The Spring Rice Family Papers

The letter spoke of his regular house visits and diligence in aiding the poor during the Great Famine. His premature death, it suggested, had been hastened by this devotion to the destitute. Ellen agreed in her response: ‘the calamities of 1846 and the following years pressed on his spirit’. It was after these years his strength began to fail, and illness reoccurred. 

Stephen Edmund Spring Rice was an Anglo-Irish civil servant and philanthropist, the heir to Thomas Spring Rice, 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon (d. 1866). As the secretary of the British Relief Association (one of only two Irish men involved at this level) and the Commissioner of Customs, Stephen routinely clashed with the senior British official responsible for famine relief, Charles Trevelyan, regarding the latter’s cruel indifference to the plight of the Irish population. The NLI holds a large amount of Spring Rice political and domestic material, and we are delighted that we recently received a very generous donation of additional personal correspondence to add to our holdings. These have now been catalogued and are available for consultation in the Manuscripts Reading Room.

A significant portion of the letters are made up of Stephen’s correspondence with his cousin, Arabella Prescott (referred to in the letters by the portmanteau ‘Carabella’), to whom he confided his thoughts, feelings and plans. The setting for much of this correspondence was Mount Trenchard House in Foynes, Limerick, the ancestral home of the Spring Rices. Although once a symbol of the Crown’s authority in Limerick, the house would later become an IRA safe house, under the ownership of the nationalist activist Hon. Mary Spring Rice, whose papers the NLI also holds.

Stephen and Ellen would raise ten children in Mount Trenchard, two sons and eight daughters. In 1844, on the birth of his daughter Aileen, Stephen noted glumly ‘I’m sorry to say it’s another girl.’ This pessimism appears to have improved markedly in the following year when his daughter Lucy arrived, as he declared ‘I don’t think you could readily find two happier people in her Majesty’s dominion (on which the sun never sets) than Ellen and I am at this moment.’ On the arrival of his heir, Thomas, in 1849, Stephen was jubilant, remarking him to be ‘a thumping boy; and likely also to keep on thumping for he has fists as big as his head.’ Stephen would tell Carabella about raising the children, news around the property and from neighbours, family disputes, and social events with well-known British and Irish figures of the day. He travelled widely, as far afield as Madeira and Algiers, eventually dying aged 50 on a steamship returning from the Mediterranean. He had been in ill health for the last couple of years of his life, physically worn down by his work. His writing, once an assured cursive, was now tremulous: ‘I find myself weak, helpless & discontented… Your harp (Carabella’s) used to charm me out of this state, years ago, but I shall never hear it again.’ 

While Stephen Edmund Spring Rice is a primary character in these letters, he is not the only author. This collection is particularly notable for its extensive correspondence between the female members of the Spring Rice family including Ellen and her many daughters. The letters of Theodosia Spring Rice (d. 1926) to her sisters, mother, cousins and aunts provide valuable insights into nineteenth-century female communication and, in particular, the dynamic networks of aristocratic Anglo-Irish women. Like her father, Theodosia charted the births, illnesses and deaths of her family, all related with an immediacy and candour. In a letter to her cousin, she announces her engagement to her future husband Reverend Edward Chapman: ‘I have come to know his great & astonishing love for me & I love him return with all my heart.’ Chapman family correspondence also appears in the collection. Theodosia recorded the illnesses and parturiencies of two of her sisters, Mary and Lucy. Like her father, Theodosia did not care much for the initial appearance of newborns; she wryly noted that her niece Hester had since ‘much improved in appearance – she was at first very ugly.’

It is clear from their correspondence that the Spring Rice sisters were well-educated; they discuss lending books to one another and leave behind original prose and poetry. Lucy Spring Rice (later Knox, d. 1884), would become a well-known poet before her untimely death at 39. A small pamphlet survives in the collection which advocated for a women’s space in the Bloomsbury Reading Room at the British Library where women could ‘meet for free discussions and lectures.’ There is a sense in both their letters and their father’s letters that the Spring Rice women’s complicated identity and position in Ireland was shifting.

In 1867, two years after her father’s death, Theodosia sent one of her family members a roughly drawn map of Ireland by her ‘Uncle C’ (probably her father’s brother, Hon. Charles Spring Rice). At the bottom of the page in pencil, she writes ‘I hope you will laugh at this’, clearly finding humour in this loose interpretation of their country. These letters narrate family events, and the struggle to pick up the pieces in the shadow of the Great Famine. They contain a wealth of information for anyone interested in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, as well as nineteenth-century female networks and correspondence.

This new collection is now available for consultation in the National Library of Ireland Manuscripts Reading Room.