Parental profligacy and the dishonesty of his guardian meant that when Edmund Spencer came of age in 1732 he inherited only a fragment of the estates that his great-great-grandfather, the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, had amassed in Ireland. To keep himself and his family in a manner appropriate to their status Spencer had to find an income. His plan to publish the collected works of his ancestor foundered on the unrest caused by the 1745 Jacobite rebellion; posts in the army and the revenue proved just as elusive.

In this collection of 120 letters, written to relatives in Wales,...