Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier; the Letters of Emma Botham Alderson

Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country.

Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson’s letters and her sister Mary Howitt’s Our Cousins in Ohio (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.

Writing Home offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson’s unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations. The notes and introductions provide background on nearly all the places, individuals, and events mentioned in the letters.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

EMMA BOTHAM ALDERSON (1806-1847) was a Quaker woman who immigrated to Ohio from Liverpool, England, in 1842, with her husband and other family members. She was the sister of Mary Howitt, popular poet, translator, and author of books for children and young adults.

DONALD INGRAM ULIN is an associate professor and director of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford in Pennsylvania and has published articles on a wide variety of topics, including literary pedagogy, Charles Darwin, film adaptations of Huckleberry Finn, and the nineteenth-century invention of an English countryside.