STARN: Scots Teaching and Resource Network
Journal of a Lady of Quality
Introduction to Janet Schaw's Journal
JANET SCHAW'S account of her journey from Leith in Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal between the years 1774 and 1776 was discovered accidentally by a researcher looking for other material in the British Museum. The manuscript from which the text was eventually printed is known as Egerton 2423 and is entered in the British Museum catalogue as 'Journal by a Lady, of a Voyage from Scotland to the West Indies and South Carolina, with an account of personal experiences during the War of Independence, and a visit to Lisbon on her return 25 October 1774 - December 1775.' This lengthy title is not entirely accurate, however, as the Journal deals with North Carolina, not South, and with only very preliminary happenings in relation to the War of Independence. In addition, it continues to February 1776 as opposed to December 1775 and, most significantly, there is no author's name given. Clearly it had not been considered a manuscript worthy of much investigative attention until its twentieth-century chance discoverers set out to track down its author and make her story more widely known. The fact that the initial publication by Yale University in 1921 went into three further reprints and that a second and third edition were brought out in the 1930s is proof of its interest.
Once investigations into the manuscript began, two other copies were found to exist, both of which had previously been considered the sole copy by their owners: an historian of Antigua who had bought the manuscript out of interest and descendants of the families involved in the narrative. These discoveries helped to authenticate the manuscript and to fill in details of the participants and their relatives. Unfortunately, however, little detailed information was uncovered about the life and personality of the author Janet Schaw, although her name now became known, together with basic biographical details. Had she been male as opposed to female, her biography would no doubt have been recorded in public records, given the social position of the family.
What is known is that Janet Schaw was born in Lauriston, Edinburgh, and that at the time of the voyage recorded in her Journal, she was probably between 35 and 40 years of age. Her family was an old Scottish family with connections to families such as the Murrays, Rutherfords and Scotts, and she was said to be a third cousin once removed of Sir Walter Scott. She was one of six children including a sister Anne and two brothers Robert and Alexander, both of whom feature in her Journal. She would appear to have made the journey to the West Indies to accompany her brother Alexander to his new home there and to visit her brother Robert in the British colony of North Carolina. She also had under her charge young relatives travelling to their home in North Carolina. Of her personal life before and after this remarkable journey there is little to be told. We don't know what happened to her on her return to Scotland via Lisbon and we have no portraits to tell us what she looked like. There is a portrait of her brother Alexander Schaw painted by Raeburn, which suggests he was a person of some standing, and one of her mother Anne Rutherford Schaw whom Janet is said to have resembled. Our knowledge of Janet's qualities, however, comes from the reading of her Journal alone.
Janet's Journal is the work of an author with a lively mind and observant eye who communicates significant happenings of the voyage and her responses to the West Indian and American environment she encounters with wit and literary skill. Her first editors claim recognition for the Journal as 'a literary and human document [which] places its author among the litterateurs of her country and century'. The Journal is also a document of much historical value, exhibiting as it does the interests, prejudices and positive qualities of the educated upper class in Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century, together with the Scottish pattern of life maintained by the merchant families who emigrated from Scotland to set up new homes and enterprises in the British colonies. Janet Schaw introduces also a different class of emigrant in the Orkney families discovered huddled in poor quarters below hatches during a storm, who had been cleared from their own crofts in Orkney and who now became her unexpected travelling companions. In Janet Schaw's changing reponses to these fellow travellers, in her interest in agricultural improvements and her comparisons of the situation she found in the West Indies with that in the Scotland she had left; in her interest in science and in her general openness to new experiences, we find the empirical spirit of enquiry associated with Enlightenment Edinburgh. Her language again relates to her time and her class, being educated English with a few Scottish terms. Her interest in the way of life she finds in the West Indies and North Carolina, in its religious practices, its household organisation, food and entertainment and the comparisons she makes with her home country tell us much about the society she has left behind in Scotland as well as that of the new world she is visiting.
Janet Schaw's Journal is a most useful addition to the small amount of writing we already have by women in eighteenth-century Scotland and it expands our awareness of the interests and intellectual contribution of women of the period. There are a few excerpts only included here. For those who wish to read the entire journal, Glasgow University Library has one copy each of the second and third edition, classmark History TP708 SCHAW.