer at the time described her novels as, “mystery is heaped upon mystery and murder upon murder with little art and great improbability.”

And if this book sounds familiar to you, it's because there's another very well-known fan of Regina Mariah Roche, Jane Austen. Yes, Jane Austen references Children of the Abbey by name in her novel Emma and another one of Roche's early works, Claremont, in her novel Northanger Abbey. So you can see how this book got around. If it's ending up in one of Jane Austen's novels, you know this is a very, very popular book. And Martha's copy was published and sold by New York bookseller H Carriot, who published the American edition in 1797. And it was so popular and was in demand that just even a year later, newspapers like the Daily Advertiser were calling for a second printing. 

SNYDER: Which is so cool. I love that. 

FERTIG: And this model in particular follows the romantic entanglements of the Fitz-Allen siblings, Amanda and Oscar, who are the children of a poor soldier and a wealthy heiress who is disinherited for marrying for love. Amanda is in love with Lord Mortimer, who cannot marry her without being disinherited himself. Oscar has fallen for a woman named Adela, who is married off to a scheming Colonel Belgrave. Colonel Belgrave also wants to seduce Amanda. A lot of seduction in this novel. 

SNYDER: A lot of seduction. 

FERTIG: And they're all separated and they go on a series of adventures until the end in which a supernatural encounter in an old abbey leads them to the will, showing that the siblings are the rightful heirs of their grandfather, and then Belgrave dies and they both marry their true loves.

SNYDER: Well, good, I'm glad that they get their true love. One thing I do want to ask, so these novels, they're quite dramatic. Would they have been read just all alone in a bedroom or would there maybe have been another way they would have been read? 

FERTIG: So with novels in particular, people read them aloud. It was very common in this period for families and women in particular to read novels together. And Gothic novels also had a very strong reputation for being read aloud by circles of women. So we can imagine Martha reading this aloud to Nellie. And we know that Martha wanted this book, and we do actually have a letter where she's writing to her niece Fanny, and she says, “My dear Fanny, I see the children of the Abbey advertised in a bookstore in the city. If you can get a set with plates or cuts, I beg you, get a set for me.”

So at the time when Martha asked for this book, Nellie was still living with her grandparents. So there's a very likely chance that she was reading this with Martha. And we can also kind of get that from that inscription in the book, which is. “I, E.P. Lewis value this old novel because my revered and beloved grandma, Mrs. Martha Washington read and liked it.” So we know Nellie knows that she liked it and that she read it. And, because she was living with him at the time, we can't tell for certain, but it is likely they were probably reading this book together. 

SNYDER: Do you think George Washington would have been sitting in and listening, or, I like my theory, that he was standing outside the little parlor door listening from afar.

FERTIG: Well, you know, it's impossible to tell. But we know that Washington himself sometimes read things aloud at Mount Vernon. That's true. That the night he died, he was reading aloud periodicals, and that it wouldn't have been uncommon for family members to gather in the same space and be reading. So we can't say for certain with this particular novel, and we can never say for certain that they were reading aloud. But considering the practices of the day, I say it's pretty likely that George overheard some of this novel at least. 

SNYDER: And they loved the theater. So this is very similar to theater even. 

FERTIG: It's not a private solitary activity. It's actually a family activity and specifically an activity between women, between a grandmother and a granddaughter. 

SNYDER: So why did women read gothic novels? So this is a genre that's mostly read by women. And if you read it, they're a little, like I said, murder heaped upon murder. A lot of times women are imprisoned underground in subterranean centers. There's a lot of imagery of devious monks stealing women away or men tricking women into marriages. It's very dramatic and it seems very over the top. But it's kind of like a way for us to understand women's experiences in this century because these are exaggerations of really, real threats women faced. The Gothic reflected women's precarious legal and social position, threats of forced marriage, fallen reputation, lost inheritances were very real for 18th century women. And we might think of it very similarly to say true crime. True crime is a very sensational genre today that is primarily consumed by women. And it's often about threats that befall women. And people have done equal research on that, of how women are sometimes drawn to this because it can reflect fears or anxieties or parts of their own situation. And Gothic operated in a similar way in the 18th century.

SNYDER: There's often the idea that these women are repressed and quiet. But if this is a women's activity, this is a way for them to experience life and actually have discussions and that sort of stuff.

FERTIG: Especially if we're thinking about a grandmother reading this with her granddaughter. Children of the Abbey contains seduction. It contains men attacking women and some brutal imagery that I think at first glance we might not immediately associate with the age of polite manners. And Martha's probably reading this with her granddaughter. At the very least, she gave the book to her granddaughter. So what is going on there? What is she trying to tell Nellie? What moral lessons is she trying to teach her? To give you an idea of what kind of language this book was written in, I'm just going to read a small excerpt of the book.

And this is where Amanda the heroine is facing an attempt at seduction by Colonel Belgrave and Belgrave is trying to convince her to become his mistress. And she's fighting against it and she says, “Your scheme, Colonel Belgrave is equally vile and futile. Though treachery may have brought you hither, you must be convinced that under the Marquis of Rossensruth, who by relationship as well as hospitality is bound to protect me, you dare not with impunity offer me any insult." And Colonel Belgrave responds by saying, “And why, my Amanda, why should you be obstinate in refusing wealth, happiness, the sincere, the ardent affection of a man who in promoting your felicity would constitute his own? My life, my fortune, would be at your command. My eternal gratitude would be yours for any trifling sacrifice the world might think you made me.” 

And he's tempting her, right? Saying I could give you security, I could give you fortune, I could give you a good life. And remember, this is for a girl in this book who can't own property herself, who's been disinherited, who has no connections in the world. And the way our heroine responds is by calling him a monster and warding him off. But think about that as a lesson from a grandmother to a granddaughter. It's very strong language and it's a very sensational idea. But this is part of Nellie learning about the world. 

SNYDER: And I kind of love it because it's such a stark difference to the letters that George Washington writes to two of his granddaughters about the lessons of love and all of this stuff. And there's one to Nellie, very flowery language about, oh, just make sure that friendship is more valuable than passion and that sort of stuff versus this very intense novel with the lessons are, so much more dramatic and probably more valuable in a way because it's the real life lessons rather than just from a man's perspective in a way. Yeah?

FERTIG: Yeah, I mean, we have to remember this deals with that question of yes, look for a man who can treat you right. And it's not just based on passion. But this is saying, what do you do when you're in a situation where a man who is more powerful than you has you cornered.

SNYDER: Exactly.

FERTIG: And that is scary and it's not a polite lesson, but it's definitely one that women of the era constantly had in the back of their heads. So just think about that as something that women in that period were constantly thinking about this, this threat of physical violence, this threat of ruining their reputation, which was so fragile, in which it could guarantee them a good marriage with financial stability or potentially throw their life into poverty. These are not polite lessons but they’re anxieties that are very real. And once again, we should think about this in context of Martha reading this book and joining this book, but also Martha passing this book down to her granddaughter. 

SNYDER: Exactly, who then in turn could read it or give it to her daughters and probably did, because there is the tracing even of one generation further where some of the books that we have even pass on to one of Nellie's daughters, Mary Eliza Angela Louis Conrad who was Nellie's, one of her favorite daughters, Nellie lost several of her children, but then she actually unfortunately dies at a relatively young age, basically from childbirth. But that's another generation down even if sharing this information down and sharing this knowledge in these life lessons, whether they're scary or not, that Nellie clearly learned from her grandmother and passed that information down because those fears were still real 50 years later, 40 years later.

FERTIG: And I think it's interesting that Nellie’s signature in the book comes from 1798, which is the year before she gets married. So she is reading this sensational adventure about a woman who's facing all of these different threats against her reputation, against her body. And she's doing that at the same time that she herself is thinking about marriage in the same time that she is probably getting all of this advice from both of her grandparents about who to marry. 

SNYDER: So in this era, women did not have a lot of what we would think of as power in a way beyond how they could use the power that they had but they didn't have the power of owning property, of basically choosing a lot of things in their life. But did novels give women their own sort of power that they wouldn't have had? 

FERTIG: Absolutely. This is such a good way of looking at the novel. The novel in the 18th century is really interesting because men and women both wrote novels. A novel reading was seen as a primarily female pursuit. So there were men who wrote novels, there were men who read novels, but there was this idea that novels were a woman's business and they were a woman's form of entertainment. So when you read Gothic novels, it's very common, this happens in Children of the Abbey, where the female heroine will run into a woman who has befallen similar dangers, but who has not been rescued. And she'll tell her woeful history and it's usually some way of, I was seduced, I was led astray and I gave into that temptation or in the very explicit ones even she was taken forcibly. So the heroine is always presented with this example of what happens if you don't take your life into your own hands. Ruin befalls you and so that almost motivates the heroine to be the one to try to escape, to fight against the men who might be physically or otherwise trying to keep them in trap.

And when we as literary historians look at that, we see that as an incredibly important moment in literature, because one, it's women writing for women, books about their own situation, where not always, sometimes at the end of Gothic novels, the women don't you see, but there's definitely a strain of Gothic novels where the heroine ends up escaping and does marry her true love and does live happily ever after. And that's always because of what she did. 

SNYDER: Exactly. 

FERTIG: Not waiting around for anyone else to save her. 

SNYDER: Exactly. They're writing their own stories. And it almost reminds me a little bit of Six, the musical that's been out right now, the women rewriting their own stories. It reminds me a lot of that, that it's like they have that power to plot out a life, whether or not it's their life. It almost makes me wonder if it was almost like an open secret between women that men did not understand the lessons in these novels because their lives were so different, then there's, I don't know, it's just very interesting because some men thumb their nose at novels and here we are talking about just how important they really were. 

FERTIG: Well, I could point out that in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which also cites one of Roche's novels, the hero of that is a man who loves gothic novels and actually enjoys them just like the heroine. So there's something good to be found in a man who enjoys them. But I think it's also interesting just to go back to Martha. It's very hard once again to find these judgments about her own life. We know very little about her early life. We know very little about her education. We have just a couple of letters, but one of my favorite letters from early on in her life isn't from her. It's when she's 17 years old. She wants to marry Daniel Park Custis, her first husband. Daniel Park Custis’ infamously curmudgeon father, John Custis, who has rejected several of Daniel's marriage proposals so far is adamant that his son will not marry. And there is a letter from John Power who wrote Daniel saying, your father has agreed to the engagement. You should marry very quickly before he changes his mind. But what changed in him? This is owing according to John Power, “To a prudent speech that Martha Washington gave to John Custis.” 

SNYDER: Love that.

FERTIG: 17 year old Martha, just like the hero in this book. She stood up for what she wanted. She gave him a speech and she convinced him to let them marry, which I think shows a remarkable character early on in her life, even though she might not have had the best education. So just a powerful woman in her own life as well. 

SNYDER: I agree. And I think Nellie admired that in her too, because I think Nellie was just like that all those years later. 

FERTIG: You know what? You can see it in Nellie's letters. Nellie had a very strong opinion of her own. Definitely empowered by the novels that she read in her own letters. She talks about that with her letters with her friend, Elizabeth Bordley Gibson. She talks about how they should become like heroines in a novel. You can see the influences of novels in the way that she writes her letters and the ways that she talks about men in particular. She's making references to the novels that they're reading and you can tell that they are empowering her. They're helping her assert her own agency, in a world where her status was still very much tied to that of her husband's. 

SNYDER: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me today. And I really appreciated our discussion about the enticingness of a Gothic novel, but also the life lessons and the discussion of how women held so much power and how Martha used to that power, how Nellie used that power. And it all ties back to books. 

FERTIG: Books that they read together, and shared together and enjoyed very much. 

SNYDER: And yes, and liked very much. 

FERTIG: Liked very much together. I think it just goes to show with women in particular and these books that have often been called silly, you can learn a lot about women by the books that they read. Absolutely. And their hopes, their fears, their dreams and the worlds that they imagine for themselves. 

SNYDER: Wonderful.

FERTIG: Well, thank you, Samantha, for joining me today. If you want to see Martha's copy of Children of the Abbey, which we hold here at the Washington Presidential Library, be sure to check out our video companion at georgewashingtonpodcast.com, or you can see it on YouTube under the same title. You can even see the inscription that Nellie wrote inside. Thank you all for joining us for another episode.

NARRATOR: The book featured in this podcast is Children of the Abbey by Regina Maria Roche. The volume that belonged to Martha Washington is held by the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. It was purchased by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in 1950. The Secrets of Washington's Archives is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and CD Squared. This show is hosted by Samantha Snyder and researched by Dr. Anne Fertig. Narration and audio production were completed by Kurt Dahl at CD Squared. The music featured in this podcast is from the album No Kissing Allowed in School, produced by the Colonial Music Institute. You can listen to more from this album and other productions of the Colonial Music Institute on Spotify.