After celebrating the Christmas festivities, as usual, in Yorkshire, early in January, 1805, she journeyed with her husband and family back to their house in London, No. 28 Grosvenor Square, a building since much altered, but still standing at the corner of Upper Grosvenor Street. [12] There she was occupied introducing into society her clever eldest daughter Marianne, aged nineteen, and preparing for the _début_ of her second daughter, Anne; and thence with the dawning of that year destined to be momentous in English history, she wrote to her son John, his father's heir- presumptive, a youth of eighteen, who had just gone to Christ Church: The New Year smiles upon us, and, thank God, finds us all well, except Henry, and he gains strength. May you see many happy ones and may the commencing year prove as happy to you as I have every reason to believe the last was.... You are really, my dear John, the most _gallant_ son I ever heard of to make such very flattering speeches.... It is vastly gratifying to a mother to have a son desire to hear from her so frequently, and such a request must always be attended to with pleasure. How assiduously the writer fulfilled her promise is testified by those packets of letters, dim with the dust and blight of a vanished century, but in which her reward is likewise attested. "I do not believe," she affirms proudly, "that there is a man at either of the Universities who writes so often to his mother as you do, and let me beg you will continue to do so, for the hearing from you is one of the chief pleasures of my life." Moreover, that family of eight sons and five daughters, who, at this date, shared her attention, in their relations to each other were singularly united. Throughout their lives, indeed, the tie of blood remained to them of paramount importance, although, as often happens, this fact bred in them a somewhat hypercritical view of the world which lay without that charmed circle. Graphic and lively as it will be seen are their writings, their wit was at times so keen-edged that it is said to have caused considerable alarm to the dandies and belles of their generation, who suffered from the too vivacious criticism of their young contemporaries. This was more particularly so in the case of Marianne, the eldest daughter, afterwards the anonymous author of the satirical novel _Almack's_. Brilliant and full of humour as is her correspondence, it shows her to have been what family tradition reports, rich in talent and accomplishments, gifted with imagination and keenly observant of her surroundings, but withal cynical of speech and critical of temperament--a woman, perhaps, more to be feared than loved.