[Letter to] My Dear Helen
Contributors: Garrison, Helen Eliza, 1811-1876, recipient
Series: William Lloyd Garrison Correspondence (1823-1879)
Published: 1846
Place of publication: Leavy Greave, Sheffield, [England]
Language: eng
Format: [manuscript]
Number of pages: 12
Subjects: Correspondence; Unitarian Church in Great Britain; Abolitionists; Society of Friends; Antislavery movements; History
Notes: Holograph, signed.

William Lloyd Garrison is at the house of a Quaker friend Mary Brady and her sister. The celebrated poet James Montgomery has promised to attend Garrison's public meeting tonight. (On pages 10-11 of this manuscript, Garrison has transcribed the letter by James Montgomery to Miss Brady in which Montgomery says that he will attend Garrison's lecture.) Garrison says about his lecture: "We are to have the Friends' meeting-house---the first one that has yet been offered to us in this country, and I presume will be the last; for the opposition to us, in this country, runs almost exclusively in the channels of Quakerism, in consequence of the poisonous influence exerted by the Broad-street Committee in London, of which Joseph Sturge is a member." George Thompson, Frederick Douglass, and Garrison had a large public meeting in Birmingham. They had breakfast with Joseph Sturge, where Garrison had a "very plain and faithful conversation with him, in regard to his treatment of me personally as an abolitionist, and to the unfair and dishonorable course of the London Committee toward the American Anti-Slavery Society." Garrison will leave for Scotland after the the great London meeting. Friends in various quarters are working to send over a larger quantity of useful and valuable items for the Faneuil Hall bazaar. Garrison would like Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman to thank Mr. John Bishop Estlin and his daughter for their help. Garrison saw Joseph Barker, a remarkable man who "sprung up from a beggar boy to the position of a great, active and glorious-minded reformer" and Unitarian. Unitarianism is odious in England. But the Unitarians have been the most zealous supporters of Garrison's mission. Elizabeth Pease (Nichol) is slowly recovering from an illness and is being watched by relatives who strongly dislike Henry C. Wright and William L. Garrison.

Merrill, Walter M. Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, v.3, no.165.