Notes and Documents

Eliza Chadwick Roberts: A Voyage to Jamaica, 1805

Susan E. Klepp and Roderick A. McDonald

ELIZA Chadwick Roberts, recently widowed, began writing her autobiography on October 14, 1814, with an account of events before her birth in 1784, especially her family's role in the settlement of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, presumably in the seventeenth century when her "Upright and candid" ancestors settled peaceably "among those Red Sons of Nature," and her parents' experiences in the Revolutionary War. She continued to write, obviously over an extended period, about events in her life up to 1821, including her later, financially disastrous marriage to Dr. Robert Scott. 1 The manuscript, clearly written in an unlined ledger, but tightly bound and fragile, is housed at the Monmouth County Historical Association, Freehold, New Jersey, along with a 115-page copy handwritten by an unknown transcriber. The last one or two pages are missing from the ledger, and both the original and the copy end in mid-sentence. The excerpt here is taken from the original ledger. 2	1
It was unusual for women, especially working women in the nineteenth century, to write accounts of their own lives. Women did occasionally write religious autobiographies, a literary tradition going back to the seventeenth century, but these usually did not include detailed descriptions or analyses of other aspects of the subject's life. Secular autobiography was still a relatively new literary genre that had developed in tandem with the novel from the early decades of the eighteenth century and was practiced almost exclusively by prominent men. Published autobiographies of women typically were scandalous memoirs. Roberts was no celebrity and recorded no scandals, nor is her autobiography a narrative of spiritual redemption. Despite her strong religious beliefs and her detailed descriptions of her trials and tribulations, her writing style owes more to contemporary sentimental fiction than to religious conversion narratives, and her autobiography deals primarily with her intense emotional reactions to the illnesses and deaths of the people close to her. She prided herself on her preternatural ability to anticipate disaster, and she highlighted her mental and physical pain, her anxieties and fears. Her trip to Jamaica, another trip to New Jersey, and a comic episode in a graveyard, stand out as happier moments in her construction of a life otherwise centered around memories of suffering, disease, and death, and her morbid imagination is as alien to most modern sensibilities as the contemporary fiction that informed her prose.	2
Aside from the gloomy subject matter, the melodramatic tone, and the florid language, her memoir has resonance for the modern reader. Roberts is very much the heroine of her own story, which centers on the important events in her life (and to a lesser extent her mother's), and more than most contemporary autobiographies, attempts to recapture her interior emotional life. She was a strong character who survived despite considerable personal misfortune. She was also ambitious, struggling to create a comfortable life and a literary legacy, although never quite succeeding at either. She was an accomplished milliner and proud of the skills with which she supported herself and her children during and after her marriages.	. . .