On the Carpet

The term, on the carpet, meant, “under consideration or discussion,” and, in Penelope Skinner’s world, it specifically referred to a belle’s status as unattached and marriageable. Penelope’s letters paint an unusually clear and vivid portrait of the lives of elite young women of the Upper South in the late 1830s.

As this sparkling correspondence opens, thirteen-year-old Penelope (1818-1841) and her younger brother Trim (1820-1862) are semi-orphans exiled to distant boarding schools from the malarial climate of their plantation home in Edenton, North Carolina. They are partners in solitude, close companions, a single indivisible family unit. Outspoken and independent, Pen shares her innermost thoughts with her brother as she recounts her life as a belle “on the carpet.” From an exhilarating whirl of parties and beaux, Pen’s life descends over a period of three years into “the blues prodigious bad.” After thirty offers and three failed highly publicized engagements, her search for a husband turns desperate. When she finally marries at twenty-one, she undergoes an almost immediate transformation into a virtuous matron.

Penelope Skinner’s fresh voice fills a gap in 1830s published primary sources and sheds new light on the precarious nature of marriage negotiations and the sheer exhausting frustration of being both pawn and agent while “on the carpet.”