Introduction to the Correspondence of Mary Hays Pforzheimer Collection, NYPL

The letters below comprise the largest set of manuscript materials related to Mary Hays and can be found in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, New York. The correspondence begins with the collection of letters Hays and her lover and eventual fiancé, John Eccles, during the final two years of his short life (1779-1780). These letters, teeming with the excesses of romantic sentiment typical of that time, were carefully transcribed and preserved in two bound volumes, of which one volume has survived. Eccles came from Fordingbridge and lived with a family in Gainsford Street, Southwark, just across the street from the Hays family; both families attended the Baptist chapel (usually referred to as the “meeting” in these letters) at the end of the street. 

Letters from the 1780s belong exclusively to those sent to Hays by the controversial Baptist minister at Cambridge, Robert Robinson (1735-90), who was instrumental in turning Hays and her sister Elizabeth from orthodoxy to Unitarianism by the late 1780s. During the next decade, Hays’s correspondence reaches its apex, especially in the letters that passed between her and Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin between 1792 and 1797, beginning with her first acquaintance with the Cambridge Unitarian William Frend and continuing through the death of Wollstonecraft. During this period Hays composed The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), in which portions of her correspondence with Godwin and Frend appear nearly verbatim.  In 1798 her thirty-year correspondence with Eliza Fenwick (1764-1840) began (nearly ninety letters from Fenwick have survived), an epistolary record of a literary friendship only surpassed by her relationship with Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), which began in 1799 and continued to her death in 1843. Other notable correspondents after 1800 include Robert Southey (with whom she approached about becoming a live-in companion to his wife and family in their Keswick home), Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Tooke, John Aikin, Penelope Pennington of Bristol, Mary Reid of Leicester, John Prior Estlin of Bristol, Mary Shelley, and Mary Jane Godwin. 

The letters to Hays from various family members and most of her literary friends belong to the Pforzheimer Collection below. Her correspondence with a host of Unitarian ministers and writers, including Henry Crabb Robinson, can be found in the A. F. Wedd Collection and the Crabb Robinson Archive at Dr. Williams's Library, London. The letters that passed between Fenwick and Hays between 1798 and 1828 can be found in the Fenwick Family Correspondence, 1798-1855, MS 211, New York Historical Society, New York City.  

The letters on the accompanying Calendar are linked to Dr. Timothy Whelan's complete edition of the Correspondence of Mary Hays, at Mary Hays: Life, Writings, and Correspondence, at https://www.maryhayslifewritingscorrespondence.com/correspondence, where complete transcriptions and extensive notes on more than 400 letters to and from Hays can be found. The letters on the Calendar highlighted in yellow can be read on this site.