Bringing Bridget Atkinson to life

After working with English Heritage on writing and voice projects for Whitby Abbey and Belsay Hall, I was delighted to be asked to read letters from the archives of 18th-century shell-collector Bridget Atkinson for their new exhibition at Chesters Roman Fort in Northumberland.

Bridget had many identities: the daughter of industrial tanners from Cumbria, she married initially in secret, and ended up with a big and busy family of eight children, for whom she wrote down hundreds of recipes and medical cures. Over her lifetime she became a rare example of a Georgian woman with expertise in collecting both coins, and shells, which she amassed not for decorative purposes but for scientific interest.

The exhibition, which runs until November, explores Bridget’s collection but also the ways in which its growth was facilitated by colonialism. We are all a product of our times – and for Bridget, those times involved family wealth and societal influence. As English Heritage curators write:

Bridget never left Britain, and rarely left the county of Cumbria, but her family and friends travelled across continents and sent her shells by ship, carriage and cart. Her son Michael was based in Bengal as an employee of the East India Company, an organisation which colonised large areas of South and South-east Asia. Bridget’s brother-in-law Richard ‘Rum’ Atkinson was a director of the East India Company, and the owner of two slave-run sugar plantations in Jamaica. Following his death in 1785, Bridget’s children inherited these estates. The Atkinson family was one of thousands of British families to benefit from imperialism.

In reading the letters, I connected with Bridget’s affectionate writing to her son Matthew, so far away in Jamaica, and I was moved to see her handwriting in the exhibition. But it is also sobering to see the request that if there are snails on the ground, to ’employ the negroes to gather some’, written by Bridget’s neighbour to her son in Virginia where black people were enslaved.

I recorded the audio letter excerpts at Woodworm Studios here in Oxfordshire, with Stuart Jones. You can hear all the clips on this site, but here is one:

and this is a video about my visit to the exhibition in beautiful Northumberland: