L- Letters written by Nelson
Nelson was a prolific letter writer. Although in his later years he had the help of secretaries he still wrote a large number of his letters himself and many of them have survived – at the last count, well over 5,000.
They give us a vivid picture of him – especially when seen in the original autograph. The words pour off his pen with scant attention to punctuation, and with an eager and wholly unpolished style – almost as if he is speaking. Like the diaries of Samuel Pepys with which they have sometimes been compared, Nelson's letters give us a clear window into the soul of the man who wrote them.
The letters fall into three distinct types. First, there are the official dispatches and reports he wrote to senior officers and politicians. Although inevitably more formal than the rest of his correspondence, they still contain traces of Nelson's engaging earnestness and directness. Then there are his letters to family and close friends: chatty, even gossipy at times, and often very frank about his own feelings and ambitions. He was a most faithful correspondent throughout his life, always good at keeping in touch with old friends and keen to acknowledge kindnesses and to repay them if it lay within his power. Then finally there are his letters to Emma Hamilton which fall into a category all of their own – ranging from frenzied and excited, through explicit and lustful, to tearful and maudlin.
A large proportion of the surviving letters are in public repositories: chiefly, the British Library, the National Maritime Museum and the Nelson Museum in Monmouth. But there are many others scattered in public and private collections all over the world and Nelson letters still regularly appear in the salerooms.
Many letters have been published: most comprehensively in Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas's monumental seven-volume collection, published in 1844-6. But Nicolas deliberately omitted most of Nelson's letters to Emma and many were later published separately by Thomas Pettigrew in 1849, and by Alfred Morrison in 1893-4. Additionally Nicolas was not able to gain access to Nelson's letters to his wife, and so these were not published until George Naish's scholarly edition of 1958.
In all the published collections with the honourable exception of Naish's, the letters are heavily edited. Nelson's grammar and punctuation is 'corrected' and all traces of impropriety expurgated, so that he speaks in a stilted 19th century manner and not at all with the eager directness of the originals.
Part of the Nelson A to Z, Edited extracts taken from The Nelson Encyclopædia by Dr Colin White, Chatham Publishing London, 2002.