HICKEY'S RAMBLES

THE MEMOIRS of William Hickey are a familiar source, but scholars have focused on the author's frequent bouts of heavy drinking and Boswell-like sexual exploits to illustrate the raucous world of eighteenthcentury London and the colonies. The document is a source worthy of serious analysis in its own right. Covering a sixty-year period, Hickey included a remarkable amount of information to reconstruct his life from birth to retirement. Admittedly, the author remembered some specific facts incorrectly. Recalling the death of his godfather, Hickey noted that Michael Ryan left him £100 when the actual sum was £20. But as this example demonstrates, Hickey usually got the main points right – Ryan did leave him a legacy – and some of his inaccuracies can be cleared up by consulting additional sources. Hickey had access to a range of documents, embedded numerous letters from friends verbatim into the text and copied in excerpts from earlier publications. Furthermore, he was a practiced record keeper. The 17th of November 1782 was a memorable day because he almost lost his life in a shipwreck. The next day he examined the escritoire he had brought along on his journey; almost all of its contents were destroyed, but the loss he lamented most was ‘a large book in which I had copied the journals of every voyage I had made, and the remarkable circumstances that had occurred’. It is unknown if he continued to keep a journal, but it is clear that he was organizing information about his life long before he sat down to write during retirement in London.

Hickey stated that he wrote the memoirs for his own amusement and ‘to fill up some tedious hours that would otherwise have hung heavy’ upon his hands. The work has tones of the confessional memoir, yet there is no indication that he intended it for publication. His reflections seemed more concerned with explaining rather than instruction and it is worth remembering that he spent much of his professional career writing. Hickey wrote the memoirs as an attorney producing a defence, but he was also the accused, the judge and jury.