(The reference to Brighton, Richard Lower explains in a footnote. Evidently, early in her reign, Queen Victoria used to stay occasionally in the “cruet stand” built by her uncle, George IV, a contemporary description of the Pavilion somewhat less flattering than that now commonly applied to it.)

Having escaped from the South, Jan works his passage home across the Atlantic Jimmy Duch-wise, i.e. without pay. Consequently, he is penniless when he lands in Liverpool, still three hundred miles from home but, by begging and selling matches he finally reaches Sussex again. Like his cousin, Tom, before him, he is disillusioned and the tale concludes with:

“So good bye to yet clawney all,
    Red, yellor, white, and black;
Yankees shull neversee my face,
    Now I be got safe back.

Bad luck to Liberty in chains,
    An Dollar Trees so clever!
I’ll be content at home to live,
    Ol’ England, den, fo ever!

Hoo-RA-A-A-AY!”

Richard Lower’s information about Americans as uncouth, untrustworthy, selfish and totally uninterested in other people’s troubles may have come from reading Mrs. Frances Trollop’s famous book The Domestic Manners of the Americans, which was published in 1832, but he also had a more personal, intimate source, for in that same year his own daughter, Martha Oxley, had migrated to live in Auburn, New York State. She went with her newly-wed husband, Joshua Quaife, son of a respectable Battle family.

Like the Lowers, Joshua was a Dissenter, but the wedding nevertheless took place in Chiddingly Parish Church because as yet the Law still did not recognise chapel weddings. Consequently, for the first and only time the whole of Richard’s family gathered together in a church and participated in a Church of England ceremony. To make the occasion, it seems, Richard determined that they would leave their mark. Normally only two witnesses to a marriage – the legally required minimum – sign the register but not so for Martha’s wedding. Every one of her family signed, right down to her ten-year-old brother, Matthew Henry, in addition to Joshua’s father, and the witnesses' signatures took up so much space that they encroached onto the space provided for the next marriage to be registered. What the Reverend Langdale thought about this piece of exhibitionism is not known, but Richard almost certainly derived considerable satisfaction from demonstrating to the parish his family’s unity in their Dissenting beliefs and contempt for the law that denied them the right to wed in their own chapel.