Archives West Finding Aid

This collection consists of approximately one hundred letters written by Mary Martin (d. 1804) to Isaac Martin Rebow (1731-1781). The earliest letters (1767-1772) were written during their long courtship, and later ones (1778-1779) during their marriage.

Mary Martin's letters are filled with details of daily life: her interactions with family members, friends, servants, and others; recreation, such as walking and fishing, and her pets; social activities; and household events such as redecorating and struggling to engage servants.

In a 1971 essay about the collection, librarian Josephine Asaro Manning described the letters and Mary Martin's social position as a privileged young woman in Georgian England:

"Mary Martin, writing from her fashionable West End residences in Chelsea and Queen Square, and sometimes from Isaac Rebow's elegant Duke Street townhouse, reveals what it was like to be of the leisure class in 18th century England. She conveys through the excessively formal, almost stilted, writing style that convention demanded, her sensitivity to the ordinary, the dramatic, and even the comic episodes that made up her day. News events, family intrigue and gossip, scandal, routine events, and hopes and aspirations, propel her quill pen as the ubiquitous Post-Boy rings the bell and waits at the door for her missive."

(Source: Josephine Asaro Manning, "The Mary Martin Rebow Letters, 1767-1772, Part I," The Record 32 (1971): 5-46.)